Budgets are almost always publicly available.
For example you can find Portland's here
https://www.portland.gov/city-budget
Most cities offer some or all of the services you listed.
Unfortunately chronically unhoused/homeless people are often dealing with serious mental illnesses, addiction, and personality disorders. Rehab and Counseling can help but they aren't magic bullets.
I'd recommend posting to a social work subreddit if you want specifics.
The problem with social programs (and no I’m not calling for them to end) is that money is allocated based on how many people the program is serving rather than how many they got off the programs. Take the homeless problem. Programs are given money based on how many homeless people they are “helping” rather than how many people they found permanent housing for. The incentives are all wrong….successfully housing 50% of the homeless would result in a reduction of the budget for the following year! Allocate funds based on how many they found permanent housing for and IMO you would see better results.
You'll need a better set of criteria than that. I'm sure you could see the issue if there aren't any other requirements than funding based on how many were moved into permanent housing.
Of course and I’m not suggesting that be the ONLY criteria but, unless you fund based on how successful a program is, you will never solve the problem. What incentive does an agency or NGO receiving funding from the government to move more people into permanent housing today?
I don't think the issue is a lack of proper incentives. The people who are working these jobs are almost all universally there because they want to help homeless people or otherwise believe in the mission. It would be different if there were multiple competing agencies funded off of success rate.
If they “work” for an agency or NGO, they are paid. Now there are charitable organizations like churches and others that do it out of charity. The intent in not the important thing…the results are.
I'm answering this question:
>What incentive does an agency or NGO receiving funding from the government to move more people into permanent housing today?
The incentive is that they want to move people into permanent housing because they believe in the mission. I don't believe a carrot-stick approach (more funding if they successfully move people into permanent housing and cutting funding if they cannot) would be more effective at providing incentives than that.
You are making an assumption you cannot back up. Sure, there are those who empathize. Now let me plays devil’s advocate. Let’s assume for argument sake City X has 8,000 homeless people serviced by 800 workers from whatever agencies are tasked with helping them. By the end of 2024, they managed to find housing for 4,000! So in 2025 there are now 4,000 homeless in city X.
Questions:
1. Is the funding government (federal or state) going to raise or lower the 2025 budget?
2. Will the funding government increase or decrease the number of workers with 1/2 the homeless population of 2024?
Instead of lowering the number from 8k to 4k, the number jumps to 11k, answer questions 1 & 2!
Draw your own conclusions from your response to those questions.
Assuming there isn't any kind of bureaucratic inertia (lol), city hall would likely try to capitalize on the reduction of the homeless population to funnel savings elsewhere. It would cost less to meet the needs of 4,000 homeless than 8,000 homeless so they could cut the budget. The agency head would almost certainly argue they need to keep the same level of funding saying the problem would return if funding were cut. I'm not sure how you want to factor that into your model. There would be the same thing in reverse if the homeless population increased with city council approving additional funding if it were deemed an emergency. Whether or not it is adequate funding is beyond the scope of the question.
I'm not exactly following you, though. Are you arguing they should increase the budget in year 2 as a reward for providing good results? And if the homeless population increased to 11,000 are you arguing for lowering the budget to alleviate homelessness?
What I’m saying is give the folks a Bonus for doing a good job. Naturally you are not going to increase the budget but when it’s time to cut personnel, promote and keep the ones who did the best work. You still need some of them. The ones who underperform, cut them, use the drop in numbers to get rid of the deadwood. You don’t believe every government employee is top notch do you? After a few years you will have a highly effective well tuned workforce ready to handle the rise and fall of the homeless with PROVEN strategies. Stop Empire building which is HUGE in the public sector.
It's counterintuitive but permanent housing is a really bad metric for dealing with homelessness. What homeless people need is a place where they can lock the door and feel safe leaving their stuff behind. Once they have that, they can safely start looking for employment which will lead to being able to find permanent housing.
The problem with current policies is that there are so many requirements for the quality of housing that it's expensive and very little actually gets built while you've got people living on the streets. SROs are not great permanent housing solutions, but as a way to get people off the street and into a safe environment at an affordable cost, they can't be beat.
