For example, it seems like most homeless shelters have tons of beds all together in one big room. But in my experience that would make it pretty hard to sleep with all the snoring and other noises. Is there some type of individual sleeping pod that would be better? What other innovations can you think of for the homeless?
I used to work in social housing
The biggest innovation in homeless is the "housing first" policy in Finland. No clever tricks or anything but homeless people are given social housing regardless of engagement with services, addition problems etc. (This is the exact opposite of how things normally work where someone has to engage well with services before being elligible for state housing).
The outcomes are basically as close to ending homelessness as you can get.
They do have a social worker living near them to make sure they don't burn their place down so it isn't just the cost of housing without any clever tricks at all. See:
> But Housing First is not just about housing. “Services have been crucial,” says Helsinki’s mayor, Jan Vapaavuori, who was housing minister when the original scheme was launched. “Many long-term homeless people have addictions, mental health issues, medical conditions that need ongoing care. The support has to be there.”
> At Rukkila, seven staff support 21 tenants. Assistant manager Saara Haapa says the work ranges from practical help navigating bureaucracy and getting education, training and work placements to activities including games, visits and learning – or re-learning – basic life skills such as cleaning and cooking.
We've gone from 20,000 homeless in the 1990s down to about 4,000 in 2023, so it's very impressive. A large part of the reason is that drug use does not disqualify you from recieving benefits.
It's important to note that fentanyl and methamphetamine are not nearly as widespread in the EU... and no amount of housing can solve a drug problem that causes people to publicly lose their minds. Having grown up during the 80s in America and watched homelessness more or less recede all the way through the 2000s until the opioid explosion, I wonder how the Finnish system will handle it if or when such drugs become widespread among working age people.
It's a good, and concerning, question. Alcohol is our most damaging drug on a collective level here for now, and I'm mostly glad we're starting to get that under control. Alcohol taxes ftw, all my homies love regressive taxation lol
But no, seriously, as an expat who grew up next to some projects I'm personally aware that meth is just in a class of its own when it comes to encouraging antisocial behavior on an individual level.
It's possible to look at America as a kind of "first contact" site for all kinds of social upheavals, positive and negative alike. It's possible the Finnish youth are simply more aware of the disastrous consequences of amphetamine abuse, and so will avoid it more. Truly hard to say.
That's a good question. The number is a little more suspect if someone automatically exits the homeless category as soon as they rent a tiny room with their Kela benefits.
The Housing and Development Centre reports "At the end of 2022, there were 3,686 homeless people living alone in Finland, which is 262 less than in 2021. The number of the long-term homeless was 1,133, which marks a decrease of 185 people."
"Of all the homeless, 70 per cent were temporarily staying with friends or relatives. Dormitories, hostels and different institutions housed 17 per cent of the homeless people. Finally, 13 per cent of the homeless people were living outside, in stairways or in overnight shelters."
So I guess the bulk of that number are short-term homeless people - maybe they got evicted, or lost all their savings or something.
Short term homeless is an interesting demographic to target. I’ve seen some threads talking about being homeless, and a common thread (very anecdotal) that I see repeated is how often a small amount of money was enough to lead to an eviction. I’m curious if there might be value in targeting homeless spending in such a way to try to limit short term homelessness by preventing evictions in the first place.
> It also effectively pays for itself through reduce utilization of other social services: medical, police, legal, food, etc.
No study offers anywhere close to proof of that. First of all by definition of course it’s not paying for itself. These are massive tax expenditures at work. At best these amounts are reduced somewhat. Second, the studies rely on lots of assumptions all down the value chain that a responsible person wouldn’t normally make. The gaslighting by the government, NGOs, and charities feeding at the trough is staggering.
I pay a shitload in taxes. Despite my libertarian leanings, I am not at all adverse about a lot of those taxes going to people who genuinely need it. But there is simply no transparency and no good faith presentation of budgets by any of these organizations.
