[MattGrommes]

I'm genuinely curious about even a hypothetical more detailed example of how some group would go about preserving a problem like homelessness, even unintentionally. I can't wrap my mind about how it would actually happen beyond simplistic sayings.

I live in Portland, OR where we have a large homeless problem and I continually hear that the groups being given money to help are incentivized to keep homelessness high for their own purposes. Like, obviously people who are paid like to keep getting paid but how would they go about making this happen when their job is the opposite?

[Tangurena2]

> would go about preserving a problem like homelessness

My state chose to outlaw homelessness [0] and to make it illegal for cities & counties to offer places to lawfully camp unless the campsites are basically enough to be KOA Campgrounds.

Actually solving homelessness is politically unacceptable, therefore it will be criminalized & preserved.

Notes:

0 - The crime is "unlawful camping".

[LorenPechtel]

That's just pushing the problem around. You aren't doing anything about the actual cause.

[MyHonestOpinon]

"KOA stands for Kampgrounds of America, the world's largest system of privately owned and franchised campgrounds"

[nostrademons]

All you have to do is promote policies that make the problem more palatable but don't actually solve it. Treatments instead of cures. As long as the problem needs treatment, the organizations dedicated to treating it will still be around, but as soon as it is no longer a problem at all, those organizations will cease to exist and everyone working on it needs a new job.

For homelessness, it's things like shelters, free meals, needle exchanges, etc. Make the life of the homeless easier without actually getting them into permanent housing. The actual solution to eliminate homelessness is to build more housing, along with financial arrangements to incentivize ownership and make it possible.

For taxes, it's accountants and tax preparation software like TurboTax or H&R block. The actual solution is to make the tax code simple enough that anyone can understand it and then withhold the appropriate amount so that nobody even needs to file. The big tax preparers have repeatedly lobbied against this.

For medicine, it's lots of prescription medication that you have to be on for life to "manage" your condition, as well as recurrent doctor's visits to diagnose and treat it. The actual solution for the vast majority of conditions that kill Americans today is diet, exercise, fiber, reduce stress, stop smoking, and wear your seatbelt. Modern medicine is also very adept at solving acute problems like broken bones, bacterial infections, appendicitis, etc. But once you've got a chronic condition of indeterminate source (many of which are actually solved by the advice above), you're in the system and can expect to pay through the nose for no solution.

For many construction projects (like say CAHSR), it's performing endless studies about how to build the project without actually building it. Some level of design is necessary for successful outcomes, but many agencies go around in circles with proposals and reports and environmental impact studies and voter referendums without actually having anyone actually pick up a shovel and start moving dirt.

[ChadNauseam]

> For homelessness, it's things like shelters, free meals, needle exchanges, etc. Make the life of the homeless easier without actually getting them into permanent housing. The actual solution to eliminate homelessness is to build more housing, along with financial arrangements to incentivize ownership and make it possible.

I love the idea of building more housing, but I think a lot of homeless people have an income of literally 0, so wouldn't they be homeless regardless of how cheap housing is?

> For many construction projects (like say CAHSR), it's performing endless studies about how to build the project without actually building it. Some level of design is necessary for successful outcomes, but many agencies go around in circles with proposals and reports and environmental impact studies and voter referendums without actually having anyone actually pick up a shovel and start moving dirt.

Environmental impact studies are required by federal law for projects receiving federal funding. It's not CAHSR's fault that they have to be done. You then have to go through the process of acquiring land along the track, which you probably should do before people start moving dirt (it's going to be pretty embarrassing if your track has a hole in the middle where someone refused to sell their house).

[AlexandrB]

> I love the idea of building more housing, but I think a lot of homeless people have an income of literally 0, so wouldn't they be homeless regardless of how cheap housing is?

