I normally understand "alarmist" to imply "unjustified/exaggerated", whereas I don't think simply calling this situation a "nightmare" falls into that category. I would call it click-bait, since it does nothing to communicate the topic, though I probably wouldn't even bother leveling that criticism out loud in a case where I feel like the gravity of the topic overshadows it and the topic is handled well in the body of the article.
This may be anecdotal, but the homeless situation + shelter-in-place combination IS a nightmare. I live it every day and I cannot describe it any other way. I didn't mind it when I spent 14 hours a day out of the house working, but I am now living, breathing, and hearing it 24 hours a day and it is a nightmare. And it's not just that they are homeless, it's all the criminal activity that radiates from the encampments right below my window.
That is correct. Writers will usually write one (or may use one an editor provided when they gave the assignment), but typically an editor will decide on the final headline/subhead/etc.
Stuffing as many homeless as possible in close quarters at Moscone gives the impression San Francisco is hellbent on killing off its homeless population using COVID-19.
There's an entire legal process for solving the fact that a city owns too little property: they can simply buy it with eminent domain, and that is precisely what they should be doing. They can ED single-family homes, rezone the properties for multifamily dwellings, and either auction them off or build on them through the housing authority. Everyone would win: the city could clear out lots of under-assessed junk, people who need housing wil get more supply, and even the owners who get bought out in the ED proceeding will get a huge paycheck, and the city needs no additional powers nor deliberations to do this, they can simply decide to do it at an ordinary supervisors' meeting. That they have chosen not to exercise such powers for the last 40-plus years tells you everything you need to know about why this problem persists.
Eminent domain is much too slow to address the current crisis. What they're trying to do is get hotel rooms, but they can only source and staff them so quickly.
Sorry, yeah, I thought we were talking about the coronavirus. I agree it's bizarre that SF is so unwilling to address its general homeless crisis except by nonstrategically throwing money at it.
At market rates. That's expensive. $1M per lot expensive.
> rezone the properties for multifamily dwellings and either auction them off...
Expect those single-family homeowners to sue because the land as clearly worth more than the city paid, they just gamed the system.
> the city could clear out lots of under-assessed junk
The taxes were too low, the buildings are often junk, but the assessments are correct.
> even the owners who get bought out in the ED proceeding will get a huge paycheck
Again, the paycheck is too low unless you making the zoning change before a new appraisal. ED isn't really needed for this; you just need to rezone areas and actually allow building, but SF does neither.
Your reply also had ~nothing to do with property to house the homeless in the short-term. This is how you build housing projects.
> They can ED single-family homes, rezone the properties for multifamily dwellings
On track, but the process you describe is overcomplicated. The whole process can be collapsed to "SF needs to upzone most of the city".
Land zoned for multifamily dwellings is worth a lot more than land zoned for single family dwellings, so the owners would have reasonable grounds to sue if the city used eminent domain to seize their property under single family zoning with plans to upzone to multifamily zoning. They would probably win and be entitled to fair compensation for assessed value as of the later zoning. So if the city were going to pursue this route it would need the upzoning first, which the city has always been able to do and has refused to do anyway.
Yes but a neat workaround is to simply ED the properties of all the people who have been lobbying against the upzoning since ~always. They demonstrably were not in line to gain from the zoning change, since they personally prevent it.
If you use previous political views as an input into the eminent domain decision I am pretty sure the courts are going to give you a hard time (justifiably so).
It's actually settled case law in California that you can declare a neighborhood a "slum" and subject it to "urban renewal" based, in part, on a high concentration of "communists". Yes that is bananas, but there you go.
How would that help? If I were fighting city hall about upzoning and they went and upzoned my property anyway, I'd likely sell my newly increased value property to someone else (or have it be ED'd at a higher compensation) and then move somewhere that still has single-family zoning. Whether one has been fighting upzoning or not, they are still entitled to the higher value.
I disagree that the city is hellbent on killing off its homeless population. If anything, the city is hellbent on improving conditions for them. The city has allowed encampments to remain untouched in many places around the city since the shelter-in-place started. They have even brought bathroom facilities to their encampments so that they stay in place. These bathroom facilities are supervised and cleaned by an attendant 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Again, I don't know why people think the city of San Francisco wants to kill their homeless population. Their policies favor the homeless population over the safety of families that live in neighborhoods other than the Marina, Pacific Heights, and North Beach.
SF politics are extremely partisan, such that they get in the way of actually accomplishing anything. The factions are the (IMHO very poorly named) Moderates and Progressives. Once you've been identified as being on one side, even if you share common goals it's unlikely that there will be any collaboration, and very likely there will be extreme antagonism wherever possible. Political point scoring and blame games have superseded the goals that people say they support.
EDIT: ignore this comment, the reasoning is wrong, see below.
> San Francisco officially reported 8,640 homeless residents in 2002—a peak—and almost as many in 2019 ... San Francisco spends more per capita on homelessness solutions than nearly any other U.S. city—three hundred and thirty million dollars a year.
330000000 / 8640 = 38194
> the median monthly rent for a one-bedroom in the city is now, by one estimate, about thirty-five hundred dollars
3500 * 12 = 42000
These numbers are surprisingly close. Moreover, 1) you need one apartment per family not per person 2) you can pay below median if you buy in bulk and aren't very picky 3) many homeless have jobs.
I suppose that money isn't spent only on housing but on social workers salaries, vaccination campaign, STD prevention campaign, food distribution, etc., right ?
Serious question. Why don't homeless people in SF and NYC go look for work in cheaper cities across America? It seems like these people with degrees and work experience can find work elsewhere and affordable housing, so I don't understand why they would continue to live in the most expensive cities in the world... I'm not American, so maybe I'm missing something.
The bit the piece touched on was that the couple it followed came to SF because it has a support system for drug addicts and the homeless. What it didn't say is that any local solution will just improve the conditions in SF, attracting more homeless and drug addicts.
SF and NYC would be better off finding those cheaper cities that need workers and showing them how to run services for the homeless. They might also want to connect the marginally homeless with these cities early.
