A big part of the problem is that, while they start from Housing First, that’s where it ends. They bung everyone who’s homeless into the same building without sorting them based on the reasons they’re homeless and the support they need. Drug addicts, runaways from abusive homes, people with severe mental illness, families that had bad financial luck, ex-cons, all in the same place. If it starts out shiny and new and renovated, guess who determines how it ends up – especially without the professional and peer support that comes from grouping together people with the same problems in the same transitional housing
The building owners still get paid, as do the contractors who do the renovations and conversions – that’s where a lot of that budget directly goes. In the end, though, that approach basically re-produces the failed shelter model. People who don’t want to live amongst squalor, drug use, and criminal activity leave and are back on the street. And without support so are the people with more severe problems.
This is what happens when you give those amounts of money to politicians who don’t or don’t want to understand the difference between equality and equity, whose first priorities are developers and property owners (including NIMBYs) and tech companies, who seize on a good starting point and who assume it’s also the endpoint, who are always willing to give larger amounts of funding to the cops and support bloated bureaucracies; in short, the “liberal” San Francisco municipal government for the last three decades.
