alt Hacker NewsSF spends more per capita than anywhere in the world on homelessness. And it’s barely made a dent. The solution is upstream of money. It’s policy decisions derived from cultural values. In other places in the world, where homelessness is vanishingly rare, these people are made to choose: “you will get treatment or you will go to jail, but we will not tolerate the destruction of the commons.”
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SF has a famously broken city government. As does Portland (the metro I now live in). Note they have huge budgets for their police and there's still plenty of crime -- does that mean they should give up on having police?
I think if it were treated as a hybrid program (federal/state/county) there could be synergy that could make it work (more eyeballs on it, more shared resources, etc).
And as far as treatment or jail, we do need the power of involuntary institutionalization but it needs to be wielded with utmost restraint and scrutiny. I have family that could have used this, it's pretty much the only way with some. But it always has to be done in the context of helping rather than punishing.
There's so much we could do: start a kind of CCC for homeless youth as a baseline starting point and give them paths up and out. Heal those you can and those you can't at least put them somewhere where they can't ruin it for others. I imagine the emotional response to that would be "send them to jail", I completely understand but it's a lot cheaper if we do something else.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/14/headway/houston-homeless-... https://community.solutions/what-cities-with-successful-home...
Another factor in other places in the world is much lower economic inequality.
The US has chosen to divide its population in this way.
Spending money doesn't get results. Spending money is often a prerequisite to getting results, but you have to be results-minded to begin with, or you just spend money without results. Large bureaucracies are especially good at spending money in ways that don't generate results.