That said, I doubt there's much work for the SF homeless. Between addiction and mental health problems, most aren't employable.
This is not a significant source of homeless people in SF. The vast majority have been living in the area, just struggling to get by. There are so many people that are one financial crisis (eg car repair) away from being evicted. It's no surprise that 1% of the population is homeless in a city where rents are not covered by entry level jobs, and where cheap rental options like SROs are being eliminated.
It’s not true. Many homeless are coached to respond to surveys (like the annual point in time count) with a claim that they’re long time locals, since it garners more political sympathy and support. But if you talk to homeless in SF or Seattle or view news clips interviewing people in camps, it seems the majority have moved in from elsewhere due to laws that permit permanent nomadic lifestyles and open drug abuse. It is just “induced demand” in action. Incentives and disincentives have effects on behaviors.
The only statistics that should be trusted are ones that have verifiable records proving the historical residency of homeless populations. Everything else is easily manipulable and not trustworthy.
> It’s not true. Many homeless are coached to respond to surveys (like the annual point in time count) with a claim that they’re long time locals, since it garners more political sympathy and support.
This is at the very best a conspiracy theory. Poll takers intentionally trying to get the wrong answers to garner political support? And what has that supposed conspiracy garnered, politically? Who gains in this conspiracy and how?
Such claims require at least some substantiation. Is there anybody who is willing to put their real name out there that has observed this?
My personal experience, in Santa Cruz, does not match what you claim. There was a recent vicious attack by a homeless person, and the police found the attacker hiding in his mother's house in town.
> And what has that supposed conspiracy garnered, politically? Who gains in this conspiracy and how?
At least where I live, I've heard a lot of conspiracy theories, many now openly discussed and not just in whispers, of a "homeless-industrial complex" where people are supposedly making bank on faux solutions to homelessness and non-profit providers are just funneling money off to the wealthy people who run the non-profits and leaving clients and volunteers hung out to dry.
As an occasional volunteer for some of those groups, I do not see this. Granted, I may not be anywhere as involved in Deep Homelessness as I might need to be in order to pull back the veil and expose the bitter truth. From my point of view, I see a shitload of people who have been dealt a terrible hand. a lot of them were people who were doing just fine before, maybe not great but were getting by and then a life event happened that, sure, from our perspectives on HN of most of us making in the low six figures to start, would have seen coming and could have planned for. But, for whatever reason, these people didn't and damn, once you fall out of "normal society," climbing back in is hard. as. fuck.
One person I helped was technically literate--we set up Yubikey auth for his Google account, for goodness sake--and had no vices besides posting up at the library to play Clash of Clans on his aging Android phone. But it still took an inordinate amount of time to get together all of the identity and proofing documents he needed to get an ID to go onto a military base to take a specialty job. In one case, he only got one of the documents because he knew a notary (me) and could have a form sworn to and stamped in under a day at no cost.
I don't think people truly appreciate just how fragile modern life is if they've never fallen out of it.
But the point is that you don't see this. SF has a $364 million dollar homeless budget, double what it was a decade ago, so the programs you volunteer for should be swimming in cash to provide their services and make sure the homeless have opportunities. If they're not, then where'd all the money go?
No, not quite. The 'point in time' count of 8,000-9,000 people is a measurement of flux; people enter homelessness and leave it all the time. A huge chunk (most?) of SF's spending goes to emergency assistance to prevent people from falling into homelessness when they have a financial emergency, which is by far the cheapest time to stop homelessness.
> And what has that supposed conspiracy garnered, politically?
That has garnered budgets in the hundreds of millions a year in several cities as well as allowance to have permanent camps, open drug abuse, littering, and environmental damage. That is, it has got them protection from the laws everyone else (such as law abiding taxpayers) are subject to.
As for substantiation - many people have had the anecdotal experience of running into homeless and discovering that they moved to SF, Portland, or Seattle with no plan and no means to support themselves. When the claimed data consistently disagrees with anecdotal experience, it points to something wrong with the process. I’m not the only one to speculate they are being coached.
In Seattle for example, they are organized enough to attend every relevant city council meeting and shout down any opposing views to expanding funding for various organizations that supposedly provide services to the homeless but have largely achieved nothing except spreading blight across the city. These organizations and their staff is what people refer to as the homeless-industrial complex. Their entire careers and livelihoods are based on drawing salaries from this process.
Obvious I don’t have strong evidence of such coaching (like on a video tape). But it is unreasonable to expect that I would, and it doesn’t invalidate my perspective. Clearly having no strong verification of identity is a major gap in these surveys. There is no reason for anyone to take that data at face value. We should assume everyone is not a long time local resident unless they can prove otherwise. Right now, taxpayers are being fleeced and are subsidizing the nomadic lifestyles of these populations in many cities.
I'm hesitant to comment on a city that I'm not familiar with, but if what the article is saying is true -- if there are people who are already working and they're still homeless -- then that is concretely a problem with housing costs and wages.
> Finding a job, as a classroom aide for special-needs students, was easy. But she struggled to find an affordable apartment. When I met D., her days began at 6 A.M., on a mat on a shelter floor. She dropped her son off at fifth grade, then went to her classroom to teach.
I just don't see a way to blame a story like that on "we attract more homeless people than other cities." The problem is your houses cost too much. Whatever the policy solution for that ends up being -- building more apartments and reforming zoning laws, or de-gentrifying neighborhoods, or rent control, or minimum wage increases, or whatever economic theories people come up with -- the individual strategy doesn't change the core problem.
The core problem is that if teaching assistants can't afford apartments, the economic math is never going to work out for SF. You are always going to have a high population of homeless people if low-income essential workers can't afford a place to live. No other fix is ever going to change that.
> D., the special-needs instructor, also college-educated and fully employed, told me, “Someone housed today, unless they’re making eighty thousand dollars a year, could be homeless tomorrow. That’s the bottom line.”