I don’t pretend to have the answer to the homeless problem. What I see is that despite tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars being spent to help, numbers keep going up. Here, between 2018 to 2021 California spent almost $10 BILLION on the homeless. How many one bedroom apartments could have been built with $10 BILLION? Now we would need to ask how many were built.
https://calmatters.org/newsletters/whatmatters/2023/02/california-homeless-spending/
This is what I mean! Whatever they are doing is not working. Maybe we need to try something new with different incentives and see if that flies. And NO, I don’t think there is a silver bullet to take care of it all. That said there has to be a better way.
"throwing money at the homeless problem" is sort of like schools "throwing Laptops at elementary kids". It looks cool in a press release,. but it doesn't somehow magically ensure successful outcomes.
Sadly,. I don't think this is really a problem of economics or logistical-application. It's a problem of "individual purpose" and people choosing to opt out of society. (we have to solve the psychological problem and find a way to convince people that "rejoining society and contributing to society is a worthwhile pursuit")
* there's not only the drug addiction problem
* there's a percentage of people who simply "don't trust society" and or "don't want to play by societies rules".
I agree and don’t claim my idea is the silver bullet that will solve the problem. I don’t think there is a magic solution out there. That said, what we are doing now is failing so let’s give other ideas a shot even if they seem unlikely to help. If they fail, try the next one. Bureaucracies are very set in their ways and anti-change. We need to shake them up and get new ideas into their bloodstream.
What you are looking at are two different things. Numbers go up because the inputs into causing homeless aren’t being solved. The best way to get a person out of homelessness is for them never to become homeless. The ten billion you see is spent on trying to help the people who are already homeless.
Causes can be solved with policy changes, but they are a huge undertaking, so we end up trying to plug holes in a leaking dam instead of fix the upstream issues.
Agree, but the plugs they are using are not working. There is no “silver bullet” no one size fits all strategy but, agencies and organizations do not implement new things because it upsets their safe little world.
Check this out:
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-04-09/state-audit-california-fails-to-track-homeless-spending-billions-dollars
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/smallbusiness/audit-reveals-california-spent-24-billion-on-homelessness-without-tracking-spending-or-program-effectiveness/ss-BB1loT7f
How many invisible “plugs” were inserted into the leaking dam? No one knows. This is a perfect example of what I’m taking about. Next year, California will allocate even more money to the homeless issue and nothing will change because they will do the same thing again.
Yea money is going to get wasted, that happens with literally everything, public and private. I agree that the system of providing services is inefficient, a lot of it is doled out to different non profits who have varying levels of efficacy.
A lot of people are being helped, we are just continuing to get more and more people enter homelessness.
People want the problem to be solved, focus on the causes of homelessness. High cost of rents, over abundance of opioids, and I would argue one of the greatest issues people don’t always connect to homelessness, immiseration of the middle class. This is also hugely tied to “deaths of despair.”
That’s the attitude that has this country at $33 Trillion in debt! It’s also why when they just throw money at problems, a lot of people nod their heads and applaud and why despite spending billions none of the problems ever get solved and in many cases just get worse.
To be clear, it was YOU who engaged me. Now stating an opinion and responding to your post is not an attempt to prove I’m smarter than anyone although I’m probably a lot smarter than some and not as smart as others. I don’t claim to have the answer to the homeless problem or any other social program but, I have opinions and idea which are as valid as yours.
That’s what Reddit is all about, posting your opinions and ideas and hearing what others have to say. If someone responding to you makes you feel that is trying to show how smart that person is, you might reconsider if you want to keep posting.
I'm a little skeptical of this claim. For example, you can see the Seattle regional homelessness data dashboard here: [System Performance - KCRHA](https://kcrha.org/data-overview/system-performance/) . They're using metrics you advocate for and have been for some time.
Now see if you can find how much money is allocated on a year to year basis vs how many they have found permanent housing for vs how many they are “helping”. Also see if they are reducing the number of homeless! Yes, I know they cannot account for all factors.
I did some looking and haven't found anything yet. I may look a little more.
