[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.

[inigyou]

They had homes, cardboard box homes. Then the government said a home couldn't be a cardboard box, and confiscated the cardboard boxes and now they sleep on benches.