Million-Dollar Murray: Homelessness may be easier to solve than to manage

&#62; An efficiency apartment in Denver averages $376 a month, or just over forty-five hundred a year, which means that you can house and care for a chronically homeless person for at most fifteen thousand dollars, or about a third of what he or she would cost on the street.<p>That assumes renters who don't try to destroy the place. However, some renters are considerably more destructive than others.<p>However, the big problem is that it assumes that homelessness is solely due to a lack of resources to obtain a home. If that were true, SF would have far fewer homeless and the shelters would be full.<p>Yet, many of SF's shelter beds are empty and folks who could be in the are on the street. Yes, they know about the beds - they prefer the street.<p>Are you really sure that they'd take an efficiency apartment? Are you sure that they wouldn't try to destroy it?<p>Someone pitching that as a solution should not only be aware of the possibilities but have reasons better than "an apartment is better than the street" because that's clearly not true for a large fraction of the relevant population.

"Power-law solutions have little appeal to the right, because they involve special treatment for people who do not deserve special treatment; and they have little appeal to the left, because their emphasis on efficiency over fairness suggests the cold number-crunching of Chicago-school cost-benefit analysis."<p>This is exactly why programs like these won't take off. It's hard to present this kind of complex analysis of the behavior of a system to the tax payers for exactly this reason. The average person probably votes their conscience, not what makes the most sense from scientific studies, which are generally not widely published anyway. There's no simple moral argument to be made for giving homeless people free apartments that they don't deserve, and most voters won't think through a proof that has more than like two steps.

Seattle actually put this into practice. The city funds and supports homeless housing for the most expensive homeless in the city. There is no requirement for sobriety. The project is called 1811 Eastlake (<a href="http://www.google.com/search?q=1811+eastlake" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/search?q=1811+eastlake</a>) and it is not without controversy. Studies of the outcomes and cost analysis has been published in JAMA. Here is a summary: <a href="http://www.desc.org/documents/DESC_1811_JAMA_info.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.desc.org/documents/DESC_1811_JAMA_info.pdf</a>.<p>My wife is an ER attending at Harborview, the hospital that sees most of these patients. Anecdotally, she has seen great outcomes out of the project, has toured it and is a big fan.<p>(Interestingly, Dr. Michael Copass, the patriarch of the Harborview ED and a pioneer in modern medical response calls these individuals "urban nomads")

<i>"...It is very much ingrained in me that you do not manage a social wrong. You should be ending it."</i><p>Lots of good stuff in this article. I had a class on homelessness and an internship at a homeless shelter. A lot of what I have seen written about it is pretty stupid. But the ideas presented here have potential.

The crux of the matter:<p><i>The cost of services comes to about ten thousand dollars per homeless client per year. An efficiency apartment in Denver averages $376 a month, or just over forty-five hundred a year, which means that you can house and care for a chronically homeless person for at most fifteen thousand dollars, or about a third of what he or she would cost on the street.</i><p>I believe similar observations have been made in subsidizing the price of fruit and vegetables (or even bikes and gym memberships) vs the medical costs of bad diets and lack of exercise, too.

The Delancey Street Foundation is an organization that has recuperated thousands of people who have hit rock bottom. And they do it without any government funding (they're self-supporting). One of the best examples of social entrepreneurship out there.<p><a href="http://www.delanceystreetfoundation.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.delanceystreetfoundation.org/</a><p>And if you're interested in the details of how the organization operates, I did some research and wrote about the organization on my blog:<p><a href="http://nathanmarz.com/blog/mimi-silbert-the-greatest-hacker-in-the-world.html" rel="nofollow">http://nathanmarz.com/blog/mimi-silbert-the-greatest-hacker-...</a>

What I would ask about these "power law" situations: Do we have any idea what moves someone from bad cop to really bad cop or homeless to homeless-and-totally-down-and-out?<p>While only a small number reach the "really bad" level, it seems plausible that there's a larger population who could move into that level if the competition or bad examples or whatever other restraining factors were removed?<p>Sure, only a tiny minority is flagrantly offending at a given point but if one doesn't understand how this minority arises, one doesn't really understand the situation.

I believe that homelessness is <i>cheaper</i> to solve than to manage.<p>However, it may be <i>easier</i> to manage (ignore) the problem than to solve.

The article is a bit too well written, if theres such a thing. I got about halfway without pausing.