How Utah Reduced Chronic Homelessness

The &#x27;Housing First&#x27; model was really pushed hard by Stephen Harper as Prime Minister of Canada. It was weird because he is such a staunch right-wing kind of guy, yet here he was putting money towards what seems like a very left-wing socialist idea.<p>But he, like Lloyd Pendleton in this article, apparently figured out that it saves a lot of money, ideology be damned.<p>Maybe that&#x27;s a good example of how to get right-wing politicians to agree to some left-wing ideals: prove that it will save money and let them lower taxes.

I&#x27;m confused by this. My brother has an office in downtown SLC near the Rio Grande building, and it&#x27;s pretty clear when I visit him that there are hundreds of homeless people living in that neighborhood alone. Pioneer Park is also covered in homeless people.<p>If that is less than 200 people either I don&#x27;t understand what &quot;homeless&quot; means or something is... off. How does one define &quot;chronic homelessness?&quot;<p>I really want it to be true. I have seen first hand how hard so many people work to help the homeless; through nonprofits, the government, and the LDS Church. But declaring &quot;victory&quot; over homelessness rings pretty hollow if you walk the streets of Salt Lake City.

Utah didn&#x27;t solve homelessness. The primary &quot;reduction&quot; was changing the definition of chronic homelessness and now less people are being counted.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aei.org&#x2F;publication&#x2F;on-utahs-91-percent-decrease-in-chronic-homelessness&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aei.org&#x2F;publication&#x2F;on-utahs-91-percent-decrease-...</a>

Vancouver tried the same thing. The made a policy of eradicating homelessness by X date and the city bought up SROs to put them in and other housing options.<p>The problem is once the rest of Canada&#x27;s homeless heard about this they came in droves, often given one way bus tickets by police, so it&#x27;s impossible to solve chronic homelessness without some kind of national effort. Utah this strategy works because there isn&#x27;t a flood of people going there like they are San Francisco or LA&#x27;s Skid Row.<p>It would be great if governments could have some kind of yearly conference to compare data and strategies to figure out what works&#x2F;doesn&#x27;t work at scale.

I have no doubt that this program works, even if the success has been overstated [0]. What we really need to think critically about is how <i>exportable</i> the concept is. And really, it comes down to one singular reason, housing costs[1]. High housing costs like those in most coastal cities contribute to higher inflows into homelessness and lower outflows out of homelessness, which means that higher housing costs increase the total number of homeless people <i>and</i> the duration of homelessness. They also increase the capital and administration costs of administering the program, often by a factor of two or more.<p>So in a city like Seattle or San Francisco, you&#x27;re going to have drastically more people to house, for drastically longer periods of time, and at higher fixed and variable costs. I have no problem believing that this solution if exported to San Francisco, New York, or Seattle, would cost anywhere between 1-2 orders of magnitude more than SLC as a percentage of total population.<p>IMO, anti-housing-development trends in our most economically important cities truly have become the US&#x27; largest source of injustice in the 21st century [2].<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;us-news&#x2F;2016&#x2F;apr&#x2F;27&#x2F;utah-homeless-shelters-housing-first" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;us-news&#x2F;2016&#x2F;apr&#x2F;27&#x2F;utah-homeles...</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rentjungle.com&#x2F;average-rent-in-salt-lake-city-rent-trends" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rentjungle.com&#x2F;average-rent-in-salt-lake-city-re...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;the-ferenstein-wire&#x2F;a-26-year-old-mit-graduate-is-turning-heads-over-his-theory-that-income-inequality-is-actually-2a3b423e0c#.vr3asyt59" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;the-ferenstein-wire&#x2F;a-26-year-old-mit-gra...</a>

Imo housing first has always been the best option. Think about how hamstrung people feel trying to conduct their lives out of hotels... now imaging being homeless.

Homes for the homeless. What an obvious solution! May I suggest medical care for the sick next?<p>I&#x27;m glad some cities are starting to recognize the level of dignity and hope a private residence with private facilities can give to impoverished families. Sadly it appears these types of programs seem to only be funded when wrapped in some questionable marketing or political gain.

As an aside, this is a perfect illustration of the states-rights approach going well.<p>States are testing incubators for trying new ideas.

