So the city says it's legal in light of Martin v. Boise because, while they don't have enough shelter for everyone, the there's enough shelter for those who accept shelter.
I guess we'll find out in 2024 if that argument has legs.
I think in the context of a legal action, the term "charged" in the current title ("S.F. sued over homeless camp sweeps: city charged with criminalizing unsheltered") is confusing, and doesn't match the Chronicle title.
They literally changed the title on the website. Lol.
The original title was : “S.F. sued over homeless camp sweeps activists charge city with criminalizing unsheltered” that I edited due to limits on title length on HN submission.
Moving them to the shelters and telling them to stay off the street. If there’s no room in the shelter, providing them housing outside the city. If you have a shelter/provided housing it’s a crime to sleep on the streets.
Alternatively start up workhouses and sanitariums again. Government work in exchange for a safe, clean place to sleep and food for the day. Mental sanitariums for those people that are too far gone. That should provide enough of a disincentive over time to camp on the streets.
An observation: most of the "simple answer" approaches to this seem to have failed badly in practice when/where they are attempted. There has to be some complexity, no?
And the current approach of leaving them to the streets is failing much much worse in practice. Of the politically and economically viable options, kicking them off the street and sending them to shelter (which they can refuse, but they can't stay on the street) is the best option I have seen. Long term we absolutely need to address the issues that cause homelessness, and I think we are overall heading that direction, but the problems of today need to be addressed with solutions for today.
Isn't that exactly what is being tried and currently failing in other places? I'm pretty sure I saw an article to that effect about Vancouver this year-ish (the one in Canada, not the one in Washington).
What is it about the shelters (other than lack of spaces) that is making people opt not to use them?
The whole area is one massive housing crisis there's barely space to put people with money for livable rates much less trying to house the entire homeless population.
Some of the replies point out that it's always more complicated than that.
One part of the problem is that the sheer cost of housing in San Francisco (and the surrounding) area is out of control. Some homeless people are simply priced out of the market. That generally is caused by a general lack of new construction in San Francisco and the Bay Area. But, I doubt that magically increasing the housing stock overnight will "solve" homelessness. (Because there are many reasons for homelessness.)
When I lived in the S.F. Bay area for almost a decade, I was shocked that the homeless problem was so bad. Where I'm from, the weather does put a sense of urgency on homelessness, because it's much more difficult to camp unsheltered in the winter. The Bay Area doesn't have the late October-November urgency to get people into shelters; nor do the homeless have the urgency to follow someone else's rules for a bit or risk freezing to death.
What I would suggest is to try to avoid seeing homeless as "others." Many people are homeless for different reasons; and it's important to empathize with the person who doesn't want the tent on their front door as much as it's important to empathize with the person in the tent.
One potential foundation is the tradition of reading the Riot Act. Normally citizens are allowed to move freely and gather. This is suspended during a riot for public safety. Homeless in general and encampments specifically can be seen as also a menace to public health and safety. Observe and record incidents of disruptive behavior, public drug use and pooping, and calls to responders and at certain level issue a warning then take action. These problem cases can cost communities hundreds of thousands. At some point something has to be done.
> These problem cases can cost communities hundreds of thousands
so let's continue to spend more on incarcerating them as a bandage rather than fixing the issues :)
> incidents of... pooping...
i'm sure they just do this outside for preference rather than utter lack of access to public facilities. why couldn't they be like me during my trip to SF where i could just patronize a business to use their bathroom when i needed to go?
> menace to public health and safety
love to see the intentional split between "public" and whatever group you'd put houseless people in (those "menaces"!)
Well, the problem there is that simply being homeless isn't a crime (which I will say seems to me to be reasonable - the alternative is things like the Victorian Poorhouses). Throwing trash all over the place (since there are no public trash services to speak of in most cities, and homeless people don't have service from trash haulers) is a crime, but if they were issued citations, they couldn't pay, and still don't have any way to get rid of their trash... I would think that using public money to haul away trash would have a pretty good return on investment for everyone concerned.
> but if they were issued citations, they couldn't pay, and still don't have any way to get rid of their trash... I would think that using public money to haul away trash would have a pretty good return on investment for everyone concerned.
One of the points of the justice system is to ensure that people are sufficiently disincentivized from doing things that society has decided shouldnt be done. We shouldnt consider it a good investment to enable bad behavior.
that "[point] of the justice system" only works if you consider everyone in a vacuum and have the false notion everyone has equal access to resources. parent already outlined why people living on the street don't have the means to throw away trash in the right place, but you're focused on it "enabl[ing] bad behavior" and (i assume) in support of giving people that have no money fines (which also unfairly impact poorer people, but i'm sure that's lost on you as well). we have immense resources to provide public utilities like roads, why can't there be more public garbage cans (which benefit everyone; last time i visited SF it was a pain carrying trash everywhere)
No false notions required -- all living people have a risk of loss of freedoms, which is why prison works.
> why can't there be more public garbage cans
I suppose this mostly makes sense until we start to have local businesses using them for free trash disposal. Why would I be more in favor of public trash cans you ask? (so you dont have to continue presuming...) Because it's enabling and encouraging an ideal behavior -- people dispose of their trash in an orderly manner.
> I suppose this mostly makes sense until we start to have local businesses using them for free trash disposal.
If you really cared about this, then you would simply impose a simple tax on local businesses and give them garbage service in return. Or you’d enforce proper garbage disposal on the businesses not the unhoused. It is a lot easier to monitor and enforce the garbage disposal of businesses then that of the unhoused.
> all living people have a risk of loss of freedoms
you realize that the justice system doesn't equally impact everyone, right? people with more wealth, more access are demonstrably treated better and have better outcomes with regard to the justice system, so no, all living people do not have the same risk of losing freedoms.
> ... which is why prison works
ah, there it is
i'm glad you agree with more access to public trash cans; however, i think it should be called out
> local businesses using them for free trash disposal
is already done in homeless encampments. i can find some, but there are many reports of businesses dumping in encampments because there's little risk of getting caught and no one bats an eye at trash-ridden encampments.
> everyone, right? people with more wealth, more access are demonstrably treated
I agree with you that this is an injustice and should be fixed, that doesnt mean we shouldnt work towards using the tool (it's not a either/or scenario, we can do both) .
> is already done in homeless encampments. ...
Only furthers my point as to why we should not be enabling bad behaviors
> I agree with you that this is an injustice and should be fixed, that doesnt mean we shouldnt work towards using the tool (it's not a either/or scenario, we can do both) .
idk. the amount the police harasses the unhoused, I think we all would be living in a police state if the same brutality was employed equally across citizens.
If that is the point of the justice system, then we really need to reconsider in light of how actual humans behave.
It has been shown multiple time over in experimental settings that punishment is a pretty poor means of modifying behavior. The deterrence of punishment is marginal at best. For punishment to work consistently you need to apply it consistently and immediately, law enforcement does neither.
There are other means of modifying behavior that are both scientifically proven and have shown results in the real world. This includes accommodating the desired behavior while disincentivizing the undesired ones.
If you want the unhoused to leave their surroundings cleaner, give them trash cans, public kitchens, safe use shelters, regular street cleaners, etc. If you don’t want them to pitch a tent on 17th and Mission, designate an area where they can.
No the point of the justice system is to give victims of crimes some solace that justice has been served. It has nothing to with the behavior of criminals.
> It has been shown multiple time over in experimental settings that punishment is a pretty poor means of modifying behavior. The deterrence of punishment is marginal at best. For punishment to work consistently you need to apply it consistently and immediately, law enforcement does neither
That's much more reasonable of a point than other peer comments. To which I mostly would suggest that rehabilitation is definitely an important part (and I'd agree with you if you claimed the USA is bad at rehabilitation... but lets improve that than bandaid something else)
Further clarification requires far more nuance and assessment than is likely to be read. There's probably not even one single cause but a multitude of social ills. Some people in this situation might experience one, but are probably each a unique snowflake of mixed problems. Unaffordable housing, mental illness (across a huge spectrum of many different illnesses, probably several different experts just for this), even the occasional grifter who just happens to prefer panhandling or urban scavenging to scrape by.
My belief is that homelessness / 'unsheltered' is a catchall result of all the gaps in society's integration of individuals; and it's also a national level problem since the individuals can also be shipped around like those migrants that made the news recently. At least in America, but I've also heard that one of the emotionally motivating factors of Brexit were migrants from outside of the EU, we refuse to even provide a path and set of requirements for those who do want to participate in the system that's setup (instead in the US it's "build the wall" or "war at the border" extremes). Closing gaps in social safety nets and providing pathways for those who are troubled to integrate into society in mutually useful ways, or perhaps even caring for those who are incapable of such self care when provided help getting out of that hole, logically seems like a far harder challenge than any single city can face in a vacuum when we can't even handle easier issues on a national level.
This suit is the kick-it-down-the-road and make someone else pay for it answer. Most of these homeless are not from SF or nearby. Moreover, their salvation isn't going to be sitting in an open drug camp. People are acting like SF is pulling people out of hospital beds or something when they actually try to help.
The correct answer is what Portugal does. Detain and imprison drug users for three to five years in a non-voluntary, non-criminal, detox programs where they don't receive a criminal record from merely non-violent crimes.
If the drug addicted were capable of operating their own cities, they already would be. They obviously need a non drug addicted population to support them.
The reports linkedin in this thread said 62% of SF homeless had a place to live in the city for at least a year before becoming homeless. It's not as simple as "all the homeless here are transplants who are here to mooch off our goodwill", although there is certainly a sizable population that is true for.
> The lawsuit alleges that the city violates state and federal laws, its own policies and homeless individuals’ rights by “punishing residents who have nowhere to go,”
They have shelter beds available. People need to stop repeating falsehoods from activists and well-meaning people who keep saying this.
Some homeless people prefer not to use them for a variety of reasons -- usually because shelters tend to be drug- and alcohol-free -- but also for reasons like not accepting pets or not housing couples of opposite gender together.
> officials estimate 20,000 people will be homeless in San Francisco over the course of this year and demand can’t keep up despite the city having 13,299 supportive housing units and 3,571 shelter spots as of last week.
There are beds available. That's all you need to know. When police go to an illegal camp and say, you need to go to a shelter, it's not accurate to say they have nowhere to go. They do have somewhere to go.
Handwaving this away and saying, well, maybe according to some estimate we may run out of beds in the future -- when we haven't run out of beds and never do, is not a serious argument.
Why not have a variety of shelters to better serve the people who need them? It seems like you could more efficiently provide services when people of similar needs are clustered together.
>usually because shelters tend to be drug- and alcohol-free
Shelters are rife with abuse and have no place for you to store your belongings.
>for reasons like not accepting pets or not housing couples of opposite gender together.
You so casually dismiss the fundamental human desire to be close to the people and animals that you trust while being inside a facility that offers you the absolute barest of minimum and is sometimes outright designed to expose you to predation.
'Unsheltered' is a propaganda word and a fig leaf for the very sad reality that we have a chronic opioid and meth crisis which tips many people over into serious mental illness. Giving these individuals expensive housing is not going to solve anything. California is a magnet for substance abuse casualties and as then SF mayor Newsom found at the end of his grandiose plan to 'end homelessness' ever more people arrived to take the places of those who have been given resources.
There is a lot of land and resources in California to help these individuals focus on recovery and it should be possible to keep the cartel drug dealers away from them in a non urban area.
Why is this comment getting downvoted? I understand in progressive circles this statement maybe controversial, but I've always admired hacker news for being slightly more sensible when it comes to shunning people for statements that are not politically correct.