What makes you think California's programs fit that description? Housing programs in the US and most other countries are viciously means-tested because the necessary long-term investments are not being made to improve capacity to meet demand (on top of the moral arguments involving who "deserves" help based on their backgrounds or struggles).
If you can point to a single housing authority who has implemented such a plan satisfactorily, ie, to meaningfully address homelessness within their jurisdiction following the dictates of that bill, please do let us know. But it's otherwise naive to assume that because a law exists that the state has the resources to enforce it. Virtue signalling pursuant to more-or-less intentionally hamstrung initiatives is rampant in California's legislative bodies.
Where in that bill is the mandate to build or acquire housing adequate for demand? What makes you think legislators aren't savvy enough to understand the consequences of legalistic language and the loopholes it can provide?
Solutions are a separate question and irrelevant for this comment thread. Do you have any reason to believe that California is comparable to Finland? Or did you just need to vent?
This is a very naive assertion. Providing homes reduces homelessness but many un-housed individuals will not accept the housing for a number of reasons to include mental illness or the stipulations required by the housing authority.
For a subset of the unhoused, yes. Some chronically unhoused people don't have the skills to function in housing, some chronically unhoused people have mental illnesses that make staying in housing difficult for them and the people around them. A small subset unhoused people want to live on the street. Homes without social services and a safety net is setting up the broad unhoused population up for failure, and then we wonder why housing programs don't work and throw money at something else.
Homelessness is an incredibly complicated issue. Mental healthcare is not the answer, medical care is not the answer, financial support is not the answer, housing is not the answer. Some combination of those things in the right proportion is the answer, and it's not one size fits all.
Imagine. Somebody's homeless, you give them a home? Where they have an address, can wash up, cook meals, get enough sleep, are safer? It's that simple?
The solution for homelessness isn't something like a sleeping pod or capsule hotels. The solution for homelessness is 3-fold:
- Secure, stable housing
- Free mental health care, substance abuse care
- Reliable and robust public transportation
Without those 3 things minimum, any other solution to the homelessness crisis will not succeed.
Access to jobs, food, and sanitary conditions is limited without stable housing. Without mental health care and substance abuse care, those with mental illnesses or substance abuse problems will not be able to adapt to the changing environment, become employable, or maintain long-term housing. And without reliable transportation, getting to grocery stores, work, etc is nearly impossible in most US cities, let alone smaller towns.
Any other solution is slapping a Hello Kitty bandaid on a gunshot wound and kicking the can further down the road for someone else to deal with.
EDIT: An organization that's local to me here in Atlanta that is succeeding very well is the Trans Housing Coalition(1). While they specifically focus their efforts on PoC transwomen in the Atlanta area they've been very successful in their work.
Also regular medical care. A lot of the unhoused have chronic but treatable illnesses which they currently lack the resources (or trust in medicine) to address.
The main question is, why are houses not like every other commodity? You never see anybody who is literally too poor to afford shoes. A car, despite being an industrial miracle assembled out of precision parts, is far cheaper than a house. Food insecurity is largely manageable for most people in rich countries.
The answer is, of course, politics - and that's also why you'll never solve homelessness with a better capsule hotel.
A friend of mine works for the city in Strasbourg, and the mayor's office wanted to improve the situation of the homeless, so they installed some basic amenities for a homeless camp. Within a fortnight, the police had trashed the amenities. If you make the situation better for the homeless in a state that wants the homeless to go elsewhere, the politics will unsolve your solution.
Some of the homeless people don't want a home. They don't even want to be in the system, now become someone says that's anecdotal, I'm not saying ALL OF THEM, I'm saying there's a minority of them, who are in fact fugitives, or maybe they just don't want to go back to their old lives due to some trauma or stress. Even so. My point being, you'll never 100% solve homelessness. Some are also dealing with serious mental issues.
