How can he live in SF for years and think it's a free market? I live across the country and even I know that the housing market there is artificially constrained.
He really seems to think that homeless people grow on trees or something instead of realizing that they lived in the city before he did.
The two ideas can work together when you're not being antagonistically extreme. Remember that without a government there isn't such a thing as property rights.
The homeless problem in SF has very little to do with the high cost of housing. SF's policies on homeless has attracted homeless people from far and wide. Other cities were caught busing their homeless people and dropping them off in SF.
Not saying the policies are great, but how can you say that limited availability of housing and astronomical prices don't cause most of the homelessness? Anyway SF only claims that the bused-in people cost them half a million dollars. http://thinkprogress.org/health/2013/09/11/2602391/san-franc...
To be a good Hacker, you must first be a good Human Being. We, as a hacker culture, don't want to encourage or harbor terrible behavior like this. But apparently that is what is happening.
You don't have to be SJW to think that tyranny is a bad solution to homelessness.
I wonder if this was s stunt to get attention on his company? This seems so cartoonish, I mean you could picture wealthy people thinking this way but to me it almost seems too insensitive.
Maybe a publicity stunt that backfired a little.
On the other hand maybe he is so sheltered as to think this is an actual problem he's helping solve...
Yup. We need to turn down our witchhunt culture and engage eachother with more open dialog and mutual respect. If someone holds a differing view, they often have a good reason for it. At the very least, people can get down to where their assumptions differ. And once we've identified assumptions, we can try to test them with data.
I considered whether it might be satire, but then he apologized for using the term "riff-raff" which implies that the rest of the article is fine by him. Also he's been defending it on Twitter.
It didn't seem clever enough to be satire, I was thinking more like he was trying to just get a lot of attention, and as we all know outrage drives viral-ity much better than admiration.
He seems to be okay with regularly telling everyone about what he thinks is wrong with the world [0]. It says a lot about you when you need to complain to companies about bugs or whatever and also tell your followers how upset you are [1].
One of the things I like about Twitter is that it's much harder for companies to just ignore your complaints about things which, I hope you would agree, are just ridiculous. Google pushes its authenticator app but when I get a new phone, even if I still have the old phone and it's working I can't move it across without some dodgy hack.
Yes it's great for complaining to companies (except maybe Google), but the guy put a '.' before each tweet so that all his followers would see his complaints too. That's the type of person that would see a homeless person and say I need to tell everyone about the 'riff-raff' I just saw in an American urban center.
(And to your point, I personally haven't had that issue with transferring my accounts on Authenticator, but maybe it's different on iOS.)
Having read the letter, I can't help but think that this must be some kind of elaborate trolling: That after 2 weeks or so, he'll follow-up with "Thanks for all the attention everyone! My start-up's revenue took a 45% bump from all this publicity!!" This reads like a cartoon caricature of the stereotypical clueless tech bro. No real person could actually think this way.
I'm just struck by the total lack of compassion towards your fellow humans. Levinas used to say that ethics was recognizing the obligation that we have towards people that are suffering - I just wonder how someone who is not a sociopath can see a suffering person on the street and feel slighted because their view was ruined.
I think it takes a special kind of person to be forever sympathetic, the folks that work in soup kitchens and volunteer helping these people are to be applauded and recognised - it's not something I could do. For the average person when you interact with dozens of homeless people every single day you just become sort of immune after a few years...
To play devil's advocate, he's right. He shouldn't have to see the pain, struggle, and despair of homeless - the city government should be providing affordable housing and shelters for the homeless. That it hasn't is a failure of the local government, and should be addressed. Much of the reason that affordable housing is out of reach of many in San Francisco is due to government regulation, not market capitalism. Extremely restrictive construction laws and absurd rent controls distort the housing market, which is driving the expensive home market and massive rents. A large portion of the blame for this situation falls to the government - they wrote the laws, they built this disaster.
He was not complaining about the suffering of those people and the lack of government intervention on their behalf - he was unhappy because poor people made his own personal life marginally worse by subjecting him to unpleasant views/smells.
> Every day, on my way to, and from work, I see people sprawled across the sidewalk, tent cities, human feces, and the faces of addiction. The city is becoming a shanty town… Worst of all, it is unsafe.
> [...]
> I am telling you, there is going to be a revolution. People on both sides are frustrated, and you can sense the anger. The city needs to tackle this problem head on, it can no longer ignore it and let people do whatever they want in the city. I don’t have a magic solution… It is a very difficult and complex situation, but somehow during Super Bowl, almost all of the homeless and riff raff[1] seem to up and vanish. I’m willing to bet that was not a coincidence. Money and political pressure can make change. So it is time to start making progress, or we as citizens will make a change in leadership and elect new officials who can.
> Democracy is not the last stop in politics. In-fact, the order of progression according to Socrates via Plato in the Republic goes: timocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and finally tyranny. Socrates argues that a society will decay and pass through each government in succession, eventually becoming a tyranny.
This guy knows there's sides, and he knows what side he's on.
The GP didn't say the letter meant it that way, he said the letter is right in that there shouldn't be homeless people living in the streets, they should be taken care of by a stronger safety net.
I'm going to be pedantic, but only because I think that's how the letter guy is going to try and get out of this too. The letter did not say that "there shouldn't be homeless people living in the streets".
Both it and GP said he shouldn't have to see homeless people. The letter writer certainly wouldn't care if the homeless people were still homeless, so long as they were bussed somewhere he didn't have to gaze upon their poor faces.
A lot of SF's homeless are from elsewhere, people who came here on a hope, or just because of SF's reputation as a city that's friendly to weirdos. (That's certainly part of why I came.)
If they can't make it here, SF offers them a way to get home again, but only if there is actually someone there who can put them up, and only if they're in good enough condition to travel. Details are here:
If you read your article, SF only offers tickets to people to return home. They're not trying to get rid of people who grew up here. This speaks to how much of SF's homeless problem stems from being a homeless destination. If you're homeless in a part of the country that is less accommodating, both politically and climatically, you come to SF. Based on your article, it seems that a lot of places will even buy you the bus ticket.
This issue reminds me of the refugee problems happening recently in Europe. The problem was refugees trying to get into Europe and should've been the responsibility of the entire EU to solve. But the problem was felt most acutely in the Greek islands where refugees were showing up. And when an national/continental issue is felt primarily by a single, smaller region, it's highly problematic.
As a thought experiment, what would happen if SF started sheltering the homeless and ensuring that all their needs were met. Well, suddenly those bus tickets bought by cities around the country become a lot more effective and more cities around the country start buying them. It's even the moral thing for social workers to do, since the political climate in their city means that it's better for the person being bussed out to go to SF. It becomes a tragedy of the commons situation where the disincentive for doing the right thing is that you get to deal with the problems from the places that do the wrong thing. A homeless person going elsewhere is a living externality.
This is a national problem (probably international, though deportation is considered entirely acceptable in that situation) and needs to be treated as such. If the Federal government doesn't want to deal with the problem, it could pass a law that allows the city that provides services to a homeless person to bill the cost to the homeless person's home city. Suddenly that bus ticket wouldn't seem like the cheapest option and SF could provide all the services necessary to solve its own homeless problem. Until then, the situation will remain fucked. SF is too liberal to be take a GTFO stance and too poor to comprehensively solve the problem for all the homeless that are there now and would show up if they started such a program.
> If you read your article, SF only offers tickets to people to return home.
They offer tickets if someone will take care of the homeless person. In practice, we see homeless refugees from San Francisco showing up in Turlock and Modesto, given free tickets, and still being homeless just in a different place.
Asking for homeless people to be moved out is basically asking for regulations and enforcement which has to be funded from taxes, isn't it. Not all that different from a shelter, except much crueller.
I visited SF a few times, and I was always horrified to see how such a wealthy city leaves its homeless people to wander around, sleep in the cold and generally live in inhuman conditions. I won't claim I know enough about the city from two visits to propose any solutions, but I know that the fact that there are hundreds or thousands of people living like that is inexcusable. I've never seen this before to such extent.
Are we talking about the same city here? I'd call SF "occasionally chilly" at best. That's part of why so many homeless people gravitate to CA; if you're sleeping outdoors there are many, many worse climates for it.
> The coldest day of the year is December 26, with an average low of 44°F and high of 55°F.
Related: did you know that windows can crack from thermal stress like cookware that you cool too rapidly? I learned that last weekend! Windchill -30F, fun times here in New England.
>did you know that windows can crack from thermal stress like cookware that you cool too rapidly?
This is called thermal shock [1]. Basically thermal expansion mismatches cause internal stress beyond the material's Ultimate Tensile Stress and causes a fracture. It's the underpinning to how tattoo removal works too.
The city spends $167 million [1] for a homeless population no larger than 15,000 (and probably closer to 7,000) [2]. The wealthy city isn't leaving anyone to his or her fate. To the contrary, it's expending vast amounts of wealth with precious little to show for it.
That's between 12k and 20k per person. Way less than you'd need to provide accommodation and treatment for a person with mental illness. It's not surprising it doesn't work.
The people blasting the city claim the city isn't doing enough, and when shown that they are actually are providing a remarkable amount of support, it still isn't enough. 12-20k annually is more than a significant chunk of the population earns in wages.
I don't really know what your point is. The amount may be a large dollar figure, but it is clearly not enough to solve the problem, therefore the problem still exists.
I'm curious how many people live in SF on 12-20k, but that's irrelevant. If someone has accommodation and is able to earn wages as a steady state, it is obvious that their costs will be less than a homeless person who needs mental health treatment, rehabilitation and maybe even education before they are employable.
The figure that employed people can survive on is well below the lower bound for what is needed to rehabilitate a homeless person.
The point is that no amount of money will solve the problem with San Francisco's current approach (whatever that is). If they spend $50 million with zero effect, and they spend $100 million with zero effect, and they spend $150 million with zero effect, where do you guess the problem stands at the $200, $250, $500 marks?
Check out the chart on page 18. $1.5 billion spent over 10 years, and the homeless population... increased! What a humiliating statistic for anyone who thinks this can be solved with mental-health treatment, rehab, empathy, or [homily of choice].
And that $167 million is just services specifically for the homeless. It does not included other city services which are heavily used by the homeless such as medical, housing, police, sanitation, etc - probably well over another $100 million - or the extensive private, non-profit and church spending.
2000 chronic homeless from what I have read. However, the city spends about $40000 per person that is not on the streets. A good article on the last 10 years or so: http://www.sfchronicle.com/archive/item/A-decade-of-homeless... 1 reason there are so many is probably because the city does try to help them and not abuse them like many cities. That and the mild weather...
SF cares for a substantial fraction of the entire nation's homeless population, who migrate to SF for weather and public services. SF gets blamed because SF helps homeless folks the most, not the least.
This is a complex issue... but in my experience, most of the homeless are not looking for help to find jobs and/or contribute to society in manner that will lead them out of "homelessness." A lot of them prefer this "lifestyle"... we try very hard to help the people that want help. Most don't.
Go talk to your local EMS/Fire department personnel and most of them will have similar stories. I know the homeless people in my area better than I know my extended family. I have memorized their birthday's, the medications they should be taking, the street drugs they prefer, the kind of beer they drink, where they stash their stuff, where they have their main camp, what their childhood, and adult life were like, their medical history, what shelters they've been kicked out of and are not allowed back to... and more.
We are forced to talk with them, sometimes 3 or 4 times a shift. I lost sympathy for most of them a long time ago, that doesn't mean we treat them like sub-humans... we just have less patience with the shit they are inevitably going to give us.
> A lot of them prefer this "lifestyle"... we try very hard to help the people that want help. Most don't.
A lot of them are mentally handicapped or dealing with acquired mental illnesses. Even under good conditions, treating either is hard. Of course EMS/fire fighters/volunteers working in shelters aren't able to do that.
I've loaded many a homeless into my fire engine to take to the local Crisis Resource Center/ Behaviour Rehabilitation center because they begged and pleaded that they want help. Great!
More often than not, we see them a few days later with Steel Reserve cans littered about after someone calls 911 for what appears to them a dead man on the side of the road.
Mental illness is brutal. I feel for these guys, especially as I get older and start seeing my age equivalent homeless folks with PTSD and the like. The Vietnam vets are being replaced with Gulf war and Afghanistan vets. It is heart breaking to be sure... especially because many of us have served. We try, again, to hook these guys up with the VA... but they must want the help. It will not work otherwise.
I wouldn't trust the VA to actually give them the help they need. Navigating a giant bureaucracy is tough for the most sane among us, let alone someone on the ropes.
Wanting help is not the same as being able to be helped. Veterans often have what is called 'treatment resistant PTSD', which is another way of saying that we haven't figured out how to treat them. There is a wealth of material on how even veterans who have supportive families and are housed and in treatment can't always hold down a job.
New treatments such as VR based exposure therapy, or MDMA therapy are promising, but the standard of care is currently CBT and/or drugs, which have generally poor outcomes.
We just don't know how to treat PTSD in general. This has nothing to do with whether people 'want' help or not.
Sure. We do our best with the training we've had to handle the situations we are presented with. I know there are subtleties and nuance, especially with vets. That doesn't change the fact that we have to deal with them now.
I'm not minimizing their issues, nor am I saying one-size fits all... but I would be remiss to not say: there are a lot of people dealing with mental/medical problems that are resistant to traditional therapies that don't resort to self-destructive behaviour to cope.
To wave off all the choices they make on a day-to-day basis is a disservice them and flies in the face of the people that are dealing with the same issues in non-self-destructive manner.
If you think addicts are making "choices" in the conventional sense of that term, you haven't quite caught on to the nature of addiction. They no longer have a choice. That's why there are no ex-addicts, just people in recovery. They spend the rest of their lives learning to avoid waking the beast that dwells within them. They very carefully construct lives that keep them away from circumstances where they lose the power of choice.
It's not an easy thing. I have friends who have made it so far, and their struggles were enormous. I have friends and family who didn't make it, and they're now dead. And I know plenty of people who just aren't addictive by nature; they made all the same choices and never had a problem at all.
I get why people don't like this. We all want to believe in the power of will. In particular, we want to believe that the power of our own will is sufficient to the challenges we face. But sometimes it isn't, and if we accepted that, we'd have fewer homeless addicts.
The fire departments in most towns in America provide emergency medical services. 911 calls about health related things often result in a fire truck arriving, rather than an ambulance.
I don't know what the history is, I'm sure it's complicated.
You've got hospital ambulances, private ambulances, city fire departments, county fire departments, volunteer fire departments and federal fire fighting organizations all potentially in the same place, all summonable by a 911 dispatcher. They all have EMT training and gear. Who shows up and how is it decided? Beats me.
Well, as long as whoever shows up has the required experience and equipment to solve the situation, great! I guess the fire fighting orgs have medical equipment and training too?
Sometimes human organisation is baffling if you are seeing it from a step further out but makes complete sense when viewed from the inside.
You really need to read up on the issue more then. Even a simple browsing of Wikipedia will show the statement is wrong. What is primarily different is reporting by news sources. If the US is nearing a million or two homeless (numbers reported are lower) for the size of its population how does that put it in perspective of Canada listing around three hundred thousand out of thirty five million people. The EU reports nearly three million.
Worse is the homeless situation in third world countries where even less services are available. Being homeless in a Western nation is far different than anywhere else. It may be exaggerated in SF and LA simply because of two reasons, climate and more support for those in need. So the city may actually being doing a good job but is simply attracting more people because they are
tl;dr do not for a moment think that homelessness isn't as bad issue elsewhere, let alone countries where the US is equal to economically.
> Even a simple browsing of Wikipedia will show the statement is wrong.
I looked up "Homelessness in the UK" on Wikpedia and the first line is:
> Homelessness in the United Kingdom is kept somewhat at bay
> by a reasonable volume of housing, statutory rights, and
> various government initiatives.
I don't know what figures you are looking at, but one caveat that occurs to me is that the UK's main homelessness charity, Shelter, has a fairly broad definition of homelessness. You don't have to be sleeping in the street for them to consider you "homeless". Which is good, because relying on your friends' sofas for housing is indeed a very crappy situation which government policy should seek to minimize, but bad, because that's not what other people consider homelessness to be.
Visited Paris last November and the situation looked very differently - homeless were present, but did not appear to be the same mentally ill types that I see in LA and SF. That's not a coincidence - France has universal healthcare (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_care_in_France).
It's really disheartening to see the plight of people who could have been helped. Especially, given that we (US) spend more per capita on healthcare...
Another interesting observation is the difference between LA and SF. In LA (beach areas and west LA/Westwood) a side from minor inconvenience of a line outside public beach restrooms/showers and some encampments, there really isn't a disruption. In SF, people walk in yelling into stores, act out aggressively in broad daylight and generally don't seem to feel any restraint. I never felt particularly unsafe in LA, but definitely had to watch my surroundings last weekend in SF, much more than ever before in the last decade.
What? Have you been to Paris or any major large city in Europe? It's not different than most of American large cities. SF and Seattle just happen to be two of the worst in the nation for homelessness issues and a lot of that is because they move there.
Just an anecdote, but when I studied in a mid-sized city in France a bit over a decade ago, one night after walking home from the bar, I commented to my host mom that I was surprised at the number of homeless people. She seemed confused, so I mentioned people sleeping in the doorways of businesses that were shuttered for the night.
Her reply has always stuck with me. "Oh! No, they're not homeless, they're Roma."
Well, she's not wrong. The situation with the Roma across Europe is a weird one that's completely separate from the homelessness situation.
[All of this is a simplification, and I'm omitting a lot here. The gist ought to be correct, and, I hope, fair to all.]
There are certain cultural barriers when it comes to the Roma. When you have an itinerant population like the Roma (and in Ireland and the UK, Travellers), you will naturally end up with with a conflict of some kind between the settled and travelling populations in a given area, unless both populations are familiar with one another, and even then the opportunities for discrimination are huge. The situation with Travellers in Ireland and the UK isn't as bad as the Roma situation, as the itinerant Roma population is self-isolating and can't speak the same language as the host settled population, whereas at least Travellers can speak the same language, so they're not as isolated from the settled population as the Roma are.
With Travellers, the core issue is that the trades that once allowed them to afford their lifestyle are no longer useful to society at large, so their opportunities for employment are few and far between, which unfortunately leads a greater number down the path of criminality [aside: the vast majority are decent people, but when you're deprived of opportunities, that's going to lead some people to crime]. Add to this that the modern state practically demands a settled lifestyle for things like taxation, education, healthcare, &c., which even further alienates the Traveller and settled populations. Now, you could suggest that they just settle, and some do, but people tend to be attached to their heritage, so for many that's not a runner.
With the Roma, all of that is even worse because they have the added language barrier and an even bigger cultural barrier. Moreover, you also have a trafficking problem surrounding some of the Roma where they're exploited as beggars, and sometimes worse.
So yes, the Roma situation is a completely separate situation from that of homelessness in general, and one nobody has any good answers for yet.
I used to also think that many homeless "preferred the lifestyle of homelessness" but I recently learned of a town in Canada (Medicine Hat) that found it more cost effective to house the homeless. This myth that people prefer to be homeless was shattered and this town found that nearly all homeless were able to reintegrated back into having their own places. The mayor was skeptical at first now, he says, “It makes financial sense. That’s how I had my epiphany and was converted. You can actually save money by giving somebody some dignity and giving them a place to live.”
Being homeless in Calgary is a lot different than the SF Bay area (you don't die in the Winter being a big one!). I'm positive there are many in SF who would benefit from a similar program, but there would still be a ton of homeless people.
I searched "salt lake city homeless" remembering the program there and the SF Gate article discussing it's applicability to SF happened to be the first result, so I'm just embracing the irony, not trying to force it.
Our super-Conservative government for the last decade (now replaced by a young, hip, Liberal one) was actually really big behind the 'housing-first' method of helping the homeless (you get an apartment, no questions asked, then we work on your drug problems, etc later), and put a lot of money towards it.
At first, this seems very socially liberal and at odds with a Conservative party kind of thing until you look at the financials and realize it actually is fiscally very conservative- it saves a ton of money on policing and medical care.
All that said, have you been to Medicine Hat? That's not a place with a very relaxed 'homeless lifestyle'. It's -15C here in Toronto today, and we're like 700km further south. In the west coast of the USA, you can survive on the street without the air itself killing you.
Well, that's great, then. It seems like a liberal calling card but appeals to everyone's desire to save money while providing actually useful social services.
political arguments against anything these days are emotional reactions to parties and politicians rather than policy. people need to turn off the cable news and live less angry lives.
...and get to know some of the homeless on a personal level.
Seriously, this is a human issue. We somehow look on these individuals as if they were almost non-human, yet they have powerful stories and painful experiences.