Again, I'm an outside observer here, I don't know what I'm talking about. But as an outside observer, that quote doesn't sound to me like "our social services are too good, so we get too many freeloaders." It sounds like, "we #$%!@ed up our economy and we don't know how to fix it."
The main problem seemed to be that the rich there demand that the homeless be housed, but they're unwilling to have low-cost, high-density dwellings in "their neighborhood" because that might lower their property value. The net result is as you see, programs upon programs "for the homeless". Ever increasing taxes. But no affordable housing anywhere, because no one is willing to allow a vote for it to be built.
:) In related news, Nintendo Switch scalpers really do want everybody to be able to get a Switch, just as long as increasing production doesn't affect any of the prices they can charge in Ebay auctions.
> SF and NYC would be better off finding those cheaper cities that need workers and showing them how to run services for the homeless.
Politically, this is almost impossible to do. When programs have provided funding to help people move to areas where they have support from friends or family, or to match up with jobs they could do but can't get to, the outcry is near-universal: "You're shoving your problems off onto the rest of the country! We don't want your cast-offs!" For good measure, they'll throw in using "liberal" or "freeloader" or "welfare" as an expletive.
The reverse--providing transportation to cities like San Francisco or Portland or Seattle, where the local community has decided to provide more services--is seen as far less politically unpopular, though doesn't happen very often but when it does, is seen as a good thing by the sending communities. "Well, they have the money to deal with it; we don't." "They like being 'Freeattle' so let them." As if there is some political motivation to being good humans to other humans.
Of course it's not anywhere near as stark contrast as my words seem like they imply; there's a whole lot of nuance and general bickering about what should/could/can be done. But if trying to be an advocate for housing and helping people out of these kinds of situations has taught me anything, people can be extremely petty about outcomes that seem like someone "undeserving" is "getting something" for "free."
The vast majority of the homeless are not such because the rent went up just above what they could previously afford but because they're unemployable and no one will rent a place to them usually due to a comibnation of substance abuse and mental illness, so they panhandle or do odd jobs and need to be in a place where there is a strong foot traffic of relatively well-off people and a thriving street economy, between those cities SF and NYC fit the bill the most and also have the most homeless-friendly laws and also most shelters, charities etc.
Yeah, people who become homeless aren't a homogeneous group. I was homeless for about ~4.5 years back in the late 90's.
In my experience from that time, mostly spent around Seattle, that roughly 2/3's of the people you see on the streets have some kind of physical, mental or emotional problems that prevent them from navigating modern civilization.
(As an aside I don't think most folks in it have a good idea just how challenging modern society can be. The street is sort of like a time machine in that living there is like going back in time two or three centuries. There are a lot of inconveniences but life is fundamentally simpler if all you have to worry about each day is that day's food and a place to crash that night. That's why I support a safety net. Not welfare in the sense of ongoing payments forever but a way to catch and support people when they stumble, to help them back to a normal life. Related to that, there's a guy who has sat in front of University district Safeway for twenty years selling "Street Sheet". To me selling Streetsheet isn't meant to be a lifetime job. If dude had put a dollar a day in a saving account with compound interest he would be ready to retire soon. That's the kind of thing I mean about helping people use civilization's API.)
Of the remaining 1/3 or so you have a mix of e.g. punk rock anti-society types, hippies, nomads, runaway kids(!), and drifters. In other words, folks who either want to be there or have no better option.
There are very few people who have their act together and live on the street because it's actually pretty easy to get off the street if you have a good attitude and are willing to work.
The answer to the OP's question is simply that people who can move to another city and get a job do that and so aren't homeless anymore.
The vast majority of homeless in NYC and SF are homeless for economic reasons, like insufficient income, lack of affordable housing or the loss of income.
The studies I'm thinking of explicitly measure homelessness due to relationship issues and divorce, violence, mental illness and drug addiction, as well as economic issues. Over the last 15 years, people, and specifically families, have become homeless increasingly because of economic issues.
At least on the coast in California, the climate is much milder than anywhere else in the USA, and it's easier to have enough clothes for the cold (for the area) spells even when rough sleeping in a cardboard box or your vehicle. I live 50 miles south of San Francisco and do not have air conditioning or use the heater in the winter - most places I have visited or lived in the central USA require both to make it liveable in a house.
A lot of low income people in NYC are immigrants; for many groups of immigrants, NYC is one of if not the largest concentration of their ethnic group in the country. Being around people from your homeland gives you familiarity and comfort, access to cultural items that may not be readily available elsewhere, and a social support network. One example of this is that New York's Chinatown has developed a completely independent farm network to grow Asian vegetables that are not available normally: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7591/j.ctt20d89sd
An immigrant leaving New York for a cheaper COL metro is leaving all this behind for the great unknown.
One other important factor is that in New York City it is very easy to live without a car. For poor people, a car is easily an expense just as large as housing. New York City has housing cost of $1.6K a month but transportation cost of $6k a year [0]; St Louis has housing cost of $960 a month but transportation cost of $11k a year.[1]
LGBTQ individuals are at an inordinately high risk of homelessness. Big cities tend to be more LGBTQ friendly. San Francisco is quite famous for being LGBTQ friendly.
Big cities also tend to be where you find sufficient soup kitchens and the like to not starve to death if you have absolutely nothing. Not all homeless have absolutely nothing. Many have some kind of an income, it's just not enough to support a middle class life (or even a lower class life that includes housing). But it can still be helpful to be in a big city where not everyone will know you and there are resources, etc.
There are substantial challenges to traveling while homeless. You may lack ID and this is a barrier to buying tickets on long distance travel options like buses or trains. You certainly lack money and bus tickets cost money. Many routes in the US are de facto closed to foot traffic. If you have no car, no driver's license, no money for tickets or no ID, going anywhere else is hugely challenging.
Most people who are homeless are disabled in some manner. They have health issues or they are mentally ill or they are ADHD, etc. This makes getting any kind of job hard. It can make just getting through the day hard.
