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Comment by Spivak | Hacker News Reader

I'm fully in the camp of just give people dollars and let them decide how to spend it rather than navigate a bureaucratic nanny state system like SNAP. But if you're only doing that well no shit it doesn't help. You have to actually put them in a stable house/apartment and get them set up with work. Or if they're homeless due to mental illness get them admitted.

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>Or if they're homeless due to mental illness get them admitted.

Therein lies the problem. A large proportion of homeless fall into this category [*], and it's very hard to institutionalize people against their will. We like to think that most homeless are functional people who are simply down on their luck, and thus putting them in stable housing and getting them set up to work would solve their problems. But this is sadly not the case.

[*] This study [0] found that 80% of homeless people have some kind of mental illness, with 30% having severe mental illness. This is compounded by the fact that >50% have substance abuse problems.

[0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8423293/

Right. As I touched on elsewhere in the thread, our local jailers know all the homeless people in town because they show up regularly when their mental illnesses and/or substance abuse get them into trouble. The ordinary guy who wound up homeless due to a string of bad luck and just needs a place to sleep and a new job to get back on his feet is more a movie trope than reality. These are people with real problems who in many cases need regular supervision in something like a group home, if not outright institutionalization. And as you said, the latter is very hard to do now.

SF tried, didn't work. The homeless population increased, not offset by the people who got housed.

That seems like an unfair metric. Any program that helps homeless people significantly more than anywhere else in the USA is going to become the new capital of homeless people and their population will explode. It doesn't mean the people helped are worse off.

Right, but the taxpayers in that city are worse off. That's why any solutions need to be driven at least at the county level and preferably at the state level. Leaving it to individual cities creates all sorts of perverse incentives. (SF is somewhat unique in that they are their own county so for that area specifically, shifting programs from the city to county level wouldn't change anything.)

Taxpayers are pretty much always going to be worse off helping the homeless. Only a small fraction of the chronically homeless will become tax positive citizens in their lifetime.

Either you start off with the first principle that it's OK for wealth-transfer schemes to make tax payers 'worse off' via compelled charity, or I don't think you can get to the point of supporting generalized homeless relief programs. Maybe programs targeted at short-duration stuff to get people into jobs that are capable of doing them and a housing contract might work, but it'd have to be extremely well thought out and wouldn't benefit most chronic homeless.

My point is that it's a lot easier to share the tax burden at the state level rather than in individual cities.

I mean, San Francisco could spend that money housing their homeless in random cities spread around the country - investing in these cities and avoiding encouraging influx to a single spot... Possibly even cities with jobs, and funding corresponding service and construction jobs in these cities. Except of course for the NIMBY problem - I laugh at how that would be received in the cities I know about.

>SF tried, didn't work. The homeless population increased, not offset by the people who got housed.

IIRC, For decades, the homeless "relief" programs run by states like Florida, Georgia, South Carolina and others pretty much ended at bus tickets to San Francisco for the homeless (whether they wanted to go or not) and that's it.

Is it any wonder the population of homeless in SF grew?

This is a popular myth but it’s not true. The reality is a lot more complicated[1].

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/dec/...

>The reality is a lot more complicated

Reality is always more complicated than a one-liner. Surprise, surprise.

But that doesn't make it a "myth." Rather it's more municipalities and more disposable people being "disposed" of.

That doesn't make it right and certainly shouldn't normalize such practices -- that said, it's a little late now.

> But that doesn't make it a "myth."

It does, though, and the article I linked explains what actually happens: people are not systematically shipped to any particular big west coast city. There are numerous programs in numerous cities which send people back home, essentially, to places where they have support in place and simply need a way to get there.

>It does, though, and the article I linked explains what actually happens:

And I disagree with your analysis. That's not an attack on you or The Guardian for that matter.

While there certainly are programs as you mention, there are (and have been for decades) others that do not seek to reunite people with support systems -- rather they just want those pesky homeless people gone.

Out of sight, out of mind and all that.

> there are (and have been for decades) others that do not seek to reunite people with support systems

I'll point out that this is a myth as many time as you repeat it until you cite some source to back up the assertion.

And what I cited is not my analysis, it's a reputable publication that did actual investigative journalism.

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