[HN Gopher] San Francisco homelessness: Park ranger helps one pe...
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San Francisco homelessness: Park ranger helps one person at a time
Author : NaOH
Score : 349 points
Date : 2025-02-17 00:15 UTC (22 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (sfstandard.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (sfstandard.com)
| searealist wrote:
| Quoting a reddit comment:
|
| > Wow, this is almost a parody. An able-bodied meth addict and
| convicted felon was illegally living in a public park for 20
| years, littering the land around him and forcing rangers to spend
| countless time and resources cleaning up the mess he left behind,
| making regular emergency room visits due to his unhealthy
| lifestyle costing the city hundreds of thousands of dollars a
| year, constantly doing illegal drugs while not holding down a job
| and suspiciously acquiring new supplies for his encampment after
| every sweep (how much do you want to be he engages in illegal
| activity), and giving an extremely hard time to caseworkers and
| HHS staff who already have a busy workload (including
| leaving/getting kicked out of housing multiple times). That one
| Golden Gate Park Dweller has probably cost the city millions of
| dollars over the last few years while consuming valuable time
| from caseworkers and park rangers who could be helping someone
| else (they're already overloaded). Not to mention the potential
| damage to the park's environment caused by his littering. What
| this guy needs is outpatient mental health treatment, and it's
| honestly criminal that our country has basically no resources for
| people with mental illness and shoves them into jail or shelters
| without treating their underlying problems.
| iancmceachern wrote:
| This is true, I've heard the SF DA and police departments say
| so as well. They no longer prosecute or convict people of
| things here also, because there is no purpose, no where for
| them to be sent for rehabilitation. As a result we have created
| an open air mental institution combined with an open air drug
| market. It's getting pretty wild to live here.
| titzer wrote:
| It's absolutely nuts to me that the government finds ways to
| spend money on literally _anything_ but providing shelter,
| clothing, food, and support to people. UBI would be cheaper
| and far more humane than practically any policy--or lack
| thereof--they can think of.
| sarchertech wrote:
| There are people UBI would help. But not the people in this
| article. The 2nd person in the article had free housing
| twice, but lost it both times because he kept fighting with
| people.
| idlewords wrote:
| This is an article about a man who was given all those
| things, repeatedly, and went back to sleeping rough in the
| park. How would giving him money make any difference?
| BryantD wrote:
| The hope is that UBI would prevent him and people like
| him from falling into homelessness in the first place.
| aprilthird2021 wrote:
| He would have still become homeless with UBI. The home he
| lived in was owned by his grandfather and was sold when
| he passed away, leaving him with no home at 18 when he
| could not possibly earn enough to rent or prove to anyone
| renting that he had enough stability and income to be
| given a place
| gs17 wrote:
| >when he could not possibly earn enough to rent or prove
| to anyone renting that he had enough stability and income
| to be given a place
|
| Why do you think that's a fault of UBI, rather than the
| fault of your hypothetical UBI being insufficient? AFAIK
| any actual implementation of UBI would be intended to be
| feasible to have housing on, even if it's not very good
| housing. With UBI, there's a level of income that people
| are guaranteed to have without needing any proof, that's
| the whole concept!
| rpcope1 wrote:
| The whole UBI thing has always seemed absurdly naive.
| What do you think a junky is going to do with that money?
| That's a rhetorical question. I really seriously doubt
| having a few extra dollars in the first place is going to
| either slow mental illness or people picking up drugs,
| and frankly having a bunch of people out of work with
| money, for the vast majority of people in my experience,
| only leads to them picking up bad things like drugs in
| the first place. One of the most myopic views I read on
| sites like this, that are obviously heavily biased in
| their readership, is that if we give people some amount
| of money for nothing, they'll magically pick up art and
| entrepreneurship and other productive outlets
| spontaneously.
|
| What's going to happen, if we're foolish enough to try
| UBI, is we're going to bleed a bunch more money that
| immediately gets vaporized (or at least put in the
| pockets of pushers and alcohol distributors), and then we
| still will have the same problems for at least 50% of the
| people that needed the focused benefits like SNAP or
| Medicaid anyways. We'd be much better served getting very
| medieval on anyone and everyone selling drugs, and then
| going from there.
| lukerramsden wrote:
| > We'd be much better served getting very medieval on
| anyone and everyone selling drugs, and then going from
| there.
|
| Ironic, isn't it? Right back to where we started.
| Portugal has tried the "empathy" approach too and is now
| going through the slow and long process of rolling it
| back
| BryantD wrote:
| We've been "foolish" enough to try UBI. Studies show that
| it doesn't tend to increase spend on alcohol or tobacco.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >What do you think a junky is going to do with that
| money?
|
| Go to a mental institute if we tie the UBI to some basic
| factors. UBI isn't just some altruistic factor that gives
| money to everyone without condition. They at least want
| to make sure you're a citizen and not going to fund the
| destruction of society with it.
|
| >if we give people some amount of money for nothing,
| they'll magically pick up art and entrepreneurship and
| other productive outlets spontaneously.
|
| Talking about non-homeless, it has shown to increase
| recreation. Not necessarily businesses, but it's nice
| having time to breathe when you aren't spending half your
| like just to make sure you can pay rent.
|
| >What's going to happen, if we're foolish enough to try
| UBI,
|
| You can speculate or you can actually read studies done.
| Domestically and worldwide.
| titzer wrote:
| > Recreation and Parks Department rangers would cite him
| and tell him to move
|
| > The department's environmental services crew...would
| tear down his tent when he was out and haul away his
| possessions.
|
| > For Barrows, trying to forcibly remove Kaine from
| Golden Gate Park seemed both ineffective and cruel
|
| > She embarked on a slow campaign of earning his trust
| and shepherding him through what one Recreation and Parks
| Department official described as the "arduous and
| achingly bureaucratic tasks" necessary just to be
| eligible for housing
|
| > Kaine had no ID. All of his required public documents,
| from a birth certificate to criminal records, were under
| a different name, and they all had to be aligned to move
| his housing applications forward. Getting everything in
| order meant trips to various agencies -- and the only way
| to ensure Kaine went was if someone accompanied him:
| either a member of HOT or Barrows and another ranger who
| was her partner at the time. Even then, Kaine repeatedly
| balked. For him, "it was overwhelming," Barrows recalled.
|
| > After seven months of cajoling, hand-holding, and
| advocacy by Barrows, Kaine in October 2021 was granted a
| room at the Civic Center Hotel Navigation Center, where
| he could stay until he was assigned permanent housing.
| Barrows and her partner helped him pack and hauled his
| two suitcases -- heavy with gear, broken electronics, and
| sticks and rocks he'd collected in the park -- up to his
| fifth-floor room. They helped him settle in by donating
| furniture and clothes, including the boots and pants worn
| by rangers. "We knew that's what it was going to take to
| make it happen," Barrows said.
|
| ..and long story short, the housing he got, sucked.
|
| So they started by trying _literally everything else
| first_ , including kicking his butt out, destroying his
| belongings, etc and then eventually had to have someone
| basically personally escort him through the system, to a
| get a shitty room and then get yelled at by his
| neighbors, and you're telling me that "he was given all
| those things, repeatedly". You didn't read the same
| article I did.
|
| Besides, this article is just ONE anecdote. The system
| helps most people absolutely zero--on the contrary, it's
| a cruel as possible to homeless people in hopes they just
| move on.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| Things are still bad in the city, but the state of
| homelessness has improved. The article states that the number
| of tents in Golden Gate Park has gone down by 10x in the last
| 8 years. I would say there's been a similar decrease on the
| sidewalks of the city in just the last 4. I walked much of
| the length of Mission Street yesterday, and there are still a
| lot of sad scenes to bear witness to. But it's clearly
| improving.
| iancmceachern wrote:
| In my daily walk to work it's gotten far worse. Often the
| "problem" just moves from neighborhood to neighborhood in
| my experience.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| Yeah I've seen things shift around as well. But I walk a
| lot in the city - all over the city. It's better overall
| now than it was a few years ago.
| chrisdhoover wrote:
| Getting? It has been for years. Frank Jordan was the last
| mayor that tried a real plan.
| galimalint wrote:
| In australia, they put the people with mental illness or
| addiction in their own apartment and give them pills, and check
| in with them regularly. Definitely costs less than 50k/year.
| Most of them do end up getting better after several years.
|
| It seems US has a system that extracts maximumly from their tax
| payers and just keeps things in (bad) status quo as long as
| they can. A babying system if you well.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| I believe the homeless are kept around as a threat to the
| poor housed Americans. On top of that, those poor people are
| struggling so greatly that they too don't want to see the
| homeless helped too much. They don't want to see someone
| without any job live an easier life than they do with 3.
| ltbarcly3 wrote:
| Do you honestly believe this or are you just being snarky?
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| I don't think it's the whole picture. But I do believe
| those are two components of the situation. I'm happy to
| hear your insights.
| ltbarcly3 wrote:
| It's not even remotely true, to any degree. It's very
| conspiratorial thinking. If "they" were competent,
| unified, and powerful enough to create a situation like
| you describe "they" wouldn't need to.
|
| Which gets to the heart of why conspiracy thinking
| doesn't hold water, who in your theory are "they"?
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| "They" in my above comment is only used to refer to
| common people voting myopically. Usually conservatives
| who vote against social services.
|
| As for my claim of homelessness being a threat - I'm not
| saying that there's any grand conspiracy. But in the
| scheme of capitalism it helps to have an underclass that
| receive undue blame and keep people from sliding down the
| ladder further out of fear. No one needs to intentionally
| keep anyone homeless for this to be a functioning part of
| the system.
|
| It's like evolution but on a societal scale. Whatever we
| have now has persisted for a while. The threat of
| homelessness is part of why it's persisted. Imagine if
| there was no uncomfortable bottom to society. All wage
| slaves that sell their body and time would simply choose
| to not work because not working would be a better life.
| It's memetics. And of course we need people to do work.
| But we could be optimizing for happiness instead of GDP
| growth.
|
| Think of religion. When a religion mandates evangelism
| it's not necessarily out of a nefarious central planner
| trying to gain control over more people. But for
| religions that do mandate evangelism there is a greater
| chance the religion thrives. Because obviously recruiting
| people means you have a bigger religion. But the
| believers might simply each want to share their religion
| out of genuine belief in an afterlife.
|
| I was raised in a specifically anti-evangelical religion.
| It's pretty small as a result. There were the Shakers, a
| now extinct sect of Christianity. They considered sex
| ungodly and thus had no children. That killed the
| religion. Other sects promote having many children and
| survive.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| I think it's a much simpler model. No one wants to help
| them, funds to help them are mosproportioned and are
| treating symptoms instead of the cause. It's also
| politically heated to give more funding because people
| are less fine using tax dollars to fix and sacrifice
| their mental health to avoid the issue.
|
| I don't think government thinks far enough ahead to use
| this as a fear tactic. Most homeless are not some drug
| users hopelessly addicted.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Or a George Carlin fan
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| Definitely a Carlin fan. I don't think how he does on
| everything, but his way of viewing the world is valid.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| IMO he went overboard on the cynicism in his later years
| but he was always funny.
| bombcar wrote:
| So shipping homeless from SF to Australia and paying $100k/yr
| per would be a win/win?
| typewithrhythm wrote:
| I have some insight into this, and it might be possible that
| with good intervention the ongoing costs are low... That
| being said, in our current system the cases that are severe
| enough to be in public housing easily cost 10 times that...
| chrsig wrote:
| well, one major problem is that you can't force people to get
| mental health treatment. the courts can, but that means things
| need to be brought before a judge.
| silverquiet wrote:
| Given how hard it's gotten to force people to take vaccines,
| I would think that psychotropic drugs are probably off the
| table completely.
| chrsig wrote:
| no, it just tends to need to be a violent offense
| goatlover wrote:
| They can be forcibly given if committed with a judge's
| order.
| StefanBatory wrote:
| And now with RFK wanting to put people with ADHD into labor
| camps, any chances of a program to help mentally ill homeless
| people is close to zero. I am _sure_ that they would accept
| that "help" :>
| TechnicolorByte wrote:
| Reopen mental institutions and enable forced is
| institutionalization. Engage this at the federal level. So sick
| of this crap.
|
| These "homeless" are not the kind who need clean clothes and
| shelter and some help getting a job. They want to live like
| this at the expense of the public's money and enjoyment of
| public amenities.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| I'm pretty far left but I have to agree that some people are
| not mentally capable of independence, cause public harm, and
| need to be forcibly committed. I want that to be done
| carefully and humanely. I don't want someone who sleeps on
| the street and causes no trouble to get institutionalized.
| But the worst of them should get jailed, tried, and then sent
| away.
|
| We also need to support people at risk when they're young. If
| their parents had mental health support, if they didn't
| experience a loss of housing as children, if losing their job
| didn't make opioids looks so attractive, we wouldn't have
| that many people unable to care for themselves.
| bloomingkales wrote:
| Hey, that actually works really well in India:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpIJJPvn_ZI
|
| Edit: This got downvoted because it's a direct retort to what
| the GP is suggesting.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| On one side, having compassion for vulnerable people is fine,
| but resources are finite.
|
| The government can help people, but who would they rather help?
|
| - a kid full of potential needing shelter, food, clothing
|
| - a brilliant student needing a scholarship
|
| - a scientist that needs funding for important research
|
| - a family affected by natural disasters
|
| - a veteran with PTSD
|
| - the guy in this article
|
| Should a kid go to bed hungry, or a student be denied access to
| education so that the government can subsidize the self
| destructive lifestyle of a person that doesn't even care about
| the people paying for it?
|
| If you pay taxes on your income, plus taxes on everything you
| buy, etc... you worked at least 5 out of 12 months of the year
| for the government. So the government not only can waste it but
| also end up in debt that will be repaid by your children?
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| The US is a first world country. Resources are not so finite
| that we cannot help that entire list and then some. It should
| not be worrying about funding any of this.
| raincole wrote:
| I've heard that SF spent a lot of money on homelessness issues.
| But each time I visited SF, the situation seemed to get worse.
| I never understood why.
|
| My reaction to the OP article is: Oh... so that is why...
|
| A rare aha moment of mine on HN.
| ggm wrote:
| Viewed from 10,000ft it could even be cheaper in the long term,
| as an overall outcome. Personal attention, guidance through the
| system, vs constant background EMT interventions, more costly
| health outcomes, Policing and ultimately incarceration risks.
|
| I don't like reductive economics logic over what is a humane
| response, but I do like that it may not only be nicer, but
| actually financially sensible.
| snarf21 wrote:
| Reminds me of an article from a while ago about a homeless
| alcoholic that ran up over $1M in hospital and ambulance costs
| over the years.
|
| https://centerforhealthjournalism.org/our-work/insights/mill...
| mikepurvis wrote:
| Nitpick, but $1M in unpaid bills is nowhere near $1M in
| _costs_. Obviously this is still a troubling result but in
| all likelihood it was less than 10% of that in actual costs
| and the costs weren't in fact borne by "the taxpayer" but
| rather by slightly inflated fees for everyone else, since US
| hospitals must bill according to an assumption that some
| percentage of bills will go unpaid, due to the relationship
| between themselves, the insurers, and uninsured patients.
| davidgay wrote:
| And for useful reference: I was in hospital last year for
| ~2 weeks, and my insurance was sent a bill for ~$580k. The
| insurance actually paid $32k.
|
| Hospital bills are clearly works of fiction.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| Indeed. Those clearly-bonkers initial bills are clearly
| meant to a) intimidate and terrify the uninsured, and b)
| present a sympathetic facade to politicians and possibly
| the IRS about how much cost the hospital absorbs from
| non-paying patients.
| alluro2 wrote:
| $580k?! As an European, I can only imagine you got 5
| organ transplants, 4 titanium limb replacements, and,
| idk, night vision or something, while staying in a
| penthouse suite with masages and coconut milk
| treatments...
|
| (Obviously joking and I know 2 weeks in a hospital is
| very unpleasant - I'm sorry for your experience and hope
| you're doing well).
| tehwebguy wrote:
| It's like a tax scam right? Or is it like once in a blue
| moon they get wealthy whale without insurance?
| sarchertech wrote:
| If they could get the guy with asthma regularly seeing a PCP,
| the money the public is spending on his constant ER trips would
| more than pay for housing and the time the ranger has to spend
| on helping him.
| lmm wrote:
| If
|
| (Also note that if that's your general policy then you
| effectively allow anyone to blackmail you to get whatever
| they want, just by making it slightly more expensive to not
| give them what they want)
| ggm wrote:
| Is this not only reductive reasoning, but also both devils
| advocating, and functionally an artefact of the US health
| system economics?
| lmm wrote:
| > Is this not only reductive reasoning
|
| Maybe. Reductive reasoning is usually a good idea.
|
| > devils advocating
|
| No.
|
| > functionally an artefact of the US health system
| economics?
|
| So what? _If and when_ you manage to fix the US health
| system for the working poor then it might become
| reasonable to provide free healthcare to the disruptive
| homeless, sure. But until then it isn 't.
| ggm wrote:
| I think we have fundamentally different views on this.
| It's also true that disruptive homeless have to be
| managed in state funded healthsystems worldwide and that
| includes denying them service when they do bad things,
| I'm not naieve enough to believe somehow this is a
| uniquely american problem (disruptive people) but I do
| think the aspect of reductive health economics here is a
| pretty unique problem to the US health economy. And I say
| that living in an economy which has private emergency
| services alongside the public ones. We just don't have
| the same problem at scale, because we don't have the
| underlying health charge model.
| freeone3000 wrote:
| Do you have a moral objection to a homeless man with asthma
| getting a primary care provider paid for by the government?
| lmm wrote:
| I have a moral objection to the government providing more
| support to a socially disruptive person than they give to
| someone who is more prosocial. I'm all for a government-
| provided healthcare that's free for everyone, but
| prioritising person A because they're more disruptive
| than person B is morally bankrupt.
| crooked-v wrote:
| You've made quite a jump here from "has asthma" to
| "socially disruptive".
| lmm wrote:
| The post I replied to was arguing from "the money the
| public is spending".
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| On ER care.
| repiret wrote:
| It's not about morality, it's about incentives. Under the
| current system in the US, if you're broke and you have no
| insurance:
|
| 1. The ER is free to you, because they legally cannot
| refuse to treat you based on your ability to pay.
|
| 2. A regular doctor's visit costs $250 and your medicine
| costs $5-$500/month depending on what you need, because
| those businesses won't give you things they don't think
| you'll pay for.
|
| One need not be morally bankrupt to make choice #1. We
| all choose things that are more expensive for society
| because they are more convenient or less expensive for us
| - lots of regular activities of what patio11 calls the
| professional/managerial class have negative externalities
| that the rest of society pays for: air travel, personal
| automobiles, and lawns all come immediately to mind.
|
| If you want people to get their medical care from a PCP
| and their medicine from the pharmacy, then make it
| cheaper for them. Health insurance companies know this;
| that's why many plans lets you see your PCP for a small
| fixed price even before your deductible is met - because
| they want to incentivise you to get your care in the way
| that's cheapest for them.
| lmm wrote:
| > One need not be morally bankrupt to make choice #1
|
| I'm talking about the people making the decisions about
| who gets free doctor's visits, not the people on the
| receiving end.
|
| > We all choose things that are more expensive for
| society because they are more convenient or less
| expensive for us - lots of regular activities of what
| patio11 calls the professional/managerial class have
| negative externalities that the rest of society pays for:
| air travel, personal automobiles, and lawns all come
| immediately to mind.
|
| That doesn't make it ok. Most people have at least some
| semblance of conscience and try to cut down on those
| things - of course no-one is perfect, but that doesn't
| mean we should allow whataboutism to get in the way of
| good policymaking. (FWIW I'm all for taxing those things
| at a fair rate that covers the costs of those
| externalities)
|
| > If you want people to get their medical care from a PCP
| and their medicine from the pharmacy, then make it
| cheaper for them.
|
| Sure. But make it cheaper for all of them. I agree that
| "it's about incentives" - so don't make it so that the
| incentive is to do the antisocial thing until the system
| pays you to stop. It should be easy to extrapolate where
| that leads.
| galimalint wrote:
| In that case, why not move all the homeless from a park in a
| metropolis to a park in a cheaper/remote area? Then you can
| actually employ cheaper custodians in those areas to look after
| these homeless.
| ggm wrote:
| See, thats why I don't like the reductive reasoning. After
| all, when you're moving them why bother with seat belts and
| comfy chairs? Just use a flatbed truck and they can hold
| their pathetic possessions on with string, if they have any.
| And you also neatly assume the resources in the remote
| location can cope with the burden rather than already being
| behind the cost curve, compared to rangers in the SF metro
| area with direct access to the agencies.
|
| Wait a minute, isn't this why it "paid" for the Texan and
| Floridan governors to ship their problems to the sanctuary
| cities?
| galimalint wrote:
| you might have misunderstood; if the homeless is now in a
| cheaper COL park, then more park custodians can be hired to
| take care of the homeless. And why should we assume that SF
| metro agencies are more apt to take care of these
| downtrodden than small town Nevada City? They haven't
| exactly done a stellar job so far for decades.
| ketzo wrote:
| > custodians can be hired
|
| SF has one of the largest city budgets in the country --
| >$15billion -- and struggles to staff park workers making
| $70-90k.
|
| If the park workers only make $60k, but the city budget
| is 1/10th, 1/20th, 1/100th of SF's, how does the math
| here ever work?
| edmundsauto wrote:
| SF budget is city and county services, fwiw. It is good
| to make apples to apples comparison.
| Redoubts wrote:
| It's also services for less than a million people
| galimalint wrote:
| Park rangers make $30k-40k in small cities/towns. Not to
| mention big cities can help pay for some of the
| transition costs for these homeless, with their 15
| billion budget. Also, it would be way cheaper to house
| these homeless once they choose to transition from park
| to an apartment.
| edm0nd wrote:
| >In fiscal year 2023-2024, San Francisco spent $690
| million on homelessness, notes the San Francisco
| Chronicle. This is a 142% increase from five years ago.
|
| Spending $700M/year on homelessness crisis is straight up
| insane. There has to be a better way that doesnt cost as
| much. SF is kinda fucked.
|
| https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/homeless-
| questions-an...
| oefrha wrote:
| When there is an enormous budget somehow used up but with
| barely any noticeable effect (and frankly, without much
| of an expectation that there's noticeable effect), you
| can bet there's someone or a lot of someones siphoning
| from it.
|
| Btw even $690m isn't the full picture:
|
| > While that amount does not include what the Department
| of Public Health or SF Public Works or many other
| departments spend related to the crisis
| ryandrake wrote:
| They could just take that $700M and divide it up among
| the ~8000 homeless in the city. That $87,500 per year
| would be enough to help get someone on their feet pretty
| quickly. Probably more effective than whatever the hell
| they're spending it on today. Salaries for administrators
| administrating other administrators?
| bombcar wrote:
| There's got to be some Appalachian town that would love
| to get paid $700m/yr to house and care for 8,000 people.
| bagels wrote:
| Maybe its facetious, but I also do not understand why
| they have to be accommodated in a top 5 most expensive
| place in the world to live in.
| bombcar wrote:
| It's half facetious but also half serious, as the amounts
| of money are simply staggering.
|
| There has to be some middle ground between "homeless in a
| park" and "living their own life with a job" and "locked
| up in prison at great cost" that would be satisfactory to
| everyone.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| SF park workers are closer to 120K from those I know. A
| lot of labor intensive hand weeding because the city
| shuns herbicide. However, this is less than the median SF
| city employee, which makes 150k
|
| https://opengovpay.com/employer/ca/san-francisco
| tsimionescu wrote:
| The point would be to still use SF's money to do this, I
| assume. The point was that SF's money would be better
| spent on park rangers in a smaller city than in SF
| itself.
|
| Now, I think there are otherajor issues with this idea
| (mostly that having a 0.1% population of assisted people
| is much more workable than a 10% population, as would
| happen if SF moved every homeless person to a smaller
| city).
| OgsyedIE wrote:
| Then they'll have much further distances to commute on foot
| to their jobs.
