[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.

[inigyou]

The market would probably solve it if you fired all the bureaucrats but there may be other side effects to that

[conception]

Because there was no homeless before government programs.

It’s like history was the first casualty of late stage capitalism and no one knows about the new deal or the war on poverty.

[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.