Where did you come up with Boston?

You can't draw any meaningful conclusions from just comparing current numbers of unsheltered homeless people. If you want to measure the effectiveness of a policy, you need to compare the numbers and trends before the policy was enacted with those after. Then you need to consider other variables, such as concurrent policy changes or economic conditions, that may have influenced the data.

I don't know whether such an analysis would support the language in the legislation or not. Your conclusion may well be correct, but your data does not support it.

Your PDF only shows New Orleans.

@2,

There's also the question of how many homeless people total a city is serving.

Thanks for highlighting this, Cienna. We can't let the less empathetic members of City Council pretend that what they're offering amounts to a real solution.

I also find it really odd that Cienna compares all of King County with San Francisco, given that: 1. Seattle has the vast majority of unsheltered homeless (nearly 2,000); 2. Seattle and Baltimore have almost exactly comparable populations (approximately 620,000). Meanwhile, Baltimore has about 100 fewer unsheltered homeless than we do. Baltimore also has *twice* the poverty rate (5 percent of people in Seattle live on less than half the poverty level, compared to 10 percent in Baltimore).

Seems like it's Baltimore that's doing something right, not us.

They could buy them all homes in North Dakota for all the money spent discussing it.

Homeless people shouldn't live in expensive cities (quite frankly, no one should).

And taxpayers shouldn't pay for their professional service people to live there either.

Grab a few hundred acres, build a brand new "encampment" in the rural areas, ship all the counselors there and get those homeless people back on track.

@2: Exactly right.

@5: It looks like that's how HUD (the source for the linked data) defines these two "Continuums of Care": SF is one, Seattle/King Co. together is another.

@7,

What linked data? Cienna's PDF only shows New Orleans, and she got her stats on King County from the Seattle/King County Coalition on Homelessness, not from HUD. Those stats parse out the numbers between cities/towns. She could have done sensible research and compared Seattle's and Baltimore's statistics instead of coughing up half-baked analysis.

@6 just think of them as Climate Change Refugees.

There will be a lot more fairly soon.

@1, my brain is fried. It's fixed.

@2, (and 7), I don't disagree with you. The larger point I was clumsily trying to make was that the council hasn't proven that assertion that I bolded in the legislation (that "most" homeless have been magically restored to homes), and that without the detailed analysis you're rightly asking for, we shouldn't take their word that these cities have been successful in curbing homelessness and we shouldn't be modeling our policies after them.

Because unless they've simply stopped counting homeless as "people" in these cities, they continue to exist in large numbers.

Why not just offer every Nickelsville resident $5,000 to clean up their shit and get out of there?

And factor in that those other cities are at lower latitudes, with warmer climates.

I'm not sure how you arrive at "reticence to meaningfully address homelessness" when you're staring at a proposal to allocate half a million dollars to find or create shelter for somewhere between 50 an 100 people.

And I notice you didn't work too hard to find figures on how much of the City's budget is already spent directly on mitigating homelessness.

This isn't about homelessness, this is about Nickelsville. They really, really aren't the same thing. If anything, the proposal the Council is considering is one that is vastly, disproportionately large in its allocation of resources to Nickelsville clients, compared to homeless people sleeping in other parts of the city.

@8: The PDF she linked is a Homeless Population and Subpopulation report from HUD's Continuum of Care program. HUD classifies San Francisco as one "continuum of care", and Seattle/King County together as another. I have no idea why they are classified that way, though.

You can find the quoted data for other cities (and lots of other interesting things) at http://www.hudhre.info/index.cfm?do=view… .

@10: Has anyone from The Stranger challenged Sally Clark and the rest of the council on this claim? Have they been asked to provide any evidence to back it up? That strikes me as a more effective way to challenge them on this, and would make for some interesting reporting.

Wow. Always glad to have the advice of people who live in $500K-plus houses on the right amount of money to spend to make sure smelly homes people don't interrupt their latte stops.

homeless

I live in a suburb of Baltimore (Towson, Maryland) and there has been a visible increase in the homeless population in the two years since I moved here from Baltimore. I wonder whether Baltimore is "solving" its homeless problem by exporting it across the county line.