Unrelated to the topic at hand, but in the last couple of days I've become completely unable to use the Archive. Infinite loops of CAPTCHAs and 429 Too Many Requests in console :(
Really sad, it feels like I'm losing access to some really core, basic internet infrastructure.
How does that solve the problem though? I certainly would be happy if my tax bill went down, but that money is being spent and a lot of it is spent on important things. Are you okay with just ignoring every problem that doesn't personally affect you? Or only this one in particular? I'm not seeing the dots connected here. You need to make at least a somewhat clear argument for how your proposed policy is sound instead of just pushing problems off on someone else.
The first step is to stop incentivizing this kind of behavior. The world runs on incentives and this is no different.
Able bodied drug addicts should be arrested and put into jail. It’s in their best interests. For the rest we have shelters and free food and free skills development and free mental health. Incentive improving one’s condition.
I didn't sign up to live in a world where someone's wellbeing is tied to their ability to work for someone else's benefit. We all have unchosen obligations.
I'm guessing that moving that (actually) $25bn "elsewhere" would actually increase the homelessness problem in California since that money funds a variety of social assistance programs for all manner of people, most of whom have a place to live!
It’s a result of voting for Reagan and his dismantling of any support for asylums. Sure, it was cruel but the voters decided to throw the baby with the bath water instead of any kind of nuance.
Additionally, the NIMBY crowd goes against building anything, even with the new “builders remedy” in place. With a majority of homeless being from CA, this has affected everyone - homeowners can’t sell and “upgrade” because supply is too low, which doesn’t help mobility in the lower classes.
The other issue is the toothless law enforcement when it comes to actual crime. That I hope will change when residents of SF get tired of the shenanigans.
I’m against reducing social programs. We need it, especially if the income inequality gap keeps getting wider. We just need to be smarter about how we spend it.
It’s also important to remember that WSJ, and particularly their opinion pieces, are very much a right-wing mouthpiece and loves to dunk on SF and the “poors”.
The lack of a robust asylum system is a huge part of the problem here, at least if you ask anyone in law enforcement. Not all homeless people are mentally ill - I would argue that most aren't - but the chronically homeless and "troublesome" homeless that people complain about are often struggling with untreated issues and there is quite literally nowhere for them to go and nowhere to send them. They won't get treatment in jail, they won't get treatment in shelters, and the emergency room will stabilize them and discharge them (with a medical bill to be paid by the taxpayer).
I wouldn't be surprised that most of that money already went somewhere else - mostly middlemen, with the homeless seeing none of it. Perhaps that will give you some piece of mind - you are not giving money to the homeless, you are helping local businesses.
Interesting this article primarily cites federal policies that have led to the current situation and then vilifies Democrats in Sacramento and Progressives in SF.
No comment on the politics, just seems like an inconsistent and thin argument (probably one that has no business on HN).
>San Francisco is under a federal injunction that bars officials from enforcing laws against camping or sleeping in public spaces as long as its homeless population exceeds available shelter beds. As we recently explained, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment creates a right to vagrancy.
>San Francisco is under a federal injunction that bars officials from enforcing laws against camping or sleeping in public spaces as long as its homeless population exceeds available shelter beds. As we recently explained, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment creates a right to vagrancy.
I am not implying the strawman hypothetical you proposed.
I think the confusion might be that the strawman doesn't even follow logic, TBH.
Were did the Sacramento Democrats comment come in? I simply stated that the article highlighted federal decisions and blamed other governments for the consequences of those decisions. In that set of circumstances, Sacramento Democrats are equal to SF progressives, as they are both bound by a higher power (The Federal Government).
And to answer the question I think that you're asking, yes, I do believe the Federal government has a lot more power to solve homelessness than SF or California does. Do you think otherwise?
EDIT: I also think this fascination with Democrats vs. Republicans really misses the point here. This shouldn't be a competition to lay blame. That's the top symptom of broken government.
It should be a creative endeavor to solve the problems and it saddens me that so many people don't feel that way on this supposed "hacker" forum.
EDIT 2:
>Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
I disagree that a city of 800k residents has the resources to solve a problem that's plagued every society ever.
I think the largest and wealthiest government in history is much better suited for the task.
I also think that SF being in the United States 100% makes it the Federal Government's issue, not some isolated thing that most people who live in other places can ignore. Like it or not, most homeless people are American citizens who happen to choose to live in SF right now. They can leave SF, but can't leave America.
You're "simply" trying to spread blame around. That's all you're simply doing.
SF has all the resources they need. They just need to use them.
"plagued every society ever" -- no, it hasn't, not to anywhere near the scale of SF. Even large cities within the jurisdiction of the 9th Circuit, like San Diego, Fresno, Spokane. San Jose.
Oh, I see, you want me to put some specifics out there, so you can nitpick them?
I guarantee to you that SF has possibly the worst problem of any city, except for some other West Coast cities. So why don't you explain why cities with equivalently good weather don't suffer nearly as much? Just luck?
What makes SF unable to have enough shelter space? Why is their homeless population unusually large? Is it a spiral of consequences that feed each other?
Do cash payments help or hurt? Clearly, there are more than just federal policies at play. They have job and home placement programs, mental health and so forth. Are they understaffed or with limited opportunities, or does the cash payment act as a perverse incentive to keep people on the street?
The biggest propaganda win of the century has been the following:
In a country with complete freedom of movement (and relatively cheap long-distance transportation), the mainstream has been convinced that homelessness is only caused by the communities where those people live.
It's the Federal government's historical role to serves as a social safety net, not mid-sized cities with 'live outside year round' weather.
Like what does SF 'fixing homelessness' even look like? I can tell you what it looks like at the Federal level.
> Federal government's historical role to serves as a social safety net
This is not true. Medicare, section 8 housing and social security are (relatively) new inventions, and Medicaid is run by individual states, with some funding from the federal government.
By volume, most social programs are either state or county run, from job training to mental health and food assistance and so on.
As for what SF can do, it can designate emergency shelter space sufficient to get out from under the federal regulations preventing them from breaking up permanent camps. They can make cash payments contingent on going through some service which pushes people towards getting mental health care, addiction treatment, housing / job assistance, etc.
So long as they are paying people to be homeless, and managing themselves into a corner where they can't stop illegal camping, some people will choose to stay that way for one reason or another, and they will choose to do so in SF.
Low income housing projects have been tried in the US too with mixed outcomes. My guess is that the Baseline social behavior and expectation is just lower in the US than in places like Taiwan or Singapore, where it is incredibly successful
Seeing comments like this get downvoted into oblivion when they're stating basic information without any obvious slant or other violations of the HN rules/norms is really bumming me out.
What's frustrating is "mixed outcomes" leads to "oh, the whole idea is bad" which then leads to "let's not do that, or try anything remotely resembling that". Low income housing projects are the answer, there's just a lot of cultural changes and reframing and winning hearts and minds; a lot of that sort of work to be done before housing projects are politically viable.
I think it would be an interesting experiment to try a planned project with high support, high requirements, and zero tolerance for crime. Instead of expecting the worst from people expect the best and hold them to a high standard.
Imagine a Gated community where everyone is expected to be in rehab, education, or employment and you get kicked out if you fail to follow through or commit crimes.
The point wouldn't be to a provide a catch-all support for everyone, but provide a safe space and support for those working to improve themselves.
One of the problems is that homelessness is a flow problem, not a stock one. If there are X homeless people in a year, then next year something like 50% * X will be newly homeless. So you could house everybody currently homeless, but you’d be back to square one shortly.
Nevertheless, the current strategy does not seem particularly effective.
Right - transient homelessness caused by unexpected and temporary loss of a living situation is the most common form. A large proportion of people in homeless shelters are employed, and will quickly leave the shelter.
i.e. there's a big difference in sensible remedy for a family that's in a shelter for a few nights after fleeing domestic abuse vs. chronically unsheltered, mentally ill
Most of the negative interactions people have are with the unsheltered (i.e. someone street sleeping) rather than the homeless, and it is often unclear even how cities would/should spend money to address those people - that's what Mayor Breed is really complaining about.
This number is horribly bias and misleading. They are using the money that goes towards all homeless programs- including programs that keep people housed- but then dividing it by the number of shelter beds, despite the fact that the vast majority of the money is not spent on shelters.
It's like taking the entire school budget, dividing it by the number of first graders, and then saying that's how much we spend per student. It's stupid math that is only used to mislead.
That's a pretty serious claim against WSJ and it's editors. Since they have a lot of credibility on HN with users and moderators, do you really think they are intentionally misleading readers?