It is getting downvoted because "sweeps" are a showy way for the cops to look like they are part of the solution. Don't buy in to copaganda. More police is a high-cost, unaccountable, self-perpetuating approach demonstrated for decades not to work.
In conservative Utah, they know their housing-first approach works. It isn't 100% effective, but it is more effective than police-based approaches.
Probably because it has nothing to do with the article. It is derailing the conversation from something interesting (the legality of the war against homelessness) to something unsubstantiated (whether substance abuse is to blame for homelessness, and the role of organized crime). I’m gonna go so far as to say that it is even a little flamebate-y.
But it's not "not politically correct" it's just plain "not correct". Every homeless population in every city has its share of drug-addicted and mentally ill people. What most cities don't have is SF's insane expensive rental market. Follow the money.
I bet many would like to sue the city as tax payers for not fixing the unsafe and unsanitary streets that are part of the commons. Parks, streets and even public transport hubs are unusable for the tax paying citizenry.
>> Giving these individuals expensive housing is not going to solve anything.
They tried this in Minneapolis during COVID to try and get a bunch of homeless people off the street in a nearby hotel that had been emptied due to COVID.
It didn't turn out very well:
A report of a drug overdose led to the eviction Tuesday of more than 200 homeless people from a hotel in south Minneapolis that had become a refuge during protests that erupted in the wake of George Floyd’s killing in police custody.
But some residents at the hotel said conditions had begun to spin out of control in recent days, with people injecting heroin and methamphetamine in the hallways, and fights breaking out at night. Volunteers became overwhelmed.
“It started out well, then descended into chaos,” said Jennie Taylor, who had a room on the second floor. “People got the message that this was a place where you could use drugs freely and that attracted the wrong crowd.”
This would have been known to anyone who has operated a motel for even a couple months. There is a reason any half decent motel requires credit card security deposits with matching government issued photo ID.
Realistically, the only way we can solve this is with incarceration.
This has little to do with the availability of housing, or the cost of housing. Some people will simply refuse to live in the housing that is provided. Many are so mentally ill and addicted to drugs that no amount of money we give them, either directly or indirectly, will get them off the streets.
Proposed solutions that don't involve incarceration should be ignored as unserious and unrealistic.
Is that harsh? Is it "not progressive?" Yep. Progressive attempts to solve this problem have all failed. Progressives have allowed San Francisco to turn into an open-air drug den, attracting homeless people from all over the country, and nobody should listen to their ideas anymore.
I know plenty of homeless people in San Francisco without drug issues. The reason they are on the street or living in their cars or crashing on a friends couch in between either other spot? They cannot afford rent. Both friends I am currently in contact with are also CURRENTLY employed.
I know lots of normally functioning adults who cannot afford rent in San Francisco. Many of them have bigger, nicer houses than my apartment - elsewhere than San Francisco.
I can think of more people who switched languages and continents than who still live in the city where they grew up. Establishing yourself in a new place where you don't know anyone isn't easy or painless, but compared to literally sleeping under a bridge? Come on.
You know people who can't afford rent in one of the most expensive cities in the world to rent in? Shocked - shocked I tell you! If only there were a solution...
yet this part of their statement is still true, let's focus on solving 70% of the problem and then we can debate the rest
> This has little to do with the availability of housing, or the cost of housing. Some people will simply refuse to live in the housing that is provided. Many are so mentally ill and addicted to drugs that no amount of money we give them, either directly or indirectly, will get them off the streets.
People that choose to make a lifestyle of it should be dealt with forcefully. And no I'm not saying to beat them up although I'm not against rounding them up and dropping them in the wilderness just like a racoon. It's not a permanent solution but deters the lifestyle and is much cheaper than rehabilitating people that don't want it.
You want to leave drugs users, on the most potent substances ever created, in open-air drug camps full of violence, rape, filth, more drugs, etc? Do you expect them to one day pull the fentanyl out of their arm and walk over to the Apple store to get a job?
The drugs, and the camps, kill people. If they don't have the wherewithal to move then we need to do it for them. They can't get better while living in filth and honestly can't choose to do better. Once they're imprisoned, in a drug program - not a jail, for the 3-5 years it takes to actually detox they'll be ready to start to get clean and on their feet.
I've been homeless without using drugs and without being mentally ill. Honestly I don't see the big deal if you sleep in a tent and use appropriate sanitation. I was always careful to pack in pack out, to respect the community, to not become intoxicated, and to dispose of waste appropriately.
IMO the homeless issue is San Francisco is because they've practically incentivized being homeless by subsidizing the homeless and also making any defense against the crimes of homeless toothless (misdemeanor theft is barely enforced, it is illegal to use violent self defense to defend property, and weapons laws are among the most restrictive in the nation.)
You don't even have to incarcerate them. Just make city policies such that there's no advantage to being homeless in SF, other than maybe the weather.
> Just make city policies such that there's no advantage to being homeless in SF
I don't see any advantage to being homeless. Literally every human being without mental issues would prefer having a roof over their head. This is a market failure.
You missed the "in SF" part of the sentence. In a sense you're correct, it is in part a market failure in SF for subsidizing homelessness.
>Literally every human being without mental issues would prefer having a roof over their head
I have a few times, on purpose. Not being responsible for a house can be liberating, depending on your life circumstances -- if you're not addicted, you're healthy and able bodied, and not mentally ill. It can be like an adventure where you see where you like to go, can get all the money you need for a week in only a day of day labor (which is trivial to get if you're able bodied and have an ID). Homelessness with serious personal problems is awful, but otherwise it can be an enjoyable lifestyle.
I would probably choose periodic homelessness still today were it not I have a child, whom CPS would probably take away if I enjoyed some of the liberties of my youth.
Good for you. The closest I've come to homelessness is renting a room so shitty that sleeping in the lab at my university was preferable. And I hated even that. I'd never be voluntarily homeless.
I think it's something you have to experience to understand. I wound up unexpectedly fired from a job when I didn't have much money. I rented a tiny room like you and hated it.
So I bought a shitty car and slept in the forest. The car finally broke down. I wound up homeless. I found out I really loved the forest and spending my time outdoors. I loved to spend months at a time in tents, coming into town to do day labor. Really it's a life I dream of nearly daily now that I have responsibilities to my family that keep me chained to a desk 5 days a week, and to a child during the weekends.
Only once you've been homeless you realize the problems of the homeless are typically the reason why they became homeless - drugs/addiction, mental illness, criminal record, lack of skills for employment. I had none of those problems really, so to me it was just a new adventure, except I could go practically anywhere I wanted and just enjoy travelling. I knew how to live outdoors and can easily adapt a tarp for inclement weather so for me it was just fun, for real! But I know it isn't that way for someone who doesn't want that life. I could always just pick up a day of day labor, and after a couple weeks of that afford to rent another room -- many people have personal problems that keep them from doing that.
Is there evidence that 100% of SF's homeless have mental issues?
Are you aware that mentally ill and drug-addicted people are often able to hold down jobs and afford rent? But that only works when rent is reasonable.
> people who would be successful and housed in cheaper markets
Do you have proof that they would, in fact, be successful? Have you tried running an RCT? Maybe they would't be able to find jobs, or have childcare available from family nearby.
Even though I'm inclined to believe people have deeper issues that would prevent them from thriving anywhere, I find Yglesias persuasive on this one [0]. Drug abuse and mental illness prevalence don't predict homelessness rates... rents do. Obviously you want to lower the rents in the places with housing crises, but those crises exist for deep and persistent reasons. Meanwhile, if in fact some currently homeless people are capable of thriving under conditions of lower rent, getting them into those conditions where they actually exist today could be cheap and cost-effective. A corporate relocation package is like $5,000, and a permanent BMR unit is like $500,000-$1m. It's orders of magnitude. I would love to see someone do the RCT. Even if the success rate is low, let's help the people we can help. Hell, I'll pay for a few out of pocket.
But I doubt it would get past an ethics committee, and if it did there would be a huge scandal. We're pretty deeply committed that the huddled masses of the world must be housed within SF. Even as we're equally deeply committed that they not exist at any particular site within SF, and won't contemplate anywhere near the unit counts (from a budget perspective or a permitting perspective) that would be required.
Not a ton of savings, tbh. You have to eat out every meal, deal with your shit getting stolen, lost sleep, probably lowered social status leading to less desirable jobs. Being poor is expensive.
Nah you don't. I bought an MSR stove that runs off gasoline you can fill up for $.10 at any gas station and then bought bags of rice and lentils that last a week for ~$10. Backpack on back, ask day labor place where to keep backpack when working, employer always had some place to tuck it away. I could earn ~120 / day and only need ~$80 a week to survive. Slept like a baby under my tarp.
If you do day labor all week you just made $500 and you only need $100 to survive the week. Pretty easy to sock money away that way... if you decide to rent a room a couple weeks of that gets you your first week in a weekly rental and from there you can clean up and get a regular factory job. I had a well oiled process that I ran that cycle quite a few times. AFter 1-3 months at a factory I would generally get a fork-lift job or something that paid even more and from there you're basically as rich as the average American.
Bonus: If you have HN skills your average wage from the fork-lift job will give you enough to buy a nice laptop, hi-speed internet and then a high-paying programming job -- although it's obviously not generally applicable (although I've done it).
I know a guy who is currently homeless again. He works at Whole Foods and doesn't use alcohol or drugs, doesn't have a car and has a years rent in the bank.
He is one of the people I am very keen to help because he is literally sleeping in the park with screaming, violent drug addicts. He's told me he can't get section 8 housing or any other help as he has money. He has told me if he was an addict he knows he would be getting state payouts and 'help'.
He has lived in rented rooms in the past and I think a boarding house model for clean, sober low income workers is essential.
I was the first post on this thread. I feel we have to be extremely aggressive with the Honduran cartels who run the drugs into SF and sell them, and to triage people on the streets into appropriate facilities, including rural substance abuse recovery incarceration centers with appropriate services.
Once drugs have rewired your brain you are turned into a zombie that has been reprogrammed to do whatever it takes to keep the flow of your addiction coming. We have to break this cycle.
Why is he in one of the most expensive cities living on the streets when he has enough money to rent for a year?
I have lived in circumstances that I did not prefer but made decisions for safer/stable alternatives only because my survival instinct was stronger than my need to establish my need for freedom. I try to be empathetic but I can’t wrap my head around this kind of logic.
He's been here 10 years. I feel people who have a track record of living, working and paying taxes in place should have better access to resources than someone who just got off a bus from Tennessee with an advocate provided checklist of how to find resources to help support their drug habit.
OTOH: Thousands of immigrants on H1 visa have a track record of living, working and paying taxes in the United States, but will never get to vote or change a job or even leave the country. There is no guarantee that we will always get what we want.
We have a system where every individual has the freedom to live within the law of the land and using their own resources.
When living in San Francisco becomes untenable and yet the choice is made, the individual should accept responsibility for their decision.
I agree. But you are claiming that the number of years having domicile in a location is an entitlement despite not being able to afford cost of living. How is that relevant/not irrelevant?
I'm unsure of the reasoning, but one plausible reasoning is that if one has been paying taxes to the most local unit (state/local) for the past 10 years or whatever by working at whole foods and buying things with his productive labor, that means that both he may have paid in enough society can help him and still break even, as well as provide some historical basis to presume the investment to help him get housed will pay in dividends in continuing taxes down the line.