I'm not doing a good job at that but I try to make it a point to reach outside of my fully-customized bubble, and engage other people who could use some respect and human dignity. My impact is minimal in terms of numbers but chatting for 10 min with someone on the street can really make their day. Who knows, if it happens enough, that person may regain the courage it takes to get back in society and reach out to services that are more competent than I at helping in the details.
a huge number of homeless are mentally ill and/or have serious substance abuse problems. re-acclimating can be very difficult. (and NO, i'm not suggesting we not try)
Since most workers in San Francisco don't work in tech, that's not true. At least not if you want to live in San Francisco. The choice is a tent or a 2 hour commute, which may cost to much given service worker's pay.
The political argument against it is "I don't want a single dime of my money going to worthless scumbag lowlifes who are too lazy to get a job" or "anything the government does is by definition wasteful, the private sector needs to handle this problem like all problems" -- the same one that galvanizes the right against welfare, regulations, healthcare, etc.
The conservatives we have in the US are so extreme they make even the ones in Canada look very, very liberal. A proposal like that here would induce horrible rage and kicking and screaming about "the free market" and "entitlements". Someone would be called a communist. Maybe impeached. Conservatives run on platforms of removing programs that help the poor, not starting new ones.
There's a reason the blog poster addressed his open letter to the chief of police, and not to a local homeless charity with a check attached. He doesn't want to help solve the problem, he just wants to whine about it really loud to powerful people without doing any work or spending any money and hope it goes away.
wrong. conservatives in the states are more than happy to donate to programs that help the homeless and mentally ill, they're consistently the most charitable americans. they do tend not to like taxes and government waste, however.
it's a myth that the only way to solve these problems is with government.
> it's a myth that the only way to solve these problems is with government.
Do you have examples of effective non-government solutions? Looking at my own country my impression is that government is far more effective than charities (in America or elsewhere) on this issue.
Do those "extreme" conservatives have any political power in the cities where this is the biggest problem? What about the liberal yuppies who live closest to the problem and who are most vocal about it?
There's no more political arguments to it. Conservatives, anymore, are simply a tool to attempt to dismantle the government, full stop. They simply don't believe we should have a government, mostly because they don't like paying taxes.
you live in a very simple place. "conservatives" (this term cracks me up) love government when it works, fear it when it doesn't. they tend to trust / prefer private institutions and solutions to public. american "liberals" prefer public solutions to private.
quit disparaging people who disagree with you. attempt to understand their real motivations rather than harping against some lame stereotype (that doesn't even make sense). that's the way to progress and solving our problems.
The political argument against HF comes down to the fact that it may not actually work very well. People opposed to HF tend to argue:
1.) HF is not effective at keeping recipients out of the criminal justice system. (This finding is controversial as, especially in Canada, 2-3 years often go by between arrest and subsequent criminal punishment.)
2.) HF creates 'slums'. (This finding is controversial as the solution is to attract a wider array of potential landlords. From a landlord's perspective, getting involved with HF is difficult as they feel that having one HF unit in a building will depress rents for the entire building.)
3.) HF is built around low quality data collection tools. HF programs always start with something called a point in time (PIT) count in which a city's homeless population is counted. PIT counts always show that homelessness is both older and whiter than frontline activists have found. This problem is highly complex and could easily turn this into a 250 page essay...:)
4.) HF is a one size fits all approach to a very complex problem. People who believe this fall into the narrative that a homeless woman with three children who lives from couch to couch is dramatically different from a homeless man who suffers from schizophrenia and pushes all of his worldly possessions in a cart. I'd argue that this is not so much a criticism as an example of ignorance - HF by its very nature recognizes that every community is different and each community must build its own program. Second, HF is built around personal relationships between recipients and advocates. The advocates are responsible for getting a particular recipient the type of help that he/she needs.
I mostly support Housing First, so I don't believe these, though #2 and #3 are definitely problems.
(source - I am an anti-poverty activist and have studied HF extensively.)
As to point 2, if there are enough homeless people in an area to turn an apartment building into a slum, there is already a de facto slum. It's just that it's a slum made of tents under a highway, rather than in a building.
This is purely anecdotal, but in my experience, proponents of the 'HF creates slums' theory tend to fall into one of two camps:
- functionally blind
- landlords
The functionally blind (note that I'm not saying 'sight impaired...this is by design) tend to argue that homelessness is okay...as long as they can't see it. Often, they live in cities like mine (Regina, Canada) where for 3-4 months of the year, it is too cold to sleep outside. Because of this, homelessness in these cities often involves a mishmash of shelters, crashing on various couches, and sleeping in malls during the day/hanging out in coffee shops at night. The rest of the year, whether through policing or civic design, 'homelessness' consists of guerilla camping in parks and other out of the way places. HF does tend to make homelessness more visible. Programs generally start with a marketing campaign designed to attract landlords, then word gets out on which buildings house the formerly homeless.
And, that's when the functionally blind start to complain. Often, the complaints take the same form as people who protest against halfway houses opening up in their neighbourhoods. They print up flyers decrying the 'death' of their neighbourhood, and show up at city council meetings. Later, they seize onto minor crimes (ie - my sister's former roommate's cousin's veterinarian had her purse snatched two blocks from that building) to justify their beliefs.
Landlords are in a more precarious situation. Since HF does not have its own housing, it absolutely requires the support of landlords. Some HF programs are not terribly well funded so, while they guarantee that rent will be paid, they often require some form of discount to be financially feasible. That alone is a strike against them, at least from the perspective of business.
But, if you are a landlord and are willing to work with HF, you have a difficult choice. Realistically speaking, HF candidates have issues which create homelessness in the first place. Candidates often suffer from severe mental illness, chronic addiction, and health problems. They aren't always capable of basic upkeep in suites. So, do you offer up, say 15 suites in one building to the program, or do you spread the suites around multiple buildings. Some landlords have reported that the buildings that house HF candidates are more difficult to rent out and that the rent for all of the suites has to drop accordingly. This is one of the biggest reasons that landlords drop out of the program!
I suspect a 'better' way of handling the landlord issue is for the government to be the 'landlord of last resort' but I'm pretty sure that would be a hard sell. Still, it would remove the profit motive.
As to the functionally or willfully blind, I wonder if the HF campaigns start their publicity too late. Perhaps if there were more pictures of tent cities and shelters people would realize there is a local problem?
I know up in Anchorage, AK housing first started gaining momentum after quite a number of extremely visible tent camps and homeless folks getting frozen to the sidewalk.
I agree with you! Many European countries (and I think Australia, though don't quote me) use government funded social housing as part of their HF programs. To me, that seems like an obvious solution to the supply problem though others in the anti-poverty community point to the stigma of housing projects in the US.
I've never lived in a housing project and to tell you the truth, most of what I know about them comes from hip hop. But, I'd rather live in the projects than under a bridge...
Re Australia, it's run by the states. I'm form South Australia, which has 'Housing SA'[1], currently live in Tasmania where the service is called 'Housing Tasmania'[2] These services will help pay / pay in full a bond for private rental, as well as co-ordinate the renting of government owned housing. Houses, town houses, units, and flats, in a variety of locations throughout a city.
If you're a welfare recipient the typically arrangement is for the rent to cost somewhere in the vicinity of 1/3 of your payment. Full rate Unemployment benefit in Australia is $600 a fortnight including something like $100 a fortnight 'Rent Assistance' payment. I believe welfare payment for people unfit for work for whatever reason is slightly more.
Australia also has fairly good services to homeless and disabled provided by the outreach sections of church organisations. Salvation Army and Mission Australia are the two I'm most familiar with. These services will, in certain circumstances, furnish a home and supply clothes.
We still have homelessness. Services are still stretched to their limits. There's a waiting period for the able-bodied to get in to public housing. We still have rough neighbour hoods.
Homelessness is damned near impossible. If we realistically want to stop homelessness, we need to:
- end racism.
- end childhood sexual abuse.
- decriminalize all drugs, treat addiction as a health problem and make addictive drugs available under provincial prescription drug programs.
- invest billions of dollars into mental health care.
If you think you can accomplish any of the above, I'll not only vote for you, but I'll quit my job and work for you (for free).
Traditional anti-homelessness programs kind of stink because they work in stages. Candidates have to pass a stage in order to move onto the next and if they fail, they move backwards. The problem with this is that it is hard to stay motivated to stay sober if you live in the same dormitory style shelter where you used to live, where all of your goods are subject to theft, and where you are surrounded by people who are high/drunk on the substance you are addicted to! The other problem is that if you stumble, you generally move backwards and end up even further away from independent housing.
I am Canadian where a striking percentage of the homeless population (especially in the west) is aboriginal. In Canada, we have something called The Indian Act which provides certain benefits to 'status Indians'. One of the benefits it provides is that income earned on a reserve is not subject to federal income tax. The big problem with this is that reserves are often horrid places with absolutely no employment and substandard housing. The second biggest problem is that the Indian Act also works to make the concept of status extinct, but that's far from the point. As an example, the reserve where I spent the first two years of my life (I am not aboriginal, but my Dad was in the RCMP) is more like a concentration camp than a community.
I argue (and this pisses just about everyone off) that one way to cut down on aboriginal homelessness would be to amend the Indian Act so that any money invested on a reserve (provided that the venture employed a certain number of people) would trigger an immediate tax credit and not be subject to any Federal capital gains taxes. Further, I'd argue that any profits earned from these ventures should never be subject to any form of Federal income tax.
Because aboriginal people with status (aka 'status Indians') do not pay federal income tax, if you provided strong tax incentives to investment, you can see a route through which manufacturing in Canada has a similar cost structure to manufacturing in either Asia or in our NAFTA partner countries. Employment on reserves would encourage aboriginal people to move back to their communities, provide more pressure to the federal government to fix the woeful state of housing, and ultimately give people an easier route to gainful employment. Studies have shown that when you bring aboriginal people back into their community and their culture, their mental health/addiction outcomes improve.
Alas, the odds of that happening are likely equivalent to the odds that I will be drafted in the first round of the next NHL draft. (I am 38 years old and don't know how to skate).
So, I think that HF is about the best policy that we have. Though, I would like to see it amended.
Purely from a business point of view, I would like to see HF provide more services (financial and otherwise) to the landlords that participate. I argue that landlords who participate in HF often put themselves at a competitive disadvantage by doing so. Therefore, I would like to see strong municipal and federal tax incentives for their participation.
Further, I argue that HF programs themselves could do a far better job of moving their candidates into jobs that they can do. There is no way in hell that many of the people I know who would be HF candidates could ever work in a traditional 'job', but I would like HF to do a better job of exploring non-traditional options.
For example, I am heavy into street papers and think that panhandlers are likely the gr...
"Homeless first" undermines the normal eligibility cycle for public housing. It also destroys the communities in these developments. If you find a man screaming obscenities while taking a dump on the sidewalk distasteful, I'll assure you that the people who get stuck living next to him share your reaction -- except they can't walk away.
So you pack housing developments with addicts, crazy people and criminals. Next step is they start attracting their friends, and all of the sudden the development turns into a crime-ridden shithole. The families living in these development get screwed.
It also causes other disruption. NYC is adopting this type of policy, so people on waiting lists or in housing they don't like are flocking there from all across the region, and are receiving enhanced benefits. (It's pretty difficult to prove that someone is bona-fide homeless.) Meanwhile, the chronic homeless people who can't hold it together are still addicted, still in need of mental healthcare and are still living under an overpass.
Also, I would be REALLY pissed if I lived in a town where I had to struggle to make rent on a place I don't own every month, and the city is giving away free permanent houses to folks who don't have jobs or pay rent... I mean, I want homeless people to have homes, but if they're getting one for free and the economy continues to have housing prices way out of the reach of someone like me, I would be fucking pissed.
It already happens. My first apartment was a studio in a new downtown building that, with parking, I paid about 1/2 my monthly income for. Then I met my neighbor, who claimed to have been hurt by a city bus ("they closed the door on my arm"). She had a 2-br place with a terrace, and paid less than half of what I was paying.
This viewpoint pretty well summarizes why homeless people aren't helped. Homeless people are viewed as "what happens when you don't have a job or stop paying your bills". Trust me, the fact that you work hard and pay your bills isn't what's keeping you off the street. It's your (relative) mental health and your network.
Another issue is the level of government providing the solution. If one town gives all homeless people a place to live, that could act to attract homeless people from other towns. So the burden of fixing a whole region's homeless problem falls on one town.
See welfare cliff. Why struggle to afford housing when a slight reduction in your income (or whatever the criteria) could net free housing? I can certainly see the appeal.
The article mentions that some people had trouble adapting to their new houses. Some slept in tents inside their house, others still slept on the street several days a week until they got used to having a house.
There are more than one kind of homeless person. There are the ones who simply fell on hard times and don't have money to pay for rent. There are the ones suffer addiction, there are the ones who suffer mental trauma there are the ones who have severe mental disorders, there are the ones avoiding regular society, etc.
Housing first works best for the fist class as well as those who have succumbed to addiction. Some of the others require intensive intervention, perhaps institutional. As someone pointed out, its complex, but it's something beyond any individual's purview, responsibility, etc., so inhabitants who do pay taxes, etc., should expect some kind of organization would be responsible for addressing the issue rather than the knee jerk public castigation for speaking one's opinion about a social issue.
> there are the ones avoiding regular society, etc.
Indeed, something as simple as smoking weed (regardless of the reason) will exclude you from most government assistance. Living indoors is not always a suitable trade-off for giving up medications that work.
Well, I think we might mean different things by "homeless". The kind of people who prefer homelessness (and I know a couple, even in my small town) don't prefer it because they don't have a house. If someone were to just provide them a house, they'd be perfectly happy with that. No, they prefer their lifestyle to the available alternatives because it frees them of any responsibility for themselves.
Naturally, though, not all homeless should be categorized this way. A great many of them surely have serious psychological disorders that prevent them from living normal independent lives. Surely many of them have suffered in many ways, and many of them are surely in the circumstances they're in due to factors they couldn't control. These are the ones that really do need help of _some_ kind.
I sympathize with people like the mayor of the town you use as an example, but he's wrong: you don't give people dignity by giving them a place to live. Housing isn't the source of human dignity. When you give people with no dignity things of value, they don't value those things, and then eventually they become valueless through abuse and neglect. That's why homeless shelters have to have volunteers to monitor when they house the homeless. That's why simply building a big apartment complex and giving keys to the homeless isn't a long-term solution and in all likelihood a fast-track to a destroyed property and a bunch of people spending some time in the clink.
Outside of personal interventions and great investment of resources into individuals, I'm not sure there are really any great solutions. It makes me sad, but I don't have any great ideas for how to help them better (writ large), than try to meet some basic material needs (food pantries, temporary shelters) and keep them safe.
>Your argument rests on the assumption that all homeless populations across the world are similar.
Certainly, being homeless in Iceland would be different that being homeless in Liberia. I was just sharing an example of a situation where a person had their views about the homeless changed. In this case it was the mayor of Medicine Hat.
Sometimes I feel this "most of them prefer the way it is" is just a way to make excuses for us not solving a problem.
For example in my city of ~ quarter mil. people, there are approximately 1000 people living on the streets and another 1000 without home (no adress, permanently living in hostels, people in prisons that no longer have home).
Currently I know that there is project that focuses on the families without home (afaik 300-400 ppl?), where the plan is to move them into the city owned flats (there is more than 20 000 flats owned by the city with several hundred empty)
I like the logic behind that. To catch people without home before they end up on the street and give them an adress. What do you think?
Maybe, but funding new programs for homeless/mentally ill is problematic for a lot of reasons; A lot municipalities have budget problems with structural deficits. This puts pressure on basic infrastructure like roads, water, and sewer. Public transportation is under severe stress due to the budgets. Public safety agencies have been relying on grants (SAFER) from the fed to get basic needs met as the cities are tapped out. Government employees in my area haven't had a raise in 10 years while the costs for insurance, medicare, and everything else has gone up more than 10%. To put it bluntly, asking voters to approve bonds/money for homeless will go over like a turd in a punch bowl.
No wonder there is a homelessness problem then. With an attitude like this from both public officials and voters alike is it surprising that homelessness is getting worse and worse?
1. "We already have lot of empty flats nobody lives in and need to maintain them"
2. "We already rent many flats for like 300$ a month to low income families, that have the courage for like 10 different visits to municipal office"
3. "Families that are on the edge of homelesness already live in some hostel and might be paying more than 300$ a month just to have a place to stay."
At least that is the gist of it as far as I know.
Second, this is an EU city, so I know that they want to get some initial funds from EU funds (the first set of flats needs to undergo reconstruction, because the basic utilities, like water and electricity are in terrible state) as a pilot 'housing first' project in the republic.
So, it isn't they are homeless because they like the lifestyle, but it is often because of an illness that they prefer that lifestyle.
We've all certainly felt extraordinary pressures related to common every-day life. Mental illness makes dealing with these pressures very difficult, often almost impossible. I would not blame someone for trying to escape those pressures.
Where I live, it is more the opposite. People come here with irrational dreams, get on the street, fall into bad things, and then through dehydration, stress and living on the street, they become more irrational, and eventually permanently changed.
That's a good point, but if you're talking about addiction, mental illness is a precursor to addictive behavior. It is one of the major reasons why people self-medicate. Certainly is not the only reason.
My philosophy is: certain things are good for everyone if everyone has them. Some of these things: food, education, healthcare, place to sleep (securely), modest personal possessions, and so forth.
Reasons are mostly because of what you said. Homelessness leads to a general decline in society. If more people have healthcare, the general health of everyone goes up. If more people are fed, more people are productive, and production is good for everyone (to draw an incredibly broad generality). And so on.
It's unrealistic to say we'll do all those things 100%, but I do not think they are unrealistic goals for a modern and technologically advanced society.
Price breakdown:
30bil/year to end world hunger.
175bil/year to end world poverty.
20bil/year to end homelessness in the US.
I can't find numbers for everything, but those are some good ones to think about.
Humanity and biology in general is a precursor to addictive behavior. One of the major reasons people self-medicate, is because they think they are their thoughts. They indulge every whim and emotional impulse as if it is a command line directing their life.
If people could separate themselves from their emotions, if they were taught stoicism, Buddhism or how free will and the self is a (likely) an illusion, then maybe they'd be stronger.
I can't elaborate, but I know people worth hundreds of millions of dollars, that are young, beautiful and have everything, but can't handle life, and tried to kill themselves but why?
Because an obese corrupt doctor told them that he knew the mysteries of the brain, and that they need to take a lighter form of methamphetamine every day for the rest of their life to be normal.
That person is in college, and the social acceptance of taking adderall to succeed is scary. If you can handle a low dose, great, I'm all for practicality. But most can't and the idea that amphetamines can cure a lack of focus is pseudoscience.
So excuse my tone, but I don't believe in what you said. The problem is behavioral choices (health, what you read/watch/interact) and learning how to deal with one's own thoughts and impulses, not mythical theories on brain chemisty.
What you are saying is often the cause of the problem, not the solution.
It's both. Many likely have some pre-existing mental condition, maybe completely latent or or maybe just early in onset. Awful life conditions combined with substance abuse then lead to a feedback loop exacerbating the mental illness, substance abuse, and shitty choices.
For a number of years I helped run a Saturday morning soup kitchen at a church near the VA in West LA. Talked to a lot of people, mostly guys, and heard this a lot too, but for most of them it's not the whole story.
Most of the homeless people I encountered had a point in their lives when the system failed them. Many of them had some traumatic event and fell into alcoholism or drugs. Many of them either had a weak social net (family or friends) or burned through that net. Counselling was not available or came too late, and once they were far enough along unemployment ran out. Eventually they embraced homelessness because they could no longer imagine an alternative, so that they could think something positive about themselves.
My sense is that there was a window during which the system could have helped them with their problems when it became too much for their friends/family and before they went too far down that path. But certain elements in our society (cough Republicans/Libertarians) just don't want to help people at risk.
"had some traumatic event and fell into alcoholism and drugs"
This phrase is doing a lot of work for your argument -- the implication is that alcohol and drugs are like open manholes, and people are just falling in.
I believe in treating addiction. I also believe in removing stigmas associated with drug crimes. I think we should help people. But we shouldn't all assume that drugs cause poverty, 100% of the time. Poverty sometimes causes drug use. Hopelessness and despair (economically, socially) lead to chemical escapism.
My point is that not every drug addict is a victim of a disease which keeps him from contributing to society. People use drugs for a lot of reasons.
I am a Republican/Libertarian, and I take a small amount of offense to the accusation that we "just don't want to help." On the contrary, I believe the current strategies -- house them, feed them, give them clean needles -- is doing more harm than good. It makes the lifestyle sustainable without giving them any hope for something better.
A better way forward:
- Stop charging drug users with felonies that prevent them from getting jobs in the future
- Legalize almost all drugs, except for those that put the public at harm by causing psychosis.
- More mental health services, including committing more people. We're failing schizophrenics when we don't force them into treatment.
- Grow the economy. We need more jobs for the lower rung of the labor force. The first step towards despair is often unemployment.
- If we're going tax dollars, let's create public jobs for people. I don't mind if subsidized housing is part of the package.