I walked and caught rides while homeless and traveled from Georgia to California. Previous comment by me about some of the challenges of trying to walk anywhere in the US:
I run several blogs about homelessness or related resources aimed at trying to help the homeless survive and get their lives back. You should be able to find all of them via Street Life Solutions (linked above).
Because once you move you lose residency. Since access to public services and support are tied to residency you won't qualify for anything. The other thing is most homeless have some social support networks. Once they more they lose that too.
Imagine you have nothing and must depend on services and resources of others to get along. You start with nothing, how are you going to make the journey? You get there, you have not created the relationships that keep you fed daily.
I don't know if you've never faced homelessness, but it gets worse the longer you're homeless in many ways. There are no creative solutions from outsiders that wouldn't occur to the homeless, just resources the haves will not share with the have-nots. Homeless people don't need ideas, they need free money, liberty, and agency. All of which aren't offered at the tip of the tongue, but with the offering of funding.
> The mayor opposed the idea, but it gained support from local powers such as Benioff and Pelosi, and passed as Proposition C. The tax has raised three hundred million dollars annually. But, for now, that money remains unavailable, ensnared in legal challenges from the business world.
> In San Francisco today, people who earn less than [$82,000] a year—or a [$117,000] for a family of four—are considered low-income.
Most people outside of San Francisco would consider that a lot of money. Would a barista working at a Starbucks in the city ever earn that much? What about a public school teacher or cleaning staff? Essential services that need to be filled are worked by people who need to live somewhere.
The rest of us in areas not controlled by the Democrat party do not think of this as an American Nightmare. Awful and terrible, yes, but a single party has been in control of these areas for a long time.
Of course I'm sympathetic to the plight of the homeless, and I think it's outrageous that SF isn't building more housing as as fast as possible to try to bring the prices down.
However, there's a dilemma where cities that have the best services (and climate) for people who are happy camping anywhere will attract folks who come there just to be homeless, like the subject of this story.
> He made money by hunting exotic minerals and rocks.
Did he? Or was he stealing exotic minerals and rocks from the National Parks in 48 states he camped at? (See https://www.nps.gov/subjects/geology/permits.htm#CP_JUMP_547... ) Shame on the New Yorker fact-checkers for not confirming where he got those minerals.
> SF isn't building more housing as as fast as possible to try to bring the prices down.
If every construction company and contractor in the entire state of CA came to SF and started building apartment buildings as fast as they could, they would still only add enough capacity to prevent rates rising, at best.
No human agency can actually bring the prices down.
He collects and analyzes historical data going back to 1948.
Punchline: "Today's outrageous prices are exactly in line with the 6.6% trend that began 60 years ago."
Rent in the Bay Area has gone up 6.6% per year for sixty years.
> In conclusion
> San Francisco is an expensive city because it is an affluent city with a growing population and no easily available land for development. Sonja Trauss is right that building more housing would reduce rents of both high- and low-end apartments. Tim Redmond is right that building enough housing to make much of a dent in prices would change the visual character of most streets, although the result could be more like Barcelona than like the Hong Kong that he fears. The unsettled question is which of these is the higher priority.
> Building enough housing to roll back prices to the "good old days" is probably not realistic, because the necessary construction rates were never achieved even when planning and zoning were considerably less restrictive than they are now. Building enough to compensate for the growing economy is a somewhat more realistic goal and would keep things from getting worse.
> In the long run, San Francisco's CPI-adjusted average income is growing by 1.72% per year, and the number of employed people is growing by 0.326% per year, which together (if you believe the first model) will raise CPI-adjusted housing costs by 3.8% per year. Therefore, if price stability is the goal, the city and its citizens should try to increase the housing supply by an average of 1.5% per year (which is about 3.75 times the general rate since 1975, and with the current inventory would mean 5700 units per year). If visual stability is the goal instead, prices will probably continue to rise uncontrollably.
> If you want to do your own analysis, the data is all available to download on Github. Please let me know what other explanations you find for the patterns!
I see a story about man who deliberately made a series of selfish high risk decisions and continued to do so with no regard for his future or his role in society.
I've done the same, to an extent - but if I ended up homeless at any point I would not have expected society to pay for my continued foolishness.
There's no doubt that welfare in some form is ideal for a modern society, but people should recognize that willingness to work is tied to desire for survival/comfort and willingness to work for most people decreases as the welfare floor increases.
Forcing someone to work for those who do not contribute to society is theft. There is no reason to believe that the average person will commit to pursuits beneficial for the collective if his needs are guaranteed to be met regardless of his willingness or ability to participate.
> Forcing someone to work for those who do not contribute to society is theft.
This is a terrible way to think about a functioning society. Taxes are not theft, and we absolutely should be supporting those who do not 'contribute to society'.
What about folks with mental illnesses, physical impairments, advanced age, pregnancy, recovering from injuries, drug/alcohol addiction, or any other number of reasons why someone might need to have us all cover for them? Why is it any different in this case?
Given how much we now know about the history of the opioid epidemic, how much we now know about how cigarettes/alcohol have been advertised throughout recent history and what the motivations were behind those advertisements, I feel like this is a particularly naive comment.
Nobody gets up in the morning and says, "gee, I'd really like to introduce a high-cost, crippling dependency in my life." Understanding that and treating drug abuse like a physical/social disease has turned out to be a surprisingly effective social policy.
It's not clear to me why addicted people should be treated differently than anyone else in any other challenging situation. Certainly once someone is addicted to a drug, there are obvious biological forces preventing them from quitting cold-turkey.
They don't, yet they "drink casually" or "do drugs casually". There's a reason certain religions ban intoxicating substances. Alas, people like to play with fire, then things go wrong, yet society still thinks that it's ok to keep marketing those dangerous substances. If society actually wants to fix the issue, there is a solution, but it doesn't sit well with the greedy and foolish.
Again, you're ignoring nearly a decade of modern research into how addiction happens, and the social infrastructures that have been deliberately set up by both dealers and drug/alcohol/pharmaceutical companies to get people addicted.
