[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.

[scarmig]

The emptying of institutions in California happened long before that, in the late 60s and through the 70s; it became very hard to commit anyone, which justified further cuts.

If you pass a bill that destroys mental health systems for the sake of civil libertarian concerns, "its issues weren't magically fixed through half a century later, which was totally unforeseeable" is not a good excuse.

[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.