San Francisco has discovered that ending homelessness begins with housing1—unsurprisingly, the homeless may travel multiple pathways when participating in our civil society structures. San Francisco may next discover that solutions to homelessness cannot be grafted onto our non-economic systems, but must be directly integrated within our economic system2. |  |
RES:
UPDATED 12/12/2015 CRS, Chronic Homelessness: Background, Research, and Outcome (courtesy of FAS)
As we begin to understand and solve systemic homelessness it will be important to frequently remind ourselves and others that "prayer" is not a plan or substitute for allocation of necessary and sufficient resources.
Web:
UPDATED 10/29/2018 PBS, In LA, Poverty on Skid Row Defies US’ Humane Reputation and NYT, California Today: Readers Talk About Homelessness With Their Children...MAGA...
...don't forget to laugh...
UPDATED 09/16/2018 NYT, Americans Want to Believe Jobs Are the Solution to Poverty. They’re Not
UPDATED 04/24/2018 Reuters, California Does 'Poor Job' in Assisting Homeless: State Auditor and Homelessness in California, State Government and the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority Need to Strengthen Their Efforts to Address Homelessness, Report 2017-112 (pdf) (online version)
Really!, who could have guessed that our poor are poorly served?
UPDATED 02/25/2018 LAT,
UPDATED 01/07/2018 UCSF, Homelessness in Older Adults: An Emerging Crisis
San Francisco's shelter system is not now configured to address almost any requirements of a chronic and aging population. The current shelter system is not a "cheap substitute" for home, assisted, and hospice care for the city's poor and aging population.
UPDATED 10/05/2017 Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, Five-year Strategic Framework, Executive Summary
UPDATED 08/18/2017 SFPublic, Home Street Home
UPDATED 12/12/2016 SFExaminer, Mayor, judge clash over enforcement of quality-of-life citations
Does this represent a too long retarded and reluctant realization among some in our judiciary that they've become an aggravating part of our growing homelessness problem or simple parsimony priority during budget pressures?
As Mayor Lee's misconstrued and misapprehending response to San Francisco's Superior Court, Presiding Judge John Kennedy Stewart's refusal to issue new and dismissal of existing quality of life warrants indicates, some leaders will not easily cease attempting to coerce "solutions" to our civil society problems, however ineffective and otiose.
UPDATED 11/19/2016 SFChron, In a wealthy SF neighborhood, residents fight low-income housing
A diverse capitalist nation requires both policy and incentives. Whether prejudice leads or lags housing prices it's highly probable there is a price point set at which all or most prejudice dissipates?
UPDATED 11/14/2016 WH, The White House’s Veterans Homelessness Summit
A cloud of myths has animates our nation's many misbegotten responses to homelessness. Our President and First Lady's leadership has enabled our nation to begin to penetrate this cloud and make sure our homeless citizenry are permanently housed.
UPDATED 10/18/2016 UnivRichmond, Mapping Inequality Redlining in New Deal America, San Francisco
Too often past responses to perceived problems are prologue to solving the problems tomorrow.
UPDATED 08/09/2016 SFExaminer, Safe SROs are vital to SF’s low-income housing option and SFDPH, Draft Single Room Occupancy Hotels in San Francisco A Health Impact Assessment – Executive Summary 2016 and SFDPH, Improving theHealth of Residentsin SRO Hotels Final Power Point Slide Aug 2016 and SFDHP, Strategies to Improve Food Security Among “Single” Residents of San Francisco’s SROs Mar 2016 and SFDPH, Improving Health in SROs Health Impact Assessment 2014
UPDATED 12/21/2015 CSM, An end to homelessness: Cities take on 'impossible' challenge
UPDATED 08/29/2015 SFChron, Combatting homelessness requires making tough choices
If you're plan is to "combat" homelessness your plan has failed before it has begun.
UPDATED 07/11/2015 Atlantic, The Best Way to End Homelessness Includes links to demographic data.
UPDATED 06/27/2015 SC, SC, Texas Dept. of Housing and Community Affairs v. Inclusive Communities Project, Inc. (slip opinion pdf)
The eventual positive impact on our civil society of this case will likely equal or exceed those of King v. Burwell or Obergefell v. Hodges , which are both currently and justifiably the focus of much celebration.
UPDATED 04/04/2015 SFExaminer, Jailing the Homeless Perpetuates Problem
It not only perpetuates the problem, it exacerbates and demonstrates a gross ignorance of the problem.