One might argue if someone just shows up from afar in SF, you get them housed and their life back together, there's comparably (to the 10 year person) little reason to believe they're gonna stick around to pay back into the system and produce the kind of ROI on the localities investment that whole foods guy may give
I'm not saying this is a "good" argument per se, but it would one that would make sense to me. If someone put a gun to my head and said "figure out how to use taxes, and only taxes, to help the homeless" I would probably rank cities by unskilled income : cost of living, then build rehabilitation facilities in those areas and use a nationwide distributed tax model to offer people voluntary relocation and rehabilitation in partnership with local businesses which is jointly funded nationwide to avoid the situation seen such as in SF where the minute you give the homeless more benefits you get them coming from all around to benefit.
If you give homeless benefits just for showing up it's gonna end up as a race to the bottom, IMO, where whoever is the most 'helpful' sees a landslide of immigration of people needing help, which isn't practical when the load isn't shared. SF locals are probably not going to want to be the ones known as the person that foots the rehab bill for anyone who hitchhikes to town and then merrily walks away never to pay it back as soon as they get their heads on straight.
This person has enough money for a year’s rent in the bank and is still sleeping on the streets. That was my read. I have to confess that I am a little confused.
I confess I am also still a little confused as to how one can involuntarily be on the streets with a year's rent in the bank. In most cities that in connection with employment is at least enough to buy and maintain a van or something that runs well enough to not run afoul of the 72 hour street parking rules. I presume there are either ideological factors or some unique unusual personal situation at play. One wild idea is perhaps ideological opposition to landlords and belief that the automobile is bad for the earth, but that's completely speculative.
1/ There are no rooms to rent
2/ He doesn't drive and doesn't want to live in a vehicle
3/ He is not 100% mentally I suspect, and I would hate to see this functioning adult deteriorate on the streets
It’s a difficult situation for sure. Fwiw, anything that requires compassion and understanding, I am loathe to rely on state/govt for it. Here is where community needs to come together to find creative solutions.
Some suggestions:
1. Move to north bay or another area where it is more affordable. Whole Foods probably will allow transfers.
2. Can he upskill? Certificate courses or some such?
3. Can he get or can someone pitch in to get him a gym membership?
4. Will he be able to rent a room?
5. Room mate situation with someone?
6. Can he take driving lessons and obtain a license?
Perhaps you can help him get a license or a gym membership? If he has the money, it’s a small amount. Stability and community is very crucial for housing vulnerable folks.
There can be other jobs like house sitting or caretaking or pet sitting. There are many jobs online that also pay these days.
When shelter is offered without any strings attached it is almost never refused by homeless persons. Some people have developed serious trust issues with government authorities after decades of abuses but if the housing is presented as a thing they control it is almost universally accepted.
The problem is that shelter is always offered with strings attached - you need to be actively seeking employment, you need to listen to our sermons, you can't use if you accept the housing, you can only sleep here for three nights then we need the bed for someone else.
If SF built some new high-rises and offered every homeless person a condo free of charge that they will personally own after some amount of occupancy you'd pretty much solve homelessness and put a significant dent in mental health issues overnight.
>If SF built some new high-rises and offered every homeless person a condo free of charge that they will personally own after some amount of occupancy you'd pretty much solve homelessness and put a significant dent in mental health issues overnight.
And if that does not happen you can always say that some strings were attached after all: the requirement to pay utility bills, the requirement to dispose of trash, the requirement not to have open fire and/or chemical labs inside, the requirement not to assault neighbors and passersby etc. etc. After all there are always some "strings" required to live in the society and even more of those when you require that the society provides you with everything you need for nothing in return.
> Long-term public support for the entire population, even the inconveniently vulnerable and expensive part of the population, is the only solution.
Right, the entire population of the US, which means solutions has to come from the federal government because of freedom of movement within the US.
The only solution available for state, county, and city governments is incarceration. Unless they want to blow up their budgets and see people who pay into the system move out and people who are net recipients of benefits move in.
You need to look at Canada, the Netherlands, Portugal, and other American cities.
Canada never tried to mass incarceration imprison-away the problem and they're rapidly discovering that they actually need some criminal charges and some incarceration or people don't care to improve. Taking fentanyl is literally the best feeling thing in life and you expect a junkie to just stop living in a free-drug camp?
The Netherlands and Portugal though have an incarceration-based rehab program. They don't ask the junkie if they're ready, they pick up anyone drugged out in public. But their programs work because there's essentially no other choice. You can't just refuse to detox because they don't give you free Fentanyl like Vancouver and SF. You can't support a junkie by giving them poison. They wean you, in 3-9 months, with long-halflife opioid agonists and then you spend years, sober, learning to live clean.
The policies you support are killing people with kindness.
First of all, we should be providing enough of a safety net that no one ever becomes homeless. But given how bad we are at that as a culture...
The fact of the matter is, there are two populations of homeless, and while they are not defined the presence or absence of drug use and mental illness, there is a correlation. These populations are those that will accept housing and shelter, and those that won't.
The former population is easy to deal with. Give them housing until they are able to obtain it on their own.
But what do you do about people who would rather stay on the streets? Let's split this "unwilling" population once more. There are the unwilling that are unobtrusive, don't bother anyone or hurt anything. Not a problem. But what about the unwilling that are a public nuisance? Erratic, violent, etc.?
What, realistically, do you do about them? They won't go, but they can't stay. Define "long-term public support" for a population of people that is dangerous to the public and unwilling not to be. Eventually they will hurt someone or damage property and end up in prison anyway. Should we not address a clear public safety hazard preemptively?
Yes yes, slippery slope. Care will need to be taken, people will fall through the cracks anyway. Every system has cracks, but god knows the current one has big gaping gashes. We are already failing these people. I don't know that incarceration would fail them worse.
Worse than the people outside your windows screaming, having fights, r*ping each other, being abused, assaulting others? Is very easy to judge when you don't live the consequences.
Anecdotally, I have SF colleagues who surprisingly often have to interrupt phone calls to check on disturbances outside. Filing a police report does nothing even for battery.
I'm still amazed by this Greater LA story where a vagrant has holed up on a woman's front porch, and the police won't do anything.
> This has little to do with the availability of housing, or the cost of housing.
This is a startlingly ignorant take. Shelter is among the basic human needs. If people were starving to death, would you blame mental illness or food prices?
> Progressive attempts to solve this problem have all failed
Yes. Because they don't focus on creating more housing. Not "affordable" housing, just housing.
They're called "progressive" attempts because the city's politics is dominated by progressives. But every property owner and voter, regardless of political stripe, is responsible for this state of affairs.
There is exactly 1 solution to California's "housing crisis". More housing. Not "affordable" housing. Not mass transit alone. More. Housing. Moar. Build baby build. If that doesn't work, you know what you do? Build more housing. Beat those prices into the ground with construction cranes and hammers.
If there were a million empty houses in San Francisco that were available free of charge, there would still be a massive homelessness problem because the real issue is not lack of housing, it's drug addiction and mental illness.
Because everyone knows that SF will tolerate behavior that other cities will not, and that attracts the most problematic homeless people from all over the country. It's practically a network effect for homeless encampments.
You're saying mentally ill, drug addicted people are capable of making rational decisions such as this. But in another thread, you also claimed that regular people who "would be successful and housed" in cheaper places don't make the seemingly rational decision to move away. How?
According to a 2019 survey [0], only 70% of people were living in SF prior to being homeless, and of those 70%, approximately half had lived in SF for less than ten years.
To me, that's staggering if 30% of the homeless population was already homeless before they moved to SF, and if another 30% became homeless within 10 years of moving to SF.
Rationality is not required. Someone sleeping rough in a place like my hometown is going to be moved along if they're in a highly visible area, driven to a shelter if it's dangerously cold, or killed by the elements if they don't get to shelter. Someone in San Francisco can sleep in the same spot right in the middle of everything, undisturbed, for years. Of course you're going to see more homeless people here.
The real issue is both. As I see it there are two types of homeless. There are the people who have a low wage job and for whatever reason get kicked out of their place. Maybe they're couch surfing, or maybe they're on the street. But they do have a desire to contribute, circumstance has just got in the way. These people would not be homeless without the housing affordability crisis since they would be able to save extra money or find a cheap place while they're down.
Then there are the chronically homeless. Those with no desire to become productive. These are the people that imo would be helped by forced rehab programs. But make no mistake, many, many homeless are the first type, not the second.
Any serious examination of the overall homeless problem also needs to take into account that for decades now, Republican governors in other states have been allowed to export their own social problems and homeless issues by busing the homeless to San Francisco and other liberal enclaves.
Should this be allowed? It's morally complex. For instance, if those people were in Nevada or Arizona, they'd likely die of exposure. San Francisco is a uniquely good place to survive being homeless, at least climate-wise.
This is absolutely appalling. Considering we've historically incarcerated these people and it didn't fix anything, I don't see how you can blame "progressive" attempts to solve the crisis.
Do more people come to these cities that have such policies? Probably... but that's not an indictment of the policy.
We have a national crisis. We have some cities/states who literally pay for 1-way bus tickets out (as an alternative to jail).
This solves nothing.
Having more people in jail solves nothing.
> This solves nothing. Having more people in jail solves nothing.
Yes it does. It gets them off the streets. It is the only thing that will do it.
The problem in the past is that we only incarcerated homeless people overnight. Jail was a revolving door, and people went right back onto the streets after being released, over and over again.
The problem is that we released them before they had recovered from the problems that made them homeless! We put them right back on the streets! It was a stupid policy that achieved nothing.
We need to be willing, as a society, to incarcerate people, and keep them incarcerated, until we have a good reason to believe they will not be homeless when released. This will require massive commitment and expenditure.
The problem has become so great that nothing else will work. There are no other possible solutions. Plus, if you see the way these people currently live, you'd realize that being institutionalized is better than the hell that is currently their daily lives.
> Yes it does. It gets them off the streets. It is the only thing that will do it.
So does it follow that the reason the previous houseed persons who are now homeless were previously in jail? If not, then there are other root causes at work, such as disappearance of inexpensive housing.
The argument you are making sounds like a dialog out of Charles Dickens, just without the irony.
Really? What about the "people are shitting on the street" issue? You don't think arresting people who do that will stop it? It'll create other problems, and obviously we shouldn't just go around and permanently lock up everyone who is living on the street, but doing that would obviously solve some things.
When inmates at one of the most notoriously dysfunctional jails spend a few hours in soiled clothes with poop on the floor, it's news. That's every day in Civic Center.
There's a point at which freedom and independence aren't working for someone. Maybe with more resources it could work. But sometimes you need to be in the care of an institution from which you cannot just wander away. This seems obvious... I genuinely do not understand. Do you think there is no such threshold? Or do you think the people hanging out in Civic Center right now aren't over it?
Let's shove everyone into a horrifying place that is already overcrowded and unable to take care of it's inmates and does very little to rehabilitate anyone.
At least we won't see them anymore, right?
I think it's extremely important to differentiate between prisons (which, honestly, need some work anyways) and institutions that specialize in mental healthcare and drug addiction treatment that include mandatory stays. Both of these types of confinement can be described as "incarceration" but they are quite different.
Just imagine living on the streets for an extended period, while also dealing with substance abuse and/or other mental illnesses. The state has failed you, there is no denying that. Indeed the state has repeatedly failed you. Every time you’ve tried to improve your living conditions has failed. Everytime you’ve tried to fix your substance abuse problem has failed, and every time you’ve found shelter, you’ve lost it for some reason. This has happened multiple times over.
Do you honestly believe that after all that, people are still rational and blindly accept help from the state? No, they’ve failed so for, you might as well just accept that things are as good as they’ll get.
When tackling this problem, we don’t only have to deal with the current situations, we also have to consider past failure, because people remember them, and they do affect current behavior.
> Proposed solutions that don't involve incarceration should be ignored as unserious and unrealistic.
