Spiraling in San Francisco’s Doom Loop
I do not know how San Francisco might solve its many other problems, but homelessness is just a game theory problem gone bad. To solve it, one does not need empathy, or pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps paternalism. We don&#x27;t need a return to 1980s style mental-illness-warehousing, or for people to be less greedy.<p>No municipality can fix this problem, regardless of the local politics, because to be the first city to solve it would mean that they&#x27;d find out they have so many more homeless people in the coming weeks and months. The homeless aren&#x27;t stupid, and they aren&#x27;t chained to the ground where ever it is they have to be right now. If they heard of a magical place where homelessness was solved, they&#x27;d hitchhike there, or panhandle for a bus ticket, or if no other options just hoof it the whole way.<p>Suddenly, this city finds out that they allocated the funding for 100% of their homelessness needs... but now they have twice as many. Five times as many. Is there even an upper limit?<p>And cities and townships everywhere else are getting bright ideas like that they can be rid of their homeless too, if they&#x27;re willing to splurge on a bus ticket for them.<p>If you were mayor of this city, the city where you could get the bill passed to fix homelessness, would you do it? It must be in the back of your mind that any attempt to fix it will result in this embarrassing calamity. Whether you are Democrat or Republican (or anything else). Maybe it&#x27;d be better to just not bother. And so you don&#x27;t. If you&#x27;re on the left, you pretend to be really empathetic, if on the right you just give a really stern speech about how everyone needs to take care of themselves. Then you let it go.<p>This remains true, no matter what the details are for your fix for homelessness. There might even be many possible fixes, but none of them can be tried (and if some unclever local politician does try, they&#x27;ll just end up making it look like it failed when it does backfire).<p>The solution is quite simple, cheap, boring, and unobjectionable to anyone who might hear it. But being those things, it also elicits a reaction of &quot;how could it be so, people have been trying to solve this for years!&quot;. If anyone can find me a city manager or city council or mayor who&#x27;d listen for 15 minutes, they could be a hero that goes down in the history books.