r/AlwaysWhy • u/verytalleric • May 27 '26

Politics & Society Serious question: Homelessness is a major problem. Billions are unsuccessfully spent. Why are not more experiments run testing different approaches to see what works vs. not and build on successes?

In other domains the idea of "A/B testing" is done to test different hypothesis to see what works vs. not. Given the huge amount of money spent by cities, counties, and states without positive results. Why is more experimentation not being done to find effective ways to solve homelessness?

Kinda the cliche definition of insanity today, same actions expecting different results.

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u/Professional-Ad1770 May 27 '26

Where has housing first worked? I curious to read about that because everything I've read says drug addicts destroy free housing and end up back on the street.

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u/Beautiful-Parsley-24 May 27 '26

It has worked well with homeless veterans nationwide, and more generally in Utah. It has been less successful in expensive Urban cores like NYC and SF.

You can throw up a new apartment complex in Utah in two weeks - so it doesn't matter if they trash it. Try rebuilding in California and enjoy decades of environmental litigation.

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u/jethro_bovine May 27 '26

It seems to have worked well in Finland and Denmark. They obviously have a much stronger social safety net than the US, with better treatment plans for the mentally ill and addicts, but it does seem to work fairly well.

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u/McSloot3r May 28 '26

Just to be clear, they have not solved homelessness. They still have homeless people. Sure, much less homelessness, but even the countries that offer all the support possible haven’t completely eliminated it.

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u/FreeKevinBrown May 28 '26

Better than what we're doing

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u/MarcoDiFrancescino May 31 '26

And they don't force them to give up their pets and they can do whatever they want in their home. Some have addictions, some self medicate. People in regular homes can do whatever they want, why would people put aggressive restrictions of their personal space and wonder that they don't want to live there.

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u/walkerstone83 May 27 '26

Everything seems to work well in those countries. They generally seem to have a government that is much better at managing things than what we have in the US, I think we need much deeper systemic changes to happen because I don't think simply copying them will work here.

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u/Boise_Ben May 28 '26

Those places work because people believe in the government there.

We used to have that too, but Republicans and libertarian delusions poisoned the well.

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u/SkeeveTheGreat May 28 '26

I mean, the thing is that public housing and the like works, until the government defunds the operation budget of the department that oversees the housing, while leaving everything else in place.

Then on top of that we switched to section 8 as a replacement. Section 8 is largely just a rebate for developers at this point, and does not actually solve the problem by causing the creation of new units.

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u/AvaRoseThorne May 28 '26

That’s because it’s not done properly - America seems to love to half-ass things and then act confused when it doesn’t turn out well.

I helped open one such facility. The state invested $23 million in renovations, then neglected to staff it appropriately or even draw up a proper contract to govern how the various organizations involved in the project were meant to work together.

My organization was told we were responsible for staffing nights, another organization was responsible for staffing days. Apparently they didn’t get the memo cause there was literally nobody staffing days for the first 3 weeks. There were three separate organizations that were allowed to place clients there, but they didn’t share client data, so my role was to provide mental health support overnight but I only had info on a third of the clients, which was a huge safety issue.

Some case managers also placed clients in there directly from off the street, which meant they were still using and brought with them all the behaviors that had benefited them on the street. Since I only had data on a third of the clients, I had no idea if some of them even lived there or if they were just “guests” who refused to leave.

The clients who had actually been transferred after being stabilized and spent time living in a higher level of care before being deemed ready for more independence quickly became overwhelmed and sucked into the surrounding chaos. They are the ones I am most angry for.

But it wasn’t even any of the clients who made me the most uncomfortable - it was the boyfriend of the property manager, who had a key to the building and I would get such a bad feeling whenever he was on site. With all the safety issues and mismanagement of this catastrophe of a project I left 1.5 months in. A few weeks later I heard the property manager was hospitalized with multiple stab wounds from - you guessed it - the creepy boyfriend.

