In that case, why not move all the homeless from a park in a metropolis to a park in a cheaper/remote area? Then you can actually employ cheaper custodians in those areas to look after these homeless.
It's a lot hard to re-enter society if you're separated from everyone and everyplace you know. Sure, it could be cheaper in some ways to ship the homeless out to bumfuck nowhere, but might be less cost-effective than you think, and certainly less humane.
If drugs are strongly intertwined I wonder if an opportunity to voluntarily seperate from familiar drug triggers and sources might provide some balancing to the downsides.
Drugs & alcohol is the majority of why they are homeless from San Francisco to Grand Junction, CO (drove through & saw they have an unofficial homeless park) to Portland to Seattle to Calgary, etc, etc.
"A survey by the United States Conference of Mayors found that 68 percent of cities reported that substance abuse was the largest cause of homelessness for single adults."
That’s not actually what you want to ask: Drug use is an additional risk factor for becoming homeless, which tells you that the people who are homeless are likely to be drug users - but that really just sorts out who is likely to become homeless, not how many people. If drug use caused homelessness then places with higher substance abuse rates would have higher homelessness rates. But they don’t! The rate of homelessness is driven most clearly by the difference between area income and area housing cost, and does not correlate well to any measures of drug use in the area.
A nice pair of contrasting data points here is WA and West Virginia. Drug usage and addiction, as well as mental health problems, in West Virginia far outstrips Washington - see https://www.kff.org/statedata/mental-health-and-substance-us... However homelessness in Washington is far, far worse than in West Virginia. West Virginia had almost the lowest rate of homelessness in the country.
You do when you subset the homeless population from couch surfers and people living in their car to the people actually finding a wink of sleep under some tarps under a noisy overpass
No you don’t. If 50% of society uses drugs, 5% of society is homeless, and 100% of homeless people uses drugs - then you’d see that all homeless people use drugs, but most drug users are not homeless, so it’s not well correlated at all.
Yes it is harder, but it's also harder for society to offer you the services like free room and board, help getting a job, and the thousand other services we offer in a high cost of living area.
Since society is taking up the bulk of the work in helping you re-enter, you have to make some compromises, and potentially moving to a new place seems like a reasonable one to make. If we want a robust and strong social safety net, we cannot commit to providing all these services in the most expensive place to do so.
Genuine question: is a social darwinist society something folks (perhaps you?) feel like they would survive in? Suppose your community decide it hates people who post online and wanted to ship them to Alaska. You cool with that?
No, but I could see why that is where your mind started.
You have a deep, implicit assumption of a social contract in your statement here:
> Since society is taking up the bulk of the work in helping you re-enter, you have to make some compromises, and potentially moving to a new place seems like a reasonable one to make. If we want a robust and strong social safety net, we cannot commit to providing all these services in the most expensive place to do so.
Some people can't. I know several schizophrenia sufferers who would never be able to hit an expected checklist. Some are brilliant. Some think they talk to an esoteric God and babble prophecy. None are functional.
We used to lock those folks up in sanitoriums for their safety, but due to systemic abuse this ended. Go back further, and the folks were tribal shamans, village jesters, and other elements of society which were supported by others until their (often untimely) deaths.
The latter support more or less ended when we as a species started settling down out of nomadic lives.
As a society, we dramatically underfund infrastructure (crumbling bridges and suburbs), healthcare (exploding costs without quality improvement), education (teachers salary is uncompetitive), government action (court systems aren't expedient, legislators xna be bought).
If we don't want these things, we should have the society decide so. This would be through legislation. But we haven't. We ignore these friction instead of addressing them.
Resolving friction takes effort, and effort has costs.
You have a deep implicit assumption that throwing money at the problem solves it. That's rarely true. In the case of schizophrenics, we have solved it a long time ago, but they refuse to take their meds. No amount of money in social programs will change that. It just shifts the "systemic abuse" (which I agree with you on) from (asylums abusing the ill) to the (the mentally ill abusing the general public). I think abuse is a great way to phrase it. We all get abused by the public excrement, petty crime, needles and trash, loss of use of common areas, etc. We all are being abused by that population.
Park Ranges and Social Services Workers are much cheaper than Police, Paramedics, and Emergency Room Staff.
Your reductive suggestion could be implemented by busing the homeless to prisons.
That's probably not what you were proposing, but it's one interpretation.
See, thats why I don't like the reductive reasoning. After all, when you're moving them why bother with seat belts and comfy chairs? Just use a flatbed truck and they can hold their pathetic possessions on with string, if they have any. And you also neatly assume the resources in the remote location can cope with the burden rather than already being behind the cost curve, compared to rangers in the SF metro area with direct access to the agencies.