This would increase the supply of housing, lowering the value of real estate investments, and thus is not permitted. Spending on homelessness in places like California is essentially a corrupt form of taxation on insanely inflated housing prices, where the money gets funneled back through various “nonprofits” and “services” that line the pockets of politicians.
This is one of those terrible, misleading statistics. Most of the "homelessness" budgets in large cities go towards preventing people from becoming unsheltered - i.e. on housing support and prevention.
I don't understand the point you're trying to make.
Fundamentally, the denominator that we ought to be using is "number of people diverted from being unsheltered", not "number of people in temporary shelters".
If a city spends $100M on homelessness and prevents 9,900 people from being unsheltered by housing them and only keeps 100 people in shelters, that looks like $1M per person on the bad metric.
But that situation is obviously better than spending $100M on sheltering 1,000 people (leaving 9,000 on the streets) instead of providing housing support, albeit that the cost looks only like $100K per person that way.
I think the point was that there are ways to have nobody in shelters without it being a well spent budget, and practically we don't know that there is a way to spend realistic levels of funding such that no one is in shelters, so while it may be true of some ideal policy it might well not be true of the best real policy.
I think it's a (marginal) nitpick over your wording, not intended as a defense of the metric you were criticizing, though of course dragonwriter can correct me on that if needed.
Well, not in San Francisco, and not anywhere in the surrounding area without driving house prices even higher.
(Now, building every homeless person a house might be more viable.)
Still doesn’t deal with the fact that much of that is nonshelter costs that would still be needs, even if they would move out of the homelessness budget.
There are places where you could buy folks many houses for 600k.
What you need are a sort of anti-vagrancy law where the "punishment" is confinement in a very minimal security home where your basic needs are met, folks are nice and caring to you, and you're gently compelled to take whatever steps you need to put your life back together. Some people will stay indefinitely, be allowed to, and choose to.
It's not 600k per year per person. It's 606k additional spending since 2016, per additional sheltered individual since 2016.
From what I can tell, SF had about 18,548 shelter beds in 2022[0], which puts it at $36,230/bed/year. In 2016, there were 11,017 beds[1], which gets you $20,332/bed/year.
And of course not all help for homeless people is just paying for housing. Still seems expensive, but not nearly as bad as your math indicates.
How about instead repealing the misconceived law that is fueling the problem?
Just another example of how off-the-rails the WSJ opinion page is: repealing what law? You mean the eight amendment to the United States Constitution? Thing is, the opinion piece isn't wrong. But to just ramble on for a whole page, and then the offered solution is to repeal a law that is never mentioned in the opinion piece (unless the author truly suggests that we suspend the Constitution), well, I don't think "sloppy" begins to cover it.
So, I don't think that was the most important part of the article--he's not claiming SF is a Homeless Mecca because of Prop. 47. He was just asking a rhetorical question to point out that the dysfunctional Democrat-lead government will throw billions of dollars at a problem before repealing a soft-on-crime law that obviously contributes to the problem.
By the way, before anybody calls me out as some right-wing troll for saying the Democrat-led government is dysfunctional: I moved to SF as a D-registered liberal, and still am a liberal in the traditional sense (not a D anymore). But the left wing extremism has caused me to reassess my stance on many issues, especially as I start a family. I am absolutely appalled by the conditions in the city, especially in the Tenderloin, which many don't realize has the highest number of children per capita.
> Since 2016 San Francisco’s homeless budget has ballooned to $672 million from $224 million, yet the number of homeless in shelters has increased by a mere 736. That equates to $609,000 in higher annual spending for each additional person in shelter.
Because the bay area is home to many extremely rich people who give absolutely nothing back to their communities, encourage rampant gentrification and generally despise poor people and advocate for anti-worker policies.
Take a scroll through the likes of some of the famous VCs who constantly complain about SF's homelessness and crime. They tend to be more mask off far-right in their likes vs tweets (some will straight up tweet it though).
If I had >$1B I would simply stop complaining and start doing something to fix the problem.
The things we've tried to fix the problem have only made it worse. You have to be honest and accept that given the choice, some small percentage of people prefer to live on the streets with zero responsibility.
Who is the one not giving back to the community, the billionaire VC who is funding hundreds of high-paying jobs, or the person who shits in the street and demands to be fed and provided with a host of other services at no cost to himself?
Ignoring the fact that you're generalizing about the vast homeless population and implying that they all are homeless by choice and being a public nuisance by choice...
It's worth considering the context that if no business will allow an unhoused person to use the toilet (okay, totally fair - private property!) and we refuse to maintain a sufficient number of public toilets, where are they supposed to defecate?
During COVID this got really extreme. You could be going on a road trip (like when I moved cross-state) and be a paying customer at a gas station or restaurant or grocery store and they all tell you "sorry, no public restroom". What are you supposed to do? Obviously, defecating in public is uncivilized, but we're not giving people many options.
> extremely rich people who give absolutely nothing back to their communities
+
> encourage rampant gentrification
Something tells me any attempt to give back to their community would be unwelcome, and labeled as "rampant gentrification". I certainly see it in the Mission, where any attempt at renovating old decrepit buildings is stopped in the name of gentrification. Now there's rats in the ceilings of public schools: https://missionlocal.org/2019/06/rat-droppings-crumbling-cei...
I think that's supposed to come from the extremely high taxes that they already pay. Which, in the context of the original article posted here, is all apparently wasted. I certainly wouldn't want to give any more money to an organization that clearly wastes all of their income currently taken by force.
I think you might be replying to the wrong comment. I didn't say anything about taxes. I said that billionaires could help with homelessness if they chose to.
Imagine I take half of your income, and I tell you that it's supposed to go towards helping the poor. Instead, the poor become poorer, all city services get worse, and nobody really seems to be getting helped. You are then expected to take even more of your income AND now time as well trying to solve this issue for which there are hundreds (thousands?) of city/state employees who are supposed to be doing this as their full time job?
It makes perfect sense to me why they aren't doing anything. Maybe it would be better if we didn't collect taxes?
Again, I have no idea why you're talking about taxes. Most wealthy people only pay capital gains tax which is hardly onerous.
If you have billions of dollars and you have some sort of problem, it's absolutely within your means to do something about it (other than whine on twitter).
I'm talking about taxes because I don't think money is the problem. If money was the problem, we should be able to raise taxes to meet the needs of, say, the public school system. The problem is, the additional amount of taxes to be collected needs to be an absolute/agreed upon value, not just "more".
What I don’t understand is that if making it illegal to build whatever living structure you want on public land is “cruel and unusual punishment”, why is it still illegal to build the living structure of your choice on private land that you own? Isn’t such a law even more restrictive?
How have we willingly ceded so much authority to bureaucratic busybodys who have nothing better to do than micromanage the size, shape, and even color of private housing? Regulating for safety is one thing, but the current state is absurd. California, and many other states like Texas, need to drastically deregulate their housing markets.
Also I hardly think the WSJ editorial board is really interested in solutions here. They just enjoy throwing punches.
> What I don’t understand is that if making it illegal to build whatever living structure you want on public land is “cruel and unusual punishment”, why is it still illegal to build the living structure of your choice on private land that you own
Your premise is wrong; making rhe first kind of law has not been ruled unconstitutional, only enforcing it when there is no available shelter for the homeless population.
Right, that’s what I mean. Why is enforcing it in either case ok under that reasoning? Clearly building a structure to house an additional person on private land would help keep people off the streets, even if it’s a shanty town. (Which is what we currently have except it’s on public land!)
Couldn't you simply add that conditional statement to the private land case as well?
It would be an interesting test case to build an illegal dormitory for homeless on private land and seek enforcement deferment as long as the same conditions are met.
Deregulation has been getting introduced. ADUs have been approved and you can now do something called SB9 which if deployed to the maximum extent allows you to take a single property split it into two parcels and build two duplexes on each parcel.
That 4xs the amount of dwelling spaces per property in theory. But of course the capital and will for a Californian who owns property to go through with it is a different story.
CA’s deregulatory moves have been great steps in the right direction, and progress is usually incremental. But realistically the whole Bay Area should be at “if you want to build a 10 or 20 story apartment building on your own land, go for it.”
Allowing duplexes on smaller lots is great, but doesn’t go far enough. I actually think the momentum is in CA’s favor and they will be in a better position than, for instance, TX in 10-20 years, as it relates to housing affordability.
Agreed. Though the 20 story apartment building is something I don't see happening tbh. The momentum is definitely here but I don't see it reaching that ideal. As with the highspeed rail it will likely hit some sort of deadlock compromise.
