[poppobit]

I think this piece makes a strong point — when there’s already a working model, just copy it instead of endlessly debating. The homelessness crisis is real, and doing nothing while watching it grow worse is the worst option. Of course there’s a chance it fails, but the bigger issue is that no one wants to take responsibility if it does. That lack of strong leadership is, in itself, part of the problem.

[onlyrealcuzzo]

> The homelessness crisis is real, and doing nothing while watching it grow worse is the worst option.

California isn't doing nothing.

They keep spending even more money and wondering why it's not working.

If it was a problem that could be solved by giving people money, they'd have solved it already.

[mothballed]

Then there's also the Williston / North Dakota oil boom model. I met tons of homeless people out there (I was one of them), many of which whom solved it through "one neat trick" of doing something like hitchiking to the oil fields, or to Seattle where literally anyone can get hired to work on a fish processing boat or facility and they give you "free" room and board and then ~$10k to go home with.

[onlyrealcuzzo]

That model clearly isn't working in SF where they spend >$100k per homeless person per year.

So, sure, maybe it works if people sign up for it and show they actually want to do something.

But it clearly doesn't work if you just hand it out and hope for the best.

[bsder]

> That model clearly isn't working in SF where they spend >$100k per homeless person per year.

That borders on irrelevant when 33% of your homeless population qualify as having a traumatic brain injury, etc. Hospital stays are about $5K per day--if a homeless person hits the hospitals for 20 days in a year you've already spent more than $100K.

After Saint Reagan (hack ... spit) "closed the institutions", there was supposed to be something better. That never happened. So, now you have the mentally ill cycling between the streets, the emergency rooms, and the prisons.

You can't fix homelessness without first fixing healthcare. Otherwise you're just rearranging the deck chairs.

[scarmig]

> After Saint Reagan (hack ... spit) "closed the institutions", there was supposed to be something better. That never happened. So, now you have the mentally ill cycling between the streets, the emergency rooms, and the prisons.

The Lanterman-Petris-Short Act, which made it possible to close the institutions, was almost unanimously passed in the Assembly and the Senate, in an unholy union of civil libertarian do-gooders and budget cutting conservatives. In fact, the lone dissenter in either legislature was a law-and-order Republican.

And it's not like Democrats have been shut out of the government of California ever since.

[bsder]

The funding for the original institutions came from the Community Mental Health Act (CMHCA).

The funding for the alternatives was also slated to come from the federal government: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_Health_Systems_Act_of_1...

But Reagan and a Republican controlled Senate killed it. Because funding was supposed to magically "trickle down" from thin air.

And, through it all, the mental health facilities were always chronically underfunded.

[pengaru]

In SF they _do_ provide housing to homeless people. The homeless people, largely addicted to illegal drugs, use the housing to store most their possessions and occasionally come in to change clothes and bathe, but continue living in tents, or otherwise existing strung out on the sidewalks.

Why? Because they're not permitted to use illegal drugs in the provided housing facilities, they will lose the housing. These "houseless" people basically have two homes, the streets are their summer home where they get high and continue to be a nuisance. The provided housing goes mostly unoccupied in these instances. Having written that, maybe the analogy works better in reverse - the public housing is the unoccupied summer home? Either way, it's totally not being used as intended because of the restrictions placed on the housing.

[mothballed]

Also consider shelters generally banned weapons and are dens of communicable disease and bed bugs (I'm horribly allergic to them so I'll never step inside a shelter).

When I was homeless I lived outside because if you have a decent tent and sleeping bag it's perfectly comfortable, and I like to have a weapon handy no matter what and I reject any living circumstance that would prohibit that. At no point did drugs enter the equation, but if they did, it wouldn't have changed the calculus.

[SolarNet]

> But it clearly doesn't work if you just hand it out and hope for the best.

I actually think if they did just give 100k to homeless people a year that it would actually solve itself.

The problem is they give 100k to grifters who say they'll do something about it.

[brewdad]

The causes of homelessness are plentiful. Some, perhaps a majority I don't know any exact figures, would be helped by simply giving them money. Others are suffering from mental health crises and/or drug addictions that must be dealt with first before they can have any hope of taking care of themselves when given the money to support themselves.

This is where good faith opinions can differ. Do these folks still deserve freedom/autonomy or can we force them into rehab or mental heath treatments? If the only crime they have committed is not having a bed to sleep in, I'm not sure I'm comfortable with taking away their freedoms. I'm closer than I was five years ago but I'm not universally there yet.