There's research that shows why increased housing prices cause increased homelessness. One of the mechanisms is that the family and friends of the homeless can no longer afford the additional space to house the folks who have literally $0 because they themselves are priced out of larger homes or have to rent space to make ends meet.[1]

> Unlike Diona’s mom, Sherman’s parents had extra space. That’s very common among homeowning, empty-nest parents, meaning that a great deal of vacant housing is in the hands of the two people who are most likely to love and forgive an adult child in dire circumstances. But in more expensive regions, fewer parents (or other loving figures) have that resource, either because they couldn’t afford to buy a house in the first place or because there are demands from multiple family members to share the legacy residence.

[1] https://doodles.mountainmath.ca/posts/2025-01-16-homelessnes...

[inigyou]

If we literally gave them free housing it would be cheaper than whatever the fuck we're currently doing.

[Swizec]

> how some group would go about preserving a problem like homelessness, even unintentionally

Simplistic version: San Francisco spends roughly $100,000/year on each homeless person. In services, salaries for people working on it, rent for office buildings etc. I am willing to bet many of these people would not be homeless if we just gave them $100,000/year without all the middle bureaucracy layers.

[verteu]

This is a fallacy because it's not the same people homeless each year. There's substantial turnover in the homeless population.

"Replace services with direct transfers" would eliminate homelessness for 1 year. Then new people would become homeless, and you'd have no services, because your budget is already committed to the "year 1 homeless-cohort."

The money spent grows quadratically (not linearly) over time.

[inigyou]

If you only gave $100k to the people who are currently homeless that year, then (ignoring that people would start keeping themselves homeless for several years on purpose) you'd still end up better than the present situation.

[verteu]

Not likely: SF has ~7,973 homeless people now, and current spending provides housing for 14,498 "previously homeless" people: https://media.api.sf.gov/documents/Agenda_Item_9_HSH_Budget_...

Thus, cutting all budget for cash transfers could increase homelessness by 80%! (Are those 14,498 now-homeless people eligible for this year's $100k? They can't be, since you already spent it on the 7,973 currently-homeless people).

Model the situation as "X(t) people become homeless at year t, Y(t) people become housed at time t," and you'll see the most important metric is "how much can we decrease X and increase Y per dollar spent"?

"Number of dollars per current homeless" is not really meaningful at all.

[AussieWog93]

If those are the actual numbers, you're proving GP's point. You can give each of those 14.5k people ~$55-60k instead of giving 8k people $100k and homelessness is still solved.

[verteu]

No, housing those people is only half the budget, so it's like $25k/person.

It's unlikely there's a trivial arbitrage to eliminate homelessness in a city full of engineers.

[verbify]

> ignoring that people would start keeping themselves homeless for several years on purpose

Don't you need to spend on bureaucracy to figure this out? That then increases the cost.

[reverius42]

How many of the homeless people in SF are from other parts of the US and are given one-way bus tickets to SF by their own hometowns? Because just giving them money could only possibly make that problem worse.

(Yes, this is a real thing that happens, though I'm not sure the extent. See https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/dec/... )

[reverius42]

Not sure why I'm downvoted for asking a question based on reporting from a reputable source.

[tikhonj]

The biggest obstacle to that is the electorate. People (voters!) would go wild. Anything the NGOs do, however shady, won't compare to that.

We had a successful campaign to recall a progressive prosecutor over less.

[RugnirViking]

But the idea that that is intentionally done is the leap, right? In my model of the world, it's very easy to believe how overlapping & duplicate programmes, middleman corruption, and ineffective programs can cause this without meaning to, rather than some deliberate attempt to engineer the morass of beuracracy.

[Swizec]

I didn't say it was intentional, it's the result of millions of little decisions that all make total sense in isolation.

[c22]

Identifying and distributing 100k to each homeless person would require many layers of bureaucracy.

As it should. It is not responsible to give millions of dollars in taxpayer funds to an intern and tell them to start passing it out to random people on the street.

[inigyou]

We could just give 50k to every person, and then increase taxes enough to make up for it.