- Stop creating homeless havens. It's counterproductive. You can't allow people to defecate on the street in broad daylight and call it compassion. When you do that, people travel to that neighborhood from all over because it's a place where they won't be hassled. It becomes impossible to run a small business there, families leave, the neighborhood dies.
I'm not saying we should fill the jails with the homeless. But why not provide public restrooms, and then arrest and/or commit those who are using the sidewalk? If we need someone to maintain the restrooms -- pay the homeless.
From what I can tell your main complaint here is that homeless addicts are... addicts?
I really appreciate that you serve homeless residents just like other residents. But you might consider that the people who you are most frequently called to help are not representative of the homeless population. Look at the national stats:
That's a lot of families. It's a lot of kids. A friend of mine put years into making a documentary about homeless youth in Chicago. I got to meet some of them, and they are entirely different than the picture you paint:
I think it's also important to note that active addicts generally refuse help no matter what level of society they're in. That's part of the addictive cycle. Homeless addicts claim to prefer their "lifestyle" and will fight to keep it. But so do gainfully employed alcoholics. So do wealthy coke fiends. It's a disease that will kill all of them eventually unless they can start facing how much addiction has screwed up their lives. And as hard as facing that has to be for a well-off person, I expect it's way harder for someone who has fallen so low as to be sleeping under an overpass and living out of a trash can.
I agree, most prefer the lifestyle because A) life is hard and B) they adapt and/or give-up.
There are 25,000 homeless in my city. I don't know exact numbers but a lot come here to pursue their dreams and some to escape a bad situation back home.
But it is so expensive here. Housing is difficult. Deception is everywhere, in terms of convincing people they have a chance at a career. But more often, they fall into drugs and prostitution, and running the streets -- because it is fun and easy, at first.
So an 18 year old kid who wants to be a singer, can run around meeting interesting people, act like he/she is achieving their dream but really is just partying. Then their irresponsible ways get them on the street.
And a once bright kid becomes diminished by drugs, and stress, and the struggle and emotional pain and torture that living on the streets causes. They then look "mentally ill" but most, in my experience, are merely exhausted and are irresponsible.
I have young friends who are homeless, and I'd start my day drinking coffee with them at Starbucks and then later eating breakfast at my building (a 5-star hotel) with people who could afford to feed a million people for a year.
And my rich friends, a lot are on drugs, and some do insane illegal things, and are generally way worse for society than my homeless friends. And I could often trust my homeless friends more than my rich ones.
At the time, I lived in an $8 million condo for free. And through a conflict of over our philosophies on pandering and prostitution, I moved out abruptly, and was nearly homeless myself. I then got to experience first hand the atrocious public transportation services, the difficulty in renting an apartment and how the City just doesn't care about working class people or the homeless.
The City is inept and just not thinking about solving the problems in a valid way. Instead, they take away electrical outlets in most areas which just punishes tourists, commuters, regular working people etc.
And great institutions, like the pubic libraries, which Carnegie saw as a way to lift up all of society, become refugees for the homeless.
Of course, the majority of homeless people are too far gone. Most are lazy, selfish, destructive and just terrible people.
Were they like that before or did they learn to be that way? Maybe if schools taught kids critical thinking skills and stoicism and how to separate themselves from the emotions, then we'd have a stronger society that knew how to deal with adversity better.
A lot of people, rich poor, smart or uneducated, are slightly fragile and weak. Life is hard, for us all, and society doesn't teach us how to live life very well.
I suspect also many of the homeless in San Francisco, especially the ones being complained about here, have pretty bad mental health problems going on treated. Government probably needs to step in and help on that front as well.
> A lot of them prefer this "lifestyle"... we try very hard to help the people that want help. Most don't.
As someone who's been homeless twice, I appreciate that you don't intend to offend, but this is a very loaded and offensive statement. You appear to work with homeless people and have very little sympathy for their situation, which I can understand but it still makes me a little sad.
Becoming homeless is something that can happen to anyone for any number of reasons, and there are different kinds of being homeless. Once you become homeless it becomes harder as time goes on to move back to something permanent. Booze and drugs can sometimes be a simple manner of being able to sleep, or to get away from the situation you're in or how you got there. Choices that seem nonsensical for those who have a warm bed every night make perfect sense when you're worn down by the elements and incredibly poor sleep. After a while the prospect of having to deal with the build up of shit in your life and get shit together becomes a bigger mountain to climb than carrying on when you are, even though your everyday struggle is a mountain of shit in itself.
It's not that people choose a lifestyle as such, it's that sometimes it feels less painful to have a permanent known level of shit in your life than to fight all the way back up to get a permanent place to live and risk being knocked back when you're already pretty fragile. Being homeless is the suckiest thing you can probably reasonably imagine.
These kind of responses have a chilling effect on debate and progress.
> this is a very loaded and offensive statement
So the fuck what? If you aren't allowed to consider anything offensive, we'd never discuss the difficult issues and make progress on them.
> something that can happen to anyone for any number of reasons, and there are different kinds of being homeless
Yeah blah blah blah he's not saying 'absolutely every homeless person is like this', he's suggesting that maybe the situation isn't as everyone assumes, which may be the case. But you've shut him down with some 'not every homeless' person bullshit.
> It's not that people choose a lifestyle as such
He didn't say choose did he? He said they prefer it - I presume he means prefer it to being institutionalised. You seem to suggest that he thinks they prefer it to being a millionaire, which of course they do not.
Have you ever heard of the idea of being charitable in how you interpret other people's thoughts?
> Being homeless is the suckiest thing you can probably reasonably imagine.
Who are you arguing with here? Who disagrees with you? All he said is that some of these homeless people may prefer being on the street to being taken into the care of the state.
Please don't create throwaway accounts on HN for the purpose of breaking the rules. There's no point here that you couldn't have made civilly.
You reacted as if iuguy had tried to "shut down" discussion with an ideological dictum, but that's not at all what he did. Both iuguy and monkmartinez have commented out of deep personal experience. We're incredibly fortunate to have commenters posting from that level, most of all in so rage-baity a thread.
Showing up with a bullhorn and blaring angry arguments is the last thing you should be doing on HN to begin with, but to insert that at the most meaningful point of human communication in this thread is really an abuse.
I have empathy for everyone. Sympathy is completely different. Why should I feel sorry for <bob> my regular that I've known for years and absolutely does not want help? I empathize with his situation as I wouldn't choose that lifestyle. Beyond that, society doesn't owe him anything.
It is complex and every story is different. I am sure if I knew every story, there would be some that I would feel sympathy and perhaps compelled to act... but so far, those have been very rare.
> Booze and drugs can sometimes be a simple manner of being able to sleep, or to get away from the situation you're in or how you got there. Choices that seem nonsensical for those who have a warm bed every night make perfect sense when you're worn down by the elements and incredibly poor sleep. After a while the prospect of having to deal with the build up of shit in your life and get shit together becomes a bigger mountain to climb than carrying on when you are, even though your everyday struggle is a mountain of shit in itself.
I am not guaranteed a warm bed every night. No one is, if you really think about it.
Further, you just described being a police officer, fire fighter/ems person with the stresses of the job. Suicide[1], booze/drugs, divorce, anger management are all unfortunate parts of the job for many. How they choose to deal with these issues are another matter entirely.
Sleep issues are a major pain point for me. I choose this life so I have had to develop strategies to deal with it. Some people can't deal with the stress, so they quit/move on, mask it with booze/drugs, have significant behavioural (anger) issues, or kill themselves. Sound familiar?
> that doesn't mean we treat them like sub-humans... we just have less patience with the shit they are inevitably going to give us.
While I have difficulty agreeing that the homeless generally want to be, it seems worth noting that they're not better than normal people, any more than they are worse - they are normal people, with the same charm and/or asshattery as the rest of us. They're just in a situation most of us (or so I think) find singularly undesirable.
Do you have any idea how taxing it is on the psyche to be homeless? Maybe there are one or two people who chose this lifestyle like developers mooching off Google. But overall this is the exception, not the rule.
Reasons many are homeless:
- Psychiatric problems. They can't fit in to normal working conditions because they are for lack of a better word crazy. They also don't get the necessary help due to poverty.
- Lost a job. In a city like New York where the cost of a studio apartment over an hour away by train can cost 1 grand a month, and minimum wage is still $9 an hour, and food is pricy, and metro isn't exactly cheap either, it can be very easy to fall into the homeless problem if you don't have friends and family helping. I know quite a few people who were fortunate to have had a car and able to get up and leave the state rather than sleep on the street.
- Being homeless often means no access to cleanliness which limits your ability to find a job. A self-fulfilling prophecy.
- If you are injured to a point where you can't work, it is not very easy to get government disability. My friend took 2 years to get the benefits while she was completely crippled. She was surviving on the generosity of her friends. When the government finally gave her money, she was able to afford a teensy apartment. If she ended up homeless the government wouldn't give her the benefits because you need an official place of residence.
- Speaking of a place of residence, a crippled homeless person cannot go to a shelter because they will be preyed upon. And they can't physically fight back. And so they also can't claim benefits because of this. I know one such person.
I am homeless. I have never spent a night in a shelter. I prefer sleeping in a tent. It is cleaner and more humane. The services aimed at helping the homeless are mostly pretty revolting. The free meals are lower quality than fast food. The emergency shelters have mold problems. And you get crowded in with other sick, poor, desperate people to have a shot at the dregs they are willing to provide you.
Homeless people need the same things other people need: Work that works for them and other middle class solutions that are largely disappearing from an increasingly polarized America. But what they are offered is mostly contempt and really low quality options and services rooted in a broken, abusive, horrifying set of mental models. And then we are vilified for not being adequately grateful for the shit offered to us.
I don't want to be homeless. But, yeah, I prefer this to the vastly shittier alternatives available to me.
>To play devil's advocate, he's right. He shouldn't have to see the pain, struggle, and despair of homeless - the city government should be providing affordable housing and shelters for the homeless.
Only if people agree, offer their solidarity, and approve the city government of doing so (with their taxes etc too).
Which is exactly what people like him don't allow.
From actual experiences talking to multiple upper class people who "don't want to see those homeless" that are invariably anti-taxes/government spending for such issues.
You shouldn't have to pay any more. Cali already takes an insane amount of your income, and it's not like the spending isn't happening. I think SF spent something like 240mm on homeless last year, which works out to something like 30-70k pp if just handed out as cash.
Paying more to the govt isn't what you should be asking for, rather, you should be asking for a more efficient and accountable govt.
Not sure what kind of solution the government should have.
There's already a myriad of local, state and federal housing programs already in place. Whether its temporary emergency housing, eviction protection, child care services, or in some cases, low income housing and federal subsidies for permanent housing.
There's plenty of safety nets in California, let alone the SF area. If people want to get off the streets, there's an abundance of resources at their disposal. Saying the government isn't doing enough is a bit myopic considering all the local, state and federal help readily available.
And that's JUST for the homeless services. It doesn't even START to address the free addiction clinics, low cost prescriptions, free health care clinics, food shelves, and other resources homeless people might need help to get off the streets.
In my mind the government is going way above and beyond trying to solve this issue.
How many of these myriad services are already running at full capacity? Just because there are homelessness support groups out there doesn't magically mean that there is enough support.
More to that point, most public resources are not required to report that they have exhausted their capacity. Further, such resources often actively waste the time of those looking for support under the pretext that resources are available and they need to prove there is demand that exceeds their capacity; even when year after year it's clear that documenting demand will not result in additional resources.
We have (Way) better than average care for homless in probably a 3 hour driving distance. There's tons of services available. And that too is a problem. Every service we provide means that more homeless come and flock to our city. Ideally, we'd like to provide for everyone, out of a sense of human decency.
The only problem with that is we could provide for everyone in the county, we cannot do the same for south central indiana, parts of Kentucky, parts of Ohio, and parts of Illinois, and wherever they come from via bus. What started as a problem of 100 people disenfranchised now is a perpetual 400.
The solution, as ugly as it may seem, needs to be a cross-country (national level) anti-homelessness mission. That means comprehensive low/no barrier essentials, possibly even a minimum income. Until a national answer happens, any community that offers above and beyond will get punished with multiplying numbers that far exceed any local budgets.
SF spends $241 million per year on homeless, with no accountability and no ability to track results. They are NOT going above and beyond, they are wasting money with no improvement in results.
Funny, I did some research and found this article which seems to know where most of the money is going. So what happened in two years between my article in 2014 and your article that came out in 2016?
How are you able to track this and then in two years, you suddenly have no idea where all the money is going?
The lion’s share of the funding goes toward supportive housing, which provides specialized and intensive services to the recently homeless as they adjust to a new way of life, with some combating drug addiction and receiving mental health care.
The City spends $81.5 million annually for 6,355 supportive units, or about $13,000 per unit. Of the 6,436 homeless individuals counted in last year’s homeless count, 3,401 were on the streets without shelter while the other homeless people counted resided in shelters, transitional housing, resource centers, residential treatment, jail or hospitals.
And
Even though The City has built 3,000 new supportive-housing units since 2002, the homeless population has remained mostly flat. The population has ranged from 6,248 to 6,514 since 2005, after dropping from 8,640 in 2002.
You claim "zero accountability" but there's several paragraphs and a large graph showing where the money goes in your article. Not sure how you fix "accountability" if your city continues to build housing for these people and continue toe expand their budget to help them. What else do you want them to do???? Most other cities would see this and spend the money elsewhere and cut the spending on these programs in a heartbeat.
Not track the money, track the results. We have no idea if this is helping to decrease homelessness or not. There are no metrics. That's a huge amount of money to spend, and not know if it's actually helping, or if the money is just being wasted.
Accountability means that if it doesn't work or if the money is being wasted, then someone needs to be held accountable.
San Francisco has a $156M annual budget to address homelessness. That's not a small amount of money. First let's make sure that it's being spend efficiently.
Or, rather than get bogged down in never-ending "efficient government" debates, we can increase spending today and simultaneously address efficiencies. Far too often the demand "efficiency first" is just a means to delay the actual commitment of resources.
But what if the already non-trivial sum isn't being spent in the best way possible? It sounds like a lot of that is going to landlords in the form of rent; granted that's a burden off the people living there.
If your doesn't work, do you upgrade your CPU or re-write your code? Sure, if your code sort of works but is maybe only 50% as efficient as you want, go ahead and upgrade your CPU.
But if your code is O(n^3) and just doesn't ever give you an answer, upgrading your CPU is throwing good money after bad.
The current system and people are not able to solve the problem, even after spending >$22k per homeless person per year. How much more do you suggest spending, and why do you think it would make any difference to outcomes?
Most of which is spent on rent, so it ends up in the pockets of the landowners. And it doesn't go as far as it needs, thanks to the crazy high rents. It's a vicious circle.
>"So how many people are going to pay more taxes to raise the money for the government to do all these things?"
If you were to ask me, I'd say "not me". And not because I don't want it done, but because I already pay taxes with the assumption that this is what a government of a supposedly enlightened society should be spending it on. I.e. to care for its weakest members, the ones that need it the most.
Assuming they would accept it and stay in it. As I said, that would work great for the short term homeless, but for many (not all) of the long term homeless, they have mental issues strong enough that they would end up homeless again.
His wording might have been harsh and maybe he's coming from the wrong viewpoint, but he's ultimately right. Fixing homelessness and mental illness in the right way would be a net benefit to both people like him and the people on the street.
California has the highest income tax in the entire United States. San Francisco is up there among county income tax. Its inexcusable that our star tech capital of the entire world is simultaneously infamous for its homelessness and mental health problems. You can phrase it "I hate looking at these people" or you can phrase it "these people need help"; the right solution remains the same. Fix it.
You're not really agreeing with him though, are you? He's saying homeless people are an eyesore. You're saying the government should create more homeless shelters. I don't think you guys are even on the same planet in terms of your views.
>He's saying homeless people are an eyesore. You're saying the government should create more homeless shelters.
I think the difference is found in empathy. Take two cases: One, I feel bad when I see a homeless person because my empathy makes me feel bad, and I want to remove that bad feeling and thus I help them. Getting them 'out of sight' might reduce the bad feeling a little, but any time I think of their being homeless people, I still feel bad for them.
Two, I feel bad because the homeless person is making the place look worse. So I want them to be gone. Once they are out of sight, I no longer feel bad.
I think the two above are more similar that many people treat them because of how selfishness and empathy interact, but I do also think their is still a significant difference because one is based off of empathy and the other is based off of pure selfishness.
I think a lot of people fall into both categories. Most people have empathy and most people like beautiful things. What differs is the weight of one feeling vs the other in these types of situations.
Well, repealing the Ellis Act, for one. You (and he) are looking at this as if the homeless spontaneously came to exist as NPCs in the RPG that is his wonderful techie San Francisco existence rather than identifying the things that led them to this place in life like the Ellis Act, skyrocketing inflation, lack of lower-middle income jobs, etc.
What? The homeless are here because the city attracts more people than there are room for (development reasons) and because SF spends huge sums to care for homeless immigrants
"Seventy-one percent (71%) of respondents reported they were living in San Francisco at the time they most recently became homeless, an increase from 61% in 2013. Of those, nearly half (49%) had lived in San Francisco for 10 years or more. Eleven percent (11%) had lived in San Francisco for less than one year."
What are these "development reasons?" Airbnb? Property owners have had no issue knocking down buildings in places like the Mission to build high-rent properties in their place. There is ample opportunity to satisfy demand for low-to-middle income housing by building upwards which developers choose to ignore in favor of satisfying the rich.
The thing that people are missing is how much dealing with this on a day-to-day basis changes you. You can't walk past/through that much human misery without hardening your heart towards it. My commute to work for the past 4 years has taken me through the 6th st corridor. I walk past homeless people, SRO hotels and what I believe is a methadone clinic. People in wheelchairs with diabetic amputations are disturbingly common. And even those with all their limbs seem broken physically in a way that means they'll never be productive members of society, even if they could get past the mental illness/drugs. Any money spent on them is simply softening their descent into death rather than helping them live.
At first, you feel bad for these people. But, over time, it changes you and you stop feeling as much empathy towards them. They're the people yelling at 3am in the morning that make you tired at work the next day. They're the people shitting on the sidewalk and forcing you to jump around it or walk in the street. They're the people leaving uncapped needles on the sidewalks.
And add to this that the situation has gotten significantly worse lately. SF is a powder keg ready to explode. There are two SFs living in close proximity to each other and both headed in opposite directions. As the one SF has gotten richer and the other has gotten poorer and evictions have increased, there's a general feeling of combativeness that's very scary. It's common for people to try to intimidate me on the sidewalks as I walk to work. They stare at me and walk directly at me no matter which side of the sidewalk I attempt to walk on. My projection is that there's a message being delivered..."you may have everything else, but I'm taking the sidewalk." Homeless people will urinate/defecate in the middle of the sidewalk in ways that make it as difficult as possible to avoid. And while it's mostly passive aggression at the moment, it feels like we're not too far off from that aggression turning active. This deeply unhealthy dynamic is why I've chosen to leave SF.
It would take an extraordinary person to be dealing with this on an everyday basis and not try to compartmentalize it in ways that appear cold and unfeeling to people viewing it from the outside. You can't understand the fear, and fear will cause people to do and say things that others would consider unconscionable. You can't understand the hopelessness of the situation that leads you to write those people off a subhuman. Out of sight is really out of mind. And anyone that isn't experiencing this problem on a daily basis isn't going to really understand this open letter. They're going to attribute the tone and callousness of the letter to the individual who wrote it rather than the experiences they've been subjected to.
he's not right. his position is that he shouldn't have to 'see' homelessness. he doesn't care if it exists or not, just so long as it's out of his view.
But what about not having to dodge shit, piss and uncapped needles on the street? What about not having to be asked for money constantly? What about not having to hear people yelling at the top of their lungs at 3am? What about not having to feel unsafe?
If it were just seeing people being unobtrusively homeless, there would be no problem, even if they were plainly visible. His phrasing may seem harsh to people that aren't not exposed to the situation on a daily basis. But let's try to not look for reasons to be offended in this situation and, instead, search for the meaning behind the words. Because there's a serious problem that needs fixing in San Francisco.
> I know people are frustrated about gentrification happening in the city, but the reality is, we live in a free market society
He is free to be rich while others are poor because of the free market. Seems like his free market has created a number of people who leave urine and feces in the streets and ask people for money.
He wants the benefit of a free market without having to deal with the consequences.
He's not appealing to the free market to fix the problem. He's appealing to his city's government, to whom he pays taxes and has a reasonable expectation that of dealing with problems like these.
Every consider that both the climate and the abundance of social programs could be exaggerating SF homeless issue for many? Simply put, its a good place to go and this word gets around. In other words, its good having such support systems but residents must understand that for that all people gravitate to cities that meet their needs. Techies and the like want the climate, the history, and high tech goods and services they desire. The homeless want the climate and access to the social services provided. One city can be the same refuge to vastly different social levels.
70% of homeless people in San Francisco were housed residents of San Francisco before the became homeless, and most of the remaining 30% were in a city adjacent to San Francisco before coming to SF after becoming homeless.
