> 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?!
(Blog author here) Every three years, SF asks volunteers to walk around the city and physically tally up people they see living on the street using clipboards. Agencies like ECS have no way to communicate progress, numbers, or success/failures with one another, and the city has no visibility into the actual movement of people between services. I'm not suggesting a few good apps would help at all. In fact, the opposite. I'm saying that we spend too much time creating net new things, like apps, and not enough time partnering with the people that are actually working on the solution. The new department of homelessness is taking on "data consolidation and collaboration" as one of their big initiatives, yet they aren't working with tech companies that are experts in that area.
My point: no one is talking to one another and using our shared skills to actually affect change.
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.
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.
Probably not to solve it, but maybe to improve on it.
Could you write an app that would make homeless outreach volunteers 2x-10x more efficient?
How about one that would crowd-source data collection to support political initiatives?
Or find a way to funnel food wasted by restaurants and supermarkets into the bellies of hungry people?
Maybe it's not just making an app, but turning the focus of SV's culture of "disruption" upon social problems. How could you "disrupt" the social, political, financial, or logistical patterns and problems that cause and perpetuate homelessness?
The only thing you are wrong about is the how fungible and fluid the issue is.
This isn't the sort of thing you solve within a limit, a set of bounds; this is the kind of thing that has to be solved at a national or even /global/ level.
I think the only difference between this problem and the European refugee crisis is that at least in the case of the latter it is the tired, the poor, and downtrodden seeking to find the hope of opportunity realized. The 'homeless' in the US probably mostly fit one of these categories: mentally ill, physically ill, under-compensated, under-serviced by and/or alienated from the community.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I read somewhat that this budget also covers around 9k people in shelters (or housed through some other form of aid). If you consider that, you get about $15K/head/year, which is not entirely ridiculous.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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?
dfabulich|9 years ago
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?!
cfishswim|9 years ago
My point: no one is talking to one another and using our shared skills to actually affect change.
Mz|9 years ago
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/
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.
cauterized|9 years ago
Could you write an app that would make homeless outreach volunteers 2x-10x more efficient?
How about one that would crowd-source data collection to support political initiatives?
Or find a way to funnel food wasted by restaurants and supermarkets into the bellies of hungry people?
Maybe it's not just making an app, but turning the focus of SV's culture of "disruption" upon social problems. How could you "disrupt" the social, political, financial, or logistical patterns and problems that cause and perpetuate homelessness?
mjevans|9 years ago
This isn't the sort of thing you solve within a limit, a set of bounds; this is the kind of thing that has to be solved at a national or even /global/ level.
I think the only difference between this problem and the European refugee crisis is that at least in the case of the latter it is the tired, the poor, and downtrodden seeking to find the hope of opportunity realized. The 'homeless' in the US probably mostly fit one of these categories: mentally ill, physically ill, under-compensated, under-serviced by and/or alienated from the community.
Mz|9 years ago
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...
erentz|9 years ago
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.
adityabansod|9 years ago
the_economist|9 years ago
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.
dangrover|9 years ago
davidjnelson|9 years ago
jxramos|9 years ago
cvwright|9 years ago
http://www.wweek.com/news/2016/09/28/portland-needs-to-build...
armen52|9 years ago
bxb1552|9 years ago
imh|9 years ago
StavrosK|9 years ago
xg15|9 years ago
If this is true, can a program like CHEFS actually get someone out of homelessness?
don_draper|9 years ago
ilostmykeys|9 years ago
SmokyBorbon|9 years ago
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