Completely self-inflicted. Let’s make sure the rest of the US does not adopt SF policies. For that matter, west coast policies (LA, Seattle, Portland).
There’s no world in which housing gets cheap enough in nyc and sf for these unhoused people to afford it. Why can’t the unhoused move to a cheaper city like everyone else who can’t afford it here?
What did you find convincing about that article? It seems like it takes the worst evidence to support the mental health claim, disputes them and then offers similar fallacious arguments to blame housing issues.
Anecdotally, I live in a quite affordable medium sized city in the midwest, and even we have a homeless crisis and an increasingly number of homeless encampments on public property. The local government being dominated by progressives, lets these encampments continue - which previously were never permitted.
He does not dispute that mental health and drugs are problematic. He points out that they are problems everywhere, and it's the places with high housing prices that have more homelessness.
Right now, the price of homes is going up everywhere, and as a consequence, I'd expect to see more homelessness everywhere.
It's bizarre how much people fight against this notion. You talk about not many people having Ferraris because they're expensive, and people look at you like "uh, ok, duh". But when the median price of homes is over 850,000 dollars (California), it's this BIG MYSTERY why people do not have homes.
There’s been a a big change recently. McDonald’s pays $17 per hour in the Bay Area now. That’s 35k per year, almost 3k per month. Companies are trying anything to get more workers. Even in the Bay Area that is enough to stay off the street if you want to. Unless they are disabled, I have a lot less sympathy for people on the street when there are a record number of unfilled jobs.
There's a lot more than just zoning, although that might be the single biggest factor.
On top of that, the permiting process is insane, takes forever (I've gone through it), and costs a lot of money. Your neighbors get a very long time to file any complaints on your proposal (which they always do, because NIMBY). It is such a painful thing that I'd rather avoid doing any more construction.
CA has a lot of rules that make construction very expensive, and SF even more so (only cast iron drain pipes, because ABS is somehow not good enough in this historic city).
Earthquakes are real, but forcing everybody with 5 units (I believe) to retrofit (at the same time) cost millions of dollars per property - driving up the rent.
And now solar power is mandatory for new construction, and solar is great, but it does add tens of thousands per unit.
Second house/vacation house (not rented): Multiply property tax by 10.
Rentals (including airbnb): If mortgaged: Max the rental (monthly and daily) to 1.1x Mortgage amount + yearly property tax amount / 12. Unmortgaged: Property tax amount * 2 max per monthly income.
Change the maximum amount you can sell a house to be equal to cost of materials plus 30 days of labor for 5 people.
Owner builder homes can get a 60K automatic grant - everything must be verified - and limit land HOA rules that specify a minimum sized house.
Make "Limited Density Owner-Built Rural Dwellings" possible in areas that are not affected by fire.
Finally to make all this feasible - make junk properties illegal (noise limits + junkyard style land usage)
It would solve a lot of NIMBY issues and please the YIMBYs. I have a billion other crazy ideas like this.
> Change the maximum amount you can sell a house to be equal to cost of materials plus 30 days of labor for 5 people.
That's a terrible idea, who will construct anything if there is no money to be made? You don't fix those kinds of problems by price fixing, let the free market take care of the supply/demand issue. Unfortunately, the bay area is far from a free market when it comes to housing.
Consider the cluster of policies that just resulted in the 469 Stevenson St project, alluded to in the article, getting axed. As I understand it:
* The project had been before the Planning Commission for at least a year.
* The project had completed an final Environmental Impact Report that had been approved by the Planning Committee. Another regulatory hurdle of questionable value for a mid-city development.
* An advocacy group, Yerba Buena Neighborhood Consortium, apparently run by a local affordable housing ownership group called TODCO, had their lawyers file an appeal to the Board of Supes opposing certification of the EIR. What could have been a pro-forma approval is now another potential place for roadblock.
* The environmental reasons? Millenium Tower FUD, gentrification, and shadows on a nearby mid-city plaza. The scope of EIRs has apparently gotten massive if gentrification is included. (Whether a Nordstrom valet parking lot better serves the local low-income community than actual housing with an affordable housing carve-out is another question.)
* The Board of Supes reverses the Planning Commission's approval. Back to the drawing board. Or... if you want to _sell_ that property you can't do anything with, I'm sure there's a local property owner that will take it off your hands if the price is low enough. ;-)
We see here multiple stages way beyond zoning where a housing project can get torpedoed, and that these extra stages have grown in scope to cover just about anything local property owners might want to object to. And that's not even considering San Francisco's Discretionary Review process, which gives local groups even _more_ opportunities to delay or kill your project if they don't like it.
Or, it would just put the rest of the US in the same situation as SF. Doubling down isn't the reasonable response here. I think it should better be considered a failed experiment.
Let them stay on the streets but at least they could try prosecuting the ones that break laws (assault, theft, hard drugs) instead of letting them run rampant on the streets.
What do you do after prosecuting them? Issue them a fine? They are homeless.
Throw them in jail? Then you are just housing them with extra steps. That's more expensive then just simply housing them; if the bay area won't build housing, why would the bay area expand prisons?
Many social problems in west coast cities are self-inflicted but there's also the 9th circuit's Martin v. Boise decision (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_v._Boise). It prevents criminalizing public camping unless there's shelter space for everyone.
perspective: I own a SFH in lower peninsula and have a lot of homeless near me - daily or semi-daily interactions. I'm typically YIMBY and pro-housing, though I lean against homeless-specific solutions (but it's case-by-case ofc). Read the article, watched the oliver segment.
I think the problem with this angle of argument is that it pretty much solely relies on extreme empathy holding from current homeowners (aka those with power). And when that empathy is worn down, such as the example woman in the oliver segment who has to pick up human poop on a regular basis, then the argument just falls completely flat. Like it basically goes like this "Look how bad these ppl have it, don't you care?" and the answer is "No." - then what do you do? There's no avenue for follow up or iteration - you've just made a assumption just completely breaks.
You can criticize the housed-first perspectives, but at least they try to find win-win common ground between the interest of the house (not picking up human poop) and the homeless (get a home). I'm also a big fan of the tax/finance forward methods and oliver had an example during his segment of a way to save $ per homeless per year spending.
To me this article reads as the epitome of 'bleeding-heart' syndrome, and lacking critical thinking toward actual problem solving with multiple stake holder interests in play.
I take issue with framing homeowners as "those with power", particularly when talking about SF. Most people in SF are renters, not homeowners, and could easily overpower any self interested NIMBY homeowners... But they don't, for various reasons, but one of them is that they don't care either.
Aside from housing, a lot of homeless people are in need of mental healthcare, and that's something no particular city is equipped to deal with without backing from the state.
> That's the reason you've lost empathy for them, because they are humans who have to shit and are denied access to toilets?
Its totally fair, and expected that people lose sympathy when they have to clean up shit.
Yes, if there were safe, available, places to shit then that'd be a good step to avoid this issue. But the root issue is that people no longer have sympathy because its so disruptive and so gross and has been going on for so long.
> I find it so weird that people blame homeless people for defecating on the streets.
They're blamed because they did it. They did it because there is no alt, but they did it, and "it" is gross and not desirable. SF has been talking about the issue for years, and its not resolved, so your tolerance and sympathy drops over time.
Yeah, people generally choose to understand that babies can't help themselves and also choose to believe that the unhoused (literally the group with the least agency in our society) have the agency to help themselves.
EDIT: To be clear. I realize shit is gross. It's the most toxic thing a human regularly encounters.
But the implication of the grossness of shit being a 'bright red line' for lost empathy is that no reasonable human would EVER deal with someone else's shit, when that is demonstrably untrue.
We choose to empathize with babies and not homeless people. That's fine, I guess, but feels sort of gross on the cosmic scale.
I would have thought it'd be the violence. Not like NYC homeless bundled up in a corner keeping warm while praying for the health of those who leave them coin.
Just my perspective, but I don't see that much violence.
Violence is an event and inherently ephemeral. Poop is a thing and it will sit there until removed giving me much more time to see it.
Maybe that's why?
I'm sure violence _would_ get on me pretty quickly, but I just don't see that much violence in the homeless in my local area.
Btw, it feels pretty disingenuous that your example is this group of perfect angel homeless people sleeping and praying on the corner. That rhetoric pretty much immediately loses anyone who has regular contact and they think "welp this person doesn't know what they are talking about"
Well thank you for letting me know I lost you. I value your opinion and I'll be sure to take it into consideration. See also: https://danluu.com/look-stupid/
I had to clean up another person's poop because they pooped next to my car. I felt pretty angry about it because I hate poop, and I had a hard time understanding why this person left their poop on the ground instead of putting it in a nearby dumpster. Then I remembered they were probably high or had a mental illness. It takes a bit of stoic zen to get un-angry about cleaning up another person's poop.
I would say it's all relative, dog owners and parents with infants deal with someone else's shit all day, every day, and only occasionally complain about it. Part of that is actively caring about the shitters in question, I assume. But as you say, it's work to extend that care to someone you don't know.
Yeah, that's all true. In addition, I know that infants and dogs literally don't have the capacity to clean up their poop - they couldn't if they wanted to.
If I, as an adult, can clean up your poop for you, then it escapes me why you, homeless but also adult, can't pick it up and put it in a dumpster. The logical conclusion is that you do not wish to.
One of the things I did to steel my will was to to think about the parents and the dog owners when I picked up other people's poop. However, thinking along those lines, I ended up connecting the idea that babies and dogs do not have free will, and I noticed that connection bubble to the surface when I saw homeless encampments. It colored the already dismal sight with a tinge of existential horror.
So, I'm not so sure that the baby/dog to encampment dweller connection makes the most appropriate vehicle for mentally dealing with the poop. Or, maybe, it is the right vehicle. I really don't know.
When I rationalize my poop scooping duties by juxtaposing them with the duties of parents and dog owners, I end up placing the babies, dogs, and adult poopers in the same category. I don't know if that categorization actually reflects reality, and therefore I can't tell if that kind of rationalization will actually help me react to the poop in a constructive way.
How free is their will? Can they choose not to poop? Can they choose to use a toilet when they have to poop? Can they choose to have all of the prerequisites to have their own toilet to poop in? (a stable location to live, an income stream to pay for it, freedom from addiction or mental illness that would disrupt their ability to generate income...)
> That's the reason you've lost empathy for them, because they are humans who have to shit and are denied access to toilets?
Oxytocin--the hormone critically involved in empathy and social behaviors--has been linked to toxin-elicited and socially-mediated disgust [1]. If that link holds, it suggests why public defecation is the emerging turning point of the debate.
Rhetorically, this means trivializing the problem is unlikely to be successful. People will lose empathy for people who shit on their street. On the flip side, this offers a well-scoped beachhead. Solving the public defecation problem could rebuild empathy for San Francisco's homeless and give political oxygen to the broader, more-intractable problem of homelessness overall.
(I'm honestly shocked nobody has run for office in San Francisco on a vision zero-esque pledge to eliminate public defecation.)
There is a lot of research on this. It's a deep, fascinating rabbit hole and I don't know its contours well enough to flag the entrances. But it touches subjects like mammalian postpartum depression, infanticide in great apes, why the characters :) make one go "aww," cute aggression and a host of other matters.
To address your point a bit more head on, I imagine public reactions to a publicly-defecating child would be very different from those to an adult.
Are you so out of touch with basic human desires that you don't see the difference between having _your biological baby with your genes_ and a random homeless person? That people love their baby _despite_ their poop, because of the joy they bring, and because it satisfies the most primary of biological drives (reproduction).
And you think it's weird that I'm okay with my baby's poop and not the poop of a random adult.
Is that your take away? Do you think you are constructive or solving problems with the way you comment?
I've admitted that I don't like homeless people, but I put forth an authentic point of view and my engagement is a form of earnest attempt at solving the problem despite my personal dislike. I've noted the types of things I would be willing to vote for and what is less likely to win me over.
What do you think you are adding to the situation? You put on this position of caring so much about the homeless population yet all you seem capable of is burning bridges for nothing in return.
And despite your implication, it's actually not controversial to have the opinion that people generally care more about genetic heirs than adopted ones. God bless those with enough patience, understanding, and resources to adopt, but there's a reason why 99.9% of people on Earth have their own babies. Or are we just cretins in your view?
FWIW: Vienna had a housing crisis 100 years ago which lead to “Gemeindebauten” and eventually turned Vienna into one of the most-livable cities in the world. I know, it would be naive to reduce this to housing policy but it certainly played its part from what I can tell.
Austria is a wealthy capitalist society with enough money to spare to dedicate some to things like housing people. It's a reasonably well-run country. My guess is if the homes have problems, they fix them.
That's socialism/communism/anarchy and would never fly in the US. Almost half of Vienna is owned by the government and 60% of residents in Vienna live in social housing. It would require the US to stop treating housing as an investment vehicle.
Can't see that happening in SF, they'll probably just tighten up the laws on loitering and rough sleeping and send them to private prisons instead... even if it costs more.
SF isn't sending anyone to prison. It's open season on any type of burglary or theft. You have to leave your car completely unlocked and windows rolled down or they will 100% get smashed in.
Needing to roll your car windows down is only a thing in certain neighborhoods and typically it is only the case at night.
A friend used to have a car they parked in SOMA - where they lived - and they had their windows joy-bashed a few times before they gave up and parked their car in the east bay. I also know other people who park their cars on the streets without any issues.
In general SFPD will not investigate anything short of a violent crime (I have personally experienced about $2k in property theft that they did not both to even file claims on for insurance purposes. I have needed medical treatment from an assault that was never investigated. FWIW, on one another occasion the police actually did catch the perpetrator of an assault with deadly case against me - though this was part of a much more serious set of crimes that happened on camera on a muni train).
In short SF has some serious problems. The police have by and large abdicated any sense of personal, professional or civic responsibility. In the absence of law enforcement, the results are simply whether people choose to be decent or not. For the most part SF is safe, but there are also some serious a-holes who try to make life shitty for everyone else.