Incarceration has been our primary approach for dealing with drug addiction and mental illness over the last 42 years. It is extremely expensive, with cost-per-inmate figures ranging from $15K-64K depending on the state, with California being the most expensive. I don't know of any public policy experts, regardless of their political leanings who consider this an effective approach.
I think people fail to recognize that part of the push to "decriminalize" drugs and homelessness isn't necessarily bleeding-heart progressivism but calculated austerity: Prisons are full. We want murders, rapists and violent criminals locked up in them. We cannot do that if they are clogged up with people whose primary offenses were being mentally ill and/or drugs.
I understand that California in particular has been more lax the rest of the country, but coming from the midwest our hard-ass drug laws didn't prevent meth and then heroin from ravaging both urban and rural communities.
So if you do want to simply lock these people away, I think you also need the political will to do two very important things:
1) Provide evidence that spending $15,000-$65,000 to incarcerate a homeless drug addict will produce a better outcome than spending those same public tax dollars on something else that could also benefit society and/or the individuals in question.
2) Raise and invest tax money into prison infrastructure to house these people. This will likely mean hiking taxes and/or cutting them from things like education.
No worries! We'll just build more prisons! Perhaps a second "inflation reduction act" could be passed to print some more money to pay for it and also to make sure there are more dollars out there to help pay for these rising prices.
I agree that incarceration isn't progressive, but is it conservative? I mean I'm sure conservatives will appreciate brutalizing (those they perceive as) criminals for little more than the sake of it, but prisons in California aren't cheap, and is there much appetite for even more taxation?
This is a grotesque mischaracterization of conservatives. Just because a group of people do not agree with you does not make them violence-obsessed brutes.
Trump was banned from Twitter because the people running it absolutely hated him and everything he stood for, and being on his way out of office they figured it was time to make the move that they had been wanting to make for years.
I am not sure if I consider Trump's behavior breaking the Terms of Services that we _all_ need to follow, but he walked up to that line closer and closer, and got bit. However, 2 others, Senator Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley said way more damning things than Trump, on paper, the same days, on the same topic, and they got no penalty.
Trivia: what country incarcerates the most people per capita? Oddly, that country is the topic of discussion here. And I live and work in/near San Francisco and it's plenty a shit show depending on neighborhood, but a very far cry from an "open-air drug den". Let's dig in deeper for solutions.
So what you’re saying is we should pay $60,000 per year for government housing for these people?
You know there have been studies where giving people homes, or building subsidized housing, absolutely does improve peoples lives, cut addiction and crime rates, and generally do the things most progressives say they will.
Your proposal also puts them in expensive government housing but it does so in a way which significantly harms the individual. Incarceration might “solve” the problem for you but it does so at an extreme cost to others. And the financial burden to the state is still high. Meanwhile social housing solutions like those in Vienna actually make positive changes to peoples lives while still getting them off the streets:
Because you outright dismiss building social housing as expensive and ineffective but you want to put them in to an equally expensive situation that is clearly less effective. I cannot imagine why you would think prison is better than social housing unless you ignore the very real cost of prison.
Prison is social housing, but it’s mandatory rather than optional.
We could build all the social housing we want, but it will only house people who willingly move into it. Many homeless people are insane drug addicts, and they are the ones who disrupt society, and they will not willingly change. What would you do about that?
Some people are going to need more intensive (and possibly coercive) care and supervision than social housing provides, but it is not like they're struggling to fill social housing units. Backlogs are deep and competitive. We need a lot more of them.
Prison abuses the soul and doesn’t help the individual. Look at the recidivism rates for US prisons to see how prison does nothing to rehabilitate people. If prison doesn’t help someone and you want to send them to prison, then you aren’t actually trying to help people you’re just trying to get rid of them. If you actually try to help people you will see how much better social housing is. But I don’t think that’s where your mind is at. You see these people as a lost cause and you want police to take them away. Don’t pretend you care if you actually just want them gone.
“Many people are insane drug addicts”
Lots of people in society are drug addicts. Probably the rate is slightly higher amongst the homeless because homelessness can be hard.
Lots of people don’t want to go to existing shelters because of the draconian rules at those shelters. Probably you wouldn’t want to live in a place either if you had to be home every night at 8pm and you couldn’t have friends over and you weren’t allowed to have some beer. Does that mean we should throw you in prison?
What I would do is provide the services these people need. Housing, mental health services, counseling, job training, and job placement programs. All told this would cost less than prison because these programs have been shown to actually help people, so the burden to the state will go down over a few years as these programs do what they are supposed to. But prison won’t help them, so the costs will continue for as long as they are in prison, and once they are released you’re back where you started.
Don’t pretend you want to help people if you don’t actually care what is most effective at helping them.
> Don’t pretend you want to help people if you don’t actually care what is most effective at helping them.
I want to help people. I just recognize reality. All of what you have suggested has been tried, and has failed, and now the streets of San Francisco are unrecognizably bad. Dystopian sci-fi movies from the 1980s are actually better than the reality on the streets today.
Also, who are we trying to help? Personally I care more about the person living in an apartment who has to deal with crazy people stabbing each other outside of their window in the morning than I do about the crazy people stabbing each other. Not enough attention has been paid to the people who are trying to live upright lives while being surrounded by this violence -- going to work, raising children, etc. They matter too.
> All of what you have suggested has been tried, and has failed
People love to say this while ignoring the fact that universal health care and social housing absolutely work in other parts of the world. Whatever parts of this strategy you think have been tried, it’s clear there are ways to make it work. You’d rather abandon those people you consider lesser because of mental illness or addiction, but we can in fact support those people for the same price as a prison cell.
It’s remarkable that you think you recognize reality and believe these things can’t work, because $60k per year of spending on social services would absolutely work. I mean hell the average German only needs something like $8k in services for medical care per year. You don’t think that would help?? You can claim to “recognize reality” but you’re ignoring how effective public spending is the world over.
America is not Germany. We have different people, and different problems. We have a uniquely violent and psychotic homeless population. You have probably not seen anything like it.
I believe this is extremely untrue - during the 70's it was (depressingly) actually accurate as stupid American politics kept leaded gasoline legal far beyond when it was known to be dangerous and caused a significant jump in violent crime but, for the most part, people are people.
If you think Americans are unable to function as well as Germans then I hope you're speaking out loudly at PTA meetings because it must mean the American education system is utterly broken.
Let’s say that you’re correct, and the homeless population in the USA is more psychotic than the homeless population in Germany. Can you possibly imagine any reasons why the German population, who has universal healthcare and a variety of other social services, would have better mental health than the US population? Could it possibly be that social spending absolutely does work?
Like, you want to spend $60k/year or whatever throwing these people in prison for struggling to make it in the current system, and I’m here saying “spend that money on services, like Germany does”, and you say “no our people are way worse off than the German population” and you cannot seem to connect the dots that German social spending is exactly the reason Germany doesn’t have these problems… social spending works!
When you say incarceration do you mean prison and jails or recovery clinics?
America (and Canada too!) had horrible issues with abuses in mental institutions that led to a short sighted knee-jerk reaction of shuttering all of them to prevent abuses rather than cleaning them up and addressing the actual concerns. As someone with a family member with developmental disabilities (comorbid with other issues) I've seen my family member thrive in institutional settings - not getting locked in a padded cell institutions but facilities with enough staff and patients to respond quickly and with specialized labour to sudden issues. I think it'd be wonderful if we could, as a society, get our minds away from Victoria Era sanitoriums where patients were exhibited as carnival shows and start seriously investing in larger facilities - home care options and group homes fall extremely short in providing ample care for folks while being extremely costly.
I don't think any of the people sleeping on the street are there by choice - it's just that their alternatives don't exist. A fair number of shelters are run by religious organizations that shame and preach to the homeless - offering a bed in exchange for prostelitization, other shelters are short on beds for the population they need to serve and prevent long term residency sometimes allowing a few consecutive nights - sometimes offering a single night, kicking everyone out in the morning and offering beds first come first served.
Depending on how you are defining incarceration I'm either in agreement with you or I guess - yea, it'd work, but it's a terrible solution to just force people with mental illnesses into the prison system where they will receive next to no mental healthcare and just rot as human beings. Mental disabilities don't make you subhuman.
It seems like they are literally bussing in homeless into San Francisco because of the services and money. It has become a drug distribution hub that is supported by the govt and tax money. There is little to no consequence for peddling drugs on the streets right under the nose of law enforcement.
I think part of the reason SF and LA have large homeless populations is because of the temperate climate. It's much easier to survive a winter outside in LA than in WV. NYC is a different story, and I'm not sure that if they have the same number of homeless on a per-capita basis as cities like LA, SF, and Sacramento.
Every single one of the cities with large homeless populations have absurdly high housing costs.
All the people in this thread are refusing to acknowledge that may play some causal factor because the solution might involve slightly lowering their property values.
So is your assertion that cities in WV "disappear" their homeless population?
Show your work here. It's actually not simple at all because per capita drug abuse is far worse in WV so if that's the causal mechanism then you should see tons of homeless in WV.
> we have a chronic opioid and meth crisis which tips many people over into serious mental illness.
But also the most visible homeless population is not the only homeless population, and people who became homeless through other paths can get stuck. Having a home is really helpful for e.g. getting and keeping a job, resolving or managing health issues, etc.
On the ground in a city determined to kill people with its liberal drug policies I can say this housing-first does NOT save junkies. Its main benefit is to provide people who do not know the conditions and the costs a way to attack those of us who do. Read the wiki page - their examples are primarily before 2010 when the opioid crisis really kicked in and many of the examples are about alcohol addiction - not hard drugs.
You can't give a junkie anything you don't want them to trade for drugs. If you give them an apartment they'll sell the plumbing fixtures and everything else. They'll also go back to sleeping outside, right next to where they procure their fentanyl, because nothing but acquiring and using matters.
Vancouver and SF also both insist you can't give someone a dingy basement suite (like many of their residents actually pay for and live in) but you have to give them a bright cheery condo in an expensive area. All done seemingly to avoid ever having enough money to house more than a few people. Housing first isn't actually being tried, in a way that taxpayers or foreign drug-policy experts would expect.
It's more about the careers of the literal thousands of people, poverty pimps, who "manage" the problem every day, and the power it gives them in city council to make sweeping decisions for the city. The number of lives lost positively correlates with dollars spent because the money goes to feel-good nonsense and bandaids, and actually counter-productive measures like fentanyl vending machines which have been proven to increase, not replace, street crime.
>California is a magnet for substance abuse casualties
The data[1] shows that over 70% of all of SF's unhoused people became homeless while living in San Francisco. What we're dealing with is a housing crisis.
Every $100 increase in median rent is associated with a 9 percent increase in the estimated homelessness rate. [2]
I just visited SF for the first time in a long time and I noticed many many homeless crushing crystals in aluminum foil and then smoking with a torch and glass pipe. (Never saw this previously.. was always people shooting up)
Out of morbid curiosity.. is this not crack cocaine?
Is this an intuitive take or a data take? My understanding is that much of the data disagrees with the idea that homelessness is driven by drug abuse. Things like the strong association between homelessness and housing costs + just survey data implying most homeless people don't move to SF as homeless people, all sort of implies that. Worth noting though, unsheltered isn't the same as homeless. Many homeless people are sheltered either in shelters, their cars, or friends homes.
I think intuitively it seem likely to me that drugs might be the difference between chronically homeless people and merely temporary, it also seems like it might have a relationship with the people you encounter on the street and get mad about seeing, but the studies of the overall population seem to say homelessness is causing drug use not the other way around
> the strong association between homelessness and housing costs
I'd be careful with this. High housing costs are also likely highly correlated with areas that provide a lot of services to the homeless which might be the cause of homelessness.
