Bernardo de La Paz

Bernardo de La Paz's Journal

April 15, 2016

Links. Try to be progressive. There is no sarcasm about this. People's lives are at stake.

Housing First: get the homeless housing and then all the other problems become more tractable.

Medicine Hat: http://www.theplaidzebra.com/a-city-in-canada-tried-giving-free-housing-to-the-homeless-and-its-working/

Thankfully, Canada has been relatively accepting of the Housing First initiative in places other than Medicine Hat. Six other cities in Alberta, including major cities Edmonton and Calgary, have taken a Housing First approach, and have seen a 16 per cent overall drop in homelessness since 2008 as a result. In Vancouver — a city notorious for its rapidly increasing homeless population in the 1990s and early 2000s — hundreds of homeless people have been put into permanent homes, though the city still has much work to do in this respect. The federal government has also devoted itself to a Housing First plan until at least 2019.

Other countries have followed suit, with the Obama administration listing the method as a best practice for eliminating chronic homelessness, and Finland and France both instituting similar measures.

Medicine Hat: http://www.mhchs.ca/
Medicine Hat: http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2014/05/15/medicine-hat-homeless_n_5332531.html

Until recently, Clugston was on the other side of the debate about how to end homelessness. He spent six years on council before becoming mayor late last year. “When I first got elected on council I was a bit of a cowboy, and I was actually speaking against a lot of these projects. I was one of their biggest detractors,” he said. But Clugston said the members of the Medicine Hat Community Housing Society spent six years making a convert out of him.

“And now I’ve become their advocate and have to admit it’s the right thing to do, it’s the moral thing to do. And it makes sense financially,” he said.

“If you can get somebody off the street, it saves the emergency room visits, it saves the police, it saves the justice system — and so when you add up all those extra costs … you can buy a lot of housing for that amount of money.”

And once people are housed, it’s easier for support workers to help them with a co-ordinated delivery of social services to address issues such as substance abuse and mental health problems, Clugston said.

Utah: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/22/home-free

It may seem surprising that a solidly conservative state like Utah has embraced an apparently bleeding-heart approach like giving homeless people homes. But in fact Housing First has become the rule in hundreds of cities around the country, in states both red and blue. And while the Obama Administration has put a lot of weight (and money) behind these efforts, the original impetus for them on a national scale came from the Bush Administration’s homelessness czar Philip Mangano. Indeed, the fight against homelessness has genuine bipartisan support.

Almost free housing in San Francisco ($375 avg): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Housing_Partnership

Still think it is a stupid idea worthy of a sarcasm tag?

Or is it a progressive idea proven to work that is worthy of more serious consideration than you are willing to give it?

April 15, 2016

+1. Time invested writing a good video summary is a good investment for many reasons

1) Efficiency: When a poster takes 2 minutes to write a couple of paragraphs summarizing the video it saves hundreds of people minutes of time which multiply out to hours. Two minutes to gain hours for others is a good expenditure of time.

2) It takes a lot more time to evaluate a video than the seconds it takes to read a summary. It often takes a few minutes or at least a minute to get a sense of where the video is going and how it is going to make its points. If a person would prefer a documentary approach, they will switch off a rant after a minute or so. But that is a minute lost and when you consider hundreds of viewers that is a lot of time wasted.

3) Most people will not invest 30 minutes to watch a 30 minute video when they can read the summary.

4) If the video is any good, then a decent summary will actually convince more people to invest time watching.

5) If the poster can't be bothered to write a couple of informative paragraphs, then I almost always skip over the video. It certainly didn't inspire the poster so I have little expectation it would inspire me.

6) Not all DU members are perfectly able. Some can't see or can't see well and might use talking browsers. Others can't hear.

7) Reading (and skimming) is very efficient compared to video.

8) Video is very time consuming compared to reading. Time yourself reading a newspaper article. Then time yourself speaking it out loud.

9) There may be a bridgeable generation gap. More seasoned DU members (older members) are not as used to or as demanding for videos for their information. Post a good summary along with the video and you reach everybody: vid fans, readers, deaf, and visually impaired.

10) Even so, there are some times when images and moving images inform people in depth better or more efficiently than a written word. Or when an experience is as important as the information. If that is the case for the video, make the case!

April 4, 2016

Wherever homeless are giving FREE HOUSING, overall costs go down a lot.

This has been proven multiple times.

What is the biggest barrier to getting a job: having an address and having a place to live, to shower, to rest. Give people a place to live and a large number (half?) end up getting jobs and paying for their own place to live.

You save tax dollars for fewer emergency room visits, fewer police interactions, less crime against and by homeless people, less court costs, less mental health care, better nutrition, longer lives, more productivity, less wasted education dollars, ....

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2015/08/13/housing-first-federal-election_n_7949510.html . . . Excerpt:

The principles of Housing First are not new. It began in New York City in the '90s with Greek-Canadian psychologist Sam Tsemberis. He kept seeing the same patients over and over while doing mental health outreach, and asked them what they needed most. The answer was blindingly obvious — a place to live. So he founded Pathways to Housing based on a theory that would later become known as Housing First.

"He said, 'Why don't we try getting these people into apartments, regular apartments, provide them the psychiatric medical and mental health support that they need and see if it works?' And it did," explains Richter. "It's taken off from there."

It's also become a bipartisan success story because you can help people and save money doing it. The political right has taken the lead on growing the program. George W. Bush's administration picked it up first, bringing it into the mainstream. The man Bush appointed to head up his efforts to combat homelessness Philip Mangano put Tsemberis’s housing first theory into nationwide practice and the result was that the "chronically homeless" fell 30 per cent between 2005 and 2007.

The Great Recession hit in 2008, but chronic homelessness fell an additional 21 per cent because Obama picked up the Housing First baton, first with the $1.5 billion stimulus-based Homeless Prevention and Rapid Re-Housing Program and then as the centerpiece of his "Opening Doors" plan. A 2015 update reconfirmed that Housing First "is the solution" and declared chronic homelessness would be eliminated in the U.S. by 2017 and that youth and family homelessness was on track to be ended by 2020.

Homelessness in Utah has fallen 91 per cent since launching its Housing First program in 2005. State housing director Gordon Walker told the Desert News in April that "the remaining balance is 178 people. We know them by name, who they are and what their needs are." To further assist the no-longer-homeless, Utah recently started a pilot program to expunge minor crimes from their records to facilitate finding employment.

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About Bernardo de La Paz

Canadian who lived for many years in Northern California and left a bit of my heart there. (note to self: https: //images.dailykos.com/images/1043361/original/2016.09.19_sunflowers_header.jpg . https://i.imgur.com/1VKgdmc.jpeg)