SFPD don't investigate because the DA wont prosecute. Actually the DA has the lowest prosecution rate and highest dismissal rate of any DA in California (maybe in the U.S.) for even those things that the police do investigate, which is, as you point out, very little.
"Since taking office Jan. 1, 2020 through March 1, 2021, Boudin has tried just 23 cases resulting in 16 convictions, including four assaults (three convictions); one auto burglary, one residential burglary, one gun felony (no conviction); three sexual assaults (two convictions); two robberies; seven misdemeanor DUIs (four convictions); and one misdemeanor vehicular homicide, which he lost. In 2019 during the same timeframe, Boudin’s predecessor, George Gascon, tried 294 cases and got 203 convictions.
The San Francisco District Attorney’s Office obtains convictions by trial as well as convictions via plea agreement, however, they only release the number of convictions obtained by trial and have thus far rejected public records requests for convictions settled by plea agreement. Total convictions, therefore, are likely higher.
In 2020, SFPD presented 6,333 felonies to Boudin’s office. Contrast that with neighboring Alameda County, where 6,331 felony cases were presented, resulting in 1,413 convictions. Alameda dismissed only 11.4 percent of cases, while San Francisco’s dismissal rate was 40 percent."[2]
- - -
"Prosecutors filed charges in 116 of 266 cases presented by police involving petty theft in 2020, compared to 450 of 647 cases in 2019, according to the data provided by the District Attorney’s Office."[1]
> The police have by and large abdicated any sense of personal, professional or civic responsibility.
The SFPD police department are heavily scrutinized, understaffed, underfunded, undertrained, and unsupported by higher levels of political officials, whom ironically carry around their own private security detail wherever they go in SF, who seek to villainize them for their own political gain. The DA's office throws everything out. You have "defund the police" clueless types abound.
The fact that SF has anyone who is willing to do that work in that city is nothing short of a miracle.
Maybe, though as a taxpayer, my perspective is more that they are overstaffed and overfunded since I see next to nothing in services coming from that department. Maybe throwing more money at an inefficient government agency will work on this one, but generally it’s not that hard to find people who will do nothing for good Union wages (would be different if they were doing their jobs).
Yeah Boudin sucks. Even Gascon was perhaps too lenient as well, but the Union is also just using this as an excuse to justify their refusal to enforce any laws. It’s possible for multiple levels of government to be broken, and I see no reason to think that SFPD deserves any benefit of the doubt here.
I wouldn't be surprised if 1934 Vienna could build housing an order of magnitude more cheaply and efficiently than the San Francisco or California governments.
I have lived in SF for 20 years. There are no good single solutions once an individual becomes homeless. The barriers to re-entering housing are high and homelessness is often the result of multiple problems making a single policy ineffective.
In my opinion, I lack evidence, the money should be targeting preventing people from ever getting homeless in the first place. The intervention needs to happens earlier because once a person is homeless the problems that contributed to their situation become insurmountable.
It's a common misconception that people experiencing homelessness are all junkies, but it's not true. A large number of homeless people are working poor. Estimates vary from 25% all the way up to 60%. If you sleep in your car because you're priced out of an apartment and you have a job, you're still homeless. Not everyone that's homeless has a needle in their arm, shouting at traffic on the street.
I would agree with you if this were 5 years ago. But the math you referenced is the data that’s been used to formulate a solution over the last decade and the problem’s only been getting significantly worse. So either your data is incorrect or the solution to build more housing is incorrect. Either way, the status quo problem/solution set is not working.
Every city in the state of California for many decades has failed to build enough housing to address the ever increasing demand for it and as a result people are losing housing. Every time rent increases significantly, homelessness increases significantly. The cost of housing in California cities and the Bay Area in particular has never decreased or even stabilized because we treat housing as an investment, keep it scarce through a number of local and statewide impediments to building, and expect outrageous returns on existing housing over time.
Most of the "problem homeless" are junkies. Overall homeless numbers include people in RVs, staying with a friend, and going to going to work day jobs.
Different types of homelessness result in different problems and different solutions.
> In my opinion, I lack evidence, the money should be targeting preventing people from ever getting homeless in the first place. The intervention needs to happens earlier because once a person is homeless the problems that contributed to their situation become insurmountable.
The city of SF does this already. There are nav centers and they triage cases for people that are on the brink of becoming homeless. The first step is prevention, but in an area that has booming rents, booming homelessness is never far behind. If you grew up in SF and you become homeless you're likely going to return to the place you know even if you don't have a place to live. The complete inability of SF to build housing at any income level is the biggest driver.
yes homelessness is often complex and multifactorial. years of abuse, psychological traits, bad luck. Pick any combinations in any order.
I honestly don't know what homeless people need, if they even want to go back to 'normal' life. What I think is possible is helping the volunteers to do more with less to provide essential care (hygiene, medicine, basic nutrition and warmth). Then there's safety.. Even some free lockers would be a boon for them. Keeping critical stuff when you sleep is a luxury for most.
All I know is that with not much funding, a bit of space, and smart care (invest in the easy to save, make them volunteers, and grow ~exponential self sufficient resources that way) you could tame these problems by a lot. Most naive solutions (renting hotels) backfire in cost or quality. I was quite stumped after hearing guys saying they'd rather sleep out than in a shelter, in the winter.. I don't want to assume but it's pretty telling.
LVT taxes the land. If you have 1 unit on 1 acre... it's going to pay the same amount in taxes as 10 units. So it's an incentive to use the land intensely enough in order to pay less in taxes.
When will we call the homeless crisis what it really is? A drug problem. The majority of the people you see on the streets in tents etc, are drug addicts. Reframing the problem as a drug crisis can give the people that are trying to solve it new solutions.
In a drug crisis, focusing on more housing might not solve the problem.
We have been trying to solve the problem with more affordable housing for a decade and every year the problem gets worse.
Because we're dealing with a drug epidemic. IMHO. It's opioids.
You're very incorrect. There are a huge number of people that are homeless that have full time jobs. There are a huge number of homeless people that don't use drugs. The problems they have are many and nuanced, trying to blame it on a single thing is a gross oversimplification of a complex problem. The solution to homelessness is housing first.
Funny enough, your point of view has been the consensus over the last decade and has been used to formulate solutions and the problem’s only getting worse. So perhaps you might consider other points of view?
Consensus is one thing, taking action on that consensus is another. We have failed to significantly increase the supply of housing so the cost of the existing housing has been on an unending march upwards. The solutions people are willing to implement are half measures and avoid the supply-demand causes of this problem.
I came across research showing that the drug use people commonly find in homeless encampments leads to disaffiliation or the severing of social ties to people outside the encampment [0]. What do you think about the idea that addiction may not lead directly to homelessness, but rather that addictions prevent people from finding a place to live outside the encampments?
Drug use prevents treatment until the drug use is resolved. Shoving an addict in to a house and calling it job done will result in a destroyed home and a soon to be homeless person again.
We don't disagree, but solving the addiction is only a prelude to solving the thing that lead to the addiction -- which may or may not be solvable by the government.
No. This reframing of the issue is incredibly reductive. The best thing you can do for homeless people us provide them with housing. Shocking I know.
Once they have housing — no strings attached housing — you need to provide health care (mental/physical). Now they have a chance to get reintegrated into society.
But without permanent housing nothing is going to happen.
Having said this, of course drug problems are extremely prevalent among the homeless population. It‘s rarely ever the root cause of the homelessness though. Maybe they had an accident or illness and were prescribed opioids frivolously and for too long. After they are sandbagged with crippling medical dept they are addicted and can‘t pay for their expenses at the same time.
Also, living on the street in extreme poverty is terrible and bleak. So no wonder one would end up depressed and start using even more opioids to mentally escape.
We should just build a resort city for them somewhere in the central valley and provide free housing, healthcare, and training opportunities. Anyone who doesn't want to go is left on their own and subject to the same expectations & laws as everyone else.
There are broadly two kinds of homeless: those who lost their job and are discreetly trying to get back on track... and those who choose this lifestyle and shit all over the place, make enormous amounts of trash, smoke meth in bookstore bathrooms, steal from stores and assault people.
All day long I see the second group all over town destroying stuff and causing mayhem that ends up hurting innocent bystanders.
Yet when the media talks about homelessness they only speak as if all homeless are in the first group-- down on their luck and needing a helping hand and if you feel anything other than deep guilt you are less than human.
The ruse is up: everyone has too many anecdotes of being assaulted, having to walk out into the street to go around heaps of garbage, watching people openly inject drugs on sidewalks in front of unwilling witnesses.
There are clearly two distinct things going on and they likely have two totally different solutions. If media and politicians keep communicating as if there is only one problem, despite what our ears and eyes tell us every single day, then this will continue to get worse and the outcome will likely be the same as the 'defund the police' movement-- a voter referendum that says 'enough of this nonsense'.
It blows my mind how out of touch people have to be to reframe the problem in this manner. Better housing is always a good thing to strive for, but clearly not the driving factor for the vast majority of homeless.
The “build more housing” coalition has been winning this argument for at least 7 years. Are you under the impression that mayors haven’t been green lighting more housing and small housing pop ups? Do you think government officials have yet to implement your plan? They are building more affordable housing and yet the problem is getting worse. I drive my kids to school on the LA freeways and have seen countless people under freeway on ramps and in tent cities next to freeways shoot up drugs or stumble around, obviously high on drugs. The scope of the problem has become shocking recently. Huge trash encampments bedside every freeway. It’s not rocket science. Drive through LA, drive through San Fran. Even the main image on the linked article shows a guy who clearly shows the effects of drug abuse. If it were a drug crisis, what would the solutions be? At least try to implement those and see where it gets us instead of deny the scope of the drug abuse effect because it has a moral component.
I see the same things you do, I was actually agreeing with you that we are in a drug crisis more than anything else. It's not an easy situation to "solve" because at the end of the day people make there own choices for the most part, and it's especially hard to offer assistance when people are unpredictable or dangerous.
Pretty much yes, can't force people to get mental health help, can't force people to quit opioids. People who think housing and access to mental health and counselling programs will solve the entire homeless crisis are incredibly short-sighted.
Anecdotal for sure, but a couple of my friends have had parents who were addicts, even when they had the love and support and housing options of being with family they chose to stay on the streets, unless they decided they needed to rob a family member for some more spending money. Spreading subsidized housing out doesn't work, addicts will just hang out closer to their dealers/sources on the streets. Putting up highly concentrated housing programs just make this problem even more dense, creating a radius of exceptionally high crime.
Even in the most idyllic scenario of creating perpetually well-maintained and totally free housing, many will end up choosing the streets anyways, out of convenience, mistrust, or mental health issues.
We should just go a step further and hand out oxy or percs to addicts for free.
The pills are incredibly cheap to manufacture.
A few things would happen if we started handing out opiods for free:
* petty crime would decrease -- it's not the drug that causes the crime, it's trying to pay for the drug
* organized crime would decrease -- moving opiods is a lucrative operation, and our addicts are bankrolling very bad people by doing business with them
* users would get clean product -- opiods laced with fentanyl are a huge problem and responsible for the majority of hospitalizations and overdose deaths
* more users could hold stable employment and rehabilitate themselves -- i've known plenty of opiods addicts, but you'd never know they had a problem, because they were all rich tech workers that were not stealing to satisfy their addiction
* most injection users would be pill users if it wasn't so expensive -- giving them free pills would encourage a less risky route of administration and decrease sepsis cases
If we still have a homeless problem after that, communal housing outside of the city with free drugs might be enough to get them to relocate to where they're not a problem and in considerably less danger.
But then I remember that we live in a god-fearing christian nation, where drugs are bad and addicts should be shunned, so my plan probably won't work.
I don't know whether this is a brilliant solution or a dystopian nightmare.
You'd re-invent the 19th century opium den, but it's public housing with free Oxy just outside the city limits, where you can choose to forego any meaningful integration into society, and (I assume) cut your life a bit shorter and escape into an unending, but more socially-acceptable, opium high.
It sounds bad when you say it like that, but also a huge upgrade over the current situation.
I think the idea would be to keep everyone safe and ideally give them pathways back to normal society, not create a permanent underclass.
If a significant percentage of the population wants to take advantage of such a program, that probably means society is doing something else wrong unrelated to drug or housing policy.
Many homeless people suffer from physical and mental disabilities that make them incapable of living independently. They aren't volunteering to live in grotesque poverty, nor are they in-between jobs, so they don't fit into your overly-neat dichotomy. I'd argue that any serious steps towards addressing homelessness should start with a realistic assessment of the issue, not axe grinding.
Steve knows this, but he is a right-wing asshole who hates poor people.
And HN is a safe space for right-wing assholes to post dishonest, bad faith bullshit. This is a deliberate decision by Dan Gackle. (Though Dan deliberately slandered me, didn’t apologize after being called on it, and killed my account the last time I brought up this topic.)
Somehow we've collectively decided that the best way to deal with people who can't take care of themselves is to ... let them take care of themselves and also give them free needles.
We clearly need to bring back insane asylums and institutionalization. Why can't we just try this again and try to make them less abusive?
I think we have to go back to some institutionalization, but only as part of the solution. We need to decriminalize drugs to remove the biggest barrier to treatment, and then fund treatment programs to remove the second biggest barrier. And we need to expand mental health services to be available to everyone regardless of insurance or ability to pay.
Each one of those things is super crazy expensive (except for decriminalizing drugs, which could save a lot of wasted funds).
If you grow up in a shitty environment there is an increased probability that you will get into drugs. Once you start doing strong drugs all day, there is a considerably increased chance of shitting all over the place and causing havoc.
I don't know if you grew up in a shitty environment or not but please consider that even if you did, the fact that you are not smoking meth in bookstore bathrooms cannot be purely a product of your own stout moral fiber, it is also due to luck, and the people that you see running riot in the city are the other side of that coin.
