One person told me that area is so bad in particular because that's the area unemployment checks are obtained. So a lot of the poorest people without an address besides a shelter have to go there regularly, and they don't exactly have spare money to travel much. It might be better for them and the rich doctors who want to run their conventions if the city found a better site to disburse the checks.
The city built a transportation center, surely they can dedicate a government building to being a combination shelter and benefits center. Or place it near a place that handles the homeless better like people's park does in Berkeley where, yes there are campers, but they keep it pretty clean and respectful.
Shows what a deep thinker the typical Californian is. I am being sarcastic. The checks are welfare checks. Not unemployment checks. Most Californians seem to use their heads as navigation ornaments. Nothing more.
Serious answer: to the countryside, away from the city and its lures, away from the dealers and with a bit of luck also away from the legal dealers of alcohol, even though that would be harder to achieve.
Then try to find a way to live a life which does not solely revolve around getting the next hit. This will work for some, it won't for others. An alcoholic will find it hard to quit drinking while living in a pub so getting her out of that place is one way to give her a hand in breaking the addiction.
It seems to me it would be cheaper to give the committed substance abuser their drug of choice for free in a safe, separated and controlled setting, rather than maintain this magical thinking that one day they will turn things around on their own in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Cheaper money-wise, maybe. Probably if and when the supply of those drugs has been taken out of criminal hands - something which is long overdue as the 'war on drugs' does nothing but guarantee high prices for criminals while it does next to nothing at all to limit the amount of drugs on the market. As to whether the 'move to the country' scenario works depends on the reason for the addiction. For some it probably will, others will either keep their addiction or change it for another one.
It will improve the quality of life for the addicts as well as the city climate, as to whether this is worth the extra costs compared to a state-supplied drug stash is up to society to decide.
I was thinking move them to the country AND supply them with their drug of choice, at least until hopefully someone discovers a miracle cure for addictive behaviour, which would be a better solution. Or why not relocate them to a closed environment with no abusable substances whatsoever?
Some people are incapable of looking after themselves, or fall into addiction after horrible experiences, and leaving these people to stew in their own juices rather than intervene is inhumane. We do after all section people that are a risk to themselves or others, so this is not without precedent.
... follow a public-health driven harm minimization strategy, such as the Netherlands.
To give one example, Amsterdam used to have a huge heroin addiction problem, with associated crime and high death rates amongst addicts.
It is now treated as a health rather than a policing problem. Safe injecting rooms, methadone replacement programs, etc. As a result, the average age of heroin addicts in NL is now over 40, because young people aren't being addicted, and 'established' addicts are able to manage their condition for years, rather than die early from overdoses.
For more info on the Dutch approach to drugs of all kinds, this 21-page PDF has good background plus statistical comparisons both over the last 15 years and with other European countries:
It's hilarious to me that this exact same newspaper ran an article less than a week ago showing that by all available measures, homelessness is improving and there are fewer people on the streets in San Francisco. (https://projects.sfchronicle.com/sf-homeless/2018-state-of-h...)
Just like our current national hysteria around crime or immigration, the notion that homelessness is somehow getting worse, or that San Francisco is doing a bad job handling it, are flatly contradicted by the data. San Francisco is in fact doing a better job handling homelessness than most of its peer cities in the United States.
Readers of Hacker News should go to the data first. Matier & Ross have a long history of this kind of ugly sensationalism and it has no place here.
Going to need a citation here, because all of the data says things are getting better. I live in SF, I have worked in mid-market and I edited the Street Sheet and worked directly with homeless people for several years. I'm not super interested in your one anecdote about the one time a homeless person scared you.
There is currently a well-funded political campaign, backed by VC money, to change conservatorship laws in California to snatch homeless people off the street and involuntarily institutionalize them. You are doing serious harm by allowing people to spread misinformation here without challenging them, and punishing people doing the thankless work of correcting them.
Of course it isn't cool, but it's impossible to prevent people from being wrong on the internet. The question is how to correct misinformation when it appears. If you blame people and snark at them, that reinforces them in the error. Worse, you discredit the truth in the eyes of the neutral audience who might be persuadable, but react adversely to the hostility. Your comment upthread was much better, especially because it provided an alternate source.
Having walked Market Street at night and during the day, I believe its seediest part is Civic Center. Everything before that seems fine due to increased police presence, a.k.a. it's the tourist zone.
I would agree that two slums sandwich this narrow band.