I was part of a homeless non-profit for about a year so I got exposure to all sorts of different scenarios. We were able to get some off the street, some literally had relatives who would have given them a home, but they needed to sort through their personal issues first.
You can't fix everyone even with infinite resources unfortunately, I'm not saying that if you can help don't, I'm just saying, I feel like some people think they can end homelessness, we're too far from that.
To understand the problem we should first define what is 'a home' is and then we should ask homeless about what they do understand as 'a home'. People who never actually interacted with homeless in any [bigger than some spare change] capacity would never understand that.
> They don't even want to be in the system
And this one is even harder, because most of them has a deep aversion and/or distrust for 'the system', for whatever reason.
> We were able to get some off the street
Kudos to you and your fellows, but, as you probably know already, many, many who get off the street gets back, often in a quite short time.
> part of a homeless non-profit for about a year
If you don't mind and the reason for quitting was related to it - what was the reason? Idle curiosity from my part.
You make a good point. A post about a specific event wherein police trashed amenities is a convenient narrative, whereas broad talk about demographics is not.
In a similar vein, in Portland, Oregon it is common to see police employ heavy machinery to bulldoze homeless camps. It is convenient to say that the police are responsible for that because we do not know that the police aren’t themselves homeless and demolishing their own camps (something they would be demographically inclined to do as homeless people)
The fact of the matter is that specifically in the US, cops hate homeless people.
Cops are violent and empowered and from my own subjective experience absolutely will take anything as an excuse to destroy anything belonging to homeless people, from amenities to personal belongings. I dont see anything even remotely fishy about the idea of cops actively destroying social amenities. Regardless of any problems that may be more or less likely in a homeless population that doesnt change the fact that cops are a tool of anti-social conservative politics and actively try to prevent social programs from working or being implemented.
The facts aren't in question, although the police say they 'evacuated' the camp (at four in the morning, with force) - and they've done so four times, destroying everything in the process.
>The main question is, why are houses not like every other commodity?
I'm working on a deal right now that could be a 40 house development... or it could be nothing. Why? Because the infrastructure doesn't exist to support the development, and it could be as much as $2MM to put in the infrastructure (think street and sewer), and because of setbacks, etc, it could be down to as few as 20 houses without some kind of variance. And that's before the cost of the land and the cost of the construction, all of which would rest on the shoulders of the developer. Shoes, a car, etc an assembly line can be configured and stamp out near identical products year after year. Even if you intend to build generic tract houses (like this development would be...), you still have tremendous up front costs and "tooling" and the variation of each new development -- location, elevation, access to services, etc.
While there are legitimate planning problems (does it make sense to run utilities out to serve yet another suburb?) that are separable from pure politics, I think you're sort of burying the lede when mention the 'cost of the land' then quickly move on to other topics.
'Cost of land' is inherently a political question, because land is not generally produced by human labour. It exists, then is divided according to some moral or political criteria. A state cannot arbitrarily say 'everybody gets a free car', because the car industry will go bust, then nobody will get a car. A state can (and states have) say that you can divide land ownership in whatever way you want. It's a purely political decision.
In many countries, areas, and states, land costs account for the massive majority of new construction costs. What's more, they force planners and developers to act in a counter-intuitive way to work around them. They incentivize insane behaviour, like empty lots in the middle of highly dense cities, due to the logic of financial speculation.
You can't 'fix' housing without fixing the political question, which ultimately starts with making people broadly recognize it is a political question, and addressing it as such.
> I think you're sort of burying the lede when mention the 'cost of the land'
Not at all - you wanted me to answer or address a different topic than the previous poster. They wanted to understand the difference between commodities. My main point was not just about cost, but about the difference in production as well as a nuance around regulation. In my market, land costs while important are not the gating factor in whether something can be developed.
I do real estate and politics for a living, but I can’t quite wrap my head around the rest of your point. I think you are advocating for some kind of government reallocation or loosening of property rights, which makes me very uncomfortable but also would not be anywhere near how I would fix housing in my state.