Also, the idea that social services are "widely available" to homless people in San Francisco is a farce. For example, there is only 1 available shelter bed for every 5 homeless people.
Source: I worked as a service provider for homeless people in SF and I've seen our supposed "generous benefits" up close.
I disagree. Handling this on a city level is absolutely wrong. That's how it is in NYC and why taxes are so high in the city. This needs to be a shared expense and program on the federal level. Otherwise, you increase the tax burden in SF and other cities/states compete in a race to the bottom, luring away businesses with their lower taxes.
Homelessness, poverty are not San Francisco's problem, they are America's problem. If the rest of America takes issue with that, perhaps the Union should be questioned.
The devil doesn't seem to need more help, so maybe you should question your hobbies. That aside, what both you and he miss: the problem with the pain, struggle and despair of homelessness is not a comfortable person having to see it. It is a person having to experience the pain, struggle, and despair of homelessness.
As a San Francisco with 5x his tenure, I am entirely proud that SF has not swept the homeless problem out of sight. I would rather that everybody were safe, whole, and housed. But as long as we have the problems we do, I would rather they be on public display. Because fixing them is going to require public action.
If that is uncomfortable for him, then good. He should be fucking uncomfortable that people are suffering in the streets. I am, and anybody with half a heart is. As long as the pain exists among his fellow residents, he should see it. We all should.
His post was incredibly tone-deaf, and he comes across as an entitled jerk. That said, there's a big difference between being reminded of other peoples' suffering and being assaulted. Leaning on someone's car, yelling at someone, and interrupting a theater are all acts of aggression. It's understandable that he's upset. Nobody should be subjected to this kind of behavior.
Honestly you come across as kind of callous by not seeming able to empathize with why he might be upset.
Of course saying that just sweeping people away is an acceptable solution is incredibly heartless. That's where he lost my sympathy. At the same time, embracing the status and also kinda heartless. It doesn't help anyone, except for people who are neither living on the street nor being confronted by people living on the street.
People often seem to think we should give the homeless and drug addicts and mentally ill free reign to do whatever they want as some sort of act of kindness. I think that's belittling and infantalizing. Nobody should punished harshly for acting a little obscene in public from time to time, but we should do something so that people actually can get help while also enforcing laws that ensure public space can be shared and enjoyed by everyone.
Being upset is reasonable, and I do empathize with that. Asking the police to make the homeless disappear because wealthy market winners feel uncomfortable is not reasonable.
> Leaning on someone's car, yelling at someone, and interrupting a theater are all acts of aggression.
He describes exactly none of those instances as even directed at him or his family. I get why people find mental illness to be troubling, and why they might feel unsafe. But he described nothing that was aggressive. Your feelings, although important, do not prove anything about what other people intend.
> People often seem to think we should give the homeless and drug addicts and mentally ill free reign to do whatever they want as some sort of act of kindness.
That is a ridiculous straw man. If they "seem" to think that to you, I don't believe you're trying very hard to understand what they actually think.
The government is our employees, not some Other power above is. We need to make the changes. Make demands , build consensus, and run for office if needed.
It's unfortunate people always have to play politics and angles. "'bro" is the new "thug". It's a label imposed on a person you disagree with in order to garner antipathy against them.
And yes, there should not be homeless people, they should be managed and taken care of by either government agencies, charities or families. It's a failure of society, rather than a failure of the people complaining about unhinged people who at times panhandle, sleep, urinate, defecate, scream, accost, spit, voice their inner monologues, eat, in public often times at the expense of the public.
And to be sure, this should not be a locally addressed problem but a national problem. Addressing it locally only attracts more homeless into homeless friendly areas.
Render homeless services to homeless based on where they lived the longest, from federal funds so you don't get concentrations in Santa Clara county, or Los Angeles county from people from all over.
To be fair, he's wrong and you're wrong. It's not about what he wants to see or not see. He says homelessness is bad because it affects him and his lifestyle. To couch this problem in such a narcissistic way leads to solutions like Super Bowl city (a solution he mentions and actively endorses). It leads to solutions to just resolve the rich lifestyles, and not actually help the homeless. His letter doesn't highlight the problem (like so many commenters here are saying), but just highlights the impact it has to his lifestyle.
Of course the city should do more to help the issue. Turning a blind eye to tents on the street (which are illegal) isn't doing enough. It just makes the issues of a poor mental health system even more obvious.
The article is interesting as it's attempting to vilify "rich tech bros". Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems weird to point out that he took his parents to a restaurant that serves Lobster (no word on if they ordered or considered ordering it) and that he once spent $20 on a ticket to a special theater. He's then called a tech bro nearly 10 times, always with the presumption that being a man who works in a tech job is both a "bro" and that because of that he's inherently responsible for everything wrong in the world.
He shouldn't have written his medium post, or at best he could have found a much better way to word it. The city DOES need to treat it's homeless in a more humane way. But I wonder if journalists don't also have some soul searching to do, and if they might want to back off the "All techies are evil" rhetoric which is really the basis of this article.
It's because if you read the article, or his letter, there's very little about "what can be done to help fix or solve this issue" or help these people, and their plight...
and very much about how someone who can afford the nice things in life, a luxurious / extravagant lifestyle by many standards, 'shouldn't have to be subjected to the unpleasantness thereof' and how uncomfortable / annoying it is -for him-.
He's not trying to solve the problem for them, he's trying to solve it for himself. He even says as much, talking about how easy it is to 'sweep the problem away' for Super Bowl. No-one thinks that SF temporarily solved the homeless issue for SB weekend, and he doesn't want it solved either (or makes no real mention of that in this letter), he just wants it swept.
Blaming it solely on government is a pretty meaningless and shallow look at it. There are many, many actors at play who have all made decisions of their own volition which has lead to this. Land developers, tech companies, VCs, zoning commissions, they all have a hand in it.
Maybe this isn't a city government problem but a federal one. What would you think about re-enacting homesteading? About half the land in this country is federally owned. Why not offer 50 acres and a trailer to whomever would be willing to work and improve it?
You are right, except we can't have that conversation till the entitled techies in the bay area just shut up for a sec. Our flooding of the market has showed how the lack of supply is the problem, but like you correctly pointed out, the deportation of techies is not the solution. But we certainly should not be writing articles like this, it makes solving the problem that much harder.
There are a lot of activists (mostly behind the scenes) trying to increase the supply the side of the economics. However, the weird alliance between the NIMBY's and progressives in the city keep pointing at the entitled techies (like the author of the article) to show how the techie's are part of the problem.
>> "Move over Martin Shkreli. You now have competition for the title of America’s most reviled millennial."
That seems unfair. Shkreli made the news for doing things that would have a tangible effect on peoples lives, and doing those things with a smile. Let's compare Shkreli raising the prices on life-saving drugs to the first paragraph of Keller's blog post:
>> "I am writing today, to voice my concern and outrage over the increasing homeless and drug problem that the city is faced with. I’ve been living in SF for over three years, and without a doubt it is the worst it has ever been. Every day, on my way to, and from work, I see people sprawled across the sidewalk, tent cities, human feces, and the faces of addiction. The city is becoming a shanty town… Worst of all, it is unsafe."
It's ridiculous and frankly narcissistic the way that he makes it about him and how it effects his life, to be sure. But, his three personal examples (from just this past weekend!) did a good job of driving home for me how interactions with the homeless are different in SF than they are in my area (northeast).
The guy could use a talking to about punching down but I haven't really heard too many people defending SF's handling of these types of issues either so I can't rip him for trying to bring more attention to the topic.
It does seems like anyone under 40 is now a millennial.
The most recent clear definition I have heard is anyone born between 1980 and 2000. So anyone ~16 and under is a new generation, currently called Gen. Z, but they may get another name soon.
It does seem like the media is absorbing Gen X into millennials now for some reason. I don't know why. Baby Boomers vs everyone else?
It helps to keep in mind these groups are just constructs to help sociologists talk about large groups of people. While they're good for talking about differences in generations, no single person is going to fit into any generational group perfectly. On top of that, it doesn't help that news outlets like to oversimplify these things for juicy headlines.
You're right. It's just one categorization of many. I might have more in common with a person who grew up in the same socioeconomic situation as me, but is separated by 30 years, then with someone born the same year as me with a vastly different socioeconomic background.
I'm 35 and my wife is 30. I was born in 1980 which means some people would say gen-x and some would say millenial. I'm also the younger child, with my older sister being squarely in gen x.
My wife definitely has more of the typical millenial characteristics then I, and talking of our high-school experiences it almost seems like we were decades apart rather than just 5 years, though perhaps some of that is that we grew up on opposite coasts.
> So anyone ~16 and under is a new generation, currently called Gen. Z
Wait, I thought those were "digital natives", i.e. never having known life without ubiquitous computers/tablets/cellphones? I've mostly heard the progression as Gen X (born in the 70s), then Gen Y (born in the 80s). After Gen Y it's supposed to be Millennials (born in the 90s/coming of age in the 00s), then Digital Natives (aforementioned "raised by the Internet").
But really, I think they just make it all up to suit their current viewpoint. I'm 38 and I've been told I straddle the line between Gen X and Gen Y. I jammed to Pearl Jam and Alice in Chains in 9th grade while wearing flannel shirts and combat boots, so I'm Gen X...wait I also had an 80s electro revival phase wearing all black the following year, so I'm Gen Y...
Seems to me it should be people who grew up with the internet. So late 90's/early 2000's onwards. As someone who was born in 1990 and had exposure to the world pre-internet it seems like there's a clear divide between my culture/outlook and those who have only ever known a world with internet.
Millennials are the group born in the 80s/early 90s and were introduced the internet at some point while they were growing up, rather than it having always existed as part of their life.
Nobody is really sure what generation Z is like yet, but they are definitely different than millennials.
Yeah, you and I are millenials, we were born in the same year and grew up with the internet, not necessarily being raised by it like the generation after us.
This reminds me of 'generation X'. When I was in my early twenties, that badge made absolutely no sense as I was lumped into a group with my mid-thirties cousins and people who were still in high school. As I've aged, it has started to make more sense. Maybe the term millennial will be the same??
I don't like using such a US-centric definition for this type of thing, but I generally think of Millennials as "people who were students when 9/11 happened". It really does seem to have been that sort of defining event.
> That seems unfair. Shkreli made the news for doing things that would have a tangible effect on peoples lives, and doing those things with a smile.
As I said in my post in this thread, journalists (keypressers) have it in for us. That's why we're "coders," "techies," and now "tech bros" in their articles. They probably resent the fact that low social status geeks are making more money than them, even if few us are actually rich.
To hell with these keypressers. Never, ever lift a finger to help them. They are our enemy.
Homeless activists are the most annoying do-gooders of them all.
Let's fight for the right of people, who are mostly struggling with mental illness and addiction to live in the street.
That sure feels noble I guess.
How about making appropriate institutional care available so these folks wouldn't have to sleep in the streets?
In my town, there's an article in the paper today decrying the fact that a local institution is no longer venting waste heat that kept vent grates warm, so people cannot sleep outside.
Yeah, it's sad that it's apparently impossible to have a serious discussion around this topic without getting vilified. It seems that a lot of people like to pat themselves on the back for how compassionate they are because they are fine with homeless people on the streets. That seems the opposite of compassionate to me. True compassion would be, as you say, making care available so these people wouldn't have to sleep in the streets. I'll include mental care in that, since many homeless seem to suffer from mental illnesses as well.
Thats probably because no tech person reads valleyrag, for the same reason that no normal person reads "newsletter of the insane communists party" and that The Sun is mostly known for the lady with the big tits on page 3.
I don't want to see homeless people, drug deals, vomiting drunks, or pantless vagrants on my commute to work either. Does that make me heartless? I would hope not because otherwise these problems are not going to be solved. You need people who do NOT want to see that kind of crap on a daily basis to do something about it.
But the reason why people don't want to see them affects the outcome.
If it's (at least partly) from compassion for people reduced to such circumstances, hopefully the solution will go some way to improving their lot.
But if it's purely from indignation at the inconvenience suffered by the observers, then the "solution" may simply involve shifting the problem elsewhere: viz. Keller's approval of the way the "homeless and other riff raff" temporarily vanished during the Super Bowl.
He's being callous and saying that he doesn't want to look at those grubby stinky people. It's not an argument from a place of sympathy. That's very different from seeing a problem and shedding light on it.
"That kind of crap" are generally people who have lived here significantly longer than he has and have been priced out due to factors not under their control. He doesn't care if _their_ problems are solved, only that _his_ problem is solved. It's a fairly disgusting attitude.
its amazing to me that with all the money and talent in the bay area, that noone has made progressive efforts in solving some of the problems with homelessness and helping others get back on their feet.
Certainly not very compassionate, but is it true that the homeless in San Francisco have a drug problem that is making the area unsafe?
Is nobody trying to treat or house these people?
Shouldn't people take this piece and use it as further evidence that there is a problem that needs to be fixed, rather than merely a culture war they can take part in?
As usual, everybody want's to talk about how much of a 'bro' this guy is, but nobody gives a shit about improving the lives of the homeless.
The "homeless" must want and work (mentally and emotionally) for help in order for it to work. fullstop.
In my experience, most do not want to put in the effort to kick the habits, contribute to society in a meaningful way, or tell you it is too late. The reality is a lot of them prefer the "lifestyle" and "freedom" to do whatever the hell they want whenever the hell they want to do it. They have a completely different take on life than "most" people.
Not if the government takes the perspective that housing is a human right, regardless of an individual's mental health or substance abuse problems, willingness or capacity to work, or even criminal history. Some would argue that a country has a duty to shelter its citizens, and research shows that the more difficult problems associated with homelessness can be solved by focusing on housing first, then taking on other issues.
It's pretty clear that you have absolutely zero experience about mental health or human psychology.
Amongst other things, most people will attempt to adapt to their situation and retain a sense of agency. That is one reason why you'll find that homeless people speak of the positive aspects of their lifestyle and act as though it's a choice. This is no different from a startup founder extolling the virtues of their 80 hour week.
You are right; I am not a clinical psychologist. In some cases, I deal with people when the shit has hit the fan. That is, I know how most people react to really bad events because I see it quite regularly.
In other cases, I deal with the long, slow, and painful descent age and terminal disease bring to people's mental faculties.
In yet other cases, I get to talk with regular 911 callers that we wake up with Narcan, drunks that are simply sleeping on the side of the road, drug seekers that have "fallen" or been "hit by a car" (with no injury to speak of)... and more.
So, generally speaking, I get to see people when they are being quite "real" or at least "true" to the event that has taken place. That doesn't make me an expert in human psychology, and I would not claim such. However, as a group, EMS personnel can cut through the bullshit a lot faster than most. Over the course of years, comparing what people say to what they do... one can not mistake the patterns. No "human psychology" textbook will teach you that.
I've never been homeless, but I do think that if you've been knocked down every time you try to get up, after a point, you'll stop trying to get up... Nor will you take a hand that's being offered.
Most of the help the homeless get is ephemeral, at best - and won't necessarily get them off the street. It's no wonder that many choose to not fight that fight.
I understand where this kid is coming from. He worded things terribly, I will give him the benefit of the doubt. Instead of attacking him, people should be trying to figure out what to do about this problem. The homeless problem has really gotten out of hand in SF - and violent crime too. I know several people that have been attacked and robbed near market street.
I left SF in 2014 after living there since 1999. It's a very different city these days, the "cost of living" to "quality of life" ratio is perhaps the worst of any city in America.
The problem goes back to 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest' and the 'Deinstitutionalisation' movement in the 70s.
Basically they shut down psychiatric facilities instead of fixing them. Now no one has a good solution for people who need care but don't qualify current programs.
The sad part about the blog post is that it does identify a big homelessness problem, but does so in a way that is callous and doesn't really help.
I spend a couple of weeks in SF this month, and was shocked at the level of homelessness that we find even in very well off districts. This is not something that is common in the big cities of the world. The city is OK with tents everywhere, but that's not really that good for the people that are now homeless either: Living on a tent on the street will not help their mental health, their self esteem, or their chances of getting out of that hole.
I don't think the problem is really the fault of the tech people moving in, and I sure don't blame the homeless themselves. The problem, once again, falls into the people that want to keep the city the way it was, and to avoid building, when the city faces other pressures that are unavoidable. San Francisco MUST build.
Until people change their mind, we'll see both more gentrification and more homelessness, until the city reaches a point where the combination of prices and homelessness makes the city life into a dystopia: Maximum inequality, brought in by policies trying, but failing, to make the city be inclusive. I sure hope San Francisco voters change their mind before it gets to that.
I think your second paragraph makes a really good point. If you live in a tent where the world around you expects you to be in a house and make enough money, the mental stress is going to be huge.
I'm not claiming to know much about homelessness or poverty, but I'm pretty sure I'd become a less productive developer if I was stuck living on the fringe.
One of the (many) things that Keller — and many of the folks here who sound like newcomers to SF — don’t get is that the homeless population is not a new thing in San Francisco. It was just like this during the 1990’s, and some say it goes all the way back to when Reagan shut down California mental health services in the 70’s.
SF didn't have a large visible homeless population until about 1985. There used to be a lot of SRO (Single Room Occupancy) hotels in SF, in the Tenderloin and SOMA. That's where the poor people lived. There are still SRO hotels, but fewer, and many are owned by nonprofits now. The areas containing those hotels are being gentrified. Many of them were in the Tenderloin near Market, across from what's now Twitter HQ. Others were on 6th St, which has stubbornly resisted gentrification for decades. Now there are construction cranes at work there.
The problem with housing the homeless in SF is where to build housing. SF is built out; you have to tear something down to build anything. There are some housing projects, but they tend to house families with kids, and they don't want large numbers of single druggies dumped on them.
> I spend a couple of weeks in SF this month, and was shocked at the level of homelessness that we find even in very well off districts. This is not something that is common in the big cities of the world.
I've lived in many places but my home is (and always will be) New York City. What you wrote here does not reflect my experience at all. When I moved into a non-gentrified part of Brooklyn, and then watched it gentrify in front of my eyes, it was only after this whole endeavor concluded that I began to see homeless people on my streets.
There's a lot of loot that upper-middle class transplants from Ohio are willing to shell out of their nice, warm winter jackets.
In this context it seems to be intended as some kind of slur, or there is at least some negative connotation here. It's a man who works in tech who... what exactly?
The behavior of the "tech bro" in question is certainly offensive and insensitive, however using terms that bigoted in a headline (shaming a minority group in "tech" for holding different political views) is something one would expect websites on both extremes of the political spectrum to engage in (Vox, Breitbart, ...) rather than the Washington Post, and it's a bit sad to see them resort to such outrageousness.
It's also disappointing to see HN moderators be OK with headlines like this.
I agree with that. I'm fine with this story being posted and discussed, but using a slur -- even if doesn't really seem to hurt anyone with "power" -- often leads to cheapening of the discussion. Referring to the blogger as a "SF tech entrepreneur" gets the point across...and people can slap on their own connotations with that term as they please.
"Bro" has become a generic term for a young man with an inflated sense of self worth, a low opinion of others, a macho attitude, and a loud voice. Think of a stereotypical fraternity member.
Somehow that does _not_ describe most young geeks that I have known. How did we simultaneously come to be known as unable to look strangers in the eye _and_ have an inflated sense of self worth?
I don't understand your comment. Most geeks are not "bros." As you say, most of us don't fit the "bro" profile. There's no conflict here, there's just different names for different groups of people.
It's a sub-category of "Silicon Valley programmer/entrepreneur/founder". Awkward geek is one sub-category, "brogrammer" or "tech bro" is another sub-category. They're separate stereotypes for the same career.
I think there are far more geeks in Silicon Valley than there are "tech bros", but the bros certainly exist.
It's a scapegoat boogieman. A tool of techies in SF to manage their cognitive dissonance.
There are things everyone else in the city hates the startup/tech scene at large for. There are also people progressives hate for their not-progressive-enough views, and some of them have the gall to work in tech. When either of those (or any other number of criticisms) are stereotypically "bro" (or close enough), the people within startups/tech can blame it on the "tech bros."
It is meant as a slur. But bros are just a convenient and useful stereotype to blame. If it wasn't them, it'd be something else. "Tech bros" just happens to be OK to openly deride, because the identity has no social power within "tech" (whatever that means).
Co-worker of mine, actual quote: "Yeah, I know there's a pay disparity, and women are paid less than men. But really, socially, they have all the power."
He's from Chicago. He's already had a car window busted by a (punk-ass) angry cyclist. He's actually a good guy, there's nothing wrong with him. But yeah, from my POV he's "right out of the stereotype catalog".
The vast majority of people are basically doing their best, but they (we, I) have a really hard time getting outside their own head.
"tech bro" is like the n-word for a software engineer. It's demeaning, dehumanizing, and offensive. The writer needs to pick a less offensive word to describe precisely what he means.
You're being really fragile about this. A "bro" is someone who's out of touch, not a sub-human creature. If this person doesn't want to be called bad names, they should stop being bad things.
