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Comment by wyager | Hacker News Reader

Seems like a sustainable permanent solution...

According to the original source[0], the solution has been in place since 2005, and had reduced the homeless population by 74% by 2012. The cost savings was about 5k per homeless person per year.

"In 2005, Utah did a study that found the average annual cost for emergency services and jail time for each chronically homeless person was $16,670. The cost to house them and provide case management services was only $11,000 per person."

Obviously those two numbers don't account for the fact that even a newly homed person might continue to have some emergency services, and jail time. Yet, Utah continues the program and "... the state is on track to meet its goal by 2015", where that goal is to eliminate chronic homelessness.

As Mr Deming once said, "In God We Trust. All others bring data."

I'm impressed that the typical moral outrage of people being given "handouts" was short-circuited by rational data analysis, and a solution driven by said data. Kudos Utah!

Sarcasm? It's almost certainly more sustainable than trying to run them out of town or put them in prison.

Indeed. What prevents other homeless people to "migrate" to Utah in order to benefit from that program ? If that's the case, the costs of the program would explode, and the savings would be gone. That's typically what happens. Not sure what they are doing to avoid that scenario.

Across the plains in their stagecoaches?

Hitch-hiking.

is that still a thing? Also, how are they supposed to hear about it? And who picks up hitchhikers anymore? I mean, maybe a few people would do it, but I'm skeptical that it would ever be a problem.

I've ran out of gas in Silicon Valley and had people pull over to offer a ride to the gas station. So folks are still awesome.

Yeah, but you probably don't look like a homeless person.

Yes people still travel by hitchhiking. Yes it is possible to do so. I know someone who hitchhikes all the time.

well...ok

Hasn't happened in the last 8 years---the programme's been running since 2005). And from a national point of view, better to house the homeless in cheap Utah than in a more expensive state.

I read that Nevada was busing their homeless into California to get them off the books; clearly they were doing it wrong and should have sent them to Utah instead.

It's funny you should say that because that's exactly what Utah was accused of doing to Las Vegas in order to clean up the streets for the 2002 Olympics.

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/14/sports/olympics-the-street...

I'm not sure there's enough history to know. Certainly counterexamples are easy to find: cities like Chicago tried providing huge amounts of housing to the poor and those projects were unmitigated disasters and have over the past decade or so been mostly torn down.

There was a good book the other year that covered the failure of Chicago public housing. Basically they demolished a lot of serviceable neighborhoods and shoved all of the displaced people into Concrete silos with people from all over the city, but not necessarily their old neighborhoods. Then, they never planned for or accounted for children and teenagers who roamed the buildings unsupervised while their parents were working or out looking for work. In the old neighborhoods, children played in the streets where any number of people could see them from store keepers to police or nosey old people. In the high rises, they were left completely to their own devices. Additionally, these high rises were built apart from other things in the city and not very accessible by foot. This meant that you couldn't walk from one to a grocery store, your church, your job, or anything really.

So basically, Chicago built giant human warehouses to store all of the poors they had collected from around the city. Not hard to imagine why that failed. IMHO, Utah's program of housing the chronically homeless is totally different.

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