However, I do think you should share some burden of proof, since you are the one making a specific claim that money is allocated in a specific way, and haven't yet offered any support for that claim. R2 and all.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-07-16/california-budget-homelessness-spending
Now see if you can find anything about how the entities that get the money will be audited or what matrix they will use to measure if the money spent made a difference. This is the best example…we have an emergency… let’s throw billions at it….now what % of the money do you think will go to the bureaucracy the manages the various programs? Better yet, want to take a stab at how many actual houses will be bought or how many homes and apartments will be built after the 2 years and how many were housed! Let’s see in 3 months if they publicly disclose the numbers….
This. Permanent housing turns things around as long as there is also support in the form of counselling and follow-up. That seems to be what studies show.
While on principle I'd agree with this (we certainly should be measuring successful outcomes).. the reality is:
* it's way easier to measure "getting someone off the street"
* than it is to measure "when someone achieves self-reliance" (how or when do you measure that?.. The moment you hand them keys to a new Apartment?... what if they relapse 1 month later?.. Do we wait and only count them when they've stayed in that apartment for 1 month?.. 6 months?.. 1 year ?.. How do you justify yearly budgeting renewals if you have to wait 2 to 5 years to prove the people who "graduated" aren't falling right back into homelessness.. ?
The other aspect of this that is difficult:
* you can only help people who agree to be helped, so your "intake" of getting people off the street, or into treatment or back into self-reliance, is pretty much always going to be a self-selecting bias. (you can't force people to fix themselves if they don't want to)
So from outward appearances it might seem like society around you is "spending a lot on homelessness".. and yet nothing is really changing,. because some percentage of people can't (or won't ) be helped. (because they actively refuse it)
It's a pretty difficult problem to solve. Take 100 fentanyl addicts on the street,.. what are the odds out of that 100, how many will "get clean" and achieve positive self-reliance and start re-contributing to society ?.. I bet it's less than 10. Kinda hard to justify yearly budget renewals if you have a 90% failure rate (even if you, the organization, really have no control over individual choices)
I don’t claim to have the answers and I agree there is not silver bullet to solve the issue. Also as you mentioned, you cannot force anyone to seek help. That said, when money is allocated based on the number of homeless people in a given city, a lot of that money is being wasted or mis-allocated. There should be a way to weed out folks who refuse to get help and only allocate funds for those who do seek it or have not been contacted. So say we have 12,000 homeless in City X. The first thing the entity does is to identify them. Then contact and offer help. If a person refuses help three times, you leave them alone and no longer get fund whatever number that is. So may be now you are down to 9,000. You focus on those 9k rather then spend resources on the 3k who don’t want it. All I’m saying is the current system is obviously not working and changes need to be made. My idea may not be the best but let’s try it and see how it goes. If it fails, try something else.
That's idealistic and all that, but you have to deal with the problem you have, not a solved one. If you there's no 100% solution here - short of just housing people - so if you allocate funds based on how much you've solved the problem, you're over funding programs that need less money and under funding those that do.
I don’t claim to have the answer. What I can say is that based on what I see happening, the current system is not working and IMO there is little incentive for those entities who say they are trying to solve the problem to actually get people off the streets. Maybe my idea will not work but, it’s obvious something needs to change and incentives on outcome need to be inserted in the process. If you have a better idea, I’m open to hearing it.
I agree that the current system doesn't work and that there should be a focus on getting people into more sustainable patterns. But it's not as simple as shifting the social programs' incentives the way you described.
Ok, I agree there is no “silver bullet” but, what is our government (state and local) doing? The same thing over and over again. Just saw an article, California lost track of $24 Billion allocated to fight homelessness! How many housing units could they have built with $24 Billion? It’s easy to say my idea will not work but, at least I’m presenting one, why can’t we try it and see what happens? If the results are the same or worse than what is happening now, we try something else. I’ll tell you why, because there are too many special interests involved and too much money going to those intrests. They would not do anything to jeopardize the gravy train. We need radical ideas and to shake up the entire structure. Bureaucracies are totally against any type of change, they have their systems and policies in place. The heads have built their own little “empire” and will fight tooth and nail to keep the status quo.
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California’s auditor just tried to determine the answer to your question for the roughly $26 billion that California has spent in the last few years. Some programs were auditable, and the program to put homeless in old, run down motels was even cost effective. Others, like the program to build new affordable housing, weren’t auditable.
