There's a number of other studies that show that, overall, letting people go unhoused is far, far more costly than just fucking housing them. It's not just paying for the cops and demo teams to chase them around, you're also paying for excess use of medical services that wouldn't be taking place otherwise, lost revenue because of people wanting to avoid the homeless, and a bunch of other things that all just pile up. It doesn't help that some startups have entered this space and you've got cities like San Francisco paying them something like 40 or 80 thousand a year to keep the homeless in a fenced off area in a tent grid. It doesn't really fix anything, it's just another shitty, expensive band-aid whose funding could have gone to fixing the problem but didn't.
Yes. They should do it like NYC, where it's basically illegal to live on the street. The city is required by law to offer free housing at a certain quality level for anyone who needs it. It's not amazing but you get a door that locks and a security team, plus a bathroom.
If you don't want to sleep inside, you literally have to leave the city. It's not cheap but it works much better than letting people live in tents.
San Francisco infuriates me. There are activist groups that are made of actual literal unhoused people telling the city what they need and what they want. And the city could just give people the money they need for a fraction of the administrative costs it spins on its non-profits and its government agencies.
But the city says homeless people are drug addicts and criminals and can't be trusted to use money responsibly.
So they funnel millions of dollars to corrupt non-profits and government agencies who promise to use the money responsibly for the benefit of the homeless and they fucking don't. There was a $350K program run by the Salvation Army in partnership with the local public transit agency. One homeless person used their services.. One.
At least government agencies are, at some remove, responsible to the taxpayers and the voters. Non-profits dedicated to "helping" the homeless have a very strong incentive to make the problem worse. Because the worse the homelessness crisis becomes, the more money goes to the nonprofits. So they take government money, give it to their employees, make some sort of pathetic token effort to help unhoused people, and as the crisis worsens they go back to the government and say "the crisis is worse, we need more money".
And civilians look at the amount of money being poured into assistance to unhoused people, and look at the crisis getting worse, and say "more money and services won't help these people, we need to criminalize them". And fucking Newsom is all over that because he's angling for the Presidency and military style crackdowns impress the fascists in red states.
There's a homelessness crisis because of government corruption and incompetence. And the majority of Americans think the solution is to give the government more military power, more police power, and let those same corrupt agencies brutalize the homeless more. It's sickening.
I actually kind of went to a major fancy pants conference in Portland last year for homelessness issues.
Yes, it was extremely dystopian to drink wine and wear jewelry and fancy dresses while seeing presentations on homelessness. The whole thing was depressing. The other people who were there to genuinely resolve the issue were also depressed. Everyone got drunk. We talked a bit.
The problem is that it's all a gridlock and all controversial and these people don't face any real discomfort from that gridlock or from prolonging the situation. They still get paid. As much as they wince and say how it's bad and they can't figure out how to work with NIMBY's and all the stigma and regulations etc- they still get paid. And they get to brag to all their friends about how kind and amazing they are for being the head of the Sad Pathetic Homeless People NonProfit Fund for the last 8 years.
It's like they sympathy jerk off. They are just edging to the suffering in a different way. If they were effective, then they wouldn't look so amazing and charitable because the homeless wouldn't be an issue. They couldn't keep jerking off to their own saintly ego.
and honestly, I would like to sit on a bench at night without worrying im keeping somebody out of their bed. that would be cool. I would like to stop the streets smelling like piss. I would like too walk on the sidewalk without having to detour and step into the street to avoid people's homes at least twice a block.
clearly, armed neo nazi thugs, even if you LIKE armed neo nazi thugs (we should, um, have a chat separately. what the fuck is wrong with hypothetical you?) don't make that happen. and for the libs: you wouldn't even have to look at human tragedy beyond their full comprehension every time you go outside! yes, you would have to give resources and basic human dignity to the 'undeserving', and supply side jesus WOULD damn you to eternal hell (being homeless in san francisco but during extreme weather events), but the few years before you die would be substantially nicer.
BuT I HaVe To WoRk FoR mY HoUsE!!
...yeah? And you get to choose how nice that house is and where it is. You aren't "forced" to only have a small apartment...
America: land of the greedy, cold, asshole.
Yeah? Well if someone decided to build affordable housing near my McMansion, then my precious house's market value will decrease. Also something about crime because of the poors
Eh ... There are literally millions of people who work and don't get to choose any of those things, and are forced into a small apartment and/or a roommate scenario.
