One Man Can Give Homes to All Homeless in America

Invisible Fan · Dec 14, 2021

bobrek said: ↑

And now... the rest of the story

https://www.sltrib.com/news/politics/2020/05/11/utah-was-once-lauded/
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It's a work in progress but seems to be worth the trouble. It seems like "Zero % homeless" is an ideal with diminishing returns the closer you reach to it.

As to sustainability due to rising housing costs and entropy of effort/will, it's way better Utah started back then starting right now. Keeping pace with demographics is always a civil planning nightmare but that doesn't mean we're better off or net positive for not trying.

Richer states like NY or the tech centric West Coast might not be able to buy public housing right now but that doesn't exclude poor southern states from attempting the plan. I'd certainly love for a Gates Foundation to spearhead that kind of effort, but that's not really their jam...

Os Trigonum · Dec 14, 2021

Nancy Pelosi is reportedly worth at least $46M, Insider estimates

https://theweek.com/nancy-pelosi/10...portedly-worth-at-least-46m-insider-estimates

adoo · Dec 14, 2021

Os Trigonum said: ↑

Nancy Pelosi is reportedly worth at least $46M, Insider estimates

https://theweek.com/nancy-pelosi/10...portedly-worth-at-least-46m-insider-estimates
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OT's sleight-of-hand is trying to divert attentions away from these two Repugs

Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), who has a minimum estimated net worth of $85M

Sen. Rick Scott of Florida who took the top spot with a minimum estimated net worth of $200M;

the senator is the cofounder of two different healthcare companies, and has also worked as a venture capitalist,

Os Trigonum · Dec 14, 2021

adoo said: ↑

OT's sleight-of-hand is trying to divert attentions away from these two Repugs

Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), who has a minimum estimated net worth of $85M

Sen. Rick Scott of Florida who took the top spot with a minimum estimated net worth of $200M;

the senator is the cofounder of two different healthcare companies, and has also worked as a venture capitalist,

Click to expand...

always nice when people read carefully the stuff I post. I would say my impact factor is through the roof

Rashmon · Dec 14, 2021

Os Trigonum said: ↑

always nice when people read carefully the stuff I post. I would say my impact factor is through the roof
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You're an inspiration to moderate Democrats everywhere...

Os Trigonum · Dec 14, 2021

Rashmon said: ↑

You're an inspiration to moderate Democrats everywhere...
Click to expand...

Invisible Fan · Dec 14, 2021

subtomic said: ↑

The rest of the story is blocked - can you post the text?
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Five years ago, Utah officials proclaimed that they were closing in on a “functional zero” for chronic homelessness.

The San Francisco Chronicle held up Salt Lake City as an example to follow, declaring that “panhandlers and homeless camps are virtually nonexistent." "The Daily Show” ran a segment in which a correspondent wandered Salt Lake City’s streets in a mock search for signs of homelessness. The Washington Post and The New Yorker wrote glowingly about the state’s progress.

The flood of attention coincided with the culmination of the state’s 10-year homelessness initiative, a project that started during the tenure of former Gov. Jon Huntsman and extended into the administration of Gov. Gary Herbert, who had served as Huntsman’s lieutenant governor.

“[W]e did our best to eradicate homelessness when I was governor before, and we came pretty close to doing that,” Huntsman, who’s now running to lead the state again, told The Salt Lake Tribune shortly before announcing his candidacy.

But the media portrayals of these gleaming successes didn’t quite match the complicated reality — that although the state had made strides, scores of Utahns were and are still caught in prolonged periods of homelessness.

In the years that came after the celebrations of 2015, officials would declare a state of emergency around Pioneer Park and The Road Home’s downtown shelter and pour tens of millions of dollars into Operation Rio Grande, an all-out attack on lawlessness in the neighborhood. They would also spend $67 million on a new homeless resource system to address a problem very much alive and well in the community.

“I don’t think we’ve ever said that we met functional zero. There was a push on veteran homelessness, I think, that was pretty close to that,” said Jonathan Hardy of the Department of Workforce Services. “But as far as our chronically homeless, we’ve never gotten there.”

Robert Marbut, the federal government’s top official on homelessness, said in a recent Q&A session with members of the Pioneer Park Coalition that claims about the state of homelessness in Utah may have been related to federal definitions around how people experiencing homelessness are counted.

“You ended homelessness, remember?" he joked. "Three years ago you had no homeless people? [That’s because] your condition of homelessness didn’t exist in Salt Lake.”

That’s not to say the “housing first” initiative was ineffective, advocates say. Through the efforts of state, local and private partners, construction of permanent supportive housing communities surged across Salt Lake Valley. But it’s been more than 10 years since the opening of Palmer Court, the last major project to house chronically homeless individuals, even as the cost of rent has soared.