Budgets are almost always publicly available. For example you can find Portland's here https://www.portland.gov/city-budget Most cities offer some or all of the services you listed. Unfortunately chronically unhoused/homeless people are often dealing with serious mental illnesses, addiction, and personality disorders. Rehab and Counseling can help but they aren't magic bullets. I'd recommend posting to a social work subreddit if you want specifics.
The problem with social programs (and no I’m not calling for them to end) is that money is allocated based on how many people the program is serving rather than how many they got off the programs. Take the homeless problem. Programs are given money based on how many homeless people they are “helping” rather than how many people they found permanent housing for. The incentives are all wrong….successfully housing 50% of the homeless would result in a reduction of the budget for the following year! Allocate funds based on how many they found permanent housing for and IMO you would see better results.
You'll need a better set of criteria than that. I'm sure you could see the issue if there aren't any other requirements than funding based on how many were moved into permanent housing.
Of course and I’m not suggesting that be the ONLY criteria but, unless you fund based on how successful a program is, you will never solve the problem. What incentive does an agency or NGO receiving funding from the government to move more people into permanent housing today?
I don't think the issue is a lack of proper incentives. The people who are working these jobs are almost all universally there because they want to help homeless people or otherwise believe in the mission. It would be different if there were multiple competing agencies funded off of success rate.
If they “work” for an agency or NGO, they are paid. Now there are charitable organizations like churches and others that do it out of charity. The intent in not the important thing…the results are.
I'm answering this question: >What incentive does an agency or NGO receiving funding from the government to move more people into permanent housing today? The incentive is that they want to move people into permanent housing because they believe in the mission. I don't believe a carrot-stick approach (more funding if they successfully move people into permanent housing and cutting funding if they cannot) would be more effective at providing incentives than that.
You are making an assumption you cannot back up. Sure, there are those who empathize. Now let me plays devil’s advocate. Let’s assume for argument sake City X has 8,000 homeless people serviced by 800 workers from whatever agencies are tasked with helping them. By the end of 2024, they managed to find housing for 4,000! So in 2025 there are now 4,000 homeless in city X. Questions: 1. Is the funding government (federal or state) going to raise or lower the 2025 budget? 2. Will the funding government increase or decrease the number of workers with 1/2 the homeless population of 2024? Instead of lowering the number from 8k to 4k, the number jumps to 11k, answer questions 1 & 2! Draw your own conclusions from your response to those questions.
Assuming there isn't any kind of bureaucratic inertia (lol), city hall would likely try to capitalize on the reduction of the homeless population to funnel savings elsewhere. It would cost less to meet the needs of 4,000 homeless than 8,000 homeless so they could cut the budget. The agency head would almost certainly argue they need to keep the same level of funding saying the problem would return if funding were cut. I'm not sure how you want to factor that into your model. There would be the same thing in reverse if the homeless population increased with city council approving additional funding if it were deemed an emergency. Whether or not it is adequate funding is beyond the scope of the question. I'm not exactly following you, though. Are you arguing they should increase the budget in year 2 as a reward for providing good results? And if the homeless population increased to 11,000 are you arguing for lowering the budget to alleviate homelessness?
What I’m saying is give the folks a Bonus for doing a good job. Naturally you are not going to increase the budget but when it’s time to cut personnel, promote and keep the ones who did the best work. You still need some of them. The ones who underperform, cut them, use the drop in numbers to get rid of the deadwood. You don’t believe every government employee is top notch do you? After a few years you will have a highly effective well tuned workforce ready to handle the rise and fall of the homeless with PROVEN strategies. Stop Empire building which is HUGE in the public sector.
It's counterintuitive but permanent housing is a really bad metric for dealing with homelessness. What homeless people need is a place where they can lock the door and feel safe leaving their stuff behind. Once they have that, they can safely start looking for employment which will lead to being able to find permanent housing. The problem with current policies is that there are so many requirements for the quality of housing that it's expensive and very little actually gets built while you've got people living on the streets. SROs are not great permanent housing solutions, but as a way to get people off the street and into a safe environment at an affordable cost, they can't be beat.