[brabel]

It may sound crazy but that may be cheaper than maintaining the status quo. The idea is serious and it’s called Universal Basic Income, or UBI. It may arrive earlier than most think.

[SoftTalker]

In the homelessness example, it's not so much that the programs and groups want to justify their continued existence (though that might be happening too). It's that the programs themselves incentivize more of the problem. When they give things to homeless people, such as food, shelter, clothes, social services, even needles and a "safe place" to get high in some cases, and often with few or no conditions, they make being homeless more tolerable. Word gets around, and people who could not feasibly be homeless where they are are drawn to Portland because they will get more support there.

[tikhonj]

None of those things make homelessness appealing in any absolute sense. Like, if people had a (reasonable-to-them) path to getting a home, the vast majority would go for it even if there were a bunch of services available.

The real answer is that the electorate is vehemently opposed to providing paths like that if those paths feel even remotely like "unfair handouts". Votes hate that idea even if it would be empirically cheaper. We collectively preserve the problem of homelessness because we feel like people who can't/won't work deserve to be unhappy, because we believe that we need the threat of homelessness to coerce people into working, because we believe people on drugs/etc are undisciplined and immoral, because... well, you get the idea.

[inigyou]

I don't think many people are being homeless by choice no matter how comfortable it is. Perhaps it makes more of them choose homelessness over suicide but I don't think it's making anyone choose homelessness over homefulness.

You know what does though? Making it really hard to get a home. That makes more people homeless. I hope that's obvious.

[Ferret7446]

Quite a few are homeless by choice. There are shelters available but they choose not to go because the shelters ban drugs. So they choose drugs over shelter.

[duskdozer]

It's easy to frame it like this to portray them in a negative light. Many also ban pets, enforce strict curfews, force you to live in close quarters with people who you don't know and who can be dangerous to you, demand you practice their religion, separate you from partners, subject you and what they allow you to keep of your belongings to frequent searches.

I don't know about you, but that sounds horrible to me. I don't see how anyone can be surprised or aggrieved that some people choose to stay away from them under those conditions.

[superb_dev]

Shelters also ban lots of normal things that make them harder to use, or have onerous rules around your schedule that make working impossible. There are a lot more reasons people don’t use shelters

[DeluluDon]

I was homeless for 6 years in the PNW due to PTSD. A lot of people do not, under any circumstances, feel comfortable sleeping next to a violent offender, child abuser, or gang member. So they sleep outside and risk a lot instead.

When I was there, I counted about 2 drug users out of 100 people in a shelter in Spokane, Washington. The rest were either ex convicts, disabled/mental issues, or just simply lost their home.

[brabel]

I thought most homeless were drug addicts?! It’s hard to believe a healthy person could fall into homelessness. Maybe as OC mentioned only those who don’t do drugs go to shelters.

[cwmoore]

Jail time is a sure spiral into unemployment and homelessness, privations, and more jailtime.

[conception]

The beatings will continue until morale improves.

[im3w1l]

I think you could solve homelessness really simple by allowing something like a favela. It will be an eyesore so pick an area out of sight of rich people. Then split it into like idk 200sqft plots. Give everyone enough corrugated steel to build a primitive shelter. Have like a central sanitation place with a shitton of toilets and showers.

[treis]

You start by fixing the problem of people sleeping on benches and in tents. Then you go to those in cars, then those crashing on a couch, then those living 8 to a house, then families with small places, and so on. What the problem is keeps expanding until the resources allocated to it are spent.

[jerlam]

Often, the homeless programs provide aid to the homeless with food and clothing and health care, not necessarily to make them not homeless.

It is much harder and expensive for homeless programs to create shelters or homes. It is also difficult if not illegal to force people into housing.

[inigyou]

But they're not even doing that. It's not the case that tents and benches have been solved and the definition expanded. There are still people sleeping on benches and in tents - more than ever before.

[MyHonestOpinon]

In your example, (it seem to me that) is not that the problems is expanding (getting worst) but it is reaching (helping) more people.