> I think you are advocating for some kind of government reallocation or loosening of property rights
I'm really just drawing attention to the fact the relevant property rights (what you can build, who can live there, how much it is worth relative to other things) are the product of continuous government intervention (planning, consultations, law, etc). Further, the government has basically free reign to legislate however it likes, unlike regulating conventional industries (automakers, etc).
My point is not that the government should just seize all inner city land - that would work, but it would also work to just rebalance the right to own land against the right to shelter in planning law, then use existing procedures to work out the consequences. For instance, one thing that could help would be to obligate developers to increase the number of housing units on a residential site if they redevelop.
Oddly enough, the only way you can really make housing a commodity item would be to build capsules or other types of mobile homes that can be purchased separately from the land they are parked on. The Nakagin Capsule Tower comes to mind[0] but it's far from a solved problem since you'd need similar infrastructure to a container port to move the capsules around but since you don't move them often the infra itself has to be movable so it can go where the demand is, which is a pretty big ask if you're only moving one capsule. The only existing format is the traditional mobile home which is limited to single story and low density which means it can't be located near urban centers that need it the most. So, you're kind of stuck with the problem of it being easy to build small homes but really hard to find a place to put them.
Well, it's really hard to find a place to put them because of planning regulations, and because of land costs.
If you, for example, nationalized all inner-city land, you could easily find plots to build high density housing. At which point, you're stuck there wondering why you should bother with the capsules: it's cheaper to just prefab the building in concrete then assemble at site. That's what the kruschevkas are: you leverage economies of scale to produce millions of units of housing for peanuts.
Obviously, nationalizing inner-city land is hard in the current political makeup of most nations today: real estate is a favoured investment for very rich people, and they have a lot of political power. So the question of housing becomes less one about houses, and more about what kind of finessed regulation you need to avoid offending the small number of very wealthy people that own inner city land, while actually allowing the state to build on it.
Nationalizing inner city land would likely have many unintended consequences. I could see it resulting in migration of people and businesses away from the nationalized area only to regroup at a new center that wasn't restricted by direct governmental control. Reasons for that that spring to mind are that planning permissions would certainly be a nightmare, difficult to obtain and extremely slow. If there was a hard quota of apartments vs commercial space it could create a bad situation for businesses and drive them away. The types of residential units may not meet the demand which could drive segments of the population to seek housing elsewhere even if the costs were higher. Poor design decisions for the units constructed could produce areas conducive to crime or just make it unattractive or inconvenient.
There's a long history of national building projects in many countries that have created problems like these.
In Europe there are very many successful examples of national housing projects, indeed many countries have large portions of the housing stock in public hands to this day.
This was generally instituted after WW2, which left the EU housing stock in a far worse condition than the US's today, and left the EU totally impoverished.
So, you can come up with hypothetical problems, but practical experience shows it can absolutely work.
I don't necessarily disagree with your conclusion, but take issue with "You never see anybody who is literally too poor to afford shoes". Seems like an odd take, shoes can easily be 100-200 currency, or maybe 20-40 on the extreme cheap end if you get lucky, of course I see people who are literally too poor to afford them. I've been too poor to afford them, it's only because I could put them on an existing credit card that I was able to get any, otherwise I'd be looking for scraps.
> You never see anybody who is literally too poor to afford shoes.
When I was younger, there were people in my town that were too poor to afford shoes. This was in the US, no less.
> The main question is, why are houses not like every other commodity?
Homes can be a commodity. The problem is that the land they sit on is not. Land is relatively fixed in supply and land that is useful for living on is even more limited.
Those are symptoms, not causes. A lot of the value of land in California is proximity to good services and high ROI as regards social and career. The red tape, permitting, and labor costs are market-derived cash extraction mechanisms. Your problem is rent-seekers, not government.
