Honestly, it's getting so bad in the Bay Area, I'm having trouble seeing how this will end. Everywhere I walk in the East Bay (mostly Oakland), there are tents.
I am in favor of the notion but it seems like revoking Prop 13 and rezoning the area over the objections of NIMBYists is just as likely to occur and probably prudent whatever else happens.
Nimby should be fixed in the law. Value of your own property should be just your own concern. If whatever happens around it doesn't emit toxic substances or horrible smells or noises and doesn't lower insolation of your property below some minimum levels then you should have no saying in what happens not on your land.
It's truly amazing that an incredibly rich city full of companies trying to "change the world" chooses over and over again to not solve its homelessness problem. It requires no new technological developments, no moonshots, just an ounce of empathy and maybe some raised taxes. But that seems to be too hard.
The amount of resources going towards the homeless are ridiculously large. The net result is that favorable weather and resource availability draws more people in from other places, and the problem is too large for any individual locality to solve.
e.g. The City of San Francisco is spending over $300M/year directly on services towards easing homelessness. This does not count state expenditures focused in the area, private expenditures, expenditures by surrounding areas, and the wealth of indirect expenses. Versus a homeless population of 10,000, this is $30,000 per year per homeless person in the City of SF-- just direct expenses by City of SF.
Clearly an overall change in approach is needed-- not just additional resources spent the same way.
The key would be that all US cities/towns/villages take care of their homeless instead of busing them to California. I can see the financial incentive - a bus ticket is like, what, couple hundred tops across the country? while the police, healthcare and other resources in a single year can easily reach five to six figures - but morally it is absolutely disgusting behavior.
Ideally federal agencies should take care of this and make sure that every US citizen in need is taken care of where he lives.
At the very least we need to strictly regulate programs that bus homeless other places.
Yes, there are circumstances where throwing someone on a bus to a locality where he has some family or other connections is the best move for all involved. But we need to make sure that is actually the case, not based on some tenuous connection and a desire to displace the costly individual somewhere else.
This isn't enough, though. Even without explicit governmental support to move, homeless people know that there are localities where it's "better" to be homeless and will move themselves.
> At the very least we need to strictly regulate programs that bus homeless other places.
That is close to impossible, I'm afraid. And even if federal regulation prohibits the executive branch from such programs, I guarantee that it will be replaced by some "church", neighborhood watch, political action group or whatever...
The homeless problem in CA is not the responsibility of the rest of the country. You want to live in a temperate climate, well so does everyone else, especially the homeless. The magical economy of CA ought to be able to fix the problem.
Wikipedia tells me there are some 500,000 homeless in all of the United States. At $30,000 per year per homeless person, that would amount to $15 billion for all homeless in the US. Certainly a lot of money, but doable for an individual locality like California if people really wanted to do it. (So much that they'd accept a 10% increase of all taxes to make it happen.)
Of course spending the money more efficiently would be preferable, but additional resources spent the same way would also work.
> that would amount to $15 billion for all homeless in the US
We are already spending, as a nation, much more than this. We spend roughly $3B federally directly on homelessness (not including other programs aimed at poverty that provide assistance). California spends $1B. California localities spend $3B. New York City spends $3B alone.
These are just governmental expenditures, aimed directly at homelessness, and ignore charitable efforts.
Then I wonder how direct that spending really is. It doesn't seem to involve handing out money to homeless directly... Does it just end up in a general budget that's labeled "homeless", but actually gets used for all kinds of projects?
A lot of it used to be direct cash assistance to the homeless. This did not work well. The trend has been towards providing services.
One caveat with the analysis is that your census of homeless people does not count the people housed as a result of these programs. It also doesn't count the number of people that would have to be served that are not presently considered homeless.
What choice are they ignoring? These cities actually spend a lot on the homeless. The problem is that the better you make things for the homeless, the more you'll be an attractive place for homeless to come to.
This seems demonstrably untrue. If it were that easy it wouldn't be such a pervasive issue across every society. It is crazy to me to see SF of all places accused of being unwilling to raise taxes
But not everyone is willing or able to conform to the rules required for such housing. Further, people migrate to SF and join the homeless population faster than people are housed.
There's conditions required for any housing, including housing one owns.
I do not think the requirements that SF allows its housing partners to impose are excessive (don't destroy the housing; don't deal drugs from the housing; don't continually create noise/waste/smells that adversely impact your neighbors).