>But realistically the whole Bay Area should be at “if you want to build a 10 or 20 story apartment building on your own land, go for it.”
While I think apartments are fine, it would help immensely if the absurd setback and height requirements were revised to something reasonable.
For example, take a standard sized lot in Alameda County (Basically all of the East Bay Area):
A standard lot is 5,000 square feet. 50'x100'
- Front setback requirements: 20'
- Back setback requirements: 20'
- Side setback requirements: 5' per side
- Max building height: 25' (2 stories max)
Total setback square feet: 2,600 out of 5,000
Taken together, it's illegal to build on 52% of the land one owns! Another way to think about this is that one must buy at least 52% more land than necessary to build on. This is completely absurd, and is contributing to the housing shortage throughout the Bay, and the state.
For real though, if you are reading this, are a YIMBY, and are a person of means, why not try to generate a test case for this? Have someone set up a tent encampment on their own private lot and force the case. How can it possibly be legal to set up a tent in a public right of way, and not on your own property?
Yeah, I think it's a really interesting thought experiment and social commentary. It's illegal to build a 20 room cinder block dormitory on a private parcel, while legal to build a Shantytown fire hazard in the sidewalk down the street.
You could easily build a SRO sized fireproof, cinderblock room (e.g. 10x10ft) for less than $5,000 per unit in materials.
https://dignitymoves.org/ is such a project, with city support. They are at the end of Gough st, and have built a bunch of small livable housing units as interim supportive housing for people.
it was a mecca before this. 2014 was about 12-18 months into the tent encampment era (especially around the mission and Division) of homelessness though it was rapidly expanding in numbers and neighborhoods then and after that. Before that, 2012 and before, homelessness in the city tended to look more like people sleeping in doorways.
> Mayor London Breed threw her hands up in response. “We can’t force people to accept or stay in shelters and we’re unable to prevent people from setting up an encampment in an area that was just cleaned. This is the situation we are in,” she tweeted Wednesday.
> She’s right. San Francisco is under a federal injunction that bars officials from enforcing laws against camping or sleeping in public spaces as long as its homeless population exceeds available shelter beds. As we recently explained, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment creates a right to vagrancy.
NYC has a ban against encampments because they provide shelter to homeless. Even after southern states have sent 100,000 penniless migrants to NYC, they still are able to find beds for people.
If San Francisco politicians can't create enough shelters, it's on them. There are hotels, parking lots, rec centers, etc if you have to deal with the numbers in the interim before you get housing up.
> a federal injunction that bars officials from enforcing laws against camping or sleeping in public spaces as long as its homeless population exceeds available shelter beds.
If a place to sleep exists, you can demolish the encampments and force them the clear out. As the old saying goes, "You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here."
>100,000 penniless migrants to NYC, they still are able to find beds for people.
These are, by and large, economic migrants who really just want to work and are therefore a very different profile from the unsheltered on typical city streets - for whom mental illness and drug dependency are almost ubiquitous.
Well, maybe they need to deal with the problems of (1) why people are afraid of shelters, and/or, even more importantly, (2) people not having homes, rather than whining that they can’t force people into terrible shelters or force them into jails for trying to survive outside of terrible shelters.
But, even so:
> Even after southern states have sent 100,000 penniless migrants to NYC, they still are able to find beds for people.
I think it's important to note a couple of things.
> The city of San Francisco released data last week showing that 55% of homeless individuals rejected shelter when offered it
I think it's very important to understand why people turn down the beds. There are several reasons-
* Shelters have very restricted hours, so if someone has a job that includes nights they likely can't use a shelter. A large number of homeless people are employed.
* To accept space at a shelter homeless people often have to abandon their belongings. If they have a tent, for example, these normally aren't allowed.
* Getting a bed for one night does not mean that they'll have one the second night. So throwing away their tent for one night in a bed just doesn't make sense.
* Shelters often don't allow pets, and a lot of homeless people have dogs.
> She’s right. San Francisco is under a federal injunction that bars officials from enforcing laws against camping or sleeping in public spaces as long as its homeless population exceeds available shelter beds.
There's a really, really important point here. If every homeless person accepted a bed, there still would be no where near enough to cover the homeless population. This is part of the reason people aren't willing to accept temporary shelter, as they know it's temporary (since there isn't enough for everyone the city basically rotates people around)
It's also really important to note that SF has, per capita (of population, not of homeless population), the lowest amount of shelter beds of any major city in the US. The bay area itself is even worse, as some cities don't have any shelter space at all. A huge part of this is because housing is so expensive, as is building.
This article tries to play it off as people just choosing to be homeless, but the reality is a lot more nuanced than that.
Even if this is the most common reason, unless "most common" means 99%, there are still a bunch of people who can't take advantage of shelters through no fault of their own.
I honestly don't believe that is anywhere near the common reason.
I know this is anecodotal (as is your comment), but I've spent a lot of time around the homeless population. I was "housed homeless" for a year, and my sister was homeless for several years due to mental illness.
The rate of drug use amongst the homeless does tend to be higher than the average population, and I don't think there's any denying that. However, it isn't nearly as universal as people seem to think. The average homeless person is homeless for less than two years, and it is normally due to financial reasons. Given programs that provide housing these people can normally come off the streets and live great lives. The simple fact that so many people manage to bounce back shows that what the average person things of homeless people isn't the actual reality.
The other thing, and this might sound obvious, is that the people who do drugs or drink simply take their stuff before they go to the shelters. These aren't people with hundreds of dollars to blow on their addictions. They often panhandle, eat, drug/do drugs, and then look for a place to crash. This also isn't the entire homeless population, just a smaller portion of it (that people use to justify not helping the larger portion, even though the whole population does need help).
I think well meaning liberals want to believe that all of society’s problems can be solved without any form of coercion, and that is simply not the case. If someone is homeless and has a dog, and there is a shelter bed for them, you may just need to force them to give up their dog and move to the shelter (or else face arrest). There are overriding concerns greater than letting people keep their pets.
I recognize the solutions are more complex than just force people to give up their pets, but most of those solutions involve some application of coercive force.
Edit: I did not explicitly spell this out, but clearly if you take away the dog it should be put up for adoption, not executed on the street while the owner is forced to watch, for maximum cruelty. Some people seem to think I was advocating something like the latter.
You may have to euthanize that animal if no one wants to adopt it.
Sorry, but there are worse things in the world than putting down animals.
And don’t even try to come at me if you eat meat! Every one of us who eats factory farmed meat (y.t. included) is participating in far worse atrocities than a shelter humanely euthanizing a relative handful of dogs.
There are worse thing, but when you are arguing for authoritarian use of force against people because you think you know what is better for them, and at the same time want to steal their animals and murder them, trying to present it as unfortunately making the best possible choice rather than admitting you're arguing for doing harm is rather distasteful.
I'm surprised how a certain part of this site's audience have no problem in proposing the use of force in guiding people's lives, and then at the same time claim it is in the name of "liberty". In this particular case I'm sure they would see no problem in killing that dog (and call it euthanasia or some other fancy name) and please don't let me go on the obvious slippery slope from there.
(EDIT: 5 minutes after and the killing was advocated. I rest my case.)
I can only speak for myself, not "certain parts of this site", but I did not use the words liberty or freedom anywhere, or even invoke those principles in broad terms, I don't think.
While objectively correct, the policy you describe is incredibly cruel. People often end up homeless through no fault of their own, and more importantly, temporarily homeless. Should someone lose all their pets just because they end up homeless for a couple days or a week? Do we want to fill the animal shelters up even further and send more animals off to be euthanized?
Imagine being a young child, already traumatized by ending up homeless, and now the pet you've been growing up with gets dragged off by the authorities to be executed.
It's absolutely the case that difficult problems can require the state to exert force to solve them, but I'm also just not convinced that forcing people into shelters is going to fix everything. Especially in this case where we know the area does not have enough beds for everyone, and the constraints enforced to get a bed are onerous (throw out your belongings, get rid of your pets, etc)
Some of the people who reject housing also cannot realistically be in a shelter because they will just cause trouble for everyone else if you force them to go. My brother used to work in law enforcement and this was an issue with the most troublesome homeless people in the area - as a law enforcement officer he really didn't have any workable tools. If you take them to a shelter they'll get kicked out because they're troubled, and if you take them to jail their condition will not improve (only deteriorate) and then they end up back on the street again once they're discharged.
I think what’s incredibly cruel is blocking people from building additional housing on their own private land that could help affordably house people at ZERO cost to the state.
> Imagine being a young child, already traumatized by ending up homeless, and now the pet you've been growing up with gets dragged off by the authorities to be executed.