Trailer parks. Mass produced, identical, movable. Government regulation prevents it for the most part with laws saying "you must pay us yearly for owning a shoe" among others.
> You never see anybody who is literally too poor to afford shoes.
Not sure where you're talking about, but if you're in Strasbourg like your friend, I lived for a while in Belfort, and Strasbourg and Basel were the two biggest cities nearby.
In both of those cities, I saw significant problems with poverty, and people I'm fairly confident were too poor to afford shoes.
Places like Avivo Village[0][1] which put single-room homes into unused commercial/industrial spaces and offer them up to unhoused people without most of the strings attached to traditional shelters: families are allowed, pets are allowed, people without ID are allowed, addicts are allowed.
Avivo has been a pretty promising success story. As the second article states, there are plans to build a second location in south MPLS, where the largest concentration of Minneapolis's unhoused population congregates.
Cities need to rewrite their laws on rooming houses. It's been many decades since they were put in place and their current form is a hindrance rather than a help. There aren't many in between options for people falling on hard times. Roommates, cheap apartment, motel room or you stay at some form of shelter. Proper rooming houses could fill that gap by being less expensive but still affording you your own space and perhaps be easier for some people such as the elderly or disabled if meals are provided.
The reason you don't see any innovations for homelessness comes entirely down to city planning and code restrictions.
There isn't a reason why you can't have capsule hotels or shared dorm style housing other than the zoning boards saying no.
Back in the day, boarding houses used to take care of this but we're quietly phased out during the post war boom. As we revert to the mean again, this type of living is going to become normal.
Ice is among the prized [and expensive] luxuries for summertime homeless. When you add the daily expense, annual refrigeration approaches the cost of cell phone service.
Adding an industrial ice machine to your local food kitchen can unburden a major expenditure for homeless' ice boxes. Just make sure you clean it [full defrost] every few months!
This is a big missing piece of the puzzle and it could all be fixed by simply repealing legislation.
> In 1917, California passed a new hotel act that prevented the building of new hotels with small cubicle rooms.[12] In addition to banning or restricting SRO hotels, land use reformers also passed zoning rules that indirectly reduced SROs: banning mixed residential and commercial use in neighbourhoods, an approach which meant that any remaining SRO hotel's residents would find it hard to eat at a local cafe or walk to a nearby corner grocery to buy food.
There are plenty of places where you can get a plot of land for under $50k, and there are plenty of ways to live on it for under $30k. You can have a warm insulated shelter, with heat, and a little electricity from solar. You can set up a composting toilet. It would be better than many Americans had at the start of the 20th century. But it will be illegal. It will not be up to code. We have attempted to solve poverty by making it illegal not to have enough money.
Granted, there are people who cannot look out for themselves or be this self reliant. But the people who can, are not even left in peace to do it.
Most innovation in the homeless “housing” space has focused on relocation, both benevolent (trying to reconnect them with family members and friends willing to house them and get them off the street) and self-interested (without regard to the well-being of the individual, just focused on getting them on a bus going somewhere far away).
When it works, it’s actually a great boon for the individuals at question, as well as dramatically out-competes alternatives on price, as there’s a four orders of magnitude difference in price between the cost of buying and building housing and shelters, particularly in some of America’s most expensive and overzoned real-estate markets, versus buying them a ride home to somewhere they’re expected. [1]
That said, these programs have mixed results - sometimes great and life-changing, sometimes ruinsome due to poor vetting of the opposite side and being used as a high-pressure removal tactic [2] - but cities have broadly embraced doing it because in either case, it is effective at the political goal of moving one’s homeless problem somewhere else.
> What other innovations can you think of for the homeless?
Go down to the shelter and volunteer. That will do substantially more than whatever capsule hotel/sleeping pod/innovation you can come up with. No disrespect. But it's becoming sort of a cliche here that hackers will save the world with code and bayesian priors. Perhaps best to remember all the damage some of tech's "innovations" have caused to society.