Speaking for myself, I am a post-graduate educated rich white guy who does my recycling and helps old ladies cross the road, and I am absolutely certain that if I got deep enough into serious drugs I would be shitting and yelling with the best of them, and I fuckin pray that if I ever get into that state, that educated people would have the sophistication to view me as something other than the unforgivably evil cartoon villain that you describe.
Everything I've heard and read from current and former unhoused people points to the fact that mental health drops rapidly upon losing a home. Not being able to sleep a whole night without waking up and being fearful of people invading your space is sufficient. Add in food insecurity, nearby drug use, violence, etc and your brain gets fried. Just like a physical injury, this wound could take months or years to heal.
I think of the problems that the homeless face as being like an evil roundabout. Although you enter with one of mental illness, addiction, or despair (or several, the analogy is imperfect) the roundabout mixes these up until you have them all.
Ultimately, we are all responsible in some sense for our own behaviour. However the freedom of people to choose to do the right thing is often severely limited by circumstance and previous choices.
I've worked with the homeless, this is absolutely the case. Being assaulted or stolen from while homeless is a matter of when not if once you've also lost your car. Sexual assault is also not uncommon.
I disagree that the parent described an "unforgivably evil cartoon villain" but how does your comment help? It's clear that particular type of homelessness is a massive problem in SF, and how they managed to get to that state isn't particularly relevant in solving the crisis. It's still important in helping prevent people from getting to that point, but that's not what we're talking about here.
A shitty environment certainly contributes, but drug abuse has risen in every demographic, and genetic predisposition is a huge factor (40-60% cited here[1]).
>Scientists estimate that genes, including the effects environmental factors have on a person's gene expression, called epigenetics, account for between 40 and 60 percent of a person's risk of addiction
That's why I phrased it as "genetic predisposition". As I understand, environment is of a major factor in gene expression, but the underlying genetics also vary between individuals, eg. Native Americans and other ethnic groups have a genetic predisposition towards alchoholism, or others that are bad with lactose, etc.
I agree with your example, but the number cited is not for innate genetic predisposition. It includes including the effects environmental factors have on a person's gene expression.
Some of these may be relatively uniform through the population, but manifest due to different environmental factors.
e.g. Child abuse could cause epigenetic changes to gene expression associated with a drug predisposition. This may be conserved between individuals.
I don't see how you can consider it 'painting a cartoon villain' when it's acknowledging a shitty reality through the lens if objectivity. There really are people doing those things. Commonly. I'd visit SF maybe once a month when I lived out there, and seeing people do all of those things on any given visit was a coin flip.
Also, you are right, people are very often victims of their environment. A component of that environment is the ease of doing bad things. If you treat people who do bad things as victims, that makes doing bad things easier. You have to balance compassion with consequences. One without will fail.
i think people lose hope, when they get a little further in life or make a step towards progress and tell people. a lot of west coast people (i live in seattle) have a hard time celebrating peoples small gains. it's all about posturing for them, they care because it makes them fit in but when it comes to actually treating people like they are human, they don't, a lot of people in these big tech cities are using each other to get ahead and if you cannot offer someone some type of nugget for them to get ahead, then you might as well be useless or homeless to them. i've witnessed it in my own career, a lot of people fear people who are struggling, even if that person never ask them for anything, they will ghost you or belittle you.
it's only a matter of time before the judgement comes for those people. like you can't treat people like they are trash because when you are down on your luck, karma or your consciousness will prevent you from getting the help you need. it's important to remember that not all these people are on drugs, some are broken, like sad broken, or a ton of mental illness. but yeah there are people on drugs, most people don't turn to drugs for fun, they turn to drugs because they are miserable and want to feel something. just like alcohol. people use drugs to avoid their situation, also why change when everyone thinks you'll never change? it's like the world has issues with forgiveness, mercy, empathy, kindness and are judgmental because they fear that poverty is contagious.
This. You hit the nail on the head - posturing of tech people. These people talk about racism and poverty as if they are solved issues. The policy has become - here's an olive branch, now it's your fault for being homeless.
The old way this stuff was handled was a social safety net - not one based in economic policy, but one that was churches and just people that cared. I think both still exist, but the current state of things is seeing a massive shift from selflessness to selfishness is actually having an effect.
The selfishness comes from a place of - it's not my problem it's now handled by policy X so I don't need to bother personally.
The reality is: Poverty is contagious. Very very contagious. I know this firsthand.
I'm totally ok with people only taking care of themselves. If you have time/energy/money to spare, sure, use to help someone in need, someone that help will actually help. But if you don't, that's totally fine too.
None of that really changes the need to arrest people who rob stores, and the need to disincentize living in tents and shooting up in the streets like you own them.
>I fuckin pray that if I ever get into that state, that educated people would have the sophistication to view me as something other than the unforgivably evil cartoon villain that you describe.
Why should they if you act like a cartoon villain? Should they pretend you are helping an old lady when they are acting like a villain and robbing her?
At some point the causality doesn't matter. IF something is broken, it doesn't matter how it got that way. You can fix it, throw it away, or mitigate the damage it causes.
Some people can't be helped. Some can with significant effort. Some need to be locked away so that they don't hurt people. Sometimes the best you can do is mitigate their suffering.
San Francisco built a bunch of 24-hour public restrooms in the early 2000s downtown, and today they're horrendous. The problem is cyclical: people shit on the streets because there's no public restrooms -- but there's no public restrooms because San Francisco is filled with psychopaths who have no problem dropping their pants and shitting in the middle of a street. Give them a public restroom and they'll destroy it.
The people causing these problems aren't normal people who think like you and just happen to be homeless. You can't relate to them by trying to project yourself into their position. They're completely different mentally. They do not think rationally, and they do not have any empathy for others around them.
Your comment is downvoted but it's something that has to be considered. Yes people shit on the streets because there are no toilets, but there are no toilets because it's extremely difficult to provide them due to abuse. It all links back to drug abuse again.
This would require some significant trial, design, study. My first question is are people who are willing to use a toilet publicly exposed actually likely to use it vs just some quiet street. And there are still plenty of ways to ruin a utilitarian toilet like shoving trash in and blocking the drain. At the very least most people can admit that the problem is more complex than simply dropping in some public toilet blocks.
You have to consider these things because there are more than enough people willing to destroy things simply for the purpose of destroying them.
the second group speaks to societal failure. If anyone wants to address this in a serious manner, you have to address people's humanity, needs (we're talking Maslow's Hierarchy here), and do so in a way that preserves dignity.
I'd look towards FDR who came closest in the last century to addressing this with the model of the second (economic) bill of rights.
I’ve posted links before, but SF publishes a regular homeless census. It includes information about mental health, substance abuse and what locale the person became homeless in. This data clearly shows that most homeless people in SF are not choosing to engage in extreme anti-social behavior. Rather what’s happening is you’re noticing the worst cases, and extrapolating that to people such as a single mother working as security guard at night living in an RV.
Doesn't this just reinforce the point of the parent post, that there are two types of homelessness?
They are explicitly separating the worst cases from those like the working mother in the RV?
Looking at the 2019 report[1], the chronically homeless better fit the negative stereotype.
Sixty-three percent 63% of chronically homeless survey respondents reported alcohol or
substance use. 53% reported living with a psychiatric or emotional condition, 52%
with post-traumatic stress disorder, 48% with a chronic health problem, and 21% suffered from a traumatic brain injury
This is from self reported survey data, so the actual numbers could be more grim (e.g. problems not acknowledged or diagnosed).
If you check page 28 it shows the overall rate at 42% for substance abuse, 39% for mental health and 37% for PTSD. Your summary is from only the chronically homeless. That skews the data towards the people who are by definition the hardest to help.
Isn't it sort of like the dead sea effect? People that are mentally stable, hard working, but down on their luck will eventually get out. People that are mentally unstable get trapped in drug cycles and stay homeless forever. So type 1 would be more temporary homelessness while type 2 more permanent homelessness.
>There are clearly two distinct things going on and they likely have two totally different solutions. If media and politicians keep communicating as if there is only one problem, despite what our ears and eyes tell us every single day, then this will continue to get worse and the outcome will likely be the same as the 'defund the police' movement-- a voter referendum that says 'enough of this nonsense'.
The establishment's failure to humanely deal with the problem is making a non-humane solution inevitable. I'm not sure anyone wants that, but sooner or later a plurality will be willing and eager to look the other way.
Why do Americans do drugs and have more bad behavior than other parts of the world if it's just a personal choice?
Blaming the poor for being poor does not help. Other countries does not depend so much inn police but on other social services, that 'non sense' actually makes a lot of sense and works. Police cannot solved social problems.
So, I agree that voters do not back up these policies. And that is why you get the problems and human suffering that you get.
It looks like the US is definitely up there for drug use. I'm not sure about bad behaviour, but it's a bit of an international reputation. Personally, most US citizens I've met have been, on average, equally as nice as people from anywhere else.
I'm definitely not agreeing with the parent comment in fact it really rubs me the wrong way, and I'm probably not even entirely disagreeing with yours, but ffs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_homeless_... Sort per capita, and yes I know this is probably a flawed list whatever it's good enough. We are not talking about "America" we are primarily talking about SF or more broadly coastal California.
Quote from Moonrise Kindgdom, "I love you, but you don't know what you are talking about."
1. By the time a person is homeless, there is a very small percentage whom ever get off the streets.
2. Yes, there are a percentage of homeless that enrages the public, but most are just trying to make it through the night. (It's housed gangs that are doing most of the shoplifting. Plus--I believe stores are using theft as an excuse to close low revenue stores. And Employees theft is never talked about.)
3. San Francisco could put porta potties where the homeless congregate. When they move, move the outhouses.
4. I've given up on a solution, other than letting them camp on federal land. Provide out houses, a place to cook, and Portable showers too. Don't just give money to a crooked 501c3 that doesn't do much.
5. Every homeless person I have known does not want a lot.
They want to hold on to a bit of degrading ego they lose every day.
Meaning they don't need 50 rules made up by someone who doesn't have a clue to what they are going through.
Yes--a room with a lock.
6. The city could hire traveling doctors, and provide meds to those that want it.
7. The small percentage that are rehabilitatable should be given more focused help.
Homeless I gave know gave a saying, "Homeless for a year, homeless for life". Meaning the brain just changes.
8. Homelessness is my biggest concern, and I have been angered over how we have dealt with it for decades. That whole Broken Window Pane is not what America should succum to.
So in summary, give them a place to chit.
Oh yea, I have know more than a few once fully employed Programmers who ended up on the street.
Jim Fox spend twenty years climbing into Scothch Broom in order to sleep. Spent his last years wearing a Penguin Outfit begging for change. Going in and out of county jail because of jaywalking, drinking in public, sleeping in the park (If you are homeless expect a ticket.), etc. type of infractions.
Jim Fox was very instrumental in the programming of Wordstar, but Semore only gave him a bit of credit.
Those of us not from wealthy loving families know we are up just a few clicks from homeless.
This is a really shallow take on the situation. Like any big problem there are multiple factors involved.
Every time there is a crisis or economic hard times it shakes the tree and we get a new crop of homeless. Those who work with organizations trying to help have long noted this cyclic nature that mirrors business cycles. For long timers this crop of homeless are notable as being by far the oldest and sickest yet.
The primary question isn't their character, but how best to manage the situation. Opining that they brought it on themselves does not get them off the street or reduce expensive calls to responders.
> Opining that they brought it on themselves does not get them off the street or reduce expensive calls to responders
OP's point, charitably, is that advocates to San Francisco's homeless may need to stomach a harsher response to the most-extreme cases, e.g. assaults and repeated public defecation, to avoid voters turning on the issue as a whole.
Empathy is needed. But human nature is human nature, and when people feel their safety and security is threatened their empathy modulates down. That's what you're seeing in OP's comment. That's happening in San Francisco.
(Oxytocin is critically involved in empathy and social behaviors. It has also been linked to toxin-elicited and socially-mediated disgust [1].)
Approximately nobody chooses this lifestyle, dude. You’re not going to make much progress on this issue if you start from what seems a very skewed perception of it.
In reality the problem is quite large and complex, and is exacerbated by the intersection of many different factors. Boiling it down to “those who deserve a helping hand” and “those who chose this lifestyle” is worryingly reminiscent of the idea of “deserving” and “undeserving” poor. There are way more than “two distinct things going on”.
haha, as it should. Taking the "hard line" here seems awfully stupid to me though. Isn't that what causes the problem? I would happily pay my share of taxes to provide the most problematic homeless with a lifetime supply of heroin and hookers if it meant my family could safely park their car when they visit.
I will admit that my current tax rate is a little....irritating in a state that can't seem to provide reasonable roads or trains, especially trains, ffs why is the east coast so much better at this. But I think that the segment of the homelessness that has the greatest negative impact on life in SF is probably smaller than you would imagine, and maybe it is just flat out worth it.
Over here on the east coast we have a lot of legacy infrastructure to support those rail lines, but they're nothing compared to what they used to be a century ago. That said, I'm hopeful that this administration can actually complete the connection between Scranton PA and NYC, as it would economically help a badly hurting rustbelt community.
As far as the homeless minority: sure, yes, they may not be as big of a population as we assume, and yet here we are discussing how much of a problem it is.
Personally, I can get behind stuff like UBI to help those folks so long as it's distributed to everyone rich or poor, and/or other inefficient social programs are shutdown to help offset these costs. Otherwise I feel like we're just rewarding incompetence and penalizing success, which I believe is where we get into enabling the proliferation of the worst kind of society to live in — one filled with apathy, nihilism, and literally poo everywhere.
Let's get one thing out of the way first, I support tax money being used to support the homeless, regardless of the cause of said homelessness, so maybe I am not the correct audience for the article but...
I am incredibly confused as to why both this article and the Oliver piece are so proud of themselves for pointing out that not all, or not even the majority, of homeless suffer from serious mental health and addiction problems. Maybe these articles aren't targeted at me, BECAUSE I ALREADY KNOW THAT.