SF also requires that nuisance evictions be conducted with plenty of warning and efforts by landlords and caseworkers to cure.. e.g.
> Nuisance evictions should include numerous incident reports, tenant complaints, prompt writeups and a “last ditch” tenant conference meeting with notes or a signed agreement.
And said tenants are entitled to due process after these numerous writeups and conference meetings, and legal assistance.
The supply of housing is an important problem (for cost of living, equitable conditions for the poor, etc), but it's not clear how directly related it is to homelessness.
That is, if you lowered rents 50% through increased housing supply, it's not clear how many formerly homeless people will now be housed.
one of the many reasons local governments don't approve housing is that tax revenues from housing rapidly decay to 0 while services for the additional residents cost significantly more than 0
do you have any references for this? how does the tax revenue 'decay' to 0. Prop 13 doesn't reduce the tax over time but fixes it at a certain amount upon purchase (if the property is new) or transfer if it's sold.
All new houses and transferred properties are taxed at the value they were purchased.
No, I have no citations for the claim that inflation is sometimes above 2% or for the claim that the inflation rate for government services (which includes the cost of buying local housing for government employees) is sometimes above 2%. If either of these were true, the tax collected on a given property would increase in nominal terms but decay toward 0 in real terms.
Unrelatedly, Brisbane found that they could raise 9 times as much revenue and provide 0 times as much additional services to residents by approving hotels instead of housing. https://brianlui.dog/2018/08/01/housing-shortages/#_edn4
Most of the homeless people in the Bay Area are folks who had housing there a few years before and then fell on hard times (e.g. had a medical emergency, lost a job, ...) and couldn’t afford to continue paying for housing.
Fixing this requires bringing housing prices way down, which requires a ton of new housing built throughout the Bay Area. This is politically difficult because a substantial proportion of the people who live in suburbs full of single-family houses don’t want to have apartment buildings on the same street, and cities would rather have office buildings (which bring tax revenue but require few services) than housing (which brings less tax revenue and requires many services).
It would also help to fix the US health insurance system.
> Most of the homeless people in the Bay Area are folks who had housing there a few years before and then fell on hard times (e.g. had a medical emergency, lost a job, ...) and couldn’t afford to continue paying for housing.
These demographic numbers are often misleading. E.g. ~70% of people in San Francisco had some sort of housing in SF at some point before becoming homeless; but that number includes people who were housed through governmental programs or spent a short time on someone's couch, and a majority of this 70% had not been in San Francisco long term.
> This is politically difficult because a substantial proportion of the people who live in suburbs full of single-family houses don’t want to have apartment buildings on the same street, and cities would rather have office buildings (which bring tax revenue but require few services) than housing
It's especially difficult because when you look at true bedroom communities, they have very low sales tax revenues already, and property tax revenues are low in California, and the share given thereof to cities is small. Expecting these communities to absorb further high-service, low-tax burden is unrealistic.
The solution always is to just build more houses. That’s fine, but with that comes sewer treatment plants, power plants, water treatment (not that CA has water anyway) and digging up the existing infrastructure to expand it, etc. All that has to be funded with bonds that will have shitty ratings since there is no tax base to pay them off.
You can house all the homeless, and more will take their place on the streets.
The more money a city spends on homelessness, the more homeless people there are. If you were a homeless person, wouldn't you go to a city where there are more services for homeless? Panhandling for a bus ticket is no big thing for them.
I’ve volunteered at the encampments in West Oakland and it’s painfully sad to see. A lot of the homeless I met were 50+ years old and had lived in Oakland all their life. It was a stark contrast to the homeless in SF.
So solution is basically simple. Provide state sponsored flat monthly amount retirement money to all people over 50 and build a bunch of homes owned by the state and rent them exclusively to 50+ at the cost that can be comfortable covered out of retirement amount. It just needs money and that should be easy in richest large country on Earth.
Change your perspective if you want to help. Those aren't tents. Those are sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, mothers, and fathers with nowhere else to go, with drug and /or emotional problems. Those are soldiers who fought our oil wars and came home broken and abandoned.
Those aren't "tents", they're you if you made the wrong choice or had the wrong thing happen to you.
Brothers? Sisters? Mothers? Sons? Do their siblings, children not want to help them out so much that they end up homeless?