For sure, there's a reason I just said association, but in the absence of evidence that the cause is something else just trying to spin an argument from first principles is dangerous. For a story to sound good it need not be true and any story that sees the bad things that happen to people in the world as somehow their own fault is bound to be attractive, though weirdly also a story that removes all personal responsibility so I must admit it goes a bit both ways.
Primary cause of homelessness in SF, according to a 2019 survey conducted by Applied Survey Research for the City of San Francisco:
Lost Job 26%
Alcohol or Drug Use 18%
Eviction 13%
Argument with Family or Friend Who Asked You to Leave 12%
Mental Health Issues 8%
Divorce/Separation/Breakup 5%
California has enough shelter space and housing for the true (involuntary) homeless, meaning those who are homeless because they can't afford housing, or because they have a mental illness and can't maintain housing on their own. Almost all of our shelters are sober facilities, meaning no drugs or alcohol, which is what led to the formation of homeless camps: drug addicts don't have to get rid of their drugs if they set up camp on a sidewalk.
The point of the sweeps is to make the camps an undesirable option compared to shelters, or moving back home, by increasing the friction and hassle of camping vs the alternatives.
Most of CA's homeless aren't local to SF, LA, or SD, or even to California. For example, LAT reporting on the subject has confirmed that as much as 75% of Hollywood's homeless may be from the Midwest. Several Midwestern states (specifically, Texas and Oklahoma) openly brag about shipping their homeless to CA to avoid dealing with the costs of caring for their own residents. Moreover, the great majority of the drug-addicted homeless population is comprised of out-of-state residents, and drug addicts are more than half of California's homeless.
Camp sweeps are a good thing. They disincentivize drug hotspots, get the mentally ill into shelters where they can be treated, and improve safety for everyone else.
these camps are a serious problem for the rest of us in SF that are trying to lead quasi-normal lives. it just cant be acceptable to have dogs trained to harass and attack people running around free on the streets.
i'm hardly a law and order kind of person, but methheads arguing outside your window every night is real problem. it really hard to run a retail business when there are 5-6 seriously messed up people living right outside you door who have reluctantly agreed to keep a tiny path free.
it really sucks to have to pick up their biological waste because they cant be bothered.
as a society, not just the city of SF, we should really wonder what we're trying to accomplish here and how this situation came to exist instead of wondering if there is another rug we can push this all under.
> Camp sweeps are a good thing. They disincentivize drug hotspots, get the mentally ill into shelters where they can be treated, and improve safety for everyone else.
I think if it disincentivizes drug hotspots, the effect is weak. I would say it temporarily moves the same people by a very short distance. You still see the same issues in the same neighborhoods, week after week. Similarly, if this is meant to be a mechanism for helping people with mental illness get to help, it's not effective. I see the same characters over and over again.
I would also argue it doesn't improve safety for everyone else. If anything, when a sweep happens, it creates a sudden stream of agitated, physically and emotionally unsettled people, moving through the street. Normally in my neighborhood walking _past_ an encampment isn't too bad. Walking home when a sweep has just happened nearby is much less comfortable.
I think what's really happening is theater. Local officials and institutions need to appear to be active more than they need to be actually effective. So while we're not actually solving problems, we're having the most visible homelessness shepherded from block to block.
Keep in mind the total number of homeless outside SF vastly exceeds the number inside, so this dose of money will no doubt create "vacancies on the street" which will be quickly filled by homeless from other areas, and require an additional dose of money. As word gets out, the problem would likely get larger, not smaller. This seems like a losing proposition for one city, surrounded by water on 3 sides, to try and solve on their own.
The worst thing about this is it is extremely unlikely to help with homelessness, but it will almost certainly earn big bucks for lawyers involved in the homeless industrial complex. The level of perverse corruption here is phenomenal.
First time I’m hearing of such a complex that sounds oxymoronic. How big is this complex? Who are the players? How do they make so much money to become a complex industry?
Apparently there was a decent amount of money being spent in Houston I think it was, that wasn't effectively housing hardly anyone until all the agencies got together and started working together. There was an HN post on it.
The motels would be worth nowhere near that much if sold as a motel, and it is happening all up and down west coast cities. I know one property that sold for $150k per key, which would have sold for half that to a non government buyer, and the kicker is that it sits empty except for housing 2 guests that were already living there when the government bought it in summer 2021.
I’m not suggesting there aren’t people who profit in some way from the money spent on services for the homeless. But calling it an industrial complex elevates it. The motels are not a single uniform entity intertwined with the government to extract profits this way while trying to undermine the mission of public policy in order to make even more money. I’m not an economist but I’m certain there is a high bar to become an industrial complex.
"The ultimate goal of the lawsuit is to push the city to instead spend billions on affordable housing to provide shelter for everyone and fix its homelessness crisis, which the lawsuit says is a result of decades of failed policies and underinvestment."
..
"Mayor London Breed has touted her effort to expand shelter beds and permanent supportive housing. Still, officials estimate 20,000 people will be homeless in San Francisco over the course of this year and demand can’t keep up despite the city having 13,299 supportive housing units and 3,571 shelter spots as of last week."
Demand, it says.
Here's the problem with homeless advocates and their goals: they're idealistic and absolute. What percentage of homeless people are locals? Maybe 50 percent or less? We live in a country of over 320 million people and porous-by-law borders between 49 other states. What do you think would happen to a place that would create supportive housing structure, have the most liberal laws on public drug use and property crimes, with volunteers on stand-by to provide needles and medical attention as needed.
It's all a bit perplexing to me that people keep touting "housing shortages." I live surrounded by homeless people. They're not homeless because rents are high, they're homeless because of a slew of other psychological and addiction issues. And almost no one was born in the city that they're homeless in.
> And almost no one was born in the city that they're homeless in
Not clear on why that is particularly relevant. Almost no one I know lives in the town they were born in, myself included. Of the few homeless people I know personally here in Oakland, all of them were born and raised in Oakland.
Is there data showing a migration of homeless people towards SF? Presumably we would see a reduction in homelessness elsewhere if SF was acting as a magnet?
[..]In what has become a five-alarm fire for many women in the city — spread on social media — several alleged victims have posted photos of the distinctive-looking Hobbs, a 6-foot-4 white man with a buzz cut and a body covered in tattoos, including the E-V-I-L tag on his fingers.
The fact that a San Francisco Superior Court judge dismissed a case against Hobbs in which he was accused of following and grabbing a 15-year-old girl — first reported in this column — is well known by now. So is the fact that he’s back on the streets despite a long arrest record in four counties, despite admitting to me in a phone interview that he follows women he finds attractive, and despite the flood of new complaints.
But it turns out city officials had another chance to intervene on Aug. 11 — and again came up short.[..]
[..]A police report states that he entered a home on Avila Street in the Marina while the owner, who left the door unlocked, was out walking his dog. When the owner returned and found Hobbs standing in his hallway, he called police and told them the intruder kept saying, “I want a house like this.”
Hobbs, according to the report, initially told officers he was “Scott Peterson,” using the name of the California man who notoriously killed his pregnant wife.[..]
Rent should be < 30% of income [1]. If the cost of housing is far more than that, then homelessness is expected. Where do service workers live? Do they drive from hours away via expensive gas? It's unsustainable unless there are artificial balances such as tax-paid subsidized housing.
Anyone who is chronically homeless should be offered jobs and paid housing. If that doesn't work, then they become a ward of the state and treated as a child.
That’s going to be most of them, as most are drug addicts. And no I don’t have any stats for you, frankly just walk around SF or Portland, it’s obvious.
Have you considered that you only notice the addicts and mentally ill? Because they don't give a shit about being seen as homeless. Everyone else is probably trying to keep up appearances by hanging out in libraries or coffee shops during the day.
There's quite a bit of confusion in this thread regarding "chronic homelessness" vs "temporary/short-term homelessness". The solution for short-term homelessness is generally the use of "emergency shelters", of which San Francisco has many. However, emergency shelters do little to nothing to address chronic homelessness, which requires long-term supportive housing, something San Francisco has very little of.
This difference, which gets lost in discussions such as the one here, leads to bad-faith statements by politicians and others regarding the true amount of housing available for homeless people. For example, the number of "available beds" touted by Newsom and others are almost entirely within short-term emergency shelters, which do not address the real problem (chronic homelessness) much at all. Instead, this "number-of-beds" statistic is used to gloss over the fact that a real solution has not been found, and then justify (probably illegal) police action against homeless people. The true intent of such actions is probably to cause regular disruption in the lives of homeless people to increase the difficulty of simply being homeless in San Francisco. Whether or not you agree with such police action is up to you, but it's important to acknowledge that the argument that "there is available housing" is a bad faith argument, and that this argument is simply used to redirect attention from both police action against homeless people as well as the fact that a real solution has not been found.
Here's a citation that describes the differences between short term emergency housing and long term housing, which illuminates why the current approach being taken by San Francisco is not genuine as well as approaches that might actually work:
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. (2018). Permanent supportive housing: Evaluating the evidence for improving health outcomes among people experiencing chronic homelessness.
https://twitter.com/chezpim/status/1574824441854324736 : reading this thread, I found out that it’s possible to buy stun guns. What does the law in CA say about using stun guns for self defense? And where does one buy them?
As to the drug-addicted or mentally unwell folks, we are going to have to figure out some other method than asylums, in neighborhood group homes, or the streets. All of these had major scandals and disfavor from the communities affected.
Its going to have to be an involuntary solution (yes, incarceration), and its probably going to involve moving people to a ranch-like area away from the city with a much different housing setup than some cells or apartments, maybe something with individual shelters with outside spaces. I expect its going to be a commitment of years or forever for some of these people. Working on people's mental health and addiction is not some 30 day process. Just the dentist bill alone will be scary, but its not going to get better in a tent in SF.
Society cannot last with this level of filth and crime in major cities.
The homeless because of cost folks, well, move to somewhere else or we are going to need a wave of mini-apartments approved at some point, but SF doesn't like such things.
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[ 0.19 ms ] story [ 210 ms ] threadI guess we'll find out in 2024 if that argument has legs.
The original title was : “S.F. sued over homeless camp sweeps activists charge city with criminalizing unsheltered” that I edited due to limits on title length on HN submission.
I'm curious - what do you imagine that looks like?
Alternatively start up workhouses and sanitariums again. Government work in exchange for a safe, clean place to sleep and food for the day. Mental sanitariums for those people that are too far gone. That should provide enough of a disincentive over time to camp on the streets.
An observation: most of the "simple answer" approaches to this seem to have failed badly in practice when/where they are attempted. There has to be some complexity, no?
What is it about the shelters (other than lack of spaces) that is making people opt not to use them?
One part of the problem is that the sheer cost of housing in San Francisco (and the surrounding) area is out of control. Some homeless people are simply priced out of the market. That generally is caused by a general lack of new construction in San Francisco and the Bay Area. But, I doubt that magically increasing the housing stock overnight will "solve" homelessness. (Because there are many reasons for homelessness.)
When I lived in the S.F. Bay area for almost a decade, I was shocked that the homeless problem was so bad. Where I'm from, the weather does put a sense of urgency on homelessness, because it's much more difficult to camp unsheltered in the winter. The Bay Area doesn't have the late October-November urgency to get people into shelters; nor do the homeless have the urgency to follow someone else's rules for a bit or risk freezing to death.