Is there really ANYBODY who is referring to a single mother living out of a car because her rent got raised when they complain about the homeless?!?! In SF I would imagine most people aren't even referring to your garden variety homeless similar to what is most visible in cities like NY. The actual problem is not being able to park anywhere with anything in your car, and passing people lying on the street that look like they are barely even alive, as well as your traditional human waste and the smell that comes with.
I don't want to act as though I am disagreeing with the conclusions of these articles, for the most part I'm not. I'm also not judging people for ending up homeless. Just please stop pretending that addiction and mental health issues are some sort of unfair characterization, because it is clearly a very accurate description of the group that is responsible for the most unpleasant manifestations of the homelessness in SF. I'm also not saying we should stop trying to help and house that specific group either. I'm just baffled by how this is being framed. "A humanitarian crisis, not an unsightly inconvenience"?!?!?!?!?! Has it not crossed the author's mind that IT COULD BE BOTH.
I've lived in SF for 10 years and seeing this problem grow everyday led me down a rabbit hole where I tried to understand what I could do politically and who I should vote for and support to at least show that I cared about the problem. It led me down a path where I came to understand housing and it's role in Europe and China. The most important thing I've learned is people don't care about the homeless and just think they are unsightly. It's a humanitarian crisis in the same way your dirty dishes are a humanitarian crisis, for most people. These are not people to be saved, but dirt to be washed off the sidewalks.
There are 4 ways to deal with the homeless that I've summarized:
(1) Kill them. I mention this one first so that it's in the back of your mind as you read about how politicians, nationwide, strike down any effort to alleviate this problem. It's the feeling I get when people say "we should do something" but then oppose any housing-first approaches.
(2) House them. Another poster mentioned it in this thread but this is essentially the approach to Vienna took. House people, in houses, not shelters, unconditionally. Once they have housing, then you can work on rehab and social/mental work. Without housing, the mental problems are impossible to solve. Of course, this would require effectively socializing the housing market and people & blackrock would scream about asset prices.
(3) Inprison them. This arguably more expensive than (2) but it doesn't affect asset prices as much. You could even recoup that cost with free prison labor. Sure most of the guys who argue we should do this are also the ones that say vaccine mandates are an infringement on basic freedoms and that being forced to wear a mask is essentially 1984. Of course you would have to figure out where you would build this prison, and the NIMBYs would prefer you built it on the Moon (they wont say that though, they will say something like "Building prisons is racist").
(4) Let them camp on the streets. This is unsightly, but it costs the less and maybe you will get a bit of (1) too when they die of exposure. Most cities already employ (1) through (4), they just wait for winter to roll around and problem solved. And as we see in San Francisco, as long as the housing market is sufficiently limited, then having a homeless camp outside your window wont reduce your property values all that much, and you get to use them as a political tool to prevent even more housing from being built.
Barring some political revolution or deadly plague I've become doom-pilled about this situation ever being resolved. Too many people, either directly or indirectly, largely benefit from the status quo. Paying $1B/year and extracting taxes from Salesforce is ultimately preferable solution than tanking the housing market.
I do wonder about number 2. Obviously it's a great solution, and even a less expensive one that you might think for a pretty good swathe of the homeless. But I've always had a pet theory that the real reason NYC and SF homeless seem so different is winter, and Vienna also gets really fucking cold. Ideally I am wrong in this, but I wonder if the most visible group in SF need something closer to assisted living than just housing.
Which honestly I am fine paying for, I just wonder if rehabilitation just isn't possible for many.
There will always be people you can't rehabilitate, but we know there are lots of people who are only homeless because they got priced out or their house burned down or they got laid off. Those people definitely can be helped.
And they should be helped. Absolutely. Regardless of the reasons I think people who need it should be helped. I just think that the most difficult group to help is also the group that causes the most serious issues.
>(2) House them. Another poster mentioned it in this thread but this is essentially the approach to Vienna took. House people, in houses, not shelters, unconditionally.
I think we should house them, but not unconditionally. Housing should be offered to everyone, but continued housing should be dependent on ongoing participation in drug rehab and mental health programs. This should be paired with enforcement of public health, shoplifting, vagrancy and other quality of life laws. Housing and rehabilitation services should be available to everyone without regard to their ability to pay, but if they choose to reject this, and insist on acting in a publicly disruptive and criminal manner, then they should be locked up.
Mandating drug rehab and mental health programs requires actually having good ones to offer, which is not something the US can really do right now. It's not a bad idea on paper.
Many homeless people are already working 2-3 jobs to try and earn enough money to get off the street, so mandating they spend a bunch of time and energy on shoddy programs would be sabotaging their progress.
As someone who's benefited from access to adequate (but not great) mental health care through my employer's insurance, I definitely think it could help. But I sincerely doubt the qualifications of most of the organizations and people who want to force "mental health" on homeless people who are already struggling.
>but not unconditionally. Housing should be offered to everyone, but continued housing should be dependent on ongoing participation in drug rehab and mental health programs.
The problem with this is it attempt to fix too many problems at once. The US does not have robust drug rehab programs, and if you make this a stipulation for housing, then those people will end up on the streets again and tax payers will eviscerate you for building housing and still having homeless. Secondly, various interest groups will use your arbitrary lines to impose their brand of morality. The christians will come in and say no weed and alcohol, and now no one wants to live there, and you've effectively replicated 70% of the problems that cause the homeless to not live in homeless shelters.
I think a better question to ask is why you want to impose this drug law. Are you letting your morals get in the way of public policy or do you actually believe that the people who live on the street today will just unilaterally decide to stop living on the street and give up heroin? Refer back to my list. Once they have failed the drug test you have (1), (3), and (4). You can go with (3), but prisons, in the US today, do not rehabilitate people and are more expensive than just housing them.
>The problem with this is it attempt to fix too many problems at once.
Its the same problem.
>The US does not have robust drug rehab programs, and if you make this a stipulation for housing, then those people will end up on the streets again and tax payers will eviscerate you for building housing and still having homeless.
Creating robust drug rehab and mental counseling programs alongside building housing for the homeless must all be considered 3 legs of the same stool or each will fail.
>The christians will come in and say no weed and alcohol, and now no one wants to live there, and you've effectively replicated 70% of the problems that cause the homeless to not live in homeless shelters.
Shelters are a non starter. The biggest problem with shelters here in NY is the rampant violence that takes place. People are not going to stay where they don't feel (and aren't) safe. There are numerous other problems with shelters, but even if all of these were solved, most people just aren't interested in forced communal living.
>I think a better question to ask is why you want to impose this drug law. Are you letting your morals get in the way of public policy or do you actually believe that the people who live on the street today will just unilaterally decide to stop living on the street and give up heroin?
I don't want to pass a drug law, I want to offer housing to drug addicts who want to clean up their lives and get off the streets. Nobody should be forced to take up this offer, but if they refuse it, and continue to break the law by stealing and creating a public menace, then they should be locked up. If someone chooses to be homeless and live in their car and boot heroin all day, that's fine as far as I'm concerned - but they can't be camping on the sidewalks, or robbing stores, or harassing people just trying to walk down the street.
>prisons, in the US today, do not rehabilitate people and are more expensive than just housing them.
Our prisons are medieval dungeons that are desperately in need of a complete overhaul, just like our "system" of dealing with homelessness and the crime that results from it. The fact is that our society is very broken on many levels, and the rising drug-addicted homeless population just happens to be one of the most visible signs of it. To be honest, I don't think we have the competence or the capacity to solve any of these problems. Our government, on every level, is inefficient, corrupt and incompetent - and only getting worse. We can sit here and jawbone about potential solutions to our many problems, but my honest opinion is that none of these problems are going to be solved. They are all going to continue to get worse until we reach some sort of breaking point. It's impossible to know how this will manifest itself exactly but it won't be pretty.
I feel like your (3) isn't discussed openly enough. As an antidote, I have a family member that was an addict living on the street. He was arrested for multiple petty crimes, and through prison was able to sober up and get the help he needed. He's now a productive member of society and we couldn't be more proud.
Now obviously we shouldn't just throw addicts into prison, and there is a laundry list of other hurdles to solve. Primarily I think the punishment after the punishment from having a criminal record (which I think we've quietly made progress on, see Fair Chance Odinances by SF). But it's a process we already have in place, and could be expanded in a humanitarian manner with less red tape than some of the other radical solutions. At the very least I'd love to see it in the running of options discussed, but all I hear is prisons=pure evil
Agreed, it is very close to the mental institutions which were once more common.
I don't think people should be institutionalized for simply being homeless, addicts, or mentally ill, but if their issues are leading to unlawful behavior, we should be able to put them in a more humane prison system that includes assessment and rehabilitation.
My uncle moved to SF in the early 2000s and died in May 2020 on Eddy St. Even before he became "homeless" he just did drugs all day and thought the world owed him something. He had a college degree and everything, worked white collar jobs, but decided he liked heroin more than that stuff, so he moved to the Tenderloin. Lack of housing wasn't part of the equation, it was the lifestyle that drew him.
I'm sorry about your uncle. The crazy thing about Heroin, I think they talk about it in Trainspotting, is that it isn't entirely irrational to value heroin more than everything else in life. That's how unbelievably good it makes people feel.
My great fear is that someday someone will make something as powerful as heroin, that doesn't have the same barrier to entry, and can easy be smoked out of a vape pen or something. Just that could easily be the demise of civilization.
I'll save you a click: "Subscribe now so you don't miss part 2." Part 2 is (I'm assuming) where the "strategy" is explained. The link provided is just the lead-in describing the problem as the author sees it. D---, would not click again.
I just skimmed very briefly, and the above link seems to just be defining terms and establishing a model of homelessness. Part 2[0] has the first part of the plan, "mitigation", which seems to boil down to add a bunch of prefab structures as homeless shelters.
Part 3[1] is the next step, "prevention": rental assistance, eviction defense (already exists, but underfunded), and informing residents of the programs. And add more housing
Part 4 is supposed to be "treatment", but I don't think it's posted yet.
> We can’t begin to solve homelessness without building more housing.
Yes we need to build more housing. But ... there are more vacant units in the city than there are homeless. The most recent ACS stats said there were >40k vacant units in the city. Meanwhile, the city was willing to pay $60k/yr per _tent site_ in safe sleeping site parking lots.
Almost certainly in reality we will need to build more housing. But there's enough money being poorly spent that honestly we could afford to solve the _housing_ portion of it by putting people in 1BD apartments. We _choose_ not to, and this reveals our preferences if not our values.
The revealed preference is, we'd _rather_ have homeless people sleep in parking lots at $5k/mo per tent than pay for an apartment at $3k/mo. We'd rather live in a society where property rights are respected than one where housing is considered a right (as in the state of NY). And we'd rather move the problem around continually than solve it.
> The most recent ACS stats said there were >40k vacant units in the city.
It’s critical to note that “vacant” can mean a lot of things when the census starts throwing the term around. For example, in San Francisco it could mean any of the following:
* 6,694 of those vacancies were units currently listed for rent that hadn’t yet found tenants. Another 1,031 were homes for sale that didn’t yet have buyers.
* 6,294 were homes with either current owners or renters that were just not living there. This can happen for any number of reasons: hospital stays, long trips out of town, delayed move-ins, even cases of homeowners who have died but are still technically counted as the resident.
* 8,523 were “occasional use” homes—i.e., these were second homes, vacation homes, some types of short-term rentals, or just any unit that was accounted for but not lived in most of the year.
*Finally, the census designated 11,760 homes in the catch-all category of “other vacant,” which primarily means vacancies without an obviously stated cause.
For a city with 800K residents, 8k 'occasional use' homes and 10k 'potentially vacant' homes is not a lot. And it's not as though this crisis was caused by those numbers going up faster than residents.
Again, I agree that we likely need to build more housing.
But when you're living in a "humanitarian crisis", leaving empty units empty is a luxury which we currently choose to permit. But that choice isn't mandatory, and it does reflect on us.
If a property hasn't sold for months, why _shouldn't_ someone be able to live in it? Some units listed for rent remain listed for an extended period. I lived across from a unit which was empty for more than 18 months. It was listed at substantially above market, and the landlord was just being picky. Should it remain her prerogative to leave it empty until she finds the tenant of her dreams if in the meantime people's lives may be threatened by living without shelter?
Maybe the answer is yes. Maybe you think the rights of a property owner to make decisions about how they will profit from their property is more important than all the other considerations, including risks to life. Is it yes for all such goods in short supply? When hospitals didn't have ventilators, if you had functional ventilators unused and in storage, would it have been ethical to let them remain there? Should it have been legal?
These are all choices. And currently we choose to privilege rights of property owners above a human right to shelter. And when we do build, if we build luxury condos, that's a choice too. If we repeatedly and consistently decide that it's more important that property owners and developers be able to make as much money as they can than for people to be housed, then we've chosen to have a homeless crisis, because we're a homeless crisis kind of people with homeless crisis values.
The government could forcefully take properties from owners and chuck random people off the street in to them. The majority of these properties will end up ruined. Or the government could build their own housing to use for this purpose. I can tell you which idea would be more popular with voters.
hypothetical public program: "We notice you haven't been able to fill this unit for 6 months. We're going to give you market rate based on the neighborhood and square footage, for this person to live here."
property owner: "But what about my right to discriminate of people I don't like the look of?"
> The majority of these properties will end up ruined.
Show me the ruined apartments from a program that tried this. I'm skeptical because there are supportive housing programs, and the complaint I normally hear is that they don't have nearly enough capacity to meet the real need, not that once residents get placed they "ruin" their units.
> Or the government could build their own housing to use for this purpose. I can tell you which idea would be more popular with voters.
And show me the many many public housing projects we've built because public housing is so popular. In SF, neighborhoods have a pretty consistent track record of fighting back against any housing that doesn't increase their comps. Note that mostly there aren't actually public housing projects for them to push back against, but rather projects from non-profits like TNDC or Mission Housing.