I bet most of the homeless have their normal social ties severed, and shame, guilt, hate and other such things keep them away from their former friends and relatives.
Also, I bet the great majority of them don't have a job, or another occupation, and lives on handouts and petty crime.
Overcoming this first is required to make these people feel like fathers, sisters, sons, etc again, and agree to come back into the society.
> Brothers? Sisters? Mothers? Sons? Do their siblings, children not want to help them out so much that they end up homeless?
Americans have this "rugged individualism" to our culture. I left my own home when I was still 15, most people at 17 or 18.
I live in Istanbul, and the first thing I noticed was the lack of homeless people in this city of 15-20million (depending on with whom you are talking). This is because Turks have a much stronger family structure, and most people live with their parents until they're married at the very least.
I'm from San Francisco and have known many of my friends to become homeless over the past 20 years through combinations of, as I stated before, substance abuse, trauma, and a lack of a strong family / social support structure.
My closest friend is a homeless violinist hippy in San Francisco (who just returned after 4 years in Istanbul). He keeps tents in 6 or 7 spots around the bay, most of them with breathtaking views. He just likes being homeless. (Brilliant guy. Oliver. He plays mostly in Bart, the Mission, and North Beach. Say hi in any language, he knows it)
I also know a lot of kids from my various music scenes who are homeless on purpose. The street punks, for example, find a stronger family structure drinking 40s on telegraph or the haight all day than they ever did in their own middle-class homes. (PS: Fuck the kids on haight. They're basically an aging street gang, I used to be in a band with one of them.)
> I live in Istanbul, and the first thing I noticed was the lack of homeless people in this city of 15-20million (depending on with whom you are talking). This is because Turks have a much stronger family structure, and most people live with their parents until they're married at the very least.
There's about 15,000 living in the streets of Istanbul, and about 150,000 living in the streets of Turkey according to NGOs.
150k per 80M compares to about 200k living unsheltered in the US (per 320M) or 550k homeless overall.
I haven't been able to locate these numbers, can you point me to them? Anecdotally, living here, there are very few homeless people in the street, not like my home in SF.
The people you do see on the street are Refugees (for whom there is available housing, whether they choose to take it or not, many of them are either on their way to Europe, or have been waylaid) and Romani.
The Roma are an unbelievably complicated problem globally which transcends the word "homeless".
What I don't see are people with heroin / meth / alcohol problems sleeping on the sidewalks / in the parks, or pooping on the street (at least I haven't the past 5 years). There was one old homeless guy in Izmir last year who asked me to buy him a durum, though.
You're not wrong, and maybe "hostile architecture" like this is cruel, but damn if I owned a business and I had homeless people setting up tents or loitering outside my door every night I'd probably find a way to stop it too. Spikes are a cheap and easy-to-deploy deterrent.
In a similar vein, I volunteer with a pigeon and dove rescue organization, and it's no secret that businesses install spikes on eaves and ledges to deter birds too. Although it always makes me sad to see them, I can understand and appreciate why they do it.
I have lived in LA, Austin, Honolulu, Cleveland, DC and now Portland, all with homeless of varying degrees. The more permissive we are for allowing the homeless to use what should be shared communal spaces for their personal use, the more they will. The people of Portland (were I live now) have a greater concern for the environment than any other city I have lived in, and yet there is trash everywhere, from the homeless. Recently here they have been building "boulders" near freeway off ramps, which is just a slightly more aesthetic variation of spikes. Frankly, when I see either I think, "good". I know this probably is not a popular opinion but we should not be going out of our way to make it comfortable to be homeless. Not if we care about these individuals and their future. Seattle is spending nearly $100 per homeless person. (This Thanksgiving I was in Seattle and the scenes I was seeing looked like Mad Max, but with more meth.) The resources are there. But for most it is frankly easier to be homeless than to tackle the difficult task of reestablishing a foothold in society. So please, by all means, install spike and boulders, take away stolen carts, and tear down encampments. Some times tough love is the only love.
Whether illegal immigration is a net gain for the American economy or not is such a complex subject that basing it off some anecdotal "homeless Mexicans" looking for manual labor post seems... ill-advised.
From the perspective of an employer the short-term gain of paying less for labor is attractive and a positive. For Americans who might be competing with "homeless Mexicans" it is likely a negative. And beyond these two simple perspectives lay more complex calculations of benefits and detriments.