Wait a minute, isn't this why it "paid" for the Texan and Floridan governors to ship their problems to the sanctuary cities?
you might have misunderstood; if the homeless is now in a cheaper COL park, then more park custodians can be hired to take care of the homeless. And why should we assume that SF metro agencies are more apt to take care of these downtrodden than small town Nevada City? They haven't exactly done a stellar job so far for decades.
>In fiscal year 2023–2024, San Francisco spent $690 million on homelessness, notes the San Francisco Chronicle. This is a 142% increase from five years ago.
Spending $700M/year on homelessness crisis is straight up insane. There has to be a better way that doesnt cost as much. SF is kinda fucked.
When there is an enormous budget somehow used up but with barely any noticeable effect (and frankly, without much of an expectation that there’s noticeable effect), you can bet there’s someone or a lot of someones siphoning from it.
Btw even $690m isn’t the full picture:
> While that amount does not include what the Department of Public Health or SF Public Works or many other departments spend related to the crisis
They could just take that $700M and divide it up among the ~8000 homeless in the city. That $87,500 per year would be enough to help get someone on their feet pretty quickly. Probably more effective than whatever the hell they’re spending it on today. Salaries for administrators administrating other administrators?
It's half facetious but also half serious, as the amounts of money are simply staggering.
There has to be some middle ground between "homeless in a park" and "living their own life with a job" and "locked up in prison at great cost" that would be satisfactory to everyone.
Park rangers make $30k-40k in small cities/towns. Not to mention big cities can help pay for some of the transition costs for these homeless, with their 15 billion budget. Also, it would be way cheaper to house these homeless once they choose to transition from park to an apartment.
The point would be to still use SF's money to do this, I assume. The point was that SF's money would be better spent on park rangers in a smaller city than in SF itself.
Now, I think there are otherajor issues with this idea (mostly that having a 0.1% population of assisted people is much more workable than a 10% population, as would happen if SF moved every homeless person to a smaller city).
SF park workers are closer to 120K from those I know. A lot of labor intensive hand weeding because the city shuns herbicide. However, this is less than the median SF city employee, which makes 150k
In australia, they put the people with mental illness or addiction in their own apartment and give them pills, and check in with them regularly. Definitely costs less than 50k/year. Most of them do end up getting better after several years.
It seems US has a system that extracts maximumly from their tax payers and just keeps things in (bad) status quo as long as they can. A babying system if you well.
I have some insight into this, and it might be possible that with good intervention the ongoing costs are low... That being said, in our current system the cases that are severe enough to be in public housing easily cost 10 times that...
I believe the homeless are kept around as a threat to the poor housed Americans. On top of that, those poor people are struggling so greatly that they too don't want to see the homeless helped too much. They don't want to see someone without any job live an easier life than they do with 3.
I think it's a much simpler model. No one wants to help them, funds to help them are mosproportioned and are treating symptoms instead of the cause. It's also politically heated to give more funding because people are less fine using tax dollars to fix and sacrifice their mental health to avoid the issue.
I don't think government thinks far enough ahead to use this as a fear tactic. Most homeless are not some drug users hopelessly addicted.
It's not even remotely true, to any degree. It's very conspiratorial thinking. If "they" were competent, unified, and powerful enough to create a situation like you describe "they" wouldn't need to.
Which gets to the heart of why conspiracy thinking doesn't hold water, who in your theory are "they"?
“They” in my above comment is only used to refer to common people voting myopically. Usually conservatives who vote against social services.
As for my claim of homelessness being a threat - I’m not saying that there’s any grand conspiracy. But in the scheme of capitalism it helps to have an underclass that receive undue blame and keep people from sliding down the ladder further out of fear. No one needs to intentionally keep anyone homeless for this to be a functioning part of the system.
It’s like evolution but on a societal scale. Whatever we have now has persisted for a while. The threat of homelessness is part of why it’s persisted. Imagine if there was no uncomfortable bottom to society. All wage slaves that sell their body and time would simply choose to not work because not working would be a better life. It’s memetics. And of course we need people to do work. But we could be optimizing for happiness instead of GDP growth.
Think of religion. When a religion mandates evangelism it’s not necessarily out of a nefarious central planner trying to gain control over more people. But for religions that do mandate evangelism there is a greater chance the religion thrives. Because obviously recruiting people means you have a bigger religion. But the believers might simply each want to share their religion out of genuine belief in an afterlife.
I was raised in a specifically anti-evangelical religion. It’s pretty small as a result. There were the Shakers, a now extinct sect of Christianity. They considered sex ungodly and thus had no children. That killed the religion. Other sects promote having many children and survive.