This looks like a nightmare. The problem is if you gather all of the lowest people in one building, it becomes hell on earth. But if you disperse them, you have a building full of decent people and one person who writes tags on the hallways and leaves trash around. So the rest of the building rightfully wants that one individual kicked out and you end up at homelessness again.
You also have no leverage against these people. For normal people you can threaten them with fines, etc. But for some people, they have nothing to lose and do not care about any punishment you apply.
Yeah, about that, we've noticed that in your household there are 160 square feet of area available per person currently on the lease and the People's Housing Commission established through Science that no person needs more than 50 square feet to live. Make sure you do not waste living space by getting more roommates, if you are unable to find more roommates in 6 months time the PHC is going to give you roommates.
1) Literally any real estate market is going to have vacancies, because otherwise how would people move between spaces?
2) The question is 'what percentage of vacancies is too high?' Given the EXTREME carrying cost of owning an unoccupied home in SF, I think it's highly unlikely that SF is 'too high'. You neighbor may have had the wealth to pay that cost, but few others do.
3) 'Luxury' housing in SF does two things: house yuppies that would otherwise move to historic neighborhoods 2) turn into shitty non-luxury housing in 30 years. This idea that the fucking NEMA or whatever won't be a relatively low-rent building (a la Fox Plaza) in 20 years is not grounded in thoughtfulness.
4) The real 'villains' are property owners who want the value of their house to go up (as an investment). And what do those people hate more than anything? New construction that is more desirable than their home.
WE HAVE A HOMELESS CRISIS BECAUSE THERE ARE NOT ENOUGH HOMES, DRIVEN BY THE FACT THAT THE RESIDENTS OF SF LIKE HAVING EXPENSIVE HOMES. You can spin it any way you want, but it's the truth and if you don't watch out, the same thing is coming for you in your town, because SF is just ahead of everywhere else, not on a different path.
> Literally any real estate market is going to have vacancies, because otherwise how would people move between spaces?
Take the building at 2100 Market, which was formerly run by Sonder. They took out a 5 year lease, the pandemic hit, they tried to sue to get out of it, and the whole thing has been empty for more than a year. I don't know how many units it is, but a lot of people could have been housed for that period. I have walked by that building, and homeless people in close proximity for _so long_. Yes, I find it about as offensive as feces.
I'm not claiming no unit should ever be vacant for a week. I'm claiming the scope of wasted livable space is comparable to the size of the problem, and that even at market rates could often be cheaper than the ridiculous things we're doing. Again, $60k/year per _tent site_ in a parking lot.
> The question is 'what percentage of vacancies is too high?'
No, I think the question is "What do we value?", or perhaps "what's our indifference curve between people living on the street and owners choosing to keep their units empty?"
If we weren't in a homeless crisis, the vacancies wouldn't be a problem.
> Given the EXTREME carrying cost of owning an unoccupied home in SF, I think it's highly unlikely that SF is 'too high'. You neighbor may have had the wealth to pay that cost, but few others do.
No, in some cases, people can't afford to fill homes. In late 2019, there were a bunch of condo buildings that were "struggling" to sell, but prices didn't come down -- because bringing down the price on one unit would set the comps for the whole project. My (former) landlord's building is rent-controlled. I think part of the calculus was to hope that rents increased and long term getting a tenant in at the higher rate would be much more valuable. When the pandemic cause prices to drop, she doubled down; taking a discount tenant is worse than having no tenant.
Even before the pandemic we saw this all over the city with retail spaces too; places can be left empty for years because the hypothetical future revenue from a vacant space is valued more highly than actual revenue from a tenant today.
We seem to feel that property owners speculating is more important than anything that actually happens inside the property.
> 'Luxury' housing in SF does two things: house yuppies that would otherwise move to historic neighborhoods 2) turn into shitty non-luxury housing in 30 years. This idea that the fucking NEMA or whatever won't be a relatively low-rent building (a la Fox Plaza) in 20 years is not grounded in thoughtfulness.
If you have a homelessness crisis, and you believe that crisis requires building more housing, then I suggest building housing for the homeless is a much more direct solution than building luxury housing for the rich and waiting a generation. Why do people who wouldn't believe in trickle-down economics for income tax policy believe that trickle-down housing makes sense?
The other thing luxury housing does in SF is make money for the developers, and for their friends at DBI.
> The real 'villains' are property owners who want the value of their house to go up (as an investment). And what do those people hate more than anything? New construction that is more desirable than their home.
The real villains are the developers who have so successfully sold the idea that the only way to house the poor is to build and sell more houses to the rich.
Similarly, eating at Lazy Bear doesn't somehow make prices go down at Grocery Outlet.
I mean, it always amazes me how much people want the 'corporate developers' to be the only bad guy, and not the citizens of this city.
We have a homelessness crisis because, we have not built truly affordable housing in SF since the 60's (related: I would love to hear your explanation as to why developers are the ones who don't want multi-unit housing west of Divis).
We have the country's worst homelessness crisis because while we were not building affordable housing, we also weren't building unaffordable housing either. We just weren't building!
I agree, building 50k supportive housing units in this city tomorrow would be great, but I also understand that the braintrusts of Telegraph Hill are unlikely to support such a thing. So instead, all I think is, let's at least release a little pressure and try not to be an international embarrassment, because 'nothing' or 'let's just put homeless people in existing hotel rooms' or 'Defer blame to marginal vacancies caused by startups' is actually a very nefarious way to make this problem worse.
> we could afford to solve the _housing_ portion of it by putting people in 1BD
I'm not claiming that apartments solve the opioid crisis.
But notice the pattern.
NIMBY property owners in SF profit while contributing to the housing shortage. We protect their rights to preserve a shortage while looking disdainfully at displaced victims.
Sacklers make >$10B selling opioids. They declare bankruptcy, keep >$5B and are protected from further liabilities.
The recipe seems to be:
- profit while creating a disaster
- accept no responsibility
- blame your victims
You think mentally ill drug addicts will destroy property.
But what if mentally ill rich people are destroying society?
I think the rich are a convenient scape goat for a mentally ill society that is destroying itself and wants to externalize blame.
This includes parents who fail to raise their children, neighbors and friends who ignore misery and addiction, and people who walk by and fail to lift a finger to help.
How many people in this thread do you think actually donate to a homeless non-profit instead of buying a latte. How many volunteer at a homeless shelter instead of watching Netflix?
People don't want to be part of the solution. They want someone else to be responsible, and someone else to blame.
His analysis and solution centers on treating this as a mental health issue, consolidating the efforts to deal with the problem, and generally modeling CalPsych after what the Dutch and several other European cities did to deal with their similar situations in previous decades.
I just recently read this article in The Atlantic[0] that, to an extent, tied the wave of homelessness to a new version of meth that's taken over.
the subheadline is Different chemically than it was a decade ago, the drug is creating a wave of severe mental illness and worsening America’s homelessness problem.
I feel like everyone talking about drug addicted homeless people shitting everywhere are really just upset that the issue affects them, in their otherwise class-insulated world, somehow.
Here's a story about homeless students living in their cars. It's not just some drug addicts making bad decisions -- they are a minority. There are thousands of people sleeping on the streets and in cars because they can not afford housing.
The sad truth is that the people in this situation lack shame. They lack the sadness that you feel when you see the way they live. They will take what you give them, and then they will take more. They will make you feel guilty for not giving enough. They will steal from you when you’re not looking. They will make you realize that beyond the external features towards which you empathize, there’s nothing inside. To whatever extent they were once alive, they’re gone now. The living dead. Their only remaining use is to be the partially sentient puppets of a childish political fantasy.
The homeless crisis is a drug epidemic caused by the law of unintended consequences.
Marijuana being legalized forced Mexican drug cartels to pivot into making synthetic meth (P2P meth)
Synthetic meth is much cheaper to make and is hard to regulate because it can be made from a cocktail of various household products, (the older meth was made from ephedra, and could be somewhat regulated by curbing the sale of large amounts of ephedra)
Whereas P2P meth can be made cheaply in large quantities with ubiquitous household chemicals
Unfortunately P2P causes psychosis at a much faster and more prevalent rate than ephedra based Meth.
So that’s what’s going on, there’s a huge influx of synthetic meth coming into America and really destroying a lot of lives. And homelessness is exploding
According to Hollywood one does not simply homebrew Phenylacetone. In movies like The Witness or the TV show Breaking Bad their entire plotlines revolve around people killing to get a drop of the stuff. It's not like it's anything new or that ephedra is some kind of natural produce that grows on trees. Skimming through your article it sounds like these cartel chemists are dropping dead in their laboratories trying to make it and producing a final product that's more like krokodil if anything.
You shouldn’t skim the article and assume things and down vote stuff you don’t know about. Sam is a friend of mine and one of the leading experts about this crisis. You should read his book dream land and not jump to conclusions. He’s dedicated a lot to this story. https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1620402521/ref=dbs_a_w_dp_162...
Why are you angry with me for downvoting something? How would you know that? Sorry for not reading your friend's book. Never claimed to be a drug expert.
Like most readers of this forum, I advocate supplying free drugs and free housing in some of the most expensive real-estate in the world, no strings attached, to people suffering mental health and addiction issues that destroy their insight and self control. Anyone who is against this position or wants to have a more nuanced discussion is privileged and clearly suffering from a lack of empathy and is therefore a worse human being.
San Francisco has the benefit of some wealthy taxpayers to stick for the sizeable bill that will be necessary.
Seriously, this is a problem for the ages. If they take a continued 'soft' stance on homelessness, it's just a beacon to draw more to the population. To take a harder stance requires political change, which will take courage and some backtracking.
As techies, many of us have a connection to SF. I hope for good results here, it will be something sociologists can discuss for a long time.
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 292 ms ] threadAnecdotally, I live in a quite affordable medium sized city in the midwest, and even we have a homeless crisis and an increasingly number of homeless encampments on public property. The local government being dominated by progressives, lets these encampments continue - which previously were never permitted.
Right now, the price of homes is going up everywhere, and as a consequence, I'd expect to see more homelessness everywhere.
The camps may also have something to do with this, which has little to do with what local politicians do or do not want: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_v._Boise
It's bizarre how much people fight against this notion. You talk about not many people having Ferraris because they're expensive, and people look at you like "uh, ok, duh". But when the median price of homes is over 850,000 dollars (California), it's this BIG MYSTERY why people do not have homes.
On top of that, the permiting process is insane, takes forever (I've gone through it), and costs a lot of money. Your neighbors get a very long time to file any complaints on your proposal (which they always do, because NIMBY). It is such a painful thing that I'd rather avoid doing any more construction.
CA has a lot of rules that make construction very expensive, and SF even more so (only cast iron drain pipes, because ABS is somehow not good enough in this historic city).
Earthquakes are real, but forcing everybody with 5 units (I believe) to retrofit (at the same time) cost millions of dollars per property - driving up the rent.
And now solar power is mandatory for new construction, and solar is great, but it does add tens of thousands per unit.
Second house/vacation house (not rented): Multiply property tax by 10.
Rentals (including airbnb): If mortgaged: Max the rental (monthly and daily) to 1.1x Mortgage amount + yearly property tax amount / 12. Unmortgaged: Property tax amount * 2 max per monthly income.
Change the maximum amount you can sell a house to be equal to cost of materials plus 30 days of labor for 5 people.
Owner builder homes can get a 60K automatic grant - everything must be verified - and limit land HOA rules that specify a minimum sized house.
Make "Limited Density Owner-Built Rural Dwellings" possible in areas that are not affected by fire.
Finally to make all this feasible - make junk properties illegal (noise limits + junkyard style land usage)
It would solve a lot of NIMBY issues and please the YIMBYs. I have a billion other crazy ideas like this.
That's a terrible idea, who will construct anything if there is no money to be made? You don't fix those kinds of problems by price fixing, let the free market take care of the supply/demand issue. Unfortunately, the bay area is far from a free market when it comes to housing.
The problem with market rate is for homes is that it turns one person's ability to be homed into another person's extraneous income flip.
* The project had been before the Planning Commission for at least a year.
* The project had completed an final Environmental Impact Report that had been approved by the Planning Committee. Another regulatory hurdle of questionable value for a mid-city development.
* An advocacy group, Yerba Buena Neighborhood Consortium, apparently run by a local affordable housing ownership group called TODCO, had their lawyers file an appeal to the Board of Supes opposing certification of the EIR. What could have been a pro-forma approval is now another potential place for roadblock.
* The environmental reasons? Millenium Tower FUD, gentrification, and shadows on a nearby mid-city plaza. The scope of EIRs has apparently gotten massive if gentrification is included. (Whether a Nordstrom valet parking lot better serves the local low-income community than actual housing with an affordable housing carve-out is another question.)
* The Board of Supes reverses the Planning Commission's approval. Back to the drawing board. Or... if you want to _sell_ that property you can't do anything with, I'm sure there's a local property owner that will take it off your hands if the price is low enough. ;-)
We see here multiple stages way beyond zoning where a housing project can get torpedoed, and that these extra stages have grown in scope to cover just about anything local property owners might want to object to. And that's not even considering San Francisco's Discretionary Review process, which gives local groups even _more_ opportunities to delay or kill your project if they don't like it.
(I imagine many homeless people who is going to SF would be going/staying elsewhere in that case, maybe I'm wrong about that.)
The rest of the US decided to just ship the homeless west. What could the west coast do other than throw them in the ocean?
Throw them in jail? Then you are just housing them with extra steps. That's more expensive then just simply housing them; if the bay area won't build housing, why would the bay area expand prisons?
Edited to fix link, thanks!
While I understand the logic of the courts, this decision has absolutely ruined public parks in much of the western US.
