[rossdavidh]

Spot on. In most previous decades, the city government (no matter the party) would have been able to take whatever action (probably more $$ for police and more enforcement) seemed appropriate to the problem, and that would be a non-partisan issue. Now even admitting that there is an actual issue seems to be a partisan stance.

[cmh89]

If enforcement and police were an actual solutions, the United States would be the cleanest, safest country on Earth. But we aren't because it isn't.

The real crux of the issue is that the major west coast cities are being tasked with dealing with a nationwide drug and mental health crisis and there just isn't the money to humanely handle the problem. So you end up with people who correctly say that locking people up in prisons for personal drug use is inhumane and doesn't address their problem, while at the same time other folks correctly point out that people should have access to a clean and safe city and not need to watch for needles and human shit.

The federal government needs to provide funding for the west coast states to build more drug treatment centers, funding to train treatment providers, and more funding for mental health services. There are anti-social people who don't belong in jail but can't be on the street, right now there is nowhere for them to go.

[fmajid]

The US is actually under-policed compared to Europe, probably because police officers are so handsomely paid cities can't afford many of them.

[lotsofpulp]

On a non federal level, imprisoning people and hence goading them elsewhere is the only solution. No city/county/state has the resources to be able to offer healthcare or housing. Freedom of movement across the country means net benefit recipients would move in, and net payers into the system would move out.

[dmix]

> No city/county/state has the resources to be able to offer healthcare or housing.

This is the lie told everywhere that the only real solution to affordable housing is gov spending billions on a small set of tenement buildings, that take a decade to build, and are 3x over budget. Instead of reforming municipal policies to reduce rampant NIMBYist roadblocks, rethinking zoning from the ground up, streamlining regulations to make it easier to follow and enforce the rules safely, etc etc.

None of those things require billions of dollars to be committed. Just heart, communication skills, and charisma. There's a mountain of capital and regular people ready to build new housing, lack of capital, or will, or lack of demand to build has never been the problem. To discover the root problem requires asking why it's so rare/expensive despite that reality and why it's so harder today than it was 100yrs ago.

[lotsofpulp]

I was addressing free housing (and/or mental healthcare/drug addiction treatment), not affordable housing.

Increasing supply of housing and bringing prices down is also a needed solution to prevent some people from getting to the destitute stage, and yes, that is under local control.

[dmix]

I personally don't see a distinction. It's infintiely more complicated to build public housing when people making $200k+ struggle to find a proper apartment to rent, let alone buy an actual house/condo.

Homelessness doesn't happen in a vacuum. It's not the homeless in one bucket then everyone else living in the real world, where the only dichotomy we have to accept when living in a city is public housing vs paying $3k/month for rent.

[realo]

Well... OP does mention that SF has an operating budget of 14 billion dollars per year...

I am pretty sure that _something_ could be done with even a small portion of that _yearly_ ingress of capital.

[lotsofpulp]

It is easy to write that, but I invite anyone to pencil it out. Same situation with healthcare. "Billions" seem like a big number, until you dig into the cost of emergency heart surgery, NICU babies, cancer treatments, etc.

Note the problems you will be up against.

Homeless populations are likelier to have more mentally ill, drug addicted, and people with criminal history among them. Any people around proposed sites would be obviously opposed to any new facilities being built near them. That is why the west coast states pay $200k+ per key to buy hotels and motels and convert them to homeless shelters, because locals cannot fight it since it is already zoned for multi tenant housing.

And then you have induced demand. Taxpayers in any other place would have no problem keeping their taxes lower by paying for flights and buses to anyone who needs them to get to SF.

[thebooktocome]

Imprisonment is far more expensive than housing. SLC ran a pilot program years ago proving the concept.

Of course, if one is the retributive sort, nothing grinds one’s spleen more than someone worse off getting something “they don’t deserve”.

I personally don’t understand why the some exceptionally wealthy billionaire in California doesn’t solve the homelessness problem themselves, expending some mere fraction of their net worth (i.e., the value of a couple bucks to the rest of us).

