[dfabulich]

> We spend a lot of time in San Francisco and Silicon Valley thinking about ways to make people’s lives easier. And through that innovation, we’ve uncovered amazing opportunities – just think about life before Google Maps! But what if we aimed just 1% of that focus of looking out on what we can invent, in on what we can improve? What if we partnered with folks like those at ECS to match their decades of experience on issues like homelessness with our super powers in technology, software development, marketing, design and data sciences. What if we worked together – imagine all the good we could do.

Perhaps this is a failure of my imagination, or perhaps I'm misinterpreting the message, but this sounds to me like the author is inviting us to solve SF homelessness using technology.

Software is a set of tools for gathering and organizing data, but the problem of homelessness is a problem of budget and political will, not data.

If you took 1% of the software developers in SF and had them organize all of the data on homelessness, it would only document the magnitude of the problem. ("Big!")

Fundamentally, there just isn't enough political will today to buy shelter (and mental-health service) for everybody who needs it.

Even if someone could afford to buy enough land to build enough shelter, the residents of the city of SF won't let you build that many homes for the homeless in their backyard.

A data-driven political campaign might do the trick, but it really might not, and regardless that's really quite a different proposal from "why don't we use technology to solve the problem of homelessness?"

Am I wrong? Do we really just need to write a few good apps to solve this problem?!

[cfishswim]

(Blog author here) Every three years, SF asks volunteers to walk around the city and physically tally up people they see living on the street using clipboards. Agencies like ECS have no way to communicate progress, numbers, or success/failures with one another, and the city has no visibility into the actual movement of people between services. I'm not suggesting a few good apps would help at all. In fact, the opposite. I'm saying that we spend too much time creating net new things, like apps, and not enough time partnering with the people that are actually working on the solution. The new department of homelessness is taking on "data consolidation and collaboration" as one of their big initiatives, yet they aren't working with tech companies that are experts in that area.

My point: no one is talking to one another and using our shared skills to actually affect change.

[Mz]

but this sounds to me like the author is inviting us to solve SF homelessness using technology.

Technology can be enormously useful in this space. I am homeless and I make money online in part by blogging, in part by doing freelance work.

You want to do some good in San Francisco in this space, let me suggest you start a San Francisco version of The San Diego Homeless Survival Guide -- listing important resources like where to get free food if you need it, as well as free electricity and wifi -- and then also give away free tablets to homeless people in the area.

http://sandiegohomelesssurvivalguide.blogspot.com/

I used the internet to research my next city and moved from San Diego more than a year ago and my quality of life has been better ever since. My health is better, my income is trending up and if I can come up with $7.5 to $10k in the next few weeks, I am planning to buy a house.

Technology can do wonder to provide gig work, low cost access to information that is valuable on the street and help homeless people become digital nomads and start soling their own problems and pulling themselves up by the bootstraps -- instead of becoming trapped in shitty homeless programs that you treat you worse than an animal.

[davidjnelson]

This is super inspiring, thank you for sharing this!

[cauterized]

Probably not to solve it, but maybe to improve on it.

Could you write an app that would make homeless outreach volunteers 2x-10x more efficient?

How about one that would crowd-source data collection to support political initiatives?

Or find a way to funnel food wasted by restaurants and supermarkets into the bellies of hungry people?

Maybe it's not just making an app, but turning the focus of SV's culture of "disruption" upon social problems. How could you "disrupt" the social, political, financial, or logistical patterns and problems that cause and perpetuate homelessness?

[mjevans]

Re: Food waste.

My experience with food waste is that it is primarily an combination of liability, lack of incentives, and very slightly infrastructure/organization.

Businesses and individuals worry about the liability; what if I /give/ someone food (presumably in good faith) and then they turn on me and sue me for some form of payout. (Political, laws)

The incentives part, how can you provide incentive for someone to give away food that is still good, but nearing the end of being good, to those who need it in a timely manor so that it reaches those with need. How can you encourage the correct kind of food being donated? (Probably political arena taxes and tax credits to manage this; yes both, you have to punish undesired behavior too.)

The infrastructure largely exists in most places, but communicating that to the public (awareness) and making the public's interaction with that structure easy (here's the one area Tech could help; aside from raw funds) are the issues.

[cauterized]

Yup, communication and facilitation are great places to start for a lot of these social challenges.

As for the rest: I'm aware of at least one very effective NGO in NYC whose mission is just such food distribution. The organization is called City Harvest, and I'm sure that a) it could use fresh new ideas and technical initiatives, and b) organizations in other cities could learn a lot by copying their model and learning how they handle the legal and logistical challenges.

[mjevans]

The only thing you are wrong about is the how fungible and fluid the issue is.

This isn't the sort of thing you solve within a limit, a set of bounds; this is the kind of thing that has to be solved at a national or even /global/ level.

I think the only difference between this problem and the European refugee crisis is that at least in the case of the latter it is the tired, the poor, and downtrodden seeking to find the hope of opportunity realized. The 'homeless' in the US probably mostly fit one of these categories: mentally ill, physically ill, under-compensated, under-serviced by and/or alienated from the community.