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| If they could have a job they wouldn't be homeless.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| My understanding is that there are plenty of homeless
| folks with jobs.
| bombcar wrote:
| Identifying and assisting these people first would seem
| to be the thing to do.
|
| But reducing those homeless to 0% would likely not move
| the needle at all on the "problematic homeless" - the
| type everyone complains about.
|
| Nobody cares about Steve Wallis sleeping in a bush.
| genewitch wrote:
| Why would a job automatically mean housing? This is
| America, a job only means enough money for housing in
| some markets.
| anadem wrote:
| It's a lot hard to re-enter society if you're separated from
| everyone and everyplace you know. Sure, it could be cheaper
| in some ways to ship the homeless out to bumfuck nowhere, but
| might be less cost-effective than you think, and certainly
| less humane.
| aprilthird2021 wrote:
| Yes it is harder, but it's also harder for society to offer
| you the services like free room and board, help getting a
| job, and the thousand other services we offer in a high
| cost of living area.
|
| Since society is taking up the bulk of the work in helping
| you re-enter, you have to make some compromises, and
| potentially moving to a new place seems like a reasonable
| one to make. If we want a robust and strong social safety
| net, we cannot commit to providing all these services in
| the most expensive place to do so.
| tomrod wrote:
| Why?
| Redoubts wrote:
| Are you asking why things have costs?
| tomrod wrote:
| No, but I could see why that is where your mind started.
|
| You have a deep, implicit assumption of a social contract
| in your statement here:
|
| > Since society is taking up the bulk of the work in
| helping you re-enter, you have to make some compromises,
| and potentially moving to a new place seems like a
| reasonable one to make. If we want a robust and strong
| social safety net, we cannot commit to providing all
| these services in the most expensive place to do so.
|
| Some people can't. I know several schizophrenia sufferers
| who would never be able to hit an expected checklist.
| Some are brilliant. Some think they talk to an esoteric
| God and babble prophecy. None are functional.
|
| We used to lock those folks up in sanitoriums for their
| safety, but due to systemic abuse this ended. Go back
| further, and the folks were tribal shamans, village
| jesters, and other elements of society which were
| supported by others until their (often untimely) deaths.
|
| The latter support more or less ended when we as a
| species started settling down out of nomadic lives.
|
| As a society, we dramatically underfund infrastructure
| (crumbling bridges and suburbs), healthcare (exploding
| costs without quality improvement), education (teachers
| salary is uncompetitive), government action (court
| systems aren't expedient, legislators xna be bought).
|
| If we don't want these things, we should have the society
| decide so. This would be through legislation. But we
| haven't. We ignore these friction instead of addressing
| them.
|
| Resolving friction takes effort, and effort has costs.
| gosub100 wrote:
| You have a deep implicit assumption that throwing money
| at the problem solves it. That's rarely true. In the case
| of schizophrenics, we have solved it a long time ago, but
| they refuse to take their meds. No amount of money in
| social programs will change that. It just shifts the
| "systemic abuse" (which I agree with you on) from
| (asylums abusing the ill) to the (the mentally ill
| abusing the general public). I think abuse is a great way
| to phrase it. We all get abused by the public excrement,
| petty crime, needles and trash, loss of use of common
| areas, etc. We all are being abused by that population.
| genewitch wrote:
| Because you either make it where you grew up or we'll
| ship you to the Midwest where you're cheaper to deal
| with, ya fuckin' bum.
| tomrod wrote:
| Genuine question: is a social darwinist society something
| folks (perhaps you?) feel like they would survive in?
| Suppose your community decide it hates people who post
| online and wanted to ship them to Alaska. You cool with
| that?
| ty6853 wrote:
| If drugs are strongly intertwined I wonder if an
| opportunity to voluntarily seperate from familiar drug
| triggers and sources might provide some balancing to the
| downsides.
| paul7986 wrote:
| Drugs & alcohol is the majority of why they are homeless
| from San Francisco to Grand Junction, CO (drove through &
| saw they have an unofficial homeless park) to Portland to
| Seattle to Calgary, etc, etc.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| No, it isn't. If that was true you'd see a much stronger
| correlation between drug and alcohol use and
| homelessness.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| You do when you subset the homeless population from couch
| surfers and people living in their car to the people
| actually finding a wink of sleep under some tarps under a
| noisy overpass
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Then maybe the easy solution to this whole issue is to
| just give the homeless free cars.
| paul7986 wrote:
| "A survey by the United States Conference of Mayors found
| that 68 percent of cities reported that substance abuse
| was the largest cause of homelessness for single adults."
|
| https://endhomelessness.org/resource/opioid-abuse-and-
| homele...
|
| i do not have any idea how to solve housed people turning
| to drugs/alcohol to try and solve internal emotional
| pain...maybe more & more education.
| drjasonharrison wrote:
| Park Ranges and Social Services Workers are much cheaper than
| Police, Paramedics, and Emergency Room Staff.
|
| Your reductive suggestion could be implemented by busing the
| homeless to prisons. That's probably not what you were
| proposing, but it's one interpretation.
| Aunche wrote:
| What you're describing is universal healthcare being cheaper in
| the long term, which I would agree with. What is described in
| this article absolutely does not sound like a productive use of
| taxpayer money at all. Any one of the ranger's clients that
| gets semi-permanent shelter is someone else who doesn't. At
| best, we're pay a full-time salary for someone to play a zero
| sum game. IMO, it's actually worse than that because such
| housing is more efficiently allocated to those who are able and
| willing to navigate the bureaucracy of public housing
| themselves are more likely to rebound successfully.
| ErigmolCt wrote:
| Exactly. The economic argument shouldn't be the only reason to
| push for better solutions, but it's a compelling one
| (especially in a system that often prioritizes cost over
| compassion)
| idlewords wrote:
| The title let me down; I was hoping this would be an article
| about a trebuchet. [edit: I see the post title has changed, the
| original one was something like "park ranger uses extraordinary
| methods to remove homeless from SF parks"]
|
| I lived next to the park for several years and grew to loathe the
| dynamic where the lives of people sleeping rough in Golden Gate
| Park or Civic Center merit months of one-on-on outreach, while
| the lives of all of those who can't walk through the park in
| safety, can't send their kids there to play, and can't sit on the
| grass for fear of stepping on a used needle or a pile of human
| excrement, don't seem to matter.
|
| I would like to see the city adopt a compassionate approach that
| doesn't at the same time enable years of lawbreaking by people
| who make nominally public spaces off-limits to the law-abiding.
| I'd like to see a San Francisco where there can be at least one
| clean, safe, working public toilet.
| smohare wrote:
| Just an anecdote but I was with my young child in GG park not
| too long ago and perhaps 50 meters from the artierial road
| encountered a homeless guy brandishing an axe. This in in a
| spot that routinely fields families.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| You should tell your elected officials that you support more
| initiatives to help the unhoused then.
|
| I've ben homeless. It's not fun. Nobody does it because they
| want to. Ending up on the street trying to make the most basic
| of normality work is really hard work. I didn't end up on meth
| or anything (I stuck to alcohol), but I understand why some
| people facing this do. When your life is utter shite, drugs
| help.
|
| Without any kind of social safety net the people who fall out
| of the bottom of society have nowhere to go except this. Build
| a decent safety net and they won't be living in the park and
| the park becomes the better place you'd like it to be.
|
| So, on behalf of the unhoused: sorry your kids can't play in
| the park but we're facing bigger problems. Helping us with our
| problems will help you with yours.
| tptacek wrote:
| I left San Francisco 20 years ago, but, speaking to the
| situation in Chicagoland: our municipality funds long-term
| housing, support, and bridge services for local unhoused, and
| my understand is that the biggest problem we have with
| problematic unhoused people --- the people shooting up out in
| the open, or using vestibules as toilets, or accosting
| passers-by --- is getting them to take up those services.
|
| It is the case that we have difficulty placing public toilets
| because of the risks their abuse will pose to unsuspecting
| users. I don't think it does anybody any good to pretend that
| these aren't real problems, or that we can moralize past
| them.
|
| I think, at least in most major metros, we're past the point
| of it being a live issue whether to fund services to
| transition homeless people off the streets. Residents will
| fund those services simply because the alternatives are so
| disruptive. With that in mind, I feel like any response to
| this problem that centers on "well we should fund more
| services" is basically stalling.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| Totally agree, and I'm not trying to minimise the harm that
| this does to our spaces.
|
| Decades ago there were institutions that these people were
| placed in. We decided not to do that any more, for good
| reasons and bad, and I think maybe we should revisit that
| decision.
| jordanb wrote:
| I've lived in Chicago since 2001 and when I got here it was
| pretty rare to see homeless people (and I lived in Uptown
| for a while back when Broadway was still borderline skid
| row).
|
| First big wave of it (when you started to see tents appear
| under the highways and such) was 2008. Second big wave
| where that seemed to metastasize were Rahm Emmanuel's
| budget cuts. In particular, he shut down all the mental
| health clinics, and you ended up with a lot of people
| getting forced off their meds.
|
| EDIT: Another thing, when I moved here there were still
| quite a few housing projects. I am not going to pretend
| they weren't _rough_. I walked through the ABLA homes most
| days and watched them get torn down. I had a kid hit me
| with a rock while biking through Cabrini. But _there was a
| place where people could be off the streets_ back then. Now
| where do you go? What 's waitlist for section 8 up to?
| tptacek wrote:
| I'm in Oak Park, for what it's worth. I went to high
| school next to the ABLA homes. I don't think redeveloping
| the projects is why we have homeless people; those
| buildings weren't full of mentally ill people, they were
| full of families. We replaced the CHA homes with Section
| 8 vouchers, and that has, I think, improved things.
| jordanb wrote:
| Well I don't think you're a renter then. I am so glad I
| bought a house in 2016 because everyone I know who rents
| has been on a wild ride.
|
| Section 8 has long wait lists. It seems kinda
| unbelievable to argue that destruction of thousands of
| units of low income housing didn't cause people to not
| have housing.
|
| I don't doubt that many people are mentally ill. Before
| Rahm's cuts, _we had a taxpayer-ran system of caring for
| the mentally ill_.
| tptacek wrote:
| I'm just saying: the ABLA homes weren't a relief valve
| for people who could not safely take care of themselves.
| It wasn't where all the people in tents on the streets
| came from. The CHA projects were overrun with gangs, for
| sure, but the median CHA tenant was a taxpaying full-time
| employee. I guess what I'm snagging on here is the
| assumption that there's an equivalence to draw between an
| ABLA tenant and a fentanyl addict.
|
| (I've been a renter and a homeowner in Chicago; I grew up
| here).
| jordanb wrote:
| Your premise seems to be that homelessness is caused by
| mental illness. I think homelessness is very often caused
| by _not being able to afford homes._ Chicago has a lot
| less low-income housing now than it did when I got here.
| There 's some basic arithmetic you can do.
|
| To the extent that your premise is true (and I believe
| that, for many individuals, it is) that also speaks to
| our city pulling up the ladder on people. I was living in
| Logan Square when Rahm shut the mental health clinics
| down. There was one on Milwaukee. People protested for
| months. People on the streets obviously being in a very
| bad place and not getting help became a lot more
| noticeable after.
| tptacek wrote:
| I'm a zoning reform person. I believe that increasing the
| supply of housing will reduce homelessness. But I have
| evidence to support my belief that it won't resolve the
| problem of people shooting up in the CTA vestibules,
| because I know many of those people have been offered
| secure housing and refused it.
| hcurtiss wrote:
| I'm just not convinced homeless drug addicts are on the
| street because they're shy of a house payment. The ones
| I've know have wound up there because they became drug
| addicts, and that addiction drove them into the abyss,
| exploiting family and friends and every relationship
| until they're under a bridge.
|
| We've spent billions and billions on the "homes are the
| solution to homelessness" crowd. And the problem has only
| grown worse.
| jordanb wrote:
| > We've spent billions and billions on the "homes are the
| solution to homelessness" crowd. And the problem has only
| grown worse.
|
| The agenda for during my adult life has been _cutting_
| services for needy (public housing, mental health, etc).
| Since we seem to agree that homelessness is getting worse
| isn 't it also rational to agree that cutting these
| services is, at the very least, _not helping._
| tptacek wrote:
| I don't think it's true that funding for services for the
| homeless have been consistently cut in Chicagoland (or
| San Francisco) during your adult lifetime. In fact, I'm
| not even sure that would be true for public housing ---
| again, a different problem than the one we're talking
| about --- I think if you look you might find that we
| spend more on housing assistance now, in constant
| dollars, than we did in 1980.
| SOLAR_FIELDS wrote:
| My spouse works in homeless outreach in Texas. Essentially
| doing the exact thing mentioned in the article that the
| park rangers are doing - Helping people jump the
| bureaucratic hurdles of no ID, no birth certificate, etc
| that preclude the client from obtaining housing or
| employment. 80% of the clients are grateful and work
| towards housing. The other 20% refuse any help whatsoever.
| devilsdata wrote:
| This is the nuanced perspective that's sorely needed in
| our society. Some people refuse help, and it becomes a
| talking point and a reason to never offer help-- but that
| simply shouldn't be the case.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Isn't it so stupid how cities don't just install port a
| potties everywhere? Same issues here where they aren't
| installed because people will make them gross. Well the
| alternative to a gross port a pottie is to have people poop
| and pee in the road which I'd say is a lot worse. Like none
| of our train stations in LA have bathrooms because they
| would get "gross" so instead people piss in the elevator on
| the floor because that is better apparently than having a
| dirty bathroom. Not building bathrooms doesn't stop biology
| from happening.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Port-a-potties require frequent emptying and other kinds
| of maintenance. Other kinds of dry toilets are under
| development which would address this issue in a variety
| of ways (e.g. composting toilets) and be applicable to
| all sorts of interesting scenarios (e.g. remote places in
| the developing world, where proper disposal of human
| excreta is a severe public health concern) but overall
| they're not yet ready for prime time.
| tptacek wrote:
| It took my muni months of meetings to come to the
| conclusion we could not safely set up public toilets. No,
| cities can't simply install port a potties everywhere.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Sounds like a parallel issue. Homes won't help with
| addiction. If Nixon didn't utterly ruin the term, a "war on
| drugs" would be applicable here. Or rather a "war on
| addiction".
|
| Hard to make compulsory though. Nixon didn't do it, but
| that era also gave asylums a horrible reputation.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| I support initiatives to get really aggressive with drug
| dealers/users. I wish we could better help the unhoused in
| humane ways, but when 99% of our social resources we allocate
| to that effort are forced to go to fent zombies to no
| appreciable effect, I am very pessimistic we will make any
| progress no matter how many billions we throw at it.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| We lost the War on Drugs. Every attempt to treat drug users
| as criminals has failed to achieve anything useful.
|
| Portugal (as an example) treats drug use as a health
| problem and has much better results.
|
| Addiction is a disease, a health problem, not something you
| can beat out of people by imprisoning them or being "really
| aggressive". That just makes the problem worse.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Portuguese complain about the drug zombies a lot more
| than I do.
|
| We lost the war, so let's just admit it and move on. Like
| you say, there is nothing we can do, so we should
| redirect our resources to unhoused cases that we have a
| much better chance of solving. We can liberalize drugs if
| you want, let them do all the fent they want; society
| just shouldn't be on the hook for fixing them, which
| doesn't seem to work very well anyways, even if we spend
| all of our money on it.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| > Portuguese complain about the drug zombies a lot more
| than I do.
|
| [0] USA has the highest drug use per head of population
| in the entire world. Portugal is way down the list.
|
| I don't think there's "nothing we can do". I think it's
| more of a question of how we approach the problem. We
| have always approached it as a failure of the individual
| in question, requiring correction by punishment. This has
| clearly not worked (ever) but everyone seems reluctant to
| abandon it.
|
| If we approach addiction as a disease, like cancer, that
| affects some people against their will, rather than
| something they chose because they're junkie scum, we
| might help them more [1]
|
| > society just shouldn't be on the hook for fixing them
|
| In the USA society is never on the hook for fixing
| people. All that rugged individualism. Other societies
| work differently, and that seems to get better results.
|
| [0] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-
| rankings/drug-use-... the USA has the highest world
|
| [1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6633066/
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > In the USA society is never on the hook for fixing
| people
|
| Can you cite this? How much does the US spend on
| entitlements vs other countries?
| ty6853 wrote:
| Something like loading up Swains Island chalk full of
| every potent drug imaginable by the barge full and then
| offering free one way tickets to whoever wants them might
| have an effect.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| >That just makes the problem worse.
|
| The core problem is that there are a large contingent of
| homeless drug users who just want to be left alone so
| that they can continue to be homeless drug users. Any
| services given to them will just be redirected by them
| towards enabling continued drug use. It's like an inbuilt
| self-sabotage that is totally alien to regular folks, but
| the choice way of living for those with it.
|
| This isn't talk about much at all, because the story book
| tale is that homeless people are just regular people who
| are down on the luck, and if we could just show them some
| respect, compassion, and spare a few resources, they'd be
| right back on their feet again. But that story is just a
| fairy tale used to sell a feel good idea, reality is way
| more fucked up than that.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Regular people who are down on their luck are at severe
| risk of _becoming_ the drug-addict permanent homeless.
| Living on the street is _real_ hard in an environment
| like SF, and subjects you to all sorts of wildly
| stressful circumstances that must be coped with somehow.
| Taking drugs then becomes a vicious cycle.
| c0redump wrote:
| The vast majority of people who are simply down on their
| luck have friends and family that will help them. It's
| not like you lose your job and go straight to living
| under a bridge. Not everyone, but most.
|
| The people who end up in truly dire circumstances have
| backstabbed everyone who ever trusted or helped them.
| They have burned every bridge, and nobody they know wants
| anything to do with them. All to feed a ravenous
| addiction.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Well yes, but keep in mind the homeless population is
| still a minority. Apparently SF has a homeless population
| of 10k out of 900k people. This is your minority.
|
| >The people who end up in truly dire circumstances have
| backstabbed everyone who ever trusted or helped them.
|
| Or their family backstabbed them, if they ever had one
| (this article has a case study on someone raised out of
| an orphanage). Or this continually individualistic
| society has loosened support networks so you never truly
| got "friends". Or you simply got priced out because rent
| became 3k and you're not a silicon valley engineer.
|
| Not all homeless people are drug users. Just the ones you
| remember most.
| asdff wrote:
| I think war on drugs only works on the user side anyhow.
| The edge in game theory is always to the smuggler not the
| inspector after all.
|
| Anecdotally during covid la metro cut a ton of staff,
| including security, and people started smoking meth and
| crack and fent in the station platforms openly. It was
| disturbing and made the few of us still riding the system
| then feel very unsafe and complain to metro leadership
| and the press. As a result they hired more staff to
| arrest and kick these people out and ridership constantly
| improves. I haven't seen someone smoke from a glass pipe
| on metro station property in probably years now, going
| from seeing it at one point or another basically every
| workday.
| idlewords wrote:
| San Francisco's homelessness budget in 2021 was $1.1 billion,
| for a homeless population of maybe 10,000. That works out to
| $110K per person before you add in state and Federal money.
|
| Say this budget was doubled. What should that money be spent
| on, that isn't being funded now?
| tptacek wrote:
| We had this mathematical problem during the Venezuelan
| migrant crisis. A group of well-intentioned activists
| bussed about 100 migrants from the CPD station on Grand to
| Village Hall in Oak Park. By the time the dust had settled,
| we'd allocated enough money to each family --- through in-
| kind services, temporary housing, bridge services, etc ---
| that most of them could have _bought a small house_
| (outright!) in the south suburbs. Most of those families
| would have been way better off with the money than with the
| program design we came up instead.
| idlewords wrote:
| Where are those families now?
| tptacek wrote:
| Really hard to say. Many of them ended up in specially-
| arranged multi-month lease situations; I don't know where
| they would have gone when the leases ended.
| ty6853 wrote:
| For the price of a home here they could live in a shack
| in the jungle of Venezuela off the mere _interest_ and
| never work again.
| tptacek wrote:
| I'm making a point about program design, not about the
| advisability of allowing economic refugees into the
| country.
| ty6853 wrote:
| Yes I am too. I have no problem with them entering at
| least facially. I'm saying if we're to provide for them I
| see even more cost effective options in areas Venezuelans
| can reside in.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I'll take the next $1.1 and provide them with new tents and
| sleeping bags and shoes.
|
| More seriously, you get grafts like these. $800k for sheds
| in Los Angeles [1] or 300k for shipping containers in
| Oakland [2]. These are the type of stories that destroy
| hope that government us up to the task of handling the
| problem, no matter how much money they throw at it.
|
| https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-03-05/lopez-
| co...
|
| https://oaklandside.org/2024/07/10/oakland-fbi-
| investigation...
