
Helping the homeless in San Francisco - gitdude
http://blogs.atlassian.com/2016/10/san-francisco-homeless/
======
dfabulich
> We spend a lot of time in San Francisco and Silicon Valley thinking about
> ways to make people’s lives easier. And through that innovation, we’ve
> uncovered amazing opportunities – just think about life before Google Maps!
> But what if we aimed just 1% of that focus of looking out on what we can
> invent, in on what we can improve? What if we partnered with folks like
> those at ECS to match their decades of experience on issues like
> homelessness with our super powers in technology, software development,
> marketing, design and data sciences. What if we worked together – imagine
> all the good we could do.

Perhaps this is a failure of my imagination, or perhaps I'm misinterpreting
the message, but this sounds to me like the author is inviting us to solve SF
homelessness using technology.

Software is a set of tools for gathering and organizing data, but the problem
of homelessness is a problem of budget and political will, not data.

If you took 1% of the software developers in SF and had them organize all of
the data on homelessness, it would only document the magnitude of the problem.
("Big!")

Fundamentally, there just isn't enough political will today to buy shelter
(and mental-health service) for everybody who needs it.

Even if someone could afford to buy enough land to build enough shelter, the
residents of the city of SF won't let you build that many homes for the
homeless in their backyard.

A data-driven political campaign might do the trick, but it really might not,
and regardless that's really quite a different proposal from "why don't we use
technology to solve the problem of homelessness?"

Am I wrong? Do we really just need to write a few good apps to solve this
problem?!

~~~
Mz
_but this sounds to me like the author is inviting us to solve SF homelessness
using technology._

Technology can be enormously useful in this space. I am homeless and I make
money online in part by blogging, in part by doing freelance work.

You want to do some good in San Francisco in this space, let me suggest you
start a San Francisco version of The San Diego Homeless Survival Guide --
listing important resources like where to get free food if you need it, as
well as free electricity and wifi -- and then also give away free tablets to
homeless people in the area.

[http://sandiegohomelesssurvivalguide.blogspot.com/](http://sandiegohomelesssurvivalguide.blogspot.com/)

I used the internet to research my next city and moved from San Diego more
than a year ago and my quality of life has been better ever since. My health
is better, my income is trending up and if I can come up with $7.5 to $10k in
the next few weeks, I am planning to buy a house.

Technology can do wonder to provide gig work, low cost access to information
that is valuable on the street and help _homeless people_ become _digital
nomads_ and start soling their own problems and pulling themselves up by the
bootstraps -- instead of becoming trapped in shitty homeless programs that you
treat you worse than an animal.

~~~
davidjnelson
This is super inspiring, thank you for sharing this!

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Mz
I desperately wish we would stop trying so hard to "help The Homeless" and
start trying to make housing more affordable and neighborhoods more walkable
so that ordinary people with ordinary jobs can walk to work and rent or buy
housing that fits their budget. Then we don't have to have these bleeding
heart bullshit displays of how fucking much people care when people mostly do
not care and, instead, they just like having an excuse to massage their own
ego and tell you how morally superior they are.

Stop treating poor people like pets you rescued and can now show off as proof
of how compassionate you are. Just build a world that WORKS, for all people,
not just the rich.

We need to build a world where people who are not "the tech elite" can afford
to live in it without some kind of intervention program. Geez.

[http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2016/07/minimum-
dece...](http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2016/07/minimum-decent-
housing-not-minimum-wage.html)

------
erentz
I feel like the best thing Bay Area tech companies could do to help with
homelessness is to use their influence to fix zoning and transit.

Granted this is short of them getting involved in campaigning for things like
universal health care, better mental health facilities, drug decriminaiation,
and other such issues that are harder to touch. But the impact of lowering
overall housing costs would help many. And the reduced housing costs would
reduce the demand for stupidly high tech wages helping with the inequality in
the Bay Area.

CEOs of these tech companies must live in bubbles to not see the threat that
Bay Area housing costs have to their business.

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adityabansod
I was at the meetup they held a few weeks ago at Atlassian; probably the most
interesting bit to me (as a 10+ year SF resident) was Jeff Kositsky discussion
about some of the structural work the city was doing to address the issues --
namely reorganizing three different groups into one, streamlining data
collection and reporting, and trying to get services more accessible.

