The thing with insane conservative thought it that it is all about punishment.

It does not matter if it is cheaper to house the homeless or better for society. Crazed conservatives are more than willing to pay more if it mean people they see as worthless suffer.

This is why they are against birth control and sex ed as well. It is worth the extra cost as long as women who are having sex suffer for it.

If it makes females, the poor, or minorities suffer, many conservatives will line up to spend tax dollars on it. It is all about punishment for living outside of their arbitrary (often passed down from a magic sky father) social rules.

I came to say exactly what @1 said. Couldn't have said it better than that.

I would only add that in addition to punishment, conservatives also have a need to feel better than others. If they can keep other people homeless, it makes them feel better about themselves.

You don't need to cite Florida to make this case. Seattle's DESC has been running the "1811 Eastlake " building for almost a decade. You can find out more here (http://www.desc.org/1811.html) along with links to studies examining the effectiveness.

When assuming the narrative stance that everyone else is a dumbass lacking in basic human empathy, you might want to learn more about the solutions being explored in your own back yard.

@2
I think the "need to feel better than others" lies within all of us. It should go without saying that Slog Writers are excellent at derogatory comments toward the people they disagree with.

Thank you @1 Theodore Gorath. Yours is the first explanation of the bizarre behavior of many conservatives that I've seen. It's about punishing people who don't believe the way they do.

Yikes! and many of these people call themselves Christians.

$10,000 a year is $833 a month.

That much affords you a very comfortable 2-bedroom apartment in Yakima.

If you double or triple up people into a 3-bedroom, then I guess you use the extra for a caseworker.

A while back I lived roomed an autistic man who had a caseworker in daily...it was great, because the caseworker did all the dishes.

@7
Autistic people, from my own experience, span a wide continuum. Care to elaborate on the specifics of your roommate? Personally, I'm simply fascinated with the condition.

Plymouth Housing Group has also been using the Housing First model...

@1: Absolutely. It's what in game theory and evolutionary psychology is known as "spiteful" behavior: it is detrimental to both the actor and the object of it. (Contrast with cooperative behavior, which is beneficial to both; altruistic behavior, which helps the object at the cost of the actor; and exploitative behavior, which benefits the actor to the detriment of the object.) So why does it arise, if it is detrimental to everyone involved? It's usually a by-product of something else which is strongly selected for. In this case, it's a self-righteous and hypercritical sense of justice; these conservatives are so bent on making sure that people (or poor people, anyway) don't get anything they didn't earn that they're willing to sacrifice their own well-being.

@3 DESC is amazing. 1811 Eastlake is amazing. And we've written about them both many times. But 1811 Eastlake serves 75 people. King County found more than 3,000 people living outside this January. (http://www.homelessinfo.org/what_we_do/o…) There is still great need, and how to address it still deserves robust discussion.

Well...1&2 are correct: with most (not all, see @7) "conservatives" they'd rather waste $100 making sure some "undeserving" individual didn't get a free $10, every time, but the real issue is this:

It all depends on who you're spending that money on - the law enforcement constituency or the social services constituency.

The homeless are just vehicles for delivering the money, just as SNAP/WIC are merely vehicles to pass through money to ADM and Cargill. Of course, if we're gonna hand out tax money, I'd prefer it have to pass through the needier members of society first in order to get to the well off end recipients.

@1, @2, and @5.

You should be aware that the majority of homeless shelters in Seattle are affiliated with Christian and Catholic organizations.

Hey, we should do that here!

Oh, wait, we already do that here. In fact, we helped to pioneer that strategy here. 1811 Eastlake is only one such program (though it is famous because the original research supporting this model is based in part on it). We have thousands of units of this kind of housing, and spend 10s of millions of dollars a year on it.

Despite what Matt Yglesias says about it, the money still does have to come from somewhere. And unless we are going to close jails and emergency services, we can't actually reallocate those funds.

Here's an overview of United Way's campaign to end chronic homelessness, just as one starting point:

http://www.uwkc.org/assets/files/homeles…

Should we do more? Yes, clearly we need to. But permanent supportive housing for the chronically homeless is not a new idea here.

@13 Do you think those organizations could be convinced to provide more permanent housing? I know some churches allow(ed) homeless encampments but would they pay for Apodments?

@7:

Why does it not surprise me in the least that you'd take advantage of your roommate's caseworker like a parasitic leech?

@5:

Well, it's a peculiarly Calvinistic form of Christianity, but its adherents still view themselves as good, God-fearing Christians nonetheless.

The attitude that the first commenter here wrote about is also the reason why it's been such a political struggle to improve the U.S.'s health care system, despite evidence from all around the world that a single-payer or universal health care system generates better health outcomes with less spending compared to our f'ed up health insurance system. It's the same phenomenon going on when states like Florida make their welfare recipients jump through drug-testing hoops to get benefits — the cost of testing everybody is higher than the amount the state saves by kicking a handful of illegal drug users out of welfare programs.

Making sure that freeloaders don't get anything they don't deserve is much more important than making sure people stay healthy (or out of poverty, or housed), and we're gonna spend extra money to make sure it happens. Punishment and spite trump economics. It's the American way.