Gee, I didn't realize tech bros had their civil and human rights trampled. "Tech bro" is nothing like the n-word. The accusation is that they're inhumane, not sub-human. The guy in the article is in favor of maintaining a displaced subclass for the good of the economy, and using force to keep them quiet. He's closer to a slavery apologist than a slave.
They tried to answer this in the article. It looks like it's referring to the general young tech entrepreneur/wantrepreneur who moves to SF to try and make it big.
-Obscure startup
-Worships tech people who made it big
-Fond of quotes from leaders in technology
-General enthusiasm for tech/robots/etc and hobbies
The shame is that this individual is far from unique, and not just in SF. I run into people daily who speak of homelessness as a conscious lifestyle choice. I know of one SF attorney who constantly rants about how the homeless there all earn 50k a year. They build up these fantasy worlds to justify their perception of themselves as moral millionaires. They believe wealth to be the inevitable result of a heightened morality. Anyone without wealth is therefore morally backward and deserving of suffering. Give them a few years. Their bubbles will burst soon enough.
Your attorney friend is talking about trustafarians in the park on the other side of the city, and gravitate to Upper Haight, not the homeless populations that center around downtown in close proximity to the TLoin. Johnny5SF isn't complaining about the former, because they're not really situated to be a daily part of any rich tech bro's commute.
Yep I also hate this narrative of how every homeless person is a lazy drug addict or has mental issues.[0] While I'm sure many of them do suffer from these problems, it's indicative of a failure in social support systems to deal with that. Also, receiving "handouts" is an indicator of higher moral character in my opinion; I'd love to see one of these types try to beg in the streets for one day and see how people treat them and the affect on their dignity.
[0]: I've actually volunteered at a soup kitchen (not the same thing as a shelter, I know) for a time and spoken to many of the people there. Many are just single parents, older/infirm people, struggling immigrants, and many just recently lost their jobs. (One was even a former college professor) There was one time when a very drunk person had to be denied, but that was a rare occurrence.
Or the solution may be to accept that the city owes a duty to everyone in it's boarders and cannot deport human beings based on circumstance. The city could tax the rich heavily, to the point that a balance is struck that both shelters the poor and dissuades further gentrification.
>owes a duty to everyone in its borders
No. A local government owes a duty to tax-paying citizens who legally inhabit it.
>tax the rich heavily
Yes, drive out the people who are capable of starting and maintaining businesses, investing in area improvements, and spending money. That's a good idea. /s
Is there anyone here who does want a group of homeless persons lining the streets of their commute, or outside their homes and workplaces?
He is being self centred in his viewpoint but he's also not unique. Most people pay extra, and as a result work harder and longer, to live and work in neighbourhoods which allow them to ignore the plight of others.
I do hope the response to this is genuine agreement that things need to change because it benefits everyone, followed by associated action, instead of just hysterical and shallow "omg I can't believe he said that".
I think he does have a point... but he could have put it better.
I live in SF too; for ~10 years. I have never seen it this bad. The City passed a "sit/lie" law a couple of years ago.. but it's never enforced. The City is spending $1M/month ... for housing 225 people[1]. Do the math, and you'll see how ridiculous is that. At that rate, how much do you think the City can spend on the homeless? It has 7000 homeless, and counting.
Many of the homeless used to live in City housing, but got kicked out due to drug and alcohol habits. What's the solution here? You can't incarcerate them. You can't force them to use detox clinics, etc.
If the person refuses help, and refuses to follow the rules of whichever shelter they're in, then s/he has no more right to live in SF! As a last resort, the City is within rights to just kick you out. No one is entitled to live in SF. You can't just show up and setup tent in a public space; that public space belongs to the rest of us too!
Maybe it is not possible yet legally, but why shouldn't we allow this? The courts can already force people to be commited for mental afflictions when they are a danger to themselves or others. Why not do the same for (heavy) drug addicts who start becoming a liability?
Clue me in, what is the human rights violation? Or better yet, in descending order what are they in regards to those needing help but refusing it and possibly endangering themselves or others?
I certainly understand why there's strife around this.
Mental drugs cause a lot of effects, including causing other problems. They usually cause you to feel like you're in a cloud of anti-emotion. It really sucks when you want to feel stuff. Worse yet, are other side effects like tardive dyskinesia and tremors and things. And those, once you get them, don't go away.
What I gather, the only really humane way to handle mental health problems relating to homelessness is to medically arrest them, have a panel of doctors whom medicate according to the mental disease, wait until the drugs take effect (upwards to 6 weeks), and then explain what's going on and how they wish to continue. If the patient wants to stay on drugs, awesome: they should be provided free of charge. Along with that, governmental services they may have turned down prior can be reactivated and put into motion to assist them.
Or... if they don't want help/treatment, they should sign a paper stating that they were medicated, informed, and that they wish to not be on drugs and live on the street. At this time, they are released to live as they choose. And this "medical arrest" to inform them of their rights would never happen again. That's a one-time affair.
This "Arrest" would happen once, and would be done to provide informed consent. We already acknowledge that things like contracts and the like can't be made while on drugs, alcohol, or under duress. There's no reason why mental defects that cause effects like drugs can't also be grouped in with this.
Tell me everything about your life, and I could envision a situation where an aspect of yourself could be considered too "abnormal" or "dangerous" in action or thought to be left untreated.
If people haven't harmed anybody, then they themselves shouldn't be harmed, even if professionals believe it is help. Removing that barrier opens the door to arbitrary treatment and involuntary commitment, the likes of which not seen since the 19th century.
Well, again, involuntary commitment for mental afflictions is a thing. So it has surely been a thing in the 20th and 21st century. Of course, you don't get commited on basis of a diagnosis alone (AFAIK), but I would expect a similar criteria of "a danger to themselves or others" to be set for drug abuse as has been set in that case.
People have the right to decline medical treatment, even if it means they will die as a result. This can only be over ridden if the person doesn't have the capacity to make that choice - if they're a child, or have a learning disability[1] or have a severe mental illness that affects their ability to make choices.
I don't know about the US, but in the UK there's a bunch of protection built in to the system and it's been tested by the courts, including European court of human rights.
Mandatory treatment can also mean forced incarceration though. It's hard to get out of a mental hospital if the government picked you up and put you there.
Firstly, you need to examine the reason why people are on the streets. Generally, it falls into three categories:
1. 'Normal' People with mental illness, and no support network
2. 'Normal' People who have lost their financial stability.
3. Rest (Choice, Addiction, etc. by far the smallest group)
The key thing to note here is that with very, very few exceptions, everyone living on the street was a 'normal' person. The line of being 'normal' and 'homeless' is startlingly slim.
For the majority of people, foundations are job, family and health. Most people can survive losing one, because the others elements support it. Two elements, most people will have problems bouncing back. Three, and you're on the street. Ask yourself: If tomorrow you lost your job and had significant health problem, could you survive? What if you had no family to support you?
Likewise, once on the street, mental health deteriorates rapidly. People wither in a matter of weeks and months. No matter how stoic, strong and determined you think you are - the streets will cripple you.
Once you're on the streets, getting back on your feet is hard. Try getting a job, an apartment, or even a document without a fixed address. It's a vicious circle.
Finally - yes, there are shelters. Unfortunately, most homeless people avoid shelters - as they are notorious spots for theft and abuse; most prefer to risk it on the streets. People aren't refusing help, they're refusing to be sexually assaulted, or have the very few posessions that have left being stolen.
Finally: you're totally right - SF is expensive. You suggest the homeless should leave, but forget the how: buy a plane / train / bus? Or, perhaps they should risk jumping without a ticket, then being arrested, and then having a felony against their name.
The take away message is this: homeless people are 'normal' people. The difference between you, me, and anyone with the homeless is that we're incredibly lucky to not have faced significant problems in life, or be burdened with mental illness.
It's a tough subject, and noone likes the results, but it's worth remembering you're human, and applying empathy.
> The key thing to note here is that with very, very few exceptions, everyone living on the street was a 'normal' person.
That is where you are dead wrong. I would highly recommend you walk down 13th street (aka Duboce or Division, can't remember) and talk to the people living in the tent colony lining it. I have; it used to be my way to work till the hassle became too much and I started taking a detour. I would posit and say 100% of them are there by some sort of choice (not following the rules of the shelter is a huge #1). Drugs, alcohol and theft (bike, specially) are rife there.
I live in SF, and just can't stand the holier-than-thou approach taken by those who have not experienced SF's homeless firsthand. These are not your "lost my job and house and am forced to live out of my car" homeless; these are people, most of whom made a conscious decision to come to SF because they're attracted by the generous benefits, or got hounded out of whatever city they were in.
I've not worked with the homeless in SF, but I have seen it first hand.
Noone is contesting the infiltration of alcoholism, drugs, etc that is a huge part of the homeless puzzle.
However, it's important to consider that the abuse comes as a result of being on the streets, and the desire to numb against the hardship, or if it was the catalyst that placed the people in that situation. My experience is that it's more the former than the latter.
Call it holier-than-thou, but I've been working with homeless for over 5 years, 2 nights per week. I am sure that SF's situation has its nuances, but I'd be surprised if it was totally different.
Serious question: how many people working in the software industry do you know who don't use drugs or alcohol?
If everybody in San Francisco was held to the insane standards shelter clients are held to, nobody would be able to stay in an apartment for more than a week.
That's a strawman. There's a difference between drinking a couple of pints of beer with buddies, and emptying a pint of cheap vodka and passing out on the street, covered in your own urine and/or vomit.
Being in a shelter is a privilege. A shelter is free to make their own rules. Since quite a few of the residents may be fighting addictions or may be recovering alcoholics, the shelter may ban all alcohol and drugs to help in their recovery.
For example: I am a vegetarian and don't allow meat in my house. It's my house, I can set the rules. If you are my guest, you have to abide by them. It's quite simple, really.
The question isn't whether or not shelters have the right to make rules that make it incredibly difficult for people to maintain a shelter bed. The questions is are they doing the right thing -- that is, acting in the best interest of both the shelter clients and the greater public.
Shelters are paid for with public money to do a specific job, which is to create a safe place for people to sleep for people who have run out of options. The public should be able to examine whether restrictive shelter rules are helping or hurting the shelters' ability to do their job.
And, in fact, this happens pretty regularly -- there were public hearings on revised shelter rules about a year ago (http://www.sfbos.org/Modules/ShowDocument.aspx?documentid=51...). A lot of people argued, correctly in my opinion, that the current regime of shelter rules put an undue burden on poor and homeless people, and make their already incredibly difficult lives even harder.
That's not what we should be doing. As lots of other people in this thread, and all throughout the community of people who study poverty alleviation, have pointed out, simply giving someone a home, or some kind of shelter, without conditions, is by far a more effective approach.
The whole idea of subjecting homeless people to more restrictive rules than anyone else faces to keep their housing is based on the notion that people are homeless because of some personal failure or lack of self-discipline. The data do not support this assumption, and we need to stop making policy based on it.
> The key thing to note here is that with very, very few exceptions, everyone living on the street was a 'normal' person. The line of being 'normal' and 'homeless' is startlingly slim.
I did some work with a bay area organization that runs reduced rate housing for transitionally housed people and families when I was in college. First, I should say that you're completely correct about the numbers at any given time, but this also misses the larger picture.
Homelessness, broadly speaking, breaks down into two categories: temporary and chronic. The vast majority (~90% by the number of people) are 'temporary' (generally just called homeless). These are people who lose housing for a short period, then find housing again. Around 10% of the homeless are 'chronically' homeless - which means they have been homeless repeatedly over a number of years.[0]
I bring this up because I think your impression of where our social safety net is failing is incorrect. We do pretty well when dealing with the 90% of non-chronically homeless people. I think we could do a lot better, but most of those people are homeless for a short time, get help and find housing and stability again. When you talk about 'normal' people who have had a run of bad luck - they are the group we do best at helping.
The chronically homeless, on the other hand, need a totally different set of services. Being homeless for a long period of time often changes your entire outlook on life. The idea of investing in the future, or of any long term planning, can start to seem absurd if you're not sure where your next meal will come from. In general, the idea of living 'in society,' where there are shared rules and expectations looses its value if society places no (or almost no) value on you. Chronically homeless people can prefer homelessness to free housing, they can refuse to participate in a process that will feed, cloth and employ them because they don't believe it will be better than their current lives. They often have PTSD. In many ways, we are still working to understand how to best help this population.
I point this out because it's important to understand the kinds of things we do well and the kinds of things we do poorly. The kinds of interventions that help the recently unhoused will often be useless to the chronically homeless. All people are people and deserve dignity and compassion, but we shouldn't focus too much on how much like us many homeless people are. The failures of our system and what most people think of as 'homeless' people, are often facing a totally different set of problems and have a very different outlook on life. They are just as much people are you or I, but we don't do them favors by pretending they're one missed paycheck away from self-sufficiency.
Thanks for the well balanced, well informed reply.
You're completely right on every single point - you highlight a lot more of the 'nuance' that I was referring to.
Obviously, and luckily, the majority of people would not be permanently on the street if they missed a paycheck, mainly because they have other support structures in place: good health, shelter, family and friend network.
However if these elements are lost simultaneously, or weren't strong to begin with, the chances of the individual recovering decrease.
And, obviously - the longer on the street, the longer the recovery - it's definitely not a case of giving out a job, suit and tie and a paycheck and expecting the trauma to evaporate.
>Do the math, and you'll see how ridiculous is that.
It's $4444 per person per month. Why is that ridiculous? They need to employ people to manage the program as well as run shelters, pay rents, etc. $4444 is not so high that it's obviously too much.
If you have a breakdown of the various expenditures showing that money is being wasted, then by all means post it. Otherwise, the amount really does not seem that high.
I saw the quote in the headline and thought, that is some seriously unfortunate wording. I get what they mean, but putting it in the first person like that makes it sound like the problem is the seeing, not the pain, struggle, etc.
Then I read the actual letter. It's not unfortunate wording! They actually intend to say that the problem is the seeing! This person doesn't care in the least about these people, he just wants them out of sight!
It's not about who is right nor his right to express his opinion but what leads to better system.
You can be right yet be toxic at the same time.
Truth can kill. Lies can heal.
Timing and situation matters. Ignore and suffer.
a friend of mine who interned in SF last summer has a (satirical, I pray) startup idea: 'uber for harassing homeless people' - just geolocate yourself and your walking route before leaving, and a team will clear the homeless and from your path
again, I hope he was joking but honestly probably wasn't - I fear this lackadaisical 'tech can solve all of MY problems' attitude is prevalent (we should also consider how we can solve the problems of others)
I went to SF (and to the US) for the first time last month and I too was baffled by the amount of homelessness I saw, which is more striking when contrasted to the wealth and beauty of the city (which I loved).
Also, I think we are judging this guy too harshly because of his privilege status. But I cant tell you that I live in Mexico, the third freaking world, and even people living on $4 don't want to see homeless people showing their genitals at them.
I think if he hadn't gone on his moral high-horse and ranted about "free market societies" and "revolutions" he would've avoided much of the controversy. I sympathized with his actual grievances, but not his armchair ranting in the second half of his article.
I think he would have been better received if he was actually concerned about the people instead of his car. His solution seems to be "out of sight, out of mind", instead of e.g. taking on the glaring inequality. No wonder people are indignant.
I recently quit Facebook because I wanted avoid the state of permanent outrage that platform has come to feed off. Some random guy says something reprehensible and we're all suppose apply their comment to an entire group and get into a discussion about said generalized group. Rinse and repeat. It's old and pointless. HN is way better than this.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 346 ms ] threadHe really seems to think that homeless people grow on trees or something instead of realizing that they lived in the city before he did.
-HN also covers stories about the human side of technology
-The story is happening in SF, which is very close to Silicon Valley
-The vitriol being spewed is coming from a member of a tech startup
It's quite appropriate on this forum.
You don't have to be SJW to think that tyranny is a bad solution to homelessness.
Maybe a publicity stunt that backfired a little.
On the other hand maybe he is so sheltered as to think this is an actual problem he's helping solve...
[0] https://twitter.com/johnny5sf
[1] https://twitter.com/johnny5sf/status/593965045085700097
(And to your point, I personally haven't had that issue with transferring my accounts on Authenticator, but maybe it's different on iOS.)
He was not complaining about the suffering of those people and the lack of government intervention on their behalf - he was unhappy because poor people made his own personal life marginally worse by subjecting him to unpleasant views/smells.
https://justink.svbtle.com/open-letter-to-mayor-ed-lee-and-g...
> Every day, on my way to, and from work, I see people sprawled across the sidewalk, tent cities, human feces, and the faces of addiction. The city is becoming a shanty town… Worst of all, it is unsafe.
> [...]
> I am telling you, there is going to be a revolution. People on both sides are frustrated, and you can sense the anger. The city needs to tackle this problem head on, it can no longer ignore it and let people do whatever they want in the city. I don’t have a magic solution… It is a very difficult and complex situation, but somehow during Super Bowl, almost all of the homeless and riff raff[1] seem to up and vanish. I’m willing to bet that was not a coincidence. Money and political pressure can make change. So it is time to start making progress, or we as citizens will make a change in leadership and elect new officials who can.
> Democracy is not the last stop in politics. In-fact, the order of progression according to Socrates via Plato in the Republic goes: timocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and finally tyranny. Socrates argues that a society will decay and pass through each government in succession, eventually becoming a tyranny.
This guy knows there's sides, and he knows what side he's on.
Both it and GP said he shouldn't have to see homeless people. The letter writer certainly wouldn't care if the homeless people were still homeless, so long as they were bussed somewhere he didn't have to gaze upon their poor faces.
A lot of SF's homeless are from elsewhere, people who came here on a hope, or just because of SF's reputation as a city that's friendly to weirdos. (That's certainly part of why I came.)
If they can't make it here, SF offers them a way to get home again, but only if there is actually someone there who can put them up, and only if they're in good enough condition to travel. Details are here:
http://www.sfhsa.org/79.htm
That is distinctly different from places that dump their homeless residents here. E.g.:
http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/S-F-Nevada-reach-tenta...
This issue reminds me of the refugee problems happening recently in Europe. The problem was refugees trying to get into Europe and should've been the responsibility of the entire EU to solve. But the problem was felt most acutely in the Greek islands where refugees were showing up. And when an national/continental issue is felt primarily by a single, smaller region, it's highly problematic.
As a thought experiment, what would happen if SF started sheltering the homeless and ensuring that all their needs were met. Well, suddenly those bus tickets bought by cities around the country become a lot more effective and more cities around the country start buying them. It's even the moral thing for social workers to do, since the political climate in their city means that it's better for the person being bussed out to go to SF. It becomes a tragedy of the commons situation where the disincentive for doing the right thing is that you get to deal with the problems from the places that do the wrong thing. A homeless person going elsewhere is a living externality.
This is a national problem (probably international, though deportation is considered entirely acceptable in that situation) and needs to be treated as such. If the Federal government doesn't want to deal with the problem, it could pass a law that allows the city that provides services to a homeless person to bill the cost to the homeless person's home city. Suddenly that bus ticket wouldn't seem like the cheapest option and SF could provide all the services necessary to solve its own homeless problem. Until then, the situation will remain fucked. SF is too liberal to be take a GTFO stance and too poor to comprehensively solve the problem for all the homeless that are there now and would show up if they started such a program.
Are we talking about the same city here? I'd call SF "occasionally chilly" at best. That's part of why so many homeless people gravitate to CA; if you're sleeping outdoors there are many, many worse climates for it.
> The coldest day of the year is December 26, with an average low of 44°F and high of 55°F.
https://weatherspark.com/averages/31587/San-Francisco-Califo...
Related: did you know that windows can crack from thermal stress like cookware that you cool too rapidly? I learned that last weekend! Windchill -30F, fun times here in New England.
Also, the Emergency Housing Project, an Ecumenical service my UU Church started 20 years ago.
This is called thermal shock [1]. Basically thermal expansion mismatches cause internal stress beyond the material's Ultimate Tensile Stress and causes a fracture. It's the underpinning to how tattoo removal works too.
[1] http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/matier-ross/article/S-F-spendi...
[2] https://sfgov.org/lhcb/sites/sfgov.org.lhcb/files/2015%20San...
I'm not saying it isn't allocated effectively, just that the numbers themselves do not tell the whole tale.
I'm curious how many people live in SF on 12-20k, but that's irrelevant. If someone has accommodation and is able to earn wages as a steady state, it is obvious that their costs will be less than a homeless person who needs mental health treatment, rehabilitation and maybe even education before they are employable.
The figure that employed people can survive on is well below the lower bound for what is needed to rehabilitate a homeless person.
http://sftreasurer.org/sites/sftreasurer.org/files/TTX_Annua...
That there's not a significant dent in the continuing issue raises some questions.