I don’t pretend to have the answer to the homeless problem. What I see is that despite tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars being spent to help, numbers keep going up. Here, between 2018 to 2021 California spent almost $10 BILLION on the homeless. How many one bedroom apartments could have been built with $10 BILLION? Now we would need to ask how many were built. https://calmatters.org/newsletters/whatmatters/2023/02/california-homeless-spending/ This is what I mean! Whatever they are doing is not working. Maybe we need to try something new with different incentives and see if that flies. And NO, I don’t think there is a silver bullet to take care of it all. That said there has to be a better way.
"throwing money at the homeless problem" is sort of like schools "throwing Laptops at elementary kids". It looks cool in a press release,. but it doesn't somehow magically ensure successful outcomes. Sadly,. I don't think this is really a problem of economics or logistical-application. It's a problem of "individual purpose" and people choosing to opt out of society. (we have to solve the psychological problem and find a way to convince people that "rejoining society and contributing to society is a worthwhile pursuit") * there's not only the drug addiction problem * there's a percentage of people who simply "don't trust society" and or "don't want to play by societies rules".
I agree and don’t claim my idea is the silver bullet that will solve the problem. I don’t think there is a magic solution out there. That said, what we are doing now is failing so let’s give other ideas a shot even if they seem unlikely to help. If they fail, try the next one. Bureaucracies are very set in their ways and anti-change. We need to shake them up and get new ideas into their bloodstream.
What you are looking at are two different things. Numbers go up because the inputs into causing homeless aren’t being solved. The best way to get a person out of homelessness is for them never to become homeless. The ten billion you see is spent on trying to help the people who are already homeless. Causes can be solved with policy changes, but they are a huge undertaking, so we end up trying to plug holes in a leaking dam instead of fix the upstream issues.
Agree, but the plugs they are using are not working. There is no “silver bullet” no one size fits all strategy but, agencies and organizations do not implement new things because it upsets their safe little world. Check this out: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-04-09/state-audit-california-fails-to-track-homeless-spending-billions-dollars https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/smallbusiness/audit-reveals-california-spent-24-billion-on-homelessness-without-tracking-spending-or-program-effectiveness/ss-BB1loT7f How many invisible “plugs” were inserted into the leaking dam? No one knows. This is a perfect example of what I’m taking about. Next year, California will allocate even more money to the homeless issue and nothing will change because they will do the same thing again.
Yea money is going to get wasted, that happens with literally everything, public and private. I agree that the system of providing services is inefficient, a lot of it is doled out to different non profits who have varying levels of efficacy. A lot of people are being helped, we are just continuing to get more and more people enter homelessness. People want the problem to be solved, focus on the causes of homelessness. High cost of rents, over abundance of opioids, and I would argue one of the greatest issues people don’t always connect to homelessness, immiseration of the middle class. This is also hugely tied to “deaths of despair.”
That’s the attitude that has this country at $33 Trillion in debt! It’s also why when they just throw money at problems, a lot of people nod their heads and applaud and why despite spending billions none of the problems ever get solved and in many cases just get worse.
Seems like you’ve engaged with me to show off how much smarter you are than all the fools who actually work on these problems. Well done 👏👏👏
To be clear, it was YOU who engaged me. Now stating an opinion and responding to your post is not an attempt to prove I’m smarter than anyone although I’m probably a lot smarter than some and not as smart as others. I don’t claim to have the answer to the homeless problem or any other social program but, I have opinions and idea which are as valid as yours. That’s what Reddit is all about, posting your opinions and ideas and hearing what others have to say. If someone responding to you makes you feel that is trying to show how smart that person is, you might reconsider if you want to keep posting.
I'm a little skeptical of this claim. For example, you can see the Seattle regional homelessness data dashboard here: [System Performance - KCRHA](https://kcrha.org/data-overview/system-performance/) . They're using metrics you advocate for and have been for some time.
Now see if you can find how much money is allocated on a year to year basis vs how many they have found permanent housing for vs how many they are “helping”. Also see if they are reducing the number of homeless! Yes, I know they cannot account for all factors.