[FireBeyond]

Hah, yes. In Australia when I was growing up there was a program called Work for the Dole (Unemployment) after you had been unemployed for a while. During the dotcom era, that was me. There was one program that was tech and web development skills. I went to a church twice a week (the organization running the program wasn't the church, they just rented rooms), and we poked at shitty old computers while I tried to help the staff figure out how to get Dreamweaver running on them (I knew more than the staff) in a way that was basically trying not to break the licensing - since they'd only bought one copy for the entire classroom. I knew more than the staff, the computers were decrepit, etc., and we were stuffed in the back room of a church.

I got to meet the "org executives" (it was really only the two of them, grifting, in the entire org) who were collecting a nice fat government check per person enrolled in their program. They came by to see how we were doing, and were there for less than 15 minutes. Two ladies in their 50s who were more interested in talking about how excited they were to be going off to pick up their new company cars after lunch, matching Jaguar XJs.

[appreciatorBus]

Everything except ending the ban on homeowners & landowners building market housing. (ofc they are taking bites out of this apple, especially very recently, but every step is fought tooth & nail by homeowners who prefer the status quo just fine)

[Spivak]

I'm fully in the camp of just give people dollars and let them decide how to spend it rather than navigate a bureaucratic nanny state system like SNAP. But if you're only doing that well no shit it doesn't help. You have to actually put them in a stable house/apartment and get them set up with work. Or if they're homeless due to mental illness get them admitted.

[MontyCarloHall]

>Or if they're homeless due to mental illness get them admitted.

Therein lies the problem. A large proportion of homeless fall into this category [*], and it's very hard to institutionalize people against their will. We like to think that most homeless are functional people who are simply down on their luck, and thus putting them in stable housing and getting them set up to work would solve their problems. But this is sadly not the case.

[*] This study [0] found that 80% of homeless people have some kind of mental illness, with 30% having severe mental illness. This is compounded by the fact that >50% have substance abuse problems.

[0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8423293/

[HankStallone]

Right. As I touched on elsewhere in the thread, our local jailers know all the homeless people in town because they show up regularly when their mental illnesses and/or substance abuse get them into trouble. The ordinary guy who wound up homeless due to a string of bad luck and just needs a place to sleep and a new job to get back on his feet is more a movie trope than reality. These are people with real problems who in many cases need regular supervision in something like a group home, if not outright institutionalization. And as you said, the latter is very hard to do now.

[onlyrealcuzzo]

SF tried, didn't work. The homeless population increased, not offset by the people who got housed.

[mothballed]

That seems like an unfair metric. Any program that helps homeless people significantly more than anywhere else in the USA is going to become the new capital of homeless people and their population will explode. It doesn't mean the people helped are worse off.

[nradov]

Right, but the taxpayers in that city are worse off. That's why any solutions need to be driven at least at the county level and preferably at the state level. Leaving it to individual cities creates all sorts of perverse incentives. (SF is somewhat unique in that they are their own county so for that area specifically, shifting programs from the city to county level wouldn't change anything.)

[mothballed]

Taxpayers are pretty much always going to be worse off helping the homeless. Only a small fraction of the chronically homeless will become tax positive citizens in their lifetime.

Either you start off with the first principle that it's OK for wealth-transfer schemes to make tax payers 'worse off' via compelled charity, or I don't think you can get to the point of supporting generalized homeless relief programs. Maybe programs targeted at short-duration stuff to get people into jobs that are capable of doing them and a housing contract might work, but it'd have to be extremely well thought out and wouldn't benefit most chronic homeless.

[creer]

I mean, San Francisco could spend that money housing their homeless in random cities spread around the country - investing in these cities and avoiding encouraging influx to a single spot... Possibly even cities with jobs, and funding corresponding service and construction jobs in these cities. Except of course for the NIMBY problem - I laugh at how that would be received in the cities I know about.

[nobody9999]

>SF tried, didn't work. The homeless population increased, not offset by the people who got housed.

IIRC, For decades, the homeless "relief" programs run by states like Florida, Georgia, South Carolina and others pretty much ended at bus tickets to San Francisco for the homeless (whether they wanted to go or not) and that's it.

Is it any wonder the population of homeless in SF grew?

[mullingitover]

This is a popular myth but it’s not true. The reality is a lot more complicated[1].

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/dec/...

[nobody9999]

>The reality is a lot more complicated

Reality is always more complicated than a one-liner. Surprise, surprise.

But that doesn't make it a "myth." Rather it's more municipalities and more disposable people being "disposed" of.

