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.
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
Noooooo my white flight suburb
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.
And what’s the problem? So what if a whole bunch of single people moved into tiny government houses? Housing is a human right. And it sure would bring rents down.
There is no problem, they create the problem to justify their lack of empathy.
Maybe your opinion is that housing is a human right but I’m not sure where you are drawing that definitive conclusion from. Are you saying it’s a legal right somewhere or that it’s your emotional stance? In my experience, housing, or even just shelter, is a human responsibility not a right.
Don’t get me wrong, it’d sure be nice if it was a legal right for folks to have a safe shelter of sorts. Men are commonly turned away from the limited shelters that exist due to comfort and safety concerns for women and children. I don’t see how that happens if it’s a human right.
Maybe your opinion is that housing is a human right but I’m not sure where you are drawing that definitive conclusion from. Are you saying it’s a legal right somewhere or that it’s your emotional stance?
The right to housing is a fundamental human right, according to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and many international treaties and agreements since. As the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights puts it:
Adequate housing was recognized as part of the right to an adequate standard of living in article 25 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and in article 11.1 of the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Other international human rights treaties have since recognized or referred to the right to adequate housing or some elements of it, such as the protection of one’s home and privacy.
https://www.ohchr.org/en/special-procedures/sr-housing/human-right-adequate-housing
Your personal experience has given you an incorrect belief regarding the human right to housing. I’m sorry to call you out so directly, but sometimes people need to hear hard truths. Facts don’t care about your feelings.
I don’t feel like you called me out at all but that doesn’t seem to establish any kind of legal human right to any specific area of interest that I have seen discussed here. Are you able to clarify how I’m missing that part of it?
Perhaps we’re talking past each other. Human rights are not defined by laws. Human rights come before laws. Laws, in decent nations, are written in such a way as to protect human rights.
The text of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, enacted by the UN in the hope that never again would the world see such widespread and horrific violations of human rights as it did during World War II, is an excellent starting point to understand how the modern world sees human rights. It is linked in the post I linked above.
And, just to circle back around to the topic, the laws of the United States are clearly failing to protect the fundamental human right to adequate housing for all persons resident in the United States.
That makes sense, thank you for clarifying.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Begs the question: who’s getting paid the difference right now? And how much are they paying which elected officials?
In my city the annual cost of a bed and support was about $80,000/year, not sure what’s different 😅
If only they did what was cheaper for them…
Tldr of the source?