You say yourself:
> yet society still thinks that it's ok to keep marketing those dangerous substances
If you're acknowledging that society is pushing people into drugs, doesn't it kind of make sense to hold society responsible for getting them out?
----
But even ignoring the causes of addiction, your suggestion that we ban alcohol/drugs also doesn't have anything to do with whether we should help people who are physically addicted now.
Okay, cool, let's ban heroin. It already is illegal, but whatever. We'll super-ban it. Even after the super-ban, we're still going to need to help the people who are addicted right now -- people who are suffering from both a biological and psychological dependency that is outside of their control to fix on their own.
> people like to play with fire
If you ride your bike without a helmet and accidentally suffer a brain injury, should society help you, even though you ignored safety advice? If you get distracted in your car and crash, should society help you, even though you weren't paying attention? Is your position that only people with birth defects have a legitimate claim to support/grace?
When I was a young kid, my brother and I use to go out in the woods and pretend sword fight with sticks, even though our parents told us this was a stupid, dangerous thing to do. We got lucky, nothing ever happened. But if one of us had accidentally stabbed an eye out, would we have been entitled to any kind of social support?
I still don't see anything that would make a drug addiction different from those scenarios.
> and the social infrastructures that have been deliberately set up by both dealers and drug/alcohol/pharmaceutical companies to get people addicted.
I indirectly mentioned that in my post. There is a solution to this problem, but it doesn't sit well with the foolish and the greedy. There is a vested interest that it doesn't get solved.
> Okay, cool, let's ban heroin. It already is illegal, but whatever. We'll super-ban it.
Should also add alcohol to the list.
> I still don't see anything that would make a drug addiction different from those scenarios.
It's very different. In the activities you mentioned, there is a positive outcome involved, or it is a natural part of growing up (kids do stupid things, but that's where the role of the parents come in). Whereas in doing drugs and alcohol, the risk/benefit ratios are so skewed, it's irrational to engage in them in the first place.
But none of what you're saying solves the problem of what we're going to do with all of the people who have a physical addiction right now: people who can't fix their own problems without external help.
You keep on kind of dancing around this "but they deserve it" argument. But who cares if they deserve it? They're not going to go away until someone else helps them. You can't just pass a law that people will stop being addicted to alcohol, that's not how biology works. How people got into a situation where they can't help themselves doesn't matter. They're still in a position where they can't fix their own problems.
And on moralization, to go back to your own point:
> There is a vested interest that it doesn't get solved.
Do you have a plan to get rid of that vested interest? How long is that plan going to take to implement? A year? Two years? Should we just let addicts die on the street until you get around to getting elected to Congress?
If society is at least partially (and arguably largely) to blame for these people's addictions, and if changing society is a difficult, long-term process that requires battling multiple vested interests, then why is it unethical for us to use social resources like taxes in the meantime to help people that society is hurting?
You can't have this both ways. You can't argue that society is obsessed with drugs and that's why we have addiction, while simultaneously arguing that every addicted person is specifically getting what they deserve and isn't worthy of our help.
> It's very different. There is a positive outcome involved, or it is a natural part of growing up
There's a positive outcome involved in glancing at a phone while driving? Riding a bicycle without a helmet is a natural part of growing up?
I strongly agree that kids often do stupid things. Trying drugs and alcohol is one of those stupid things. And to be honest, comparatively, riding a bicycle without a helmet is way more stupid and way more irrational than accidentally getting peer-pressured by a drug-obsessed society into a debilitating addiction.
I don't see a difference here except that one of those activities is being labeled as harmless stupidity, and one of them is being labeled as a moral failing.
Getting addicted to painkillers coming out of surgeries with badly dosed prescriptions is still a common worry for many people. I have friends that refuse to take any painkillers in a hospital specifically because they're frightened of that exact scenario. The best case scenario for people who get addicted to painkillers is for them to get 3rd-party help before they become addicted to more serious drugs. It's absurd to me to argue that their problems were caused by them being stupid or immoral, when I can directly see the role that doctors and the medical industry played in their addictions. Are those people worthy of getting help from society?
Because they consciously and purposely got themselves into it. They played with fire and got burnt. It's not like they woke up in some zombie state and started drinking and doing drugs. Many people abstain from drinking, gambling, etc. precisely because we know the outcomes, and it works.
If you believe the humans roughly follow a bell curve in terms of success/work ethic/conscientiousness/mental health/ability to get your sh*t together, pick your metric, there will always be some tail on the bell curve who legitimately can't hold it together. The trick is finding the sweet spot. Help too much, and disincentives become a drag on society. Help too little, and campers in the park and crazy guys waving needles around become a drag on society.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 151 ms ] threadhttps://archive.thinkprogress.org/why-writers-dont-write-hea...
This coverline caused particular rage internally amongst staff: https://images.app.goo.gl/cGhZ8usRNCBqhcp49
At market rates. That's expensive. $1M per lot expensive.
> rezone the properties for multifamily dwellings and either auction them off...
Expect those single-family homeowners to sue because the land as clearly worth more than the city paid, they just gamed the system.
> the city could clear out lots of under-assessed junk
The taxes were too low, the buildings are often junk, but the assessments are correct.
> even the owners who get bought out in the ED proceeding will get a huge paycheck
Again, the paycheck is too low unless you making the zoning change before a new appraisal. ED isn't really needed for this; you just need to rezone areas and actually allow building, but SF does neither.
Your reply also had ~nothing to do with property to house the homeless in the short-term. This is how you build housing projects.
On track, but the process you describe is overcomplicated. The whole process can be collapsed to "SF needs to upzone most of the city".
Land zoned for multifamily dwellings is worth a lot more than land zoned for single family dwellings, so the owners would have reasonable grounds to sue if the city used eminent domain to seize their property under single family zoning with plans to upzone to multifamily zoning. They would probably win and be entitled to fair compensation for assessed value as of the later zoning. So if the city were going to pursue this route it would need the upzoning first, which the city has always been able to do and has refused to do anyway.