“There’s a temptation to say this is sort of a finite problem, and, in fact, it really isn’t,” said Glenn Bailey, executive director of Crossroads Urban Center. “You have to continually add resources in order to keep up with it.”

Housing first
In 2005, the first year of Huntsman’s administration, Utah officials adopted a 10-year plan to end chronic homelessness using the “housing first” model — a deceptively straightforward approach that calls for tackling the problem by putting homeless individuals in homes. The initiative, which relied on local and nonprofit partnerships, focused on creating permanent housing with on-site support services so people could find their footing within the safety of their own apartments.

"It does work, but it takes patience and time and commitment and resources," Bailey said. "But it is one of the only things I've ever seen that, in the end, can change someone's life."

It wasn’t long before these communities began to spring up. Sunrise Metro Apartments, Utah’s first large housing development for individuals experiencing homelessness, opened with 100 apartments in 2007. Residents were able to stay for as long as they needed, with the promise that they would never pay more than 30% of their income on rent.

After that came the 84-unit Grace Mary Manor and the Kelly Benson Apartments, supplying 48 units for homeless seniors. A defunct Holiday Inn was retrofitted into a 201-unit community called Palmer Court; since its 2009 opening, more than 900 people have lived there.

The state's stock of permanent supportive housing was capable of sheltering 1,316 people in 2005. That capacity nearly doubled — increasing to 2,403 — over the decade that followed.

The housing was primarily targeted to serve the chronically homeless population, people who are on the streets for more than a year at a stretch or homeless four times within a three-year period.

“The investment was tremendous,” said Sam Tsemberis, a national evangelist for the housing first model, recalling the way state, local and private partners were working in tandem. “It sort of showed what can be achieved when all those are aligned.”

Declaring victory
By 2015, accolades were raining down on Utah officials. Headlines trumpeted that Utah was “winning the war on chronic homelessness” and presented the state as a model for other communities across the nation.

Meanwhile, state leaders were declaring victory in their 10-year initiative, proclaiming that Utah had achieved a 90% drop in chronic homelessness.

“No other state is even close,” Gordon Walker, the state’s former director of community and housing, told the Deseret News at the time.

Despite these celebrations, in 2015, the state’s service providers tallied more than 3,000 individuals who didn’t have a home during the annual point-in-time count. And while the subset of chronically homeless people had declined sharply over the prior decade, changes in reporting methodology helped drive the precipitous drop, Hardy said.

For instance, state officials in 2005 pegged the number of chronically homeless individuals in Utah at 1,932 — even though only 615 had been counted during the point-in-time census that year. Because the point-in-time tally is a reflection of one particular night in January, Hardy explained, officials used a multiplier to estimate the number of chronically homeless individuals across the entire year.

The problem is that officials weren’t consistent; they compared the inflated “annualized number" from 2005 with the snapshot number from 2015 to conclude chronic homelessness was down 90% over the decade. Without this apples-to-oranges comparison, it would’ve been a more modest 71% reduction, or from 615 chronically homeless individuals to 178.

Still, Bailey says, the decadelong initiative did make a dent in chronic homelessness, which represents a relatively small share of total homelessness but demands a significant amount of resources.

“They did make a lot of progress,” Bailey said. “They never got it as far along as the state contended.”

Takes a village
Since Kelly Benson opened in 2011, construction of permanent supportive housing communities in the state has slowed for reasons including financial feasibility, advocates say.
Paying for these projects often involves cobbling together state and local assistance with federal tax credits and private donations and requires a high level of cooperation, said Janice Kimball, executive director of Housing Connect, formerly the Housing Authority of Salt Lake County.
"It really does take a village," she said.

Still, the state has boosted permanent supportive housing capacity by about 600 since 2015. For instance, Kimball’s agency has focused on expanding rental assistance programs and adding scattered supportive housing units in various apartment complexes.

But the high demand in Salt Lake City’s residential market makes building deeply affordable housing even more difficult as construction and property costs soar, explained Preston Cochrane, former executive director of Shelter the Homeless.

"The market-rate housing has the ability to capture the higher-market rents to get bigger loans," he said. "But affordable housing projects don't have that luxury."
There are a couple of housing projects in the pipeline — The Road Home and Shelter the Homeless just broke ground on a 65-unit complex called the Magnolia, and the Salt Lake City Housing Authority is working on a 100-unit facility called Pamela's Place Apartments. Both communities are designated for individuals experiencing chronic homelessness.

But the need for permanent supportive housing in all forms will continue to grow as the state does, mainly because many residents remain there for the duration of their lives. And that's OK, Kimball said.
"Most of the people there have a disability, maybe a mental health issue, maybe a substance abuse issue," Kimball said. "So being able to stay there, take care of the unit, pay the rent, we consider to be a success."