Expatistan's crowd-sourced info finds SF housing to be the most expensive in the world, and cost of living in general nearly there:
https://www.expatistan.com/cost-of-living/san-francisco
Go talk to your local EMS/Fire department personnel and most of them will have similar stories. I know the homeless people in my area better than I know my extended family. I have memorized their birthday's, the medications they should be taking, the street drugs they prefer, the kind of beer they drink, where they stash their stuff, where they have their main camp, what their childhood, and adult life were like, their medical history, what shelters they've been kicked out of and are not allowed back to... and more.
We are forced to talk with them, sometimes 3 or 4 times a shift. I lost sympathy for most of them a long time ago, that doesn't mean we treat them like sub-humans... we just have less patience with the shit they are inevitably going to give us.
Edit: here is an article specific to San Fran about EMS & the homeless: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/27/us/san-francisco-firefight...
A lot of them are mentally handicapped or dealing with acquired mental illnesses. Even under good conditions, treating either is hard. Of course EMS/fire fighters/volunteers working in shelters aren't able to do that.
http://www.nytimes.com/1984/10/30/science/how-release-of-men...
More often than not, we see them a few days later with Steel Reserve cans littered about after someone calls 911 for what appears to them a dead man on the side of the road.
Mental illness is brutal. I feel for these guys, especially as I get older and start seeing my age equivalent homeless folks with PTSD and the like. The Vietnam vets are being replaced with Gulf war and Afghanistan vets. It is heart breaking to be sure... especially because many of us have served. We try, again, to hook these guys up with the VA... but they must want the help. It will not work otherwise.
New treatments such as VR based exposure therapy, or MDMA therapy are promising, but the standard of care is currently CBT and/or drugs, which have generally poor outcomes.
We just don't know how to treat PTSD in general. This has nothing to do with whether people 'want' help or not.
I'm not minimizing their issues, nor am I saying one-size fits all... but I would be remiss to not say: there are a lot of people dealing with mental/medical problems that are resistant to traditional therapies that don't resort to self-destructive behaviour to cope.
To wave off all the choices they make on a day-to-day basis is a disservice them and flies in the face of the people that are dealing with the same issues in non-self-destructive manner.
It's not an easy thing. I have friends who have made it so far, and their struggles were enormous. I have friends and family who didn't make it, and they're now dead. And I know plenty of people who just aren't addictive by nature; they made all the same choices and never had a problem at all.
I get why people don't like this. We all want to believe in the power of will. In particular, we want to believe that the power of our own will is sufficient to the challenges we face. But sometimes it isn't, and if we accepted that, we'd have fewer homeless addicts.
Only if we are the Military-Industrial Complex.
Err... why? Were they on fire? Why is the fire department involved in homeless people?
You've got hospital ambulances, private ambulances, city fire departments, county fire departments, volunteer fire departments and federal fire fighting organizations all potentially in the same place, all summonable by a 911 dispatcher. They all have EMT training and gear. Who shows up and how is it decided? Beats me.
Sometimes human organisation is baffling if you are seeing it from a step further out but makes complete sense when viewed from the inside.
Worse is the homeless situation in third world countries where even less services are available. Being homeless in a Western nation is far different than anywhere else. It may be exaggerated in SF and LA simply because of two reasons, climate and more support for those in need. So the city may actually being doing a good job but is simply attracting more people because they are
tl;dr do not for a moment think that homelessness isn't as bad issue elsewhere, let alone countries where the US is equal to economically.
I looked up "Homelessness in the UK" on Wikpedia and the first line is:
> Homelessness in the United Kingdom is kept somewhat at bay
> by a reasonable volume of housing, statutory rights, and
> various government initiatives.
I don't know what figures you are looking at, but one caveat that occurs to me is that the UK's main homelessness charity, Shelter, has a fairly broad definition of homelessness. You don't have to be sleeping in the street for them to consider you "homeless". Which is good, because relying on your friends' sofas for housing is indeed a very crappy situation which government policy should seek to minimize, but bad, because that's not what other people consider homelessness to be.
It's really disheartening to see the plight of people who could have been helped. Especially, given that we (US) spend more per capita on healthcare...
Another interesting observation is the difference between LA and SF. In LA (beach areas and west LA/Westwood) a side from minor inconvenience of a line outside public beach restrooms/showers and some encampments, there really isn't a disruption. In SF, people walk in yelling into stores, act out aggressively in broad daylight and generally don't seem to feel any restraint. I never felt particularly unsafe in LA, but definitely had to watch my surroundings last weekend in SF, much more than ever before in the last decade.
Her reply has always stuck with me. "Oh! No, they're not homeless, they're Roma."
[All of this is a simplification, and I'm omitting a lot here. The gist ought to be correct, and, I hope, fair to all.]
There are certain cultural barriers when it comes to the Roma. When you have an itinerant population like the Roma (and in Ireland and the UK, Travellers), you will naturally end up with with a conflict of some kind between the settled and travelling populations in a given area, unless both populations are familiar with one another, and even then the opportunities for discrimination are huge. The situation with Travellers in Ireland and the UK isn't as bad as the Roma situation, as the itinerant Roma population is self-isolating and can't speak the same language as the host settled population, whereas at least Travellers can speak the same language, so they're not as isolated from the settled population as the Roma are.
With Travellers, the core issue is that the trades that once allowed them to afford their lifestyle are no longer useful to society at large, so their opportunities for employment are few and far between, which unfortunately leads a greater number down the path of criminality [aside: the vast majority are decent people, but when you're deprived of opportunities, that's going to lead some people to crime]. Add to this that the modern state practically demands a settled lifestyle for things like taxation, education, healthcare, &c., which even further alienates the Traveller and settled populations. Now, you could suggest that they just settle, and some do, but people tend to be attached to their heritage, so for many that's not a runner.
With the Roma, all of that is even worse because they have the added language barrier and an even bigger cultural barrier. Moreover, you also have a trafficking problem surrounding some of the Roma where they're exploited as beggars, and sometimes worse.
So yes, the Roma situation is a completely separate situation from that of homelessness in general, and one nobody has any good answers for yet.
I used to also think that many homeless "preferred the lifestyle of homelessness" but I recently learned of a town in Canada (Medicine Hat) that found it more cost effective to house the homeless. This myth that people prefer to be homeless was shattered and this town found that nearly all homeless were able to reintegrated back into having their own places. The mayor was skeptical at first now, he says, “It makes financial sense. That’s how I had my epiphany and was converted. You can actually save money by giving somebody some dignity and giving them a place to live.”
Medicine Hat on brink of ending homelessness
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/medicine-hat-on-brink-...
http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/medicine-hat-has-al...
I searched "salt lake city homeless" remembering the program there and the SF Gate article discussing it's applicability to SF happened to be the first result, so I'm just embracing the irony, not trying to force it.
At first, this seems very socially liberal and at odds with a Conservative party kind of thing until you look at the financials and realize it actually is fiscally very conservative- it saves a ton of money on policing and medical care.
All that said, have you been to Medicine Hat? That's not a place with a very relaxed 'homeless lifestyle'. It's -15C here in Toronto today, and we're like 700km further south. In the west coast of the USA, you can survive on the street without the air itself killing you.
So what's the political argument against it?
Seriously, this is a human issue. We somehow look on these individuals as if they were almost non-human, yet they have powerful stories and painful experiences.
I'm not doing a good job at that but I try to make it a point to reach outside of my fully-customized bubble, and engage other people who could use some respect and human dignity. My impact is minimal in terms of numbers but chatting for 10 min with someone on the street can really make their day. Who knows, if it happens enough, that person may regain the courage it takes to get back in society and reach out to services that are more competent than I at helping in the details.
The only solution is way more housing.
I'm not sure about you, but where I come from, we call that a bargain.
The conservatives we have in the US are so extreme they make even the ones in Canada look very, very liberal. A proposal like that here would induce horrible rage and kicking and screaming about "the free market" and "entitlements". Someone would be called a communist. Maybe impeached. Conservatives run on platforms of removing programs that help the poor, not starting new ones.
There's a reason the blog poster addressed his open letter to the chief of police, and not to a local homeless charity with a check attached. He doesn't want to help solve the problem, he just wants to whine about it really loud to powerful people without doing any work or spending any money and hope it goes away.
it's a myth that the only way to solve these problems is with government.
Do you have examples of effective non-government solutions? Looking at my own country my impression is that government is far more effective than charities (in America or elsewhere) on this issue.
quit disparaging people who disagree with you. attempt to understand their real motivations rather than harping against some lame stereotype (that doesn't even make sense). that's the way to progress and solving our problems.
1.) HF is not effective at keeping recipients out of the criminal justice system. (This finding is controversial as, especially in Canada, 2-3 years often go by between arrest and subsequent criminal punishment.)
2.) HF creates 'slums'. (This finding is controversial as the solution is to attract a wider array of potential landlords. From a landlord's perspective, getting involved with HF is difficult as they feel that having one HF unit in a building will depress rents for the entire building.)
3.) HF is built around low quality data collection tools. HF programs always start with something called a point in time (PIT) count in which a city's homeless population is counted. PIT counts always show that homelessness is both older and whiter than frontline activists have found. This problem is highly complex and could easily turn this into a 250 page essay...:)
4.) HF is a one size fits all approach to a very complex problem. People who believe this fall into the narrative that a homeless woman with three children who lives from couch to couch is dramatically different from a homeless man who suffers from schizophrenia and pushes all of his worldly possessions in a cart. I'd argue that this is not so much a criticism as an example of ignorance - HF by its very nature recognizes that every community is different and each community must build its own program. Second, HF is built around personal relationships between recipients and advocates. The advocates are responsible for getting a particular recipient the type of help that he/she needs.
I mostly support Housing First, so I don't believe these, though #2 and #3 are definitely problems.
(source - I am an anti-poverty activist and have studied HF extensively.)
This is purely anecdotal, but in my experience, proponents of the 'HF creates slums' theory tend to fall into one of two camps:
- functionally blind
- landlords
The functionally blind (note that I'm not saying 'sight impaired...this is by design) tend to argue that homelessness is okay...as long as they can't see it. Often, they live in cities like mine (Regina, Canada) where for 3-4 months of the year, it is too cold to sleep outside. Because of this, homelessness in these cities often involves a mishmash of shelters, crashing on various couches, and sleeping in malls during the day/hanging out in coffee shops at night. The rest of the year, whether through policing or civic design, 'homelessness' consists of guerilla camping in parks and other out of the way places. HF does tend to make homelessness more visible. Programs generally start with a marketing campaign designed to attract landlords, then word gets out on which buildings house the formerly homeless.
And, that's when the functionally blind start to complain. Often, the complaints take the same form as people who protest against halfway houses opening up in their neighbourhoods. They print up flyers decrying the 'death' of their neighbourhood, and show up at city council meetings. Later, they seize onto minor crimes (ie - my sister's former roommate's cousin's veterinarian had her purse snatched two blocks from that building) to justify their beliefs.
Landlords are in a more precarious situation. Since HF does not have its own housing, it absolutely requires the support of landlords. Some HF programs are not terribly well funded so, while they guarantee that rent will be paid, they often require some form of discount to be financially feasible. That alone is a strike against them, at least from the perspective of business.
But, if you are a landlord and are willing to work with HF, you have a difficult choice. Realistically speaking, HF candidates have issues which create homelessness in the first place. Candidates often suffer from severe mental illness, chronic addiction, and health problems. They aren't always capable of basic upkeep in suites. So, do you offer up, say 15 suites in one building to the program, or do you spread the suites around multiple buildings. Some landlords have reported that the buildings that house HF candidates are more difficult to rent out and that the rent for all of the suites has to drop accordingly. This is one of the biggest reasons that landlords drop out of the program!
As to the functionally or willfully blind, I wonder if the HF campaigns start their publicity too late. Perhaps if there were more pictures of tent cities and shelters people would realize there is a local problem?
I know up in Anchorage, AK housing first started gaining momentum after quite a number of extremely visible tent camps and homeless folks getting frozen to the sidewalk.
I've never lived in a housing project and to tell you the truth, most of what I know about them comes from hip hop. But, I'd rather live in the projects than under a bridge...
If you're a welfare recipient the typically arrangement is for the rent to cost somewhere in the vicinity of 1/3 of your payment. Full rate Unemployment benefit in Australia is $600 a fortnight including something like $100 a fortnight 'Rent Assistance' payment. I believe welfare payment for people unfit for work for whatever reason is slightly more.
Australia also has fairly good services to homeless and disabled provided by the outreach sections of church organisations. Salvation Army and Mission Australia are the two I'm most familiar with. These services will, in certain circumstances, furnish a home and supply clothes.
We still have homelessness. Services are still stretched to their limits. There's a waiting period for the able-bodied to get in to public housing. We still have rough neighbour hoods.
1. https://dcsi.sa.gov.au/services/housing-sa
2. https://www.dhhs.tas.gov.au/housing
- end racism.
- end childhood sexual abuse.
- decriminalize all drugs, treat addiction as a health problem and make addictive drugs available under provincial prescription drug programs.
- invest billions of dollars into mental health care.
If you think you can accomplish any of the above, I'll not only vote for you, but I'll quit my job and work for you (for free).
Traditional anti-homelessness programs kind of stink because they work in stages. Candidates have to pass a stage in order to move onto the next and if they fail, they move backwards. The problem with this is that it is hard to stay motivated to stay sober if you live in the same dormitory style shelter where you used to live, where all of your goods are subject to theft, and where you are surrounded by people who are high/drunk on the substance you are addicted to! The other problem is that if you stumble, you generally move backwards and end up even further away from independent housing.
I am Canadian where a striking percentage of the homeless population (especially in the west) is aboriginal. In Canada, we have something called The Indian Act which provides certain benefits to 'status Indians'. One of the benefits it provides is that income earned on a reserve is not subject to federal income tax. The big problem with this is that reserves are often horrid places with absolutely no employment and substandard housing. The second biggest problem is that the Indian Act also works to make the concept of status extinct, but that's far from the point. As an example, the reserve where I spent the first two years of my life (I am not aboriginal, but my Dad was in the RCMP) is more like a concentration camp than a community.
I argue (and this pisses just about everyone off) that one way to cut down on aboriginal homelessness would be to amend the Indian Act so that any money invested on a reserve (provided that the venture employed a certain number of people) would trigger an immediate tax credit and not be subject to any Federal capital gains taxes. Further, I'd argue that any profits earned from these ventures should never be subject to any form of Federal income tax.
Because aboriginal people with status (aka 'status Indians') do not pay federal income tax, if you provided strong tax incentives to investment, you can see a route through which manufacturing in Canada has a similar cost structure to manufacturing in either Asia or in our NAFTA partner countries. Employment on reserves would encourage aboriginal people to move back to their communities, provide more pressure to the federal government to fix the woeful state of housing, and ultimately give people an easier route to gainful employment. Studies have shown that when you bring aboriginal people back into their community and their culture, their mental health/addiction outcomes improve.
Alas, the odds of that happening are likely equivalent to the odds that I will be drafted in the first round of the next NHL draft. (I am 38 years old and don't know how to skate).
So, I think that HF is about the best policy that we have. Though, I would like to see it amended.
Purely from a business point of view, I would like to see HF provide more services (financial and otherwise) to the landlords that participate. I argue that landlords who participate in HF often put themselves at a competitive disadvantage by doing so. Therefore, I would like to see strong municipal and federal tax incentives for their participation.
Further, I argue that HF programs themselves could do a far better job of moving their candidates into jobs that they can do. There is no way in hell that many of the people I know who would be HF candidates could ever work in a traditional 'job', but I would like HF to do a better job of exploring non-traditional options.
For example, I am heavy into street papers and think that panhandlers are likely the gr...
So you pack housing developments with addicts, crazy people and criminals. Next step is they start attracting their friends, and all of the sudden the development turns into a crime-ridden shithole. The families living in these development get screwed.
It also causes other disruption. NYC is adopting this type of policy, so people on waiting lists or in housing they don't like are flocking there from all across the region, and are receiving enhanced benefits. (It's pretty difficult to prove that someone is bona-fide homeless.) Meanwhile, the chronic homeless people who can't hold it together are still addicted, still in need of mental healthcare and are still living under an overpass.
http://www.npr.org/2015/12/10/459100751/utah-reduced-chronic...
The article mentions that some people had trouble adapting to their new houses. Some slept in tents inside their house, others still slept on the street several days a week until they got used to having a house.
Housing first works best for the fist class as well as those who have succumbed to addiction. Some of the others require intensive intervention, perhaps institutional. As someone pointed out, its complex, but it's something beyond any individual's purview, responsibility, etc., so inhabitants who do pay taxes, etc., should expect some kind of organization would be responsible for addressing the issue rather than the knee jerk public castigation for speaking one's opinion about a social issue.
Indeed, something as simple as smoking weed (regardless of the reason) will exclude you from most government assistance. Living indoors is not always a suitable trade-off for giving up medications that work.
But you also have people avoiding an address for whatever legal or avoidance reasons.
Naturally, though, not all homeless should be categorized this way. A great many of them surely have serious psychological disorders that prevent them from living normal independent lives. Surely many of them have suffered in many ways, and many of them are surely in the circumstances they're in due to factors they couldn't control. These are the ones that really do need help of _some_ kind.
I sympathize with people like the mayor of the town you use as an example, but he's wrong: you don't give people dignity by giving them a place to live. Housing isn't the source of human dignity. When you give people with no dignity things of value, they don't value those things, and then eventually they become valueless through abuse and neglect. That's why homeless shelters have to have volunteers to monitor when they house the homeless. That's why simply building a big apartment complex and giving keys to the homeless isn't a long-term solution and in all likelihood a fast-track to a destroyed property and a bunch of people spending some time in the clink.
Outside of personal interventions and great investment of resources into individuals, I'm not sure there are really any great solutions. It makes me sad, but I don't have any great ideas for how to help them better (writ large), than try to meet some basic material needs (food pantries, temporary shelters) and keep them safe.
In reality, the homeless population in 2016 SF and in 2014 Medicine Hat are shaped by the specific conditions and incentives in those communities.
Certainly, being homeless in Iceland would be different that being homeless in Liberia. I was just sharing an example of a situation where a person had their views about the homeless changed. In this case it was the mayor of Medicine Hat.
For example in my city of ~ quarter mil. people, there are approximately 1000 people living on the streets and another 1000 without home (no adress, permanently living in hostels, people in prisons that no longer have home).
Currently I know that there is project that focuses on the families without home (afaik 300-400 ppl?), where the plan is to move them into the city owned flats (there is more than 20 000 flats owned by the city with several hundred empty)
I like the logic behind that. To catch people without home before they end up on the street and give them an adress. What do you think?
1. "We already have lot of empty flats nobody lives in and need to maintain them" 2. "We already rent many flats for like 300$ a month to low income families, that have the courage for like 10 different visits to municipal office" 3. "Families that are on the edge of homelesness already live in some hostel and might be paying more than 300$ a month just to have a place to stay."
At least that is the gist of it as far as I know.
Second, this is an EU city, so I know that they want to get some initial funds from EU funds (the first set of flats needs to undergo reconstruction, because the basic utilities, like water and electricity are in terrible state) as a pilot 'housing first' project in the republic.
So, it isn't they are homeless because they like the lifestyle, but it is often because of an illness that they prefer that lifestyle.
We've all certainly felt extraordinary pressures related to common every-day life. Mental illness makes dealing with these pressures very difficult, often almost impossible. I would not blame someone for trying to escape those pressures.
My philosophy is: certain things are good for everyone if everyone has them. Some of these things: food, education, healthcare, place to sleep (securely), modest personal possessions, and so forth.
Reasons are mostly because of what you said. Homelessness leads to a general decline in society. If more people have healthcare, the general health of everyone goes up. If more people are fed, more people are productive, and production is good for everyone (to draw an incredibly broad generality). And so on.
It's unrealistic to say we'll do all those things 100%, but I do not think they are unrealistic goals for a modern and technologically advanced society.
Price breakdown:
30bil/year to end world hunger. 175bil/year to end world poverty.
20bil/year to end homelessness in the US.
I can't find numbers for everything, but those are some good ones to think about.
If people could separate themselves from their emotions, if they were taught stoicism, Buddhism or how free will and the self is a (likely) an illusion, then maybe they'd be stronger.
I can't elaborate, but I know people worth hundreds of millions of dollars, that are young, beautiful and have everything, but can't handle life, and tried to kill themselves but why?
Because an obese corrupt doctor told them that he knew the mysteries of the brain, and that they need to take a lighter form of methamphetamine every day for the rest of their life to be normal.
As Dr. Carl Hart explained, adderall is basically meth- http://www.vice.com/read/a-neuroscientist-explains-how-he-fo...
That person is in college, and the social acceptance of taking adderall to succeed is scary. If you can handle a low dose, great, I'm all for practicality. But most can't and the idea that amphetamines can cure a lack of focus is pseudoscience.
So excuse my tone, but I don't believe in what you said. The problem is behavioral choices (health, what you read/watch/interact) and learning how to deal with one's own thoughts and impulses, not mythical theories on brain chemisty.
What you are saying is often the cause of the problem, not the solution.