I think the problem with this angle of argument is that it pretty much solely relies on extreme empathy holding from current homeowners (aka those with power). And when that empathy is worn down, such as the example woman in the oliver segment who has to pick up human poop on a regular basis, then the argument just falls completely flat. Like it basically goes like this "Look how bad these ppl have it, don't you care?" and the answer is "No." - then what do you do? There's no avenue for follow up or iteration - you've just made a assumption just completely breaks.
You can criticize the housed-first perspectives, but at least they try to find win-win common ground between the interest of the house (not picking up human poop) and the homeless (get a home). I'm also a big fan of the tax/finance forward methods and oliver had an example during his segment of a way to save $ per homeless per year spending.
To me this article reads as the epitome of 'bleeding-heart' syndrome, and lacking critical thinking toward actual problem solving with multiple stake holder interests in play.
Aside from housing, a lot of homeless people are in need of mental healthcare, and that's something no particular city is equipped to deal with without backing from the state.
Where else can they go? One of c. 2 dozen 'pit stops' that mostly close by 8pm?
That's the reason you've lost empathy for them, because they are humans who have to shit and are denied access to toilets?
Its totally fair, and expected that people lose sympathy when they have to clean up shit.
Yes, if there were safe, available, places to shit then that'd be a good step to avoid this issue. But the root issue is that people no longer have sympathy because its so disruptive and so gross and has been going on for so long.
> I find it so weird that people blame homeless people for defecating on the streets.
They're blamed because they did it. They did it because there is no alt, but they did it, and "it" is gross and not desirable. SF has been talking about the issue for years, and its not resolved, so your tolerance and sympathy drops over time.
EDIT: To be clear. I realize shit is gross. It's the most toxic thing a human regularly encounters.
But the implication of the grossness of shit being a 'bright red line' for lost empathy is that no reasonable human would EVER deal with someone else's shit, when that is demonstrably untrue.
We choose to empathize with babies and not homeless people. That's fine, I guess, but feels sort of gross on the cosmic scale.
Violence is an event and inherently ephemeral. Poop is a thing and it will sit there until removed giving me much more time to see it.
Maybe that's why?
I'm sure violence _would_ get on me pretty quickly, but I just don't see that much violence in the homeless in my local area.
Btw, it feels pretty disingenuous that your example is this group of perfect angel homeless people sleeping and praying on the corner. That rhetoric pretty much immediately loses anyone who has regular contact and they think "welp this person doesn't know what they are talking about"
If I, as an adult, can clean up your poop for you, then it escapes me why you, homeless but also adult, can't pick it up and put it in a dumpster. The logical conclusion is that you do not wish to.
So, I'm not so sure that the baby/dog to encampment dweller connection makes the most appropriate vehicle for mentally dealing with the poop. Or, maybe, it is the right vehicle. I really don't know.
When I rationalize my poop scooping duties by juxtaposing them with the duties of parents and dog owners, I end up placing the babies, dogs, and adult poopers in the same category. I don't know if that categorization actually reflects reality, and therefore I can't tell if that kind of rationalization will actually help me react to the poop in a constructive way.
Oxytocin--the hormone critically involved in empathy and social behaviors--has been linked to toxin-elicited and socially-mediated disgust [1]. If that link holds, it suggests why public defecation is the emerging turning point of the debate.
Rhetorically, this means trivializing the problem is unlikely to be successful. People will lose empathy for people who shit on their street. On the flip side, this offers a well-scoped beachhead. Solving the public defecation problem could rebuild empathy for San Francisco's homeless and give political oxygen to the broader, more-intractable problem of homelessness overall.
(I'm honestly shocked nobody has run for office in San Francisco on a vision zero-esque pledge to eliminate public defecation.)
[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1111/gbb.12...
There is a lot of research on this. It's a deep, fascinating rabbit hole and I don't know its contours well enough to flag the entrances. But it touches subjects like mammalian postpartum depression, infanticide in great apes, why the characters :) make one go "aww," cute aggression and a host of other matters.
To address your point a bit more head on, I imagine public reactions to a publicly-defecating child would be very different from those to an adult.
Are you so out of touch with basic human desires that you don't see the difference between having _your biological baby with your genes_ and a random homeless person? That people love their baby _despite_ their poop, because of the joy they bring, and because it satisfies the most primary of biological drives (reproduction).
And you think it's weird that I'm okay with my baby's poop and not the poop of a random adult.
Shots across the bow to adoptees. Damn.
I've admitted that I don't like homeless people, but I put forth an authentic point of view and my engagement is a form of earnest attempt at solving the problem despite my personal dislike. I've noted the types of things I would be willing to vote for and what is less likely to win me over.
What do you think you are adding to the situation? You put on this position of caring so much about the homeless population yet all you seem capable of is burning bridges for nothing in return.
And despite your implication, it's actually not controversial to have the opinion that people generally care more about genetic heirs than adopted ones. God bless those with enough patience, understanding, and resources to adopt, but there's a reason why 99.9% of people on Earth have their own babies. Or are we just cretins in your view?
Maybe rather than caring so much about the quality of discourse online, you should look into those feelings. Damn.
Nope, I lost empathy because in Seattle the homeless are exempt from prosecution and commit crimes with impunity. People like Francisco Calderon (https://komonews.com/news/project-seattle/warrant-issued-for...) or Travis Berge (https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/meth-mental-illness-murder-...) are repeatedly released to commit crimes and harm others.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemeindebau
This may be managed by building high rises, I wonder what happens when these start to fall apart.
Can't see that happening in SF, they'll probably just tighten up the laws on loitering and rough sleeping and send them to private prisons instead... even if it costs more.
In general SFPD will not investigate anything short of a violent crime (I have personally experienced about $2k in property theft that they did not both to even file claims on for insurance purposes. I have needed medical treatment from an assault that was never investigated. FWIW, on one another occasion the police actually did catch the perpetrator of an assault with deadly case against me - though this was part of a much more serious set of crimes that happened on camera on a muni train).
In short SF has some serious problems. The police have by and large abdicated any sense of personal, professional or civic responsibility. In the absence of law enforcement, the results are simply whether people choose to be decent or not. For the most part SF is safe, but there are also some serious a-holes who try to make life shitty for everyone else.
"Since taking office Jan. 1, 2020 through March 1, 2021, Boudin has tried just 23 cases resulting in 16 convictions, including four assaults (three convictions); one auto burglary, one residential burglary, one gun felony (no conviction); three sexual assaults (two convictions); two robberies; seven misdemeanor DUIs (four convictions); and one misdemeanor vehicular homicide, which he lost. In 2019 during the same timeframe, Boudin’s predecessor, George Gascon, tried 294 cases and got 203 convictions.
The San Francisco District Attorney’s Office obtains convictions by trial as well as convictions via plea agreement, however, they only release the number of convictions obtained by trial and have thus far rejected public records requests for convictions settled by plea agreement. Total convictions, therefore, are likely higher.
In 2020, SFPD presented 6,333 felonies to Boudin’s office. Contrast that with neighboring Alameda County, where 6,331 felony cases were presented, resulting in 1,413 convictions. Alameda dismissed only 11.4 percent of cases, while San Francisco’s dismissal rate was 40 percent."[2]
- - -
"Prosecutors filed charges in 116 of 266 cases presented by police involving petty theft in 2020, compared to 450 of 647 cases in 2019, according to the data provided by the District Attorney’s Office."[1]
- - -
[1]https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/data-shows-chesa-boudin-pros...
[2]https://www.marinatimes.com/chesa-boudin-by-the-numbers#:~:t...
The SFPD police department are heavily scrutinized, understaffed, underfunded, undertrained, and unsupported by higher levels of political officials, whom ironically carry around their own private security detail wherever they go in SF, who seek to villainize them for their own political gain. The DA's office throws everything out. You have "defund the police" clueless types abound.
The fact that SF has anyone who is willing to do that work in that city is nothing short of a miracle.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/Why-did-S-F-superviso...
In my opinion, I lack evidence, the money should be targeting preventing people from ever getting homeless in the first place. The intervention needs to happens earlier because once a person is homeless the problems that contributed to their situation become insurmountable.
Different types of homelessness result in different problems and different solutions.
The city of SF does this already. There are nav centers and they triage cases for people that are on the brink of becoming homeless. The first step is prevention, but in an area that has booming rents, booming homelessness is never far behind. If you grew up in SF and you become homeless you're likely going to return to the place you know even if you don't have a place to live. The complete inability of SF to build housing at any income level is the biggest driver.
I honestly don't know what homeless people need, if they even want to go back to 'normal' life. What I think is possible is helping the volunteers to do more with less to provide essential care (hygiene, medicine, basic nutrition and warmth). Then there's safety.. Even some free lockers would be a boon for them. Keeping critical stuff when you sleep is a luxury for most.
All I know is that with not much funding, a bit of space, and smart care (invest in the easy to save, make them volunteers, and grow ~exponential self sufficient resources that way) you could tame these problems by a lot. Most naive solutions (renting hotels) backfire in cost or quality. I was quite stumped after hearing guys saying they'd rather sleep out than in a shelter, in the winter.. I don't want to assume but it's pretty telling.
Solution: redistribute rents
How: land-value taxation or municipal land trusts + basic income
In a drug crisis, focusing on more housing might not solve the problem.
We have been trying to solve the problem with more affordable housing for a decade and every year the problem gets worse.
Because we're dealing with a drug epidemic. IMHO. It's opioids.
[0] https://filtermag.org/drugs-homelessness/
Once they have housing — no strings attached housing — you need to provide health care (mental/physical). Now they have a chance to get reintegrated into society.
But without permanent housing nothing is going to happen.
Having said this, of course drug problems are extremely prevalent among the homeless population. It‘s rarely ever the root cause of the homelessness though. Maybe they had an accident or illness and were prescribed opioids frivolously and for too long. After they are sandbagged with crippling medical dept they are addicted and can‘t pay for their expenses at the same time.
Also, living on the street in extreme poverty is terrible and bleak. So no wonder one would end up depressed and start using even more opioids to mentally escape.
All day long I see the second group all over town destroying stuff and causing mayhem that ends up hurting innocent bystanders.
Yet when the media talks about homelessness they only speak as if all homeless are in the first group-- down on their luck and needing a helping hand and if you feel anything other than deep guilt you are less than human.
The ruse is up: everyone has too many anecdotes of being assaulted, having to walk out into the street to go around heaps of garbage, watching people openly inject drugs on sidewalks in front of unwilling witnesses.
There are clearly two distinct things going on and they likely have two totally different solutions. If media and politicians keep communicating as if there is only one problem, despite what our ears and eyes tell us every single day, then this will continue to get worse and the outcome will likely be the same as the 'defund the police' movement-- a voter referendum that says 'enough of this nonsense'.
Anecdotal for sure, but a couple of my friends have had parents who were addicts, even when they had the love and support and housing options of being with family they chose to stay on the streets, unless they decided they needed to rob a family member for some more spending money. Spreading subsidized housing out doesn't work, addicts will just hang out closer to their dealers/sources on the streets. Putting up highly concentrated housing programs just make this problem even more dense, creating a radius of exceptionally high crime.
Even in the most idyllic scenario of creating perpetually well-maintained and totally free housing, many will end up choosing the streets anyways, out of convenience, mistrust, or mental health issues.
The pills are incredibly cheap to manufacture.
A few things would happen if we started handing out opiods for free:
* petty crime would decrease -- it's not the drug that causes the crime, it's trying to pay for the drug
* organized crime would decrease -- moving opiods is a lucrative operation, and our addicts are bankrolling very bad people by doing business with them
* users would get clean product -- opiods laced with fentanyl are a huge problem and responsible for the majority of hospitalizations and overdose deaths
* more users could hold stable employment and rehabilitate themselves -- i've known plenty of opiods addicts, but you'd never know they had a problem, because they were all rich tech workers that were not stealing to satisfy their addiction
* most injection users would be pill users if it wasn't so expensive -- giving them free pills would encourage a less risky route of administration and decrease sepsis cases
If we still have a homeless problem after that, communal housing outside of the city with free drugs might be enough to get them to relocate to where they're not a problem and in considerably less danger.
But then I remember that we live in a god-fearing christian nation, where drugs are bad and addicts should be shunned, so my plan probably won't work.
Find a more dangerous phrase.
You'd re-invent the 19th century opium den, but it's public housing with free Oxy just outside the city limits, where you can choose to forego any meaningful integration into society, and (I assume) cut your life a bit shorter and escape into an unending, but more socially-acceptable, opium high.
I think the idea would be to keep everyone safe and ideally give them pathways back to normal society, not create a permanent underclass.
If a significant percentage of the population wants to take advantage of such a program, that probably means society is doing something else wrong unrelated to drug or housing policy.
And HN is a safe space for right-wing assholes to post dishonest, bad faith bullshit. This is a deliberate decision by Dan Gackle. (Though Dan deliberately slandered me, didn’t apologize after being called on it, and killed my account the last time I brought up this topic.)
We clearly need to bring back insane asylums and institutionalization. Why can't we just try this again and try to make them less abusive?
We can't even make the ones that exist today "less abusive"[1].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28857567
Each one of those things is super crazy expensive (except for decriminalizing drugs, which could save a lot of wasted funds).
But I fully understand that you are vile person who wants to perpetuate a false narrative that allows you to hate people who need help.
We need more people to choose to be good and helpful people, and fewer people to be useless, hate-filled, ignorant assholes like Steve.
I don't know if you grew up in a shitty environment or not but please consider that even if you did, the fact that you are not smoking meth in bookstore bathrooms cannot be purely a product of your own stout moral fiber, it is also due to luck, and the people that you see running riot in the city are the other side of that coin.
Speaking for myself, I am a post-graduate educated rich white guy who does my recycling and helps old ladies cross the road, and I am absolutely certain that if I got deep enough into serious drugs I would be shitting and yelling with the best of them, and I fuckin pray that if I ever get into that state, that educated people would have the sophistication to view me as something other than the unforgivably evil cartoon villain that you describe.
Ultimately, we are all responsible in some sense for our own behaviour. However the freedom of people to choose to do the right thing is often severely limited by circumstance and previous choices.