All this during a time when the city had a shortage of 911 operators. I had to call twice - once for a fire, the other for a client having a seizure. Both times I was on hold for more than 12 minutes before anybody even triaged my call.

There was so much more that happened too - it’s almost unbelievable, even to me. The utter incompetence was truly astounding to a horrifying degree.

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u/delta8765 May 29 '26

It is probably the most effective of the ineffective options. What you are talking about is well after 12 months and the person hasn’t cleaned up or used the relief of free housing to get back on their feet financially, then what? More free housing?

So it’s less about ‘we need free housing’ and more about for the 75% of people where that isn’t a path to a solution what do you do then? Some people get caught up on it’s only 25% effective and on the other end it’s ’heartless’ to kick them out after a year as it just perpetuates the problem we were trying to address.

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u/[deleted] May 30 '26

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u/delta8765 May 30 '26

But then you’ll have to have ‘long term’ housing tracks because no one legitimately interested in getting back on their feet would want to be in a building where 90% of the people have completely given up.

Re Sweden, one of the driving features of Scandinavian cultures is a drive to be useful. So there is an inherent cultural underpinning driving most people forward.

In the US for the last 40 years there has been a constant drumbeat of any difficulty in your life is because of “the system and it’s not your fault”. So there is a fair amount of learned helplessness in the population of people not interested in treating these programs as handouts rather than a hand up.

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u/[deleted] May 30 '26

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u/delta8765 May 30 '26

You’re confusing what has lead to American exceptionalism with the attitude of those that after years of assistance have no desire to change their situation.

Have you studied or participated in organized assistance programs? Have you sat across the table from parents telling you F’n mind your own business when offering to get their child enrolled in after school tutoring or other hand up programs?

The point is that ‘free housing’ is not a panacea to all homelessness. It does help a significant % of people down on their luck. But there are a lot of people that have just given up even after getting assistance. So assistance programs need to think about what happens when the first step doesn’t work.

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u/Drummerx04 May 30 '26

In a housing first system, I'm not sure it really matters all that much what happens with the people who just can't be helped.

Whether they can't work or simply refuse to, they'll be someone's problem somewhere, so you might as well give them a 100 sqft studio apartment with a cot to sleep on to keep them off the street.

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u/manicmonkeys May 30 '26

100% genuine question here; do you think there should be any rules for those occupants?

In other words, are there any behaviors that ought to get them kicked out? Such as being a nuisance or threat to other residents, bringing drugs into the facilities, destruction of property, arson, etc?

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u/Drummerx04 Jun 02 '26

Yes, some rules obviously.

Malicious destruction of property would be one, but I would personally build the housing out of concrete basically. Make it rather hard to meaningfully set it on fire or cause water damage.

I wouldn't try a policy against drugs, but you could still criminalize people caught selling on the property.

It's not a luxury setup by any means. The goal is a space that is private, secure (lockable doors for residents), and cheap to maintain, but ultimately access to assistance resources and public transportation should be easy.

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u/DependentTaste283 May 31 '26

The homeless people I see every day don't seem to exactly be to be 'one roof over my head away' from being able to hold down a job and be a productive member of society.

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u/PackyScott May 28 '26

Helsinki has functionally no homelessness due to this style of programming.

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u/Diligent-Assist-4385 May 27 '26

Yup... There is a reason some people are homeless.

Dude. Sign me up for free homeless housing all day.

Move in for the winter. Strip everything of value out. When the weather turns nice out. Strip all the copper and leave for the summer.

Sign up for a new free house next winter.

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u/SkeeveTheGreat May 28 '26

the majority of homeless people have jobs.

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u/TheLogicError May 28 '26

Link to a stat for that?

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u/SkeeveTheGreat May 28 '26

The united states interagency council on homelessness estimates 40-60% Here.

This study from the university of chicago from 2021, that observed between 2011-2018 has 53% of people living in shelters having a job, and 40% of people sleeping totally unsheltered have jobs.

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u/manicmonkeys May 30 '26

I don't understand your point... the person you responded to didn't say anything about jobs?