CBC Ottawa visited a number of apartments that have been destroyed by Housing First-supported clients and their guests. Landlords we spoke with say the syste...
Article claims about a 75% success rate, though success isn’t defined. But that means for a guy with 13 units, he’s basically guaranteed at least one failure (98% chance).
If failure means his place gets trashed with minimal support from the original agency due to understaffing or budget problems, then we need to reevaluate the setup, because that’s not a level of risk that seems fair.
I know people don’t like to see their tax dollars going towards people’s salary, but this sounds like a pretty good case for more social workers.
Why don’t we like that though? Social workers are great. They’re people we hire to do shit for people who need it. We do get value out of them and they often save us money or provide quite a bit of value
Typically most grants from the government come with strings attached. Those strings are typically a minimum amount of the money going directly to the people it helps.
In this case, that means going to pay the rent on these houses (or the subsidized amount), and setting some aside for the repairs to the program. I’d guess the way they’re worded would likely force the organizations to choose to either pay good wages, and keep good social workers, or skimp on the wages and get more bodies in seats, and in theory, more people helped. But paying poor wages means there are fewer good people to work for you, and you wind up in other troubles. Pay them too much, and a news article about cushy governmental jobs catches peoples eye and the program gets shuttered. Those strings are supposed to prevent massive bloat of admin/staffing costs that eat up all the cash without providing a full benefit for the people it should be helping. Which makes sense - its easy to see how funding without those strings could easily lead to poorer and poorer outcomes for those its supposed to help. The tricky part is finding the balance, and the way the article phrases it, it seems like there isn’t enough support for these people available.
Article claims about a 75% success rate, though success isn’t defined. But that means for a guy with 13 units, he’s basically guaranteed at least one failure (98% chance).
If failure means his place gets trashed with minimal support from the original agency due to understaffing or budget problems, then we need to reevaluate the setup, because that’s not a level of risk that seems fair.
I know people don’t like to see their tax dollars going towards people’s salary, but this sounds like a pretty good case for more social workers.
Why don’t we like that though? Social workers are great. They’re people we hire to do shit for people who need it. We do get value out of them and they often save us money or provide quite a bit of value
Typically most grants from the government come with strings attached. Those strings are typically a minimum amount of the money going directly to the people it helps.
In this case, that means going to pay the rent on these houses (or the subsidized amount), and setting some aside for the repairs to the program. I’d guess the way they’re worded would likely force the organizations to choose to either pay good wages, and keep good social workers, or skimp on the wages and get more bodies in seats, and in theory, more people helped. But paying poor wages means there are fewer good people to work for you, and you wind up in other troubles. Pay them too much, and a news article about cushy governmental jobs catches peoples eye and the program gets shuttered. Those strings are supposed to prevent massive bloat of admin/staffing costs that eat up all the cash without providing a full benefit for the people it should be helping. Which makes sense - its easy to see how funding without those strings could easily lead to poorer and poorer outcomes for those its supposed to help. The tricky part is finding the balance, and the way the article phrases it, it seems like there isn’t enough support for these people available.