Housing first is much broader than permanent supportive homes, said Michelle Flynn, executive director for The Road Home. Flynn argues the state and its providers have never been more focused on the concept, which is baked into the state’s brand-new emergency shelter system and a range of homeless services.
For people experiencing episodic homelessness, that could mean rental assistance or rapid rehousing.
Still, officials and advocates agree that affordable housing — from permanent supportive communities to apartments that are financially within reach for working-class families — is the biggest piece of addressing homelessness across the board in the state. And they hope Utah’s next governor makes it a top priority to address this fundamental need for shelter.
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Os Trigonum · Dec 14, 2021

FranchiseBlade · Dec 14, 2021

Os Trigonum said: ↑

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I thought Musk would have better twitter game than that. Warren's initial tweet seemed on point.

Os Trigonum · Dec 14, 2021

FranchiseBlade said: ↑

I thought Musk would have better twitter game than that. Warren's initial tweet seemed on point.
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you'll want to take that up with @tinman

tinman · Dec 14, 2021

Os Trigonum said: ↑

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What a jealous b****
Hater of the year

London'sBurning · Dec 15, 2021

Tesla gets state COVID extension on jobs commitment deadline; lawmakers frustrated

Article said:

BUFFALO, N.Y. — It's one of the ultimate You Paid For It sites in Western New York: the huge Tesla plant along South Park in South Buffalo.

In exchange for hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer money, it was built on the promise of creating hundreds of good paying jobs. Now state lawmakers are watching closely because the state is giving Tesla even more time to reach those job goals.

At a cost of over $700 million and millions more to equip it from New York State and us as taxpayers, the Tesla plant rose from the Riverbend site in South Buffalo. But has that plant and its corporate owner, Elon Musk, risen to the commitment of creating over 1,400 good paying jobs in this area primarily through solar roof panel production?

There's been plenty of frustration among lawmakers who were thrilled when it was announced. State Senator Sean Ryan, who sits on the Senate Commerce, Economic Development, and Small Business Committee, says, "We've all been keeping our fingers crossed that this all works, and that we can become a solar hub in Buffalo with bringing a lot of manufacturing jobs here, and hopefully spinoffs. But there's been, you know, stop-and-start and hiccups, and nothing seems to have gone smoothly."

Assemblymember Pat Burke of Buffalo is a bit more blunt, saying in a statement: "There have been issues and scandal surrounding this project from its inception, and New Yorkers are tired of it. I understand there's a pandemic, but we have to make sure that isn't just the latest excuse for more broken promises."
That reference to the pandemic relates to the statement from the state's Empire State Development agency giving Tesla its requested extension on the deadline to meet the jobs commitment.

"Empire State Development will extend the opportunity for business relief through the end of the year 2021 for any qualifying ESD partners who continue to demonstrate COVID-19 related economic hardship, including Tesla, which now has an approved extension. This extension continues to be available to all ESD partners that can demonstrate that due to COVID-19 related business interruptions, they are temporarily unable to meet their obligations to New York State."

But after December, what could happen if they don't have all those workers on staff?

Ryan says: "Well we have the claw-back language, so if they don't hit their goals, and with their extension, they're going to have to pay the state $41 million. And we're going to hold them to it, but we'd rather have a factory full of people working."

He adds, "Nobody wins by this place failing, so we want it to work. I'd rather have a factory full of people working at just the start."

Another report on current employment from Tesla is due to the State ESD by May 31.
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Taxpayers funded $177M of equipment for Tesla, now it's no longer needed

Article said:

BUFFALO, N.Y. — Millions of dollars worth of equipment taxpayers helped fund at Tesla's Gigafactory in South Buffalo is now going to waste.

In total, $177 million of taxpayer funded gear is no longer needed by Tesla.

It includes at least $127 million of surplus machinery.

That's in addition to the $50 million worth of equipment 2 On Your Side reported on last year which was shipped to a warehouse in Wheatfield.

"As part of a our long-term strategy, we are taking steps to reduce both excess inventory and expenses, which includes selling unneeded tools and equipment," said Jason Conwall, vice president with the state agency NY CREATES.

2 On Your Side can also report some of the equipment that was no longer needed was shredded at a scrap yard.

The South Buffalo Tesla plant was created with the promise it would bring more than 2,000 jobs to Western New York. The company is 500 jobs short of that goal, but has until December 31 to meet it.

Tesla was granted an extension because its business operations have taken a hit from the COVID-19 pandemic. If Tesla doesn't meet the requirement, the state could fine the solar panel manufacturer up to $40 million.

As for that surplus of equipment, this is a developing story.
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Some food for thought when considering the construction of the factory in Austin. Expectations of meeting a job quota for building here will likely yield similar plodding results.

ThatBoyNick · Dec 15, 2021

Invisible Fan said: ↑

If this were a better medium and I was a younger, I could write in detail how it's not as simple as that.