Im sorry but pets die, it’s a part of life. It can be traumatic no matter what the circumstances. But so is living unhoused on the street, I’d imagine.
And this is exactly the attitude I mean. You, a well intentioned liberal, like to think that we can regulate society and enforce laws without causing any trauma to anyone involved.
Sometimes you have to take away a pet from a family in the name of the greater good for society as a whole, for instance if that pet is a danger to others.
And I did not say that forcing people into shelters will fix everything. There are a lot of other problems including drug addiction and mental illness. It’s incredibly sad how far we’ve allowed the situation to degrade, and the climb out of here will be difficult.
Always amusing to me when people like you say things like that. Treat the trauma like it’s nothing. I’d love to see you get forced into a traumatic situation by the government and keep that same attitude.
Just an utter lack of empathy. People like you should have no say in how a society is run.
You're making a lot of assumptions about what traumatic situations I may or may not have been in. Maybe it is because I have been through some shit that I realize sometimes we have to do "mean" things to people, sometimes for their own good but often for the good of those around them.
I am anti-cruelty and suffering, but it is not always cruel to force someone to do something they don't want to do, and it is not always kind to give them what they want.
If the choice is between them getting back on their feet but having to put the dog up for adoption (which is what I meant, not executing the dog on the spot), vs being stuck indefinitely homeless, I know which one I'm picking.
And again, I don't think "dogs" are the main impediment to homeless rehabilitation, the whole discussion is a sideshow. It was an illustrative example about well meaning intentions gone awry.
I understand your argument. It is a tough situation to get out from, between a cycle of mental illness, isolation, a tough climb out.
Life can be very cruel. And when everyone and everything failed that man, and nothing left for him but that dog, he is then faced with a choice of between leaving the dog to try to fit again in a world that hurt him. No wonder many are stuck in this situation.
? I was just responding to the immediate reply that I wouldn't feel the same if the government had done something traumatic to me, when actually they have and I do. My past trauma is not justifying anything, but it does inform my thinking.
I wonder how homeless shelter housing intersects with FHA 'emotional support animal' requirements. Presumably, someone homeless with a dog, would use the dog as an emotional support animal, but not have any of the required documentation.
https://www.humanesociety.org/resources/fair-housing-act-and...
How utterly cruel. Imagine a homeless life where not only do you not have any friends or relatives to lean on, but everyone who passes you by on the street either ignores you or outright loathes you. A dog that loves you unconditionally would quite literally be a life-saver.
Imagine not letting someone build cheap housing that could keep someone sheltered with a roof over their head because of your own idiosyncratic opinions on housing style.
I think letting people build the housing that people need would be 1000x the life saver compared to letting them have a dog once they're already out on the street. This is like the "let them eat cake" of homelessness policy.
If you institute that rule, every tabloid in the US will immediately feed pictures of people being separated from their dogs. You will have a lynch mob on your hands in five minutes flat and anyone who supports you will have the same.
That may be the case, again it is my original point that many liberals (which I consider myself one for the record) want to believe that all of our problems can be solved without any coercion or cruelty. But beloved pets are taken away from their owners all the time in the US, every single day, for a variety of reasons. The idea that it is "beyond the pale" to remove an animal from a family who cannot properly care for it is exactly the problem I'm pointing out.
We are in the current mess wrt housing because many of the solutions are political non-starters, but I am not trying to advocate the most politically acceptable solutions on HN, but instead encourage people to examine whether or not their genuine, well meaning intentions may be counterproductive in some cases.
And also, I am not trying to assert that but for euthanizing homeless people's dogs, all of CA's homeless issues would be solved. Clearly that's not the case.
Maybe flip it around then, offer shelter for homeless dogs with a human sized bed attached. Everyone gets to feel morally righteous and hopefully the job still gets done.
Let's say this morning you force someone into a shelter bed, euthanizing their dog and throwing away their tent and other bulky property in the process. What are you going to do tomorrow morning? Is that bed now reserved for them going forward? Or can they lose access to it? If it's the latter then you've taken someone who has almost no stability in their life and removed whatever scraps of it they had left, then tossed them back into the street. You've accomplished absolutely nothing in this scenario, except make it even less likely that person will ever find their way back into a stable living situation.
These sound more like complaints with shelters than anything I said. If getting someone into a shelter bed is not overall a net positive for them and society, why are we even doing it in the first place? You're pointing out a lot of other issues that have nothing to do with what I talked about. I'm sure there are lots of ways shelters could be run better and improved. It's an imperfect, partial solution to a huge problem.
I absolutely agree it's a problem with shelter beds, but this is exactly what you're talking about. Coercive force is useless at best unless there's something effective that you're pushing people into. Pretending like the problem is that we're not "cracking down" hard enough, or that progressives are simply averse to sufficiently coercive measures bc they're soft-hearted or whatever, only obscures the solution space until we've resolved the other issues first. Coercion without effective direction is nothing more than torture.
I am not an expert on homeless shelters and the exact pros and cons. You seem to have thoughts that getting someone into a shelter would be overall net negative, which is fine for you to have that opinion.
But in the context of the discussion, if we take for granted that doing X for homeless people is good, whatever X may be (e.g. moving them into a shelter, attending an AA meeting, seeing a doctor, whatever), my point is that you may need to apply moderate, reasonable and proportionate levels of force and/or coercion in order to achieve X.
> my point is that you may need to apply moderate, reasonable and proportionate levels of force and/or coercion in order to achieve X
Fine and acceptable, even to most progressives I think, but also in my opinion entirely tangential until we have resolved what X is first. Moreover, I am of the belief that for effectively chosen values of X the required amount of coercive force will be substantially lower than what most people seem to think is actually necessary.
I'd think you'd be surprised, the prevailing elite opinion in progressive circles seems to be that application of coercive force (which is what makes a government a government) must be avoided at any and all cost. I don't think this is the opinion of most people, but it seems to be where many policy makers and "thought leaders" (:eye-roll:) are at.
AND, the current law in place is that ZERO coercion/force can be applied to homeless people. Just read what Mayor Breed said, it sounds like they cannot enforce any type of nuisance, public safety, or sanitation laws against homeless people.
>application of coercive force (which is what makes a government a government) must be avoided at any and all cost
I think this statement is eminently reasonable. Although a monopoly on coercive force is one important defining feature of government, I think it's desirable to have its minimization as the highest priority. Moreover, I think in the US our baseline for appropriate levels of coercive force is far too high.
> the current law in place is that ZERO coercion/force can be applied to homeless people
As I was stressing earlier, if we don't have a reasonable outcome at the other end of the coercive force applying it anyway is unethical and ineffective. I don't believe that they are legally prevented from enforcing eg. noise ordinances (could be wrong here). They are merely prevented from throwing out someone's tent and kicking them to the next block.
> > application of coercive force (which is what makes a government a government) must be avoided at any and all cost
> I think this statement is eminently reasonable. Although a monopoly on coercive force is one important defining feature of government, I think it's desirable to have its minimization as the highest priority. Moreover, I think in the US our baseline for appropriate levels of coercive force is far too high.
Agree to disagree. I think coercive force should applied where appropriate, not avoided at any and all cost (a very strong qualifier). For instance, releasing defendants with GPS monitors prior to trial, and then arresting them and holding them in jail if they violate the terms of the release.
Meanwhile, coercive force in the form of escalating fines and, eventually, imprisonment, is applied to people who would dare to build apartments on their own land and then rent them to others. Where is the outcry over that? It is truly a tragedy of our own making.
> I'd think you'd be surprised, the prevailing elite opinion in progressive circles seems to be that application of coercive force (which is what makes a government a government) must be avoided at any and all cost.
Most who rail against progressive elites make the opposite claim.
That may be the case, but just as an example, elite progressive opinion seems to have shifted to a nonsensical "pro-gun control, anti-arresting people for gun crimes".
Consider that if the housing option you're providing is so shitty that people opt for homelessness over staying there it's cruel to force them to stay there.
You're arguing for a cruel and authoritarian option no matter how much you want blame those you want to victimise.
Taking the dog away and putting it up for adoption, while better than shooting it in front of the owner, is still not something the person wants to do. They have an emotional sentimental attachment to the animal and sometimes it is literally the only thing keeping them from killing themselves. And you want them to give it up? In exchange for a warm bed? 3 months from now when they've been kicked out for whatever reason, they won't have a warm bed anymore, and worse, they won't have their pet. Better just to keep the pet and be homeless.