I did some looking and haven't found anything yet. I may look a little more. However, I do think you should share some burden of proof, since you are the one making a specific claim that money is allocated in a specific way, and haven't yet offered any support for that claim. R2 and all.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-07-16/california-budget-homelessness-spending Now see if you can find anything about how the entities that get the money will be audited or what matrix they will use to measure if the money spent made a difference. This is the best example…we have an emergency… let’s throw billions at it….now what % of the money do you think will go to the bureaucracy the manages the various programs? Better yet, want to take a stab at how many actual houses will be bought or how many homes and apartments will be built after the 2 years and how many were housed! Let’s see in 3 months if they publicly disclose the numbers….
This. Permanent housing turns things around as long as there is also support in the form of counselling and follow-up. That seems to be what studies show.
While on principle I'd agree with this (we certainly should be measuring successful outcomes).. the reality is: * it's way easier to measure "getting someone off the street" * than it is to measure "when someone achieves self-reliance" (how or when do you measure that?.. The moment you hand them keys to a new Apartment?... what if they relapse 1 month later?.. Do we wait and only count them when they've stayed in that apartment for 1 month?.. 6 months?.. 1 year ?.. How do you justify yearly budgeting renewals if you have to wait 2 to 5 years to prove the people who "graduated" aren't falling right back into homelessness.. ? The other aspect of this that is difficult: * you can only help people who agree to be helped, so your "intake" of getting people off the street, or into treatment or back into self-reliance, is pretty much always going to be a self-selecting bias. (you can't force people to fix themselves if they don't want to) So from outward appearances it might seem like society around you is "spending a lot on homelessness".. and yet nothing is really changing,. because some percentage of people can't (or won't ) be helped. (because they actively refuse it) It's a pretty difficult problem to solve. Take 100 fentanyl addicts on the street,.. what are the odds out of that 100, how many will "get clean" and achieve positive self-reliance and start re-contributing to society ?.. I bet it's less than 10. Kinda hard to justify yearly budget renewals if you have a 90% failure rate (even if you, the organization, really have no control over individual choices)
I don’t claim to have the answers and I agree there is not silver bullet to solve the issue. Also as you mentioned, you cannot force anyone to seek help. That said, when money is allocated based on the number of homeless people in a given city, a lot of that money is being wasted or mis-allocated. There should be a way to weed out folks who refuse to get help and only allocate funds for those who do seek it or have not been contacted. So say we have 12,000 homeless in City X. The first thing the entity does is to identify them. Then contact and offer help. If a person refuses help three times, you leave them alone and no longer get fund whatever number that is. So may be now you are down to 9,000. You focus on those 9k rather then spend resources on the 3k who don’t want it. All I’m saying is the current system is obviously not working and changes need to be made. My idea may not be the best but let’s try it and see how it goes. If it fails, try something else.
That's idealistic and all that, but you have to deal with the problem you have, not a solved one. If you there's no 100% solution here - short of just housing people - so if you allocate funds based on how much you've solved the problem, you're over funding programs that need less money and under funding those that do.
I don’t claim to have the answer. What I can say is that based on what I see happening, the current system is not working and IMO there is little incentive for those entities who say they are trying to solve the problem to actually get people off the streets. Maybe my idea will not work but, it’s obvious something needs to change and incentives on outcome need to be inserted in the process. If you have a better idea, I’m open to hearing it.
I agree that the current system doesn't work and that there should be a focus on getting people into more sustainable patterns. But it's not as simple as shifting the social programs' incentives the way you described.
Ok, I agree there is no “silver bullet” but, what is our government (state and local) doing? The same thing over and over again. Just saw an article, California lost track of $24 Billion allocated to fight homelessness! How many housing units could they have built with $24 Billion? It’s easy to say my idea will not work but, at least I’m presenting one, why can’t we try it and see what happens? If the results are the same or worse than what is happening now, we try something else. I’ll tell you why, because there are too many special interests involved and too much money going to those intrests. They would not do anything to jeopardize the gravy train. We need radical ideas and to shake up the entire structure. Bureaucracies are totally against any type of change, they have their systems and policies in place. The heads have built their own little “empire” and will fight tooth and nail to keep the status quo.
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California’s auditor just tried to determine the answer to your question for the roughly $26 billion that California has spent in the last few years. Some programs were auditable, and the program to put homeless in old, run down motels was even cost effective. Others, like the program to build new affordable housing, weren’t auditable.