Our small town has won awards for its approach to homelessness, so FWIW... they have several sections... there is a building that is dorm style, and these are intended for walk-ins / very temporary needs. Then they have exactly what you suggest - small tilt-up pods that have power and heating. There is a shared shower building and I believe a separate "services" building. There's very much a program to get people through the system and ideally into long-term housing, with the pods in particular as a temporary dwelling. Apart from this program, there are of course warming shelters (generally church affiliated) with the big-room style shared space -- these are ultra-temporary and by anecdote appear to attract the majority of serious mental / drug issues, whereas the homeless program I described above is more people caught in bad economic / life decision scenarios.
The Delancey Street Foundation focuses on adjacent / overlapping problems - recovery from substance abuse, convicted criminals re-entering society, and the homeless situations that often come with those situations. They have been remarkably successful and financially self-sustaining. I lived next to their development in San Francisco for 5 years and regularly patronized their retail businesses. For the first year or so, I had no idea about the foundation behind the businesses (or that their members were the employees) until I read something posted on the wall at one of them.
Homeless shelters in north america are missing a feature. Many features are possible.
Switzerland for example uses their bomb shelters as homeless shelters.
But north america doesn't have that same war fears. We don't have bomb shelters everywhere.
One thing which always made me curious. Why don't storage lockers act as cheap housing? It's 1 light, maybe an outlet. But they all disallow people living out of them.
Homeless have their stolen shopping carts full of junk. Wouldnt storage spot of 8'x8' be enough to at least offer people housing when they need it? Safely store their stuff and get out of the elements. Constructing these is trivial as well. We could produce a ridiculous number of storage lockers at virtually no cost. People can use them for whatever reason they want.
Biggest problem is "cleanup". Lack of availability of basic hygiene almost guarantees health hazards and extreme cleanup costs for storage facility owners.
Santa Monica, CA, has a place with storage, washers, and laundry. It is called SHWASHLOCK.[1] It's been open for thirty years now.
Amusingly, they don't give the address, which is 505 Olympic Boulevard.
Have been donating to this charity for years (originally known as Swags.org). The backpack provides a portable home with many advantages. https://backpackbed.org/au/
I've been doing research into the high-rise housing projects in Chicago. One of the things I'm curious about when it comes to advocacy for more housing and to have that housing be accessible regardless of mental health or substance abuse issues is, does that not pretty much look like high-rise housing projects? If you want more diffuse housing that is accessible and also available regardless of other contributing factors, then it seems to me you would have to build this well outside of urban centers, as the land is too expensive, but then I doubt urban homeless would find satellite housing desirable.
I do a fair bit of local politics work on this issue in Chicagoland (specifically, Oak Park) and no, advocacy for building more housing mostly takes the form of replacing SFH lot zoning with 2- and 3- flat zoning; "big" projects here (and by "big" I mean "6-month long yard sign campaigns to try to halt them) are 5-story buildings here.
The term of art is "missing middle housing".
The concentrated high-rise public housing model was an obvious failure and I don't think anybody is ever going to try to reproduce it. Ironically, where you see high-density high rise construction proposed (and resisted) most often now are luxury condo buildings.
The concentrated high rise public housing model was panned in its own time. The housing advocates at the time encouraged diffuse public housing.
Instead the existing (white) political machine used high rise public housing to explicitly punish and break up an ascendant black political block. They used highways and a university campus to the same effect.
In fill housing, at least in Chicago, is not a problem as we have both empty lots and tons of single family homes that can become 2 and 3 flats. Along with that you can add small specialized housing for various populations that need it.
A big innovation would be to add campground-like amenities (showers, water + power hookups, basic laundry nearby) to those "safe parking lots" - basically urban and suburban RV parks - would seriously help a lot of people.
It's better to prevent new people from landing on the actual street than to wait until they get there to do stuff.
