
Billionaire Marc Benioff donates $30M to research homelessness - jelliclesfarm
https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/01/business/marc-benioff-ucsf-donation-homeless-research-trnd/index.html
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nickelcitymario
Although I applaud the donation, I'm skeptical of what will come of it.

In Canada, at all levels of government, every few years we see a new study
being funded on how to end homelessness. Everyone cheers. Finally, someone is
doing something! Then the study goes unnoticed, ignored, or is otherwise
unactionable.

But no worries, because someone else will fund a study and we'll get to the
bottom of it this time!

It's an endless cycle.

Maybe this will be different. It's not government afterall, it's private
money. Maybe he'll take an approach similar to Bill Gates and actually do
something about the problem he paid to study. It would be a pleasant surprise.

But for now? I'm taking a "wait and see" approach. Marc certainly goes out of
his way to portray an image of a good man trying to use his wealth to
accomplish good things. I'd really like to see some of that come to more than
just P.R.

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nugget
Here's a recent exposé about homelessness in Seattle:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpAi70WWBlw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpAi70WWBlw)

My takeaway: drug addiction and mental illness are the real problems.
Homelessness is just a symptom of the disease. Why does that distinction
matter? Building affordable housing without infrastructure and services to
address addiction and mental health will not work.

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mabynogy
It's 4981 years of hotel here (16.5€/night). There is no secret to discover in
homelessness. They have housing and/or drug and/or mental disorder problem.
They need to stop using drug, a good psy with a working treatment and a house.
House is the simpler to fix. Let's start with that.

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aeternus
How does housing fix the drug or mental disorder problem? How do we pay for
the housing or address the issues with supply and demand when providing free
housing?

With engineering, very few engineers would start work on a design that only
addresses a small part of the known problem space.

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SeanAppleby
As someone who knows struggling addicts with good housing who would otherwise
be homeless, yeah, housing does absolutely not fix the problem. It's so
complicated.

Nihilism and a lack of a reason to care about getting better. Drugs offer a
cheap escape from their grim view of reality. No friends who aren't addicts,
so it's normalized.

A criminal record blocking gainful employment. Court mandated treatment
programs that prevent people from moving away from their deadend town and self
reinforcing social circle of addicts. Court mandated treatment that's forcing
them to spend all of their time around other addicts, who only have drugs in
common and thus have their relationships built on the shared interest in
drugs, preventing them from participating in anything that would lead to a
more productive social circle.

Their criminal record might mean that by an enormous margin the most lucrative
thing they can do, and perhaps actually their only realistic hope of financial
independence, freedom, and an escape from their miserable reality of barely
scraping by spending most of their time doing things they hate, is to sell
drugs, which is self reinforcing their environment.

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mabynogy
Yeah. You describe that well. It is a very difficult problem.

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TbobbyZ
My father is homeless. No matter how much money you throw at him, he's never
been able to be self-reliant. He has not had his own place for over 20 years
(I'm 31 years old). He has problems with alcohol and can never stick with
anything (jobs, education, trade schools).

I think my father's homeless situation is very similar to 95% of the homeless
population. They can't break their old habits or just don't want to. It takes
a very competent person to stick with a job, make sure all your bills, and to
acquire the skills needed to make someone want to pay you more than minimum
wage.

If someone has drive and is competent, there is no reason for them to be
homeless. There is so much free information out there or very cheap courses to
learn many skills that are in demand.

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new_guy
For $30 million he could pretty much end homelessness, surely? At least in a
couple of cities.

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eigenspace
I think the last 50 years have shown that simply throwing money at
homelessness won't make it go away. Most modern projects to reduce
homelessness have either had unexpectedly underwhelming results or
surprisingly large unintended consequences.

I think that is about as clear a sign as we're going to get that our common
sense notions about how to solve homelessness are insufficient, which means
further scientific research is necessary.

~~~
_Microft
They had a different experience with throwing money at the problem in London.
There it actually worked for their test group.

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/free-money-might-
be-...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/free-money-might-be-the-best-
way-to-end-poverty/2013/12/29/679c8344-5ec8-11e3-95c2-13623eb2b0e1_story.html)