What I would suggest is to try to avoid seeing homeless as "others." Many people are homeless for different reasons; and it's important to empathize with the person who doesn't want the tent on their front door as much as it's important to empathize with the person in the tent.
so let's continue to spend more on incarcerating them as a bandage rather than fixing the issues :)
> incidents of... pooping...
i'm sure they just do this outside for preference rather than utter lack of access to public facilities. why couldn't they be like me during my trip to SF where i could just patronize a business to use their bathroom when i needed to go?
> menace to public health and safety
love to see the intentional split between "public" and whatever group you'd put houseless people in (those "menaces"!)
One of the points of the justice system is to ensure that people are sufficiently disincentivized from doing things that society has decided shouldnt be done. We shouldnt consider it a good investment to enable bad behavior.
No false notions required -- all living people have a risk of loss of freedoms, which is why prison works.
> why can't there be more public garbage cans
I suppose this mostly makes sense until we start to have local businesses using them for free trash disposal. Why would I be more in favor of public trash cans you ask? (so you dont have to continue presuming...) Because it's enabling and encouraging an ideal behavior -- people dispose of their trash in an orderly manner.
If you really cared about this, then you would simply impose a simple tax on local businesses and give them garbage service in return. Or you’d enforce proper garbage disposal on the businesses not the unhoused. It is a lot easier to monitor and enforce the garbage disposal of businesses then that of the unhoused.
you realize that the justice system doesn't equally impact everyone, right? people with more wealth, more access are demonstrably treated better and have better outcomes with regard to the justice system, so no, all living people do not have the same risk of losing freedoms.
> ... which is why prison works
ah, there it is
i'm glad you agree with more access to public trash cans; however, i think it should be called out
> local businesses using them for free trash disposal
is already done in homeless encampments. i can find some, but there are many reports of businesses dumping in encampments because there's little risk of getting caught and no one bats an eye at trash-ridden encampments.
I agree with you that this is an injustice and should be fixed, that doesnt mean we shouldnt work towards using the tool (it's not a either/or scenario, we can do both) .
> is already done in homeless encampments. ...
Only furthers my point as to why we should not be enabling bad behaviors
idk. the amount the police harasses the unhoused, I think we all would be living in a police state if the same brutality was employed equally across citizens.
It has been shown multiple time over in experimental settings that punishment is a pretty poor means of modifying behavior. The deterrence of punishment is marginal at best. For punishment to work consistently you need to apply it consistently and immediately, law enforcement does neither.
There are other means of modifying behavior that are both scientifically proven and have shown results in the real world. This includes accommodating the desired behavior while disincentivizing the undesired ones.
If you want the unhoused to leave their surroundings cleaner, give them trash cans, public kitchens, safe use shelters, regular street cleaners, etc. If you don’t want them to pitch a tent on 17th and Mission, designate an area where they can.
No the point of the justice system is to give victims of crimes some solace that justice has been served. It has nothing to with the behavior of criminals.
That's much more reasonable of a point than other peer comments. To which I mostly would suggest that rehabilitation is definitely an important part (and I'd agree with you if you claimed the USA is bad at rehabilitation... but lets improve that than bandaid something else)
I'll wait.
My belief is that homelessness / 'unsheltered' is a catchall result of all the gaps in society's integration of individuals; and it's also a national level problem since the individuals can also be shipped around like those migrants that made the news recently. At least in America, but I've also heard that one of the emotionally motivating factors of Brexit were migrants from outside of the EU, we refuse to even provide a path and set of requirements for those who do want to participate in the system that's setup (instead in the US it's "build the wall" or "war at the border" extremes). Closing gaps in social safety nets and providing pathways for those who are troubled to integrate into society in mutually useful ways, or perhaps even caring for those who are incapable of such self care when provided help getting out of that hole, logically seems like a far harder challenge than any single city can face in a vacuum when we can't even handle easier issues on a national level.
The correct answer is what Portugal does. Detain and imprison drug users for three to five years in a non-voluntary, non-criminal, detox programs where they don't receive a criminal record from merely non-violent crimes.
Still cheaper than prisons.
Only if you don't value human life. People die in these cities' drug camps. Tens of thousands per year.
But the problem is overstated because these don't need to be expensive supermax prisons. More like a chainlink fence and ankle-bracelets for everyone.
We can't afford to not incarcerate junkies because of the harms to the cities, their residents, and the junkies themselves.
They have shelter beds available. People need to stop repeating falsehoods from activists and well-meaning people who keep saying this.
Some homeless people prefer not to use them for a variety of reasons -- usually because shelters tend to be drug- and alcohol-free -- but also for reasons like not accepting pets or not housing couples of opposite gender together.
Handwaving this away and saying, well, maybe according to some estimate we may run out of beds in the future -- when we haven't run out of beds and never do, is not a serious argument.
Shelters are rife with abuse and have no place for you to store your belongings.
>for reasons like not accepting pets or not housing couples of opposite gender together.
You so casually dismiss the fundamental human desire to be close to the people and animals that you trust while being inside a facility that offers you the absolute barest of minimum and is sometimes outright designed to expose you to predation.
I hope you are able to cite some sources the next time you try to make this point.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/archive/item/A-decade-of-homeles...
There is a lot of land and resources in California to help these individuals focus on recovery and it should be possible to keep the cartel drug dealers away from them in a non urban area.
In conservative Utah, they know their housing-first approach works. It isn't 100% effective, but it is more effective than police-based approaches.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Also, commenting on downvoting is generally frowned upon here. Discuss the article and the comments themselves instead.
They tried this in Minneapolis during COVID to try and get a bunch of homeless people off the street in a nearby hotel that had been emptied due to COVID.
It didn't turn out very well:
A report of a drug overdose led to the eviction Tuesday of more than 200 homeless people from a hotel in south Minneapolis that had become a refuge during protests that erupted in the wake of George Floyd’s killing in police custody.
But some residents at the hotel said conditions had begun to spin out of control in recent days, with people injecting heroin and methamphetamine in the hallways, and fights breaking out at night. Volunteers became overwhelmed.
“It started out well, then descended into chaos,” said Jennie Taylor, who had a room on the second floor. “People got the message that this was a place where you could use drugs freely and that attracted the wrong crowd.”
https://www.startribune.com/homeless-evicted-from-former-mpl...
This has little to do with the availability of housing, or the cost of housing. Some people will simply refuse to live in the housing that is provided. Many are so mentally ill and addicted to drugs that no amount of money we give them, either directly or indirectly, will get them off the streets.
Proposed solutions that don't involve incarceration should be ignored as unserious and unrealistic.
Is that harsh? Is it "not progressive?" Yep. Progressive attempts to solve this problem have all failed. Progressives have allowed San Francisco to turn into an open-air drug den, attracting homeless people from all over the country, and nobody should listen to their ideas anymore.
Genuinely curious, what is the estimated income of your two homeless friends? And do they have any limitations on their salary potential?
> This has little to do with the availability of housing, or the cost of housing. Some people will simply refuse to live in the housing that is provided. Many are so mentally ill and addicted to drugs that no amount of money we give them, either directly or indirectly, will get them off the streets.
Everyone cohabitates with family and friends at some point in life. It's very different than sleeping on the street.
The drugs, and the camps, kill people. If they don't have the wherewithal to move then we need to do it for them. They can't get better while living in filth and honestly can't choose to do better. Once they're imprisoned, in a drug program - not a jail, for the 3-5 years it takes to actually detox they'll be ready to start to get clean and on their feet.
Once they get detoxed though they're going to be looking for a room to rent and a friend and now your offer of help is both wanted and sustainable.
IMO the homeless issue is San Francisco is because they've practically incentivized being homeless by subsidizing the homeless and also making any defense against the crimes of homeless toothless (misdemeanor theft is barely enforced, it is illegal to use violent self defense to defend property, and weapons laws are among the most restrictive in the nation.)
You don't even have to incarcerate them. Just make city policies such that there's no advantage to being homeless in SF, other than maybe the weather.
I don't see any advantage to being homeless. Literally every human being without mental issues would prefer having a roof over their head. This is a market failure.
You missed the "in SF" part of the sentence. In a sense you're correct, it is in part a market failure in SF for subsidizing homelessness.
>Literally every human being without mental issues would prefer having a roof over their head
I have a few times, on purpose. Not being responsible for a house can be liberating, depending on your life circumstances -- if you're not addicted, you're healthy and able bodied, and not mentally ill. It can be like an adventure where you see where you like to go, can get all the money you need for a week in only a day of day labor (which is trivial to get if you're able bodied and have an ID). Homelessness with serious personal problems is awful, but otherwise it can be an enjoyable lifestyle.
I would probably choose periodic homelessness still today were it not I have a child, whom CPS would probably take away if I enjoyed some of the liberties of my youth.
So I bought a shitty car and slept in the forest. The car finally broke down. I wound up homeless. I found out I really loved the forest and spending my time outdoors. I loved to spend months at a time in tents, coming into town to do day labor. Really it's a life I dream of nearly daily now that I have responsibilities to my family that keep me chained to a desk 5 days a week, and to a child during the weekends.
Only once you've been homeless you realize the problems of the homeless are typically the reason why they became homeless - drugs/addiction, mental illness, criminal record, lack of skills for employment. I had none of those problems really, so to me it was just a new adventure, except I could go practically anywhere I wanted and just enjoy travelling. I knew how to live outdoors and can easily adapt a tarp for inclement weather so for me it was just fun, for real! But I know it isn't that way for someone who doesn't want that life. I could always just pick up a day of day labor, and after a couple weeks of that afford to rent another room -- many people have personal problems that keep them from doing that.
That's the problem right there.
Are you aware that mentally ill and drug-addicted people are often able to hold down jobs and afford rent? But that only works when rent is reasonable.
Do you have proof that they would, in fact, be successful? Have you tried running an RCT? Maybe they would't be able to find jobs, or have childcare available from family nearby.
But I doubt it would get past an ethics committee, and if it did there would be a huge scandal. We're pretty deeply committed that the huddled masses of the world must be housed within SF. Even as we're equally deeply committed that they not exist at any particular site within SF, and won't contemplate anywhere near the unit counts (from a budget perspective or a permitting perspective) that would be required.
[0] https://www.slowboring.com/p/homelessness-housing
If you do day labor all week you just made $500 and you only need $100 to survive the week. Pretty easy to sock money away that way... if you decide to rent a room a couple weeks of that gets you your first week in a weekly rental and from there you can clean up and get a regular factory job. I had a well oiled process that I ran that cycle quite a few times. AFter 1-3 months at a factory I would generally get a fork-lift job or something that paid even more and from there you're basically as rich as the average American.
Bonus: If you have HN skills your average wage from the fork-lift job will give you enough to buy a nice laptop, hi-speed internet and then a high-paying programming job -- although it's obviously not generally applicable (although I've done it).
He is one of the people I am very keen to help because he is literally sleeping in the park with screaming, violent drug addicts. He's told me he can't get section 8 housing or any other help as he has money. He has told me if he was an addict he knows he would be getting state payouts and 'help'.
He has lived in rented rooms in the past and I think a boarding house model for clean, sober low income workers is essential.
I was the first post on this thread. I feel we have to be extremely aggressive with the Honduran cartels who run the drugs into SF and sell them, and to triage people on the streets into appropriate facilities, including rural substance abuse recovery incarceration centers with appropriate services.
Once drugs have rewired your brain you are turned into a zombie that has been reprogrammed to do whatever it takes to keep the flow of your addiction coming. We have to break this cycle.
I have lived in circumstances that I did not prefer but made decisions for safer/stable alternatives only because my survival instinct was stronger than my need to establish my need for freedom. I try to be empathetic but I can’t wrap my head around this kind of logic.