In 2017 SF had about 7500 Homeless people, if your numbers are correct (cannot find the source), then it means city spends per homeless person annually somewhere between $40K to $53K, which seems to be insane amount of money.
Trickle down doesn't work for people who do not contribute to the society in any way. Why do many homeless don't? I don't know, but that's what any government effort should focus on. Spending money and hoping it will trickle down without addressing the root cause is stupid.
The data in the article you linked shows that there has been a continued increase in the amount of human waste, used needles, and encampments. Even the primary positive figure they cite, a drop in population of 8,640 in 2004 to 7,499 in 2017, is not a substantial improvement. Given the impression that many residents have that things have gotten worse, some of it may be accounted for by factors mentioned in the article (i.e. the perception of increase by people who are simply in areas that the homeless have been displaced to), but I'm also inclined to believe that housing the chronically homeless to reduce the official population count might not actually have too much of an impact. For example, what if the entirety of those 7,500 were given a permanent residence, so that the homeless population drops to 0? I'm not so sure it would be easy to distinguish between the severely mentally ill or drug addicted individual who was technically homeless vs technically not. I suspect that much of the day to day activity would remain unchanged.
If you just look at the homeless population number that is a 13.2% drop versus a population growth in San Francisco of approximately 17.9% over the same period. I would call that significant.
In 2004 the homeless made up 1.15% of the population. In 2017 it was 0.08%. A 30.5% reduction. Definitely significant.
I see two issues that are driving the false perception regarding homelessness.:
As you reduce the overall homeless population the significantly mentally ill and drug addicted make up a higher percentage of the homeless that remain.
The policies enacted have concentrated the homeless into fewer areas which makes it seem that their numbers are higher rather than lower.
At the risk of comparing the homeless to wildlife, perhaps the apparent increase is because of the homeless being driven out of former lower-profile "habitats" by development.
Part of the problem, if not a large-ish part of the problem, is that apparently drugs and alcohol are usually restricted from homeless shelters.
And addiction is a large component of homelessness, but if you're still addicted you're obviously not going to spend much time in a place where you have to go cold turkey to enter.
So, my ( probably naive ) suggestion would be to allow drugs and alcohol in the shelters, hopefully giving the residents long enough of a chance to receive some help. No it's just a revolving door that doesn't appear to be helping anyone.
I think for people working at a shelter, that might be pretty annoying. To be honest, the fundamental problem is obvious: SF has too high rent. Until serious money and resources are devoted to solving that, you will have homelessness.
You think that people who are now homeless should be looking for legitimate residential opportunities in the most expensive city to live in in the world...by mechanism of lowering rent in said city?
What? It's like a conscious strategy on the part of homeless people? That would be cool.
No, I really just think that people should stop overthinking problems like this. You don't need to go around asking everybody's life story to work out that homelessness is tightly coupled with rent prices. Fix one, you fix the other. Or, if you think that's too expensive or onerous, own it. Accept that you're basically OK with other people being homeless. Everything else is just crocodile tears.
My first question is, which I think you missed, is why do they need to be given housing in the most expensive city in the world? There is a lot of space in this country.
My second question is, how exactly do you propose rent be lowered? Do you just think that rent is made up on the spot by evil rich white people, and we should have the government force them to charge less? The reason rent is so high in the first place is largely to do with government restrictions on new developments...Rent is also high here because there is a large concentration of high paying work in the area. Are these high earning people going to be allowed to benefit from your proposed arbitrary lowering of rent, so that we only disproportionately punish the wealthy landlords but not the wealthy tech workers? If not, how many tech workers would you like to displace to make room for homeless residents, and how do you determine which?
I feel foolish for not realizing how simple of a solution it was that you were proposing, but not all of us operate in the intellectual 4th dimension.
Look, don't believe me. Just look at the history of public housing. It's expensive. It works. People like to pretend there's a lot of complexity to issues like these because they couldn't really care less about homeless people, and they'd rather not spend the money to give them homes. Talking about complex social issues is a great way to come across as both clever and caring. Paying more taxes, however, is a pain in the ass.
I think generally speaking, lowering housing costs isn't to allow a homeless person to save up for a deposit and rent an apartment. It's to increase the likelyhood that the sibling they always got along with will have a spare room, or to increase the buffer between losing a job and being on the streets, or to make it so the old friend doesn't mind it that much that somebody is sleeping in their spare room, since they have a spare room.
