#How SF can deal with Homelessness with Technology, Design Principles, Data Science and Agile methodologies?
Homeless, drugs, and crime issue has created a hostile environment for the residents of Soma and Tenderloin and Downtown San Francisco. First, we need to get everyone in the street into a recovery center. Homeless on the street are not living, they are dying. We need to make a registry of the homeless to track and make sure everyone in the list is addressed as they get enough sleep, food, etc. For example, One way to enforce the sleep is to give every one of 9,784 homeless people a tracking device like Fitbit with the cost of 2 Million dollars total. We also need to equip shelters with wifi such that we have access to their sleep data from their wearable devices. If a small town like Santa Cruz was able to house 700 hundred people in an area away from City Center, SF should be able to create dense housing to fit 9,784 people. There are many volunteers that work in the center and ensure that the homeless are getting enough care. Collecting all homeless in one place provides an enormous reduction in cost of taking care of them.
Once we have a way of measuring the homeless activities and behavior we can start looking into how to break them out of this cycle. We should use game theory principles and the idea of tit for tat to make sure the system is balanced. Once the homeless are all in one place, we can use video technologies and data science to monitor and track and improve their behavior. For example, we could reward the homeless with good behavior a trip to Hawaii or a meal at a good restaurant. (right now their incentive is to steal some stuff to be able to pay for drugs, we need to change that cycle)
Every American buys 65 articles of clothing on average per year. What will happen if we don’t need them? We can recycle and equip the homeless with the best clouting possible from the recycled or second-hand material. We measure their, size height and weight and make an internal website for the homeless to be able to shop (i.e. personalization and tracking), yeah that means we should also give them all smartphones ($4 -10M)
One way to get the homeless engaged is to provide them with a big farm. Imagine many of them are working on a farm that can feed themselves during the day. The garden could be outside SF and 50 buses will be used to transport them into the garden some can cook i.e. building a community. Create a reward system for the homeless to create an economy between themselves, i.e. one is chef one is a grower (i.e. with Cryptocurrency).
Just like a software company in which the development team has 2 weeks to a month of sprints, we can implement an ever-changing and improving program. We can create and implement common-sense ideas quickly and measure their impact with KPIs (improving life, improving sleep, etc via verified with a survey or smart devices) and adopt.
Crime is the most complicated of all, tracking who does the crime and why is important. But there will be crimes, it will get reduced by providing a caring system. We need to make the system sustainable enough that the person can benefit enough from activities that he/she doesn’t need to steal. And there should be root cause analysis or psychological treatment for the person.
This is very hard to address, we need to take people in the shelter a drug test every month and treat people with this problem. One way it is to provide them with less addictive drugs i.e. Marijuana and then slowly take them off. We can use data science to address this problem as well. Seeing what works for how many people we can adjust our approach.
There will inflow of people to the center, but there should be also an outflow. The center should plan to take people from homelessness into the economy by preparing them for entry-level jobs (through a partnership with local businesses). Some have a disability and won’t be able to do it but the vision should be to take people out of the center after 4 years. There should be classes and programs in the center that makes people ready to get out of the recovery center and into the economy.
Homeless are suffering and SF is pouring millions dollar money on them per year which does not seem to solve the problem. We need to fundamentally change our approach. We need to create a community for them, creating peace and care so they can either move to civilian life or have a life worth living and not dying on street, stealing stuff, or using drugs to get themselves out of the miserable reality they live in.
React
Typescript
Django
Laravel
Facebook
Microsoft
Google
Alibaba
D3
Tencent