Oh I know that all too well lol I currently rent an "apartment" that is the upstairs of a dilapidated garage and I work full time as a psudo-supervisor in a factory (whatever im considered idk lol we don't use titles so we can't determine our value properly)
For us, that "free housing" would probably be equivalent to what we have now lol
I think the issue is that if the government offered tiny houses or apartments for anyone that everyone would want one.
The value of "free shit" is somehow larger than the value of owning a large mansion or something.
I distrust toots that assert something without providing a link
I was lucky and found a link to the 31K figure; sounds partially like it does NOT apply to all homeless people, just some small percentage, so probably a bullshit numberhttps://homelessvoice.org/the-cost-to-criminalize-homelessness/
I appreciate the link!
The article, I think, is very clear on how those dollar amounts were measured, and I don't think they're bullshit at all, but everybody here can read the article and decide for themselves.
Also, they quote $10k for "supportive housing" and show a picture of San Francisco. I guarantee that's not accurate. The state needs to pay to house these people, but we need to be realistic about the cost.
Housing in places like SF is expensive because of private landlords jacking up proces to the moon. If the government owns the property and gets to control the cost then it’s really not any more expensive than housing them anywhere else. Better still it puts those people within the range of public services like transit so they can actually work on getting themselves into a better situation.
Sure, but are you accounting for the profit gained from slave labor in the private prisons?
The $10k for supportive housing seems insanely low…
I can’t imagine a government doing anything over the course of a year and it only costing $10k.
Single small bedroom with shared kitchen and bathrooms is pretty cheap. You probably want to spend a bit more though to help the homeless into a position, where they can take care of themself.
My first residence after the military was a common kitchen and living room with an exterior door and four bedrooms with a bedroom door at each corner with its own keyed entry. Each bedroom had its own closet and bathroom. So you needed an exterior door key and your bedroom door key to get to your room from the quad. It was one of my favorite places to live and I didn’t get along well with one of the other guys but we just left each other alone.
The building had eight of these quads per floor per building and it was two stories. Two buildings were connected on the second floor by an attached breezeway and paths to the stairs. The first floor had a rec room and facility office in leu of two of the center first floor quads.
I agree. Where is this $800/MO housing? Especially when you recognize that most homeless live in cities where housing is more expensive than average.
@an_onanist @li10 housing prices are set by LANDLORDS, not some kind of objective metric that's tied to material facts.
Housing costs what it takes to build & maintain it, & that's not the same as what landlords charge for it in order to turn a profit off gatekeeping access to necessary resources. Housing could be far cheaper than it is for most people but that's a choice we make as a society as well. So i don't accept "where is housing that cheap" as a valid argument against these findings.
Yea this isn't really believable to me for most cities.
In my Canadian city: "While each of the locations would have different operating budgets, the average annual cost is almost $111,759 per bed."
I don't get it
People love paying extra for the cruelty.
At least in countries with shanty towns, the poor are allowed to live in squats. We don't even give people that tiny grace. We don't even give them free cheap cars to live in parking lots, or vouchers for mechanic repairs for the cars they live in. We'd have shanty towns if we allowed it. We just hide it rather than see how bad things really are.
And those shanty towns often get mass transit services so the people can get to work.
In America (and Britain), towns specifically avoid serving very poor areas for fear that they might actually use it.
Can't allow competition for corporate landlords, could cut into their profits.
But you see this easy they would be getting an ...undeserved benefit (gasp!!) and we can't have those.
I kid you not, this is what the conservative brain thinks.
Yep, punishment must be part of the deal, even if it costs us 3 times as much. This is how we know that, for conservatives, the cruelty is the point.
It's honestly stunning how much they value cruelty. This is why we shouldn't spank our kids. All it teaches them is to add a pointless step for violence before actually problem solving.
We're fine providing housing for these losers.
In prison.
We cannot allow these men a little wooden house with windows and an open door. Their housing must be a little part of a concrete and iron world attended by sadists, their neigbors and roommates should be mean, violent people.
And you have to let us enslave them a little bit and ensure they have no freedom to roam and no worldly pleasures, no intimacy or sex except that which the strong can take homosexually nonconsensually from their fellow man.
It's what Jesus would want us to do.
Does anyone have the actual research on this? Both of those numbers seem really low.
https://www.npscoalition.org/post/fact-sheet-cost-of-homelessness
The savings/costs drastically change based on state/city. But the overwhelming majority of the time it is cheaper to do the morally correct thing of providing permanent housing assistance.
$10,000 a year to provide a single person housing? To put that in perspective. I'd assume that means a studio type apartment of some kind. Not high end, but a roof and place to live for $10,000 a year. I have a 1500sqft home in Washington state on 3 acres of land, and I pay $27,000 a year for my mortgage. So to me, $10,000 seems reasonable for a government funded studio for a year.