#10

You can blame "conservatives" for spiteful behavior, but if you open your eyes, you will see our entire economy is based on it.

Given -- we can pretty much produce goods for a tiny fraction at which they are sold. However, if we did the whole world would be quickly exhausted by gluttony and growth.

Therefore, all our roses have their thorns.

@13,
I do know that many homeless shelters around the country are affiliated or directly run by religious organizations.

@14,

You beat me to it.

There's a reason why this is a seemingly intractable problem even in very liberal cities. Constructing housing for homeless people, something similar to SROs, which seems to be the norm for housing first projects, requires a huge upfront investment, and we're already spending millions just to keep homeless people from dying in the street. You can't divert money from emergency services to housing projects, which means housing first requires additional funding beyond what we're already spending.

Even prioritizing housing for those homeless people who present the greatest cost to taxpayers is a long, hard process; something with a long-term outlook of 20 years just to get the most hard-luck cases (and not the other couple thousand homeless) off the street permanently.

The problem with cost calculations like this is the implicit assumption that police, ambulance, emergency room, and other services could be cut by X dollars if only we spent 1/3 of X on [insert preferred social program].

If it worked that way, that would be great, but it doesn't, and we all know it.

Make the case for giving free housing to the homeless on moral grounds-- it's a much stronger argument.

Anna who cares if it done for economic reasons as long as it's done. You liberals are almost as bad as Republicans.

@15 & @!9 - yes, many are and many are just non-profit local entities that scrape up money wherever they can find it in an attempt to address the problem. As I've heard it put: the non/not-for-profit sectors exists because of government and market failures...taking care of the homeless/indigent will never be a profit center, no matter how much economic savings we see collectively. It's a variant of the 'tragedy of the commons'. I really like @10's evolutionary explanation.

My point was that in competing for tax money, the constituencies (receivers of tax dollars) who provide military and law enforcement 'services' tend to win (get more votes) out over the providers of social services. The appeal to the Calvinist punitive approach resonates too well in the general population.

See: Drug War and Mass Incarceration (other frequent SLOG topics).

Spiteful indeed.

I'm personally a little leery of the faith-based-initiatives approach, particularly when some faith-based-entrepreneurs (the tax free kind) seem to have trouble understanding the first amendment - so while one can make an argument that many of these non-profits are deserving of block grants and other tax dollars, in the end the government might be the best provider. I'm on the fence about that, despite my normal ACLU tendencies.

@18: Yo dawg did you even read my post? You're describing exploitative rather than spiteful behavior. Also, did you seriously just say that the world would be overcome with gluttony if we made it easier for poor people to afford manufactured goods? JBITSMFOTP

@14

"There's a reason why this is a seemingly intractable problem even in very liberal cities. "

It's intractable in cities because they are the most expensive places to provide basic services while at the same time attracting homeless for the same reason they attract workers (lots of people means more economic opportunity). Beyond that, surrounding areas are basically free-riding in that they can dump off the homeless they produce while not paying for the city and county services the people will end up using (or being abused by, in the case of the police).

If you really want to solve the problem you don't pay $4000 a month to house a family in NYC (real example), you give them $2000 a month and tell them to figure out how to house and feed themselves.

There is one issue this article didn't bring up, and that is how government regulations punish people who try to help the homeless. For example, this guy opened a homeless shelter in his church, and the government shut it down for not having a license: http://www.jsonline.com/news/milwaukee/8…

@1
Yes, and maybe that's why conservatives give more to charity and do more volunteer work than liberals.

http://abcnews.go.com/2020/story?id=2682…

And SPARE ME the old "that's just churches they're giving to!" line. As the article says: "Actually, the truth is that they're giving to more than their churches," he says. "The religious Americans are more likely to give to every kind of cause and charity, including explicitly non-religious charities."

We libertarians and also conservatives understand that it is the responsibility of society and individuals, not government, to help our fellow man. Liberals want to steal from people through taxation to attempt to help the poor. This sums it up perfectly: http://dougarrington.squarespace.com/sto…

@26: It may seem callous, but the dynamics of such a situation, particularly with regard to liability and safety, do require some oversight. A better solution in my opinion would be to require the church to establish a working plan to address safety issues and GET licensed, but allow it to operate on a provisional basis while that is being handled.

@27: Wrong wrong wrong, amigo. Mr. Brooks's study had some serious holes in it with regard to defining "liberal" and "conservative"; it turns out that liberals and conservatives tend to give comparably, but conservatives give more to religious charities while liberals prefer secular organizations.
http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/… http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonk…

Has anyone thought about simply making it legal to sleep, drink, and pee in public?

Late to the party here, but Utah already gives apartments to the homeless because it is cheaper - UTAH! Check it out with your favorite browser, or see this from Huffpost years ago:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/30…

@25 aHA!

this approach seems best (particularly where coupled with neoliberal supply-side reform of zoning, etc)

@3 is it really about the lack of empathy or do these programs actually work and accomplish what we want? As a former addict and alcoholic, having these systems in place made it easier to focus my time on scoring dope. Of course now I see the flaws in my own plans but it kept me housed but didn't keep me clean and it didn't keep me out of jail.