[the_economist]

Homelessness is mainly a byproduct of mental illness and drug addiction. If you want to solve homelessness, you need to target those problems. I would suggest that new technology is needed, particularly in the case of mental illness. We do not have a good medicine to treat schizophrenia, for example.

The city of San Francisco spends $241 million/year on ~7 thousand homeless, an indication that throwing money at this problem doesn't do much.

[dangrover]

I read somewhat that this budget also covers around 9k people in shelters (or housed through some other form of aid). If you consider that, you get about $15K/head/year, which is not entirely ridiculous.

[davidjnelson]

Any idea why there is no effective medicine for it? It seems like a really important thing to solve. It sounds like a _lot_ of people would benefit.

[the_economist]

Human biology is hard. We don't have a cure for AIDS, baldness, acne, heart disease, cancer, the common cold, etc.

[xg15]

Also note that "schizophrenia" is not an illness but a family of illnesses (and even that definition is one of the less fuzzy ones). Finding a "universal cure" is as likely as finding a universal cure for cancer. That is, very unlikely.

[davidjnelson]

Oh wow I didn't know that. I thought it was a neurotransmitter issue with unbalanced levels of various neurotransmitter and/or receptors, but I don't know much about it. Science will get there someday though! I guess for both cancer and complex mental illness and other types of complex illness, the trick would be to both find a workable solution to each sub-problem, and then use them to address the full complex. It would be cool if companies were working on these types of approaches. I wonder if any are?

[davidjnelson]

Human biology is indeed incredibly complex. I'm inspired by the star trek tricorders and medicine. Some day :-)