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| If I may give you some optimism for LA:
|
| https://abc7.com/post/federal-judge-frustrated-missing-
| data-...
|
| "frustrated" is an understatement.
|
| "You're not working on your time frame now. You're
| working on mine," Carter said.
|
| And surprise. LA is getting small improvements on the
| homeless situation.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| I'm not familiar with SF finances. I gather the problem
| with any kind of public works in the USA is that it
| immediately gets drowned in graft, pork and bureaucracy.
|
| I suspect the bulk of the money in that budget is being
| spent on civil servants and very little of it actually
| reaches the people who need the help.
|
| Doubling the budget will just attract more graft and not
| double the amount of help getting through. But I'm not an
| expert, so I may well be wrong.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Clearly the local electorate has decided such desires and
| aspirations are not worthwhile enough to change their voting
| behaviour...
|
| So the question is how do you plan to change that?
|
| Trying to convince random HN readers seems pointless if that's
| your goal.
| aprilthird2021 wrote:
| This isn't true btw. In San Francisco the constant homeless
| and drug and crime issues have led to voting changes.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Since when did changes in one electoral cycle automatically
| equate to changes in long term voting behaviour?
|
| e.g. Swing states are a well known concept, so it's unclear
| how you could confuse that.
|
| It has to be credibly sustained and durable for a few
| cycles, at the very least.
| aprilthird2021 wrote:
| It has been durable for a few cycles. There was the
| Boudin recall and now the recent election
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Can you provide sources for the relevant electoral
| districts...?
|
| At the very least, whatever has been imagined hasn't
| translated into a ground reality expected by the parent.
| So I doubt it's true.
| xyst wrote:
| Blame the rapacious capitalists that have essentially ripped
| away the safety nets that Americans used to enjoy. Cost of
| living has skyrocketed while labor wages have stagnated.
|
| Blame awful economic theory such as neoliberalism, "trickle
| down economics" that has allowed a few people and corporations
| to acquire a significant amounts of wealth while not paying
| back into the system that helped them get there.
|
| Decades of tax cuts to the wealthy while cutting funding for
| federal/state programs.
|
| Corporations are buying up all of the property and jacking up
| the rates. Minimum wage hasn't been increased since 2009.
|
| What we need is a political party that _fights_ for the middle
| class. We need power to shift back to labor instead of the
| rapacious capitalists that instead of investing the profits
| into the company (ie, increase wages for labor) it's reinvested
| into stock manipulation tactics such as stock buybacks. The
| shareholders, often foreigners as well, get paid while labor
| holds the bag.
|
| Fuck the culture war. The next war is a class war and it won't
| end well if this country continues at its current trajectory.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| I don't like saying this much as an ex-redditors. But it's a
| shame seeing this downvoted as if a huge cause of a lot of
| things isn't our gridlocked politics bribed/powered by donors
| and billionaires robbing the country blind.
| WeylandYutani wrote:
| America has no social safety net and a drug epidemic. What did
| you seriously think was going to happen?
|
| I even find a weird sense of respect for the folks who want to
| build concentration camps because at least they are honest.
| ambarp2 wrote:
| My solution to this was to sell my home and leave San Francisco
| after living there 19 years. The moment I had a baby on the
| way, it no longer became tenable for me to deal with the lack
| of cleanliness or safety on the streets.
|
| The irony is that I moved to Mexico City. It's a far safer
| place than San Francisco.
| blovescoffee wrote:
| That's pretty debatable and entirely depends on how you
| define safety. I live in cdmx btw.
| rafram wrote:
| Just for the record, CDMX has a crime rate of over 50,000 per
| 100,000 residents, meaning that there's one crime for every
| two residents each year. SF's crime rate is about 6,000 per
| 100,000 - so about eight times safer. CDMX might feel safer
| than SF to you, but it is unequivocally much, much more
| dangerous.
|
| When the housing crisis there reaches its breaking point
| (driven by gentrifying transplants), we'll see if even the
| feeling lasts.
| hcurtiss wrote:
| Mexico City is absolutely enormous. I don't know for sure,
| but I'm betting crime rates city-wide don't tell the whole
| story.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| The same is true with San Francisco, even if it isn't as
| big. We could cherry pick compare the best neighborhood
| of Mexico City against the worst neighborhood of SF to
| falsify a claim that Mexico City is safer than San
| Francisco.
| rafram wrote:
| Sure, and all cities of all sizes have crime hotspots,
| but even the rich transplant epicenter, Roma, has a crime
| rate of about 8 per 100 [1]. That's well above the SF
| average, which itself is skewed by a few high-crime
| outliers like the Tenderloin.
|
| [1]: https://hoyodecrimen.com/en/sectores-map/
| almosthere wrote:
| Someone in SF with a $2M home can buy something pretty
| significantly away from the crime areas of Mexico City, and
| probably has a remote salary that can afford private gun
| toting security.
| dmix wrote:
| When my friend got robbed in SF the police didnt even show
| up for 2hrs and the owner of the bar I was at laughed at
| the idea of calling the police like they'd care. I highly
| doubt crime statistics reflect how bad it really is.
| Besides most of the worst of SF is the dirtiness and petty
| crime that police care even less about. Come out of the
| subway and see a homeless guy urinating right in front of
| the steps without even turning away is not something people
| are calling the police over but is a typical day-to-day
| experience.
| rafram wrote:
| OK, but the police in Mexico City are corrupt, abusive,
| and untrusted by the public, so the stats there are
| likely at least as skewed. You think people there are
| calling the cops when they get robbed? There's a
| neighborhood a few blocks from the presidential palace
| (and tourist center) that the cops don't even enter. SF
| has issues, but this thread was contrasting it with CDMX,
| and my point is that that's ridiculous.
| gadders wrote:
| As Rob Henderson said "San Francisco is the only city where
| dogs tread in human shit."
| habosa wrote:
| As someone who has enjoyed your writing, I find your trebuchet
| comment to be so distasteful I'll have a hard time not hearing
| it if I read your posts again in the future. These are human
| beings you're talking about.
|
| And before you say I don't get to have a say, I'd like to point
| out I live only 3 blocks from Golden Gate Park and I'm raising
| my child here. I've lived all over the city including in some
| of the worst areas (6th Street). I do understand the problems
| we have here, but I don't think it's appropriate to suggest we
| trebuchet people.
| ltbarcly3 wrote:
| Then why are the parks still full of homeless? Maybe they need to
| re-evaluate such extraordinary methods.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Why does it take seven months and a team in order to fill out the
| paperwork to make one eligible for a room at a state SRO?
| idlewords wrote:
| Because this is a person wants to sleep rough in a park and has
| to be pushed through every step of the process to leave it. I
| would imagine things go much faster if you hate sleeping in a
| park and want a roof over your head.
| bombcar wrote:
| The problem is CA weather is too nice.
|
| If the park was -40deg for a few months a year things would
| be drastically different.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Well he stayed there for over a decade. Yoj have to pay thst
| cost if you took that long to resolve things. Or fail to
| resolve the root issues.
| umvi wrote:
| I have a pet theory that love is a basic human need (and a
| requirement for good mental health), and governments are
| notoriously bad at providing love no matter how much money you
| throw at mental health therapy, treatment programs, UBI, etc.
| Barrows is setting a good example here, but how to get more
| citizens involved so the burden isn't all on a few rangers?
| II2II wrote:
| I suspect that few people want to be involved. It is difficult
| and dangerous work. It requires a personality that both cares
| for others, while being resilient enough to face the challenges
| of those in their care. By in large, it is also a thankless
| job. Just look at many of the responses here. The public don't
| care about the time and effort involved. Many think that it is
| best to just lock them up. Quite often the recipients don't
| care. They are too busy battling their own demons.
|
| It's probably best to have safety nets in place so that people
| don't reach these depths in the first place.
| aprilthird2021 wrote:
| We have social safety nets in the US. We just don't have one
| robust enough that you can live in housing and have enough
| income without working in San Francisco permanently.
| bloomingkales wrote:
| The safety net for everyone is your friends and family. Drug
| addiction destroys that, so you are left alone. They kind of
| don't have anyone else. People see homelessness, but all I
| see is a slow trek to a suicide for many. They are dying
| slowly - and do not make any mistake about that. It's fatal.
|
| Overall, there are many drugs addicts and homeless people in
| the world. It only bothers us when it obstructs our vision,
| very disgusting sentences like _I cant even visit the beach
| anymore_. I think that 's fine, there are many beaches and
| many other places. You can visit the beach somewhere else,
| these people are dying.
|
| Millionaire Rogan found the sight of homeless people
| unbearable so he _had_ to leave the state (could be the
| taxes, but he 's also filthy rich. I don't want to say he's
| just rotten, that's mean. I'll say a few other things
| instead).
|
| Your society creates an inordinate amount of homeless people,
| that's first. Worry about the view later. You are lucky that
| you even get to see poverty up close, most just move the
| living fuck away from it.
|
| Wait.
|
| Edit:
|
| I bring Rogan up because if you go through his entire
| catalog, you will see he has hours and hours of content that
| just bullies homeless people. He has done that to a few other
| groups, literal _hours_ if you stack them side by side in a
| compilation. So there was already a lot of damage done in
| terms of mindshare by this media-arm.
| throwaway7783 wrote:
| Trivializing other people's concerns and worries is not the
| best way to get their help - even when priorities are
| pretty clear. It is very similar to trivializing "oh you
| shouldn't be an addict in the first place"
|
| We are dealing with humans here, and all of them, including
| the homeless and people complaining about views, make up
| our society.
| bloomingkales wrote:
| Again, I said a specific sentence, and I think it's the
| most important sentence to me. _You have to be lucky to
| be witness to poverty, it provides incredible
| perspective_. I undermine other 's concerns about the
| _unsightly view_ because I believe their attitude is
| immoral, and I have no issue drawing a red line there.
| ty6853 wrote:
| Having been homeless a couple times the way out is rather
| simple in most cases if you're sane and sober. A days day
| labor is enough for food, propane, and bus passes for a
| week. Anything beyond that us enough to buy a shower at a
| truck stop and get cleaned up for an interview at a
| warehouse. You can trivially survive outside with a weeks
| day labor wages worth of REI gear on the coasts and most
| the lower 49 ( of course a junky would hawk this as soon
| as they are dope sick )
|
| On both occasions I used this equation homeless -> day
| labor for Airbnb to clean up for warehouse/factory
| interview -> work in factory until deposit on apartment
| earned to get out.
|
| Most the people actually on the street are nuts or
| drugged out. People like me would clean construction
| site, then take a bus to edge of town and climb a flat
| roof and sleep where no one sees us.
|
| What you're witnessing isn't so much poverty but
| insanity.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| I can't even find work with experience and a clean
| record. I can't imagine how bad it'd be to find minimum
| wage work while not having an address to full a form out
| with. If it's been a whine for you it's gotten so much
| worse.
|
| >Most the people actually on the street are nuts or
| drugged out
|
| The most obvious, in your face example are the crazy
| ones. For basic human survival we remember those the
| most. But I bet most homeless people are just a person on
| the streets getting by. Not even the ones begging for
| change. It's a lot harder to get by in CA though.
| throwaway7783 wrote:
| Yes, you can draw a line wherever your moral compass
| tells you to. My point was not about morality. It is just
| that regardless of what you think of morals as an
| individual, these people are all still part of the same
| society, and parts of both problems and solutions.
|
| And in many parts of the world you have to be lucky _not_
| to see /experience poverty from up close.
| tdeck wrote:
| The thing is that being homeless is a constant state of
| emergency for homeless people and we don't talk about it
| like that.
|
| Imagine if someone spent their time complaining about how
| pulling over for an ambulance or firetruck made them late
| to an important life event, so we should stop doing that.
| I don't think most of us would say "hey wait a minute,
| this person has a genuine concern. Let's not trivialize
| it".
| presentation wrote:
| I disagree with the idea that we should accept that
| homelessness and crippling drug addiction are socially
| acceptable and normal aspects of society just because the
| people going through them are suffering more than you
| are. I think it's totally reasonable to express that the
| beach feeling dangerous and disgusting is in fact awful
| and that you do not like the state of things, and I do
| not want to live in a society where you can't state
| opinions like this straightforwardly (which is why I left
| SF).
| bloomingkales wrote:
| Can I ask what you do on a regular basis to help homeless
| people? Was moving away your only actionable item?
|
| I don't go out of my way to help the homeless either, but
| I also don't go out of my way expressing how disgusted I
| am with them, or rally behind politics that are net bad
| for everyone just because I really agree that SF is
| really not to my liking.
|
| You moving away was the adult thing to do. You adding to
| the carrion call of maga voices is reprehensible.
|
| Enjoy your beaches.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| You're free to leave. Running is always the fastest
| solution to avoiding an issue, and you probably can't fix
| that issue alone.
|
| But I'd hope someone in a thread like this would be
| interested in a deeper understanding on what factors lead
| to that.
| nullc wrote:
| Thank you.
|
| I think what you're saying is particularly true on this
| subject-- the people with skeptical or negative remarks
| are likely people who they or their families have
| personally suffered harm. When someone denies your own
| experience it's natural to write them off if not to
| actively oppose their position.
|
| Widely contentious issues are usually contentious
| precisely because the different perspectives are all
| simultaneously valid.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| To be frank, they never wanted to help to begin with. Why
| would I care about coddling their concerns if they are
| being selfish all this time?
|
| Sometimes, awareness is just as much about identifying
| who to not bother with as it is about empowering future
| allies.
| throwaway7783 wrote:
| Where did the $640B+ that was spent to help the homeless
| came from? Thin air?
| lynx97 wrote:
| I find your way of downplaying the worries of other
| citizens way more disgustng then the comment you replied to
| can ever be. This "your problems are a joke" attitude is
| very condescending and patronising.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| > It requires a personality that both cares for others, while
| being resilient enough to face the challenges of those in
| their care.
|
| Not only resilience to the challenges, but resilience to the
| fact that some people you will just fail to help. The more
| you care about those in your care, the more it will generally
| consume you when they don't succeed.
|
| This is a hugely difficult thing to overcome, and it's a big
| reason why, for example, hospital doctors typically end up
| with relatively little empathy for patients: it's very hard
| to maintain your mental health while empathizing with people
| hurting and dying every day. You really have to build some
| kind of wall between you and them to cope with the inevitable
| losses.
| dannc wrote:
| Get more folks involved in local volunteering opportunities,
| especially ones with direct outreach to people in need.
|
| I'm heavily involved with Austin Bicycle Meals [1]. When a
| homeless person already knows you are there to help, it creates
| an entirely different social dynamic than normal. You get
| opportunities to make conversation and connections, which
| humanizes how we view these issues.
|
| That's a total reversal to how most people interact with the
| homeless: in an entirely avoidant manner either randomly on the
| street or through a car window. That's why so much of the
| general public is numb to their plight.
|
| The change in mindset that happens is really powerful, can take
| only a couple of hours of volunteering to happen, and something
| I hope more people seek out.
|
| https://linktr.ee/austinbicyclemeals
| anon291 wrote:
| There's this thing called religion where we chant hymns and
| sing songs in an attempt to reorient our psyche to suppress our
| innate selfishness. By raising our oxytocin levels amongst our
| community via shared belief and communal celebration, we leave
| the room in an exuberant mood to serve others.
|
| I know people think the prayer meetings et al are corny, but
| when you realize what comes afterwards (or should) then it
| really all makes sense.
|
| And it's not just about helping strangers it's about helping
| others who are maybe not your best friend but still in your
| circle.
|
| Congregational religion is one of the most tragically trampled
| upon secular fences.
|
| It's no surprised that the same methodology was arrived at by
| the world's great religions. Buddhist and Christian mendicant
| and service-based monastic orders come to mind
| moralestapia wrote:
| You'll be glad to know that your "pet theory" is a topic that
| has extensive literature around it, even going back milennia.
|
| I've read a lot around this, happy to provide some suggestions
| if you choose to dive into this.
| xyst wrote:
| The rising homeless crisis is a symptom of a much larger issue:
| poor economic policy propagated by decades of awful neoclassical
| economic theory and neoliberalism (ie, "trickle down economics"
| or Reagon-omics)
| mrlambchop wrote:
| I was really swept up in this article and the portrait of Amanda
| Barrows - what a unique and strong person and this city is
| incredibly lucky to have her.
|
| Unlike some here, I came away with a deep sense of empathy, and
| today's HN snark and frustration bounced off me pretty hard. The
| public order issues - homelessness in parks, the challenges of
| shared spaces--have certainly impacted me. But more than that, I
| struggle with how to translate the state of the world to my boys.
| I always remind them: every unhoused person was once a little boy
| or girl. We might be older now, but we're still kids inside, and
| nobody dreams of growing up in these circumstances.
|
| What struck me most was the balance of compassion and pragmatism
| that Amanda brings to her work. It's easy to be frustrated with
| the policies and bureaucratic inefficiencies that slow down real
| solutions - but they are, in some ways, understandable.
|
| The biggest frustration for me is the gap between the mental
| state of many unhoused individuals and the requirements needed to
| secure housing. The city surely understands the long-term costs
| of its policies, and it's run by highly pragmatic people with
| limited budgets. But rules are rules, and at some point, top-down
| accommodations (including medical interventions...) are necessary
| to bridge this gap.
| nocoiner wrote:
| This comment captured a lot of my thoughts about the article,
| Amanda and many of the other comments on this thread, except
| that you put them into words much more capably and eloquently
| than I was able to do. Well stated.
| nullc wrote:
| That's what the article was written for-- and it's one valid
| perspective on it.
|
| To those whose lives have been irreparably harmed by the
| violent mentally ill people inhabiting SF's streets and parks
| while the police stand idle and billions of their tax dollars
| are spent annually failing to solve the problem-- it might hit
| a bit differently. That isn't the story here, but when you see
| people taking it differently than you it isn't necessarily
| because are in any way lacking in compassion.
|
| The article paints the person in question as a harmless Garden
| Hermit ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_hermit ), perhaps
| he is but many of the support-resistant homeless are certainly
| not harmless.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| If a black person attacks you, does that mean that black
| people are then violent? All the statistics I've ever seen
| indicate that while the homeless and mentally ill are
| particularly prone to being victims of violence, they don't
| seem to actually pose a higher issue of safety than anyone
| else you encounter in your daily life.
|
| It makes sense that would be the case when you think of it -
| do the rates of violence decrease as you move up the
| socioeconomic ladder? By all indications the rate of violence
| among the very wealthy is not dissimilar from those lower on
| the socioeconomic ladder. Why would you think homelessness is
| a cliff through which people suddenly become drastically more
| violent, especially considering how people like Putin and
| drug lords are extremely wealthy while paying people lower on
| the socioeconomic rung to do violence on their behalf to
| protect their economic interests?
| searealist wrote:
| Would you want your kids to be around homeless drug
| addicts? Yes or no?
| vlovich123 wrote:
| So the logic is we should jail all the people I don't
| want my kids around?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| This is exactly how you get Bell Riots.
|
| Which are, surprisingly, half a year overdue by now!
| olyjohn wrote:
| Wait until you see what happens in 2026.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Yeah, it's pretty clear by now that the meddling of
| Romulan Time Travelers keeps pushing the events further
| into the future. So I'd expect WW3 no sooner than 2027.
|
| Stopping Bell Riots from happening was quite a feat,
| though. Based on the real-world reports of the last few
| years, I was _sure_ that this particular event is bound
| to happen exactly when Star Trek originally predicted it.
| yawgmoth wrote:
| In America, there are plenty of housed drug addicts. Your
| question is too simple to represent reality.
| lotsoweiners wrote:
| You didn't answer the question.
| bloomingkales wrote:
| _If a black person attacks you, does that mean that black
| people are then violent?_
|
| That's the playbook. Do they not do this with black people?
| Immigrants? Trans? China? Homeless?
|
| It's all they do. It's their one play, and this playbook
| that they all subscribe to caused a lot of problems. That's
| all.
|
| We must look at the package of beliefs, none of this is
| isolated.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| I'm not sure why this is downvoted. Blaming marginalized
| groups for social ills is indeed a very old political
| playbook.
| bloomingkales wrote:
| Closet maga in the house, just cutting the tall grass to
| see the snake heads.
| briandear wrote:
| > they don't seem to actually pose a higher issue of safety
| than anyone else you encounter in your daily life.
|
| Not sure what the studies say, but I don't need a
| weatherman to tell me when it's raining outside.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Facts schmacts. We should make decisions by what feels
| true.
| nullc wrote:
| Most policy is set by gut because we lack the data and
| lack a sufficient understanding of the limitations of the
| data we have. Sometimes we launder gut through truthy
| data strawmen, to our detriment.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts. When
| you don't, pound the table. Please stop pounding the
| proverbial table and stick to facts.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| At this point it sounds like you'd just flip the board,
| not matter how many comparisons, studies, case studies,
| and anecdotes are noted. Can't make a horse drink.
| spoonjim wrote:
| If we imprisoned people for playing their music on
| speakerphone in public there would be a lot fewer murders
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| No, there wouldn't be.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| You may want to go see the doctor about your humor bone.
| It seems to have been amputated.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| It wasn't a funny joke given the context.
| nullc wrote:
| The message you are responding to did not say anything
| about homeless people in general, nor anything about race,
| nor economic standing.
|
| Being a victim of violence is entirely compatible with
| being a perpetrator of violence. I believe that is very
| often the case.
|
| But if you ever have a person in a crisp tailored suit come
| out nowhere at you with a knife in an effort to murder you
| for no reason than delusion or perhaps a desire to steal
| your backpack, please let me know.
|
| This isn't a remark on wealthy people being more or less
| capable of physical violence, but rather that untreated
| serious mental illness is usually incompatible with
| maintaining a high maintenance lifestyle. While headwinds
| probably mean that many of the violent people on the SF
| streets did come from unprivileged backgrounds, I'm sure
| people from all different starting points end up there too.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| I was highlighting the logical fallacy being made with
| this provocative statement:
|
| > To those whose lives have been irreparably harmed by
| the violent mentally ill people inhabiting SF's streets
| and parks while the police stand idle and billions of
| their tax dollars are spent annually failing to solve the
| problem-- it might hit a bit differently
|
| The logic is that if your life is harmed by a violent
| mentally ill homeless person, then all homeless mentally
| ill people are more prone to causing such behavior. It's
| flawed and I was purposefully making a provocative
| statement. A statement I might add that has actually been
| made in the past with much of the same emotional
| reasoning - I was hoping the jarring racism would
| resonante and share much of the same callous tone being
| displayed.
|
| > This isn't a remark on wealthy people being more or
| less capable of physical violence, but rather that
| untreated serious mental illness is usually incompatible
| with maintaining a high maintenance lifestyle
|
| I remember when Bob Lee was murdered in SF and everyone
| came out of the woodwork claiming it's the supposedly
| violent mentally ill homeless people who clearly must
| have been responsible (it wasn't). It's important to
| separate the baseless narrative from the actual facts on
| the ground. Mentally ill and homeless make people _feel_
| uneasy and unsafe but the actual data suggests in reality
| they're not so much different.
| nullc wrote:
| > I remember when Bob Lee was murdered in SF and everyone
| came out of the woodwork claiming it's the supposedly
| violent mentally ill homeless people who clearly must
| have been responsible (it wasn't). ... not so much
| different
|
| We can go back through the threads if you like, but it
| certainly wasn't everyone. My bet was on it being related
| to the yet unresolved theft of a ~billion dollars from
| FTX using phenomenal amounts of mobilcoin.
|
| Instead it was a less interesting story: A drug user
| under the influence killed another drug user they knew
| well over an interpersonal dispute.
|
| People doing dumb shit attacking other people they know
| who are also engaged in dumb shit is enormously different
| from being attacked by a stranger out of nowhere while
| minding your own business. People rightfully feel less
| safe regarding risk that they don't have much control
| over vs risk they have more control over.
|
| And we should treat it differently. No amount of policing
| can ever make you safe-- ultimately we all have to keep
| ourselves safe. FAFO is a law of the universe that we
| can't legislate out of existence, but we can adopt
| policies that increase or decrease the risk of random
| violence.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| > San Francisco is home to much in the way of visible
| public misery, unnerving street behavior and overt drug
| use. Its property crime rate has long been high, and the
| police clearance rate for property crimes has long been
| minimal. But the city's violent crime rate is at a near-
| historic low, and is lower than most mid-to-large-sized
| cities.
|
| [1]
|
| Seems like violence is at an all time low, meaning the
| city is actually safer than ever. In fact, in 2024
| violent crimes fell another 14% [2]. So if the goal truly
| is safety, we should keep doing whatever it is we're
| doing because we're on a fantastic roll of making the
| city safer.
|
| [1] https://missionlocal.org/2023/04/bob-lee-killing-
| arrest-made...
|
| [2] https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/san-
| francisco-2024...
| nullc wrote:
| You know what also causes low police reports? Police
| dissuading people from making them or refusing to take
| them, and people not bothering to contact police because
| they believe (correctly or otherwise) the police won't do
| anything about it, or because they believe police
| response will be dangerous or overkill... also people
| self-protecting by avoiding dangerous areas or times,
| avoiding being alone, or leaving the city entirely (e.g.
| SF population decreased 9.42% in 2024 according to the
| internets).
|
| Homicide rates are more reliable, since it's not
| something that can easily go unreported. But there is a
| lot of room for violent crime that is short of homicide.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| https://sfstandard.com/2024/12/31/homicides-down-san-
| francis...
|
| > The 2024 downward trend was evident early in the year
| and was clearer by July, when police statistics showed a
| 39% drop in homicides from the first half of 2023,
| alongside significant declines in some violent and
| property crimes.