That doesn't make it right and certainly shouldn't normalize such practices -- that said, it's a little late now.

[stonogo]

That point would be strong, but this article doesn't make that point, or any other points I can tell. It does really weird things like comparing the annual cost of housing one Texan person to building an entire Californian housing unit, changes which definition of "homelessness" it uses (sometimes mid-sentence), ignores Houston's extremely police-oriented approach to the topic (police can cite you for trespassing if you're at a bus stop and don't produce ID), pretends the Texas cities aren't sweeping encampments (they are, right now, on Nance Street), and just generally plays fast-and-loose with the facts in Texas.

[Yizahi]

The problem is not that lack of examples. Technically, all two hundred something countries could take example of the best one in every metric and just copy most of the stuff to make life better.

The problem is that politicians are afraid to do anything (outside of direct and indirect enrichment). No one can blame some John Doe, chief Busybody of the Busyarea, if he won't do something. Because that didn't happen, nothing to point finger at directly, except for "you don't do enough", which is generic enough to be used at anyone and so ineffective at everyone. But if he will do something and it is immediately painful to at at least some group, then he will be blamed and his opponent will do that with pleasure too.

[nis0s]

I am not saying it’s okay that anyone should be homeless, but it’s baseless to call homelessness a crises for the U.S.

The homeless population accounts for 0.23% of the total U.S. population, or about ~771K people.

https://endhomelessness.org/state-of-homelessness/

For comparison, more people are getting DUI citations per year,

https://www.safehome.org/resources/dui-statistics/

[sethammons]

> it’s baseless to call homelessness a crises for the U.S

Sure, a quarter of a percent is not a big percent, but that sure is a lot of people. It is _more_ than the entire population of Alaska, Wyoming, or Vermont. It is near the population size of several other states.

An entire US state's worth of people are unable to find adequate housing and not just because they are off their meds. According to the 2024 Point-in-Time count, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development estimated 22% of homeless are facing a severe mental illness. So nearly 4 out of 5 homeless are regular people who simply cannot secure permanent housing.

That sure as hell sounds like a crisis to me.

[FireBeyond]

> the US Department of Housing and Urban Development estimated 22% of homeless are facing a severe mental illness. So nearly 4 out of 5 homeless are regular people who simply cannot secure permanent housing.

No - the word there is severe. Requiring hospitalization more than once a month, often. When you look at "untreated mental illness" in the homeless, now you're above 50%.

[pandaman]

> So nearly 4 out of 5 homeless are regular people who simply cannot secure permanent housing.

How does it follow? Not having a severe mental illness makes one normal? It's as same as saying that not suffering from severe obesity makes you fit and healthy.

[sethammons]

Obesity is an excess of something. If we flip it, you can say that "too skinny is a problem" and there is a difference between someone someone with an eating disorder that makes them avoid food vs those who simply don't eat enough.

The unhoused has those people with a housing disorder, aka mental illness, and those who, simply, don't "house" enough.

Why don't they house enough? Many reasons. But nearly 4 out of 5 are not ticking the severe mental illness part. So there is less water in the argument that homelessness is caused by mental illnesses which is the leading reason I hear when people talk about homelessness. So, they aren't "mental," they are "normal."

[pandaman]

Perhaps having a severe mental illness is somehow important for you but I still don't see how is it relevant in this context other than it shows that the fraction of homeless with it is ~4x bigger than in regular population so it's likely the rest of them are suffering with less than severe mental illness (not even taking drug addiction into account).

[onlyrealcuzzo]

There's 8300+ homeless people in San Francisco.

That's 1% of the population. Maybe not a big deal to you.

There's only 13,000 city blocks in SF.

That's a homeless person every 2 blocks.

Kind of dangerous to be walking past people in all different states of desperation multiple times every trip everywhere you go, is another way to look at it.

[Broken_Hippo]

Even if you end homelessness, you'll still be walking past people in all different states of desperation multiple times everywhere you go.

People looking like they have homes or acting like it won't stop this. It doesn't make people inherently dangerous.

Don't get me wrong, I think any percent of the population being homeless because of lack of options is a tragedy. (I don't really care if someone wishes to be so, and I think we should have appropriate living options for this). I understand that you can't really stop temporary homelessness - fires and urgent things happen - but that's something we can deal with as needed.

[onlyrealcuzzo]

Is your argument that, because x% of the population is desperate, we shouldn't care or do anything about x%+y% being like that?

y% LIVES on the blocks - so the multiple on y is higher (higher probability you encounter them), and the desperation factor is also likely much higher.

