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by techsupporter 2219 days ago
> And what has that supposed conspiracy garnered, politically? Who gains in this conspiracy and how?

At least where I live, I've heard a lot of conspiracy theories, many now openly discussed and not just in whispers, of a "homeless-industrial complex" where people are supposedly making bank on faux solutions to homelessness and non-profit providers are just funneling money off to the wealthy people who run the non-profits and leaving clients and volunteers hung out to dry.

As an occasional volunteer for some of those groups, I do not see this. Granted, I may not be anywhere as involved in Deep Homelessness as I might need to be in order to pull back the veil and expose the bitter truth. From my point of view, I see a shitload of people who have been dealt a terrible hand. a lot of them were people who were doing just fine before, maybe not great but were getting by and then a life event happened that, sure, from our perspectives on HN of most of us making in the low six figures to start, would have seen coming and could have planned for. But, for whatever reason, these people didn't and damn, once you fall out of "normal society," climbing back in is hard. as. fuck.

One person I helped was technically literate--we set up Yubikey auth for his Google account, for goodness sake--and had no vices besides posting up at the library to play Clash of Clans on his aging Android phone. But it still took an inordinate amount of time to get together all of the identity and proofing documents he needed to get an ID to go onto a military base to take a specialty job. In one case, he only got one of the documents because he knew a notary (me) and could have a form sworn to and stamped in under a day at no cost.

I don't think people truly appreciate just how fragile modern life is if they've never fallen out of it.

1 comments

But the point is that you don't see this. SF has a $364 million dollar homeless budget, double what it was a decade ago, so the programs you volunteer for should be swimming in cash to provide their services and make sure the homeless have opportunities. If they're not, then where'd all the money go?
SF spends $45k per homeless person?!
No, not quite. The 'point in time' count of 8,000-9,000 people is a measurement of flux; people enter homelessness and leave it all the time. A huge chunk (most?) of SF's spending goes to emergency assistance to prevent people from falling into homelessness when they have a financial emergency, which is by far the cheapest time to stop homelessness.