|
| Wouldn't it make sense that if homicides are down then so
| is violent crime? It would be strange if they didn't
| track together for the most part.
|
| It's interesting the kind of alternative explanations
| that you start bringing out when the narrative you have
| doesn't agree with the data.
|
| Oh and look:
|
| > Between 2022 and 2024, chronic homelessness increased
| by 11% with 2,989 people experiencing chronic
| homelessness in 2024. Thirty-five percent of the total
| homeless population is chronically homeless, a rate
| similar to 2022.
|
| Weird how the homeless population stayed the same yet
| violent crime decreased. It's almost like they're not the
| ones that are behind the violence statistics.
|
| https://www.sf.gov/reports--september-2024--2024-point-
| time-...
| sweeter wrote:
| I think it is an understandable reaction. They're a long
| history of articles like "man saves multiple orphans from the
| orphan crushing machine" and people go "ahhh that's so sweet"
| and nobody stops to ask "why do we have an orphan crushing
| machine and why can't do anything about that?"
|
| I think it's important to do both.
| rsktaker wrote:
| Wonderful analogy
| red75prime wrote:
| > why can't do anything about that
|
| Maybe because it's not the orphan crushing machine, but the
| lack of the low functioning orphan saving machine. Or a mix
| of both.
| username332211 wrote:
| I get the impression that the reaction right now is more
| likely to be caused by someone in government turning off a
| lot of those orphan crushing machines recently.
|
| And the only thing to show for it is gangs of feral orphans
| raping and pillaging. (If I can stretch the metaphor a bit
| too much.)
|
| I suspect if someone did a survey, they'd find that most
| places in the internet have grown consistently less
| empathetic in terms of social policy since mid 2020.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Did you read the article? It seems like the cycle of doom
| these people are in where a) there's an impossible to
| navigate beauracracy b) the beauracracy is setting up zero
| tolerance policy to kick them out when they're just
| starting to try to make their way. It doesn't sound like
| the orphan crushing machines were ever truly turned off.
| username332211 wrote:
| I did. The main zero-tolerance policy referred to in the
| article is someone getting into a fight with staff and
| roommates at a social care facility.
|
| You condemn that policy, so I suppose you think this
| should be tolerated to a degree?
|
| Let's say that a homeless shelter abolished it's zero-
| tolerance policy. Staff and other occupants can now be
| assaulted a few times, before someone gets kicked out.
|
| Who'd work at this facility? At this point, you aren't
| looking for social workers, you're looking for _prison
| guards_. They 'd treat their charges with the same love
| and compassion that correctional officers are known for.
|
| Who'd go into this facility? Would a non-violent peaceful
| person even want to be sheltered there?
|
| Do you really think a facility like that will help
| _anyone_?
|
| Suddenly a zero-tolerance policy towards violence isn't
| such a bad idea, is it? Maybe, just maybe there is no
| orphan crushing machine, is there?
| vlovich123 wrote:
| You're seeing up a false dichotomy. For one, the fight
| wasn't with staff, it was with a random roommate he was
| paired with. Your equating the two when they're not equal
| at all. I don't know about you but I've always gotten to
| pick my roommates.
|
| > Ronnie was always very clear about his needs. He knows
| he's a volatile person. He doesn't want to be in a shared
| room, especially with a stranger
|
| So perhaps listening to what the people need instead of
| forcing them into unwinnable situations is the right
| answer. If your question is how you scale personalized
| care in a way that's financially sustainable I don't
| know. But pretending like the orphan crushing machine was
| turned off, to use your words, isn't capturing the
| picture as I'm seeing it. Seems pretty crush happy.
| username332211 wrote:
| Read the article again. There was a violent incident with
| the staff as well. The system did listen to that man's
| needs. It provided him with a hotel room all to himself.
| Here's the result:
|
| > All seemed to be going well. But in September,
| Morrisette got into a fight with staff at the Monarch and
| was evicted. "It was devastating," Barrows said. Because
| she was out of town dealing with a family crisis, she
| couldn't intervene or help him lodge an appeal.
|
| > It angered her that one bout of bad behavior could cost
| him so dearly. Given his background and mental health
| issues, the Monarch should have cut him more slack, she
| thought.
| bombcar wrote:
| It's always easy to volunteer others to be assaulted.
|
| Prison guards get extra pay compared to the work they do,
| and great benefits, to compensate for the assaults.
|
| Hotel staff do not.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Nowhere did I suggest that housing homeless in general
| purpose hotels is a good idea. If that's the housing
| that's available, then the staff need to be trained and
| capable of handling such issues. And since density might
| be higher than normal, you need lots of people around who
| can help deescalate situations before they reach violence
| and to council the people who have such needs on how to
| better manage their anger. But all of that costs money to
| run well, money most people aren't willing to spend
| because "eww homeless" or "it's their mess, I shouldn't
| be paying for it". So you end up spending a lot on half
| measures that helps no one.
| bombcar wrote:
| You didn't, but she clearly thought that in the
| circumstances they should have "given him more chances":
|
| > Given his background and mental health issues, the
| Monarch should have cut him more slack, she thought.
|
| Which is the equivalent of "hotel staff should just take
| abuse".
| aprilthird2021 wrote:
| We don't have anything like a machine that causes
| homelessness though. Homelessness has existed for thousands
| of years if not all of human existence and we are probably
| the closest any society has gotten to eradicating it
| entirely. We are dealing with probably the hard last 10% of a
| hard problem. It's just not at all as if we have a terrible
| system that leads to these outcomes. On the contrary, we've
| built many systems to successfully prevent these outcomes.
| They're just not perfect
| mordae wrote:
| No, we have a system that needs low degree of poverty to
| scare everyone into compliance.
|
| That's why they say capitalism is based in fear. That's why
| we have dreams of Star Trek.
| presentation wrote:
| lol you make it sound like SF is the normal state of things
| when it's one of the only places in the developed world
| with these issues
| lazide wrote:
| SF is the left wing version of the headline 'nothing can
| be done about school shootings, says the only nation
| where this regularly occurs'.
|
| And while it is a magnet for this kind of problem, San
| Jose and Los Angeles have similar issues.
|
| Part of the problem being, they're one of the easiest
| places to be/exist if you're homeless. Not that it's
| necessarily easy or pleasant, but compared to Chicago,
| New York City, or some random suburb? You bet.
| screye wrote:
| Nyc has more homeless people, but they're sheltered. [1]
| California homeless have higher rates of mental illness
| and drug abuse.
|
| It's this trifecta that people complain about -
| unsheltered, mentally ill and addicted. If we can solve
| any one, that feeling of abject squalor goes away.
|
| [1] - https://open.substack.com/pub/dynomight/p/homeless
| tsimionescu wrote:
| If you were talking about disease or poverty, you might
| have a point, but homelessness has never been as big of an
| issue as it is in certain parts of California or more
| broadly the USA today, except for certain refugee crises.
|
| And a very basic part of it is simply geometry: the more
| people you have in a limited area, the harder it is to
| build homes for all of them. Historically, there simply
| were FAR fewer people, and so finding place for homes was
| never a huge issue. The cost of housing is mostly property,
| not construction costs.
| ninalanyon wrote:
| > the more people you have in a limited area,
|
| The US is huge with a low population density, why not
| just expand the cities a bit or build a few new ones? Is
| there some reason why this can't be done?
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Unfortunately the majority of the USA, even where people
| don't live, is valuable private property one way or
| another. Back when there were fewer people and especially
| agriculture was much more manual labor intensive, it
| simply wasn't possible to work every last bit of land, so
| building new houses at the edge of town was not generally
| a huge problem (not that people didn't care about
| ownership, of course, but they cared less - i.e. it was
| cheaper). Today it is, since every bit of land you build
| houses on means removing that land from some other
| economic purpose.
| c0redump wrote:
| This is more or less what the trump administration says
| they want to do
|
| > Throughout his campaign, Trump focused on deregulation,
| tax cuts and reducing mortgage rates. In speeches,
| including one at the Economic Club of New York in
| September and a press conference in August, Trump
| reiterated his promise to reduce regulatory barriers and
| vowed to make federal land available for extensive
| housing projects.
|
| https://www.housingwire.com/articles/trump-housing-build-
| fed...
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| So, how we funding this while getting less taxes,
| especially for the rich?
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| We do, but it's not as opaque and obvious as an orphan
| crushing machine. There's still systems in place that at
| best ignore and at best accelerate such homelessness
| issues.
| optimalsolver wrote:
| HN readers might be interested to know that the machine's
| codebase was recently ported to C++ 17 from Fortran. It was a
| nightmare to maintain!
| ninetyninenine wrote:
| I mean the article dances around it. I hate to say this, but we
| have to face reality.
|
| It is empathy that is in great part responsible for for the
| crime ridden shit show that is much of SF.
|
| How do we balance empathy while making SF not a gigantic pile
| of shit? I don't think there is an answer here. It's choose
| one, or choose the other.
| slantedview wrote:
| I thought it was expensive housing.
| ninetyninenine wrote:
| You thought wrong. SF gave out free syringes and created
| laws that were empathetic to robbers and thieves.
|
| https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/san-francisco-sign-
| stolen-...
| kurikuri wrote:
| What does that snopes article have to do with what you
| said?
|
| Free syringes make sense because people will find
| disease-prone means to get their fix, and then they end
| up in emergency rooms requiring more expensive care.
| ninetyninenine wrote:
| The sign is a satirical prank made to show awareness of a
| specific law.
| majormajor wrote:
| Which part of that link is the part you mean to
| emphasize? Is it just Prop 47? Cause then a more direct
| link to it than to a picture of a fake sign would
| probably be more compelling. (And in that case, that's
| not a city-level law anyway.)
| ninetyninenine wrote:
| The sign illustrates the spirit of the law. I'd rather
| talk about that then the technicalities of a legal
| document.
| notthemessiah wrote:
| > SF ... created laws that were empathetic to robbers and
| thieves.
|
| You're right in that SF does way too much to accommodate
| robber barons, tech moguls, heavily-subsidized Silicon
| Valley industries, and housing speculators.
| ta1243 wrote:
| That link proves you wrong
| throw16180339 wrote:
| The sign refers to Proposition 47 (https://en.wikipedia.o
| rg/wiki/2014_California_Proposition_47), a statewide
| initiative that passed in 2014; it's absurd to blame the
| city of San Francisco for it.
| archagon wrote:
| "We have to face reality" is a thought-terminating cliche.
| The causes of homelessness are myriad and there's a ton of
| conservative propaganda denigrating left-leaning politics.
| Also, many would beg to differ that SF is a "gigantic pile of
| shit."
| ninetyninenine wrote:
| So? Did I say it wasn't myriad? Tons of SF policies are
| responsible for it.
|
| >Also, many would beg to differ that SF is a "gigantic pile
| of shit."
|
| It's like the myriad of people living in North Korea who
| think it's the greatest country in the world. There's
| reality and then there's people who don't face it.
| archagon wrote:
| > _Tons of SF policies are responsible for it._
|
| Which ones? Are there stats showing before/after unhoused
| numbers?
|
| > _There 's reality and then there's people who don't
| face it._
|
| I guess I'm just too brainwashed to be miserable living
| in the Mission.
| ninetyninenine wrote:
| Are you not aware that San Francisco was the site of the
| biggest population exodus out of any city? You may not be
| miserable but if you're unable to comprehend why that
| exodus happened then you're completely out of touch.
|
| I'm too lazy to find stats and stats may not exist
| anyway. You don't need science to prove to you the ground
| exists when you get up in the morning. You use your
| common sense for that.
| archagon wrote:
| I'm hearing a lot of appeal to emotion, not facts.
|
| With regard to migration, I frequently see expensive CoL
| and remote work vis-a-vis the pandemic cited as primary
| reasons, not homelessness or crime. If you have reputable
| sources saying otherwise, please cite them.
| ninetyninenine wrote:
| There's tons and tons of facts. Just no stats. I can
| point you or you can point yourself to dozens of articles
| and opinion pieces. But stats I'm too lazy to find and
| they likely don't exist.
|
| You go continue to live in a universe where you ignore
| general sentiment and fill in reality with your own happy
| construct where a void of stats and science exists. Did
| they do a research study on whether people enjoy eating
| feces? No? I guess I can make up whatever garbage I want
| around this area now. Yes people love eating shit. (This
| is what you and all the science maniacs around HN love
| doing).
|
| No science exists on how much people hate San Francisco
| even though there are reams and reams of people talking
| about how bad things are? Ok fill it in with your own
| delusion of reality. San Francisco is great. I love the
| whiff of fresh human shit I occasionally get when the
| right breeze just waffs by under my nose. I love stepping
| on broken syringes when I go run.
| james4k wrote:
| Empathy created the housing crisis?
| ninetyninenine wrote:
| prop 47 and free syringes.
|
| The housing crisis extends across the bay area and SF is
| noticeably shittier then most places int he bay area. So
| it's likely not the housing crisis that is the reason why
| SF is particularly bad.
| notthemessiah wrote:
| San Francisco doesn't even have free Narcan, which many
| US cities do. And of course syringes will flood the
| streets when you don't have safe injection sites. SF
| needs to learn from Portugal on how to address the drug
| crises. Also, it just needs to build denser to
| accommodate housing demand.
| slater wrote:
| > San Francisco doesn't even have free Narcan
|
| It does: https://www.sf.gov/information--overdose-
| prevention-resource...
| vlovich123 wrote:
| People always say this, and yet it just seems more like
| SF is the tip of the spear to changes that the rest of
| the area faces. I remember when people were decrying the
| homeless epidemic in SF only for El Camino in South Bay
| to start having significant homeless population spring
| up. And then LA's housing problem also got markedly
| worse. And people decry that it's "Californian" politics
| only for the same problems to pop up later in their neck
| of the woods. These are growing systemic national and
| global problems with our social fabric falling apart and
| the response for many seems to be "take care of me
| first". You even see it with the huge political backlash
| globally.
| kortilla wrote:
| > People always say this, and yet it just seems more like
| SF is the tip of the spear to changes that the rest of
| the area faces.
|
| This is not correct. SF gets a superset.
|
| Car break-ins in SF were commonplace 25 years ago. They
| never became bad in the South Bay. SF just has
| legitimately bad policies that directly cause a lot of
| their issues.
|
| The housing crisis is about the only thing it has in
| common with the South Bay and that's because it is a
| state issue.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Except housing is a growing problem in other states &
| countries as well.
|
| Car break-ins are because the police were not doing
| anything. They have started trying to finally do
| something about it and made a dent:
| https://www.sf.gov/news--increased-enforcement-against-
| car-b...
|
| But keep in mind that police only ever make positive
| progress on policies in order to extract concessions from
| the city
|
| > "I'm optimistic about the progress we've made in
| reducing the number of auto burglaries in San Francisco,
| but this is just a start," Chief Bill Scott said. "I want
| to thank our officers for their tireless work. The SFPD
| hopes to build on this progress with additional tools,
| like automated license plate readers, to continue making
| arrests and holding perpetrators accountable."
|
| > The City has also reached a 5 year high in applicants
| to join SFPD, which is essential for adding more police
| officers back.
|
| Oh look, the police force is becoming more politically
| powerful & crime is down. Wonder how that happens.
| bombcar wrote:
| SF literally is the tip - it's a peninsula.
|
| Most other cities that have large homeless populations
| aren't on a peninsula so they can eventually shuffle them
| to places that are "out of sight, out of mind."
| olyjohn wrote:
| Because it was re-using the dirty syringes that was
| keeping people off the streets before.
| Redoubts wrote:
| Yes. Bad feel-good policies are the vast majority of the
| problem
| james4k wrote:
| Thank you for expounding. I can only assume we're talking
| about empathy from the real estate lobbyists who control
| housing policy.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| The state controls housing policy.
| james4k wrote:
| Everyone is so informative here. Thank you.
| Redoubts wrote:
| To be direct, construction would look much more like
| Austin, which has lowered rents by actually builds
| things, if your vision of the case were true.
|
| https://x.com/sp6runderrated/status/1879257360344199255?s
| =46...
|
| To act like housing policy is controlled by developers,
| even in this contemptuous jest you exude, is delirious
| and is the remainder of the problem with San Francisco.
| james4k wrote:
| I misinterpreted you as implying a libertarian anti-state
| argument. I had thought I was returning the same energy.
|
| My apologies.
| danem wrote:
| I promise you, its not the "real estate lobbyists" who
| fought to block subsidized housing for teachers in the
| Sunset.
| kortilla wrote:
| If you want to focus on the housing crisis aspect and not
| the policies that enable addiction, then the answer is
| still yes.
|
| Capped property tax increases is a moronic empathy law
| based on "protecting little old ladies on fixed incomes".
| It has resulted in an incentive structure that means all
| home owners are incentivized to block all new housing and
| keep the value of their homes sky rocketing.
|
| The second level of empathy laws causing the housing issue
| is all if the ones that empower NIMBYs to stop housing
| developments.
|
| "Preventing gentrification", "stopping the character of the
| neighborhood from changing", "delays for a 1 year impact
| study" are all empathy motivated laws that caused the
| housing crisis in Cali.
| james4k wrote:
| You are right. Empathy in the literal sense of only being
| able to relate with others that have the same experiences
| and interests. I appreciate that clarity.
| lupusreal wrote:
| Housing is too expensive for many people in many places.
| The normal healthy response to housing being too expensive
| in an area is to live in another area. Only a very small
| minority of people who can't afford housing in a place
| they'd like to live respond by becoming homeless in that
| place. It's simply not a rational response to housing being
| too expensive.
| istjohn wrote:
| It's not easy to leave your social network, job, and home
| to look for better opportunities while living hand to
| mouth. Things happen unexpectedly.
|
| And it's not particularly insightful to point out that
| people who are homeless often have difficulties coping
| with the demands and challenges of life.
| xivzgrev wrote:
| I mean, empathy for a criminal is ensuring they have their
| day in court. Free counsel if they can't afford. Innocent
| until proven guilty.
|
| But their rights can't trump victims, that's not justice.
| Like someone else mentioned prop 47 was a bad idea.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > empathy for a criminal is ensuring they have their day in
| court. Free counsel if they can't afford. Innocent until
| proven guilty
|
| That's not empathy. Empathy is being sympathetic to someone
| based on how similar they are to you. You're talking about
| much older, less relative concepts, such as equality under
| the law and limits on what the state can do to people.
| Aunche wrote:
| > What struck me most was the balance of compassion and
| pragmatism that Amanda brings to her work.
|
| Nothing about this article strikes me as pragmatic. She's
| spending all her energy attempting to help people with the
| least likelihood of success and then gets angry at the system
| when they inevitably fail. The city didn't kick Morrisette out
| of the hotel because they like zero-tolerance policies, but
| because other people deserve a chance a chance to live in a
| free hotel room as well.
| xivzgrev wrote:
| I'm not sure what the right answer is, but asking people who
| are used to rough and tumble life outside to then behave
| civilly indoors with zero tolerance seems...set for failure?
|
| There are those that do succeed but those are certainly the
| most motivated to do so. Others are in transition: know they
| should get indoors but know their difficulties.
|
| Rather than kicking them out, maybe they are required to
| attend some mandatory psych sessions. Maybe they go maybe
| they don't but at least there support to help them work thru
| their issues of why they blew up at the staff (as in this
| instance).
| Aunche wrote:
| > asking people who are used to rough and tumble life
| outside to then behave civilly indoors with zero tolerance
| seems...set for failure?
|
| This is what I'm saying the ranger is doing. Someone who
| gets extremely distressed by indoor living is not a good
| candidate taxpayer funded indoor living. On the other hand,
| that housing given to someone who is capable of navigating
| welfare bureaucracy on their own may actually enable
| someone who is at risk spiraling down a path of no return
| to turn their life around.
| bbarnett wrote:
| I've always wondered why such people don't live in a
| rural area. You could literally set aside parks for
| people wanting to live in this fashion, used to living in
| this fashion, but also provide facilities (bedding, small
| cabins, water supplies, washing machines, etc, etc).
|
| You'd need, I think, to have security guards on hand. Not
| to stop drug use, but instead to stop violence against
| other homeless, to intervene if medical attention is
| required, and so on.
|
| While the costs would be higher than some other
| solutions, it would be lower (I think) than paying for
| private housing.
|
| Of course, you'd have to force move people, and that's
| not going to happen. That is, unless you make squatting
| in a park a crime, and the result is "you're going to be
| incarcerated in this very nice outdoor place" the "jail".
|
| Maybe a medical order.
|
| My point is, I don't see an issue with some of your
| logic. Some people won't transition to inside living, or
| being close to others.
|
| But if you take people used to living in parks, move them
| to a park with cabins(tiny homes), and state run
| water/facilities, the cost might be the same, but they'd
| have a warm bed, etc.
| lupusreal wrote:
| A few people might be cut out to be rural hermits, but
| most need other people to fuel their lifestyle with food,
| booze and drugs, etc. Hard to buy fent by stealing
| bicycles if you're in a remote park.
| ninalanyon wrote:
| What everyone wants, and these people want more than most
| perhaps, is autonomy. Your idea might work so long as
| there are few rules that would cause people to be kicked
| out and so long as money is also provided. It probably
| won't work if people are forced into it because being
| forced into things is one of the reason they are in their
| situation already.
|
| More carrot and less stick, more compassion and less
| puritanism might have a chance of working.
| bombcar wrote:
| The people who are capable of this do this on their own.
|
| The California high desert is full of variations of this
| in shacks and trailers across the nearly uninhabited
| expanse.
|
| The biggest problem is support, but if they can navigate
| enough to get government assistance they can survive for
| quite a long time.
| pkaeding wrote:
| Your last idea reminds me of https://mlf.org/community-
| first/
|
| From what I hear, it is quite successful, giving their
| residents the dignity and autonomy they need to stand on
| their own.
| lazide wrote:
| The ranger is a hero. And hero's are often toxic in long
| running scenarios for exactly the reason outlined - they
| are trying to make up for a systemic failure through self
| sacrifice, therefore enabling the underlying system
| failure.
| hnbad wrote:
| This is needlessly cynical. The hero isn't toxic. The
| _narrative_ of an individual effort in lieu of calling
| out the systemic issue is what 's toxic. I don't see any
| way she could have better spent her energy contributing
| to systemic change whereas by doing what she does she
| literally improves the lives of others.
|
| Favoring narratives of individual heroes over narratives
| of systemic changes is a cultural problem. Whether it's
| Atlas Shrugged, the Odyssey or Harry Potter. It instills
| a learned helplessness and an artificial desire for a
| "strong man fix things" that can be very difficult to
| overcome. But it also atomizes and fractures society and
| benefits those with the most individual wealth and power.
|
| The ranger is a hero. What she is doing is good. But she
| shouldn't have to do it. And nobody should have to do so
| much. The article intentionally buries its lede: if this
| is what it takes to save one person, how can we save
| thousands? The implied answer is again helplessness: of
| course this isn't scalable so we can't. What she is doing
| is too much for one person, so we can't expect it of
| others. But the real answer is that literally none of
| this would be necessary if the system were actually built
| to help these people.
|
| Her work does not require a herculean effort because it
| is difficult. It requires so much effort because it is
| being made difficult. The right question isn't how can we
| scale this, the right question is how can we make it easy
| enough that we don't need her to be a hero. The question
| of scalability answers itself once you've removed the
| obstacles.
| AStonesThrow wrote:
| perhaps the pervasive narratives of systemic toxicity and
| chronic social issues that get us down? are those good
| for society? should we listen to those news stories all
| day? and believe that things are so awful that There
| Oughtta Be A Law And Reform?