Drugs drown out the non-stop pain of existence.
[1] https://americanaddictioncenters.org/rehab-guide/addiction-s...
>Scientists estimate that genes, including the effects environmental factors have on a person's gene expression, called epigenetics, account for between 40 and 60 percent of a person's risk of addiction
Some of these may be relatively uniform through the population, but manifest due to different environmental factors.
e.g. Child abuse could cause epigenetic changes to gene expression associated with a drug predisposition. This may be conserved between individuals.
Also, you are right, people are very often victims of their environment. A component of that environment is the ease of doing bad things. If you treat people who do bad things as victims, that makes doing bad things easier. You have to balance compassion with consequences. One without will fail.
it's only a matter of time before the judgement comes for those people. like you can't treat people like they are trash because when you are down on your luck, karma or your consciousness will prevent you from getting the help you need. it's important to remember that not all these people are on drugs, some are broken, like sad broken, or a ton of mental illness. but yeah there are people on drugs, most people don't turn to drugs for fun, they turn to drugs because they are miserable and want to feel something. just like alcohol. people use drugs to avoid their situation, also why change when everyone thinks you'll never change? it's like the world has issues with forgiveness, mercy, empathy, kindness and are judgmental because they fear that poverty is contagious.
The old way this stuff was handled was a social safety net - not one based in economic policy, but one that was churches and just people that cared. I think both still exist, but the current state of things is seeing a massive shift from selflessness to selfishness is actually having an effect.
The selfishness comes from a place of - it's not my problem it's now handled by policy X so I don't need to bother personally.
I'm totally ok with people only taking care of themselves. If you have time/energy/money to spare, sure, use to help someone in need, someone that help will actually help. But if you don't, that's totally fine too.
None of that really changes the need to arrest people who rob stores, and the need to disincentize living in tents and shooting up in the streets like you own them.
Why should they if you act like a cartoon villain? Should they pretend you are helping an old lady when they are acting like a villain and robbing her?
At some point the causality doesn't matter. IF something is broken, it doesn't matter how it got that way. You can fix it, throw it away, or mitigate the damage it causes.
Some people can't be helped. Some can with significant effort. Some need to be locked away so that they don't hurt people. Sometimes the best you can do is mitigate their suffering.
This is some very convenient blame-shifting to avoid noticing SF's distinct shortage of 24-hour public bathrooms[1].
[1]: https://www.sfchronicle.com/local-politics/article/San-Franc...
San Francisco built a bunch of 24-hour public restrooms in the early 2000s downtown, and today they're horrendous. The problem is cyclical: people shit on the streets because there's no public restrooms -- but there's no public restrooms because San Francisco is filled with psychopaths who have no problem dropping their pants and shitting in the middle of a street. Give them a public restroom and they'll destroy it.
The people causing these problems aren't normal people who think like you and just happen to be homeless. You can't relate to them by trying to project yourself into their position. They're completely different mentally. They do not think rationally, and they do not have any empathy for others around them.
e.g. toilets with no privacy and pressure washable steel
You have to consider these things because there are more than enough people willing to destroy things simply for the purpose of destroying them.
>My first question is are people who are willing to use a toilet publicly exposed actually likely to use it vs just some quiet street.
I believe the person willing to take a shit on the sidewalk on busy street, would also be willing to do so in a metal receptacle with TP provided.
I think there are engineering solutions that might not make it unpluggable, but give it a pretty high up time.
You're right that it might take some trial design and study. But that is an argument for trying it!
Meanwhile Paris has about 400 of them, 150 of which are 24 hours, costing €6 million per year.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanisette
[2] https://en.parisinfo.com/practical-paris/useful-info/public-...
I'd look towards FDR who came closest in the last century to addressing this with the model of the second (economic) bill of rights.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Bill_of_Rights
They are explicitly separating the worst cases from those like the working mother in the RV?
Looking at the 2019 report[1], the chronically homeless better fit the negative stereotype.
Sixty-three percent 63% of chronically homeless survey respondents reported alcohol or substance use. 53% reported living with a psychiatric or emotional condition, 52% with post-traumatic stress disorder, 48% with a chronic health problem, and 21% suffered from a traumatic brain injury
This is from self reported survey data, so the actual numbers could be more grim (e.g. problems not acknowledged or diagnosed).
https://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/FINAL-PIT-R...
>Doesn't this just reinforce the point of the parent post, that there are two types of homelessness?
>They are explicitly separating the worst cases from those like the working mother in the RV?
>Looking at the 2019 report[1], the chronically homeless better fit the negative stereotype.
The establishment's failure to humanely deal with the problem is making a non-humane solution inevitable. I'm not sure anyone wants that, but sooner or later a plurality will be willing and eager to look the other way.
Blaming the poor for being poor does not help. Other countries does not depend so much inn police but on other social services, that 'non sense' actually makes a lot of sense and works. Police cannot solved social problems.
So, I agree that voters do not back up these policies. And that is why you get the problems and human suffering that you get.
Do we? (Genuine question.)
https://ourworldindata.org/drug-use
I don't think that "choice" is the right word for a large portion of that second category.
1. By the time a person is homeless, there is a very small percentage whom ever get off the streets.
2. Yes, there are a percentage of homeless that enrages the public, but most are just trying to make it through the night. (It's housed gangs that are doing most of the shoplifting. Plus--I believe stores are using theft as an excuse to close low revenue stores. And Employees theft is never talked about.)
3. San Francisco could put porta potties where the homeless congregate. When they move, move the outhouses.
4. I've given up on a solution, other than letting them camp on federal land. Provide out houses, a place to cook, and Portable showers too. Don't just give money to a crooked 501c3 that doesn't do much.
5. Every homeless person I have known does not want a lot.
They want to hold on to a bit of degrading ego they lose every day.
Meaning they don't need 50 rules made up by someone who doesn't have a clue to what they are going through.
Yes--a room with a lock.
6. The city could hire traveling doctors, and provide meds to those that want it.
7. The small percentage that are rehabilitatable should be given more focused help.
Homeless I gave know gave a saying, "Homeless for a year, homeless for life". Meaning the brain just changes.
8. Homelessness is my biggest concern, and I have been angered over how we have dealt with it for decades. That whole Broken Window Pane is not what America should succum to.
So in summary, give them a place to chit.
Oh yea, I have know more than a few once fully employed Programmers who ended up on the street.
Jim Fox spend twenty years climbing into Scothch Broom in order to sleep. Spent his last years wearing a Penguin Outfit begging for change. Going in and out of county jail because of jaywalking, drinking in public, sleeping in the park (If you are homeless expect a ticket.), etc. type of infractions.
Jim Fox was very instrumental in the programming of Wordstar, but Semore only gave him a bit of credit.
Those of us not from wealthy loving families know we are up just a few clicks from homeless.
Every time there is a crisis or economic hard times it shakes the tree and we get a new crop of homeless. Those who work with organizations trying to help have long noted this cyclic nature that mirrors business cycles. For long timers this crop of homeless are notable as being by far the oldest and sickest yet.
The primary question isn't their character, but how best to manage the situation. Opining that they brought it on themselves does not get them off the street or reduce expensive calls to responders.
OP's point, charitably, is that advocates to San Francisco's homeless may need to stomach a harsher response to the most-extreme cases, e.g. assaults and repeated public defecation, to avoid voters turning on the issue as a whole.
Empathy is needed. But human nature is human nature, and when people feel their safety and security is threatened their empathy modulates down. That's what you're seeing in OP's comment. That's happening in San Francisco.
(Oxytocin is critically involved in empathy and social behaviors. It has also been linked to toxin-elicited and socially-mediated disgust [1].)
[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1111/gbb.12... § 7.1
Approximately nobody chooses this lifestyle, dude. You’re not going to make much progress on this issue if you start from what seems a very skewed perception of it.
In reality the problem is quite large and complex, and is exacerbated by the intersection of many different factors. Boiling it down to “those who deserve a helping hand” and “those who chose this lifestyle” is worryingly reminiscent of the idea of “deserving” and “undeserving” poor. There are way more than “two distinct things going on”.
https://www.wethegoverned.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Hom...
Definitely from a point of view, but well argued and documented
As far as the homeless minority: sure, yes, they may not be as big of a population as we assume, and yet here we are discussing how much of a problem it is.
Personally, I can get behind stuff like UBI to help those folks so long as it's distributed to everyone rich or poor, and/or other inefficient social programs are shutdown to help offset these costs. Otherwise I feel like we're just rewarding incompetence and penalizing success, which I believe is where we get into enabling the proliferation of the worst kind of society to live in — one filled with apathy, nihilism, and literally poo everywhere.
I am incredibly confused as to why both this article and the Oliver piece are so proud of themselves for pointing out that not all, or not even the majority, of homeless suffer from serious mental health and addiction problems. Maybe these articles aren't targeted at me, BECAUSE I ALREADY KNOW THAT.
Is there really ANYBODY who is referring to a single mother living out of a car because her rent got raised when they complain about the homeless?!?! In SF I would imagine most people aren't even referring to your garden variety homeless similar to what is most visible in cities like NY. The actual problem is not being able to park anywhere with anything in your car, and passing people lying on the street that look like they are barely even alive, as well as your traditional human waste and the smell that comes with.
I don't want to act as though I am disagreeing with the conclusions of these articles, for the most part I'm not. I'm also not judging people for ending up homeless. Just please stop pretending that addiction and mental health issues are some sort of unfair characterization, because it is clearly a very accurate description of the group that is responsible for the most unpleasant manifestations of the homelessness in SF. I'm also not saying we should stop trying to help and house that specific group either. I'm just baffled by how this is being framed. "A humanitarian crisis, not an unsightly inconvenience"?!?!?!?!?! Has it not crossed the author's mind that IT COULD BE BOTH.
There are 4 ways to deal with the homeless that I've summarized:
(1) Kill them. I mention this one first so that it's in the back of your mind as you read about how politicians, nationwide, strike down any effort to alleviate this problem. It's the feeling I get when people say "we should do something" but then oppose any housing-first approaches.
(2) House them. Another poster mentioned it in this thread but this is essentially the approach to Vienna took. House people, in houses, not shelters, unconditionally. Once they have housing, then you can work on rehab and social/mental work. Without housing, the mental problems are impossible to solve. Of course, this would require effectively socializing the housing market and people & blackrock would scream about asset prices.
(3) Inprison them. This arguably more expensive than (2) but it doesn't affect asset prices as much. You could even recoup that cost with free prison labor. Sure most of the guys who argue we should do this are also the ones that say vaccine mandates are an infringement on basic freedoms and that being forced to wear a mask is essentially 1984. Of course you would have to figure out where you would build this prison, and the NIMBYs would prefer you built it on the Moon (they wont say that though, they will say something like "Building prisons is racist").
(4) Let them camp on the streets. This is unsightly, but it costs the less and maybe you will get a bit of (1) too when they die of exposure. Most cities already employ (1) through (4), they just wait for winter to roll around and problem solved. And as we see in San Francisco, as long as the housing market is sufficiently limited, then having a homeless camp outside your window wont reduce your property values all that much, and you get to use them as a political tool to prevent even more housing from being built.
Barring some political revolution or deadly plague I've become doom-pilled about this situation ever being resolved. Too many people, either directly or indirectly, largely benefit from the status quo. Paying $1B/year and extracting taxes from Salesforce is ultimately preferable solution than tanking the housing market.
Which honestly I am fine paying for, I just wonder if rehabilitation just isn't possible for many.
I think we should house them, but not unconditionally. Housing should be offered to everyone, but continued housing should be dependent on ongoing participation in drug rehab and mental health programs. This should be paired with enforcement of public health, shoplifting, vagrancy and other quality of life laws. Housing and rehabilitation services should be available to everyone without regard to their ability to pay, but if they choose to reject this, and insist on acting in a publicly disruptive and criminal manner, then they should be locked up.
"Rehab" in the US can look like unpaid forced labor, using up time and energy that the homeless person could instead be using to earn money to get themselves into a better situation: https://www.law360.com/articles/1311467/all-work-and-no-pay-...
Many homeless people are already working 2-3 jobs to try and earn enough money to get off the street, so mandating they spend a bunch of time and energy on shoddy programs would be sabotaging their progress.
As someone who's benefited from access to adequate (but not great) mental health care through my employer's insurance, I definitely think it could help. But I sincerely doubt the qualifications of most of the organizations and people who want to force "mental health" on homeless people who are already struggling.
The problem with this is it attempt to fix too many problems at once. The US does not have robust drug rehab programs, and if you make this a stipulation for housing, then those people will end up on the streets again and tax payers will eviscerate you for building housing and still having homeless. Secondly, various interest groups will use your arbitrary lines to impose their brand of morality. The christians will come in and say no weed and alcohol, and now no one wants to live there, and you've effectively replicated 70% of the problems that cause the homeless to not live in homeless shelters.
I think a better question to ask is why you want to impose this drug law. Are you letting your morals get in the way of public policy or do you actually believe that the people who live on the street today will just unilaterally decide to stop living on the street and give up heroin? Refer back to my list. Once they have failed the drug test you have (1), (3), and (4). You can go with (3), but prisons, in the US today, do not rehabilitate people and are more expensive than just housing them.
Its the same problem.
>The US does not have robust drug rehab programs, and if you make this a stipulation for housing, then those people will end up on the streets again and tax payers will eviscerate you for building housing and still having homeless.
Creating robust drug rehab and mental counseling programs alongside building housing for the homeless must all be considered 3 legs of the same stool or each will fail.
>The christians will come in and say no weed and alcohol, and now no one wants to live there, and you've effectively replicated 70% of the problems that cause the homeless to not live in homeless shelters.
Shelters are a non starter. The biggest problem with shelters here in NY is the rampant violence that takes place. People are not going to stay where they don't feel (and aren't) safe. There are numerous other problems with shelters, but even if all of these were solved, most people just aren't interested in forced communal living.