I mentioned pension (or retirement) funds because they've likely caused more havoc to our society despite public acceptance that they guarantee elderly retirement. We live in a specialized society. If you're uniquely talented at basketball, you get rewarded for it. Real Estate or Sales reps can earn as much or more as doctors.

The purpose of these funds are to guarantee yield at all costs. Up until recently, most didn't care how they got that return. That means when you hear a corporation like Rubbermaid cut costs with subpar products and white labeled Chinese imports, it's not necessarily because the CEO wanted to get a larger annual bonus, it's because their shareholders didn't like the "relative growth" compared to its competitors and they threatened to pull out of the stock. You might think this is the manifestation of greed, except shareholding (on the surface) is a direct representation of the company's owners. Everyone who owns the company has a voice and vote.

Pension funds skew this because they can manage upwards of tens of billions of dollars in assets and all they care about is the max amount of yearly return possible. Your ten shares of voting power will be dwarfed by their ten million. A founder/CEO could potentially be outcompeted by funds banding together and forcing a short term decision.

They don't care about Made N Murca. They don't care about worker rights. Blue, Red, Purple...**** them, pay us now.

Is that the "tyranny of the few"? Not necessarily because those whales represent tens of millions of workers hoping to have some golden parachute in 10-25 years. They don't know how to pick stocks or use compound interest to their favor so they chose the Daryl Morry of investing and went to sleep without ever needing to think about it again for a few decades.

In any case, Elon technically isn't a founder. Despite the stories of him "bankrolling the company on the throws of bankruptcy", he mostly came to those shares from agreed upon benchmarks signed between him and the board. I don't know if taking those shares from Elon to liquidate into homes-full-o-homeless is desired...why not just eliminate the middleman and just take over the all shares themselves?

This is just one fragment of how specialization enables progress in civilization but compounds complexity in unseen ways. If you want to go the deep end, there are plenty of slow burning Adam Curtis documentaries on BBC each with their own rabbit holes.
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I'm not seeing this point as conflicting so much with the one I made (perhaps I'm missing the connection) but it's definitely interesting on its own. The tyranny of the many (over the tyranny of the few) lines was mostly a joke for Os, but I do agree with it for the most part. I'm definitely more comfortable with power (be it good, bad, or benevolent) being distributed across many people than a single or tiny group of people. That's not to say large groups of people can't do or be responsible for bad things.

Invisible Fan · Dec 15, 2021

Os Trigonum said: ↑

you'll want to take that up with @tinman
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Tesla spends zero dollars on advertising and has a rep for **** customer service. Hmmm....

tinman · Dec 15, 2021

Damn plaid edition!

Os Trigonum · Dec 15, 2021

FranchiseBlade said: ↑

I thought Musk would have better twitter game than that. Warren's initial tweet seemed on point.
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"lol, he kinda has a point"

Xerobull · Dec 15, 2021

deb4rockets said: ↑

There are 552,000 homeless people in America.

Musk' net worth is worth 297 billion dollars. He cash in his net worth, buy a 200,000 house for all the homeless people in America, and still have 3 billion 110 million dollars a year to spend if he lived 60 years, without putting a cent in interest drawing funds or banks.

Wouldn't you do it if you could still be a billionaire the rest of your life?
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I would give most of it away.

There are more economical ways to house the homeless than to buy them houses.

FranchiseBlade · Dec 15, 2021

Os Trigonum said: ↑

"lol, he kinda has a point"

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He probably got more in tax breaks than any American this year. I think she has a point.

It's fine for him to keep going. Most people aren't going to feel sorry for his tax burden no matter what it is. Mukti-Billiinaires don't usually generate a lot of sympathy when they gripe about that kind of thing.

Especially since Warren has a proven track record of fighting for the little guy and against big businesses that take advantage of them.

Os Trigonum · Dec 15, 2021

FranchiseBlade said: ↑

He probably got more in tax breaks than any American this year. I think she has a point.

It's fine for him to keep going. Most people aren't going to feel sorry for his tax burden no matter what it is. Mukti-Billiinaires don't usually generate a lot of sympathy when they gripe about that kind of thing.

Especially since Warren has a proven track record of fighting for the little guy and against big businesses that take advantage of them.
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I think he has to pay capital gains on all that stock he's selling, no? anyway. the whole exchange is pretty amusing

by the way, Warren is in the United States Senate. She bears partial responsibility for the tax code. just sayin'

bobrek · Dec 15, 2021

Os Trigonum said: ↑

I think he has to pay capital gains on all that stock he's selling, no? anyway. the whole exchange is pretty amusing

by the way, Warren is in the United States Senate. She bears partial responsibility for the tax code. just sayin'
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Right...

They are estimating he'll be paying 15 billion in taxes this year.

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