Yes, if we took the pet away from them it would be more convenient for the rest of us. It would also be more convenient if they did not exist at all. Unfortunately that's not the reality we live in. We really like giving people agency in their own lives, and taking it away isn't something most of us are huge fans of. We can debate whether or not that's a good thing, but for now, people have agency, even temporarily unhoused people, and they don't want to give up their pets, their lifetime companion, in exchange for a few days of warmth.
If my Hobson choice was giving up my dog, out sleeping in a bed. I'm sleeping outside with my dog (unless it was freezing) asking (it rather forcing) someone to give up their dog is cruel. Cruel to both the person and the dog.
1) your two points are at odds: some proportion of the homeless refuse shelter under any circumstances. What, then, is the point of wildly overprovisioning shelter beds, when ones are going unused today?
2) So, the idea is that until the government guarantees a free rental unit that accepts pets and provides a storage unit for all of a homeless person's stuff, it should be prevented from enforcing any laws about camping in public spaces and preventing the public from using those spaces?
You're missing the point. The reason they don't give things up is because the shelter is temporary, but they results of using it aren't.
If you tell a homeless person you're going to shelter them for six months, the vast majority will take the shelter. If you tell them they have to move and you'll give them a bed for a night then many of them will see that as a shitty deal (which it is).
As for the legal stuff, you'll have to ask the supreme court as I wasn't the one arguing the case or making the law. That being said there are cities that have built out storage systems for homeless people. You don't even have to go that far for it, as Berkeley has been experimenting with this for awhile now. https://www.berkeleyside.org/2018/08/27/city-makes-available...
That said, giving the homeless a place to stay is cheaper than leaving them on the street. The vast majority of people in these programs end up getting jobs and paying their own way in the future.
You're missing the point: requiring the government to provide permanent housing that has storage units and allows pets (and alcohol, and drugs, and...) before it can take action on homelessness is not an effective approach. Temporary housing is useful, even though it might mean having to give up a dog. The fact that most of those remaining on the streets don't want it has no bearing on whether the government should be able to enforce public safety and sanitation laws.
Building the shelters is taking action. Without the shelters what exactly are you proposing to do? If there literally are no beds available, where are the homeless supposed to go in your system?
That's what the supreme court pointed out. They said that if there is no place for the homeless to go, if the city hasn't done it's job, then it has no right to tell people they can't sleep on public spaces.
The point is that there are shelter beds available: many are empty. The fact that if every single homeless person decided to take a bed there wouldn't be enough is irrelevant, because they don't want to. If N is the number of beds needed to house absolutely every homeless person, going from N-1 to N wouldn't result in a single additional homeless person in a bed, because right now there are empty beds available that aren't being taken. There are reasons a homeless person might not want to take a bed right now, some of them even sympathetic reasons (safety being foremost), but getting up to N beds would do nothing to make them want to take one of those beds. And as soon as we did get to N beds, homelessness advocates would immediately start stipulating additional demands before anything could be done: it can't be just a bed, it needs a storage unit; it needs to allow pets; it can't be just a bed but be an entirely separate unit having a locking door for safety; etc. The "we must get to N beds before we do anything!" is a talking point that distracts from the core issue.
For the record, I'd be against enforcing the laws if it were the case that every homeless shelter was at full capacity.
It is relevant because taking a bed means giving up means of survival without anything to replace it. You also seem to be forgetting that these are people with agency and not just numbers on a spreadsheet so yes, people will argue that they deserve the respect needed to improve their own conditions.
I have personally spent hours trying to find people beds at the homeless shelters in SF- they are at full capacity. If someone refuses a bed someone else steps up to take it. This idea that there are a bunch of empty shelter beds is pure fiction.
SF should do the sweeps anyways. Who cares what this ridiculous judge thinks? What is she gonna do, send in the National Guard? That would be an improvement.
At a certain point the blathering of these judges is completely irrelevant and simply not worthy of respect or obedience.
> Since 2016 San Francisco’s homeless budget has ballooned to $672 million from $224 million, yet the number of homeless in shelters has increased by a mere 736. That equates to $609,000 in higher annual spending for each additional person in shelter.
That's a case of BAD math if I've ever seen one. It's presented as if the goal of the homeless program is to corral homeless people into shelter and increase shelter occupancy (it's not.)
What are the number of people who has been rehomed? As a figure of speech, if a program rehomes a million people, and shelter occupancy goes up by a 736, is that still $609k a person?
I know WSJ writes from a biased place, but man, I couldn't read on after this sentence.
This article makes a number of statements which run counter to empirical research I've seen on this topic, and doesn't cite anything to support these claims. My understanding is that the majority of CA homeless are in fact from CA, and few people are "professional vagrants". Some Ezra Klein episode I listened to last week brought up a number of highly detailed surveys from which I'm drawing these conclusions.
I see lots of statements like "many homeless prefer to live on the streets where they can freely use drugs", particularly in right-leaning media, but IMO these are kind of strawmen that elide a lot of the significant elements of the situation. Drug addicts don't just "prefer" to stay where they can use drugs, it is for all intents and purposes a biological necessity. Shelters which will stop people from using ex. opiates are going to be non-starters unless they an offer viable paths out of addiction, or embrace a harm reduction approach which gets pilloried left and right in the US.
The overall framing that "social services incentivize homelessness" also seems to run up against the fact that the largest driver of homelessness is obviously the rising price of housing. Presumably if social services (which in this article seems synonymous with money spent on shelters) were the cause of SF's homelessness problem you would see people using the shelters they moved there for. But as the article points out this isn't the case; engagement with the expensive services is far below the desired levels. If people simply wanted to live somewhere they don't have to pay rent and can use drugs freely there are a number of extremely accommodating rural areas for this lifestyle. It seems more likely to me that SFs housing market pushed a large number of people into penury, and some of them are coping with their extreme deprivation by using drugs. Not that SF has somehow become a national destination for homeless (who exist everywhere in the country, and every city seems to think that they are somehow a magnet for them).
I am sympathetic to people who prefer not to have encampments in the public space, but I think we need to be clear-eyed about the causes and potential solutions. Simply "cracking down" with aggressively enforced urban camping bans hasn't worked in pretty much any city its been tried in (see Denver, where the cops have spent the better part of two years pushing the city's 4K homeless from block to block, with overall levels only increasing). Presumably it would be better to (a) stop the flow of people into homelessness with a stronger social safety net and a better housing supply and (b) increase the flow out of homelessness with better rehabilitation programs.
It's truthiness. It sounds right to the biases that people hold dear. No one wants to think "there but for the grace of whatever, go I."
A part of American capitalism uses people up and spits them out when they stumble and fall. Broken bodies and broken minds look for some sort of balm to try to numb the pain. It's just that many people don't realize that they do it too, with addictions to alcohol, games, social media, pornography, or hatred.
We're blindly rushing headlong into a massive crisis of environment, society, government, and people. Homelessness, mass murder, harmful drug use, and fascism are all symptoms of this and no one wants to think about it.
It doesn't make sense to have shelters in SF. It is the most expensive (or close to it) real estate in the US. You can get the homeless a private room in some places for the cost of a single shelter.
Now if someone has a job, you can't move them, that much is clear, but if you move out the rest, you will have more shelter space for the rest.
And while you are at it, nobody wants to be in an unsafe or unclean shelter - a shelter is not an appropriate place for a mentally ill person, who is not properly medicated.
Of course none of this matters, because nobody is listening to a bunch of people on a messaging board, even though we are smarter than they are.
another thread where 'more housing', 'we must do more', 'politicians aren't doing enough' is the proposed solution. Lol. The simplest explanation is the love for drugs, and the lax laws against crime, and the removal of ability of people to defend themselves (ban on open carry). Whether HN likes it or not, it is progressive politics (voted in by the residents) which led to this. Which makes it really an SF problem and no one elses.
But Texas also has a large homeless population, despite being tough on crime and drug use, so your proposed solutions are clearly deficient. Conservatives love to pretend that every social problem can be resolved by throwing everyone in jail, but this has been shown over and over again to not only make the problem worse, but also cost more money in the long term. IDK what open carry would do, unless you're proposing armed vigilantes gunning down vagrants in the streets which IMO doesn't sound very "law and order" to me.
It’s cost of living is also much higher than Texas no? To me this seems like a far more probable explanatory factor than laxity towards crime or lack of open carry laws
This is an opinion piece, not an article. Still, citing some sources would have helped.
> Many homeless prefer to live on the streets where they can freely use drugs
Says who? When I was there what I saw was (majorly) people with untreated mental health issues.
> San Francisco’s homeless epidemic is a result in large part of the familiar problems of drug addiction and mental illness.
Again, according to whom? If half of the issue is mental illness, why is this the only mention, while drugs are mentioned several times?