Try living on the streets and you will become an addicted asshole. I don't think there are a lot of people who can do it for years and stay 'normal'.
For a number of years I helped run a Saturday morning soup kitchen at a church near the VA in West LA. Talked to a lot of people, mostly guys, and heard this a lot too, but for most of them it's not the whole story.
Most of the homeless people I encountered had a point in their lives when the system failed them. Many of them had some traumatic event and fell into alcoholism or drugs. Many of them either had a weak social net (family or friends) or burned through that net. Counselling was not available or came too late, and once they were far enough along unemployment ran out. Eventually they embraced homelessness because they could no longer imagine an alternative, so that they could think something positive about themselves.
My sense is that there was a window during which the system could have helped them with their problems when it became too much for their friends/family and before they went too far down that path. But certain elements in our society (cough Republicans/Libertarians) just don't want to help people at risk.
This phrase is doing a lot of work for your argument -- the implication is that alcohol and drugs are like open manholes, and people are just falling in.
I believe in treating addiction. I also believe in removing stigmas associated with drug crimes. I think we should help people. But we shouldn't all assume that drugs cause poverty, 100% of the time. Poverty sometimes causes drug use. Hopelessness and despair (economically, socially) lead to chemical escapism.
My point is that not every drug addict is a victim of a disease which keeps him from contributing to society. People use drugs for a lot of reasons.
I am a Republican/Libertarian, and I take a small amount of offense to the accusation that we "just don't want to help." On the contrary, I believe the current strategies -- house them, feed them, give them clean needles -- is doing more harm than good. It makes the lifestyle sustainable without giving them any hope for something better.
A better way forward: - Stop charging drug users with felonies that prevent them from getting jobs in the future - Legalize almost all drugs, except for those that put the public at harm by causing psychosis. - More mental health services, including committing more people. We're failing schizophrenics when we don't force them into treatment. - Grow the economy. We need more jobs for the lower rung of the labor force. The first step towards despair is often unemployment. - If we're going tax dollars, let's create public jobs for people. I don't mind if subsidized housing is part of the package. - Stop creating homeless havens. It's counterproductive. You can't allow people to defecate on the street in broad daylight and call it compassion. When you do that, people travel to that neighborhood from all over because it's a place where they won't be hassled. It becomes impossible to run a small business there, families leave, the neighborhood dies.
I'm not saying we should fill the jails with the homeless. But why not provide public restrooms, and then arrest and/or commit those who are using the sidewalk? If we need someone to maintain the restrooms -- pay the homeless.
I really appreciate that you serve homeless residents just like other residents. But you might consider that the people who you are most frequently called to help are not representative of the homeless population. Look at the national stats:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_United_Sta...
That's a lot of families. It's a lot of kids. A friend of mine put years into making a documentary about homeless youth in Chicago. I got to meet some of them, and they are entirely different than the picture you paint:
http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/films/homestretch/
I think it's also important to note that active addicts generally refuse help no matter what level of society they're in. That's part of the addictive cycle. Homeless addicts claim to prefer their "lifestyle" and will fight to keep it. But so do gainfully employed alcoholics. So do wealthy coke fiends. It's a disease that will kill all of them eventually unless they can start facing how much addiction has screwed up their lives. And as hard as facing that has to be for a well-off person, I expect it's way harder for someone who has fallen so low as to be sleeping under an overpass and living out of a trash can.
There are 25,000 homeless in my city. I don't know exact numbers but a lot come here to pursue their dreams and some to escape a bad situation back home.
But it is so expensive here. Housing is difficult. Deception is everywhere, in terms of convincing people they have a chance at a career. But more often, they fall into drugs and prostitution, and running the streets -- because it is fun and easy, at first.
So an 18 year old kid who wants to be a singer, can run around meeting interesting people, act like he/she is achieving their dream but really is just partying. Then their irresponsible ways get them on the street.
And a once bright kid becomes diminished by drugs, and stress, and the struggle and emotional pain and torture that living on the streets causes. They then look "mentally ill" but most, in my experience, are merely exhausted and are irresponsible.
I have young friends who are homeless, and I'd start my day drinking coffee with them at Starbucks and then later eating breakfast at my building (a 5-star hotel) with people who could afford to feed a million people for a year.
And my rich friends, a lot are on drugs, and some do insane illegal things, and are generally way worse for society than my homeless friends. And I could often trust my homeless friends more than my rich ones.
At the time, I lived in an $8 million condo for free. And through a conflict of over our philosophies on pandering and prostitution, I moved out abruptly, and was nearly homeless myself. I then got to experience first hand the atrocious public transportation services, the difficulty in renting an apartment and how the City just doesn't care about working class people or the homeless.
The City is inept and just not thinking about solving the problems in a valid way. Instead, they take away electrical outlets in most areas which just punishes tourists, commuters, regular working people etc.
And great institutions, like the pubic libraries, which Carnegie saw as a way to lift up all of society, become refugees for the homeless.
Of course, the majority of homeless people are too far gone. Most are lazy, selfish, destructive and just terrible people.
Were they like that before or did they learn to be that way? Maybe if schools taught kids critical thinking skills and stoicism and how to separate themselves from the emotions, then we'd have a stronger society that knew how to deal with adversity better.
A lot of people, rich poor, smart or uneducated, are slightly fragile and weak. Life is hard, for us all, and society doesn't teach us how to live life very well.
When I worked at a VA Medical Center 25 years ago, the problem was identical. You end up feeling more for the social workers than for the vets.
To the extent that's true, I suspect that says a lot more about the alternatives that they are presented with than anything else.
As someone who's been homeless twice, I appreciate that you don't intend to offend, but this is a very loaded and offensive statement. You appear to work with homeless people and have very little sympathy for their situation, which I can understand but it still makes me a little sad.
Becoming homeless is something that can happen to anyone for any number of reasons, and there are different kinds of being homeless. Once you become homeless it becomes harder as time goes on to move back to something permanent. Booze and drugs can sometimes be a simple manner of being able to sleep, or to get away from the situation you're in or how you got there. Choices that seem nonsensical for those who have a warm bed every night make perfect sense when you're worn down by the elements and incredibly poor sleep. After a while the prospect of having to deal with the build up of shit in your life and get shit together becomes a bigger mountain to climb than carrying on when you are, even though your everyday struggle is a mountain of shit in itself.
It's not that people choose a lifestyle as such, it's that sometimes it feels less painful to have a permanent known level of shit in your life than to fight all the way back up to get a permanent place to live and risk being knocked back when you're already pretty fragile. Being homeless is the suckiest thing you can probably reasonably imagine.
> this is a very loaded and offensive statement
So the fuck what? If you aren't allowed to consider anything offensive, we'd never discuss the difficult issues and make progress on them.
> something that can happen to anyone for any number of reasons, and there are different kinds of being homeless
Yeah blah blah blah he's not saying 'absolutely every homeless person is like this', he's suggesting that maybe the situation isn't as everyone assumes, which may be the case. But you've shut him down with some 'not every homeless' person bullshit.
> It's not that people choose a lifestyle as such
He didn't say choose did he? He said they prefer it - I presume he means prefer it to being institutionalised. You seem to suggest that he thinks they prefer it to being a millionaire, which of course they do not.
Have you ever heard of the idea of being charitable in how you interpret other people's thoughts?
> Being homeless is the suckiest thing you can probably reasonably imagine.
Who are you arguing with here? Who disagrees with you? All he said is that some of these homeless people may prefer being on the street to being taken into the care of the state.
You are destroying debate!
You reacted as if iuguy had tried to "shut down" discussion with an ideological dictum, but that's not at all what he did. Both iuguy and monkmartinez have commented out of deep personal experience. We're incredibly fortunate to have commenters posting from that level, most of all in so rage-baity a thread.
Showing up with a bullhorn and blaring angry arguments is the last thing you should be doing on HN to begin with, but to insert that at the most meaningful point of human communication in this thread is really an abuse.
It is complex and every story is different. I am sure if I knew every story, there would be some that I would feel sympathy and perhaps compelled to act... but so far, those have been very rare.
> Booze and drugs can sometimes be a simple manner of being able to sleep, or to get away from the situation you're in or how you got there. Choices that seem nonsensical for those who have a warm bed every night make perfect sense when you're worn down by the elements and incredibly poor sleep. After a while the prospect of having to deal with the build up of shit in your life and get shit together becomes a bigger mountain to climb than carrying on when you are, even though your everyday struggle is a mountain of shit in itself.
I am not guaranteed a warm bed every night. No one is, if you really think about it.
Further, you just described being a police officer, fire fighter/ems person with the stresses of the job. Suicide[1], booze/drugs, divorce, anger management are all unfortunate parts of the job for many. How they choose to deal with these issues are another matter entirely.
Sleep issues are a major pain point for me. I choose this life so I have had to develop strategies to deal with it. Some people can't deal with the stress, so they quit/move on, mask it with booze/drugs, have significant behavioural (anger) issues, or kill themselves. Sound familiar?
[1]http://www.policechiefmagazine.org/magazine/index.cfm?fuseac...
http://www.nbcchicago.com/investigations/Firefighters-Addres...
While I have difficulty agreeing that the homeless generally want to be, it seems worth noting that they're not better than normal people, any more than they are worse - they are normal people, with the same charm and/or asshattery as the rest of us. They're just in a situation most of us (or so I think) find singularly undesirable.
Reasons many are homeless:
- Psychiatric problems. They can't fit in to normal working conditions because they are for lack of a better word crazy. They also don't get the necessary help due to poverty.
- Lost a job. In a city like New York where the cost of a studio apartment over an hour away by train can cost 1 grand a month, and minimum wage is still $9 an hour, and food is pricy, and metro isn't exactly cheap either, it can be very easy to fall into the homeless problem if you don't have friends and family helping. I know quite a few people who were fortunate to have had a car and able to get up and leave the state rather than sleep on the street.
- Being homeless often means no access to cleanliness which limits your ability to find a job. A self-fulfilling prophecy.
- If you are injured to a point where you can't work, it is not very easy to get government disability. My friend took 2 years to get the benefits while she was completely crippled. She was surviving on the generosity of her friends. When the government finally gave her money, she was able to afford a teensy apartment. If she ended up homeless the government wouldn't give her the benefits because you need an official place of residence.
- Speaking of a place of residence, a crippled homeless person cannot go to a shelter because they will be preyed upon. And they can't physically fight back. And so they also can't claim benefits because of this. I know one such person.
This is part of why I have this blog: http://sandiegohomelesssurvivalguide.blogspot.com/
Homeless people need the same things other people need: Work that works for them and other middle class solutions that are largely disappearing from an increasingly polarized America. But what they are offered is mostly contempt and really low quality options and services rooted in a broken, abusive, horrifying set of mental models. And then we are vilified for not being adequately grateful for the shit offered to us.
I don't want to be homeless. But, yeah, I prefer this to the vastly shittier alternatives available to me.
Only if people agree, offer their solidarity, and approve the city government of doing so (with their taxes etc too).
Which is exactly what people like him don't allow.
How did you come to that conclusion?
Paying more to the govt isn't what you should be asking for, rather, you should be asking for a more efficient and accountable govt.
There's already a myriad of local, state and federal housing programs already in place. Whether its temporary emergency housing, eviction protection, child care services, or in some cases, low income housing and federal subsidies for permanent housing.
There's plenty of safety nets in California, let alone the SF area. If people want to get off the streets, there's an abundance of resources at their disposal. Saying the government isn't doing enough is a bit myopic considering all the local, state and federal help readily available.
http://www.sfhsa.org/76.htm
http://sf-moh.org/index.aspx?page=130
https://www.mercyhousing.org/california
http://www.homeless.org.au/directory/us-california.htm
http://www.freeprintshop.org/download/shelter_english.pdf
http://www.sfcenter.org/resources/housing
http://portal.hud.gov/hudportal/HUD?src=/states/california/h...
http://ssa.ocgov.com/calfresh/calworks/emergency/homeless
http://www.needhelppayingbills.com/html/calworks_homeless_as...
And that's JUST for the homeless services. It doesn't even START to address the free addiction clinics, low cost prescriptions, free health care clinics, food shelves, and other resources homeless people might need help to get off the streets.
In my mind the government is going way above and beyond trying to solve this issue.
We have (Way) better than average care for homless in probably a 3 hour driving distance. There's tons of services available. And that too is a problem. Every service we provide means that more homeless come and flock to our city. Ideally, we'd like to provide for everyone, out of a sense of human decency.
The only problem with that is we could provide for everyone in the county, we cannot do the same for south central indiana, parts of Kentucky, parts of Ohio, and parts of Illinois, and wherever they come from via bus. What started as a problem of 100 people disenfranchised now is a perpetual 400.
The solution, as ugly as it may seem, needs to be a cross-country (national level) anti-homelessness mission. That means comprehensive low/no barrier essentials, possibly even a minimum income. Until a national answer happens, any community that offers above and beyond will get punished with multiplying numbers that far exceed any local budgets.
http://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/S-F-spends-record...
SF spends $241 million per year on homeless, with no accountability and no ability to track results. They are NOT going above and beyond, they are wasting money with no improvement in results.
How are you able to track this and then in two years, you suddenly have no idea where all the money is going?
http://archives.sfexaminer.com/sanfrancisco/sf-spends-1657-m...
The lion’s share of the funding goes toward supportive housing, which provides specialized and intensive services to the recently homeless as they adjust to a new way of life, with some combating drug addiction and receiving mental health care.
The City spends $81.5 million annually for 6,355 supportive units, or about $13,000 per unit. Of the 6,436 homeless individuals counted in last year’s homeless count, 3,401 were on the streets without shelter while the other homeless people counted resided in shelters, transitional housing, resource centers, residential treatment, jail or hospitals.
And
Even though The City has built 3,000 new supportive-housing units since 2002, the homeless population has remained mostly flat. The population has ranged from 6,248 to 6,514 since 2005, after dropping from 8,640 in 2002.
You claim "zero accountability" but there's several paragraphs and a large graph showing where the money goes in your article. Not sure how you fix "accountability" if your city continues to build housing for these people and continue toe expand their budget to help them. What else do you want them to do???? Most other cities would see this and spend the money elsewhere and cut the spending on these programs in a heartbeat.
Accountability means that if it doesn't work or if the money is being wasted, then someone needs to be held accountable.
In the end, it still comes back to the people. It's not the government's fault.
But if your code is O(n^3) and just doesn't ever give you an answer, upgrading your CPU is throwing good money after bad.
The current system and people are not able to solve the problem, even after spending >$22k per homeless person per year. How much more do you suggest spending, and why do you think it would make any difference to outcomes?
[0] http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/S-F-homeless-populatio...
If you were to ask me, I'd say "not me". And not because I don't want it done, but because I already pay taxes with the assumption that this is what a government of a supposedly enlightened society should be spending it on. I.e. to care for its weakest members, the ones that need it the most.
This helps the short term homeless. Long term homeless often have problems that can't be met just by giving them housing.
California has the highest income tax in the entire United States. San Francisco is up there among county income tax. Its inexcusable that our star tech capital of the entire world is simultaneously infamous for its homelessness and mental health problems. You can phrase it "I hate looking at these people" or you can phrase it "these people need help"; the right solution remains the same. Fix it.
I think the difference is found in empathy. Take two cases: One, I feel bad when I see a homeless person because my empathy makes me feel bad, and I want to remove that bad feeling and thus I help them. Getting them 'out of sight' might reduce the bad feeling a little, but any time I think of their being homeless people, I still feel bad for them.
Two, I feel bad because the homeless person is making the place look worse. So I want them to be gone. Once they are out of sight, I no longer feel bad.
I think the two above are more similar that many people treat them because of how selfishness and empathy interact, but I do also think their is still a significant difference because one is based off of empathy and the other is based off of pure selfishness.
He's also saying the government should fix it, what other options are there but homeless shelters?
I don't get why people are acting like this guy wants to send the homeless to concentration camps and gas them.
"Seventy-one percent (71%) of respondents reported they were living in San Francisco at the time they most recently became homeless, an increase from 61% in 2013. Of those, nearly half (49%) had lived in San Francisco for 10 years or more. Eleven percent (11%) had lived in San Francisco for less than one year."
What are these "development reasons?" Airbnb? Property owners have had no issue knocking down buildings in places like the Mission to build high-rent properties in their place. There is ample opportunity to satisfy demand for low-to-middle income housing by building upwards which developers choose to ignore in favor of satisfying the rich.
At first, you feel bad for these people. But, over time, it changes you and you stop feeling as much empathy towards them. They're the people yelling at 3am in the morning that make you tired at work the next day. They're the people shitting on the sidewalk and forcing you to jump around it or walk in the street. They're the people leaving uncapped needles on the sidewalks.
And add to this that the situation has gotten significantly worse lately. SF is a powder keg ready to explode. There are two SFs living in close proximity to each other and both headed in opposite directions. As the one SF has gotten richer and the other has gotten poorer and evictions have increased, there's a general feeling of combativeness that's very scary. It's common for people to try to intimidate me on the sidewalks as I walk to work. They stare at me and walk directly at me no matter which side of the sidewalk I attempt to walk on. My projection is that there's a message being delivered..."you may have everything else, but I'm taking the sidewalk." Homeless people will urinate/defecate in the middle of the sidewalk in ways that make it as difficult as possible to avoid. And while it's mostly passive aggression at the moment, it feels like we're not too far off from that aggression turning active. This deeply unhealthy dynamic is why I've chosen to leave SF.
It would take an extraordinary person to be dealing with this on an everyday basis and not try to compartmentalize it in ways that appear cold and unfeeling to people viewing it from the outside. You can't understand the fear, and fear will cause people to do and say things that others would consider unconscionable. You can't understand the hopelessness of the situation that leads you to write those people off a subhuman. Out of sight is really out of mind. And anyone that isn't experiencing this problem on a daily basis isn't going to really understand this open letter. They're going to attribute the tone and callousness of the letter to the individual who wrote it rather than the experiences they've been subjected to.
But what about not having to dodge shit, piss and uncapped needles on the street? What about not having to be asked for money constantly? What about not having to hear people yelling at the top of their lungs at 3am? What about not having to feel unsafe?
If it were just seeing people being unobtrusively homeless, there would be no problem, even if they were plainly visible. His phrasing may seem harsh to people that aren't not exposed to the situation on a daily basis. But let's try to not look for reasons to be offended in this situation and, instead, search for the meaning behind the words. Because there's a serious problem that needs fixing in San Francisco.
He is free to be rich while others are poor because of the free market. Seems like his free market has created a number of people who leave urine and feces in the streets and ask people for money.
He wants the benefit of a free market without having to deal with the consequences.
http://sfgov.org/lhcb/sites/sfgov.org.lhcb/files/2015%20San%...
70% of homeless people in San Francisco were housed residents of San Francisco before the became homeless, and most of the remaining 30% were in a city adjacent to San Francisco before coming to SF after becoming homeless.
Also, the idea that social services are "widely available" to homless people in San Francisco is a farce. For example, there is only 1 available shelter bed for every 5 homeless people.
Source: I worked as a service provider for homeless people in SF and I've seen our supposed "generous benefits" up close.
Homelessness, poverty are not San Francisco's problem, they are America's problem. If the rest of America takes issue with that, perhaps the Union should be questioned.
As a San Francisco with 5x his tenure, I am entirely proud that SF has not swept the homeless problem out of sight. I would rather that everybody were safe, whole, and housed. But as long as we have the problems we do, I would rather they be on public display. Because fixing them is going to require public action.
If that is uncomfortable for him, then good. He should be fucking uncomfortable that people are suffering in the streets. I am, and anybody with half a heart is. As long as the pain exists among his fellow residents, he should see it. We all should.
Honestly you come across as kind of callous by not seeming able to empathize with why he might be upset.
Of course saying that just sweeping people away is an acceptable solution is incredibly heartless. That's where he lost my sympathy. At the same time, embracing the status and also kinda heartless. It doesn't help anyone, except for people who are neither living on the street nor being confronted by people living on the street.
People often seem to think we should give the homeless and drug addicts and mentally ill free reign to do whatever they want as some sort of act of kindness. I think that's belittling and infantalizing. Nobody should punished harshly for acting a little obscene in public from time to time, but we should do something so that people actually can get help while also enforcing laws that ensure public space can be shared and enjoyed by everyone.
> Leaning on someone's car, yelling at someone, and interrupting a theater are all acts of aggression.
He describes exactly none of those instances as even directed at him or his family. I get why people find mental illness to be troubling, and why they might feel unsafe. But he described nothing that was aggressive. Your feelings, although important, do not prove anything about what other people intend.
> People often seem to think we should give the homeless and drug addicts and mentally ill free reign to do whatever they want as some sort of act of kindness.
That is a ridiculous straw man. If they "seem" to think that to you, I don't believe you're trying very hard to understand what they actually think.
And yes, there should not be homeless people, they should be managed and taken care of by either government agencies, charities or families. It's a failure of society, rather than a failure of the people complaining about unhinged people who at times panhandle, sleep, urinate, defecate, scream, accost, spit, voice their inner monologues, eat, in public often times at the expense of the public.