On the individual level, I expect the reason why people stay is that being homeless makes you very dependent on local knowledge and social network. Knowing what bins contain food, where is good shelter, which police officers are dangerous, and so on - is very important. If you move city, you're not suddenly going to have the kind of money to pay a deposit. You'll just be homeless in a place you don't know. That, and a lot of homeless people have jobs.
Brilliant point. Homeless people don't care where they live. Raise awareness at a national governmental level. Remove the homeless to mental hospitals built for the purpose in a remote area. Many businesses that employed 100's of people have relocated to the midwest. Other businesses from the midwest have opened manufacturing facilities in SF for the cheap Asian labor. Pres. Trump is rumored to want to move 50,000 undocumented immigrants to Concord, a suburban sanctuary city near SF where there already is a burden of crime gangs made up of teenage immigrants, an excessive population of welfare recipient residents and a drug problem and housing shortage and excessive rate of teen pregnancy.
I actually don't think it is. A lot of SF's homeless population comes here from other places on trains or buses because the city has a reputation for tolerance and supportive social services. Some cities/states even bus people here.
I think the root problem is that SF is carrying too much of the load for other places who won't take up the problem themselves. Every place is going to have some level of drug use or social problems. But it's not productive or responsible for everyone else to just dump it all on the SF taxpayers.
A lesser problem is the populace's unwillingness to hold the homeless to any reasonable standard of behavior. I'm sorry, I know the homeless have it hard, but there are certain global norms of civilized behavior I consider inviolate, like, don't defecate in public, or don't drop used syringes on the ground, where people will step on them. These things happen here every day and the political climate is such that it's taboo to ask for law enforcement to get involved.
i don't think its taboo, its just that the bar keeps getting higher and higher for law enforcement to even notice.
it used to be that if a pile of drunks had a loud party outside my house at 3am, I could call the cops and they would send someone to break it up. or if someone started living outside by business, screaming at passersby and making a huge biohazard mess I could call them and they would move them along.
now they want to know how big the encampment is, if it gets big enough they will break it up after a few weeks. otherwise I get the feeling they just put you on a list of whiners to ignore. anyways - you stop calling.
even if the rent weren't so insane I would want to leave just because of the sheer misery involved for everyone.
I live in Oakland Chinatown. Too many car break-ins on the back side of Potrero Hill eventually got me down.
I'm really thinking about leaving. Not, as perhaps the other 95% of people do, for economic reasons, but just because I'm tired of how dysfunctional SF is. We pay through the nose in taxes and get what, a disgusting, dirty city, with barely-functional transit, do-nothing law enforcement, totally unaffordable housing, and insane traffic. It really does get under your skin after a while.
I'm optimistic with London Breed that we'll finally get some tech/lawyer/finance/other working professional-driven emphasis on accountability and RESULTS from the city government. Less grandstanding and speeches, more numbers, data, better schools, functioning transit, and cleanliness.
Per the same link, SF spends very little money on homelessness. A lot of the so called homelessness money is actually subsidized housing money.
Most issues with the homeless represent a public health issue much more than a law enforcement issue.
Given they lack access to toilet facilities, are you imagining the homeless not pooping through sheer willpower?
Addiction is a form of mental illness, and that's not the only mental illness common among the homeless. Many suffer from other illnesses. Nobody wakes up wanting to be addicted, or schizophrenic, or whatever, whether they are homeless or otherwise.
What this city really needs is restrooms. Agree with you on that. Yes, people would do drugs in them, but it would certainly help with some of the smells.
Another related problem is that barely-better-than-being-homeless housing has been zoned out of existence. Single room occupancy units (small bedroom with lockable door and shared kitchens/bathrooms) have been torn down and not built over time in the Bay Area, and I directly blame that for a decent chunk of the homelessness problem.
When you make bad options illegal, you aren't magically giving anyone any better options.
Yes, agree. I've worked in shelters. Burn-out time. The city government is cynical and heartless. The attitude of residents is "whatever." The moral compass of the city is non-existent. The underground BART stations at Civic and now Powell are full of demented elderly who live there, drink, drug and beg and sometimes jump in front of oncoming trains. And all that the city council seems capable of handling is to hold council meetings to vote to banish plastic straws. Really? With 10,000 people living on the streets, some with children, openly using drugs, leaving needles, openly defecating near many Burger King or fast food places or 711's. So mayoral candidate's campaign promise is more street sweepers to sweep away the poop. Next week it could be 220 lbs of poop and city council might decide to use taxpayer funds to find another excuse to ignore human suffering lining the streets and gutters. Churches used to let homeless men sleep in pews and sit on the property and beg and gave them lunch, socks, toiletries. They picked up some slack in helping those the city ignored. Until those who attended church and paid the bills stopped coming. After too many thefts, stench, disrespect, even the most caring had enough.