Measuring the negatives against the positives requires far more data than a single anecdotal post about "homeless Mexicans." At least for me.
Instead of being homeless, now they’re wet, cold, and homeless? Brilliant.
Forcing the poor and homeless out of sight doesn’t fix anything. Criminalizing poverty doesn’t fix anything. If you’re so offended by poverty, perhaps do something useful to address the root causes?
I’ve lived in China, France, the UK, Canada, and the US.
I can tell you that having no free healthcare, no help for people who don’t seem to manage, and blaming mental illness seem to be causes for homelessness.
Think as homelessness of just a symptom of deeper issues. If you try to treat the symptoms you’re not going to get far.
In large part family. There is an expectation that family will take care of family members in need. Doesn’t always happen of course and some people don’t have close family.
The problem is that quite a number of the homeless would not, and cannot, return to the society. Some are addicted to alcohol. Many have mental issues.
While reintegration may help some of the homeless, most of them likely need a different approach if we want to somehow relieve their plight. Something more geared towards medical and psychiatric help.
Look at the statistics: the vast majority of homeless people are homeless because of simple economic problems like the loss of income or lack of affordable housing, and a minority have mental illnesses or addictions.
I hope someone shows you empathy when you're down on your luck.
Yours is an incredibly privileged, yet disturbingly common viewpoint, especially on HN. I am SO sorry that those stinky homeless people are ruining your neighborhood. That must be really hard for you. Shame on you.
As a teenager, I used to skateboard a decent amount. Sometimes businesses would put juts on rails, or little lips on things - stuff like that to keep kids from skating on their property.
It didn't stop us from skating, obviously; we just found somewhere else to skate. Often on the same property. More malicious peers of mine would do things like grind down the rail until it was smooth.
I think about that a lot when I hear about stories like this. We were just kids doing stuff for fun, not people fighting for survival.
As a Canadian it seems like there is a major difference in attitude towards the homeless. In the US it seems much more common to blame the individual, and talk about who deserves what. Ie blaming laziness, drug use etc. Where as in canada there is a more prevalent attitude of everyone should have some minimum living condition, regardless of the circumstances.
And yet Vancouver has a terrible problem with the homeless, who are as aggressive as any I've seen in the US. From what I can tell, they do have better services than most places in the US but that doesn't seem to have translated into a reduced homeless population or better behavior by the homeless. If you're a homeless person, Vancouver probably is a better place than most of the US, but for the average resident it doesn't seem like there is much of a difference.
From a quick google search Vancouver has a homeless population of under 3000. Seattle, which is close climate wise has 4 times at around 12,000 and San Francisco at around 8,000. Vancouver has a homelessness problem by Canadian standards but it’s many times better than west coast US cities.
So lower rate of homelessness plus better living conditions while being homeless seem like both good things.
I sympathize with the plight of the homeless and donate what I can to local Bay Area charities. But after volunteering with some river cleanup efforts I am appalled by the amount of litter that homeless people thoughtlessly dump in ecologically sensitive areas. And don't tell me they had no alternative: there were public garbage cans within easy walking distance.
Not to go into personal attacks but reading your comment history explains a lot. "I went to a pretty well regarded private high school in California."
You simply don't know what these people are going through. Kicking them out of your sight is not "tough love" and isn't solving anything. You seem very resentful.
> but for most it is frankly easier to be homeless than to tackle the difficult task of reestablishing a foothold in society.
Don't you think that your kind of attitude might be part of the problem? Every country has homelessness issues but not every country treat them like a pest.
It would be easy to dismiss your post as merely repugnant, and it certainly is. Essentially you're proposing a death march from one city location to another.
But the lack of logic you display is common when people discuss the homeless problem.
So I'll illustrate a productive way to discuss this.
Let's assume the following demographics about SF, which has a reported budget of over $300 million for 5,000 homeless (and rapidly growing as rents skyrocket) - that's $60,000/yr per homeless person:
- 50% of homeless are healthy but unemployed - we can fix this fairly easily. Provide a mailing address, missing id documents, cubicles for job interview calls, and databases of room rentals and employers. Have a help line to sort out kafkaeque procedural problems, like e-verify database problems.
This would be incredibly cost-effective for solving the current problem, but equally important for the coming tidal wave of even more homeless as rents continue to rise in 2020.
