> I even said some dumb things like, 'Why should they have granite countertops when I don't.' However, I've come around.<p>This sort of "crab mentality" makes even discussing things like basic income, minimum wage, or projects like this so difficult, let alone implementing them. People come to believe they deserve their position in life when so much of it is due to advantages/disadvantages outside their control: <a href="http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/business-jan-june13-makingsense_06-21/" rel="nofollow">http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/business-jan-june13-makingsen...</a><p>> The rich players are determined randomly by coin toss, the game rigged so they cannot lose. And yet, says Piff, despite their presumably liberal bent going in, [w]hen we asked them afterwards, how much do you feel like you deserved to win the game? The rich people felt entitled. They felt like they deserved to win the game. And that’s a really incredible insight into what the mind does to make sense of advantage or disadvantage.<p>Successful people believe they deserve to be successful and they believe that unsuccessful people must have acted in a way to deserve it, because attributing your success and their destitution to factors outside anyone's control is scary and difficult.
My first reaction when I started reading this was, "Yeah, but what do you do with the crazy people who prefer sleeping on the streets?". Their answer was to just keep picking them up and taking them to their new home, until they chose to live there. Medicine Hat is not a big place, but doing that 70 times in some cases showed commendable perseverance.<p>I'd like to see this approach in other cities in Alberta, but there are some pretty big obstacles to overcome. Calgary, for example, presents the choice between very high property values in the core and remote suburbs that aren't very pedestrian friendly. Relocating someone from downtown to a likely site of affordable housing could mean a 30 minute drive. If most people they knew were downtown, this would cut them off pretty effectively, and that's a long way to take someone 70 times too! Perhaps situating affordable housing near a train station and giving residents free transit passes would help.<p>There are several months out of the year when living outside in Alberta is basically impossible. Some of the homeless go to shelters, but many wind up sleeping inside of derelict buildings or hiding in office buildings. The security guards working those buildings sometimes let them sleep there (the result of kicking them out on some nights is likely death), but security guards aren't the most uniformly humane and caring bunch. Some of them treat the homeless very badly. Getting these people into housing and treating them with a modicum of dignity could really help their mental state improve.<p>Hopefully Medicine Hat's program can prove that housing the homeless is an economically viable approach, even in bigger cities.
It's kind of interesting that this is seen as a major achievement. To the best of my knowledge, under the standards set here (no more than 10 days on the street or in an emergency shelter), we've long had this in most of the UK and various other parts of Europe. It's almost true in London, modulo some people with mental health issues. Homeless people get picked up and moved into temporary housing about that quickly. Having everybody able to afford their own housing is a much harder problem - we're nowhere near that. But getting them into council-owned "temporary" housing? That problem's more or less solved. It's crowded, costs more than it should, and most families don't have enough space, and there's all sorts of things about the system which aren't very fair, but it's housing.<p>(There's a guy who lives under a road bridge, not far from my flat. He's been there for years. He wants to live under that road bridge. He's obviously crazy, but he's not a danger to himself or others, and it turns out that it's not illegal for him to live there. So he's a +1 to the permanent homelessness statistics, but he's perfectly happy with this - the standard as written will never be achieved in London because of cases like this one.)
I think this is an excellent data point. The article quotes an economic cost of $20,000 vs $100,000 for giving them a home vs having someone homeless. Is there a writeup somewhere on the methodology for doing that calculation? San Francisco claims to have 7,500 homeless people so that would be $750M vs $150M. I'm pretty sure the city supervisors would go for a half billion annual reduction in their expenses.
Turns out, less social welfare is often more expensive for society.<p>I hope that over time, the social sciences will get a better (data based) grip on what works and how beneficial it is, and thus more of these problems can get solved.
Czech rep. had something similar for some time. There are two problems:<p>One has to prove to be homeless. Have some distant relative or had income a few years ago? Too bad, not homeless.<p>And some people will demolish their own house. It is expensive to buy firewood, floor and walls can be used instead. House gets eventually destroyed, owner become homeless, gets new house...
Really interesting program. Does it have any effect on the local real estate market? I would imagine it would have at least some impact on renting/purchasing prices.
I'm skeptical. I mean, it's not as though the idea of public housing is new, and it has been used in places far more liberal than the US who have not eliminated homelessness.<p>My first question is "Where are they keeping all these people?" Previous attempts to just build enough housing for everyone[1] haven't turned out all that well, and they became cesspools of crime.<p>Beyond that, are the conditions in Medicine Hat such that they can be replicated everywhere? Perhaps Medicine Hat just has an abundance of housing.<p>And lastly, it doesn't seem clear to me that they actually have eliminated homelessness. Other news sources claim that they will eliminate homelessness "soon"[2] or that they have "almost" eliminated homelessness[3].<p>[1] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruitt%E2%80%93Igoe" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruitt%E2%80%93Igoe</a>
[2] <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2015/05/14/medicine-hat-homelessness-end-2015_n_7280232.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2015/05/14/medicine-hat-homeles...</a>
[3] <a href="http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/medicine-hat-has-almost-eliminated-homelessness-by-giving-homeless-people-the-keys-to-their-own-apartments" rel="nofollow">http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/medicine-hat-has-al...</a>
What happens when the homeless from other cities start making their way to Medicine Hat?<p>I'd like for this to work out long-term, but it strikes me as unrealistic. Here's hoping I'm wrong.
Reminds me of this Washington Post article about Pathways to Housing founder Sam Tsemberis<p><a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/inspired-life/wp/2015/05/06/meet-the-outsider-who-accidentally-solved-chronic-homelessness/" rel="nofollow">http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/inspired-life/wp/2015/05/...</a>
> <i>With money chipped in by the province</i>, the city built many new homes.<p>You can temporarily improve anything by getting an even larger entity or group to pay for it.<p>The problem is this eventually runs into issues of scale.