WSJ columnist James Taranto has a regular feature in his Best of the Web newlsetter, in which he posts news items where obvious cause-and-effect relationships are presented as baffling paradoxes. A typical such item might be a headline that says “Despite Historically Low Crime Rate, Incarcerations Are At All-Time High”.
He had a good one today, from an article by Heather Knight in the San Francisco Chronicle:
San Francisco spends $165 million a year on services for homeless people, but all that money hasn’t made a dent in the homeless population in at least nine years.
Baffling, no?
8 Comments
What’s baffling? You stated two unrelated facts in search of a conclusion. It’s like saying that we spend x on fire departments and the number of fires hasn’t changed.
If you wanted to make a meaningful argument about the homeless, you might start with what the goal of public policy should be. Should the city devote resources to build housing for homeless people? If so, how much? How do you do that in a city which is surrounded by water on three sides? Is money better spent on housing or things like counseling and substance abuse treatment? What has worked (and hasn’t worked) in the past, and what works elsewhere?
It is not illegal to be homeless. What do you do with people who refuse to seek help? What about the mentally ill — do you lock them up and let Nurse Ratched watch over them? Sounds like tyranny to me when the state can round up people and incarcerate them with nothing more than a doctor’s note.
You would also look at exogenous factors. Housing prices in SF are similar to Manhattan, without the elaborate protections of rent control which New Yorkers have. When landlords raise rent, some number of people go homeless. What do you do about that? The city of San Francisco is suing the city of Reno, because the latter places homeless and mentally ill people on buses with one way tickets to SF. How many of SF’s homeless are indigenous and how many are exported from other places?
Most importantly, you would look at the money which is spent and form judgments about whether it spent efficiently, efficaciously, and scaled to the size of the problem. You would create models which would compare how much was spent with what the probable results would be if greater and lesser sums were spent. You would then determine how much resources should be devoted to the homeless versus other municipal priorities. You would also look at how spending on the homeless affect spending elsewhere: does providing medical clinics lower the number of emergency room visits?
But that’s not what you did. You stated the cost of programs for the homeless along with the fact that the situation is stable, with the implication (I guess) that $165 million is a lot of money, and when you spend a lot of money you should expect a mitigation of the problem, regardless of the problem’s scale, complexity, or intractability.
Durned tootin’ One-Eyed! Go get em!
Whatever San Fransister mighta spent and where it went is water under the Gay Bridge.
The impertinent data to look at is what was spent on the Federal War on Poverty program. & to find that you’ll need to scroll down past the many successes under The War on Drugs.
FedStats.gov
Wow, Pete.
It wasn’t me who stated ’em. And they aren’t necessarily unrelated, is kind of the point…
You know, there are days when I almost begin to get the feeling that you just like to argue.
I can out-argue any man in the house! Even a two-eyed man if you can find one! And I’ll prove it, too, if you pay for the rounds of beer!
Jeffery Hodges
* * *
San Francisco, once the most beautiful city in the world, has become a sanctuary for pond scum, including, but not restricted to, illegal aliens, vagrants, Leftist “occupiers”, perverts, and miscellaneous morons like Nancy Pelosi.
The only saving grace is the Golden Gate heading towards Marin County.
“You stated the cost of programs for the homeless along with the fact that the situation is stable, with the implication (I guess) that $165 million is a lot of money, and when you spend a lot of money you should expect a mitigation of the problem, regardless of the problem’s scale, complexity, or intractability.”
That comes to around $23,500 per year per homeless person for this special services for this select group of citizens. The problem is intractable, because the helper bees spend way more time trying to make this problem complex and intractable.
“It is not illegal to be homeless.”
Start with that premise and you will always have an out of control homeless problem. If you pass laws that people can not live in the streets and then build services around that premise, you’d get a different outcome – services geared toward a specific, directed outcome – a one-way street leading to a solution, instead of a revolving door. If you tell people, we will not allow people to live in the streets within our city limits, you could quickly resolve this problem. It’s about planning toward resolving a problem rather than planning to create an ever-burgeoning system to perpetuate the problem.
I don’t seek to argue, I seek to enlighten.
H. L. Mencken correctly noted that “for every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” Homelessness is an exceedingly complex problem which is also difficult, intractable, and possibly insolvable. Simply stating that the problem exists and citing the amount spent on it – with the apparent implication that too much is being spent – is like bemoaning the fact that people still get cancer, despite all the money which has been put into cancer research.
Not sure if you are intentionally being a bit of a bollard here, but…
The line in question said that “despite” spending all this money on homeless services, there were still lots of homeless people. Obviously that “despite” reveals an assumption that, having spent lots of money, that shouldn’t be the case.
Let’s say Scroogeville, AZ has a black-hearted public policy where all they give homeless people is a poke in the ribs. San Francisco, on the other hand, is a caring place that spends a fortune on looking after them. If you were a homeless person, in which town would you choose to make your, er, home?
Yes, obviously “homelessness is an exceedingly complex problem which is also difficult, intractable, and possibly insolvable”. As Jesus said: “The poor you will always have with you”. (And as Abe Lincoln said: “God must love the poor – Why else would he have made so many of them?”)
But liberals always forget rule #1 of economics: when you subsidize something, you get more of it. (See also indolence, bastardy, etc.) So Taranto pointed out that the author’s surprise was amusingly naive. That’s it!
Rant on some more if you like, though; the floor is yours. Peace out.