Again, I don't know why people think the city of San Francisco wants to kill their homeless population. Their policies favor the homeless population over the safety of families that live in neighborhoods other than the Marina, Pacific Heights, and North Beach.
> San Francisco officially reported 8,640 homeless residents in 2002—a peak—and almost as many in 2019 ... San Francisco spends more per capita on homelessness solutions than nearly any other U.S. city—three hundred and thirty million dollars a year.
330000000 / 8640 = 38194
> the median monthly rent for a one-bedroom in the city is now, by one estimate, about thirty-five hundred dollars
3500 * 12 = 42000
These numbers are surprisingly close. Moreover, 1) you need one apartment per family not per person 2) you can pay below median if you buy in bulk and aren't very picky 3) many homeless have jobs.
In other words, not all of the $330 million is for that 8,640 people, most of it is going toward housing people who would otherwise be homeless.
SF and NYC would be better off finding those cheaper cities that need workers and showing them how to run services for the homeless. They might also want to connect the marginally homeless with these cities early.
That said, I doubt there's much work for the SF homeless. Between addiction and mental health problems, most aren't employable.
The only statistics that should be trusted are ones that have verifiable records proving the historical residency of homeless populations. Everything else is easily manipulable and not trustworthy.
This is at the very best a conspiracy theory. Poll takers intentionally trying to get the wrong answers to garner political support? And what has that supposed conspiracy garnered, politically? Who gains in this conspiracy and how?
Such claims require at least some substantiation. Is there anybody who is willing to put their real name out there that has observed this?
My personal experience, in Santa Cruz, does not match what you claim. There was a recent vicious attack by a homeless person, and the police found the attacker hiding in his mother's house in town.
At least where I live, I've heard a lot of conspiracy theories, many now openly discussed and not just in whispers, of a "homeless-industrial complex" where people are supposedly making bank on faux solutions to homelessness and non-profit providers are just funneling money off to the wealthy people who run the non-profits and leaving clients and volunteers hung out to dry.
As an occasional volunteer for some of those groups, I do not see this. Granted, I may not be anywhere as involved in Deep Homelessness as I might need to be in order to pull back the veil and expose the bitter truth. From my point of view, I see a shitload of people who have been dealt a terrible hand. a lot of them were people who were doing just fine before, maybe not great but were getting by and then a life event happened that, sure, from our perspectives on HN of most of us making in the low six figures to start, would have seen coming and could have planned for. But, for whatever reason, these people didn't and damn, once you fall out of "normal society," climbing back in is hard. as. fuck.
One person I helped was technically literate--we set up Yubikey auth for his Google account, for goodness sake--and had no vices besides posting up at the library to play Clash of Clans on his aging Android phone. But it still took an inordinate amount of time to get together all of the identity and proofing documents he needed to get an ID to go onto a military base to take a specialty job. In one case, he only got one of the documents because he knew a notary (me) and could have a form sworn to and stamped in under a day at no cost.
I don't think people truly appreciate just how fragile modern life is if they've never fallen out of it.
That has garnered budgets in the hundreds of millions a year in several cities as well as allowance to have permanent camps, open drug abuse, littering, and environmental damage. That is, it has got them protection from the laws everyone else (such as law abiding taxpayers) are subject to.
As for substantiation - many people have had the anecdotal experience of running into homeless and discovering that they moved to SF, Portland, or Seattle with no plan and no means to support themselves. When the claimed data consistently disagrees with anecdotal experience, it points to something wrong with the process. I’m not the only one to speculate they are being coached.
In Seattle for example, they are organized enough to attend every relevant city council meeting and shout down any opposing views to expanding funding for various organizations that supposedly provide services to the homeless but have largely achieved nothing except spreading blight across the city. These organizations and their staff is what people refer to as the homeless-industrial complex. Their entire careers and livelihoods are based on drawing salaries from this process.
Obvious I don’t have strong evidence of such coaching (like on a video tape). But it is unreasonable to expect that I would, and it doesn’t invalidate my perspective. Clearly having no strong verification of identity is a major gap in these surveys. There is no reason for anyone to take that data at face value. We should assume everyone is not a long time local resident unless they can prove otherwise. Right now, taxpayers are being fleeced and are subsidizing the nomadic lifestyles of these populations in many cities.
> Finding a job, as a classroom aide for special-needs students, was easy. But she struggled to find an affordable apartment. When I met D., her days began at 6 A.M., on a mat on a shelter floor. She dropped her son off at fifth grade, then went to her classroom to teach.
I just don't see a way to blame a story like that on "we attract more homeless people than other cities." The problem is your houses cost too much. Whatever the policy solution for that ends up being -- building more apartments and reforming zoning laws, or de-gentrifying neighborhoods, or rent control, or minimum wage increases, or whatever economic theories people come up with -- the individual strategy doesn't change the core problem.
The core problem is that if teaching assistants can't afford apartments, the economic math is never going to work out for SF. You are always going to have a high population of homeless people if low-income essential workers can't afford a place to live. No other fix is ever going to change that.
> D., the special-needs instructor, also college-educated and fully employed, told me, “Someone housed today, unless they’re making eighty thousand dollars a year, could be homeless tomorrow. That’s the bottom line.”
Again, I'm an outside observer here, I don't know what I'm talking about. But as an outside observer, that quote doesn't sound to me like "our social services are too good, so we get too many freeloaders." It sounds like, "we #$%!@ed up our economy and we don't know how to fix it."
:) In related news, Nintendo Switch scalpers really do want everybody to be able to get a Switch, just as long as increasing production doesn't affect any of the prices they can charge in Ebay auctions.
Politically, this is almost impossible to do. When programs have provided funding to help people move to areas where they have support from friends or family, or to match up with jobs they could do but can't get to, the outcry is near-universal: "You're shoving your problems off onto the rest of the country! We don't want your cast-offs!" For good measure, they'll throw in using "liberal" or "freeloader" or "welfare" as an expletive.