We have a system where every individual has the freedom to live within the law of the land and using their own resources.
When living in San Francisco becomes untenable and yet the choice is made, the individual should accept responsibility for their decision.
One might argue if someone just shows up from afar in SF, you get them housed and their life back together, there's comparably (to the 10 year person) little reason to believe they're gonna stick around to pay back into the system and produce the kind of ROI on the localities investment that whole foods guy may give
I'm not saying this is a "good" argument per se, but it would one that would make sense to me. If someone put a gun to my head and said "figure out how to use taxes, and only taxes, to help the homeless" I would probably rank cities by unskilled income : cost of living, then build rehabilitation facilities in those areas and use a nationwide distributed tax model to offer people voluntary relocation and rehabilitation in partnership with local businesses which is jointly funded nationwide to avoid the situation seen such as in SF where the minute you give the homeless more benefits you get them coming from all around to benefit.
If you give homeless benefits just for showing up it's gonna end up as a race to the bottom, IMO, where whoever is the most 'helpful' sees a landslide of immigration of people needing help, which isn't practical when the load isn't shared. SF locals are probably not going to want to be the ones known as the person that foots the rehab bill for anyone who hitchhikes to town and then merrily walks away never to pay it back as soon as they get their heads on straight.
Some suggestions:
1. Move to north bay or another area where it is more affordable. Whole Foods probably will allow transfers. 2. Can he upskill? Certificate courses or some such? 3. Can he get or can someone pitch in to get him a gym membership? 4. Will he be able to rent a room? 5. Room mate situation with someone? 6. Can he take driving lessons and obtain a license?
Perhaps you can help him get a license or a gym membership? If he has the money, it’s a small amount. Stability and community is very crucial for housing vulnerable folks.
There can be other jobs like house sitting or caretaking or pet sitting. There are many jobs online that also pay these days.
Best of luck to your friend.
Ok, what will you do about the people who actively refuse to accept that support?
We are talking about non-rational, mentally ill, addicted people. You can't just offer support. If that worked, this problem would not exist.
The problem is that shelter is always offered with strings attached - you need to be actively seeking employment, you need to listen to our sermons, you can't use if you accept the housing, you can only sleep here for three nights then we need the bed for someone else.
If SF built some new high-rises and offered every homeless person a condo free of charge that they will personally own after some amount of occupancy you'd pretty much solve homelessness and put a significant dent in mental health issues overnight.
And if that does not happen you can always say that some strings were attached after all: the requirement to pay utility bills, the requirement to dispose of trash, the requirement not to have open fire and/or chemical labs inside, the requirement not to assault neighbors and passersby etc. etc. After all there are always some "strings" required to live in the society and even more of those when you require that the society provides you with everything you need for nothing in return.
Right, the entire population of the US, which means solutions has to come from the federal government because of freedom of movement within the US.
The only solution available for state, county, and city governments is incarceration. Unless they want to blow up their budgets and see people who pay into the system move out and people who are net recipients of benefits move in.
Canada never tried to mass incarceration imprison-away the problem and they're rapidly discovering that they actually need some criminal charges and some incarceration or people don't care to improve. Taking fentanyl is literally the best feeling thing in life and you expect a junkie to just stop living in a free-drug camp?
The Netherlands and Portugal though have an incarceration-based rehab program. They don't ask the junkie if they're ready, they pick up anyone drugged out in public. But their programs work because there's essentially no other choice. You can't just refuse to detox because they don't give you free Fentanyl like Vancouver and SF. You can't support a junkie by giving them poison. They wean you, in 3-9 months, with long-halflife opioid agonists and then you spend years, sober, learning to live clean.
The policies you support are killing people with kindness.
The fact of the matter is, there are two populations of homeless, and while they are not defined the presence or absence of drug use and mental illness, there is a correlation. These populations are those that will accept housing and shelter, and those that won't.
The former population is easy to deal with. Give them housing until they are able to obtain it on their own.
But what do you do about people who would rather stay on the streets? Let's split this "unwilling" population once more. There are the unwilling that are unobtrusive, don't bother anyone or hurt anything. Not a problem. But what about the unwilling that are a public nuisance? Erratic, violent, etc.?
What, realistically, do you do about them? They won't go, but they can't stay. Define "long-term public support" for a population of people that is dangerous to the public and unwilling not to be. Eventually they will hurt someone or damage property and end up in prison anyway. Should we not address a clear public safety hazard preemptively?
Yes yes, slippery slope. Care will need to be taken, people will fall through the cracks anyway. Every system has cracks, but god knows the current one has big gaping gashes. We are already failing these people. I don't know that incarceration would fail them worse.
I'm still amazed by this Greater LA story where a vagrant has holed up on a woman's front porch, and the police won't do anything.
[0] https://abc7.com/van-nuys-los-angeles-homeless-man-porch-tak...
1- https://www.amren.com/news/2022/02/seattle-homeless-man-crac...
This is a startlingly ignorant take. Shelter is among the basic human needs. If people were starving to death, would you blame mental illness or food prices?
> Progressive attempts to solve this problem have all failed
Yes. Because they don't focus on creating more housing. Not "affordable" housing, just housing.
They're called "progressive" attempts because the city's politics is dominated by progressives. But every property owner and voter, regardless of political stripe, is responsible for this state of affairs.
There is exactly 1 solution to California's "housing crisis". More housing. Not "affordable" housing. Not mass transit alone. More. Housing. Moar. Build baby build. If that doesn't work, you know what you do? Build more housing. Beat those prices into the ground with construction cranes and hammers.
Here's a study someone else posted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33010913
"The data shows that over 70% of all of SF's unhoused people became homeless while living in San Francisco"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33011351
According to a 2019 survey [0], only 70% of people were living in SF prior to being homeless, and of those 70%, approximately half had lived in SF for less than ten years.
To me, that's staggering if 30% of the homeless population was already homeless before they moved to SF, and if another 30% became homeless within 10 years of moving to SF.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_San_Franci...
Then there are the chronically homeless. Those with no desire to become productive. These are the people that imo would be helped by forced rehab programs. But make no mistake, many, many homeless are the first type, not the second.
Should this be allowed? It's morally complex. For instance, if those people were in Nevada or Arizona, they'd likely die of exposure. San Francisco is a uniquely good place to survive being homeless, at least climate-wise.
Do more people come to these cities that have such policies? Probably... but that's not an indictment of the policy. We have a national crisis. We have some cities/states who literally pay for 1-way bus tickets out (as an alternative to jail).
This solves nothing. Having more people in jail solves nothing.
Yes it does. It gets them off the streets. It is the only thing that will do it.
The problem in the past is that we only incarcerated homeless people overnight. Jail was a revolving door, and people went right back onto the streets after being released, over and over again.
The problem is that we released them before they had recovered from the problems that made them homeless! We put them right back on the streets! It was a stupid policy that achieved nothing.
We need to be willing, as a society, to incarcerate people, and keep them incarcerated, until we have a good reason to believe they will not be homeless when released. This will require massive commitment and expenditure.
The problem has become so great that nothing else will work. There are no other possible solutions. Plus, if you see the way these people currently live, you'd realize that being institutionalized is better than the hell that is currently their daily lives.
So does it follow that the reason the previous houseed persons who are now homeless were previously in jail? If not, then there are other root causes at work, such as disappearance of inexpensive housing.
The argument you are making sounds like a dialog out of Charles Dickens, just without the irony.
Really? What about the "people are shitting on the street" issue? You don't think arresting people who do that will stop it? It'll create other problems, and obviously we shouldn't just go around and permanently lock up everyone who is living on the street, but doing that would obviously solve some things.
There's a point at which freedom and independence aren't working for someone. Maybe with more resources it could work. But sometimes you need to be in the care of an institution from which you cannot just wander away. This seems obvious... I genuinely do not understand. Do you think there is no such threshold? Or do you think the people hanging out in Civic Center right now aren't over it?
[0] https://gothamist.com/news/rikers-images-shower-cages-poor-c...
Do you honestly believe that after all that, people are still rational and blindly accept help from the state? No, they’ve failed so for, you might as well just accept that things are as good as they’ll get.
When tackling this problem, we don’t only have to deal with the current situations, we also have to consider past failure, because people remember them, and they do affect current behavior.
Incarceration has been our primary approach for dealing with drug addiction and mental illness over the last 42 years. It is extremely expensive, with cost-per-inmate figures ranging from $15K-64K depending on the state, with California being the most expensive. I don't know of any public policy experts, regardless of their political leanings who consider this an effective approach.
I think people fail to recognize that part of the push to "decriminalize" drugs and homelessness isn't necessarily bleeding-heart progressivism but calculated austerity: Prisons are full. We want murders, rapists and violent criminals locked up in them. We cannot do that if they are clogged up with people whose primary offenses were being mentally ill and/or drugs.
I understand that California in particular has been more lax the rest of the country, but coming from the midwest our hard-ass drug laws didn't prevent meth and then heroin from ravaging both urban and rural communities.
So if you do want to simply lock these people away, I think you also need the political will to do two very important things:
1) Provide evidence that spending $15,000-$65,000 to incarcerate a homeless drug addict will produce a better outcome than spending those same public tax dollars on something else that could also benefit society and/or the individuals in question.
2) Raise and invest tax money into prison infrastructure to house these people. This will likely mean hiking taxes and/or cutting them from things like education.
I mean, you can stop right there. Our cities should not be like that. We need to have higher standards than that.
You know there have been studies where giving people homes, or building subsidized housing, absolutely does improve peoples lives, cut addiction and crime rates, and generally do the things most progressives say they will.
Your proposal also puts them in expensive government housing but it does so in a way which significantly harms the individual. Incarceration might “solve” the problem for you but it does so at an extreme cost to others. And the financial burden to the state is still high. Meanwhile social housing solutions like those in Vienna actually make positive changes to peoples lives while still getting them off the streets:
https://www.huduser.gov/portal/pdredge/pdr_edge_featd_articl...
Honestly it’s like you people think the police and prisons are free.
No, I think those things cost money and are worth paying for.
What did I write that made you think I thought they were free?
We could build all the social housing we want, but it will only house people who willingly move into it. Many homeless people are insane drug addicts, and they are the ones who disrupt society, and they will not willingly change. What would you do about that?
“Many people are insane drug addicts”
Lots of people in society are drug addicts. Probably the rate is slightly higher amongst the homeless because homelessness can be hard.
Lots of people don’t want to go to existing shelters because of the draconian rules at those shelters. Probably you wouldn’t want to live in a place either if you had to be home every night at 8pm and you couldn’t have friends over and you weren’t allowed to have some beer. Does that mean we should throw you in prison?
What I would do is provide the services these people need. Housing, mental health services, counseling, job training, and job placement programs. All told this would cost less than prison because these programs have been shown to actually help people, so the burden to the state will go down over a few years as these programs do what they are supposed to. But prison won’t help them, so the costs will continue for as long as they are in prison, and once they are released you’re back where you started.
Don’t pretend you want to help people if you don’t actually care what is most effective at helping them.
I want to help people. I just recognize reality. All of what you have suggested has been tried, and has failed, and now the streets of San Francisco are unrecognizably bad. Dystopian sci-fi movies from the 1980s are actually better than the reality on the streets today.
Also, who are we trying to help? Personally I care more about the person living in an apartment who has to deal with crazy people stabbing each other outside of their window in the morning than I do about the crazy people stabbing each other. Not enough attention has been paid to the people who are trying to live upright lives while being surrounded by this violence -- going to work, raising children, etc. They matter too.