I’ve been to SF once for 3 days, and I have never seen so many frankly mentally ill people wandering the streets. This always seems to be downplayed as a factor in the homelessness problem. Difficult to be a part of any solution when you have untreated chronic schizophrenia.
I'm sure it's driving out smaller meetings as well, which might not make big news but might add up to even bigger losses overall.
Some of my team went to a meeting in SF a few years back. They described "running the gauntlet" from the hotel to a Mexican restaurant in an area where the streets were full of homeless people. While none of them ran into direct trouble, they felt uncomfortable and unsafe, and were disgusted at the state of the place (human waste on the streets etc), "like a third-world country".
In subsequent years, when the company asked for volunteers to go, no one wanted to, and no one volunteered. A week long all-expenses-paid trip from the UK to SF is something which would previously have been considered a huge perk, but is now considered to be a dangerous punishment. I certainly had no desire to visit.
62 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 136 ms ] thread> It didn’t help that one board member had been assaulted near Moscone Center last year.
It's not just a stigma. It's not safe.
The city built a transportation center, surely they can dedicate a government building to being a combination shelter and benefits center. Or place it near a place that handles the homeless better like people's park does in Berkeley where, yes there are campers, but they keep it pretty clean and respectful.
Given the high gdp and high tax rate, why isn't SF better than it is?
I'm would really like to understand this. Is it politics, economics, cost of living?
It will improve the quality of life for the addicts as well as the city climate, as to whether this is worth the extra costs compared to a state-supplied drug stash is up to society to decide.
Some people are incapable of looking after themselves, or fall into addiction after horrible experiences, and leaving these people to stew in their own juices rather than intervene is inhumane. We do after all section people that are a risk to themselves or others, so this is not without precedent.
A slim majority has recognized that consent and autonomy are important rights and chooses to deal with the consequences of maximizing them.
To give one example, Amsterdam used to have a huge heroin addiction problem, with associated crime and high death rates amongst addicts.
It is now treated as a health rather than a policing problem. Safe injecting rooms, methadone replacement programs, etc. As a result, the average age of heroin addicts in NL is now over 40, because young people aren't being addicted, and 'established' addicts are able to manage their condition for years, rather than die early from overdoses.
For more info on the Dutch approach to drugs of all kinds, this 21-page PDF has good background plus statistical comparisons both over the last 15 years and with other European countries:
http://www.emcdda.europa.eu/system/files/publications/4512/T...
Just like our current national hysteria around crime or immigration, the notion that homelessness is somehow getting worse, or that San Francisco is doing a bad job handling it, are flatly contradicted by the data. San Francisco is in fact doing a better job handling homelessness than most of its peer cities in the United States.
Readers of Hacker News should go to the data first. Matier & Ross have a long history of this kind of ugly sensationalism and it has no place here.
Market St. is a war zone.
The city spends $300 - $400 million a year on the homeless industry, but virtually none trickles down to the actual homeless.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
There is currently a well-funded political campaign, backed by VC money, to change conservatorship laws in California to snatch homeless people off the street and involuntarily institutionalize them. You are doing serious harm by allowing people to spread misinformation here without challenging them, and punishing people doing the thankless work of correcting them.
I would agree that two slums sandwich this narrow band.
Trickle down doesn't work for people who do not contribute to the society in any way. Why do many homeless don't? I don't know, but that's what any government effort should focus on. Spending money and hoping it will trickle down without addressing the root cause is stupid.
In 2004 the homeless made up 1.15% of the population. In 2017 it was 0.08%. A 30.5% reduction. Definitely significant.
I see two issues that are driving the false perception regarding homelessness.:
As you reduce the overall homeless population the significantly mentally ill and drug addicted make up a higher percentage of the homeless that remain.
The policies enacted have concentrated the homeless into fewer areas which makes it seem that their numbers are higher rather than lower.
And addiction is a large component of homelessness, but if you're still addicted you're obviously not going to spend much time in a place where you have to go cold turkey to enter.
So, my ( probably naive ) suggestion would be to allow drugs and alcohol in the shelters, hopefully giving the residents long enough of a chance to receive some help. No it's just a revolving door that doesn't appear to be helping anyone.