The reverse--providing transportation to cities like San Francisco or Portland or Seattle, where the local community has decided to provide more services--is seen as far less politically unpopular, though doesn't happen very often but when it does, is seen as a good thing by the sending communities. "Well, they have the money to deal with it; we don't." "They like being 'Freeattle' so let them." As if there is some political motivation to being good humans to other humans.
Of course it's not anywhere near as stark contrast as my words seem like they imply; there's a whole lot of nuance and general bickering about what should/could/can be done. But if trying to be an advocate for housing and helping people out of these kinds of situations has taught me anything, people can be extremely petty about outcomes that seem like someone "undeserving" is "getting something" for "free."
In my experience from that time, mostly spent around Seattle, that roughly 2/3's of the people you see on the streets have some kind of physical, mental or emotional problems that prevent them from navigating modern civilization.
(As an aside I don't think most folks in it have a good idea just how challenging modern society can be. The street is sort of like a time machine in that living there is like going back in time two or three centuries. There are a lot of inconveniences but life is fundamentally simpler if all you have to worry about each day is that day's food and a place to crash that night. That's why I support a safety net. Not welfare in the sense of ongoing payments forever but a way to catch and support people when they stumble, to help them back to a normal life. Related to that, there's a guy who has sat in front of University district Safeway for twenty years selling "Street Sheet". To me selling Streetsheet isn't meant to be a lifetime job. If dude had put a dollar a day in a saving account with compound interest he would be ready to retire soon. That's the kind of thing I mean about helping people use civilization's API.)
Of the remaining 1/3 or so you have a mix of e.g. punk rock anti-society types, hippies, nomads, runaway kids(!), and drifters. In other words, folks who either want to be there or have no better option.
There are very few people who have their act together and live on the street because it's actually pretty easy to get off the street if you have a good attitude and are willing to work.
The answer to the OP's question is simply that people who can move to another city and get a job do that and so aren't homeless anymore.
This is plainly wrong. Saving $1 per day, at 7% interest, would net about $15,000 after 20 years.
See for yourself: https://financialmentor.com/calculator/compound-interest-cal...
But why NYC?
An immigrant leaving New York for a cheaper COL metro is leaving all this behind for the great unknown.
One other important factor is that in New York City it is very easy to live without a car. For poor people, a car is easily an expense just as large as housing. New York City has housing cost of $1.6K a month but transportation cost of $6k a year [0]; St Louis has housing cost of $960 a month but transportation cost of $11k a year.[1]
[0] https://htaindex.cnt.org/fact-sheets/#?focus=place&gid=16861 [1]https://htaindex.cnt.org/fact-sheets/?focus=place&gid=14098
Per year, as per your link.
https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2019/06/lgbtq-indiv...
Big cities also tend to be where you find sufficient soup kitchens and the like to not starve to death if you have absolutely nothing. Not all homeless have absolutely nothing. Many have some kind of an income, it's just not enough to support a middle class life (or even a lower class life that includes housing). But it can still be helpful to be in a big city where not everyone will know you and there are resources, etc.
There are substantial challenges to traveling while homeless. You may lack ID and this is a barrier to buying tickets on long distance travel options like buses or trains. You certainly lack money and bus tickets cost money. Many routes in the US are de facto closed to foot traffic. If you have no car, no driver's license, no money for tickets or no ID, going anywhere else is hugely challenging.
Most people who are homeless are disabled in some manner. They have health issues or they are mentally ill or they are ADHD, etc. This makes getting any kind of job hard. It can make just getting through the day hard.
I walked and caught rides while homeless and traveled from Georgia to California. Previous comment by me about some of the challenges of trying to walk anywhere in the US:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21309036
I run several blogs about homelessness or related resources aimed at trying to help the homeless survive and get their lives back. You should be able to find all of them via Street Life Solutions (linked above).
I don't know if you've never faced homelessness, but it gets worse the longer you're homeless in many ways. There are no creative solutions from outsiders that wouldn't occur to the homeless, just resources the haves will not share with the have-nots. Homeless people don't need ideas, they need free money, liberty, and agency. All of which aren't offered at the tip of the tongue, but with the offering of funding.
Does anybody know about these legal challenges?
> In San Francisco today, people who earn less than [$82,000] a year—or a [$117,000] for a family of four—are considered low-income.
Most people outside of San Francisco would consider that a lot of money. Would a barista working at a Starbucks in the city ever earn that much? What about a public school teacher or cleaning staff? Essential services that need to be filled are worked by people who need to live somewhere.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
However, there's a dilemma where cities that have the best services (and climate) for people who are happy camping anywhere will attract folks who come there just to be homeless, like the subject of this story.
> He made money by hunting exotic minerals and rocks.
Did he? Or was he stealing exotic minerals and rocks from the National Parks in 48 states he camped at? (See https://www.nps.gov/subjects/geology/permits.htm#CP_JUMP_547... ) Shame on the New Yorker fact-checkers for not confirming where he got those minerals.
If every construction company and contractor in the entire state of CA came to SF and started building apartment buildings as fast as they could, they would still only add enough capacity to prevent rates rising, at best.
No human agency can actually bring the prices down.
He collects and analyzes historical data going back to 1948.
Punchline: "Today's outrageous prices are exactly in line with the 6.6% trend that began 60 years ago."
Rent in the Bay Area has gone up 6.6% per year for sixty years.
> In conclusion
> San Francisco is an expensive city because it is an affluent city with a growing population and no easily available land for development. Sonja Trauss is right that building more housing would reduce rents of both high- and low-end apartments. Tim Redmond is right that building enough housing to make much of a dent in prices would change the visual character of most streets, although the result could be more like Barcelona than like the Hong Kong that he fears. The unsettled question is which of these is the higher priority.
> Building enough housing to roll back prices to the "good old days" is probably not realistic, because the necessary construction rates were never achieved even when planning and zoning were considerably less restrictive than they are now. Building enough to compensate for the growing economy is a somewhat more realistic goal and would keep things from getting worse.