My understanding is that the most meaningful and controversial of those rules, the one which states you can't do illegal drugs or be under their influence while at the shelter, is one which is frequently demanded by the shelter residents themselves.
I mean it makes sense, if my child and I are homeless and I'm sharing a room with people in my situation, my preference would certainly be for them not to be smoking fentanyl right next to me. "People need freedom" is a nice truism, but I don't think it's unreasonable to expect the "freedom" provided to shelter residents be similar to the "freedom" one might expect in other types of shared housing.
I guess my own biases came through because when I read "people not going in shelters" my mind went to "addicts in tents". I assume a sober-enough homeless person, especially one with a child, which means the adult is more likely to be a woman, has access to some level of emergency shelter and is using it.
I 100% agree with you that I would rather not be next to someone doing drugs, which is why they are annoying out in the streets!
Addicts would rather do drugs on the street than not do drugs no matter what the incentive (the infamous "rock bottom"). Literally the only way to get them indoors is to allow drug use or arrest them.
A buddy of mine up north is building what is basically an autonomous capsule hotel with a breathalyzer on it to carrot-and-stick his way into providing very cheap accommodations at the ends of public transport lines. Alcohol obviously isn't the only drug homeless folks have problems with but it's by far the most common, especially up there.
He says the biggest cost is heat. I'm rooting for him.
Alcoholics don't just decide to stop drinking so they can have a warm bed. In fact, alcohol is one of the few drugs that can cause death through withdrawal (in heavy drinkers).
Any writeups or video about that model? It's interesting about the concept of a breathalyzer locked door. I wonder if his model includes a public intoxication rest area accessible to such members, where they can safely recover and get service/advice.
Just paying people’s rent is cheaper and has substantially better outcomes.
The solution to homelessness is to give people homes.
Shelters are a major reason why there are street homeless. They are dangerous, dirty, loud, and the use of them is likely a parole violation in and of itself.
This is such an odd question with an obvious answer. Same reason we give food stamps to people that can't afford food instead of pay for Michelin star dinners for the middle class.
so its about efficiency and waste? are you making a utilitarian argument about the relative utility gain of middleclass(michelin) vs poor(food stamps)
why cant i just define a problem, "mansionlessness." This isn't a problem but really just a vehicle for a "solution to mansionlessness" which is just a transfer of wealth in one direction.
the crux of your argument seems to be "the middle class are undeserving of this assistance" but that's relative to the homeless.
but i dont think that comparison makes sense. why can't i do the reverse instead and find a group, "more deserving" than the homeless and use their "plight" to block homeless aid.
if i were to respond, "the homeless dont deserved this assistance" which mirrors your "the middle class dont deserve this assistance" you would probably call me cruel.
i think the argument "Y-less dont have Y so give Y" is some weird ouroboros logic failure.
I didn't say the middleclass is undeserving of assistance. As you said this is about marginal utility. Giving a starving man food saves his life. Giving a middle class person fancy food marginally improves their happiness momentarily and there is an argument that cheap food (ex. tacos) is just as delicious.
Yes, if someone is dying of thirst, why do we give them water? It’s like giving the champagne-less champagne.
One of these things is not like the other.
The law, in its great equanimity, forbids both the rich and poor from sleeping under bridges.
There is only one trick in the history of humanity that has consistently improved a lot of every citizen in a society, and that is to dedicate a portion of the private surplus public good.
That reduces cost of rent, which helps but it isn’t the entire solution. From drug use to mental health, lack of qualifications for work,
needing an address catch 22s and DV to name a few.
We have good solutions we know work for some unhoused people. They're just expensive, complicated, not one size fits all, and require a lot of political will. The first thing we have to say is, "we're going to use our resources to help people who need help" and not ask what's in it for us.
Housing isn't the silver bullet for homelessness. For some homeless people, especially people who are just down on their luck and homeless for financial reasons, it can be, but housing isn't enough for the chronically unhoused who may have substance abuse problems, mental health problems, medical problems, or life skill problems that prevent them from thriving in housing.