[nis0s]

Please note that someone giving you a quantitative context isn’t necessarily saying don’t care. But it’s important to be mindful of how people use words in the media to describe certain issues because it benefits them politically or financially.

The problem which sticks out to me is that homelessness can be addressed by providing housing, but that’s not an easy solution to provide in a country that gets 10s of millions of illegal immigrants. So why is someone talking so much about homelessness relative to other issues? Do they want the U.S. to provide a house for every illegal immigrant who crosses a border? If political officials in states struggling with homelessness really care about solving the problem, they would do what other states are doing, as mentioned in OP’s article.

[UncleMeat]

Is it dangerous? I agree that people with means feel unsafe when encountering poverty but the "it is unsafe to ride the subway because there are poor people there" stuff doesn't appear to be proportionate with actual risk.

I think that one of the huge limitations of how we think about homelessness in the US is that we view it as a problem that non-homeless people encounter. This encourages a bunch of policies that make it easier for somebody to avoid ever having to see a homeless person but which do little to mitigate the suffering of a homeless person.

[devmor]

I don’t really think this holds the point you think it does.

While property crime is more likely to be committed by people the lower their income level is, the majority of all violent crime is committed by people who have homes.

In fact, the homeless are far more likely to be the victims of a violent crime than any other income demographic.

Furthermore, the unstable and dangerous people you see behaving erratically on the street are not necessarily sleeping there - and the homeless in the area probably feel much more unsafe about their presence than you do.

[onlyrealcuzzo]

> majority of all violent crime is committed by people who have homes.

Gee, I wonder why, they make up 99% of the population.

How could they ever make up more than 50% of crime?

> I don’t really think this holds the point you think it does

[devmor]

No, you just missed the point I made.

Which is that if you’re scared of being assaulted by someone you should be scared of everyone around you at all times. Someone’s housing status does not make them any more likely to attack you.

Being scared of homeless people hurting you is like being scared of flying in a plane when you drive a car every day.

[sroussey]

People drugged out screaming on the street in SF are not necessarily homeless. Just that they may have rules about drugs in their room.

[onlyrealcuzzo]

Is this an argument that a homeless person per block isn't a problem?

Or are you just what-about-ing?

Homeless people can be a problem independent of housed-drug addicts being a problem.

[ThrowMeAway1618]

Yeah! A big problem. We should just Brian Kilmeade[0] them all, right?

They're a burden on society and should be removed. But why stop there? The bottom 20% of school kids are just going to end up being a burden on society too! Prison costs something like $50k/inmate/annum. So let's inject them too!

But why wait for the kids? We know who is popping out all those burden-on-society babies. Sterilize them. Then we can use them as "comfort women" for our brave, selfless Immigration Enforcement heroes!

USA! USA! USA!

[0] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/fox-news-involuntary-letha...

[ThrowMeAway1618]

I'm getting a little worried about you HNers.

Granted, this is pretty obvious satire, but upvoting it?

If you did, is it because you support murdering poor and disadvantaged people?

I hope not. But some folks around here make me wonder.

Maybe I'll just stop, as I certainly don't want to encourage murderous pieces of shit.

[0_____0]

771K people isn't a small number. 0.23% isn't a small number when it comes to homelessness. This also doesn't consider people who are housed but are overcrowded or living in otherwise very poor environments.

You also ignore that it's a rapidly growing problem.

Comparing it to DUI numbers doesn't make any sense whatsoever.

[nis0s]

Disagree that it’s a growing problem, there are lots of states dealing with it correctly. Look at the article, for example.

[brewdad]

And there are plenty of states that put their homeless on a bus to some other state to deal with.

That's not doing anything about the root causes.

[nis0s]

I agree, and I want humane solutions for people who go through this.

[captainclam]

I've always been surprised by the official homeless population count, but it turns out there's a lot more to it.

The department of HUD generates this ~771K figure from a "point-in-time" estimate, a single count from a single night performed in January. They literally have volunteers go out, count the number of homeless people they observe, and report their findings.

It's not hard to imagine why this is probably a significant undercount. There is likely a long tail of people that happened to be in a situation that night where they were not able to be counted (i.e. somewhere secluded, sleeping in a friend's private residence that night, etc).