&gt; Utah says it won &#x27;war on homelessness&#x27;, but shelters tell a different story<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;us-news&#x2F;2016&#x2F;apr&#x2F;27&#x2F;utah-homeless-shelters-housing-first" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;us-news&#x2F;2016&#x2F;apr&#x2F;27&#x2F;utah-homeles...</a>

It was interesting to hear about this, then drive down Rio Grande street or around Pioneer Park and see the massive tent cities and tons of homeless people. Things got really bad downtown the last year or so.<p>I wonder if this is a case of Salt Lake doing such a good job that homeless from other states were attracted here?

&gt; For Joe Ortega, it means ... getting used to being alone.<p>I would not have figured that moving off the street would be more isolating than living on the street. Don&#x27;t these housing options mean that someone else is living just in an adjacent room or across the hall?

I wish there is something we can do in New York City. In the last two years, I saw a significant increase in the number of homeless people in New York City. They have no home and take refuge in subways and the bathrooms at Penn Station.

This will sound hostile. It is not meant to.<p>Didn&#x27;t we do the &quot;housing first&quot; thing decades ago? The Projects in the Bronx? Cabrini Green in Chicago? Now most of those places are torn down or being gentrified or are miserable black holes of chaos and crime.<p>It seems to me that it&#x27;s really important that residents have some skin in the game, which may be the difference in the Utah program. It is also notable that the Mormon church has such deep involvement. Here in Seattle the Union Gospel Mission has been infinitely at dealing with homeless than the bureaucracy.

[2015]

I wonder if better&#x2F;more accessible health care would eliminate homeless as a side effect. It seems much of the homeless in Boston, anyway is mental health&#x2F;health related.<p>I doubt anyone will say that what Utah did here is <i>bad</i>, but you have to wonder what&#x27;s preventing a more comprehensive solution (the answer is politics, but ideally you&#x27;d get a more specific answer).

The situation in Utah is FAR from perfect. I work near a building that was renovated to house the homeless. These places are often rampant with prostitution, drug dealing and other nefarious operations. In effect many now have a roof over their heads, but they now live in what some might consider slums.

&gt;A similar approach was first tried in Los Angeles in the late 1980s and New York City in the early 1990s.<p>Does anyone have a reference for this? I did some searching, but didn&#x27;t find anything. If anything, the articles I found just said that homelessness in LA was a continuing problem throughout the 80s until today.

Last time I was in Salt Lake, there were a bunch of homeless people camped out all over the place. It was really odd, I noticed some of them were just casually smoking weed. Still not as bad as it is here in the Southern California area.

Regardless of how effective or how it&#x27;s just &quot;changing the definition&quot; at least it <i>is</i> helping.<p>Unlike here in Portland where it&#x27;s just ignored and occasionally the tent cities get pushed to a different area.

Definitely better than when they were just buying bus tickets for the homeless to go to Phoenix and Albuquerque... (Fixing the homeless problem by making it someone else&#x27;s problem)

Give every homeless person a $20 thing of nicotine each month.<p>Stop the ponzi scheme of housing costs.<p>Teach them skills general enough to plug into a variety of jobs and specific enough to survive alongside automation.<p>Giving a chronically homeless person a &quot;home&quot; doesn&#x27;t make up for the completely shattered social network they have. And the shattered sense of civil conduct in a society which literally tossed them to the trash.<p>My melancholy tells me the above will never happen. Homelessness is a shadow industry where nobody gets punished for letting relapses happen. Therefore, nobody &quot;owns&quot; performance in getting the homeless into a housed state. In the industry, talking points are more valuable than actual &quot;performance&quot;.

Homelessness should not be a problem in USA where land is plenty. If homelessness is a problem it is mostly because cities are not growing horizontally fast enough.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=b2zGFXaPn0o" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=b2zGFXaPn0o</a>

Imagine what the states could do with the &gt; $50 billion we are about to send to our already outsized military.

So you redefined homelessness and end up counting less people in order to call it success.

Maybe &quot;enlightened self interest&quot; as a governing principle will catch on.

This an older article...and I think it might have been on HN already

*From December 2015