Conditions in homeless shelters can be bad, but snoring isn't the biggest problem. Theft is a problem in homeless shelters, as can be violence, both physical and sexual. Many homeless people have pets, and pets generally aren't allowed in shelters. Many shelters require sobriety, which excludes tons of homeless people with addictions, which might be the reason they ended up on the street in the first place.
I think sleeping pods would be a bad idea, but maybe for some people it would be desirable. Some homeless people find shelters to be like jails, and avoid them for that reason. If you've experienced traumas that put you in that mindset I can only imagine what a claustrophobic sleeping space would be like.
Mental healthcare, medical care, social services, good housing (with accessible transit), and compassion are means of treating homelessness. They're complicated, and they're expensive, and they're going to take a lot of political will to make happen. Any one of them alone is not enough to end homelessness.
Donate to shelters if you can, buy a homeless person a meal if you can, treat them with dignity if you can. Not all homeless people are addicts, not all homeless people are grifters, not all homeless people are mentally ill. They're all in hard times and they're all humans, like you.
In Japan, capsule hotels have been stereotypically used by Japanese salarymen who may be too drunk to return home safely, have missed the last train of the day to make a return trip home due to working late hours, or are too embarrassed to face their spouses.
I have countless thought-hours and emotional input in this space. I have an Akashic record in me about my inputs on why I, also, would like to solve this problem.
I looked at the SFDPH homeless stats, (I built services for these folks including being a primary tech designer for SFGH pre zuck)
I have worked with and for home manufacturers, such as Buffetts' Clayton Homes, Wind River Tiny Homes, City of Alameda...
AND - I have attempted to map out the Bicycle industry... I have a ton of input on a topic nobody wants to discuss..
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I have looked at the behavior of homeless over the last decade as I experienced them, through observation, empathy, [all the emotions].
I built a joke thing back in the early days of the internet when internet advertising was obviously ridiculous which was "Hobo Housing" (cant find it today, but it was along the lines of Cards Against Humanity: Offering Free Hobos Housing in foldable cardboard sheds that advertised Realtor Businesses printed on them.
Or food stipends for Hobos pulling a cart with marketing for a particular brand, high end, like Perfume... (designed a backpak strap for one to pull a shopping cart, rather than push, off road carts, etc)
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I did this as to highlight how fucked up our economy is.
I have worked (against) with with City of alameda on municipal Tiny home reformation, their adherence to Corp Media (common.net, comcast) "We sold our media rights to comcast, thus we will never allow municipal internet in Alaameda" <- alameda mayor stated to me.
Its a CLUSTER*
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I have a lot to contribute to this conversation but a rate-limited input model on HN would prevent that.
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To start:
An aptitude test of ANY person entering Public Service MUST be (not should) - Recite Maslows order of needs.
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A "Politician/Police Officer" <- what does each mean, what are the implications upon society?
I take a job description, interpolate it to my skillset and determine if I am suitable for the role, and then, if such APPLY. (Meaning I will APPLY my QUALIFIERS to that ROLE.)
...
I am going to cut this post short because I think this warrants a greater discussion...
TL;DR: (Dark times ahead as AI subverts HUMAN BASED critical thinking)
(that is the demise of thought - aqueiscing to only machine's logic and eschewing all spirit and humanity of emotion and intuition.)
And it is only Intuition which centuries ago predicted this, as if the result of some sort of DNA encoded Calamity with AI that, by the nature of it, AI makes us forget.
Like expending hours of thought building a base on a platform like Enshrouded, we are revealed that you are spending your Loosh - to the extractors.
(Science fiction mode kicked in, but I am not wrong)
The outcomes are basically as close to ending homelessness as you can get.
Link if people want to find out more: https://www.centreforpublicimpact.org/case-study/eradicating...