[next_xibalba]

SF spends more per capita than anywhere in the world on homelessness. And it’s barely made a dent. The solution is upstream of money. It’s policy decisions derived from cultural values. In other places in the world, where homelessness is vanishingly rare, these people are made to choose: “you will get treatment or you will go to jail, but we will not tolerate the destruction of the commons.”

[pstuart]

SF has a famously broken city government. As does Portland (the metro I now live in). Note they have huge budgets for their police and there's still plenty of crime -- does that mean they should give up on having police?

I think if it were treated as a hybrid program (federal/state/county) there could be synergy that could make it work (more eyeballs on it, more shared resources, etc).

And as far as treatment or jail, we do need the power of involuntary institutionalization but it needs to be wielded with utmost restraint and scrutiny. I have family that could have used this, it's pretty much the only way with some. But it always has to be done in the context of helping rather than punishing.

There's so much we could do: start a kind of CCC for homeless youth as a baseline starting point and give them paths up and out. Heal those you can and those you can't at least put them somewhere where they can't ruin it for others. I imagine the emotional response to that would be "send them to jail", I completely understand but it's a lot cheaper if we do something else.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/14/headway/houston-homeless-... https://community.solutions/what-cities-with-successful-home...

[next_xibalba]

> SF has a famously broken city government. As does Portland (the metro I now live in). Note they have huge budgets for their police and there's still plenty of crime -- does that mean they should give up on having police?

I don't think the police analogy works. The relevant question is not whether a big police budget solves crime. Not the expected outcome. The real question is whether, when crimes happen, the system is allowed to investigate, arrest, prosecute, punish, deter, and incapacitate criminals.

If you port the SF/PDX homelessness model into criminal justice, the analogy would be something like this: we spend a lot on police, but we also prevent them from arresting people, prevent prosecutors from prosecuting, treat enforcement as inhumane, and then decide that the problem is insufficient “resources” or “coordination.”

Money isn't irrelevant. It's that money cannot overcome a policy framework that refuses to impose obligations on the people causing damage. You can spend billions on outreach, services, navigation centers, nonprofit contracts, and harm-reduction.. etc etc. But if the answer to refusal is always “try again tomorrow,” then the system has no endpoint and fails.

YEs, involuntary institutionalization should be used carefully. Jail should not be the first answer for people whose problem is psychosis, addiction, or incapacity. But that doesn't concedes the central point: for many, voluntary help will not work. The only real solution is compulsory: treatment, supervised placement, or jail. And it can't be after multiple years of attempts while the person languishes on the streets and the commons are destroyed.

A crisis care program for homeless youth might be good upstream, but it doesn't address acute problems: chronically homeless people who are severely mentally ill, addicted, violent, or destructive (usually multiple at the same time), and who refuse help. Those cases require either 1) shelter or treatment (won't work for most), 2) secure care, or 3) jail.

Again, the question isn't “should we give up because spending has not solved homelessness?” The question is whether the current model is even capable of solving it. A system built around voluntary services, weak enforcement, and tolerance of public disorder will predictably produce encampments, addiction zones, and unusable public spaces no matter how much money it receives. The missing piece isn't just funding. It is authority, conditionality, and a cultural choice to protect the commons.

Also, zealously dismantle and prosecute the non-profit homelessness grift complex.

[watwut]

You are talking about a country with one of highest incarceration rates in the world, certainly western world.

A country with so expensive legal defense that most simply cant afford it. And a country that punishes even attempt to go to court to defend oneself with years and years of additional prison time if you loose.

A country where it is near impossible to convince a cop or prosecutor of wrongdoing, a country that goes really out of its way to rationalize what would be a clear murder elsewhere. A country with qualified immunity too.

Oh, and a country willing to incarcerate on any quack pseudo science.

But, somehow ... it is prosecutors and police who need more help.

[next_xibalba]

> But, somehow ... it is prosecutors and police who need more help.

I'm not sure how you get that from what I wrote. My solution is (like many, many places in the world): "treatment or jail, but we will not tolerate a destruction of the commons". PDX/SF could do this with the police they have, and it might even imply force reduction as getting those people off the streets would reduce A LOT of crime.

Yes, the U.S. has many significant problems. I agree. Is your suggestion that we have to address them sequentially, prioritized according to your preferences... or else do nothing?

[pocksuppet]

Spending money doesn't get results. Spending money is often a prerequisite to getting results, but you have to be results-minded to begin with, or you just spend money without results. Large bureaucracies are especially good at spending money in ways that don't generate results.

[throwaway313313]

SF spending on homelessness has actually created a homeless industrial complex that thrives off of the enhancement and continuation of the "community" they serve.

The current solutions, while all well meaning or nice sounding, are essentially incentives and akin to figuring out all kinds of accelerants to throw on a fire.

The more money they spend on their current approaches the greater the homeless population they can and need to accommodate, and then even more money becomes "needed".

The problem is just about every well meaning "provide for a specific need" program creates a dependency and all of the deterrent solutions look like non solutions to all of the short term empathic people.

[antonvs]

Another factor in other places in the world is much lower economic inequality.

The US has chosen to divide its population in this way.