|
| those who cried out to quote Tax The Rich unquote, were
| likewise upset by the tariffs being imposed which are
| taxes on the rich... a really uniform and effective one!
| taxing corporations by tariffs is much father reaching
| than taxing individuals. individual heroes.
|
| those who cannot interpret epic fantasy sagas as allegory
| or larger than Life metaphors are already helpless and
| they just need entertainment and some opiates.
| lazide wrote:
| that's what i said?
| hnbad wrote:
| You said heroes are enabling the system.
|
| Hero _narratives_ are enabling the system.
|
| Those are two different things. She likely doesn't
| consinder herself heroic. The story about her however is
| written in such a way to portray her as heroic. It
| doesn't leave room for any other option than helplessness
| and hoping for more heroes to emerge.
|
| Framing it as _heroes_ being toxic and enabling the
| system suggests accelerationism: if things only get bad
| enough (i.e. if we stop "enabling" the system by trying
| to work around it), the people will see how bad things
| are and demand change. But accelerationism doesn't work.
| When things are bad enough, the people will want a simple
| answer and a promise of a fast change. Stable systemic
| changes don't work fast and they are rarely simple.
|
| To put it another way, heroes aren't toxic, heroes are
| harm reduction. Harm reduction is good because it helps
| people in the here and now. But harm reduction is not a
| solution to problems. Solving problems requires putting
| in the ground work of building bottom-up social
| structures. There's no reason to believe she would be
| just as good and enduring in doing that as she is in what
| she does now. And most importantly, she wouldn't be
| helping those she helps now because she might not even
| see it resulting in change within her lifetime.
|
| So given that heroism doesn't work and letting things get
| worse doesn't work, what now? It sounds like we need a
| hero to take on the herculean task of dismantling the
| individualist atomizing culture norms - oh.
| hnbad wrote:
| > taxpayer funded
|
| I don't understand the reflexive nature many people
| present in jumping this kind of framing. Of course it's
| taxpayer funded. Everything is taxpayer funded. Even when
| it's not literally paid from taxes collected by the
| government, it's probably funded by people who pay taxes.
|
| The price you pay for your groceries funds not just the
| wholesale purchase of the goods you pay for but also the
| labor, facilities, equipment and resources used to
| purchase, deliver, store and sell those goods.
| Considering the total amount of taxes collected versus
| the revenue of the place you get your groceries, you
| probably contribute more of your income to operating that
| place than to any single service funded directly from
| taxes. The amount of those grocery expenses that goes
| directly into profits alone is probably still greater
| than that. Housing first specifically also literally is
| cheaper than the previous approach by reducing expenses
| for medical services, policing and incarceration.
|
| So "taxpayer funded" is neither a meaningful qualifier if
| taken literally nor do its implications stand up to
| scrutiny.
|
| The most common reason for using this phrase is an
| emotional appeal to selfishness. _Your_ money is being
| spent without _your_ say on services _you_ don 't benefit
| from. I find that framing morally appalling but even so,
| what is the alternative? What the US did before was more
| expensive. Not housing people means more health issues
| and ER visits. Throwing them in prison means housing and
| feeding them at a massive multiple of the cost of a
| housing first initiative. If you want to save costs
| without spending money on housing, I guess you could cut
| their access to medical services but then you might as
| well allow law enforcement to shoot them on sight as the
| outcome will be the same.
|
| > On the other hand, that housing given to someone who is
| capable of navigating welfare bureaucracy on their own
|
| What you're describing is triage, not housing the
| homeless. If your housing program is small enough that
| you have to engage in triage and turn people away, it's
| not addressing homelessness, it's addressing a fraction
| of the homeless population. It's better than nothing,
| sure, but it's not enough.
|
| Also triage means weighing the necessary resources for
| treatment against the likelihood of recovery and the
| likely extent of the recovery. You don't treat someone
| who can walk it off but you also don't treat someone
| who's in very poor health or too far gone to be saved
| without using a disproportionate amount of resources.
|
| Triage is not how you organize a hospital. Triage is how
| you respond to an overwhelming emergency situation
| without access to necessary resources. Triage is a last
| resort measure to reduce the number of people who will
| die, not a strategy for helping people survive and
| thrive.
|
| Homelessness is not a natural disaster, not a spontaneous
| pandemic. Homelessness is a longstanding social issue
| most often directly arising from poverty and lack of
| mental health support. If your concern is with the
| support being wasted on people with worse chances and not
| support being insufficiently funded for that kind of
| decision not having to be made, I think you might be
| overestimating your humanitarianism.
| pc86 wrote:
| "Taxpayer funded" pretty obviously means "paid for or
| subsidized by the government directly" and it seems bad
| faith to pretend you don't know that.
|
| Of course you can probably find some government subsidy
| somewhere and trace it to grocery stores but nobody
| realistically claims grocery stores are taxpayer funded.
|
| The government directly putting homeless in hotels over
| and over again is very clearly taxpayer funded and
| everybody knows what is meant when someone says that.
| DangitBobby wrote:
| If you think this is a reply to their comment, you must
| not have read it.
| hnbad wrote:
| Thanks. To clarify for those who can't muster the
| attention span to make it to the second paragraph: my
| point is that the phrase is a red herring designed to
| trigger an emotional response because we're bad at
| comprehending how miniscule our relative contribution to
| each "taxpayer funded" expense actually is.
|
| The parent of your post is a good example of how
| effective it is at doing that, especially when combined
| with the claim of an apparent wasteful use of that money.
| If you pay tens of thousands of dollars in taxes and hear
| about a million dollars of "taxpayer money" being
| supposedly wasted, your emotional response reflects an
| imagined scenario where all of your taxes went into that
| alleged waste even if individual income taxes alone
| represent over $2 trillion (i.e. million million, or
| thousand billion) of the US federal budget and your
| actual relative lifetime contribution to that individual
| project can't even be measured in cents.
|
| Not to mention that the news sources referring to that
| spending as waste may be reporting on inaccurate or
| incomplete information (even when deferring to an
| official source) and may be misrepresenting or omitting
| the actual economic efficiency of that spending (e.g. the
| entire "condoms to Hamas" incident where the official
| announcement turned out to not only apparently have
| mistaken about US medical aid in Gaza specifically but
| also misrepresent the total spending on contraceptives
| for AIDS relief by the US across the globe as going to a
| single place - the benefit to Americans of providing
| contraceptives to HIV hotspots should be obvious enough).
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Grocery stores are subsidized by the government. I would
| call pretty much any grocery chain store that gets
| government handouts to be taxpayer funded, yes.
|
| >The government directly putting homeless in hotels over
| and over again is very clearly taxpayer funded and
| everybody knows what is meant when someone says that.
|
| And why are we framing is as bad? You're either funding
| their low income housing, or you are funding their jail
| cell (and they are not generating any real sense of
| income to stimulate the economy).
| Aunche wrote:
| > Your money is being spent without your say on services
| you don't benefit from.
|
| I don't mind strangers benefitting from my tax dollars.
| No where do I even imply this, so this idea is completely
| coming from your own preconceived ideas about those who
| disagree with you. The problem with this case is that I'm
| not sure _anyone_ is benefiting from these tax dollars.
| These men aren 't asking for help. They're being
| pressured into accepting help. Someone resourceful enough
| to trap racoons isn't fundamentally so helpless that they
| require 7 months of handholding to apply for temporary
| housing. He required 7 months because that wasn't
| something he was interested in the first place but is
| willing to occasionally humor a pretty ranger. She would
| have much more success meeting them where they're at. For
| example, she can set up an arrangement where the rangers
| will stop harassing the campers and tearing down their
| encampments if they keep the surroundings clean.
|
| > What you're describing is triage, not housing the
| homeless
|
| Yes, I'm talking about triage because that's exactly what
| the ranger is doing.
| hnbad wrote:
| > She would have much more success meeting them where
| they're at. For example, she can set up an arrangement
| where the rangers will stop harassing the campers and
| tearing down their encampments if they keep the
| surroundings clean.
|
| We must have read different articles because the one I
| read stated that her job description is literally to
| remove people from these parks, just in a more humane way
| than just harassing the campers and tearing down the
| campsites. You can make an argument that they should be
| allowed to let them live there but her job isn't simply
| to keep the park clean but to stop people from living
| there.
|
| > Yes, I'm talking about triage because that's exactly
| what the ranger is doing.
|
| Again, we seem to have read different articles because to
| me it didn't read like she was prioritizing specific
| individuals for movement into housing using any of the
| considerations I described.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Also, to repeat a point I often make about this ...
|
| Until sometime around the 1980s, even in the USA poverty
| and homelessness were scene as systemic failures - "our
| system should not lead to those results". Post-Reagan,
| the attitude has shifted dramatically and now poverty and
| homelessness are broadly seen as personal failures, a
| mixture of poor morals, bad character and weak decision
| making. We even used to be a little inclined towards a
| potential role for the state in helping individuals deal
| with bad luck, but now bad luck is seen as "gravitating"
| towards individuals whose fault is all theirs.
|
| This has necessarily drastically altered government
| policies at the local, state and federal level. We are
| much, much worse for it, no matter which interpretation
| of poverty and homelessness is more factually correct.
| bnralt wrote:
| > I'm not sure what the right answer is, but asking people
| who are used to rough and tumble life outside to then
| behave civilly indoors with zero tolerance seems...set for
| failure?
|
| This is true, and that's why housing first is a terrible
| policy (I've seen it fail spectacularly first hand). Many
| of these people simply can't take care of themselves, and
| putting them in free apartments doesn't fix their
| situation, but it does make life miserable for long-term
| residents. All while being extremely expensive.
|
| > Maybe they go maybe they don't
|
| Here they have frequent wellness checks. It doesn't solve
| anything. This shouldn't be a surprise - someone who's
| incapable of living civilly when given a free apartment
| likely isn't going to be a person who's going to put the
| time and effort into mental health classes.
| vidarh wrote:
| You seem to be assuming a specific version of housing
| first that is by no means the only option, and then
| dismissing the concept as a whole on that basis.
| bnralt wrote:
| My "specific version" is the version used by government
| agencies, which specifically states that the government
| is giving people free permanent housing without requiring
| prerequisites.
|
| HUD[1]:
|
| "Housing First is an approach to quickly and successfully
| connect individuals and families experiencing
| homelessness to permanent housing without preconditions
| and barriers to entry, such as sobriety, treatment or
| service participation requirements."
|
| California Department of Housing and Community
| Development[2]:
|
| "Housing First is an approach to serving people
| experiencing homelessness that recognizes a homeless
| person must first be able to access a decent, safe place
| to live, that does not limit length of stay (permanent
| housing)...Under the Housing First approach, anyone
| experiencing homelessness should be connected to a
| permanent home as quickly as possible, and programs
| should remove barriers to accessing the housing, like
| requirements for sobriety or absence of criminal
| history."
|
| [1] https://files.hudexchange.info/resources/documents/Ho
| using-F... [2] https://www.hcd.ca.gov/grants-
| funding/active-funding/docs/ho...
| vidarh wrote:
| The versions used by _US_ government agencies.
|
| Presumably you're aware that's not the only option, as
| your last comment before the one above was on a thread
| about the Finnish approach, which has found it to be
| cheaper and to act as a gateway to get people other help.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| The finnish approach isn't on the same scale as the
| number of homeless people in the US and is hard to apply.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Well we spent more time ignoring the issue. Of course we
| need to climb more to get out. I don't think "but it's
| hard" is a good mentality when it comes to solving hard
| problems.
| throaway89 wrote:
| Its been a success in Canada when tried
| https://www.cba.org/Publications-Resources/Practice-
| Tools/Ta...
| zdragnar wrote:
| > maybe they are required to attend some mandatory psych
| session
|
| According to the social workers I know who work with this
| population, there is a persistent fear that any form of
| offered mental health help is a trap for institutionalizing
| people.
|
| By and large, people who are chronically homeless due to
| mental health issues will prefer to remain homeless over
| being required to see a psychiatrist and having to take
| medicine, or so I'm told.
| lazide wrote:
| The issue is also that it's selection bias - folks who
| permanently benefit from the treatment leave the system,
| so you end up with a more and more concentrated
| population of people who don't (or refuse to) permanently
| benefit from it.
|
| Barring other factors, of course.
| hnbad wrote:
| The obvious problem is that that fear is entirely
| justified and rational.
|
| Even if you disregard history, the current POTUS
| literally talked about concentrating homeless populations
| into centralized camps away from the general population.
|
| How realistic this fear is and how probable it is, is of
| course debatable. But given that these people probably
| didn't have any positive experiences with mental
| healthcare and institutions and that the public discourse
| often describes them as analogous to vermin or disease
| and focuses on "removing them" rather than helping them,
| trusting a psychiatrist - especially if it means having
| to go to them, especially into a clinical environment -
| let alone taking psychopharmaceuticals seems like it
| would require quite the leap of faith.
| tiahura wrote:
| We used to have work farms, SF had a few. They were shut
| down by the same counterculture types that said turning a
| blind eye to drugs and vagrancy wouldn't be a problem.
| mordae wrote:
| I am sorry to hear that the richest country on earth cannot
| afford tiny private flats for anyone and everyone unhoused.
| Aunche wrote:
| I mean yes. When engineers making six figures can't afford
| a flat in the bay area thanks to nimbyism, then you can't
| expect the government to either.
| truckerbill wrote:
| That's kinda the whole point, but noone is framing that
| situation as the problem. They would rather think that
| homeless people are innately inferior and thus deserve to
| suffer, rather than victims of circumstance in one way or
| another.
| doomroot wrote:
| > but noone is framing that situation as the problem.
|
| I think yimbys are framing that situation as THE problem.
| truckerbill wrote:
| I meant here, though I think there is also tendency in
| general
|
| As a side note I think the state of current discourse has
| shown that anything other than concrete language presents
| too much opportunity to talk past each other. So I don't
| think talking about yimbys is specific enough (and its
| too tempting to strawman). Same for magas and libs, they
| are broad labels for a broad spectrum of people
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| So, what do we talk about then? Humans are pretty bad at
| multitasking so when speaking generally to a public you
| want to focus on one issue at a time.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| No one is framing it that way because it misses the
| nuance of these homeless peoples individual issues and
| how we might actually treat them. When people complain
| about homeless people in their neighborhood, they aren't
| talking about the invisible homeless who are only
| homeless due to economic circumstance and might be couch
| surfing or living in their car. They are talking almost
| exclusively about the most visible population of homeless
| people, those who have severe mental health or drug
| addictions and need in patient services for potentially
| all their life.
| presentation wrote:
| The solution increasingly looks like completely replacing
| SF governance - not just be the people and laws but the
| structure too.
| Yeul wrote:
| Sure you can many countries have a social housing
| program... Cities across the world run into the same
| problems SF does you know it is not particularly unique
| or unusual.
|
| Although I am a bit perturbed that there is still such a
| huge problem with drugs when the economy is booming and
| unemployment so low. It points to deeper problems within
| the fabric of American society.
| Aunche wrote:
| A prerequisite to building social housing is to allow
| building housing at all. Social housing projects also
| have to pay for artificially inflated land prices and
| wait years to obtain permits. SF has spent billions of
| dollars on building new social housing in the past
| decade, but that doesn't make a difference when they cost
| millions of dollars a unit to construct.
| lotsoweiners wrote:
| > Although I am a bit perturbed that there is still such
| a huge problem with drugs when the economy is booming and
| unemployment so low. It points to deeper problems within
| the fabric of American society.
|
| I think you're coming at this from the wrong angle. A lot
| of people just really like drugs (and alcohol) and it has
| nothing to do with society getting them down. Surely
| there are plenty of people abusing substances as a coping
| mechanism but I think there are likely a lot more who
| just want to have a good time.
| olyjohn wrote:
| This just sounds like some random-ass assumption if you
| ask me.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >the economy is booming and unemployment so low.
|
| Well that's your first problem. We're hiding the
| underemplyment crisis with "but unemployment is so low!".
| Quality of life for underemplyment is a lot closer to
| homelessness than middle class.
|
| The deeper problem that America is more and more trying
| to focus on the elite over the working class.
| bbarnett wrote:
| That seems a weird assertion.
|
| I just went to apartments.com. Palo Alto (not the
| cheapest place), shows loads of 1 and 2 bedroom
| apartments under and at 3k/month. That's under $40k/year.
|
| This tax calculator shows the generic case of $120k (low
| 'six figures'), as being more than $80k takehome:
|
| https://www.talent.com/tax-calculator/California-120000
|
| That means less than 1/2 of a 'low end' engineering
| salary is taken for housing, and that's without a room-
| mate. Something most people have at the start of their
| career, and before being married (which is another way to
| have a room mate).
|
| Do you actually live in the region? Why do you think
| almost $4k/month of cash in hand, left over after rent
| paid and taxes paid, isn't much?
|
| Why do you think no one can find a place to live, when
| apartments.com show places aplenty?
|
| Are you referring to a specific area, instead of a more
| central place such as Palo Alto?
| michaelt wrote:
| Well, in the US the median _pre-tax household_ income is
| $80k and the median renter spends <35% of their income
| on rent.
|
| Imagine singlehandedly earning 150% of what the average
| _family_ earns, in one of the _richest countries in the
| world_ and living in a _one-bedroom apartment_ - and such
| a low standard of living isn 't even cheap.
|
| The landlords must be laughing all the way to the bank!
| Aunche wrote:
| I wasn't clear. By "afford a flat" I meant outright
| purchase property, which the government would need to do
| to actually solve homelessness.
| flerchin wrote:
| Where do you think the grocery store workers are going to
| live when highly skilled professionals have to roommate
| to make rent?
| dventimi wrote:
| "engineers making six figures" is the cause of San
| Francisco's problems, not "nimbyism."
| throwaway173738 wrote:
| Lawmakers not having the moral courage to stand up to
| NIMBYs are part of the problem, along with people not
| voting for them. Cutting people off at the knees to make
| the grass taller is not a solution.
| dventimi wrote:
| I can't agree with this. At various times over the last
| 30 years, there has been roughly two classes of people in
| SF: "tech workers", and "everyone else." The "everyone
| else" comprises teachers, restaurant workers, retail
| workers, delivery drivers, and others, who cater to the
| whims of "tech workers." "Everyone else" works in
| industries subject to competition, market forces, and the
| ruthless demand for profitability (try keeping a
| restaurant open for 3 losing quarters). "Tech workers"
| work in an industry often shielded from these exigencies,
| cossetted in a pillowy cocoon of VC money. "Everyone
| else" serves the local community. "Tech workers", if they
| serve anybody, tend to be disconnected from the local
| economy and serve national or global markets. Relatedly,
| "tech workers" are paid high salaries that rise quickly.
| "Everyone else" is paid much more modest salaries that
| tend to stagnate. To add insult to injury, not only did
| this set of circumstances arrive in SF, it also arrived
| quickly, in waves, representing a series of shocks. Then
| came the last and possibly the most serious shock: remote
| work. Altogether, this is a recipe for: spiraling costs,
| social fragmentation, homelessness, and political
| turbulence.
|
| Put another way, an ocean of money was poured into a
| thimble and no amount of "increasing supply" is going to
| make a difference. Make it two thimbles, ten thimbles, a
| hundred thimbles, it's still going to leave a mess.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > Put another way, an ocean of money was poured into a
| thimble and no amount of "increasing supply" is going to
| make a difference.
|
| So? The problem is not "too much money", it's too little
| housing. Having lots of highly-paid folks around is
| _good_ for local workers ' incomes; housing scarcity is
| really bad for them. Homelessness happens when people
| can't afford to pay for a home.
| dventimi wrote:
| > _Having lots of highly-paid folks around is good for
| local workers ' incomes_
|
| You're describing income inequality. Personally, I don't
| believe income inequality is good for everybody. I think
| it tends to benefit some people at the expense of others.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| It's also a kind of "income inequality" that those who
| are "disadvantaged" most from it can avoid very easily,
| by voting with their feet. But you don't see very many
| people moving _from_ the highest-income cities in the
| U.S. _to_ places like Appalachia, or for that matter to
| the poorest places in Mexico. People tend to do the exact
| opposite, funnily enough.
| dventimi wrote:
| People did vote with their feet, moving out of the core
| of the Bay Area to its periphery.
|
| https://chatgpt.com/share/67b36262-3c7c-8013-aa61-f1ff808
| 8fb...