> Localities can’t use the threat of jail to induce addicts to receive treatment.
That's because putting someone in jail for stealing less than $950 worth of goods is bonkers. The problem is when the only response localities have for addicts is the threat of jail.
> That's because putting someone in jail for stealing less than $950 worth of goods is bonkers.
I really can't believe you still think that way. Have you been to a Walgreens/CVS in the city lately? Where everything's locked up, and security guards are shooting people on their own now? And you think it was "bonkers" before all of that started happening, wow.
You cannot expect the severely mentally ill to "voluntarily" seek medical help - this is the current prerequisite for medical intervention in SF. If a child runs into the street, you don't ask for consent before moving them out of the way of oncoming traffic. The severely ill in this city have less mental capacity than a child and yet we expect them to consent like any other adult. If you truly understand these illnesses you will recognize the futility of throwing money, housing, etc. at this problem.
Let's correct this false notion: "Shelters have very restricted hours, so if someone has a job that includes nights they likely can't use a shelter."
This is flat out wrong. MANY shelters will alter their curfew hours based around a person's employment status. Talk to the actual shelters about this policy and you will realize most are more than willing to adapt hours around a person's legitimate employment status.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 233 ms ] threadReally sad, it feels like I'm losing access to some really core, basic internet infrastructure.
We definitely need to reduce the social programs and put that $20bn somewhere else.
No matter how you slice it, $609,000/yr per homeless person is simply absurd.
Able bodied drug addicts should be arrested and put into jail. It’s in their best interests. For the rest we have shelters and free food and free skills development and free mental health. Incentive improving one’s condition.
It's not our responsibility to care for the homeless of the entire western US.
I don't think there is any hope for California, you need to wait for them to crash completely and then you can rebuild from the ashes.
Of course this is especially hard because a lot of profit is made and taxed in California which helps keeping the circus running.
Democracy is the theory that the people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.
You can see the spend here: https://lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/4640
Additionally, the NIMBY crowd goes against building anything, even with the new “builders remedy” in place. With a majority of homeless being from CA, this has affected everyone - homeowners can’t sell and “upgrade” because supply is too low, which doesn’t help mobility in the lower classes.
The other issue is the toothless law enforcement when it comes to actual crime. That I hope will change when residents of SF get tired of the shenanigans.
I’m against reducing social programs. We need it, especially if the income inequality gap keeps getting wider. We just need to be smarter about how we spend it.
It’s also important to remember that WSJ, and particularly their opinion pieces, are very much a right-wing mouthpiece and loves to dunk on SF and the “poors”.
No comment on the politics, just seems like an inconsistent and thin argument (probably one that has no business on HN).
>San Francisco is under a federal injunction that bars officials from enforcing laws against camping or sleeping in public spaces as long as its homeless population exceeds available shelter beds. As we recently explained, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment creates a right to vagrancy.
>San Francisco is under a federal injunction that bars officials from enforcing laws against camping or sleeping in public spaces as long as its homeless population exceeds available shelter beds. As we recently explained, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment creates a right to vagrancy.
I think the confusion might be that the strawman doesn't even follow logic, TBH.
Were did the Sacramento Democrats comment come in? I simply stated that the article highlighted federal decisions and blamed other governments for the consequences of those decisions. In that set of circumstances, Sacramento Democrats are equal to SF progressives, as they are both bound by a higher power (The Federal Government).
And to answer the question I think that you're asking, yes, I do believe the Federal government has a lot more power to solve homelessness than SF or California does. Do you think otherwise?
EDIT: I also think this fascination with Democrats vs. Republicans really misses the point here. This shouldn't be a competition to lay blame. That's the top symptom of broken government.
It should be a creative endeavor to solve the problems and it saddens me that so many people don't feel that way on this supposed "hacker" forum.
EDIT 2: >Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
I disagree that a city of 800k residents has the resources to solve a problem that's plagued every society ever.
I think the largest and wealthiest government in history is much better suited for the task.
I also think that SF being in the United States 100% makes it the Federal Government's issue, not some isolated thing that most people who live in other places can ignore. Like it or not, most homeless people are American citizens who happen to choose to live in SF right now. They can leave SF, but can't leave America.
SF has all the resources they need. They just need to use them.
"plagued every society ever" -- no, it hasn't, not to anywhere near the scale of SF. Even large cities within the jurisdiction of the 9th Circuit, like San Diego, Fresno, Spokane. San Jose.
>SF has all the resources they need. They just need to use them.
I guarantee to you the Federal government has more/better. But hey, let's play the game. What exactly does SF need to do? Step by step.
I guarantee to you that SF has possibly the worst problem of any city, except for some other West Coast cities. So why don't you explain why cities with equivalently good weather don't suffer nearly as much? Just luck?
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/wall-street-journal/
https://www.sfhsa.org/services/financial-assistance/county-a....
Do cash payments help or hurt? Clearly, there are more than just federal policies at play. They have job and home placement programs, mental health and so forth. Are they understaffed or with limited opportunities, or does the cash payment act as a perverse incentive to keep people on the street?
In a country with complete freedom of movement (and relatively cheap long-distance transportation), the mainstream has been convinced that homelessness is only caused by the communities where those people live.
It's the Federal government's historical role to serves as a social safety net, not mid-sized cities with 'live outside year round' weather.
Like what does SF 'fixing homelessness' even look like? I can tell you what it looks like at the Federal level.
This is not true. Medicare, section 8 housing and social security are (relatively) new inventions, and Medicaid is run by individual states, with some funding from the federal government.
By volume, most social programs are either state or county run, from job training to mental health and food assistance and so on.
As for what SF can do, it can designate emergency shelter space sufficient to get out from under the federal regulations preventing them from breaking up permanent camps. They can make cash payments contingent on going through some service which pushes people towards getting mental health care, addiction treatment, housing / job assistance, etc.
So long as they are paying people to be homeless, and managing themselves into a corner where they can't stop illegal camping, some people will choose to stay that way for one reason or another, and they will choose to do so in SF.
I guess we just have different time horizons of what counts are historical, since Medicare is ~3x my age.
With that amount of funding you may as well buy every homeless person a house
I think it would be an interesting experiment to try a planned project with high support, high requirements, and zero tolerance for crime. Instead of expecting the worst from people expect the best and hold them to a high standard.
Imagine a Gated community where everyone is expected to be in rehab, education, or employment and you get kicked out if you fail to follow through or commit crimes.
The point wouldn't be to a provide a catch-all support for everyone, but provide a safe space and support for those working to improve themselves.
Nevertheless, the current strategy does not seem particularly effective.
i.e. there's a big difference in sensible remedy for a family that's in a shelter for a few nights after fleeing domestic abuse vs. chronically unsheltered, mentally ill
Most of the negative interactions people have are with the unsheltered (i.e. someone street sleeping) rather than the homeless, and it is often unclear even how cities would/should spend money to address those people - that's what Mayor Breed is really complaining about.
It's like taking the entire school budget, dividing it by the number of first graders, and then saying that's how much we spend per student. It's stupid math that is only used to mislead.
Two-thirds of San Francisco's homelessness budget is spent on housing and prevention: https://hsh.sfgov.org/about/budget/overview-previous-budgets...
By definition, the best spent homelessness budget would be the one that resulted in zero people in shelters right?
Well, no, otherwise “have no shelters” would be the cheapest optimal strategy.
Fundamentally, the denominator that we ought to be using is "number of people diverted from being unsheltered", not "number of people in temporary shelters".
If a city spends $100M on homelessness and prevents 9,900 people from being unsheltered by housing them and only keeps 100 people in shelters, that looks like $1M per person on the bad metric.
But that situation is obviously better than spending $100M on sheltering 1,000 people (leaving 9,000 on the streets) instead of providing housing support, albeit that the cost looks only like $100K per person that way.
I think it's a (marginal) nitpick over your wording, not intended as a defense of the metric you were criticizing, though of course dragonwriter can correct me on that if needed.
(Now, building every homeless person a house might be more viable.)
Still doesn’t deal with the fact that much of that is nonshelter costs that would still be needs, even if they would move out of the homelessness budget.
What you need are a sort of anti-vagrancy law where the "punishment" is confinement in a very minimal security home where your basic needs are met, folks are nice and caring to you, and you're gently compelled to take whatever steps you need to put your life back together. Some people will stay indefinitely, be allowed to, and choose to.
From what I can tell, SF had about 18,548 shelter beds in 2022[0], which puts it at $36,230/bed/year. In 2016, there were 11,017 beds[1], which gets you $20,332/bed/year.