Some housing assistance would be needed, say 90 days, as well as acute medical assistance, but hey, $300 million - where's it being spent today?
- 50% of homeless are mentally ill - there is no short-term solution for those in psychosis, but we have data now on the effects of closing long-term care facilities and can revisit those policies. The milder cases can be helped to stabilize and integrate with society, but the rest need institutional care.
Decreasing from 5,000 people on the streets to 2,500 in SF is a huge win and would really improve the situation for everybody and allow resources to focus on the more difficulat cases.
Without an actionable plan, the alternative is Mad Max, which Market St. has already become.
'without an actionable plan, tWithout an actionable plan, the alternative is Mad Max, which Market St. has already become. he alternative is Mad Max, which Market St. has already become. '
Yeah let's make it more difficult for people to get back on their feet. While we're at it, let's not forget about arresting anyone who is an addict or has mental issues. We should expand that and arrest cancer patients and people with other maladies who went bankrupt and became homeless. Maybe we should torture them too. We could light a fire under their ass to get them moving back into society. Literally. All great ideas. I'm sure as long as we stay on this track we've been on for so many decades and do the exact same thing we've been doing, things will magically improve. That's logic for you. Hard to argue with that. /s
I find this quite interesting. Anti homeless spikes are a problem, but no-one can actually agree on the origin of the image.
Spikes are definitely hostile to users of space, but pretending we can just give them housing shows nothing but ignorance.
The Twitter user who posted this tweet, refuses to believe the origin (Daily mail) claiming the papers xenophobia is enough to discredit the possibility that this is in China, and not somewhere in the West.
It is this attitude that is most alarming, perhaps not unusual on twitter. Pro communist beliefs, splattered with justifications for the so called concentration camps purportedly in China is much more troubling than hostile architecture.
I believe anti-homeless architecture is appalling and Western culture of "the strong (rich) deserve more than others" is the root cause but good lord please go to China and talk to some people before you go repeating propaganda like that...
She is very far from socialist. She isn't in line with democrat ideologies either. Her policies don't matter, what matters is her history. She is a conservative masquerading as a democrat.
I don't have a magic solution but I would like to add few thoughts:
1. Homeless people destroy environment and don't practice sanitation on the same level (non homeless folks)
That imo is true and we shouldn't ignore it. But why? I have a few explanation depending on the place so it's not an apply all hammer, alcohol & drug abuse/mental illness are one of the reasons why there are homeless in big rich cities (combined with other) but wouldn't that cause itself will lead to people caring less about environment and things that don't directly affect them? When was the last time you were depressed and wanted to hole up in your bed doing nothing? Consider that and with not a good overall health condition, lacking empathy (of course why would they for the society that failed them), poverty mindset and resource constraints with no hope for a brighter future.
It's a self destructive mindset.
Oh to make it more suitable for HN in analogy, think of those anti homeless spikes as walled garden of the big companies. Imessage? Yeah, you can't connect with your friends anymore after you can't afford an iPhone.
Maybe you contributed to society in tax and other spheres and now you can't anymore, you don't deserve whatever crumbles are left there.
Of course I am exaggerating.
2. Throw money at them and it will go away.
I hope that worked, I really do but that doesn't solve any of the problems. US puts a lot of money more than countries with free healthcare (controlled for population but not size) yet people aren't getting it. The system is dysfunctional or benefits some people more than others due to lack of awareness, discrimination (advertising towards one gender or race is an example), collective empathy, and tendency to put pressure on your career/home/bank as an identity.
Maybe those homeless shelters are far away. I don't know but why blame anyone without any evidence or data on those things.
I think we can employee homeless people with the money spent on 'solving' the problem for cleaning and maintaining our environment. They get a job and maybe they can afford some housing now or make free housing structures for those employees.
CEOs who afaik are 100% not homeless destroy the environment to such an extent as to make what all the homeless in the US destroy seem insignificant and inconsequential. They too lack empathy and have a destructive mindset. I say we address this much more massive problem first and the homeless problem will likely be solved by our actions.
Yeah, carbon emission tax or other similar taxation can be used more effectively, I guess. Raising taxes for luxury that are not providing anything but a way to brag should be heavily taxed into oblivion.