And to be sure, this should not be a locally addressed problem but a national problem. Addressing it locally only attracts more homeless into homeless friendly areas.
Render homeless services to homeless based on where they lived the longest, from federal funds so you don't get concentrations in Santa Clara county, or Los Angeles county from people from all over.
The article is interesting as it's attempting to vilify "rich tech bros". Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems weird to point out that he took his parents to a restaurant that serves Lobster (no word on if they ordered or considered ordering it) and that he once spent $20 on a ticket to a special theater. He's then called a tech bro nearly 10 times, always with the presumption that being a man who works in a tech job is both a "bro" and that because of that he's inherently responsible for everything wrong in the world.
He shouldn't have written his medium post, or at best he could have found a much better way to word it. The city DOES need to treat it's homeless in a more humane way. But I wonder if journalists don't also have some soul searching to do, and if they might want to back off the "All techies are evil" rhetoric which is really the basis of this article.
and very much about how someone who can afford the nice things in life, a luxurious / extravagant lifestyle by many standards, 'shouldn't have to be subjected to the unpleasantness thereof' and how uncomfortable / annoying it is -for him-.
He's not trying to solve the problem for them, he's trying to solve it for himself. He even says as much, talking about how easy it is to 'sweep the problem away' for Super Bowl. No-one thinks that SF temporarily solved the homeless issue for SB weekend, and he doesn't want it solved either (or makes no real mention of that in this letter), he just wants it swept.
There are a lot of activists (mostly behind the scenes) trying to increase the supply the side of the economics. However, the weird alliance between the NIMBY's and progressives in the city keep pointing at the entitled techies (like the author of the article) to show how the techie's are part of the problem.
That seems unfair. Shkreli made the news for doing things that would have a tangible effect on peoples lives, and doing those things with a smile. Let's compare Shkreli raising the prices on life-saving drugs to the first paragraph of Keller's blog post:
>> "I am writing today, to voice my concern and outrage over the increasing homeless and drug problem that the city is faced with. I’ve been living in SF for over three years, and without a doubt it is the worst it has ever been. Every day, on my way to, and from work, I see people sprawled across the sidewalk, tent cities, human feces, and the faces of addiction. The city is becoming a shanty town… Worst of all, it is unsafe."
It's ridiculous and frankly narcissistic the way that he makes it about him and how it effects his life, to be sure. But, his three personal examples (from just this past weekend!) did a good job of driving home for me how interactions with the homeless are different in SF than they are in my area (northeast).
The guy could use a talking to about punching down but I haven't really heard too many people defending SF's handling of these types of issues either so I can't rip him for trying to bring more attention to the topic.
The most recent clear definition I have heard is anyone born between 1980 and 2000. So anyone ~16 and under is a new generation, currently called Gen. Z, but they may get another name soon.
It does seem like the media is absorbing Gen X into millennials now for some reason. I don't know why. Baby Boomers vs everyone else?
My wife definitely has more of the typical millenial characteristics then I, and talking of our high-school experiences it almost seems like we were decades apart rather than just 5 years, though perhaps some of that is that we grew up on opposite coasts.
Wait, I thought those were "digital natives", i.e. never having known life without ubiquitous computers/tablets/cellphones? I've mostly heard the progression as Gen X (born in the 70s), then Gen Y (born in the 80s). After Gen Y it's supposed to be Millennials (born in the 90s/coming of age in the 00s), then Digital Natives (aforementioned "raised by the Internet").
But really, I think they just make it all up to suit their current viewpoint. I'm 38 and I've been told I straddle the line between Gen X and Gen Y. I jammed to Pearl Jam and Alice in Chains in 9th grade while wearing flannel shirts and combat boots, so I'm Gen X...wait I also had an 80s electro revival phase wearing all black the following year, so I'm Gen Y...
You get the picture.
Millennials are the group born in the 80s/early 90s and were introduced the internet at some point while they were growing up, rather than it having always existed as part of their life.
Nobody is really sure what generation Z is like yet, but they are definitely different than millennials.
Edit - replaced the word 'pumped' with 'lumped'.
As I said in my post in this thread, journalists (keypressers) have it in for us. That's why we're "coders," "techies," and now "tech bros" in their articles. They probably resent the fact that low social status geeks are making more money than them, even if few us are actually rich.
To hell with these keypressers. Never, ever lift a finger to help them. They are our enemy.
Let's fight for the right of people, who are mostly struggling with mental illness and addiction to live in the street.
That sure feels noble I guess.
How about making appropriate institutional care available so these folks wouldn't have to sleep in the streets?
In my town, there's an article in the paper today decrying the fact that a local institution is no longer venting waste heat that kept vent grates warm, so people cannot sleep outside.
Taking it away is literally dehumanizing. So if it is to be done, it should be done with great care.
(I'm addressing your 2,3,4th paragraphs, I think not heating the outdoors is fine)
http://valleywag.gawker.com/startup-stud-hates-homeless-peop...
http://valleywag.gawker.com/happy-holidays-startup-ceo-compl...
Semi-surprised to see this crop up again when the outrage over these incidents was pretty severe and infamous.
If it's (at least partly) from compassion for people reduced to such circumstances, hopefully the solution will go some way to improving their lot.
But if it's purely from indignation at the inconvenience suffered by the observers, then the "solution" may simply involve shifting the problem elsewhere: viz. Keller's approval of the way the "homeless and other riff raff" temporarily vanished during the Super Bowl.
That was quite the zinger!
Is nobody trying to treat or house these people?
Shouldn't people take this piece and use it as further evidence that there is a problem that needs to be fixed, rather than merely a culture war they can take part in?
As usual, everybody want's to talk about how much of a 'bro' this guy is, but nobody gives a shit about improving the lives of the homeless.
In my experience, most do not want to put in the effort to kick the habits, contribute to society in a meaningful way, or tell you it is too late. The reality is a lot of them prefer the "lifestyle" and "freedom" to do whatever the hell they want whenever the hell they want to do it. They have a completely different take on life than "most" people.
The Housing First movement takes this stance, and has seen some success: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_First
Amongst other things, most people will attempt to adapt to their situation and retain a sense of agency. That is one reason why you'll find that homeless people speak of the positive aspects of their lifestyle and act as though it's a choice. This is no different from a startup founder extolling the virtues of their 80 hour week.
In other cases, I deal with the long, slow, and painful descent age and terminal disease bring to people's mental faculties.
In yet other cases, I get to talk with regular 911 callers that we wake up with Narcan, drunks that are simply sleeping on the side of the road, drug seekers that have "fallen" or been "hit by a car" (with no injury to speak of)... and more.
So, generally speaking, I get to see people when they are being quite "real" or at least "true" to the event that has taken place. That doesn't make me an expert in human psychology, and I would not claim such. However, as a group, EMS personnel can cut through the bullshit a lot faster than most. Over the course of years, comparing what people say to what they do... one can not mistake the patterns. No "human psychology" textbook will teach you that.
Most of the help the homeless get is ephemeral, at best - and won't necessarily get them off the street. It's no wonder that many choose to not fight that fight.
I left SF in 2014 after living there since 1999. It's a very different city these days, the "cost of living" to "quality of life" ratio is perhaps the worst of any city in America.
Basically they shut down psychiatric facilities instead of fixing them. Now no one has a good solution for people who need care but don't qualify current programs.
I spend a couple of weeks in SF this month, and was shocked at the level of homelessness that we find even in very well off districts. This is not something that is common in the big cities of the world. The city is OK with tents everywhere, but that's not really that good for the people that are now homeless either: Living on a tent on the street will not help their mental health, their self esteem, or their chances of getting out of that hole.
I don't think the problem is really the fault of the tech people moving in, and I sure don't blame the homeless themselves. The problem, once again, falls into the people that want to keep the city the way it was, and to avoid building, when the city faces other pressures that are unavoidable. San Francisco MUST build.
Until people change their mind, we'll see both more gentrification and more homelessness, until the city reaches a point where the combination of prices and homelessness makes the city life into a dystopia: Maximum inequality, brought in by policies trying, but failing, to make the city be inclusive. I sure hope San Francisco voters change their mind before it gets to that.
I'm not claiming to know much about homelessness or poverty, but I'm pretty sure I'd become a less productive developer if I was stuck living on the fringe.
The problem with housing the homeless in SF is where to build housing. SF is built out; you have to tear something down to build anything. There are some housing projects, but they tend to house families with kids, and they don't want large numbers of single druggies dumped on them.
Any ideas?
I've lived in many places but my home is (and always will be) New York City. What you wrote here does not reflect my experience at all. When I moved into a non-gentrified part of Brooklyn, and then watched it gentrify in front of my eyes, it was only after this whole endeavor concluded that I began to see homeless people on my streets.
There's a lot of loot that upper-middle class transplants from Ohio are willing to shell out of their nice, warm winter jackets.
In this context it seems to be intended as some kind of slur, or there is at least some negative connotation here. It's a man who works in tech who... what exactly?
The behavior of the "tech bro" in question is certainly offensive and insensitive, however using terms that bigoted in a headline (shaming a minority group in "tech" for holding different political views) is something one would expect websites on both extremes of the political spectrum to engage in (Vox, Breitbart, ...) rather than the Washington Post, and it's a bit sad to see them resort to such outrageousness.
It's also disappointing to see HN moderators be OK with headlines like this.
I think there are far more geeks in Silicon Valley than there are "tech bros", but the bros certainly exist.
It's a scapegoat boogieman. A tool of techies in SF to manage their cognitive dissonance.
There are things everyone else in the city hates the startup/tech scene at large for. There are also people progressives hate for their not-progressive-enough views, and some of them have the gall to work in tech. When either of those (or any other number of criticisms) are stereotypically "bro" (or close enough), the people within startups/tech can blame it on the "tech bros."
It is meant as a slur. But bros are just a convenient and useful stereotype to blame. If it wasn't them, it'd be something else. "Tech bros" just happens to be OK to openly deride, because the identity has no social power within "tech" (whatever that means).
THAT, my friend is a "tech bro" and he's in SF.
Maybe he's a neckbeard instead for having that view. I mean, as long as we're throwing sterotypes around, maybe that one fits better.
The vast majority of people are basically doing their best, but they (we, I) have a really hard time getting outside their own head.
-Obscure startup -Worships tech people who made it big -Fond of quotes from leaders in technology -General enthusiasm for tech/robots/etc and hobbies
[0]: I've actually volunteered at a soup kitchen (not the same thing as a shelter, I know) for a time and spoken to many of the people there. Many are just single parents, older/infirm people, struggling immigrants, and many just recently lost their jobs. (One was even a former college professor) There was one time when a very drunk person had to be denied, but that was a rare occurrence.
It's not clear what the solution is to this complex problem.
A part, but not a big part :)
>tax the rich heavily Yes, drive out the people who are capable of starting and maintaining businesses, investing in area improvements, and spending money. That's a good idea. /s
Ah, to see the American Dream expressed in such clarity in a comment on the internet. /me wipes a tear
He is being self centred in his viewpoint but he's also not unique. Most people pay extra, and as a result work harder and longer, to live and work in neighbourhoods which allow them to ignore the plight of others.
I do hope the response to this is genuine agreement that things need to change because it benefits everyone, followed by associated action, instead of just hysterical and shallow "omg I can't believe he said that".
I live in SF too; for ~10 years. I have never seen it this bad. The City passed a "sit/lie" law a couple of years ago.. but it's never enforced. The City is spending $1M/month ... for housing 225 people[1]. Do the math, and you'll see how ridiculous is that. At that rate, how much do you think the City can spend on the homeless? It has 7000 homeless, and counting.
Many of the homeless used to live in City housing, but got kicked out due to drug and alcohol habits. What's the solution here? You can't incarcerate them. You can't force them to use detox clinics, etc.
If the person refuses help, and refuses to follow the rules of whichever shelter they're in, then s/he has no more right to live in SF! As a last resort, the City is within rights to just kick you out. No one is entitled to live in SF. You can't just show up and setup tent in a public space; that public space belongs to the rest of us too!
[1] http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2016/02/10/san-franciscos-p...
Maybe it is not possible yet legally, but why shouldn't we allow this? The courts can already force people to be commited for mental afflictions when they are a danger to themselves or others. Why not do the same for (heavy) drug addicts who start becoming a liability?
Mental drugs cause a lot of effects, including causing other problems. They usually cause you to feel like you're in a cloud of anti-emotion. It really sucks when you want to feel stuff. Worse yet, are other side effects like tardive dyskinesia and tremors and things. And those, once you get them, don't go away.
What I gather, the only really humane way to handle mental health problems relating to homelessness is to medically arrest them, have a panel of doctors whom medicate according to the mental disease, wait until the drugs take effect (upwards to 6 weeks), and then explain what's going on and how they wish to continue. If the patient wants to stay on drugs, awesome: they should be provided free of charge. Along with that, governmental services they may have turned down prior can be reactivated and put into motion to assist them.
Or... if they don't want help/treatment, they should sign a paper stating that they were medicated, informed, and that they wish to not be on drugs and live on the street. At this time, they are released to live as they choose. And this "medical arrest" to inform them of their rights would never happen again. That's a one-time affair.
This "Arrest" would happen once, and would be done to provide informed consent. We already acknowledge that things like contracts and the like can't be made while on drugs, alcohol, or under duress. There's no reason why mental defects that cause effects like drugs can't also be grouped in with this.
This sounds to be the most fair..
Sounds like most drivers I know...
If people haven't harmed anybody, then they themselves shouldn't be harmed, even if professionals believe it is help. Removing that barrier opens the door to arbitrary treatment and involuntary commitment, the likes of which not seen since the 19th century.
Not saying I know the answer though.
Firstly, you need to examine the reason why people are on the streets. Generally, it falls into three categories:
1. 'Normal' People with mental illness, and no support network
2. 'Normal' People who have lost their financial stability.
3. Rest (Choice, Addiction, etc. by far the smallest group)
The key thing to note here is that with very, very few exceptions, everyone living on the street was a 'normal' person. The line of being 'normal' and 'homeless' is startlingly slim.
For the majority of people, foundations are job, family and health. Most people can survive losing one, because the others elements support it. Two elements, most people will have problems bouncing back. Three, and you're on the street. Ask yourself: If tomorrow you lost your job and had significant health problem, could you survive? What if you had no family to support you?
Likewise, once on the street, mental health deteriorates rapidly. People wither in a matter of weeks and months. No matter how stoic, strong and determined you think you are - the streets will cripple you.
Once you're on the streets, getting back on your feet is hard. Try getting a job, an apartment, or even a document without a fixed address. It's a vicious circle.
Finally - yes, there are shelters. Unfortunately, most homeless people avoid shelters - as they are notorious spots for theft and abuse; most prefer to risk it on the streets. People aren't refusing help, they're refusing to be sexually assaulted, or have the very few posessions that have left being stolen.
Finally: you're totally right - SF is expensive. You suggest the homeless should leave, but forget the how: buy a plane / train / bus? Or, perhaps they should risk jumping without a ticket, then being arrested, and then having a felony against their name.
The take away message is this: homeless people are 'normal' people. The difference between you, me, and anyone with the homeless is that we're incredibly lucky to not have faced significant problems in life, or be burdened with mental illness.
It's a tough subject, and noone likes the results, but it's worth remembering you're human, and applying empathy.
That is where you are dead wrong. I would highly recommend you walk down 13th street (aka Duboce or Division, can't remember) and talk to the people living in the tent colony lining it. I have; it used to be my way to work till the hassle became too much and I started taking a detour. I would posit and say 100% of them are there by some sort of choice (not following the rules of the shelter is a huge #1). Drugs, alcohol and theft (bike, specially) are rife there.
I live in SF, and just can't stand the holier-than-thou approach taken by those who have not experienced SF's homeless firsthand. These are not your "lost my job and house and am forced to live out of my car" homeless; these are people, most of whom made a conscious decision to come to SF because they're attracted by the generous benefits, or got hounded out of whatever city they were in.
Noone is contesting the infiltration of alcoholism, drugs, etc that is a huge part of the homeless puzzle.
However, it's important to consider that the abuse comes as a result of being on the streets, and the desire to numb against the hardship, or if it was the catalyst that placed the people in that situation. My experience is that it's more the former than the latter.
Call it holier-than-thou, but I've been working with homeless for over 5 years, 2 nights per week. I am sure that SF's situation has its nuances, but I'd be surprised if it was totally different.
If everybody in San Francisco was held to the insane standards shelter clients are held to, nobody would be able to stay in an apartment for more than a week.
For example: I am a vegetarian and don't allow meat in my house. It's my house, I can set the rules. If you are my guest, you have to abide by them. It's quite simple, really.
Shelters are paid for with public money to do a specific job, which is to create a safe place for people to sleep for people who have run out of options. The public should be able to examine whether restrictive shelter rules are helping or hurting the shelters' ability to do their job.
And, in fact, this happens pretty regularly -- there were public hearings on revised shelter rules about a year ago (http://www.sfbos.org/Modules/ShowDocument.aspx?documentid=51...). A lot of people argued, correctly in my opinion, that the current regime of shelter rules put an undue burden on poor and homeless people, and make their already incredibly difficult lives even harder.
That's not what we should be doing. As lots of other people in this thread, and all throughout the community of people who study poverty alleviation, have pointed out, simply giving someone a home, or some kind of shelter, without conditions, is by far a more effective approach.
The whole idea of subjecting homeless people to more restrictive rules than anyone else faces to keep their housing is based on the notion that people are homeless because of some personal failure or lack of self-discipline. The data do not support this assumption, and we need to stop making policy based on it.
I did some work with a bay area organization that runs reduced rate housing for transitionally housed people and families when I was in college. First, I should say that you're completely correct about the numbers at any given time, but this also misses the larger picture.
Homelessness, broadly speaking, breaks down into two categories: temporary and chronic. The vast majority (~90% by the number of people) are 'temporary' (generally just called homeless). These are people who lose housing for a short period, then find housing again. Around 10% of the homeless are 'chronically' homeless - which means they have been homeless repeatedly over a number of years.[0]
I bring this up because I think your impression of where our social safety net is failing is incorrect. We do pretty well when dealing with the 90% of non-chronically homeless people. I think we could do a lot better, but most of those people are homeless for a short time, get help and find housing and stability again. When you talk about 'normal' people who have had a run of bad luck - they are the group we do best at helping.
The chronically homeless, on the other hand, need a totally different set of services. Being homeless for a long period of time often changes your entire outlook on life. The idea of investing in the future, or of any long term planning, can start to seem absurd if you're not sure where your next meal will come from. In general, the idea of living 'in society,' where there are shared rules and expectations looses its value if society places no (or almost no) value on you. Chronically homeless people can prefer homelessness to free housing, they can refuse to participate in a process that will feed, cloth and employ them because they don't believe it will be better than their current lives. They often have PTSD. In many ways, we are still working to understand how to best help this population.
I point this out because it's important to understand the kinds of things we do well and the kinds of things we do poorly. The kinds of interventions that help the recently unhoused will often be useless to the chronically homeless. All people are people and deserve dignity and compassion, but we shouldn't focus too much on how much like us many homeless people are. The failures of our system and what most people think of as 'homeless' people, are often facing a totally different set of problems and have a very different outlook on life. They are just as much people are you or I, but we don't do them favors by pretending they're one missed paycheck away from self-sufficiency.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_United_Sta...
You're completely right on every single point - you highlight a lot more of the 'nuance' that I was referring to.
Obviously, and luckily, the majority of people would not be permanently on the street if they missed a paycheck, mainly because they have other support structures in place: good health, shelter, family and friend network.
However if these elements are lost simultaneously, or weren't strong to begin with, the chances of the individual recovering decrease.
And, obviously - the longer on the street, the longer the recovery - it's definitely not a case of giving out a job, suit and tie and a paycheck and expecting the trauma to evaporate.
It's $4444 per person per month. Why is that ridiculous? They need to employ people to manage the program as well as run shelters, pay rents, etc. $4444 is not so high that it's obviously too much.
Who will they pay rent to? The pier belongs to the City.
That much money gets a homeless basically a cot in a large warehouse. How is that worth $4K/month? And which other city spends $50K/homeless person?
I saw the quote in the headline and thought, that is some seriously unfortunate wording. I get what they mean, but putting it in the first person like that makes it sound like the problem is the seeing, not the pain, struggle, etc.
Then I read the actual letter. It's not unfortunate wording! They actually intend to say that the problem is the seeing! This person doesn't care in the least about these people, he just wants them out of sight!
again, I hope he was joking but honestly probably wasn't - I fear this lackadaisical 'tech can solve all of MY problems' attitude is prevalent (we should also consider how we can solve the problems of others)
Also, I think we are judging this guy too harshly because of his privilege status. But I cant tell you that I live in Mexico, the third freaking world, and even people living on $4 don't want to see homeless people showing their genitals at them.
Relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11110271