Then the voters say "It must be audited!" and another oversight committee is created (at the cost of taxpayers) and some numbers are published to a cryptic PDF that no one looks at and nothing changes.
I’m not sure that they meant financial auditors when they created that quote. They were talking about people with either police powers or state security apparatus that does more than verifying financial metrics and can actually do something beyond changing a few numbers in a spreadsheet from a far.
Yeah. It would be so much more effective to just establish key metrics (and tracking methods) up front, rather than try to unearth everything after the fact. This seems like a really common problem in government. How do you influence politicians to enforce more data driven policy making?
Why would you think that? My take is that they’re spending the money the best they know - they just don’t have the expertise to do so effectively (i.e.: establishing and tracking metrics)
Nothing like starting major governmental programs with zero metrics for success or accountability requirements to make the public feel confident in their tax dollars.
The opposite is also true, Oregon spent millions ($130k per month) for a phone number to help people with addictions. It has so little calls it come to about $10k per call. It’s kind of like how some startups can spend too much time optimizing instead of growing.
The TSA is a jobs program, and one that was easily sold to a part of the electorate that typically resists jobs programs. Granted, I’d rather just cut people a cheque and skip the theatre.
In the before times, the jobs programs were more useful, at least in theory. Can we get a new WPA that hires away the TSA agents... Even if the public works aren't great, it's better than a jobs program for people to annoy and delay the public.
What would setup the proper incentive here? I'd think something like low-interest construction loans and rent subsidies for new construction high density affordable housing.
1) The amount spent on homelessness in California
2) The number of homeless in California
you will realize that both charts could represent a fast growing SAAS business. One for revenue and the other for users. The people working in the government sector known as the homeless industrial complex have incentive to keep the charts going in that direction.
The only real effective solution to homelessness is to give homeless people houses and then extra support, other solutions (whilst having some beneficial effect) aren't sufficient.
However the concept of a homeless industrial complex has essentially been pushed and overblown by right wing think tanks with significantly worse solutions.
24 billion dollars for 184,000 homeless people (United States Department of Housing and Urban Development estimate). That's 135k per person. Where is the money going if not the homeless industrial complex?
Hahahaha, that won’t solve it either. That just incentivizes categorizing people as homeless so the industry can create substandard housing at inflated prices (to the taxpayer) and lock them into it (while charging the taxpayer to administer it forever). See the racket that is ‘affordable housing’ in the same areas.
The thing to realize here is that these groups would rather have a large, unsolvable problem they can constantly try to ‘fix’ at great expense, than actually resolve a real problem.
Oregon and Washington are similar. Zero accountability and zero metrics.
That's on purpose. The vast majority of unsheltered homeless are now drug addicts and/or have serious mental health issues, and there's simply no way this can be fixed without harsh unpopular ("you want to hurt poors!") measures.
I'm not so sure about that... but as a starting point.
* National problem scope needs National solution
* Mental Health Institutions (need to be audited, but need to return)
* Non-secular drug rehab and prevention
* Jobs programs for those without
* Workforce training for those that want it
* Society integration programs, to help people 'get in'
* Treating the unhoused as humans, with human rights
There's a LOT of reasons, some of them interacting. Some of the unhoused are anarchists who'd prefer to be untracked so they can commit crimes; I've seen that on the local news way too often. However those are extreme cases that got regional news coverage. Many have drug addiction, traumatic life experiences, or other issues. They need help and evaluation and hopefully recovery. Some are just professional panhandlers conning people into giving handouts; which also make everyone who needs real help look bad.
Maybe those people could get help if some major movie or TV drama setup kidnapping anyone on the street for crimes and followed what happened to them in a setting that wasn't the suck IRL is.
> There's a LOT of reasons, some of them interacting.
Not really. It's now super-reductive, with basically two major causes that keep people getting into unsheltered homelessness: drugs and mental health issues.
Any plan to combat homelessness must tackle these two issues. Now try my local homelessness graft agency's website: https://kcrha.org/data-overview/ and look for their approach to mental health and drug abuse.
> Some of the unhoused are anarchists who'd prefer to be untracked so they can commit crimes; I've seen that on the local news way too often.
They are basically a rounding error at this point.
You ignore literally the sentence after which states:
"However those are extreme cases that got regional news coverage."
Yes, they're a topic of sensationalism that helps to direct public anger at the groups rather than more systemic solutions which would help the victims and expose the criminals.
I like “zero metrics” followed up by “vast majority”. It is like “the problem is that there is no data to support the thing that I’m about to say, which I am sure of regardless”
This makes sense if you count 20% as a “vast majority” of a group. The singular use of “serious mental illness” in that pdf is this sentence.
>In this study we
use clinical service records from the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health to estimate 20%
of individuals participating in Street Outreach services had a clinical diagnosis of serious mental illness
within the previous twelve years.
Alternatively if you simply imagine that any and every counted incident of any mental health issue as being serious to the point of calling for mysterious unpopular “hurt the poors” policy, you do not even need a pdf to back that up. You can simply believe it in your heart like a matter of faith
Do you have any sources to back the claim that it is "on purpose"? What solutions are you proposing to help people with mental health issues that are untenable?
> Do you have any sources to back the claim that it is "on purpose"?
Sigh. I can talk about KCRHA (King County Regional Homeless Authority) for a while. It had crossed the line between "incompetent" and "malicious" long ago.
> What solutions are you proposing to help people with mental health issues that are untenable?
Anti-homelessness programs in California aren't designed to end homelessness, they are designed as a slush fund for politically favored groups that happen to be organized as not-for-profit corporations. With that goal in mind, you can see that the programs are working perfectly.
They don't want to end homelessness because then so many activists and organizations will be out of a job. It's a perverse incentive.
The key to tackling the housing crisis is to build more housing, particularly high-density housing. And to do that, zoning laws must be deregulated and liberalized, if not outright abolished in some instances.
But of course, the activists will never agree to that because it's a market-centered reform and because they are rich NIMBYs. More housing will mean the properties they own will decrease in value. The scarce housing supply and the continued existence of the homelessness problem is great for their own wallet.
Most people on the streets aren't capable of maintaining a house, mostly thanks to drug use, with mental illness as a smaller-but-still-significant secondary cause.
Fixing this would also put a bunch of activists out of a job, would remove a lot of cover for state-sponsored domestic terror activities, and would require harsh measures that are total non-starters.
Ergo, nothing is going to change on this front until either powerful interests want it to change, or until there is some sort of mass event that kills off a substantial fraction of the population.
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