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| And if you were speaking faithfully you know there are
| mechanisms by coincidence or design that make it harder
| for the disadvantaged to vote. It's no coincidence that
| your rep is probably only available every other Tuesday
| at 1pm while the disadvantaged are working at one of
| their two jobs.
|
| > But you don't see very many people moving from the
| highest-income cities in the U.S. to places like
| Appalachia
|
| CA declined in population this decade until 2024:
|
| https://apnews.com/article/california-population-growth-
| pand...
|
| So yes, people are moving out.
| selectodude wrote:
| Every time I read this sort of stuff, I ask - do you
| think that the demand to live in San Francisco is
| infinite? For a city that's less than one-half as densely
| populated as Brooklyn, NY, no less? This problem was
| solved 150 years ago.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Even if demand was so large as to be practically
| infinite, all it would mean is that San Francisco becomes
| the local Manhattan equivalent on the West Coast. Which
| in turn means big-government California progressives gets
| a whole lot of additional tax revenue to play with, at
| zero extra cost to the rest of the economy. How is that
| supposed to be a bad thing, exactly?
| dventimi wrote:
| Not necessarily.
|
| https://www.wired.com/story/no-more-deals-san-francisco-
| cons...
| dventimi wrote:
| No, I don't think that the demand to live in San
| Francisco ever has been or ever will be "infinite." I
| also don't think that's a relevant question.
| selectodude wrote:
| Of course it is. You claim that it's impossible for San
| Francisco to satiate demand. That implies that it's
| functionally infinite seeing as it's currently less dense
| than Brooklyn or the north side of Chicago - dense places
| but not quite Manhattan or Manila.
| dventimi wrote:
| > _You claim that it's impossible for San Francisco to
| satiate demand_
|
| No, I don't. I claim it's difficult and unlikely.
|
| EDIT: so long as it offers an urban playground to people
| earning high salaries, that is
| selectodude wrote:
| So then there's obviously infinite demand to live in San
| Francisco. It's not difficult - we're actively
| accomplishing it in other cities that have tons of
| wealthy people (detached single family in my neighborhood
| is >$2mm) and relatively affordable housing (an apartment
| is under $1000/bd).
| dventimi wrote:
| Continue to say there's infinite demand if you like, but
| I won't be joining you.
|
| As for "we're actively accomplishing it in other cities",
| I'm interested in these questions:
|
| 1. Who's "we"?
|
| 2. Which cities?
|
| 3. What _exactly_ is being accomplished?
| selectodude wrote:
| >1. Who's "we"?
|
| Humans.
|
| >2. Which cities?
|
| My example is Chicago.
|
| >3. What exactly is being accomplished?
|
| Letting people who want to live in San Francisco live
| there.
|
| If you're not saying that San Francisco can't build
| enough housing to satiate demand, what _are_ you saying,
| exactly?
| marnett wrote:
| Which of the two classes does San Francisco's billionaire
| capitalist class fit into in your analysis - "tech
| workers?"
|
| Equally curious which the non-working property owners
| fall into as well?
| dventimi wrote:
| Why are you curious? I didn't say there were only two
| classes. I said there's been "roughly" two classes over
| the last 30 years. Add other classes if you want
| (billionaire tech owners who don't code, billionaires in
| non-tech fields like real estate or agriculture or
| petroleum, old-money San Franciscans, millionaire non-
| working property owners who don't know how to open a
| Google Doc), it doesn't affect the conclusions: "tech
| workers" (and the "tech owners" who pay them) are an
| important factor causing many of the problems in SF.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > At various times over the last 30 years, there has been
| roughly two classes of people in SF: "tech workers", and
| "everyone else."
|
| You can always arbitrarily divide people into two groups
| by making one "everybody else", but the two groups you
| name are not coherent classes. (Not even the first, which
| overlaps both [a relatively well paid segment of] the
| working class and the petite bourgeoisie, but especially
| not the second, which spans from the lowest of the
| working class to the highest end of the
| rentier/capitalist class.)
| immibis wrote:
| The problem with rich people is not that they are rich,
| it's the side effects of them being rich which cause
| other people to be poorer. I have no problem with Elon
| owning 10 megayachts if he wants to. Unless he's buying
| so much steel to build his megayachts that no one else
| can get steel things. Then it's a problem. And only then.
|
| Even then, the problem could be Elon buying so much
| steel, _or_ it could be steel manufacturers deliberately
| limiting steel production and only selling it to Elon to
| keep prices high. The latter is what is happening with
| landlords and building restrictions.
| dventimi wrote:
| Except that the "side effects" of being rich aren't "side
| effects", they're the essential effects. Being richer
| than other people by definition means you can outcompete
| those other people for goods and services. That's the
| whole purpose. Elon owning 10 megayachts means 10
| megayachts (as much as $5 billion) worth of productive
| capacity being redirected away from other uses that
| benefit many people, to a use that is frivolous insofar
| as it largely benefits just one person.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Elon got rich by _creating_ goods and services for other
| people - such as EV cars, or low-cost space launches. It
| 's a wash. Oh wait, actually it isn't because every trade
| of goods and services is advantageous to both parties by
| definition.
|
| (There are of course some who only got rich by
| transferring wealth away from others - but they're not
| the ones people mostly complain about wrt. 'the rich'.)
| dventimi wrote:
| Personally, I don't know any working-class people who can
| afford a Tesla, let alone a space launch vehicle.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| I do!
|
| I met a nursing student in Shanghai who ended up marrying
| a "driver". (For reference, the way you get into nursing
| school in China is by flunking the college entrance
| exam.)
|
| Attending Fudan University, I also met several students
| there and at the school across the street, Shanghai
| University of Finance and Economics. Both are highly
| prestigious.
|
| Everyone's graduated by now, and the most materially
| successful of all the contacts I made, by far, is the
| nurse. She already owns a Tesla and an apartment in
| Shanghai. (She also has a child, which is true of only
| one of the university students.) What's her secret?
|
| The couple's parents bought those things for them.
| dventimi wrote:
| What's her secret? She works in healthcare, which is very
| expensive in the United States and especially in the Bay
| Area, and tends to pay nurses very very well (especially
| in the Bay Area). This illustrates my point. Her high
| salary as a nurse comes at the cost of many people around
| her, in many ways: we all pay higher healthcare costs, in
| part because of the high pay for doctors and nurses (as
| well as to hospital administrators, insurance companies,
| drug companies, etc.), _and_ she 's yet another highly-
| paid professional with the ability to outcompete other
| people for things like housing. Is she working class? I'm
| not convinced that she is.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| I do, especially the cheaper ones. Many people buy F150s
| as well (best selling vehicle in the US), as they are
| about the same prices.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| GP said afford, not that they are buying them anyway
| despite living paycheck to paycheck.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Sounds like goalpost moving for the common use of the
| word "afford," but even if we take it to be what you
| mean, that's still an assumption you're making, as they
| can afford it theoretically, and the fact that they do or
| don't buy is ancillary; I can also afford a Lamborghini,
| but I'm not going to buy one.
| lotsoweiners wrote:
| I'm sure there's room for both.
| dventimi wrote:
| I'm sure there isn't.
| adrr wrote:
| Gentrification where crimes goes down, schools get better
| and home prices go up because people want to live there
| is the real problem.
| UltraSane wrote:
| The issue is that a lot of homeless actively destroy any
| housing they are put into.
| skirge wrote:
| there are 7 billion people who want to live in free tiny
| private flat in San Francisco and US in general. More lanes
| - more traffic - more traffic jams.
| freejazz wrote:
| I wouldn't live in SF is someone paid me... and not
| because of the homeless
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Nah, count me out of that 7 billion.
|
| Heck, Id2be surprised if we got even a plurality of
| Americans who said they'd want to live in San Francisco.
| robswc wrote:
| This is one of the core problems and I don't think people
| want to admit it "can't be solved."
|
| When I was naive, out on my own after 18 I found a low-
| income/income-restricted apartment complex and thought I got
| a steal. It was $1k a month for a 2 bed when everywhere else
| was closer to $1.5k.
|
| I soon realized I would _never_ live in a low income place if
| I could help it. Someone was killed in our building. Fights
| in the parking lot every other day. People leaving trash in
| the hall ways. People smoking 24/7. Of course, maybe only 25%
| of the people were "problematic" but that was more than
| enough to make you feel totally uncomfortable in your own
| home. The last straw was potheads causing a fire alarm at 3
| AM and having to evacuate into the cold night in a panic.
|
| Some people are simply selfish and will not be able to live
| close to/with others without causing problems. _Most_ people
| do not want to live next to them.
| autobodie wrote:
| > _I don 't think people want to admit it "can't be
| solved"._
|
| The fact that many countries have solved it seems to
| indicate that you are wrong.
| wavemode wrote:
| Which countries have solved it, and how? I'm genuinely
| curious.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| It is hard to imagine a nation without this sort of thing
| to some degree without a total police state. These are
| issues with poor living in apartments in Europe too you
| know; a tragedy of the commons situation as the community
| shoulders the burden of those of it that have vice or
| mental illness that the government authority doesn't
| effectively treat because this class is invisible in
| local mass media.
| Agentus wrote:
| yeah, ive heard not having a home was illegal of sorts in
| the Soviet Union, meaning eviction was illegal or
| something equivolent.
|
| I know what you mean by police state, but i wonder why
| america doesn't consider themselves a police state, with
| such a large prison population and all the innocuous
| behaviors that can land you in legal trouble. i guess
| americans get indoctrinated in a certain way of thinking,
| where their subset of freedoms which they can mostly
| practice, makes them think they are free but ignore all
| the numerous other penalized behaviors. for example: i
| cant possess cocaine regardless if it wont be consumed as
| a drug, cant drink in public, cant lay down in public,
| cant sleep in public(ny), etc etc. a lot of intermediary
| stuff gets penalized because its the only way to control
| some tangentially related detrimental behavior, or its
| penalized for making people feel odd (nudity).
|
| but more on point: america polices property taxes. Any
| property owned gets taxed automatically. this creates a
| forced work state to accumulate money to pay Uncle Sam.
| Failure to comply with this system and you get policed or
| pushed around as a homeless. David Graeber talks about
| Madagascar colonies set up with a similar system
| (underline) intentionally(/u) to produce a productive
| populace. similarly he mentions ways monarchies created
| rules and systems to force markets and force productivity
| elsewhere. I think homelessness circumstances is by
| design, and this free nonpolice state we call america is
| actually an artificial created police state. we can
| choose different governing setups that have different
| features emergent and by design. Its what Mao attempted
| to do, its what the French and British monarch did. But i
| see the coercive force in all the government setups even
| the ones that claim to be free.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| If we believe the stories of old, even this country used
| to have this solved.
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| It all started to change with O'Connor v. Donaldson.
| Prior to that, a person could be committed for basically
| life for just about anything...
|
| Reference: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
| vondur wrote:
| I think outrage from that movie and the conditions of the
| Asylums around that time period was why many of the
| public asylums were shuttered.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| During the late 19th to early 20th century, asylums were
| launched all over the US. They were commonly public-
| private partnerships but tended to be spearheaded by
| altruistic individuals. They were genuinely positive
| places and were constantly lauded by the
| public/press/pols.
|
| The focus on humane care was universal. The methods
| sometimes suffered from incomplete understanding but that
| improved over time.
|
| From 1930s to 1960s, the responsible individuals died off
| and no one replaced them. The p/p/p quit caring.
| Locations transitioned to gov-only. The public/press
| weren't interested so neither were pols. The quality of
| care steeply fell off as budgets (read 'efficiency') were
| prioritized over everything.
|
| By the 1970s, asylums were associated with hellholes for
| mostly good reasons. By the 1980s most were shuttered.
| The public justification was the inhumane conditions
| (typically true). The motivating reason was to recapture
| the remaining funds that were spent on them. There was
| little/no interest in funding replacements.
|
| FF to today. Florida has 5 state criminal mental health
| institutions. Their long history is that patients and
| staff die there with some regularity. After that came out
| in a news series, reporters lost access and that's where
| that's at. source: 10y genealogy
| research & 25y caring for mi spouse. Also: 10y
| supporting developmentally disabled care facilities
| (public/private) that are still spearheaded by caring,
| invested individuals. They are models of what is
| possible.
| robswc wrote:
| The problem isn't "solved." The problem is you have to
| deal with it in a way that most/everyone would be OK with
| and vote for. I don't think we can do that in the US.
|
| We could "solve" the problem like Singapore or China
| (some of these 'many countries'), and simply throw
| everyone in jail for petty crimes. In fact, IIRC
| Singapore is one of the safest places on earth. I'm sure
| SF (and California, and the country at large) would
| probably take issue with a sudden step up in policing.
| sightbroke wrote:
| As far as I can tell, the bottom line is king in the US.
|
| So the way I figure, you spend money on imprisoning
| (though private prisons make more money and can sell non-
| violent labor).
|
| Or spend money on housing and social workers and maybe a
| good chunk of this individuals rejoin the workforce and
| pay taxes.
|
| Or you spend money on cleaning up after, paying for
| medical emergencies, and increased private security
| costs.
|
| The option selected is either the one that the invisible
| hand found to be the most efficient or a better option
| was not sold well enough.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| if you think prison privatization is the problem... you
| should see state run prisons. while studies show that
| private prisons are "statistically" worse (lots of
| problems with the statistics, e.g. commingling criminal
| incarceration contracts with migrant incarceration
| contracts), the difference is marginal, at best.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| The incentive structure is the bigger issue here, not
| necessarily prisoner treatment (though yes, we can
| address that too). A state wants to minimize prisons. A
| profit run prison wants to keep getting prisoners.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| state run prisons and prison guard unions also have this
| problem. and these orgs are known to have successfully
| put legislative pressure on laws that will increase
| incarceration rates
| Aunche wrote:
| If the bottom line were actually king, we'd have a VAT,
| LVT, functional public transit, and sensible zoning laws
| among other things. Hell, even a fully socialized
| healthcare system would be more economically efficient
| than the public-private Frankenstein we have today.
|
| A common meme on both sides of the political aisle is
| that public spending that they don't like is motivated by
| someone else's profit, but that's never the why the
| spending happens. I'd like the government to give me a
| million bucks to dig a hole in my backyard, but that's
| not going to happen unless if the voters agree to it.
| reportingsjr wrote:
| > We could "solve" the problem like Singapore or China
| (some of these 'many countries'), and simply throw
| everyone in jail for petty crimes.
|
| This clearly isn't true, as the US has a per capita
| prison population four to five times that of China &
| Singapore! We jail far, far more people than they do.
| robswc wrote:
| It could simply be that more people in China and
| Singapore are afraid to commit crimes. Their prison
| sentences and punishments are much worse. In 2022, they
| executed 11 people, the US executed 18. The US has a ~50x
| larger population.
|
| I'm not even saying the solution is more/harsher
| policing. I'm saying it is a solution that seemingly
| works.
| 11101010001100 wrote:
| This is speculation, the parent replied with statistics.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| It could also be that they didn't governmental distribute
| drugs to their population with the purpose of mass
| arresting for petty crimes. So half their criminal
| population aren't just in for smoking pit.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Why do you count "per capita" when it should be counted
| "per crime"? Per capita means nothing for this argument.
| Aunche wrote:
| You're right, but progressives treat crime statistics as
| dog whistles for racism, which to be fair isn't uncommon.
| However, you can make a very similar "woke" argument.
| Much of crime is caused by centuries of systemic racism
| that Singapore and China never experienced, so you can't
| do an apple to apple comparison between incarcerations
| per capita.
|
| Overall, Singapore and China are significantly more
| willing to sacrifice freedom in exchange for security.
| There is more surveillance and no trial by jury, for
| example.
| atoav wrote:
| You are mentally on a wrong track there. If imprisonment
| solved your problem, it would already be solved. The US
| has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world
| (see: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_b
| y_incarce...). Fifth place versus Singapore on 105th. The
| US incarcerates 3.5 times more of it's population than
| Singapore.
|
| If you have the money to imprison the homeless you could
| use that very same money to just build more affordable
| housing and that would give you more in terms of results
| per dollar spent.
|
| But that doesn't jive well with the American idea of
| having to morally punish unwanted behavior, instead of
| just helping people.
|
| Jailing homeless people is like jailing people who break
| a leg: Nobody _plans_ to break a leg, so jailing people
| who do won 't reduce the number of people who do. The
| only thing criminalization of such involuntary traits
| achieves is to reduce visibility and pushing people to
| hide it.
| robswc wrote:
| > The US incarcerates 3.5 times more of it's population
| than Singapore.
|
| And Singapore executes ~3.5 times more of it's population
| than the US. Singapore is a heavily policed state. They
| still cane people there.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caning_in_Singapore
|
| There is a _huge_ difference between how crime is handled
| in the US and how it is handled in Singapore.
|
| > If you have the money to imprison the homeless you
| could use that very same money to just build more
| affordable housing and that would give you more in terms
| of results per dollar spent.
|
| I'm not talking about the homeless. The people I lived
| next to had homes (that were unfortunately adjacent to
| mine). They would constantly commit crime and face 0
| repercussions for it. I knew of someone in the building
| that was on their 5th DUI somehow. They were still
| driving, still causing problems nearly every week.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Caning is very cost effective!
|
| Costs almost nothing compared to prisons, and has a
| comparable deterrence effect.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| We don't actually execute that many people in the US, so
| this was an instant fail on the sniff test:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_Sin
| gap...
|
| 540 ish executions in 35 years. 50 executions last
| decade. I don't think these are the statistics that make
| me thing Singapore is a kill happy country.
|
| >m not talking about the homeless. The people I lived
| next to had homes (that were unfortunately adjacent to
| mine). They would constantly commit crime and face 0
|
| Anecdotes are just that. I've been in a nice
| neighborhood. I don't think people are naturally evil.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| > But that doesn't jive well with the American idea of
| having to morally punish unwanted behavior, instead of
| just helping people.
|
| I advocate a Singapore-style justice system then thanks
| to atoav's revelation that they do much better on crime
| than we do with punishments like caning and execution for
| most hard drug offenses.
| Agentus wrote:
| ---- If you have the money to imprison the homeless you
| could use that very same money to just build more
| affordable housing and that would give you more in terms
| of results per dollar spent. But that doesn't jive well
| with the American idea of having to morally punish
| unwanted behavior, instead of just helping people.
| Jailing homeless people is like jailing people who break
| a leg: --- Forgive me if i misinterpret you. But i think
| theirs three relevant perspectives here whereof two and a
| half disagree with your points that americans dont punish
| people down on their luck.
|
| first perspective is the common american sympathetic or
| not to homeless and their perspective on penal code. then
| 2nd, theres reactive use and enforcement of code, which
| is the main punishment for homelessness. and third is the
| figurative cognitive behavior modifiers but instead of
| being therapists they are american rulers who want
| subjects to behave in a certain manner ( more on that at
| the end).
|
| first perspective is divided into two camps i think.
| empathetic yes lets not punish homelessness, lets help
| them out. they seem to have more influence in liberal
| states. then theres the "lazy bum" castigators, like
| trump said or would say. no sympathy, get a job types.
|
| 2nd perspective matters more because homelessness in-
| effect criminalized if police enforce laws and the laws
| are sufficient to cause more than a minor inconvenience
| to the homeless. Most states technically have all types
| of laws to put homeless people in jail, but in certain
| states and certain contexts do homelessness get more
| aggressively targeted and thus punished. its in the form
| of no body wants to deal with homeless people where they
| hang out at (nimbyism) so they have police remove them
| however the police are instructed and allowed to do,
| which might be making and enforcing laws incidentally
| target behavior homeless are more likely to do but
| everyone does like loitering.
|
| 3rd perspective is more conjecture but is based on
| academic documented equivalent cases in french and
| british colonies (found in david graebers writings) and
| extrapolated to say that people who make the laws in
| america must think like cognitive behaviorists
| specifically to wielding the threat of homelessness as a
| tool to modify the populations behavior to their agendas.
| this is conjecture but not unreasonable, and its
| substantiated.
|
| But places in America do penalize homelessness if not
| intentionally implicitly. examples include hostile
| archtecture, no sitting rules in transportation hubs,
| sleep police in new york, and consequences for being,
| acting, or appearing homeless in various municipalities
| which sometimes results in jail.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| People get jailed/locked up when they are a physical
| danger to those around them. The reason jails are the way
| they are is not so much to punish the inmates but far
| more relevantly, to _protect them from one another_. As
| it turns out, unfortunately, much of the supposed problem
| with the really long term homeless is that, rightly or
| wrongly, they _are_ perceived as a physical threat to
| others. So, even assuming the best possible intentions on
| your part, whatever place you put the homeless is going
| to look a lot like jail.
| Agentus wrote:
| You don't have to even go to more authoritarian places to
| see the "solved" phenomenon. Many conservative states
| have harsher sentences or are more proactive in
| enforcement of petty crimes to "solve"
| undesirable/nonconformist behavior. Also solve is a funny
| word to describe dealing with people who ultimately dont
| want to conform to arbitrary restrictions on behavior.
|
| Humans naturally evolved in a hunter gathering setting,
| yet certain governing "civilizing" forces had the
| audacity to eliminate that as possible lifestyle, and
| then label people who defy that restriction on lifestyle
| choice as problemmatic.
| cheriot wrote:
| I don't see a pattern of conservative states solving
| drugs or violent crime.
|
| https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/place-
| based-...
|
| https://americaninequality.substack.com/p/violent-crime-
| and-...
| Agentus wrote:
| yeah the pattern is indiscernible because i was talking
| about petty crimes and related behavior (specifically
| homelessness) that have a lower per capita rate. violence
| isnt petty and i assume many drugs offenses arent
| considered petty. a quick google has validating
| statistics, although i cant find sources better than
| business insider at the moment. homeless population per
| capita by state and homelessness criminalization by
| state.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > Humans naturally evolved in a hunter gathering setting
|
| Frequently asserted, but not really well substantiated.
| Plenty of new (or previously) ignored archeological and
| anthropological evidence that humans moved back and forth
| fairly seamlessly between hunting, gathering and
| cultivating in many differents part of the world.
|
| You sound like the kind of person who would have somehow
| managed to read "The Dawn of Everything" by Graeber &
| Wengrow, but apparently either did not or for some reason
| disagree with one of their fundamental conclusions.
| Agentus wrote:
| yup, in the process of reading Wengrow
| JimDabell wrote:
| > We could "solve" the problem like Singapore or China
| (some of these 'many countries'), and simply throw
| everyone in jail for petty crimes
|
| The incarceration rate of the USA is 541/100k:
|
| https://www.prisonstudies.org/country/united-states-
| america
|
| The incarceration rate of Singapore is 164/100k:
|
| https://www.prisonstudies.org/country/singapore
|
| The homelessness rate in the USA is 19.5/10k. The
| homelessness rate in Singapore is 1.9/10k.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by
| _ho...
|
| Singapore doesn't have a homelessness problem because
| they build as much public housing as possible, sell it to
| citizens at a massively subsidised rate, and follow up
| with schemes to rent to people who fall through the
| system for practically nothing.
|
| If you want to reduce homelessness, you need to build a
| large volume of housing. San Francisco is doing the exact
| opposite and getting the exact opposite results.
| robswc wrote:
| Do the math on the execution rate. You do _not_ want to
| be a criminal in Singapore. You especially do not want to
| be a criminal involved with drugs (which is the highest %
| offense of prisoners in the US).
|
| > Singapore doesn't have a homelessness problem because
| they build as much public housing as possible, sell it to
| citizens at a massively subsidised rate, and follow up
| with schemes to rent to people who fall through the
| system for practically nothing.
|
| How policed are these public housing projects? I wouldn't
| have a problem living near or even in a place like that
| if there weren't criminals running around.
|
| The problem I was referencing was the problem of trying
| to get the general populace to live with antisocial
| types. I don't think that can be "solved" in the US
| anytime soon.
|
| > If you want to reduce homelessness, you need to build a
| large volume of housing. San Francisco is doing the exact
| opposite and getting the exact opposite results.
|
| Sure. I just don't see that happening in the US without
| it turning into a dump. I didn't even live in a homeless
| shelter. I lived in an income restricted place. It was a
| magnet for criminals and non-criminals are punished for
| it.
| JimDabell wrote:
| > Do the math on the execution rate. You do _not_ want to
| be a criminal in Singapore.
|
| In 2023, Singapore executed 5 people, which is less than
| one in a million:
|
| https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/policy-
| issues/policy/internatio...
|
| You basically have to bring drugs into the country to be
| executed. So as long as you don't do that, this statistic
| doesn't affect you at all.
|
| > How policed are these public housing projects? I
| wouldn't have a problem living near or even in a place
| like that if there weren't criminals running around.
|
| Three quarters of Singaporeans live in these places, and
| there is no significant police presence. There doesn't
| have to be because the crime rate is so low. Criminals
| aren't running around.
|
| > Sure. I just don't see that happening in the US without
| it turning into a dump. I didn't even live in a homeless
| shelter. I lived in an income restricted place. It was a
| magnet for criminals and non-criminals are punished for
| it.
|
| I think you read "public housing" and interpreted it as
| something like you have in America, with high crime and
| poverty. That's a misinterpretation. This is the type of
| place _most people_ live in Singapore. They are nice
| places to live, they are just massively subsidised by the
| government.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| Why are people always championing Singapore as a paragon
| of free markets while nearly all its residents live in
| government provided housing
| fragmede wrote:
| Given the numerous housing crisis's all over the world,
| are you _sure_ that the free market is best positioned to
| provide housing?