Begs the question: who's getting paid the difference right now? And how much are they paying which elected officials?
The overhead goes to a bunch of stuff. The costs of housing inmates include the cost of hours of judges, lawyers, COs, etc. However the way it it profitable, beyond just collecting fines, and deciding your money is suspect, and taking it, is because of the corpratization of the legal system. Huge, but, often, not well known, corporations that run aspects of jails, and prisons. They make the food, run the inmate phone systems, control the inmate commissary, staff the medical departments, and more. These are just the ones that work with jails. There are third part corporations that provide bulk legal assistance work, editing services, services for a lot of the moving factors of the legal system.
These companies, in turn, give huge amounts of "donations" to politician's needs. Campaign funds being the most well known. This money, while paying for these costs, is also used to keep them living an exceptionally comfortable life. Many, after pushing through legislation favorable to a company, will be compensated in a number of ways. From them being able to take advantage of stock investment knowing how the law is about to change, and how that will affect their holdings, to exiting politics and being given a cushy, high paying, fluff job in the industry they helped out.
There isn't so much of the straight bribes, graft, and other forms of corruption people assume with politics. It is more abstracted than that, and technically legal. Obviously there are conflicts of interest that can easily be seen in this, however, since a company isn't just handing the official a bag of money, that they will keep as their own income, it is deemed legal.
Housing is kept artificially scarce to keep prices up. Criminalizing homelessness raises the demand for housing. I wonder how many people making these policies have rental properties or invest in housing.
There’s frequently a lot more to homelessness than just giving someone a place to live. Many of these people are mentally ill or addicted to something and cannot function or take care of themselves. There’s additional costs above just providing a place to live - like food and clothing and healthcare.
Inmates are supposed to be provided with services like meals, showers, uniforms, and healthcare so that’s part of the reason for the discrepancy in costs. I doubt there’s much addiction care or mental health care in prison though.
These people really need a better place to get help than jail. But we don’t have socialized medicine in the US, and that’s probably a huge contributor to homelessness. Just think if you couldn’t drown in medical debt, or could walk in to any clinic and sign up for addiction care or mental health assistance how many homeless people might not have ended up homeless.
Also I’m not aware of any major US city where rent or mortgage is $10k per year. A lot of cities are buying up old motels and providing support services and temporary housing. That seems to be a good start, but it probably costs more than $10k per year per person. And without free continuing healthcare a lot of people are going to end up back on the street.
Some of them it was for sure a preexisting condidtion. But how many homeless people developed addictions and assorted health problems because of homelessness?
A HELL of a lot more.
If they had had a home that they wouldn't lose to bullshit to begin with...
Yesterday, Human Rights Watch published a report on criminalization of unhoused people in Los Angeles. It's worth a read.
Any particular points you could summarise for us?
Hilariously Los Angeles and a bunch of California cities just told Newsom to fuck off with his orders to clear homeless encampments.
"So for 20 000 extra we can keep a cop on the payroll that will protect us when the people rise against us?"
In my city the annual cost of a bed and support was about $80,000/year, not sure what's different 😅
Your city obviously decided to employ psychologists in a 1 to 1 ratio.
I am all for helping the homeless but these numbers seem misleading. Now I want to see how much if they also get all of the amenities that come with prison. 3 meals a day and (shitty) healthcare.
Housing - 10,050 Medicare average cost per beneficiary (2022) - 15,730
31065-10050-15730 = 5285 remaining for meals, three meals everyday for a year would be $4.83 per meal, low but doable. This assumes the government will be providing everything with no contribution from the individual. Lack of housing is probably the largest impediment to employment, no address or id for job apps, nowhere to shower and be clean, have clean clothes, etc. Addiction is another issue but safe stable housing would be a major help in getting clean as well. So some number of these people will be able to get back on track and start contributing to themselves and society at large.
I realized after typing I found Medicare instead of Medicaid, it varies by state but average cost per enrollee is 8651, so another 1400 is available in the equation.
And that is probably on the low end. So even if we round up to $30,000, it's still less. And the people are better off. I have been a homeless drug addict. It's a rough life. The only reason I broke free from heroin/fentanyl addiction is because I went to prison. But I also wanted to quit. If someone does not want to quit, they won't quit.
Thank you for taking the time to research and do the math. You are a good person.
If only they did what was cheaper for them....
And what do you do with the mentally ill homeless who refuse services and help? Cause I'm my city those are the homeless that remain. And until people accept that some will have to be taken off the streets and forced into help, against their will, then we're always gonna have this issue.