Even if these numbers are correct, to my mind a "crisis" is still more characterized by the trend than the numbers in absolute. From the first link you provided, we saw a 39% increase in "people in families" experiencing homelessness, and 9% in individuals. A resource from the HUD itself suggests a 33% increase in homelessness from 2020-2024, 18% increase from 2023-2024. That is far apace of the population increase in general.

https://www.huduser.gov/portal/sites/default/files/pdf/2024-...

And even then, I would say many people would suggest that the change in visible homelessness they've experienced in the last 10 years would amount to "crisis" levels, at least relative to the past.

It's completely fair to argue that it is not in fact a crisis, but claiming that it is certainly not "baseless."

[saghm]

It's kind of wild that they pick maybe the coldest month of the year to do this. You'd think that would be when people are most likely to try to find some sort way of avoiding direct exposure to the open air even if it's extremely short term.

[HankStallone]

A quarter of a percent still seems like a lot to me, even if it's not a "crisis."

But we can't do anything about it until we face up to the problem. Spending more money won't help. I'm somewhat familiar with the activity at our local jail, and a good part of it is homeless people rotating in and out. They get brought in because they were trespassing or shoplifting or something, the jail cleans them up and dries them out (they're usually on drugs, which they somehow manage to buy) and tries to get them back on their medications, they get released, and the cycle begins again. Most of them are mentally unstable, and perhaps they'd be somewhat functional if they could stay on their medication, but they don't, so they can't function in society for long.

We don't want to put them back in asylums, because some asylums really were hellholes, and I guess we don't trust ourselves not to let them be hellholes again. That seems awfully pessimistic; factories used to be pretty awful too, but we require them to be safe and clean now. Seems like we could do the same with asylums, but we won't even consider it. So we're left with letting them wander the streets, maybe bedding down at homeless shelters when they feel like it, using the jails as temporary asylums when they get in trouble, and throwing more money at the problem once in a while to soothe our guilt. It's sad.

[nis0s]

Different US states have implemented useful measures for helping homeless people, but states which are struggling with their implementation have other issues as well. Border states in particular have illegal immigrants to contend with as well, so a housing-first policy for homelessness gets taken off the table right away. California has the means and resources for dealing with its homelessness problem, but the political will is murky.

[watwut]

Why are you comparing amount of homeless people to DUI?

[superxpro12]

Scale of the issue relative to the risk, I think.

[harpiaharpyja]

It's another public health issue that could also be receiving attention which causes harm to people.

[bdcravens]

Whether it's homelessness, DUIs, or fentanyl deaths (only 75k per year!), measuring the impact of something by ignoring the blast radius is disingenuous. All who are touched are part of it. In the case of homelessness, it's a burden on emergency services, creates unsafe environments, impacts businesses, etc.

[nis0s]

I think the article points out some useful ways to deal with the problem at hand.

[pessimizer]

What is supposed to be the relationship between those two things? Will you be comparing it to the number of ham sandwiches next?

[nis0s]

You would think that since DUI operators present a greater social problem, both in numbers and potential to cause harm, there would be all sorts of active campaigns against such an issue. But the present reality is that some issues have great political forces behind them, and the media takes care to paint such issues as “crises”. Maybe it is a crisis, for a certain locality, and that reflects on the governance of that place. But I don’t think it’s fair or accurate to say your local problem is a problem at large, even if that means you get less federal monies to deal with it. Maybe what that means is that people need to reflect on how their localities are spending their budget, or sorting their priorities.

[jsbisviewtiful]

How does Houston deal with those that can't be housed? Sure, 90% retention sounds nice for these people but California has limited housing/higher housing costs, in general, last I had read. The write-up even mentions rising housing costs or the Trump admin taking away their funding can crash the system, so unclear how easily this system could transfer to other cities. Sure, better communicating systems and a better hierarchy will lead to better outcomes for most orgs, but that's a pretty general statement about basically every org out there.

I also feel like this write-up sugar coats some of the actions Houston/Texas has been taking against non-compliance. Ticketing homeless people $200 for existing on the streets seems a bit counter intuitive - and Texas has been systematically shipping homeless and immigrants around the country (human trafficking) for political theater, so are they excluding that data? Probably.

I'm not an expert, but this write-up really comes off as one-sided since it's only talking about what's not working in California and ignoring some of the background stuff Texas is up to. Overall, do agree that better management and accountability would do other cities favors, but again, that's such an easy statement to make about any plan or org.

https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/city-of-hou...

[nradov]

Higher housing costs in California are in some sense an artificial manufactured problem. California should mimic Texas by making it easier and cheaper to build more housing. Take approval power away from local governments, and give property owners and developers the right to build pretty much whatever they want wherever they want.