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Homeless people aren't as mobile as you think. When someone is homeless they depend on a very specific set of municipal services and it's a huge risk to move somewhere else and not have a way into those services or even a way to find out about them.

To put it another way, why are there any homeless people in Canada or the northern USA at all when they could just move to Florida where it's warm?

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While I like the concept of this article, I think there's enough mobility that this may occur. However, I'd much rather someone get a house than move to another city just to live in the street, so ultimately I'd hope more areas adopt something similar if they see this as effective.

San Francisco and Portland both SEEM to have a problem with destination homelessness, in particular, Portland was known to have strong city services and may have led to that.

Given, the job industry there is recovering from a major source of industry, so I could be massively wrong, but it seems like the case.

Ultimately SF and the Bay Area seem to have enough wealthy corporations that, if someone were able to support it, it could totally work. Though I recently remember reading an article from the Slack CEO, where he justified taking a large investment round he didn't need because the VCs were not going to spend it on homelessness.

Unfortunately we still incentize the wrong things in seeking profits. Obviously, we can't call a single case out, but in the end, there's enough funding here to completely fix it if people rallied together and the Medicine Town thing could probably be done at SF or Portland level scale.

It would be crazy expensive, yes, but would also greatly improve those cities.

> Ultimately SF and the Bay Area seem to have enough wealthy corporations that, if someone were able to support it, it could totally work.

Isn't central SF - presumably the location that homeless people for various reasons prefer to be located in - so expensive that even software developers employed by these companies on salaries north of $100k per annum feel they're being priced out of it?

There is a unique area known as the Tenderloin which only has SROs, and is much cheaper.

The TL does not have only SROs, and SROs do exist elsewhere. SROs are also not especially cheap; for example, the Adrian Hotel rents SROs for $700 a week (http://sfhomeless.wikia.com/wiki/Adrian_Hotel). Of course many SRO residents also receive subsidies of various kinds.

A Craigslist housing search limited to the TL shows only 2 listings for under $1500/month. Most are closer to $2000/month.

The TL's cheaper, sure, but still rather expensive.

http://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/sfc/apa?nh=156&maxAsk=150...

I'm kind of positing something that won't happen.

Like someone like Ellison or Page or Musk builds a big tower or buys up several blocks, maybe it's not even downtown.

OTOH, people would also want to live there with other people and other root cause problems would have to be addressed for many. So you might need many of these scattered around, and would need to figure out NIMBY factors.

But yeah, the idea is someone else would need to front that bill.

I know homeless people that migrate from Québec to BC every summer to work in the fields.

There are also a lot of homeless people that moves north from Montréal.

They are quite mobile but only if there is a reason to. Good housing is a big reason and I'm sure many of them will consider moving there.

I seriously doubt there will be any significant migration to Medicine Hat just for the free housing.

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