People love to say this while ignoring the fact that universal health care and social housing absolutely work in other parts of the world. Whatever parts of this strategy you think have been tried, it’s clear there are ways to make it work. You’d rather abandon those people you consider lesser because of mental illness or addiction, but we can in fact support those people for the same price as a prison cell.
It’s remarkable that you think you recognize reality and believe these things can’t work, because $60k per year of spending on social services would absolutely work. I mean hell the average German only needs something like $8k in services for medical care per year. You don’t think that would help?? You can claim to “recognize reality” but you’re ignoring how effective public spending is the world over.
If you think Americans are unable to function as well as Germans then I hope you're speaking out loudly at PTA meetings because it must mean the American education system is utterly broken.
Like, you want to spend $60k/year or whatever throwing these people in prison for struggling to make it in the current system, and I’m here saying “spend that money on services, like Germany does”, and you say “no our people are way worse off than the German population” and you cannot seem to connect the dots that German social spending is exactly the reason Germany doesn’t have these problems… social spending works!
America (and Canada too!) had horrible issues with abuses in mental institutions that led to a short sighted knee-jerk reaction of shuttering all of them to prevent abuses rather than cleaning them up and addressing the actual concerns. As someone with a family member with developmental disabilities (comorbid with other issues) I've seen my family member thrive in institutional settings - not getting locked in a padded cell institutions but facilities with enough staff and patients to respond quickly and with specialized labour to sudden issues. I think it'd be wonderful if we could, as a society, get our minds away from Victoria Era sanitoriums where patients were exhibited as carnival shows and start seriously investing in larger facilities - home care options and group homes fall extremely short in providing ample care for folks while being extremely costly.
I don't think any of the people sleeping on the street are there by choice - it's just that their alternatives don't exist. A fair number of shelters are run by religious organizations that shame and preach to the homeless - offering a bed in exchange for prostelitization, other shelters are short on beds for the population they need to serve and prevent long term residency sometimes allowing a few consecutive nights - sometimes offering a single night, kicking everyone out in the morning and offering beds first come first served.
Depending on how you are defining incarceration I'm either in agreement with you or I guess - yea, it'd work, but it's a terrible solution to just force people with mental illnesses into the prison system where they will receive next to no mental healthcare and just rot as human beings. Mental disabilities don't make you subhuman.
Drug addiction is far worse in WV yet they don't have a major homeless problem.
Explain this discrepency please if it's all because of drugs
All the people in this thread are refusing to acknowledge that may play some causal factor because the solution might involve slightly lowering their property values.
Show your work here. It's actually not simple at all because per capita drug abuse is far worse in WV so if that's the causal mechanism then you should see tons of homeless in WV.
You're getting REALLY close to getting this.
The "housing first" approach does seem to have a number of successful examples. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_First#Evidence_and_out...
> we have a chronic opioid and meth crisis which tips many people over into serious mental illness.
But also the most visible homeless population is not the only homeless population, and people who became homeless through other paths can get stuck. Having a home is really helpful for e.g. getting and keeping a job, resolving or managing health issues, etc.
You can't give a junkie anything you don't want them to trade for drugs. If you give them an apartment they'll sell the plumbing fixtures and everything else. They'll also go back to sleeping outside, right next to where they procure their fentanyl, because nothing but acquiring and using matters.
Vancouver and SF also both insist you can't give someone a dingy basement suite (like many of their residents actually pay for and live in) but you have to give them a bright cheery condo in an expensive area. All done seemingly to avoid ever having enough money to house more than a few people. Housing first isn't actually being tried, in a way that taxpayers or foreign drug-policy experts would expect.
It's more about the careers of the literal thousands of people, poverty pimps, who "manage" the problem every day, and the power it gives them in city council to make sweeping decisions for the city. The number of lives lost positively correlates with dollars spent because the money goes to feel-good nonsense and bandaids, and actually counter-productive measures like fentanyl vending machines which have been proven to increase, not replace, street crime.
The data[1] shows that over 70% of all of SF's unhoused people became homeless while living in San Francisco. What we're dealing with is a housing crisis.
Every $100 increase in median rent is associated with a 9 percent increase in the estimated homelessness rate. [2]
[1] https://hsh.sfgov.org/get-involved/2022-pit-count/
[2] https://nlihc.org/resource/gao-report-congress-finds-increas...
Out of morbid curiosity.. is this not crack cocaine?
I think intuitively it seem likely to me that drugs might be the difference between chronically homeless people and merely temporary, it also seems like it might have a relationship with the people you encounter on the street and get mad about seeing, but the studies of the overall population seem to say homelessness is causing drug use not the other way around
I'd be careful with this. High housing costs are also likely highly correlated with areas that provide a lot of services to the homeless which might be the cause of homelessness.
Lost Job 26% Alcohol or Drug Use 18% Eviction 13% Argument with Family or Friend Who Asked You to Leave 12% Mental Health Issues 8% Divorce/Separation/Breakup 5%
https://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/2019HIRDRep...
The point of the sweeps is to make the camps an undesirable option compared to shelters, or moving back home, by increasing the friction and hassle of camping vs the alternatives.
Most of CA's homeless aren't local to SF, LA, or SD, or even to California. For example, LAT reporting on the subject has confirmed that as much as 75% of Hollywood's homeless may be from the Midwest. Several Midwestern states (specifically, Texas and Oklahoma) openly brag about shipping their homeless to CA to avoid dealing with the costs of caring for their own residents. Moreover, the great majority of the drug-addicted homeless population is comprised of out-of-state residents, and drug addicts are more than half of California's homeless.
Camp sweeps are a good thing. They disincentivize drug hotspots, get the mentally ill into shelters where they can be treated, and improve safety for everyone else.
these camps are a serious problem for the rest of us in SF that are trying to lead quasi-normal lives. it just cant be acceptable to have dogs trained to harass and attack people running around free on the streets.
i'm hardly a law and order kind of person, but methheads arguing outside your window every night is real problem. it really hard to run a retail business when there are 5-6 seriously messed up people living right outside you door who have reluctantly agreed to keep a tiny path free.
it really sucks to have to pick up their biological waste because they cant be bothered.
as a society, not just the city of SF, we should really wonder what we're trying to accomplish here and how this situation came to exist instead of wondering if there is another rug we can push this all under.
I think if it disincentivizes drug hotspots, the effect is weak. I would say it temporarily moves the same people by a very short distance. You still see the same issues in the same neighborhoods, week after week. Similarly, if this is meant to be a mechanism for helping people with mental illness get to help, it's not effective. I see the same characters over and over again.
I would also argue it doesn't improve safety for everyone else. If anything, when a sweep happens, it creates a sudden stream of agitated, physically and emotionally unsettled people, moving through the street. Normally in my neighborhood walking _past_ an encampment isn't too bad. Walking home when a sweep has just happened nearby is much less comfortable.
I think what's really happening is theater. Local officials and institutions need to appear to be active more than they need to be actually effective. So while we're not actually solving problems, we're having the most visible homelessness shepherded from block to block.
When they say “units”, do they just mean housing, or does it also include mental health and rehab units?
First time I’m hearing of such a complex that sounds oxymoronic. How big is this complex? Who are the players? How do they make so much money to become a complex industry?
https://mynorthwest.com/2744155/seattles-two-new-hotel-homel...
The motels would be worth nowhere near that much if sold as a motel, and it is happening all up and down west coast cities. I know one property that sold for $150k per key, which would have sold for half that to a non government buyer, and the kicker is that it sits empty except for housing 2 guests that were already living there when the government bought it in summer 2021.
Demand, it says.
Here's the problem with homeless advocates and their goals: they're idealistic and absolute. What percentage of homeless people are locals? Maybe 50 percent or less? We live in a country of over 320 million people and porous-by-law borders between 49 other states. What do you think would happen to a place that would create supportive housing structure, have the most liberal laws on public drug use and property crimes, with volunteers on stand-by to provide needles and medical attention as needed.
It's all a bit perplexing to me that people keep touting "housing shortages." I live surrounded by homeless people. They're not homeless because rents are high, they're homeless because of a slew of other psychological and addiction issues. And almost no one was born in the city that they're homeless in.
70% by recent counts. 22% from California (and 14% from other bay area counties). The remaining 8% are from out of state.
https://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/2019HIRDRep...
> And almost no one was born in the city that they're homeless in
Not clear on why that is particularly relevant. Almost no one I know lives in the town they were born in, myself included. Of the few homeless people I know personally here in Oakland, all of them were born and raised in Oakland.
Everyday, there is a missed opportunity to clean up the streets: https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/bayarea/heatherknight/article...
[..]In what has become a five-alarm fire for many women in the city — spread on social media — several alleged victims have posted photos of the distinctive-looking Hobbs, a 6-foot-4 white man with a buzz cut and a body covered in tattoos, including the E-V-I-L tag on his fingers.
The fact that a San Francisco Superior Court judge dismissed a case against Hobbs in which he was accused of following and grabbing a 15-year-old girl — first reported in this column — is well known by now. So is the fact that he’s back on the streets despite a long arrest record in four counties, despite admitting to me in a phone interview that he follows women he finds attractive, and despite the flood of new complaints.
But it turns out city officials had another chance to intervene on Aug. 11 — and again came up short.[..]
[..]A police report states that he entered a home on Avila Street in the Marina while the owner, who left the door unlocked, was out walking his dog. When the owner returned and found Hobbs standing in his hallway, he called police and told them the intruder kept saying, “I want a house like this.”
Hobbs, according to the report, initially told officers he was “Scott Peterson,” using the name of the California man who notoriously killed his pregnant wife.[..]
Anyone who is chronically homeless should be offered jobs and paid housing. If that doesn't work, then they become a ward of the state and treated as a child.
[1] https://www.chase.com/personal/banking/education/budgeting-s....
Have you considered that you only notice the addicts and mentally ill? Because they don't give a shit about being seen as homeless. Everyone else is probably trying to keep up appearances by hanging out in libraries or coffee shops during the day.
They're also very unlikely to remain homeless for long periods.
> If that doesn't work, then they become a ward of the state and treated as a child.
This difference, which gets lost in discussions such as the one here, leads to bad-faith statements by politicians and others regarding the true amount of housing available for homeless people. For example, the number of "available beds" touted by Newsom and others are almost entirely within short-term emergency shelters, which do not address the real problem (chronic homelessness) much at all. Instead, this "number-of-beds" statistic is used to gloss over the fact that a real solution has not been found, and then justify (probably illegal) police action against homeless people. The true intent of such actions is probably to cause regular disruption in the lives of homeless people to increase the difficulty of simply being homeless in San Francisco. Whether or not you agree with such police action is up to you, but it's important to acknowledge that the argument that "there is available housing" is a bad faith argument, and that this argument is simply used to redirect attention from both police action against homeless people as well as the fact that a real solution has not been found.
Here's a citation that describes the differences between short term emergency housing and long term housing, which illuminates why the current approach being taken by San Francisco is not genuine as well as approaches that might actually work:
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. (2018). Permanent supportive housing: Evaluating the evidence for improving health outcomes among people experiencing chronic homelessness.
Its going to have to be an involuntary solution (yes, incarceration), and its probably going to involve moving people to a ranch-like area away from the city with a much different housing setup than some cells or apartments, maybe something with individual shelters with outside spaces. I expect its going to be a commitment of years or forever for some of these people. Working on people's mental health and addiction is not some 30 day process. Just the dentist bill alone will be scary, but its not going to get better in a tent in SF.
Society cannot last with this level of filth and crime in major cities.
The homeless because of cost folks, well, move to somewhere else or we are going to need a wave of mini-apartments approved at some point, but SF doesn't like such things.