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| Not at all. I'm curious about those who seek to import
| Singapore's authoritarian climate while praising its free
| market and rebuking social welfare policies at home
| zozbot234 wrote:
| The "housing crisis" all over the world is not really a
| housing crisis per se. The problem is not with the cost
| of _building_ more shelter. It 's a crisis of land values
| (they aren't making any more of it, so the free market
| cannot "provide" it in any real sense) and misguided
| government regulation, viz. zoning (that has nothing to
| do with the free market). If you want to improve free
| market dynamics in the housing sector, get rid of Prop 13
| and put a higher property tax on urban land values (that
| are seeing most of the actual "crisis") while untaxing
| the built structures. Then local governments will be
| incented to provide the best living arrangements, since
| these will directly translate into higher tax revenues.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| Your (likely rhetorical) question presumes that a nation
| which is devoted to free markets would require housing to
| be distributed via free markets, but that's not
| necessarily true. In fact I'd say there's a lot of
| evidence built up now that the free market is in fact,
| not actually that great at distributing property, because
| necessarily to engage with a market, one must have money,
| and everyone needs a home, but not everyone has money.
|
| Personally in my ideal world, we would distribute life's
| essentials in such a way as to be free at point of use,
| and then leave markets to handle things they're actually
| good at, like televisions and such.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| You're assuming that US federal/states do not also
| subsidize housing.
|
| They are a "a paragon of free markets" because their
| social safeties actually work. Housing probably isn't a
| stock to hoard like in the US, nor owned by private
| equity to treat as a business. so you can focus on more
| than just staying alive and do actual work/passions.
| novok wrote:
| You don't have to compare Singapore or other places. Just
| comparing the USA to other English countries shows stark
| differences. The UK, Canada, Australia, Ireland, and NZ
| have way less of the bad kind of "low income", better
| incarceration rates, homeless and more than the USA. And
| in many ways, people are poorer in those countries than
| the USA too. It's not money, it's political will and
| organization.
| mkl wrote:
| *English-speaking
|
| Part of the UK is English, but none of the rest are.
| hector126 wrote:
| My understanding is that countries who have "solved"
| homelessness either -
|
| * Societally and culturally produce so few individuals
| who would behave the way America's most problematic
| homeless do that direct 1on1 intervention is feasible.
| There are school districts in the US where the truancy
| rate exceeds 70%. There are other countries where this is
| not the case. Switzerland and Norway come to mind.
|
| * Involuntarily commit or arrest individuals who are
| mentally unfit to function in normal society.
| Institutionalization, basically. China and Russia come to
| mind.
|
| If there was a silver bullet which was politically
| acceptable to "solve" America's homeless problem I ensure
| you, folks in California would have tried it.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| California, like most of the USA, contains a very broad
| spectrum of political opinion. There are plenty of
| conservative right wing folk there, it just so happens
| that the current state of things there leads to them not
| holding huge amounts of power at the level of the state
| legislature or governor's office.
|
| This is marked contrast to, for example, most European
| countries (particularly the two you've mentioned) where
| the number of people who simply do not see a role for
| non-carceral government action (i.e. the first solution
| you've described) is quite small.
|
| Combine that with a referendum process, and you've got a
| situation in which there are lots of things that could
| theoretically be tried but will not be, even in
| California.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| 1. Yes, it's cultural and we keep encouraging people to
| be selfish. Our influencers, the media, this push of
| "make it in your own" despite no one in history truly
| being self made. And if we're being frank, prejudice is
| still alive and well which underfunded certain kinds of
| areas. We don't want to help those people. And we have 50
| mini countries to balance this between.
|
| 2. Almost. They don't use for profit prisons who are
| incentivized to punish. Other countries actually focus on
| minimizing recidivism. But America keeps falling for
| "Hard on Crime". Again, that selfishness: "I would never
| do that, that person deserves to suffer".
|
| >If there was a silver bullet which was politically
| acceptable to "solve" America's homeless problem I ensure
| you, folks in California would have tried it.
|
| I agree. But politically people treat reformation as
| "free handouts". With that attitude nothing will change.
| Aunche wrote:
| > Involuntarily commit or arrest individuals who are
| mentally unfit to function in normal society.
|
| Finland, the poster child for housing first, does this as
| well.
| monero-xmr wrote:
| Students graduate high school in Finland and are ecstatic
| if they can get a job at a restaurant. I have a lot of
| family there...
| yibg wrote:
| The US seems to be a text book case of treating the
| symptom rather than the cause (and not just in terms of
| homelessness either). Culturally we:
|
| - Seem to tolerate high income inequality or even see it
| as a good thing.
|
| - Value "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps" and
| devalue social safety nets and other avenues of providing
| opportunity to the masses
|
| - Have given up on higher crime rates, lower education,
| poorer health care and health outcomes compared to other
| wealthy nations
|
| Instead of trying to prevent homelessness in the first
| place, we try to tackle it once it's already there, then
| throw up our hands and say it's not possible to deal
| with.
| novok wrote:
| There are two kinds of 'low income.' There is a working-
| class neighborhood where people are not rich; life is hard,
| and stuff is a bit run down, but people are normal.
| Employed-ish, don't start fights and are respectful. The
| sense of community and friendliness might even be better
| than a 'normal' place because you need community to
| survive. Living in these places is fine. Then there is the
| kind of 'low income' you describe, which is a very
| different kind of place and people.
|
| When people talk about this topic, people get into big
| debates about it because they are thinking of 2 very
| different kinds of low-income places.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >This is one of the core problems and I don't think people
| want to admit it "can't be solved."
|
| It certainly can be solved. The real think is people in
| power don't want to solve it, and the voters don't want to
| invest in solving it. Admitting your own folly and vainness
| is much more difficult than dismissing it as an "impossible
| problem".
|
| >Some people are simply selfish and will not be able to
| live close to/with others without causing problems. _Most_
| people do not want to live next to them.
|
| And those people do not get the help they need. Again, and
| investment no one cares to put in. Better to sweep it under
| the rug and try to rely on the security of higher income
| areas to deal with it than taking preventative measures.
| tclancy wrote:
| There is honor is such a quest.
| https://blog.granneman.com/2005/09/30/cuchullin-fights-
| the-o...
| ErigmolCt wrote:
| Amanda's work is proof that personal engagement makes a
| difference, but scaling that kind of approach is incredibly
| difficult
| dsign wrote:
| Indeed. But I have another point of view: what if our society
| is utterly broken? To see what I mean, imagine a world where
| that level of effort would cure any disease, even aging. How
| would that split us?
| altacc wrote:
| Society is far from perfect and some are definitely leaning
| more towards broken than perfect. I don't know how many
| people really see themselves as part of society vs
| individuals living among other unconnected individuals.
|
| Homelessness, poor physical or mental health, crime,
| domestic violence, discrimination. There's a long list of
| social ills that get worse when a society is inequitable
| and unequal. These problems and their effects go down
| significantly when a society acts to maintain its own
| health and distribution of resources is more equal, there
| is social mobility, individuals are under less financial
| stress, etc... Number will never go to zero or even close
| but there are countries where the base homelessness rate is
| similar to the US but the manifestation of problem is very
| different as is the approach, mostly that being homeless
| isn't considered criminal. e.g. very few people sleep
| rough, their homelessness period is shorter and living in
| cars is not normal.
|
| Just that last fact, that living in cars is relatively
| common and that includes children, makes me look at the US
| and decide that yes, US society is broken.
| jmcgough wrote:
| The biggest problem with our society is that no one knows
| or helps their neighbors anymore. I work in the emergency
| department and maybe a third of the patients are more in
| need of a good support system than medical treatment.
|
| Met a guy whose elderly wife isn't strong enough to lift
| him when he falls out of bed, so once a week they call EMS
| or the fire department to get him back in bed. So many
| things that you used to call on your neighbors for help
| with, but life for many Americans in 2025 is isolating and
| lonely.
| nosianu wrote:
| Did that ever work, except maybe in tribal societies?
|
| Anything I read about middle ages or later was even
| worse. At best, they put such people into _poorhouses_.
|
| A big family under one roof helped the best I guess? But
| in any less ideal situations I doubt even the children
| would have gone out of their way to devote their lives to
| the care of the elderly or the disabled. Examples from
| primitive societies:
| https://www.international.ucla.edu/cnes/article/113384
| dsign wrote:
| > Did that ever work, except maybe in tribal societies?
|
| Maybe I don't understand your comment, but I think our
| societies were/are tighter in many places and epochs.
| Maybe it's not so in cities and suburbs in the modern
| West, but, I think it used to be different in Medieval
| Europe and before, in villages at least. Neighbors were
| your support community. I know there are parts of the
| world where it's still the case.
|
| I'm not that old and I was raised by my neighbors,
| because both of my parents were working. When my dad was
| dying last year, I couldn't be there because I was their
| only economic support, working abroad, and I don't have
| any wealth to be so if I'm not working. There was more
| family, but the neighbors were the ones day to day
| helping my mom with shores and the care of my dad.
|
| >> But in any less ideal situations I doubt even the
| children would have gone out of their way to devote their
| lives to the care of the elderly or the disabled.
|
| It was the children, in most sane cases. Not that I argue
| it's a good thing to bring children to the world to take
| care of you when you are dying.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Capitalism makes us more atomic, not a surprise.
| rmah wrote:
| It's not capitalism, per se. It's a society that
| overvalues individualism and devalues family. IMO, of
| course. One part of the social compact used to be that in
| return for parents taking care of you as a child, you
| took care of them when they were old. It worked for
| literally 1000's of generations.
| nosianu wrote:
| > It worked for literally 1000's of generations.
|
| Did it?
|
| There is an interesting discussion for a picture on
| reddit's //r/wtf right now: https://old.reddit.com/r/WTF/
| comments/1ioz5xy/carved_ivory_c...
|
| Basically, it looks like a significant propaganda effort
| was used to get people to act that way. That means it
| wasn't automatic at all.
|
| It works best when the parent/child relationship is
| pretty good, and when the child is not under a lot of
| pressure him- or herself.
|
| It was the ideal, sure, but how much of it is actually
| true IRL? There seem to be plenty of bad parents, in
| which case the children would require quite a bit of
| pressure and/or brainwashing to take care of them I would
| think.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Given that the framing here is based on accounts of the
| most extreme cases, I would trust this reflects their
| society as well as Ripley's Belive it or Not does.
|
| And you're too focused on families. This society relied
| on villages that were all somewhat connected. Modern 3rd
| world countries still have an arguably richer social
| support than the US because overall their burdens are not
| theirs to share alone. They pitch in the care for
| children, provide food, maintain housing, and much more.
| Having a big family can simulate this clan feeling but
| the scale is still a magnitude smaller than a village
| working together.
|
| >in which case the children would require quite a bit of
| pressure and/or brainwashing to take care of them I would
| think.
|
| In the same way kids are "brainwashed" to get kicked out
| at 18 and make a life for themselves in America with
| minimum support, sure. Any upbringing can be framed as
| "brainwashing" if you don't agree with it.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Anything I read about middle ages or later was even
| worse. At best, they put such people into _poorhouses_.
|
| No, in the middle ages that job would have been done by
| the guy's son, who would have been living in the home.
| nosianu wrote:
| That is similar to the many family movies today: It shows
| the situation of specifically those where this ideal idea
| of family actually works. I doubt that was common in the
| middle ages. It worked best for those who owned
| something, like craftspeople or land-owning farmers, and
| then for their first heir who would inherit it all.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| You only need to go back 50 years. Have we already
| forgotten "it takes a village to raise a child"?
|
| Even in my childhood I had remnants of this. My uncles or
| not-grandma grandma neighbors could be trusted to take
| care of my when my mom or grandparents weren't around.
| Nowadays that dynamic is spending $30+ on a credible
| babysitter. Those are the sort of dynamics that have
| recently weathered away.
|
| >I doubt even the children would have gone out of their
| way to devote their lives to the care of the elderly or
| the disable
|
| 1. Yes they did and do. Many people still love their
| parents and want to make sure they are taken care for.
|
| 2. It isn't really that deep for neighbors. It's just a
| matter of checking up in them every few days. It isn't
| full time care. Of course if they get hurt they can
| either help out in minor cases or call emergency if it's
| more than minor.
|
| These days you may sadly accept dying alone and not being
| discovered for weeks if people don't regularly contact
| you. What does that say about modern society?
| presentation wrote:
| Nobody knows or helps their neighbors here in Japan or
| any number of places on earth and yet it's not like it is
| there.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| > Nobody knows or helps their neighbors here in Japan
|
| What? In a big city, maybe. This is not true in rural
| areas.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Third places and overall closer proximity plays a factor
| too. Do you have a place you can just "meet people"
| without needing to pay in?
| yibg wrote:
| Homelessness isn't totally solved any where else but if
| we look at comparable countries (Canada, Australia, New
| Zealand etc), the magnitude is much lower. Not to mention
| other issues like healthcare, crime, education, life
| expectancy etc. But there seems to be a huge resistance
| to doing things in the US how it's done in other places.
| tmpz22 wrote:
| Don't throw the baby out with the bath water. This isn't an
| unprofitable codebase at some VC funded atrocity where
| consequences don't exist.
|
| This is the real world where societal structures save
| hundreds of millions every year.
|
| The amount of suffering that would exist if society
| dissolved is unfathomable.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| what happened to "do things that don't scale"?
| bagels wrote:
| We're missing all the rest of the steps, but besides, I'm
| not sure how that applies when there's no profit motive.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| charity: water
| RobertRoberts wrote:
| Most people I met when homeless didn't want the help the
| government offered. There's a direct conflict between people
| who lead and those that actually want to help.
|
| Unfortunately, a lot of the homeless I knew were very proud,
| arrogant, angry, bitter and many other emotions that made it
| nearly impossible to get them to take care of themselves
| through any intervention.
|
| And if people refuse to take care of themselves, they will
| always be in a state where they need others to step in. Once
| they become destructive to society, I don't think any
| expectation of mercy from leadership should be expected. That
| leads to the situations we currently see in some places today.
|
| It's not the lack of shelter that's the issue. There's plenty
| of shelter and housing if you want it.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| > The city surely understands the long-term costs of its
| policies, and it's run by highly pragmatic people with limited
| budgets.
|
| Is that the case? maybe there are highly pragmatic people in
| the org, but i dont think they are "running" things. and the
| city's budget for homelessness is astoundingly high (look it
| up)
| Miraste wrote:
| If anyone is wondering, it's ~1 billion dollars per year, for
| a homeless population of less than 10,000. With this money,
| they have achieved basically zero change in that number for
| years. Staggering, incredible levels of waste.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| jesus, the amount has increased since last i checked -- it
| was 80k/homeless person before.
|
| > basically zero change
|
| i would have to be persuaded the change hasn't been
| _negative_
|
| Obviously some secular external effects (like fentanyl)
| have been causing a large part of the problem, but still.
| ryoshu wrote:
| If the population is increasing YoY and the number of
| homeless remains the same, is it?
| istjohn wrote:
| It might be more appropriate to look at the numbers of
| people being brought off the streets. They have over 14,000
| supportive housing units and 4,200 shelter beds. 5,000 of
| the supportive housing units were added in the last 5
| years."More than 20,000 people seek homeless services in
| San Francisco over the course of a full year" [0].
|
| At the Jan 2024 Point-in-Time count, 4,354 unsheltered
| people were counted, a 1% decrease since 2022 and a 16%
| decrease since 2019. There was a 20% decrease in the number
| of people living in cars since 2019.
|
| To compare, NYC spends $4 billion per year and has 62,000
| supportive housing units and 130,000 shelter beds (these
| NYC numbers come from GPT4o Search and are unverified).
|
| 0. https://www.sf.gov/reports--september-2024--2024-point-
| time-...
| yibg wrote:
| That's not necessarily the right measure though right? If
| that money wasn't spent (or less of it was spent), what
| would things be like? Hard to A/B test this, but seems like
| the "problem" would get worse rather than stay steady
| state.
| bagels wrote:
| I wish that park rangers didn't have to bear the cost of this
| problem. Nobody has the appetite to do anything effective about
| it.
| wnc3141 wrote:
| I search through the internet looking for these type of stories
| that renew my faith in humanity. Thank you for sharing.
| radu_floricica wrote:
| > shepherding him through what one Recreation and Parks
| Department official described as the "arduous and achingly
| bureaucratic tasks" necessary just to be eligible for housing.
|
| I'm going to risk a political statement and say that this is why
| I'm mostly hopeful about DOGE, even if parts of it are a shit
| show.
|
| Building civilization comes with a hefty dose of institutional
| entropy, which keeps accumulating, despite (or often because)
| good intentions and competence. Everybody is improving their
| piece of the map, but this means you get stuck in a lot of spots
| of local maxima. Some can be fixed from a level above, but some
| need a round of creative destruction every 10 years or so.
|
| I've read this yesterday:
| https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/why-japan-succ...
|
| It's a good read and a good blog for many reasons, but the
| relevant part to this conversation: Japan managed to keep a very
| high level of living even through decades of economic stagnation
| and aging population in large part by having a sane zoning
| system. Yes, that simple. They have 12, nation-wide, mostly
| inclusive zoning types. This means the permitted building types
| carry over as you move up the categories, allowing mixed-use
| development by default.
|
| And indeed, you can actually go to Japan and buy a house for
| about the price of a decent car - which coincidently used to be
| the case in most of the world, before the double pressure of
| zoning/coding on one hand, and migration towards urban centers on
| the other squeezed the housing pricing way above what actual
| costs would have it be.
| croes wrote:
| The problem is if you want lower bureaucracy you have to change
| laws and not fire people. Most of the time you still need them,
| they just have no time to do what they are supposed to do.
|
| For instance, would you fire doctors to reduce bureaucracy in
| medical services?
| anon7000 wrote:
| Great point. And if you fire all the insurance middlemen, but
| don't get rid of the legal requirements which spawned those
| middlemen in the first place, you end up with medical
| professionals swamped with paperwork they shouldn't have to
| deal with it.
| DangitBobby wrote:
| What legal requirements spawned insurance middlemen?
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| The problem is if you want lower bureaucracy you have to
| change laws and not fire people.
|
| Not every excessive process is the result of legislation.
| Some of these processes arise gradually and unnecessarily,
| because, in an organization without competition, there's no
| pressure to be efficient (i.e. focus on increasing output).
| jquery wrote:
| A business can become more efficient by focusing on the
| most profitable customers. The government is not a
| business, nor should it be.
|
| There is plenty of pressure on the organizations to be
| efficient, the American people never saw a tax cut they
| didn't like.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| There is plenty of pressure on the organizations to be
| efficient
|
| What you say may be true in certain parts of the US. But
| we're talking about San Francisco. I've lived here for
| over 5 years, and my observations during that time do not
| tell me there's _any_ pressure on governmental
| organizations here to be efficient, let alone 'plenty of
| pressure'.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Are you looking in the right places? I'm sure all the big
| tech leaders put pressure on? But their definition of
| "efficient" may not align with yours or mine.
| gosub100 wrote:
| > . The government is not a business, nor should it be.
|
| And it's not a charity either. So get rid of these
| wasteful programs that redistribute other peoples money
| that don't even work.
| gosub100 wrote:
| For insurance companies? Yes doctors can be fired. They do
| not provide treatment.
| j-krieger wrote:
| You most definitely have to fire people. After all, their
| number one aim is to make sure their job still exists in a
| decade.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| But their job doesn't exist for another month of you fire
| them. They aren't replacing "unproductive" workers.
| crooked-v wrote:
| How in the world is randomly firing people supposed to make
| anything more efficient? They literally don't even know what
| the people they're firing do, as seen with the latest mess with
| the Department of Energy.
| givemeethekeys wrote:
| Maybe it forces the people who're left to prioritize which
| civil services to keep.
| aqueueaqueue wrote:
| And forces states, especially poorer ones, to raise their
| taxes.
| gosub100 wrote:
| Or lower their taxes, now they don't have to fund useless
| bs
| bagels wrote:
| You think the states will get more federal money now?
|
| The trend of stealing money from New York, shutting down
| the Department of Education, and FEMA would make me think
| otherwise.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| The explicit point of dismantling some agencies is to
| leave it to the states. Aka they want to reduce state
| funding. So the state choices are generate more income or
| let certain institutions rot.
| clarionbell wrote:
| It's probably not. At this point I would place my hope in
| second order effects. But I'm not the sort of person to do
| that.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Fiery take, but Elon eviscerated twitter and just kept
| kicking people out seemingly randomly. Anyone who didn't like
| it was encouraged walk out too on top of that. Twitter was
| doomed and the internet was rife with how it's collapse was
| immanent.
|
| But he we are three years later and twitter is still running
| and still top dog in the message-post space.
|
| I can't help but feel that in the presence of lots of money,
| organizations just bloat and bloat and bloat, and all that
| bloat will be sure to have a long winded explanation for why
| it is _critical_ to stay in existence.
| UltraSane wrote:
| Twitter is barely breaking even because Musk's stupid
| policies have chased away a lot of advertisers.
| jonkoops wrote:
| Twitter is losing more money than before Musk, so I
| personally don't see how this is working out except as a
| mechanism to extract power.
| aketchum wrote:
| twitter corporate bonds are trading at 97 cents on the
| dollar now, they were trading closer to 40 cents shortly
| after the acquisition. I would not assume they are still
| losing money
| squigz wrote:
| > shortly after the acquisition
|
| I would expect this to be a particularly low point. Can
| you link some data?
| aketchum wrote:
| "The banks marketed the deal last week with an intention
| to sell down the debt at 90-95 cents to the dollar but
| managed to price it at a higher price of 97 cents... In
| late 2022, an attempt to sell the unsecured loan
| attracted bids in the 60 cents to the dollar range which
| would have seen the banks take on a large loss on the
| face value of the debt."
|
| https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/banks-sell-
| down-55-...
|
| so I was wrong to say they were as low as 40 cents, but
| the point stands that twitter's financials have improved
| a great deal
| rurp wrote:
| The massive interest payments he added match or exceed
| the entire company revenue. There is no way the company
| is even close to making money.
| bagels wrote:
| That only means that the borrowers think that the
| interest payments will be made.
| jquery wrote:
| He also eviserated 75% of Twitter's market cap. The only
| metric Twitter is a success is Elon leveraged it to get
| Trump elected and Trump is now showering him with favors.
| namuol wrote:
| > twitter is still running and still top dog in the
| message-post space
|
| He just hasn't finished the job.
| sanktanglia wrote:
| Twitter has become a hive of racism and hate that is a
| shadow of its former self. I literally can't keep racist
| slurs from my homepage, if you think musk has improved it
| since he took over man so I have a bridge to sell you
| jccalhoun wrote:
| Agreed. Maybe the government is terribly inefficient. I don't
| know. However, this isn't the most efficient way to make it
| better. Moreover, efficiency is not just saving money which
| seems to be all that is going on.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| The necessity for delicately traversing the path to a solution
| that's more long-term sustainable than that which already
| exists seems to be something that DOGE is entirely incapable
| of.
|
| Musk seems to want things to scale; fewer people to achieve
| more productivity. People that already fall through the cracks
| aren't going to suddenly find themselves better off via a
| system that scales better, because better scaling actually
| creates wider cracks.
|
| The median flows better, at the cost of the fringes.
|
| Your comments regarding Japan are interesting. Japan's
| definitely an interesting example to use due to the odd,
| unenviable economic situation, but that makes your point stand
| out more rather than less, I think.
| UltraSane wrote:
| Musk is using DOGE to shut down agencies he doesn't like. The
| dude likes firing people WAY too much.
| Philpax wrote:
| Such a thing requires a redesign, not an uncontrolled
| demolition.
| archagon wrote:
| You think conservatives care about actually helping the
| unhoused? Their ultimate goal is to funnel money from public
| services into private hands; and their "solution" to
| homelessness involves prison, concentration camps[1], or
| exile[2] -- because they see the problem as undesirables
| reducing quality of life for the worthy rich, not abject human
| misery. (Indeed, Musk considers recipients of federal aid to be
| part of the "parasite class."[3])
|
| [1]: https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-
| polit...
|
| [2]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_homeless_relocation_pr...
|
| [3]: https://atlantablackstar.com/2025/02/14/elon-musk-faces-
| back...
| bagels wrote:
| Musk is the biggest parasite in the parasite class.
| majormajor wrote:
| DOGE comes from the political machine that believes _more_
| restrictions on eligibility for government assistance are a
| GOOD thing and that spending on such assistance should be
| dramatically cut.
|
| So good luck with that.
|
| Zoning as a silver bullet? When you have a huge economic
| difference as a conflating factor? If the US had had decades of
| economic stagnation the housing price pressure caused by the
| beneficiaries of many sectors of the economy NOT stagnating,
| but instead of booming at more-than-anywhere-else-in-the-world-
| levels, seen in SF in particular, would be far less.) Look at
| housing prices in hollowing-out former industrial towns in the
| Midwest. Economic stagnation and lower cost of living go hand
| in hand. Japan stagnated at a pretty high level, quality-of-
| living-wise. That doesn't seem like a bad thing. It's certainly
| not comparable to Nigeria, Pakistan, or Chile. It's also not
| comparable to the US. And do you know who else doesn't want the
| US to stagnate like that for the elite professional class? Elon
| Musk. (And Japan's economic situation has more than a few
| darker aspects to it.)
|
| (Republicans also fucking love zoning, so..... again... wtf)
| aprilthird2021 wrote:
| > If the US had had decades of economic stagnation the
| housing price pressure caused by the beneficiaries of many
| sectors of the economy NOT stagnating, but instead of booming
| at more-than-anywhere-else-in-the-world-levels, seen in SF in
| particular, would be far less.) Look at housing prices in
| hollowing-out former industrial towns in the Midwest.
|
| But the article isn't wrong though. Zoning things like Tokyo
| in San Francisco would be a silver bullet to the woes there
| and it would go a long way to making people feel prosperous.
| If you live in the bay area, you'll be shocked to see people
| with quite large net worths, feel like they have nothing
| because the only place they can afford near their workplace
| is $1M or more and we're talking about condos here.
| energy123 wrote:
| But DOGE, Elon Musk and Donald Trump don't have zoning on the
| agenda.
|
| Trump's campaign platform was verbatim in favor of single
| family zoning according to his website. Harris's official
| platform was to ease permitting restrictions and provide
| incentives to states to reduce these regulations, according to
| their website and the multiple times they discussed this on the
| campaign trail.
|
| Look past the marketing hype of DOGE and see that it's not
| actually deregulating anything that matters. The regulations
| that are blocking housing and energy are only going to be
| accelerated under this administration -- wilfully so.
|
| The technocratic center-right have at times embraced
| deregulations like this, but not the new populist-right. The
| populist-right, if anything, see these regulations as _useful_
| because it empowers the immigrant scapegoat tactic as an
| explanation for housing costs.
| Tade0 wrote:
| > This means the permitted building types carry over as you
| move up the categories, allowing mixed-use development by
| default.
|
| That is more or less how it works all around the world except
| the US. Or rather: mixed use is the default, outside of
| specific cases
| genewitch wrote:
| Cool. The US is the third largest country in the world; not
| all of us have to live above a restaurant or laundry. Or in
| apartments or other multi-tenant housing.
|
| Those of us that want to can move to San Francisco or New
| York.
|
| The state i live in has fewer people than metro Los Angeles.
| What works for them for housing is unnecessary for us.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Okay, no one was talking about your town. I'm not even sure
| if your state/town has zoning laws.
|
| SF and LA have a lot less "living above a restaurant"
| because of those.
| aprilthird2021 wrote:
| I think zoning is THE reason for what the article explains (and
| thanks for sharing it by the way, it was very insightful, imo).
|
| But how does fixing our zoning issues translate to, for
| example, firing thousands of IRS workers?