And of course not all help for homeless people is just paying for housing. Still seems expensive, but not nearly as bad as your math indicates.
[0] https://files.hudexchange.info/reports/published/CoC_HIC_CoC...
[1] https://files.hudexchange.info/reports/published/CoC_HIC_CoC...
Just another example of how off-the-rails the WSJ opinion page is: repealing what law? You mean the eight amendment to the United States Constitution? Thing is, the opinion piece isn't wrong. But to just ramble on for a whole page, and then the offered solution is to repeal a law that is never mentioned in the opinion piece (unless the author truly suggests that we suspend the Constitution), well, I don't think "sloppy" begins to cover it.
(I would also argue the lede is a bit buried down in the penultimate paragraph, but it's still my misreading.)
So, I don't think that was the most important part of the article--he's not claiming SF is a Homeless Mecca because of Prop. 47. He was just asking a rhetorical question to point out that the dysfunctional Democrat-lead government will throw billions of dollars at a problem before repealing a soft-on-crime law that obviously contributes to the problem.
By the way, before anybody calls me out as some right-wing troll for saying the Democrat-led government is dysfunctional: I moved to SF as a D-registered liberal, and still am a liberal in the traditional sense (not a D anymore). But the left wing extremism has caused me to reassess my stance on many issues, especially as I start a family. I am absolutely appalled by the conditions in the city, especially in the Tenderloin, which many don't realize has the highest number of children per capita.
Where's the breakdown of where that $896K goes?
Take a scroll through the likes of some of the famous VCs who constantly complain about SF's homelessness and crime. They tend to be more mask off far-right in their likes vs tweets (some will straight up tweet it though).
If I had >$1B I would simply stop complaining and start doing something to fix the problem.
The selfishness on display is frightening.
Who is the one not giving back to the community, the billionaire VC who is funding hundreds of high-paying jobs, or the person who shits in the street and demands to be fed and provided with a host of other services at no cost to himself?
It's worth considering the context that if no business will allow an unhoused person to use the toilet (okay, totally fair - private property!) and we refuse to maintain a sufficient number of public toilets, where are they supposed to defecate?
During COVID this got really extreme. You could be going on a road trip (like when I moved cross-state) and be a paying customer at a gas station or restaurant or grocery store and they all tell you "sorry, no public restroom". What are you supposed to do? Obviously, defecating in public is uncivilized, but we're not giving people many options.
For example, a city as large as San Francisco has a grand total of 25 public toilets: https://www.sfpublicworks.org/services/public-toilets
“There are no libertarians in bank runs”
+
> encourage rampant gentrification
Something tells me any attempt to give back to their community would be unwelcome, and labeled as "rampant gentrification". I certainly see it in the Mission, where any attempt at renovating old decrepit buildings is stopped in the name of gentrification. Now there's rats in the ceilings of public schools: https://missionlocal.org/2019/06/rat-droppings-crumbling-cei...
It makes perfect sense to me why they aren't doing anything. Maybe it would be better if we didn't collect taxes?
If you have billions of dollars and you have some sort of problem, it's absolutely within your means to do something about it (other than whine on twitter).
How have we willingly ceded so much authority to bureaucratic busybodys who have nothing better to do than micromanage the size, shape, and even color of private housing? Regulating for safety is one thing, but the current state is absurd. California, and many other states like Texas, need to drastically deregulate their housing markets.
Also I hardly think the WSJ editorial board is really interested in solutions here. They just enjoy throwing punches.
Your premise is wrong; making rhe first kind of law has not been ruled unconstitutional, only enforcing it when there is no available shelter for the homeless population.
It would be an interesting test case to build an illegal dormitory for homeless on private land and seek enforcement deferment as long as the same conditions are met.
That 4xs the amount of dwelling spaces per property in theory. But of course the capital and will for a Californian who owns property to go through with it is a different story.
Allowing duplexes on smaller lots is great, but doesn’t go far enough. I actually think the momentum is in CA’s favor and they will be in a better position than, for instance, TX in 10-20 years, as it relates to housing affordability.
While I think apartments are fine, it would help immensely if the absurd setback and height requirements were revised to something reasonable.
For example, take a standard sized lot in Alameda County (Basically all of the East Bay Area):
A standard lot is 5,000 square feet. 50'x100'
- Front setback requirements: 20'
- Back setback requirements: 20'
- Side setback requirements: 5' per side
- Max building height: 25' (2 stories max)
Total setback square feet: 2,600 out of 5,000
Taken together, it's illegal to build on 52% of the land one owns! Another way to think about this is that one must buy at least 52% more land than necessary to build on. This is completely absurd, and is contributing to the housing shortage throughout the Bay, and the state.
Some setbacks are fine, but really, 52%?!
Source: https://www.acgov.org/cda/planning/ordinance/documents/R-2_D...
You could easily build a SRO sized fireproof, cinderblock room (e.g. 10x10ft) for less than $5,000 per unit in materials.
https://www.woodyguthrie.org/Lyrics/Do_Re_Mi.htm
https://missionlocal.org/2014/09/homeless-encampments-here-t...
> She’s right. San Francisco is under a federal injunction that bars officials from enforcing laws against camping or sleeping in public spaces as long as its homeless population exceeds available shelter beds. As we recently explained, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment creates a right to vagrancy.
NYC has a ban against encampments because they provide shelter to homeless. Even after southern states have sent 100,000 penniless migrants to NYC, they still are able to find beds for people.
If San Francisco politicians can't create enough shelters, it's on them. There are hotels, parking lots, rec centers, etc if you have to deal with the numbers in the interim before you get housing up.
This is literally the opener to the article. The whole argument it is making is a complete mess.
If a place to sleep exists, you can demolish the encampments and force them the clear out. As the old saying goes, "You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here."
These are, by and large, economic migrants who really just want to work and are therefore a very different profile from the unsheltered on typical city streets - for whom mental illness and drug dependency are almost ubiquitous.
But, even so:
> Even after southern states have sent 100,000 penniless migrants to NYC, they still are able to find beds for people.
NYC is ~10 times the size of SF.
> The city of San Francisco released data last week showing that 55% of homeless individuals rejected shelter when offered it
I think it's very important to understand why people turn down the beds. There are several reasons-
* Shelters have very restricted hours, so if someone has a job that includes nights they likely can't use a shelter. A large number of homeless people are employed.
* To accept space at a shelter homeless people often have to abandon their belongings. If they have a tent, for example, these normally aren't allowed.
* Getting a bed for one night does not mean that they'll have one the second night. So throwing away their tent for one night in a bed just doesn't make sense.
* Shelters often don't allow pets, and a lot of homeless people have dogs.
> She’s right. San Francisco is under a federal injunction that bars officials from enforcing laws against camping or sleeping in public spaces as long as its homeless population exceeds available shelter beds.
There's a really, really important point here. If every homeless person accepted a bed, there still would be no where near enough to cover the homeless population. This is part of the reason people aren't willing to accept temporary shelter, as they know it's temporary (since there isn't enough for everyone the city basically rotates people around)
It's also really important to note that SF has, per capita (of population, not of homeless population), the lowest amount of shelter beds of any major city in the US. The bay area itself is even worse, as some cities don't have any shelter space at all. A huge part of this is because housing is so expensive, as is building.
This article tries to play it off as people just choosing to be homeless, but the reality is a lot more nuanced than that.
* Drugs and alcohol are not allowed
I know this is anecodotal (as is your comment), but I've spent a lot of time around the homeless population. I was "housed homeless" for a year, and my sister was homeless for several years due to mental illness.
The rate of drug use amongst the homeless does tend to be higher than the average population, and I don't think there's any denying that. However, it isn't nearly as universal as people seem to think. The average homeless person is homeless for less than two years, and it is normally due to financial reasons. Given programs that provide housing these people can normally come off the streets and live great lives. The simple fact that so many people manage to bounce back shows that what the average person things of homeless people isn't the actual reality.
The other thing, and this might sound obvious, is that the people who do drugs or drink simply take their stuff before they go to the shelters. These aren't people with hundreds of dollars to blow on their addictions. They often panhandle, eat, drug/do drugs, and then look for a place to crash. This also isn't the entire homeless population, just a smaller portion of it (that people use to justify not helping the larger portion, even though the whole population does need help).
I recognize the solutions are more complex than just force people to give up their pets, but most of those solutions involve some application of coercive force.
Edit: I did not explicitly spell this out, but clearly if you take away the dog it should be put up for adoption, not executed on the street while the owner is forced to watch, for maximum cruelty. Some people seem to think I was advocating something like the latter.
Sorry, but there are worse things in the world than putting down animals.