> In the long run, San Francisco's CPI-adjusted average income is growing by 1.72% per year, and the number of employed people is growing by 0.326% per year, which together (if you believe the first model) will raise CPI-adjusted housing costs by 3.8% per year. Therefore, if price stability is the goal, the city and its citizens should try to increase the housing supply by an average of 1.5% per year (which is about 3.75 times the general rate since 1975, and with the current inventory would mean 5700 units per year). If visual stability is the goal instead, prices will probably continue to rise uncontrollably.
> If you want to do your own analysis, the data is all available to download on Github. Please let me know what other explanations you find for the patterns!
I've done the same, to an extent - but if I ended up homeless at any point I would not have expected society to pay for my continued foolishness.
There's no doubt that welfare in some form is ideal for a modern society, but people should recognize that willingness to work is tied to desire for survival/comfort and willingness to work for most people decreases as the welfare floor increases.
Forcing someone to work for those who do not contribute to society is theft. There is no reason to believe that the average person will commit to pursuits beneficial for the collective if his needs are guaranteed to be met regardless of his willingness or ability to participate.
This is a terrible way to think about a functioning society. Taxes are not theft, and we absolutely should be supporting those who do not 'contribute to society'.
What about folks with mental illnesses, physical impairments, advanced age, pregnancy, recovering from injuries, drug/alcohol addiction, or any other number of reasons why someone might need to have us all cover for them? Why is it any different in this case?
Drug and alcohol addition are definitely not in the same group as the rest.
Nobody gets up in the morning and says, "gee, I'd really like to introduce a high-cost, crippling dependency in my life." Understanding that and treating drug abuse like a physical/social disease has turned out to be a surprisingly effective social policy.
It's not clear to me why addicted people should be treated differently than anyone else in any other challenging situation. Certainly once someone is addicted to a drug, there are obvious biological forces preventing them from quitting cold-turkey.
They don't, yet they "drink casually" or "do drugs casually". There's a reason certain religions ban intoxicating substances. Alas, people like to play with fire, then things go wrong, yet society still thinks that it's ok to keep marketing those dangerous substances. If society actually wants to fix the issue, there is a solution, but it doesn't sit well with the greedy and foolish.
You say yourself:
> yet society still thinks that it's ok to keep marketing those dangerous substances
If you're acknowledging that society is pushing people into drugs, doesn't it kind of make sense to hold society responsible for getting them out?
----
But even ignoring the causes of addiction, your suggestion that we ban alcohol/drugs also doesn't have anything to do with whether we should help people who are physically addicted now.
Okay, cool, let's ban heroin. It already is illegal, but whatever. We'll super-ban it. Even after the super-ban, we're still going to need to help the people who are addicted right now -- people who are suffering from both a biological and psychological dependency that is outside of their control to fix on their own.
> people like to play with fire
If you ride your bike without a helmet and accidentally suffer a brain injury, should society help you, even though you ignored safety advice? If you get distracted in your car and crash, should society help you, even though you weren't paying attention? Is your position that only people with birth defects have a legitimate claim to support/grace?
When I was a young kid, my brother and I use to go out in the woods and pretend sword fight with sticks, even though our parents told us this was a stupid, dangerous thing to do. We got lucky, nothing ever happened. But if one of us had accidentally stabbed an eye out, would we have been entitled to any kind of social support?
I still don't see anything that would make a drug addiction different from those scenarios.
I indirectly mentioned that in my post. There is a solution to this problem, but it doesn't sit well with the foolish and the greedy. There is a vested interest that it doesn't get solved.
> Okay, cool, let's ban heroin. It already is illegal, but whatever. We'll super-ban it.
Should also add alcohol to the list.
> I still don't see anything that would make a drug addiction different from those scenarios.
It's very different. In the activities you mentioned, there is a positive outcome involved, or it is a natural part of growing up (kids do stupid things, but that's where the role of the parents come in). Whereas in doing drugs and alcohol, the risk/benefit ratios are so skewed, it's irrational to engage in them in the first place.
You keep on kind of dancing around this "but they deserve it" argument. But who cares if they deserve it? They're not going to go away until someone else helps them. You can't just pass a law that people will stop being addicted to alcohol, that's not how biology works. How people got into a situation where they can't help themselves doesn't matter. They're still in a position where they can't fix their own problems.
And on moralization, to go back to your own point:
> There is a vested interest that it doesn't get solved.
Do you have a plan to get rid of that vested interest? How long is that plan going to take to implement? A year? Two years? Should we just let addicts die on the street until you get around to getting elected to Congress?
If society is at least partially (and arguably largely) to blame for these people's addictions, and if changing society is a difficult, long-term process that requires battling multiple vested interests, then why is it unethical for us to use social resources like taxes in the meantime to help people that society is hurting?
You can't have this both ways. You can't argue that society is obsessed with drugs and that's why we have addiction, while simultaneously arguing that every addicted person is specifically getting what they deserve and isn't worthy of our help.
> It's very different. There is a positive outcome involved, or it is a natural part of growing up
There's a positive outcome involved in glancing at a phone while driving? Riding a bicycle without a helmet is a natural part of growing up?
I strongly agree that kids often do stupid things. Trying drugs and alcohol is one of those stupid things. And to be honest, comparatively, riding a bicycle without a helmet is way more stupid and way more irrational than accidentally getting peer-pressured by a drug-obsessed society into a debilitating addiction.
I don't see a difference here except that one of those activities is being labeled as harmless stupidity, and one of them is being labeled as a moral failing.
Getting addicted to painkillers coming out of surgeries with badly dosed prescriptions is still a common worry for many people. I have friends that refuse to take any painkillers in a hospital specifically because they're frightened of that exact scenario. The best case scenario for people who get addicted to painkillers is for them to get 3rd-party help before they become addicted to more serious drugs. It's absurd to me to argue that their problems were caused by them being stupid or immoral, when I can directly see the role that doctors and the medical industry played in their addictions. Are those people worthy of getting help from society?