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the_economist
Homelessness is mainly a byproduct of mental illness and drug addiction. If
you want to solve homelessness, you need to target those problems. I would
suggest that new technology is needed, particularly in the case of mental
illness. We do not have a good medicine to treat schizophrenia, for example.

The city of San Francisco spends $241 million/year on ~7 thousand homeless, an
indication that throwing money at this problem doesn't do much.

~~~
davidjnelson
Any idea why there is no effective medicine for it? It seems like a really
important thing to solve. It sounds like a _lot_ of people would benefit.

~~~
the_economist
Human biology is hard. We don't have a cure for AIDS, baldness, acne, heart
disease, cancer, the common cold, etc.

~~~
xg15
Also note that "schizophrenia" is not an illness but a family of illnesses
(and even that definition is one of the less fuzzy ones). Finding a "universal
cure" is as likely as finding a universal cure for cancer. That is, very
unlikely.

~~~
davidjnelson
Oh wow I didn't know that. I thought it was a neurotransmitter issue with
unbalanced levels of various neurotransmitter and/or receptors, but I don't
know much about it. Science will get there someday though! I guess for both
cancer and complex mental illness and other types of complex illness, the
trick would be to both find a workable solution to each sub-problem, and then
use them to address the full complex. It would be cool if companies were
working on these types of approaches. I wonder if any are?

------
jxramos
That ECS stuff makes me think about that old Heather MacDonald article about
The sidewalks of San Francisco and all various interest groups and cynical
factions she unveils in her article which she refers to as "Homelessness,
Inc". It's forever changed my skepticism around this topic. [http://www.city-
journal.org/html/sidewalks-san-francisco-133...](http://www.city-
journal.org/html/sidewalks-san-francisco-13321.html)

~~~
cvwright
Reminds me of Willamette Week's recent story about Portland's failure to build
enough affordable housing. The reported reason? The city funds "cool" projects
run by "cool" nonprofits instead of spending money where it will do the most
good. Super frustrating but also informative.

[http://www.wweek.com/news/2016/09/28/portland-needs-to-
build...](http://www.wweek.com/news/2016/09/28/portland-needs-to-build-
thousands-of-affordable-apartments-heres-why-it-keeps-coming-up-short/)

~~~
jxramos
Pretty good quotes from various involved individuals, such as "Our government
is so caught up in efforts to appease so many interests that they step right
over that guy on the sidewalk to accomplish other goals,"

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armen52
Since when did we start referring to ourselves as "the tech elite"? This seems
like the wrong way to frame the problem, or our relation to it.

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bxb1552
It's hard to believe that the problem is a lack of funds when the city's
2015-16 budget allocates $241m to help ~7k homeless people. It sounds more
like we can't figure out how to deploy these resources effectively.

~~~
imh
That sounds like a ton, but for the estimated 7k-10k homeless people in SF,
that's $24k-34k per person annually. A lot of money, but not an insane amount
given the high local costs of absolutely everything.

~~~
aseipp
Also: is the $241mil estimate the actual literal amount reserved/given to the
homeless of SF -- or is it the budget for the entire project of dealing with
homelessness in SF? I see this number get thrown around and I don't think I've
ever seen anyone clarify this bit? It seems quite obvious and very significant
to factor in operation costs if this is the case.

If things like the budget for those shelters and their employees also come out
of the $241mil -- even assuming an even split -- you're probably looking at
_way_ less than $30k or even $20k per-person already... Assuming it 'only'
cost $50 million to run it all, that's about $19k per person at 10,000
homeless, with 25k-at-7k.

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xg15
Non-SF resident here. From other stories I have read, it seems to me as if
housing prices start to reach levels where even average middle-class workers
have trouble finding something affordable.

If this is true, can a program like CHEFS actually get someone out of
homelessness?

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don_draper
Don't forget to estimate and log your work

~~~
ilostmykeys
haha! the tools they build are meant for Vogons, not coders. In fact, Jira
takes the "agile" out of agile.