[orangecat]

I personally don’t understand why the some exceptionally wealthy billionaire in California doesn’t solve the homelessness problem themselves

If you were an exceptionally wealthy billionaire, how would you solve it? Especially considering that the obvious approach of "build housing" is largely illegal.

[nradov]

Due to the SB-8 Housing Crisis Act of 2019, it is now largely legal to build housing. Sometimes property developers have had to sue local governments in order to enforce their rights but now most cities are complying. Obtaining the necessary land and building permits is still extremely expensive. A billion dollars worth of new housing would be great, but it would barely begin to address the shortage.

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml...

[fmajid]

The Builder's Remedy doesn't apply to SF yet because of its sham "Housing Element" plan it filed with the State government, that has realistically zero chances of ever happening, but bought them an 8 year reprieve.

[prottog]

> Sometimes property developers have had to sue local governments in order to enforce their rights

I'm glad that the state government has taken a step in the right direction, but the situation on the ground as you describe it still doesn't sound very friendly. There's enough risks in investment and business (that is, property development) as it is without needing to fight City Hall on top of it.

> Obtaining the necessary land and building permits is still extremely expensive.

Land I understand, since it's of a fixed supply in a highly desired area, but there's no reason why permitting should be so burdensome if policy intent is to foster more building.

[thebooktocome]

Billionaires don’t seem to have trouble doing illegal things when it comes to tax evasion, securities fraud, and the like. Some random municipal zoning board would be child’s play with their resources.

The proof of this is that the rich regularly manipulate zoning laws. Look at what Google and Apple did to Palo Alto.

[lotsofpulp]

Violating a random municipal zoning board’s orders by building something without the necessary permits is a clear cut violation that is easy to spot that you cannot use plausible deniability for.

The US is not that corrupt yet. The billionaire might be able to bribe the zoning board members, but it would be pretty sacrificial of one’s self to risk a felony just to watch the building’s freshly laid foundation get destroyed, because that is only how far one might get without the cops getting involved.

[lotsofpulp]

Imprisonment is to keep people moving along, or deter them from coming.

Housing is more expensive because of the opposite, it incentives everyone to come get it.

On a federal level, housing and healthcare might be cheaper than imprisonment. But what is even cheaper (in the short run) is ignoring it altogether.

>I personally don’t understand why the some exceptionally wealthy billionaire in California doesn’t solve the homelessness problem themselves, expending some mere fraction of their net worth (i.e., the value of a couple bucks to the rest of us).

Because the problem is far more expensive than any single billionaire or even group of billionaires entire net worth. Even if they could handle just California's population. there are 290M people in the rest of the country, and a significant portion who would not mind coming to California for free housing.

[thebooktocome]

Here is SLC’s program, including all the community work they have to do to mollify the NIMBYs:

https://www.npr.org/2022/11/06/1134230388/village-salt-lake-...

Median rent in SLC: 1.8k/mo, 21.6k/yr

Federal prison: ~39k/yr

https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/09/01/2021-18...

Median rent in CA: 2.9k/mo, 34.8k/yr (according to Zillow)

CA prison: 106k/yr (!)

https://lao.ca.gov/policyareas/cj/6_cj_inmatecost

Incarcerating the homeless is not an economic decision, it’s an emotional one. Society doesn’t mind wasting endless amounts of money doing it, because the cruelty is the point.

[lotsofpulp]

I feel like the induced demand portion of my argument is being ignored.

CA prison might be 3x expensive per year, but would CA be looking to house 3x or more people if they offered free housing?

[pandaman]

All law enforcement is not economical in this approach, when you are pricing only immediate costs. E.g. prosecuting a murderer is a complete loss of hundreds of thousands dollars if not millions. And we are not even getting the victim back for all these money spent.

[thebooktocome]

Murderers aren’t really representative of the homeless.

Bear in mind mere homelessness is not unequivocally a crime in the states, see Martin v. Boise (2020 or so).