
Nonprofits are pushing a homeless policy that works for some but not for others - tomohawk
https://world.wng.org/2017/11/housing_shorts
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gwern
> Twenty-five years later, Megison is now president and CEO of Solutions for
> Change, a nonprofit transitional housing program for homeless families in
> North County San Diego. Key to Solutions’ success is its requirement that
> families stay sober and go through an intensive, structured 1,000-day
> residential program that includes classes on parenting, servant leadership,
> job training, and financial literacy. Ninety-three percent of families who
> have graduated from the program are still housed, employed, and self-
> sustaining.

Housing First has undergone randomized assessments. Has Solutions for Change?
Touting a 93% (!!!) 'success rate' reminds me of the bogus AA claims, where
they report similar literally unbelievable success rates (and note the overlap
of alcoholism with homelessness) by a variety of mechanisms like screening out
the hard cases, excluding anyone who doesn't complete the program, ultra-small
samples, using weak endpoints like very short-term followups of self-reports
or additional attrition, publication bias, p-hacking various outcomes and
adding new ones on the fly etc. As a rule, there are no interventions with 93%
success rates for such intractable problems as schizophrenia, alcoholism and
drug addictions, homelessness, or poverty - the experiment has died and the
statistician can only do a post-mortem.

~~~
blfr
Yes, the 93% success rate seems to be for people who finish the initial 1000
days so they exclude anyone who doesn't complete the program.

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sbierwagen
[https://world.wng.org/about](https://world.wng.org/about)

>As many have come to expect, WORLD reports the news from a Christian
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jonstewart
Not just a Christian worldview, per se, but one founded to "to challenge the
assumptions and activities of the liberals and to return the Southern
Presbyterian denomination to its biblical moorings". See
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_(magazine)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_\(magazine\))

Like any large structural social problem, there's probably not a single all-
encompassing policy solution at the current time. Housing First has shown some
success. Kudos to Solutions for Change for its accomplishments, too. It's
important to realize that Housing First doesn't imply Housing Last, a
distinction I'm not sure the article makes.

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jseliger
Ah yes, homelessness in California again. I've worked on a bunch of homeless
service projects (I do grant writing for nonprofit and public agencies), and
the biggest problem with homeless services is actually zoning—for reasons I
describe in "L.A. digs a hole more slowly than economics fills it back in: The
Proposition HHH Facilities Program RFP:"
[http://seliger.com/2017/08/30/l-digs-hole-slowly-
economics-f...](http://seliger.com/2017/08/30/l-digs-hole-slowly-economics-
fills-back-proposition-hhh-facilities-program/) .

Until the zoning / NIMBY / Prop 13 problems get addressed, there isn't enough
money in the world to do enough on the homeless challenges.

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JackFr
Despite this being anecdotal, I think the takeaway seems to be that
homelessness is not a simple, single problem, and thus there is no simple,
one-size solution.

It also highlights that intelligent, informed people of good will, acting in
good faith can view a problem and come up with different solutions.

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DINKDINK
The unacknowledged myth of public policy is that there is no such thing as
"the public good". No treatment -- drug, government policy, 'planning' \-- can
benefit all people. E.g. People in your country are suffering from
malnutrition so you decide to subsidize certain crops. Congratulations now
high fructose corn syrup has created an obesity epidemic. In the medical field
this is acknowledged under the study of 'iatrogenics', that harm which results
from attempting to help.

Unstudied, or unstudiable, government policy results in whole societies being
forced to take metaphorical drugs in which politicians, without any supporting
evidence, tell the populace that this policy will help them. And yet people
who live in the real world see the exact opposite. The economic and social
isolation of the political class exacerbates this effect.

~~~
cirgue
> No treatment -- drug, government policy, 'planning' \-- can benefit all
> people.

This is the fundamental problem that any just political systems seeks to
solve. No policy will ever benefit everyone, much less benefit them equally.
That doesn't mean we should avoid implementing policies that help some more
than others: that is in itself a form of injustice.

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jtchang
Homelessness has a lot of parallels to education and how we teach kids. In
schools we need lessons that are individualized to a student. Not every
student learns the same. The buzzword that goes around is individualized
instruction.

The same can be said of how we fix homelessness. There is no one size fits all
solution. You have to figure out for any given person what they need. This is
what makes it so expensive to fix. As a society we love panaceas. The reality
is that we need to figure out how to diagnose the root cause of a person's
homelessness faster and cheaper before anything will get better. With respect
to how we do that our technology is still stuck in the middle ages.

~~~
derefr
Tangent: I find the idea that we'll reach zero employment any time soon
strange, because we have (and have always had) a desperate need for social
workers. We could have 10x the number we have today, and still not be
providing the level of individualized care that would meet most people's idea
of an "ethical system" vs. being some sort of Kafka-esque farce.

Maybe nobody will want to _pay_ them (their salaries come out of taxes, after
all), but the jobs will continue to exist, with whatever budget—they certainly
can't be automated away. There is an intrinsically human element to figuring
out just how to untangle a (seemingly-irreversibly) knotted-up human life.

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Mz
I am really sort of tired of the articles and discussions of homelessness and
"the homeless." It is very othering.

Will we ever talk about how society no longer provides affordable housing for
young single adults and similar demographics?

I am so tired of these discussions and how they turn a certain segment of
society into zoo animals to gawk at in a way that just reinforces the idea
that there is something wrong with these people rather than something wrong
with society and our policies.

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Eridrus
Thanks for sharing. It's interesting that some of the criticism of the housing
first approach seem similar to criticisms about housing projects.

I think we've largely seen a policy change away from projects to vouchers that
spread people out, though I've also seen some studies saying that projects vs
vouchers is not a choice that is better for every demographic group, one way
or another.

In an ideal world, you would send people to the program that works for them,
but that raises questions of fairness and asks who is going to be making
decisions. Maybe it's good that these decisions are being made by
decentralized NGOs rather than the government.

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morpheuskafka
Surprisingly, the article was not bad, although the libertarian bias is pretty
bare with the last paragraph. But really, World News Group?

~~~
weberc2
I don't notice anything particularly libertarian about the last paragraph, but
I appreciate that the article illustrated the complex nature of homelessness.
Most media describe the homeless in sugar coated terms, presumably for fear of
being viewed as cruel. I found it refreshing that this article was willing to
paint a realistic portrait of homelessness. It seems to me that over-
emphasizing the innocence of certain groups is often less compassionate than
looking honestly at the root causes.

If this sort of realism is particular to one political ideology, sign me up.

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weerd

      each chronically homeless individual uses about $30,000 to $50,000 in taxpayer funds per year by cycling in and out of emergency rooms, hospital beds, detox programs, jails, and psychiatric institutions.
    
    

Damn, that is a huge amount of money. This can't be unique to the U.S. How do
they address this problem in other countries?

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intopieces
I read the article and I found the headline to be rather uninspired and
obvious. No policy works for everyone. Instead: “When ‘housing first’ fails,
some homeless turn to more structured aid.”