My city provides great homeless services, but only if you ask or want them. If you're the guy who doesn't know or want help and running around the subway threatening and harassing people, you get to stay on the street and do as you want.
Unhoused people refuse help because past "help" failed them or people they know, or "help" comes with conditions that are unacceptable to them, or "help" will not solve the actual problems they have. The solution is not to force people into institutions that abuse them, neglect them, and then kick them out for failing to follow arbitrary rules.
I mean, if you have a dog, and the shelters don't allow dogs, what do you do? What sane person would risk their dog being put down at the pound in exchange for a few weeks of housing - housing, moreover, that is demonstratively less safe than living on the street?
The solution is to improve the services available without conditions so that unhoused people feel safe in asking for those services.
There are a small number of people who genuinely cannot make decisions because they cannot comprehend reality. And those people need help, possibly involuntary help. But even then, that doesn't mean taking them away from the people and places they know and locking them up. People blame Reagan's deinstitutionalization of mentally ill people in the '80s for the current homeless crisis - people forget Reagan's deinstitutionalization policy was popular because insane asylums were horrifically incompetent and abusive.
And if you see a homeless person experiencing a mental health crisis or acting irrational in public, please remember, they have no private place to go - how would you come off to the public if your worst moments had to be displayed in public? - and then ask yourself whether their actions are making you feel unsafe, or merely uncomfortable.
I wish more people went to the Glore Psychiatric Museum in St Joseph, MO. Here's a famous display from that museum, for "pica":
That museum really really shows how little difference there was in the way we treated patients of asylums, versus inmates, versus prisoners of war. There are so many torture devices in there, disguised as medical devices. As someone formerly in the bioengineering field, it was a sober warning to the harm that can be created through "medical" devices and our own hubris and cruelty.
People have no idea what those were like. And how unethical forced imprisonment is. That should make everyone recoil. I thought we all hated slavery, right? It would be more compassionate to let them set up squats and car camps than to force institutionalization on them.
Ps the above picture results in the patient dying. It was one of the first surgeries to remove stomach contents and anesthesia wasn't refined/good back then. So they performed an experimental procedure on a patient who couldn't consent to it and who DIDN'T consent to it, and she died from it. That's what asylums were like.
Well, having a home will help their mental illness because they'll be able to develop a circadian rhythm, sleep, not be constantly stressed. They are more likely to be able to take their meds on time. They can spend time on their phones to relax because they will have access to chargers/electricity. Very very few people are so mentally disabled they need assisted living, and those people don't usually stay alive on the streets.
And this time of year gets extra crazy homeless/street people because of sunstroke, heatstroke, and dehydration which they also would be able to avoid in a home. It's probably your same local homeless people, just some are allowed in libraries and places with AC, and the ones that aren't are getting extra agitated.
Like literally, cosplay homelessness in your city at peak heat times and no money. How would you cool off if you can't go in a store? Where is the nearest shade you can sit and rest in? How cool are you, really? Many city have designed infrastructure specifically so homeless can't cool off. That makes everything worse. Including with climate change for housed people.
You can thank Reagan for shutting down the mental institutions instead of fixing them.
We just let our mentally ill roam the streets now, even the veterans
The title is a shit take. We have a word for when what something is doing isn't aligned with it's purpose, broken. If something is broken it needs fixing.
I think you're missing the point. It's not broken. It's working completely as intended. The system is doing exactly what it was designed to do. The broken part is in the juxtaposition of what you think it should do.
Well why don't all the blue states band together and make it happen? In fact why haven't they done it in the last 40 years or so? What's going on? What are they waiting for? They have power and money to make it happen. They supposedly even have political will? It's almost like it's all talk and nobody wants to do it
This is my question as well for a lot of issues and I think part of the answer must be that the democratic party as a whole just isn't that "left" when the rubber meets the road.
Another thing is that the places where democrats have overwhelming political majority is major cities more often than states. So you might get BLUE cities existing in just kinda blue states which exist in a country that is only half blue on a good day. The city, where the most political will to implement very left policies exists, is constrained in its actions by state and federal law and state and federal budgeting constraints which the city can't effect directly.
Because society as a whole has to tackle this. What do you think the red fuckers would do? They'd start shipping bussess of homeless people into blue states.
There needs to be a federal incentive structure. Don't want to take care of your homeless? No problem, no tax dollars for you, we're sending it to the blue states that are doing something.
Of course this would have to pass Congress and the red fuckers will never allow that to happen.