I wish we could have something like pollution emission credit, the higher your credit. The more percentage of income/wealth you have to pay but that is unenforceable, actionable and will go against human rights to track.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 146 ms ] threade.g. The City of San Francisco is spending over $300M/year directly on services towards easing homelessness. This does not count state expenditures focused in the area, private expenditures, expenditures by surrounding areas, and the wealth of indirect expenses. Versus a homeless population of 10,000, this is $30,000 per year per homeless person in the City of SF-- just direct expenses by City of SF.
Clearly an overall change in approach is needed-- not just additional resources spent the same way.
Ideally federal agencies should take care of this and make sure that every US citizen in need is taken care of where he lives.
Yes, there are circumstances where throwing someone on a bus to a locality where he has some family or other connections is the best move for all involved. But we need to make sure that is actually the case, not based on some tenuous connection and a desire to displace the costly individual somewhere else.
This isn't enough, though. Even without explicit governmental support to move, homeless people know that there are localities where it's "better" to be homeless and will move themselves.
That is close to impossible, I'm afraid. And even if federal regulation prohibits the executive branch from such programs, I guarantee that it will be replaced by some "church", neighborhood watch, political action group or whatever...
Of course spending the money more efficiently would be preferable, but additional resources spent the same way would also work.
We are already spending, as a nation, much more than this. We spend roughly $3B federally directly on homelessness (not including other programs aimed at poverty that provide assistance). California spends $1B. California localities spend $3B. New York City spends $3B alone.
These are just governmental expenditures, aimed directly at homelessness, and ignore charitable efforts.
One caveat with the analysis is that your census of homeless people does not count the people housed as a result of these programs. It also doesn't count the number of people that would have to be served that are not presently considered homeless.
But not everyone is willing or able to conform to the rules required for such housing. Further, people migrate to SF and join the homeless population faster than people are housed.
There's conditions required for any housing, including housing one owns.
I do not think the requirements that SF allows its housing partners to impose are excessive (don't destroy the housing; don't deal drugs from the housing; don't continually create noise/waste/smells that adversely impact your neighbors).
SF also requires that nuisance evictions be conducted with plenty of warning and efforts by landlords and caseworkers to cure.. e.g.
> Nuisance evictions should include numerous incident reports, tenant complaints, prompt writeups and a “last ditch” tenant conference meeting with notes or a signed agreement.
And said tenants are entitled to due process after these numerous writeups and conference meetings, and legal assistance.
That is, if you lowered rents 50% through increased housing supply, it's not clear how many formerly homeless people will now be housed.
All new houses and transferred properties are taxed at the value they were purchased.
Unrelatedly, Brisbane found that they could raise 9 times as much revenue and provide 0 times as much additional services to residents by approving hotels instead of housing. https://brianlui.dog/2018/08/01/housing-shortages/#_edn4
Fixing this requires bringing housing prices way down, which requires a ton of new housing built throughout the Bay Area. This is politically difficult because a substantial proportion of the people who live in suburbs full of single-family houses don’t want to have apartment buildings on the same street, and cities would rather have office buildings (which bring tax revenue but require few services) than housing (which brings less tax revenue and requires many services).
It would also help to fix the US health insurance system.
These demographic numbers are often misleading. E.g. ~70% of people in San Francisco had some sort of housing in SF at some point before becoming homeless; but that number includes people who were housed through governmental programs or spent a short time on someone's couch, and a majority of this 70% had not been in San Francisco long term.
> This is politically difficult because a substantial proportion of the people who live in suburbs full of single-family houses don’t want to have apartment buildings on the same street, and cities would rather have office buildings (which bring tax revenue but require few services) than housing
It's especially difficult because when you look at true bedroom communities, they have very low sales tax revenues already, and property tax revenues are low in California, and the share given thereof to cities is small. Expecting these communities to absorb further high-service, low-tax burden is unrealistic.
You can house all the homeless, and more will take their place on the streets.
Those aren't "tents", they're you if you made the wrong choice or had the wrong thing happen to you.
I bet most of the homeless have their normal social ties severed, and shame, guilt, hate and other such things keep them away from their former friends and relatives.
Also, I bet the great majority of them don't have a job, or another occupation, and lives on handouts and petty crime.
Overcoming this first is required to make these people feel like fathers, sisters, sons, etc again, and agree to come back into the society.
Americans have this "rugged individualism" to our culture. I left my own home when I was still 15, most people at 17 or 18.