Eventually, our nation will ensure every citizen-resident is habitabily housed, regardless of their inability to pay or reason for homelessness, but evidently not until we've tried every other alternative, regardless of how inefficient, ineffective, inane, or inhumane!
UPDATED 01/15/2015 SFExaminer, Ed Lee to put focus on housing in State of the City address
Ensuring each citizen-resident has continuous access to habitable housing is not a "below market" exercise—it's an "all market" exercise.
The idea that any of our citizenry is homeless because they queue on an arbitrarily "below market" segment of an arbitrary housing market gradient seems absurd, at best.
Any homeless citizen-resident is a housing market failure—calling it a "below market" housing failure does not eliminate or excuse that failure.
UPDATED 12/27/2014 OutbreakToday, San Francisco Reports Spike in Shigella Infection, Homeless Hit Especially Hard
Just another reason, from a developing long list of reasons to ensure each and every one of our citizen-residents has continuous access to sustainable shelter, healthcare, nutrition, and education.
It's shocking that we have so long tolerated and many times proudly praise economic schemes4 incapable of ensuring each and every one of our citizen-residents has continuous access to sustainable shelter, healthcare, nutrition, and education.
UPDATED 12/18/2014 SFExaminer, Nonprofit Offers Expanded Shelter Resources to Homeless Families during Winter
A waiting list for any "emergency shelter" or service is by definition not an "emergency shelter" or service. At best is a non-responsive system to a fundamental need and requirement of our citizens and residents—at worst it is a grossly negligent and indifferent system to all their fundamental needs and requirements.
Unfortunately, it has become fashionable to publish "homelessness stories" during our holiday season then return to business as usual for the remainder of the year, which generally includes enormous "waiting lists" and "queues" for sporadic access to even the most basic and fundamental of human needs such as shelter, healthcare, nutrition, and education.
Our civil society objectives should not be to make access to these basic human services so ineffective, inefficient, painful, miserly or minimal that collecting bottles, aluminum cans and coding to arbitrage or auction public parking become or qualify as career or growth opportunities, by comparison!
UPDATED 11/17/2014 UPI, President Obama wants to end homelessness by the year 2020 and NCFH, Child Homelessness:America’s Youngest Outcasts (report pdf)
It will take until 2020 just to eliminate all the myths successive governments and some citizens perpetuate about homelessness, typically in an effort to do little or nothing to eradicate it.
Perhaps our President intends to ignore all the mythology, proceeding directly to eradicate the homelessness scourge from our nation—one-fourth of the minimum required of any “exceptional” nation (the other three-fourths being citizenry’s continuous access to nutrition, healthcare and education)!
UPDATED 04/24/2014 KQED Forum, Is San Francisco Effectively Fighting Homelessness?
It's fantastic that discussions on homelessness are beginning to occur more frequently.
Instead of directly integrating homelessness into our economic system, homelessness is treated as an unexpected aberration or defect that surprises and shocks our economic system.3
Homelessness is then grafted onto a hodge-podge of non-economic systems where ephemeral strategies are abundant and solutions more rare than winning a lottery.
SFGate Blog, No longer homeless, but they act that way
-----notes-----
1. Before saying "duh" consider that most American cities are decades away from making this discovery, if they ever do—it's difficult to discover solutions to a problem you're busy hiding, denying, ignoring or shifting. The logic is deceptively simple and incorrect; homelessness is inconsistent with the expectations of our economic system.
2. Typically, many putative solutions to homelessness have presumed an individual has some moral defect (why else would they be homeless) that requires correction before that individual is redeemed and partially "reintegrated" into civil society. Unsurprisingly religion and churches have played a primary and dominant, if ineffective role in "reintegrating" our homeless.
Integrating solutions to homelessness directly within our economic system does not presume any moral defect or depend on any religion or church. Of course some individuals' pathway may involve religions and churches, but their participation in our civil society structures must not be constrained by any religion or church.
3. It seems bizarre that an advanced economy would depend on the luck of lottery or arbitrary self interested generosity to ensure all their citizenry have continuous and unconditional access to basic nutrition, shelter, healthcare and education.
4. Until the economic schemes unwind and all prior praise morphs in to vociferous condemnation amid protestations that the schema was too complex to understand. It's unclear why schema, which are too complex to understand are not simultaneously too complex to proceed?
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