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Yup. Top bad Trump's actual political stance wants to focus
| on single family households.
| BrenBarn wrote:
| I mean, the other conclusion from that article is a negative,
| namely: constant GDP growth is not a great measure of success.
| Who cares if GDP goes up or down? What matters is quality of
| life.
| hatmatrix wrote:
| Indeed there is administrative bloat everywhere, and I can
| sympathize with your hope that tearing down the current system
| will leave room for building anew.
|
| However, it's hubris to assume that everything is bloat. There
| is the adage of Chesterton's fence, which reads: "...reforms
| should not be made until the reasoning behind the existing
| state of affairs is understood." Many things that appear to be
| bloat that serves a useful function, and tearing them blindly
| is going to do irreparable damage.
|
| [1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Chesterton%27s_fence
| fergie wrote:
| Despite the hype, DOGE is about replacing government employees
| with private contractors rather that actually saving money.
| Therefore it will almost certainly end up costing more in the
| long run.
|
| At a high level, the current administration is seeking ways to
| cut tax for the wealthy and pay and conditions for workers. As
| a property developer, Trump has a literal vested interest in
| maintaining high property values.
|
| Its really difficult to see how this will translate into more
| affordable housing for poor people.
| Fin_Code wrote:
| I'm with you in that hope. There has been wild growth for a
| very long time. Realignments are painful but necessary.
| UltraSane wrote:
| Elon Musk is a liar with zero credibility. All his claims about
| government "inefficiency" are lies used to make people like you
| OK with him shutting down agencies he doesn't like.
| namuol wrote:
| Can you point out the parts which aren't a shit-show?
| evantbyrne wrote:
| Really not seeing the forest through the trees on this one. The
| president is not supposed to have unilateral authority to axe
| written law. He's trimming the legislative branch, not the
| budget.
| pfannkuchen wrote:
| Paul Graham approves.
| alluro2 wrote:
| The frustration of some of the people in the comments is clear -
| "the city is spending a lot of our tax money on these criminals,
| savages and addicts and they don't even want help".
|
| It's incredibly privileged and reductive to think of it that way
| - that, after surviving in a park for 10 YEARS, struggling for
| food and shelter, surviving the seasons, rest of society and
| getting beat down to square 1 so many times -and basically being
| in constant fight or flight mode as the article states - you
| think _you_ wouldn 't resort to escaping through alcohol or
| drugs, and could simply "decide to get your act together" and
| adapt to anything the govt agencies expect from you on daily
| basis in some of those housing solutions.
|
| Those people did not cheerfully decide one day to dedicate their
| life to shitting all over a park and be addicted to meth. A lot
| of homeless people got there either by being let down by the
| society very early on, or by 1-2 bad events in life making it
| impossible to pay rent and getting dragged into a downward spiral
| from there.
|
| Solutions should be focused on the root causes, and not the
| symptoms. If the country is such a late-stage capitalism shithole
| that so many people are 1 medical emergency away from not being
| able to pay rent, and there's no safety net or effective
| government support to prevent them from going homeless, the cost
| of trying to rehabilitate someone after years on the streets / in
| the parks is going to be multiplied. I'd like to see how those
| large budgets are being targetted first at number of new people
| coming into this situation being reduced, and then additionally
| decreasing the existing homeless population.
|
| As usually, there are methods being successfully (at least to a
| larger extent) used in other societies - but USA is very often
| dismissive of them, because it's special and different.
| hcurtiss wrote:
| Nah -- usually they decided to do meth and the rest followed. I
| used to be pretty libertarian about drugs. Victimless crime and
| all. But in the last ten years, it's become clear to me that
| they exploit fundamental human weaknesses. TBH - I've become a
| much bigger fan of the war on drugs, and very heavy penalties
| for dealers.
| Double_a_92 wrote:
| Why did they decide to do meth?
| hcurtiss wrote:
| It's a fun high? Is this even a serious question?
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Is this a serious answer or do you really not know your
| history?
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| The real answer is the war on drugs, which was actually a
| war on minorities. Of course some non-minorities get hit in
| the cross fire too.
| Ylpertnodi wrote:
| In the war against drugs, you're losing very, very, badly.
|
| What, though, is 'pretty libertarian' about drugs? I ask,
| 'cus every professed-libertarian I've met doesn't seem to be
| very clear in their arguments about anything really.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| That was the point on the War in Dugs, so Nixon would say
| it's a smashing success.
| ErigmolCt wrote:
| This story shows a rare instance where the system actually helped
| someone... But unfortunately I think without a truly personal
| approach, most initiatives (in this field) end up as half-
| measures at best
| lisper wrote:
| Almost 20 years ago I spent two years trying to get a homeless
| person off the street and made a movie about it:
|
| https://graceofgodmovie.com/
|
| It's an incredibly complicated problem, but if there is one
| message I can share it is this: homeless people are, first and
| foremost, people. They span the full range of human experience
| (the main subject of my movie had a masters degree in psychology)
| and there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Homelessness is not
| one problem, it is a symptom of at least half a dozen different
| problems, all of which need different solutions. (And, BTW, some
| homeless people voluntarily choose the lifestyle. It's definitely
| a minority, but it's not zero.)
| harlanji wrote:
| Yea, I'm a regular HN reader and I've been stuck on the street
| for going on 7 years. Used to be commended for persevering
| against the odds and the like, as a child and young programmer
| at 15 onward, home owner at 22.
|
| I've left SF and landed in a college town in Sac Valley last
| year. Rent is $750/mo here. Been working in a kitchen for a
| year. Am I housed yet? Nope. Just gotta save a few thousand
| dollars. I have about the same amount of bills as a housed
| person, between gym + storage + take out food + car insurance.
|
| But then the social aspect, my old relatives and network need
| to distance themselves from me. Any kind of old reference or
| something, non starter.
|
| I will beat this. I only keep posting here on these threads
| because as you say, we span the full range of human existence.
| I like to think I'll use my approach as a template to help
| others. Get out of the big metro and into a peaceful place with
| cheap rent and lots of opportunity, yadda yadda.
|
| Cheers.
| thierrydamiba wrote:
| Goodluck and Godspeed my friend
| wnolens wrote:
| > Get out of the big metro and into a peaceful place with
| cheap rent and lots of opportunity
|
| This always comes to mind when I see folks on the street here
| in NYC/Brooklyn. Is it too simple a solution? Is a dense
| metro better in some ways?
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| You just need to remember that homeless people have most of
| the same constraints and ties to location that you do.
| Everyone grew up somewhere, a lot of homeless people had
| relatively "normal" lives before the street and most have
| some connections lingering from that time.
|
| So they probably still have family connections there,
| friends, maybe a church or AA group, case worker, friendly
| coffee shop owner, etc. They aren't any more eager to break
| these ties than you would be.
| hector126 wrote:
| I think it's hard to imagine someone who prefers
| homelessness to living somewhere cheap. I understand
| there's a lot of nuance and for the majority of homeless
| folks, $750 rent isn't necessarily more realistic than
| the $3000 rent I remember in NYC, but for the people for
| whom cheap living _is_ a viable option, I'm struggling to
| believe that their AA group or a friendly coffee shop
| owner are their reasoning for choosing NYC over a highway
| town outside of Rochester.
|
| I actually think it's a bit infantilizing to suggest that
| any otherwise capable person would choose sleeping on the
| streets or in shelters over a basement apartment in a
| cheap, boring town.
|
| Speaking personally, I'd prefer living in quite literally
| any town in the entire country if it meant a roof over my
| head.
| Agentus wrote:
| Manhattan is great to be homeless in. free food available
| every couple of blocks, lots of social services. can sleep
| in hospitals, on the subway or elsewhere. good free
| transportation in the form of the subway. subways not a bad
| place to sleep, certain comedians did it getting started in
| new york. I do it.
|
| cold isnt a big problem if u know what ur doing. during the
| summers u can spend all day at the beach and that makes up
| for it.
|
| spend the day at the library working on the computer.
| police and security are relatively lax so long as you know
| how to blend in, some homeless people are less socially
| adept and dont take care of themselves so they are magnets
| for reprisals in a manner of speaking.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Have you looked into joining the merchant fleet? They need
| people working in their galleys as well, and you'll have no
| bills to pay.
| tlogan wrote:
| For those who live in San Francisco and witness homelessness and
| drug addiction across the city, this article feels deeply out of
| touch and even insulting.
|
| We need to acknowledge that San Francisco has spent billions over
| decades on homelessness programs, yet the crisis persists,
| leaving us to ask: Is this truly the best we can do? Are we
| investing efficiently, or are we simply maintaining a broken
| system?
| presentation wrote:
| The latter
| martinald wrote:
| The core problem imo is there is simply not good enough
| treatments for addiction (yet?). For opioid addiction there is
| methadone and buprenorphine etc. But I suspect these have
| became even less effective with so much fentanyl around now,
| requiring much higher doses. But these all really work
| (simplifying massively) by replacing the addiction with
| something that is easier to eventually titrate down.
|
| For meth, crack, etc there are effectively no pharmacological
| interventions available. And many (most?) of the street
| homeless have dual addictions to a stimulant and an opioid, so
| even if they did manage to switch from fentanyl to
| buprenorphine they would almost certainly be extremely unstable
| with their stimulant addiction.
|
| Obviously there are psychological interventions and peer
| support groups, but these require quite a lot of stability to
| stick to and get to, which I think is extremely difficult for
| someone in a very chaotic addiction cycle.
|
| To me, it seems some of the billions that cities spent on
| social services for homeless should be diverted (or in addition
| to) to pharmacological research. There is so little funding
| available for this - I read Prof David Nutt was doing an
| interesting PET study for kappa opioid response in addiction
| but ran out of funding. The funding requirements were low-
| medium hundreds of thousands of dollars and couldn't find it to
| continue the research.
|
| The current status quo seems a bit like trying to treat TB
| without antibiotics. The treatment back then was basically
| similar to current 'rehab' programs - send them to a quiet
| place and give them care and help. Obviously not a bad thing to
| do; but once you had antibiotics the prognosis improved by many
| orders of magnitude almost overnight (and a lot less costly to
| provide).
| starspangled wrote:
| > The core problem imo is there is simply not good enough
| treatments for addiction (yet?).
|
| Isn't that still treating a symptom, rather than the core
| problem? If homelessness is caused by drug addiction, what
| causes drug addiction? Underlying mental health? Lack of
| opportunity? Government welfare dependence?
| habosa wrote:
| Please try to speak only for yourself, not all SF residents.
|
| I've lived here for a decade, in 6 different neighborhoods
| (including 6th street). I now live near Golden Gate Park where
| this article is mostly set. I found it inspiring, not
| insulting.
| archagon wrote:
| Ditto. (Except I live in the Mission.)
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| I can't speak for SF, but LA had judges recently come down very
| hard on housing organizations for having basicslly zero data on
| where 20 billion dollars went. The judge forced actual audits
| and homelessness is actually slightly improving as of late
| 2024.
|
| I would nlt he shocked if similar issues are happening in SF.
| at best very inefficient spending on minor factors, at medium
| they may be "fixing homelessness" by paying for more security
| than actual homes (this was one of the LA factors). Or at the
| damndest it's hurt outright Embezzlement.
| Nifty3929 wrote:
| The problem is that money cannot solve homelessness, because
| you cannot live in it or eat it or be treated by it. It's just
| money - numbers in a computer.
|
| Things that might help would be housing, food or treatments.
| But those real-world things are often very hard to come by, and
| often encumbered by the very people who profess to want to
| help.
|
| For example, maybe building more homes would help - but
| developers are often hamstrung in their ability to do so - and
| often by exactly the same people that want to fund homeless
| programs.
|
| So what happens when we give people a lot of money to "solve" a
| problem, but then prevent them from taking the actions that
| might help? Well, they still will always find a way to "use"
| the money (I'm not necessarily implying fraud here), but the
| results will never materialize. What this looks like in
| practice is funding studies, working groups, paper-pushing
| bureaucracies, etc.
|
| So the money is gone, any we don't have anything to show for
| it.
| lukerramsden wrote:
| California is simply amazing. In so many areas they have problems
| simply nobody else has (wildfires due to bad fire control policy,
| homelessness and public drug usage as discussed here) or is at
| magnitudes worse scale than elsewhere, and then policymakers
| handwring about how "nothing can be done". Nowhere else I have
| ever been even comes close to what I see in California.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Yeah, meanwhile California alone is a top 10 economy and houses
| more billionaires than any other place. I wonder if it's a
| coincidence that increased greed fuels (or buys) less empathy?
| IceHegel wrote:
| I'm 24 (which I think is younger than most people in here) and I
| live in San Francisco. I'm pretty ashamed to live here and hope
| to move soon.
|
| The "on the ground" feeling is bad. Every issue we had 5 years
| ago is worse (except the drought).
|
| Daily life involves walking calculated circles around drug
| addicts to avoid agroing them (like Dead Island).
|
| I'm seeing more trash on the streets, more graffiti covering
| highway signs.
|
| People have given up trying to change anything and just tolerate
| it now. I thought I'd meet high agency tech people when I moved
| here. The tech scene is way better than Boston but the sprit of
| SF is really dead. All the money in the world and they can't run
| a city half a well as was done before cars...
| presentation wrote:
| lol San Franciscans never tried to change anything for the last
| 50 years, they never gave up since they never tried to begin
| with - they actually prefer it this way.
| kelnos wrote:
| Where in SF do you live? I'm guessing Soma, or near downtown?
| Get out of your neighborhood now and then. Most of the city
| does not have a drug addict or three on every block, and trash
| everywhere.
| infecto wrote:
| You need to get out of SoMa. The rest of SF is pretty nice,
| there are definite hot zones like near Bayview but generally
| what you describe is just SF. I left to raise a family and one
| of the reasons was the homelessness BUT SF has always been like
| this and if it was not the homeless it was the gangs or other
| issues in different parts of the city. Try living in a
| different part of the city, it might change things up a bit.
| cancan wrote:
| My experience suggests the opposite; the city was an upwards
| trajectory until 2018 or so but it's taken a turn for the
| worse since.
|
| I lived in SF from 2009 to 2024. Every part of the city has
| gotten worse. When I moved, parts of Mission were definitely
| rough and they've cleaned up quite a bit. Even SoMa became
| somewhat interesting, as much as area like that could have
| before Covid.
| robotburrito wrote:
| Weird. I've lived here for 12 years. Things seem slightly
| better if not the same.
| MisterTea wrote:
| Same with NYC. People just moving here are unaware of the
| history and think OMG so much homelessness, so much crime!
| Meanwhile I grew up remembering seeing crack vials all over
| the street, the mob was ever present actively extorting and
| murdering people, numerous abandoned buildings creating ghost
| towns of squatters, and the homeless camps were quite
| elaborate - I remember a big encampment around the foot of
| the Manhattan Bridge complete with burning trash barrels and
| a large teepee. Today's NYC is sterile compared to the 80's I
| grew up in.
| ycsf999 wrote:
| Overpaid tech workers like yourself have done much more to
| destroy the "spirit" of San Fransisco than some homeless people
| sleeping in a park. You can look all the way back to the 1960s
| and see the same complaints about "lawlessness" in San
| Fransisco, there's always a marginalized scapegoat to blame -
| first the beatniks, then the hippies, then the gays, now the
| homeless. The homeless are not an aberration or a new
| phenomenon in San Fransisco. It's the entitled, overpaid tech
| transplants rampaging through the city that are destroying it.
| namuol wrote:
| It can take time to get to know any city, but SF has the
| advantage of being relatively dense and walkable.
|
| I moved here in 2015, and I was about the same age when I
| arrived. It was an adjustment for me back then too. The
| problems don't really seem worse to me overall, but I will say
| that market street and SoMa in general feel worse than I
| remember but not really because of homeless people or drug use
| (that was already a highly visible problem); I think it's
| important to point out how much commercial real estate has gone
| fallow since tons of stuff was shuttered during the pandemic.
| That's the most noticeable change to me, and it just makes the
| whole area that much more depressing.
|
| So before writing off the city entirely as has-been or
| whatever, maybe try a day of walking around the northeast
| corner when the weather is nicer. Nob Hill into Chinatown, then
| North Beach. From there you can enjoy a view from Coit Tower
| before taking one of the semi-famous stairways down to the
| Embarcadero. Levi plaza is a nice spot to rest your feet. If
| you need a place to stop and work, and you don't mind
| tethering, find your way up into the Embarcadero center. The
| upper portion is an open air walkway over the streets with
| really well-kept gardens/trees along the way (at least once
| winter passes). Below you'll find shelter from cold or wet
| weather, with lots of places to sit. It's kind of the best kept
| secret of the city if you work remotely.
|
| > All the money in the world and they can't run a city half a
| well as was done before cars...
|
| This is hardly unique to SF. Hell, the city is a diamond in the
| rough among other post-industrial cities anywhere in the world.
|
| If not the northeastern corner, maybe try the mission near 24th
| and Valencia, or Fillmore near Japan Town. There are other
| spots too of course but these are all places I walk or take the
| train to regularly and I will miss them dearly if I leave.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| You're ashamed? I have to be honest with you - I just moved
| into the city last year after living in the suburbs since 2018.
| SF is the most beautiful city I've ever been in. Do you not
| have a strong attachment to the communities here? I'm finding
| the city surprisingly good at cultivating niches.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| The park rangers empathic personal approach is interesting, she
| is working within a system not worth navigating as even that best
| case outcome is still a poor case outcome
|
| > For him, "it was overwhelming,"
|
| I've dealt with people that take 15 years to do some basic action
| because of something considered overwhelming. The only thing I
| observe is that you could literally start from scratch, the age
| of zero, and be competent in any field by this time
|
| In this guys case, it took 7 months to get basic identifying
| paperwork regenerated, so that he can walk into one of those
| classic grifter housing projects
|
| So many issues with that, masqueraded as a solution
| jonstewart wrote:
| The last time I was in San Francisco was 8.5 years ago. My family
| had a cabbie with a pile of new tube socks in front seat. When
| he'd have to stop at a light, he would look for any homeless near
| the intersection, get their attention, and hand them new socks.
|
| We gave the cabbie a good tip.
| barrenko wrote:
| Root cause of this issue all wonderfully explained in the Tom
| Holland's Dominion (not to be confused with the Spiderman actor).
| namlem wrote:
| Yep, thought the same thing when reading the article. Christian
| morality. I think it's a good thing for society to care for the
| poor and downtrodden, but when it reaches the point of self-
| flaggelation, it's gone too far. Imo, we need some form of
| institutionalization that's milder than what we have for the
| criminally insane, but still coercive.
| tehjoker wrote:
| What a horrible problem with such a simple solution. Give people
| adequate and decent housing at reasonable prices or for free if
| necessary. Laughable this is still a question in the richest
| country in world history.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| Did you read the article? Some of these people don't want to
| live in housing. I think what they'd prefer (and it's not
| realistic) is to live in the woods on a few acres of their own
| in a cabin with all of their needs met.
|
| But I agree if housing was more affordable the problem would
| not be as bad.
| 1024core wrote:
| If this person wants to be left alone and live by himself, why
| doesn't he find some place in the wilderness, away from a city;
| maybe an area managed by BLM where he won't be bothered? Why does
| he have to fuck up one of the few parks in a city of 850,000
| people?
| itishappy wrote:
| The article speaks explicitly to this point:
|
| > Barrows slowly learned that he'd had a rough childhood and
| had grown up in a foster family. The park was his childhood
| refuge, a place where he'd spend afternoons wandering around
| and riding the carousel. She understood then why he had such a
| deep attachment to the place.
| nickvec wrote:
| How do you expect them to get necessities to survive in the
| wilderness?
| sidgarimella wrote:
| the hn cynicism is crazy but unsurprising. turns out can really
| easily spend your whole life obsessed with a pragmatism that
| betrays taking any action, however directionally correct
| namlem wrote:
| Sorry but the idea that such a system of personal involvement is
| a practical solution is a pipe dream. We need some system of
| involuntary confinement that isn't prison or psych hospitals imo.
| A place where we can put these people in humane conditions that
| is meant to transition them into being able to take care of
| themselves. A place where they can have private rooms and be
| given useful work to do, as well as counseling for their mental
| health issues.
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