I live in Istanbul, and the first thing I noticed was the lack of homeless people in this city of 15-20million (depending on with whom you are talking). This is because Turks have a much stronger family structure, and most people live with their parents until they're married at the very least.
I'm from San Francisco and have known many of my friends to become homeless over the past 20 years through combinations of, as I stated before, substance abuse, trauma, and a lack of a strong family / social support structure.
My closest friend is a homeless violinist hippy in San Francisco (who just returned after 4 years in Istanbul). He keeps tents in 6 or 7 spots around the bay, most of them with breathtaking views. He just likes being homeless. (Brilliant guy. Oliver. He plays mostly in Bart, the Mission, and North Beach. Say hi in any language, he knows it)
I also know a lot of kids from my various music scenes who are homeless on purpose. The street punks, for example, find a stronger family structure drinking 40s on telegraph or the haight all day than they ever did in their own middle-class homes. (PS: Fuck the kids on haight. They're basically an aging street gang, I used to be in a band with one of them.)
There's about 15,000 living in the streets of Istanbul, and about 150,000 living in the streets of Turkey according to NGOs.
150k per 80M compares to about 200k living unsheltered in the US (per 320M) or 550k homeless overall.
The people you do see on the street are Refugees (for whom there is available housing, whether they choose to take it or not, many of them are either on their way to Europe, or have been waylaid) and Romani.
The Roma are an unbelievably complicated problem globally which transcends the word "homeless".
What I don't see are people with heroin / meth / alcohol problems sleeping on the sidewalks / in the parks, or pooping on the street (at least I haven't the past 5 years). There was one old homeless guy in Izmir last year who asked me to buy him a durum, though.
In a similar vein, I volunteer with a pigeon and dove rescue organization, and it's no secret that businesses install spikes on eaves and ledges to deter birds too. Although it always makes me sad to see them, I can understand and appreciate why they do it.
So, you're more concerned about the welfare of birds than you are about people?
Furthermore, that attitude drives people away from philanthropic work by alienating them about what image their proposed good deed generates.
Just do good, any way you find.
From the perspective of an employer the short-term gain of paying less for labor is attractive and a positive. For Americans who might be competing with "homeless Mexicans" it is likely a negative. And beyond these two simple perspectives lay more complex calculations of benefits and detriments.
Measuring the negatives against the positives requires far more data than a single anecdotal post about "homeless Mexicans." At least for me.
Forcing the poor and homeless out of sight doesn’t fix anything. Criminalizing poverty doesn’t fix anything. If you’re so offended by poverty, perhaps do something useful to address the root causes?
I can tell you that having no free healthcare, no help for people who don’t seem to manage, and blaming mental illness seem to be causes for homelessness.
Think as homelessness of just a symptom of deeper issues. If you try to treat the symptoms you’re not going to get far.
While reintegration may help some of the homeless, most of them likely need a different approach if we want to somehow relieve their plight. Something more geared towards medical and psychiatric help.
Yours is an incredibly privileged, yet disturbingly common viewpoint, especially on HN. I am SO sorry that those stinky homeless people are ruining your neighborhood. That must be really hard for you. Shame on you.
It didn't stop us from skating, obviously; we just found somewhere else to skate. Often on the same property. More malicious peers of mine would do things like grind down the rail until it was smooth.
I think about that a lot when I hear about stories like this. We were just kids doing stuff for fun, not people fighting for survival.
Building such spikes etc. means going out of one's way to make it uncomfortable for everyone, just so it may be uncomfortable for the homeless, too.
Not building these spikes isn't "going out of one's way", it's the default.
So maybe it’s more of a social problem then the fault of individuals. And maybe it would make more sense to fight the root causes then the symptoms.
1) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/227691245_Homelessn...
So lower rate of homelessness plus better living conditions while being homeless seem like both good things.
1. "Trash" marks a spot where you intend to return. This can help ensure that you have a regular place to sleep.
2. What appears to be trash might have some value to the hoarder, e.g., trashy but wearable clothing, recyclables, etc.
3. Litter can camouflage minor valuables, so you can accomplish #1 and also have a hiding place for stuff people might steal.
4. Given all of the above, trash naturally gathers in a homeless community and eventually gets dumped however is most practical.
> but for most it is frankly easier to be homeless than to tackle the difficult task of reestablishing a foothold in society.