Universal basic income too. :-)
No, I really just think that people should stop overthinking problems like this. You don't need to go around asking everybody's life story to work out that homelessness is tightly coupled with rent prices. Fix one, you fix the other. Or, if you think that's too expensive or onerous, own it. Accept that you're basically OK with other people being homeless. Everything else is just crocodile tears.
My second question is, how exactly do you propose rent be lowered? Do you just think that rent is made up on the spot by evil rich white people, and we should have the government force them to charge less? The reason rent is so high in the first place is largely to do with government restrictions on new developments...Rent is also high here because there is a large concentration of high paying work in the area. Are these high earning people going to be allowed to benefit from your proposed arbitrary lowering of rent, so that we only disproportionately punish the wealthy landlords but not the wealthy tech workers? If not, how many tech workers would you like to displace to make room for homeless residents, and how do you determine which?
I feel foolish for not realizing how simple of a solution it was that you were proposing, but not all of us operate in the intellectual 4th dimension.
It seems to me something else is going on that pulls homeless people into San Francisco. But I readily admit I don’t understand it all very well.
On the individual level, I expect the reason why people stay is that being homeless makes you very dependent on local knowledge and social network. Knowing what bins contain food, where is good shelter, which police officers are dangerous, and so on - is very important. If you move city, you're not suddenly going to have the kind of money to pay a deposit. You'll just be homeless in a place you don't know. That, and a lot of homeless people have jobs.
You can understand quite a lot about this place if you really internalize that realization.
I think the root problem is that SF is carrying too much of the load for other places who won't take up the problem themselves. Every place is going to have some level of drug use or social problems. But it's not productive or responsible for everyone else to just dump it all on the SF taxpayers.
A lesser problem is the populace's unwillingness to hold the homeless to any reasonable standard of behavior. I'm sorry, I know the homeless have it hard, but there are certain global norms of civilized behavior I consider inviolate, like, don't defecate in public, or don't drop used syringes on the ground, where people will step on them. These things happen here every day and the political climate is such that it's taboo to ask for law enforcement to get involved.
it used to be that if a pile of drunks had a loud party outside my house at 3am, I could call the cops and they would send someone to break it up. or if someone started living outside by business, screaming at passersby and making a huge biohazard mess I could call them and they would move them along.
now they want to know how big the encampment is, if it gets big enough they will break it up after a few weeks. otherwise I get the feeling they just put you on a list of whiners to ignore. anyways - you stop calling.
even if the rent weren't so insane I would want to leave just because of the sheer misery involved for everyone.
I'm really thinking about leaving. Not, as perhaps the other 95% of people do, for economic reasons, but just because I'm tired of how dysfunctional SF is. We pay through the nose in taxes and get what, a disgusting, dirty city, with barely-functional transit, do-nothing law enforcement, totally unaffordable housing, and insane traffic. It really does get under your skin after a while.
I'm optimistic with London Breed that we'll finally get some tech/lawyer/finance/other working professional-driven emphasis on accountability and RESULTS from the city government. Less grandstanding and speeches, more numbers, data, better schools, functioning transit, and cleanliness.
Per the same link, SF spends very little money on homelessness. A lot of the so called homelessness money is actually subsidized housing money.
Most issues with the homeless represent a public health issue much more than a law enforcement issue.
Given they lack access to toilet facilities, are you imagining the homeless not pooping through sheer willpower?
Addiction is a form of mental illness, and that's not the only mental illness common among the homeless. Many suffer from other illnesses. Nobody wakes up wanting to be addicted, or schizophrenic, or whatever, whether they are homeless or otherwise.
What this city really needs is restrooms. Agree with you on that. Yes, people would do drugs in them, but it would certainly help with some of the smells.
When you make bad options illegal, you aren't magically giving anyone any better options.
There'd probably have to be shelters specific to users of a given substance who want to continue using.
At least then non-using homeless would be less likely to suffer from proximity to agitated drunk/high individuals.
And homeless recovering addicts wouldn't be living with actively using addicts.
Edit: you would literally have to pay me a million a year to even consider living there.
Some of my team went to a meeting in SF a few years back. They described "running the gauntlet" from the hotel to a Mexican restaurant in an area where the streets were full of homeless people. While none of them ran into direct trouble, they felt uncomfortable and unsafe, and were disgusted at the state of the place (human waste on the streets etc), "like a third-world country".
In subsequent years, when the company asked for volunteers to go, no one wanted to, and no one volunteered. A week long all-expenses-paid trip from the UK to SF is something which would previously have been considered a huge perk, but is now considered to be a dangerous punishment. I certainly had no desire to visit.