>I think a better question to ask is why you want to impose this drug law. Are you letting your morals get in the way of public policy or do you actually believe that the people who live on the street today will just unilaterally decide to stop living on the street and give up heroin?
I don't want to pass a drug law, I want to offer housing to drug addicts who want to clean up their lives and get off the streets. Nobody should be forced to take up this offer, but if they refuse it, and continue to break the law by stealing and creating a public menace, then they should be locked up. If someone chooses to be homeless and live in their car and boot heroin all day, that's fine as far as I'm concerned - but they can't be camping on the sidewalks, or robbing stores, or harassing people just trying to walk down the street.
>prisons, in the US today, do not rehabilitate people and are more expensive than just housing them.
Our prisons are medieval dungeons that are desperately in need of a complete overhaul, just like our "system" of dealing with homelessness and the crime that results from it. The fact is that our society is very broken on many levels, and the rising drug-addicted homeless population just happens to be one of the most visible signs of it. To be honest, I don't think we have the competence or the capacity to solve any of these problems. Our government, on every level, is inefficient, corrupt and incompetent - and only getting worse. We can sit here and jawbone about potential solutions to our many problems, but my honest opinion is that none of these problems are going to be solved. They are all going to continue to get worse until we reach some sort of breaking point. It's impossible to know how this will manifest itself exactly but it won't be pretty.
Now obviously we shouldn't just throw addicts into prison, and there is a laundry list of other hurdles to solve. Primarily I think the punishment after the punishment from having a criminal record (which I think we've quietly made progress on, see Fair Chance Odinances by SF). But it's a process we already have in place, and could be expanded in a humanitarian manner with less red tape than some of the other radical solutions. At the very least I'd love to see it in the running of options discussed, but all I hear is prisons=pure evil
I don't think people should be institutionalized for simply being homeless, addicts, or mentally ill, but if their issues are leading to unlawful behavior, we should be able to put them in a more humane prison system that includes assessment and rehabilitation.
If they were homeless because they were mentally ill, we housed them. In an asylum.
If they were homeless because they were drug addicts, we housed them. In a prison.
If they were homeless because they didn't want to work, we housed them. In a workhouse.
If they were homeless because they couldn't afford a safe, decent place to live, we housed them. In a flophouse.
Those solutions for the most part have been regulated out of existence (not prison, for example, but prison as a solution for narcotics addiction).
My great fear is that someday someone will make something as powerful as heroin, that doesn't have the same barrier to entry, and can easy be smoked out of a vape pen or something. Just that could easily be the demise of civilization.
Part 3[1] is the next step, "prevention": rental assistance, eviction defense (already exists, but underfunded), and informing residents of the programs. And add more housing
Part 4 is supposed to be "treatment", but I don't think it's posted yet.
[0] https://sbuss.substack.com/p/plan-to-end-street-homelessness...
[1] https://sbuss.substack.com/p/plan-to-end-street-homelessness...
Yes we need to build more housing. But ... there are more vacant units in the city than there are homeless. The most recent ACS stats said there were >40k vacant units in the city. Meanwhile, the city was willing to pay $60k/yr per _tent site_ in safe sleeping site parking lots.
Almost certainly in reality we will need to build more housing. But there's enough money being poorly spent that honestly we could afford to solve the _housing_ portion of it by putting people in 1BD apartments. We _choose_ not to, and this reveals our preferences if not our values.
The revealed preference is, we'd _rather_ have homeless people sleep in parking lots at $5k/mo per tent than pay for an apartment at $3k/mo. We'd rather live in a society where property rights are respected than one where housing is considered a right (as in the state of NY). And we'd rather move the problem around continually than solve it.
https://data.census.gov/cedsci/table?q=vacancy&g=0500000US06...
https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/S-F-officials-w...
https://missionlocal.org/2020/05/trove-of-text-messages-reve...
https://sfist.com/2020/12/18/mayor-breed-takes-to-medium-to-...
It’s critical to note that “vacant” can mean a lot of things when the census starts throwing the term around. For example, in San Francisco it could mean any of the following:
* 6,694 of those vacancies were units currently listed for rent that hadn’t yet found tenants. Another 1,031 were homes for sale that didn’t yet have buyers.
* 6,294 were homes with either current owners or renters that were just not living there. This can happen for any number of reasons: hospital stays, long trips out of town, delayed move-ins, even cases of homeowners who have died but are still technically counted as the resident.
* 8,523 were “occasional use” homes—i.e., these were second homes, vacation homes, some types of short-term rentals, or just any unit that was accounted for but not lived in most of the year.
*Finally, the census designated 11,760 homes in the catch-all category of “other vacant,” which primarily means vacancies without an obviously stated cause.
For a city with 800K residents, 8k 'occasional use' homes and 10k 'potentially vacant' homes is not a lot. And it's not as though this crisis was caused by those numbers going up faster than residents.
So yeah, more housing is 100% the answer.
If a property hasn't sold for months, why _shouldn't_ someone be able to live in it? Some units listed for rent remain listed for an extended period. I lived across from a unit which was empty for more than 18 months. It was listed at substantially above market, and the landlord was just being picky. Should it remain her prerogative to leave it empty until she finds the tenant of her dreams if in the meantime people's lives may be threatened by living without shelter?
Maybe the answer is yes. Maybe you think the rights of a property owner to make decisions about how they will profit from their property is more important than all the other considerations, including risks to life. Is it yes for all such goods in short supply? When hospitals didn't have ventilators, if you had functional ventilators unused and in storage, would it have been ethical to let them remain there? Should it have been legal?
These are all choices. And currently we choose to privilege rights of property owners above a human right to shelter. And when we do build, if we build luxury condos, that's a choice too. If we repeatedly and consistently decide that it's more important that property owners and developers be able to make as much money as they can than for people to be housed, then we've chosen to have a homeless crisis, because we're a homeless crisis kind of people with homeless crisis values.
Hooray, we got what we want.
property owner: "But what about my right to discriminate of people I don't like the look of?"
> The majority of these properties will end up ruined.
Show me the ruined apartments from a program that tried this. I'm skeptical because there are supportive housing programs, and the complaint I normally hear is that they don't have nearly enough capacity to meet the real need, not that once residents get placed they "ruin" their units.
> Or the government could build their own housing to use for this purpose. I can tell you which idea would be more popular with voters.
And show me the many many public housing projects we've built because public housing is so popular. In SF, neighborhoods have a pretty consistent track record of fighting back against any housing that doesn't increase their comps. Note that mostly there aren't actually public housing projects for them to push back against, but rather projects from non-profits like TNDC or Mission Housing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabrini%E2%80%93Green_Homes
You also have no leverage against these people. For normal people you can threaten them with fines, etc. But for some people, they have nothing to lose and do not care about any punishment you apply.
1) Literally any real estate market is going to have vacancies, because otherwise how would people move between spaces?
2) The question is 'what percentage of vacancies is too high?' Given the EXTREME carrying cost of owning an unoccupied home in SF, I think it's highly unlikely that SF is 'too high'. You neighbor may have had the wealth to pay that cost, but few others do.
3) 'Luxury' housing in SF does two things: house yuppies that would otherwise move to historic neighborhoods 2) turn into shitty non-luxury housing in 30 years. This idea that the fucking NEMA or whatever won't be a relatively low-rent building (a la Fox Plaza) in 20 years is not grounded in thoughtfulness.
4) The real 'villains' are property owners who want the value of their house to go up (as an investment). And what do those people hate more than anything? New construction that is more desirable than their home.
WE HAVE A HOMELESS CRISIS BECAUSE THERE ARE NOT ENOUGH HOMES, DRIVEN BY THE FACT THAT THE RESIDENTS OF SF LIKE HAVING EXPENSIVE HOMES. You can spin it any way you want, but it's the truth and if you don't watch out, the same thing is coming for you in your town, because SF is just ahead of everywhere else, not on a different path.
Take the building at 2100 Market, which was formerly run by Sonder. They took out a 5 year lease, the pandemic hit, they tried to sue to get out of it, and the whole thing has been empty for more than a year. I don't know how many units it is, but a lot of people could have been housed for that period. I have walked by that building, and homeless people in close proximity for _so long_. Yes, I find it about as offensive as feces.
I'm not claiming no unit should ever be vacant for a week. I'm claiming the scope of wasted livable space is comparable to the size of the problem, and that even at market rates could often be cheaper than the ridiculous things we're doing. Again, $60k/year per _tent site_ in a parking lot.
> The question is 'what percentage of vacancies is too high?'
No, I think the question is "What do we value?", or perhaps "what's our indifference curve between people living on the street and owners choosing to keep their units empty?"
If we weren't in a homeless crisis, the vacancies wouldn't be a problem.
> Given the EXTREME carrying cost of owning an unoccupied home in SF, I think it's highly unlikely that SF is 'too high'. You neighbor may have had the wealth to pay that cost, but few others do.
No, in some cases, people can't afford to fill homes. In late 2019, there were a bunch of condo buildings that were "struggling" to sell, but prices didn't come down -- because bringing down the price on one unit would set the comps for the whole project. My (former) landlord's building is rent-controlled. I think part of the calculus was to hope that rents increased and long term getting a tenant in at the higher rate would be much more valuable. When the pandemic cause prices to drop, she doubled down; taking a discount tenant is worse than having no tenant.
Even before the pandemic we saw this all over the city with retail spaces too; places can be left empty for years because the hypothetical future revenue from a vacant space is valued more highly than actual revenue from a tenant today.
We seem to feel that property owners speculating is more important than anything that actually happens inside the property.
> 'Luxury' housing in SF does two things: house yuppies that would otherwise move to historic neighborhoods 2) turn into shitty non-luxury housing in 30 years. This idea that the fucking NEMA or whatever won't be a relatively low-rent building (a la Fox Plaza) in 20 years is not grounded in thoughtfulness.
If you have a homelessness crisis, and you believe that crisis requires building more housing, then I suggest building housing for the homeless is a much more direct solution than building luxury housing for the rich and waiting a generation. Why do people who wouldn't believe in trickle-down economics for income tax policy believe that trickle-down housing makes sense?
The other thing luxury housing does in SF is make money for the developers, and for their friends at DBI.
> The real 'villains' are property owners who want the value of their house to go up (as an investment). And what do those people hate more than anything? New construction that is more desirable than their home.
The real villains are the developers who have so successfully sold the idea that the only way to house the poor is to build and sell more houses to the rich.
Similarly, eating at Lazy Bear doesn't somehow make prices go down at Grocery Outlet.
We have a homelessness crisis because, we have not built truly affordable housing in SF since the 60's (related: I would love to hear your explanation as to why developers are the ones who don't want multi-unit housing west of Divis).
We have the country's worst homelessness crisis because while we were not building affordable housing, we also weren't building unaffordable housing either. We just weren't building!
I agree, building 50k supportive housing units in this city tomorrow would be great, but I also understand that the braintrusts of Telegraph Hill are unlikely to support such a thing. So instead, all I think is, let's at least release a little pressure and try not to be an international embarrassment, because 'nothing' or 'let's just put homeless people in existing hotel rooms' or 'Defer blame to marginal vacancies caused by startups' is actually a very nefarious way to make this problem worse.
Mentally ill drug addicts will destroy the unit and end up back on the street. Not all homeless fall into this category, but many do.
I'm not claiming that apartments solve the opioid crisis.
But notice the pattern.
NIMBY property owners in SF profit while contributing to the housing shortage. We protect their rights to preserve a shortage while looking disdainfully at displaced victims.
Sacklers make >$10B selling opioids. They declare bankruptcy, keep >$5B and are protected from further liabilities.
The recipe seems to be:
- profit while creating a disaster
- accept no responsibility
- blame your victims
You think mentally ill drug addicts will destroy property. But what if mentally ill rich people are destroying society?
This includes parents who fail to raise their children, neighbors and friends who ignore misery and addiction, and people who walk by and fail to lift a finger to help.
How many people in this thread do you think actually donate to a homeless non-profit instead of buying a latte. How many volunteer at a homeless shelter instead of watching Netflix?
People don't want to be part of the solution. They want someone else to be responsible, and someone else to blame.
His analysis and solution centers on treating this as a mental health issue, consolidating the efforts to deal with the problem, and generally modeling CalPsych after what the Dutch and several other European cities did to deal with their similar situations in previous decades.
the subheadline is Different chemically than it was a decade ago, the drug is creating a wave of severe mental illness and worsening America’s homelessness problem.
It was worth a read for some context
[0] - https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/11/the-new...
There was a recent article on HN rebutting this hypothesis [1][2]. (Convincingly, in my opinion.)
TL; DR There isn't a different kind of meth as much as there is just a lot more meth.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29027284
[2] https://dynomight.net/p2p-meth/
Here's a story about homeless students living in their cars. It's not just some drug addicts making bad decisions -- they are a minority. There are thousands of people sleeping on the streets and in cars because they can not afford housing.
https://ktla.com/news/local-news/safe-parking-program-homele...
Marijuana being legalized forced Mexican drug cartels to pivot into making synthetic meth (P2P meth)
Synthetic meth is much cheaper to make and is hard to regulate because it can be made from a cocktail of various household products, (the older meth was made from ephedra, and could be somewhat regulated by curbing the sale of large amounts of ephedra)
Whereas P2P meth can be made cheaply in large quantities with ubiquitous household chemicals
Unfortunately P2P causes psychosis at a much faster and more prevalent rate than ephedra based Meth.
So that’s what’s going on, there’s a huge influx of synthetic meth coming into America and really destroying a lot of lives. And homelessness is exploding
For further reading https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/11/the-new...
Seriously, this is a problem for the ages. If they take a continued 'soft' stance on homelessness, it's just a beacon to draw more to the population. To take a harder stance requires political change, which will take courage and some backtracking.
As techies, many of us have a connection to SF. I hope for good results here, it will be something sociologists can discuss for a long time.