Don't you think that your kind of attitude might be part of the problem? Every country has homelessness issues but not every country treat them like a pest.
It would be easy to dismiss your post as merely repugnant, and it certainly is. Essentially you're proposing a death march from one city location to another.
But the lack of logic you display is common when people discuss the homeless problem.
So I'll illustrate a productive way to discuss this.
Let's assume the following demographics about SF, which has a reported budget of over $300 million for 5,000 homeless (and rapidly growing as rents skyrocket) - that's $60,000/yr per homeless person:
- 50% of homeless are healthy but unemployed - we can fix this fairly easily. Provide a mailing address, missing id documents, cubicles for job interview calls, and databases of room rentals and employers. Have a help line to sort out kafkaeque procedural problems, like e-verify database problems.
https://www.e-verify.gov/
This would be incredibly cost-effective for solving the current problem, but equally important for the coming tidal wave of even more homeless as rents continue to rise in 2020.
Some housing assistance would be needed, say 90 days, as well as acute medical assistance, but hey, $300 million - where's it being spent today?
- 50% of homeless are mentally ill - there is no short-term solution for those in psychosis, but we have data now on the effects of closing long-term care facilities and can revisit those policies. The milder cases can be helped to stabilize and integrate with society, but the rest need institutional care.
Decreasing from 5,000 people on the streets to 2,500 in SF is a huge win and would really improve the situation for everybody and allow resources to focus on the more difficulat cases.
Without an actionable plan, the alternative is Mad Max, which Market St. has already become.
thats called catastrophism.
Spikes are definitely hostile to users of space, but pretending we can just give them housing shows nothing but ignorance.
The Twitter user who posted this tweet, refuses to believe the origin (Daily mail) claiming the papers xenophobia is enough to discredit the possibility that this is in China, and not somewhere in the West.
It is this attitude that is most alarming, perhaps not unusual on twitter. Pro communist beliefs, splattered with justifications for the so called concentration camps purportedly in China is much more troubling than hostile architecture.
Some related sites:
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/unpleasant-design-hos...
https://99percentinvisible.org/article/design-crimes-artist-...
Aaaaaaa!
I believe anti-homeless architecture is appalling and Western culture of "the strong (rich) deserve more than others" is the root cause but good lord please go to China and talk to some people before you go repeating propaganda like that...
For example: https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/13/politics/kfile-tulsi-gabbard-...
[citation needed]
two, actually.
one regarding the Western origins of 'the strong (rich)', and one regarding poverty being caused by 'the strong (rich)'
I think both claims are overly ambitious. These problems largely pre-date mass civilization, not to mention 'the east and west'.
1. Homeless people destroy environment and don't practice sanitation on the same level (non homeless folks) That imo is true and we shouldn't ignore it. But why? I have a few explanation depending on the place so it's not an apply all hammer, alcohol & drug abuse/mental illness are one of the reasons why there are homeless in big rich cities (combined with other) but wouldn't that cause itself will lead to people caring less about environment and things that don't directly affect them? When was the last time you were depressed and wanted to hole up in your bed doing nothing? Consider that and with not a good overall health condition, lacking empathy (of course why would they for the society that failed them), poverty mindset and resource constraints with no hope for a brighter future. It's a self destructive mindset.
Oh to make it more suitable for HN in analogy, think of those anti homeless spikes as walled garden of the big companies. Imessage? Yeah, you can't connect with your friends anymore after you can't afford an iPhone. Maybe you contributed to society in tax and other spheres and now you can't anymore, you don't deserve whatever crumbles are left there.
Of course I am exaggerating.
2. Throw money at them and it will go away. I hope that worked, I really do but that doesn't solve any of the problems. US puts a lot of money more than countries with free healthcare (controlled for population but not size) yet people aren't getting it. The system is dysfunctional or benefits some people more than others due to lack of awareness, discrimination (advertising towards one gender or race is an example), collective empathy, and tendency to put pressure on your career/home/bank as an identity.
Maybe those homeless shelters are far away. I don't know but why blame anyone without any evidence or data on those things.
I wish we could have something like pollution emission credit, the higher your credit. The more percentage of income/wealth you have to pay but that is unenforceable, actionable and will go against human rights to track.
https://sciencedemonstrations.fas.harvard.edu/presentations/...