And don’t even try to come at me if you eat meat! Every one of us who eats factory farmed meat (y.t. included) is participating in far worse atrocities than a shelter humanely euthanizing a relative handful of dogs.
(EDIT: 5 minutes after and the killing was advocated. I rest my case.)
Imagine being a young child, already traumatized by ending up homeless, and now the pet you've been growing up with gets dragged off by the authorities to be executed.
It's absolutely the case that difficult problems can require the state to exert force to solve them, but I'm also just not convinced that forcing people into shelters is going to fix everything. Especially in this case where we know the area does not have enough beds for everyone, and the constraints enforced to get a bed are onerous (throw out your belongings, get rid of your pets, etc)
Some of the people who reject housing also cannot realistically be in a shelter because they will just cause trouble for everyone else if you force them to go. My brother used to work in law enforcement and this was an issue with the most troublesome homeless people in the area - as a law enforcement officer he really didn't have any workable tools. If you take them to a shelter they'll get kicked out because they're troubled, and if you take them to jail their condition will not improve (only deteriorate) and then they end up back on the street again once they're discharged.
> Imagine being a young child, already traumatized by ending up homeless, and now the pet you've been growing up with gets dragged off by the authorities to be executed.
Im sorry but pets die, it’s a part of life. It can be traumatic no matter what the circumstances. But so is living unhoused on the street, I’d imagine.
And this is exactly the attitude I mean. You, a well intentioned liberal, like to think that we can regulate society and enforce laws without causing any trauma to anyone involved.
Sometimes you have to take away a pet from a family in the name of the greater good for society as a whole, for instance if that pet is a danger to others.
And I did not say that forcing people into shelters will fix everything. There are a lot of other problems including drug addiction and mental illness. It’s incredibly sad how far we’ve allowed the situation to degrade, and the climb out of here will be difficult.
Just an utter lack of empathy. People like you should have no say in how a society is run.
And stupid cruel people with power make others suffer and some of them will end up homeless.
The homeless needs a lot of nurturing to get back on their feet.
If the choice is between them getting back on their feet but having to put the dog up for adoption (which is what I meant, not executing the dog on the spot), vs being stuck indefinitely homeless, I know which one I'm picking.
And again, I don't think "dogs" are the main impediment to homeless rehabilitation, the whole discussion is a sideshow. It was an illustrative example about well meaning intentions gone awry.
I am skeptical the choice you presented was illustrative. Temporary shelter is not enough often.
The supply of dogs exceeds demand. Have the honesty and courage to acknowledge the consequences of your proposals.
Life can be very cruel. And when everyone and everything failed that man, and nothing left for him but that dog, he is then faced with a choice of between leaving the dog to try to fit again in a world that hurt him. No wonder many are stuck in this situation.
I think letting people build the housing that people need would be 1000x the life saver compared to letting them have a dog once they're already out on the street. This is like the "let them eat cake" of homelessness policy.
It's a complete non-starter politically.
We are in the current mess wrt housing because many of the solutions are political non-starters, but I am not trying to advocate the most politically acceptable solutions on HN, but instead encourage people to examine whether or not their genuine, well meaning intentions may be counterproductive in some cases.
And also, I am not trying to assert that but for euthanizing homeless people's dogs, all of CA's homeless issues would be solved. Clearly that's not the case.
But in the context of the discussion, if we take for granted that doing X for homeless people is good, whatever X may be (e.g. moving them into a shelter, attending an AA meeting, seeing a doctor, whatever), my point is that you may need to apply moderate, reasonable and proportionate levels of force and/or coercion in order to achieve X.
Fine and acceptable, even to most progressives I think, but also in my opinion entirely tangential until we have resolved what X is first. Moreover, I am of the belief that for effectively chosen values of X the required amount of coercive force will be substantially lower than what most people seem to think is actually necessary.
AND, the current law in place is that ZERO coercion/force can be applied to homeless people. Just read what Mayor Breed said, it sounds like they cannot enforce any type of nuisance, public safety, or sanitation laws against homeless people.
I think this statement is eminently reasonable. Although a monopoly on coercive force is one important defining feature of government, I think it's desirable to have its minimization as the highest priority. Moreover, I think in the US our baseline for appropriate levels of coercive force is far too high.
> the current law in place is that ZERO coercion/force can be applied to homeless people
As I was stressing earlier, if we don't have a reasonable outcome at the other end of the coercive force applying it anyway is unethical and ineffective. I don't believe that they are legally prevented from enforcing eg. noise ordinances (could be wrong here). They are merely prevented from throwing out someone's tent and kicking them to the next block.
> I think this statement is eminently reasonable. Although a monopoly on coercive force is one important defining feature of government, I think it's desirable to have its minimization as the highest priority. Moreover, I think in the US our baseline for appropriate levels of coercive force is far too high.
Agree to disagree. I think coercive force should applied where appropriate, not avoided at any and all cost (a very strong qualifier). For instance, releasing defendants with GPS monitors prior to trial, and then arresting them and holding them in jail if they violate the terms of the release.
Meanwhile, coercive force in the form of escalating fines and, eventually, imprisonment, is applied to people who would dare to build apartments on their own land and then rent them to others. Where is the outcry over that? It is truly a tragedy of our own making.
Most who rail against progressive elites make the opposite claim.
Maybe rethink why so many see the shelters as the worse option before you start trying to justify authoritarian approaches.
You're arguing for a cruel and authoritarian option no matter how much you want blame those you want to victimise.
Yes, if we took the pet away from them it would be more convenient for the rest of us. It would also be more convenient if they did not exist at all. Unfortunately that's not the reality we live in. We really like giving people agency in their own lives, and taking it away isn't something most of us are huge fans of. We can debate whether or not that's a good thing, but for now, people have agency, even temporarily unhoused people, and they don't want to give up their pets, their lifetime companion, in exchange for a few days of warmth.
2) So, the idea is that until the government guarantees a free rental unit that accepts pets and provides a storage unit for all of a homeless person's stuff, it should be prevented from enforcing any laws about camping in public spaces and preventing the public from using those spaces?
If you tell a homeless person you're going to shelter them for six months, the vast majority will take the shelter. If you tell them they have to move and you'll give them a bed for a night then many of them will see that as a shitty deal (which it is).
As for the legal stuff, you'll have to ask the supreme court as I wasn't the one arguing the case or making the law. That being said there are cities that have built out storage systems for homeless people. You don't even have to go that far for it, as Berkeley has been experimenting with this for awhile now. https://www.berkeleyside.org/2018/08/27/city-makes-available...
That said, giving the homeless a place to stay is cheaper than leaving them on the street. The vast majority of people in these programs end up getting jobs and paying their own way in the future.
> before it can take action on homelessness
Building the shelters is taking action. Without the shelters what exactly are you proposing to do? If there literally are no beds available, where are the homeless supposed to go in your system?
That's what the supreme court pointed out. They said that if there is no place for the homeless to go, if the city hasn't done it's job, then it has no right to tell people they can't sleep on public spaces.
What action would you take?
For the record, I'd be against enforcing the laws if it were the case that every homeless shelter was at full capacity.
https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/federal-judge-refuses-to...
At a certain point the blathering of these judges is completely irrelevant and simply not worthy of respect or obedience.
That's a case of BAD math if I've ever seen one. It's presented as if the goal of the homeless program is to corral homeless people into shelter and increase shelter occupancy (it's not.)
What are the number of people who has been rehomed? As a figure of speech, if a program rehomes a million people, and shelter occupancy goes up by a 736, is that still $609k a person?
I know WSJ writes from a biased place, but man, I couldn't read on after this sentence.
I see lots of statements like "many homeless prefer to live on the streets where they can freely use drugs", particularly in right-leaning media, but IMO these are kind of strawmen that elide a lot of the significant elements of the situation. Drug addicts don't just "prefer" to stay where they can use drugs, it is for all intents and purposes a biological necessity. Shelters which will stop people from using ex. opiates are going to be non-starters unless they an offer viable paths out of addiction, or embrace a harm reduction approach which gets pilloried left and right in the US.
The overall framing that "social services incentivize homelessness" also seems to run up against the fact that the largest driver of homelessness is obviously the rising price of housing. Presumably if social services (which in this article seems synonymous with money spent on shelters) were the cause of SF's homelessness problem you would see people using the shelters they moved there for. But as the article points out this isn't the case; engagement with the expensive services is far below the desired levels. If people simply wanted to live somewhere they don't have to pay rent and can use drugs freely there are a number of extremely accommodating rural areas for this lifestyle. It seems more likely to me that SFs housing market pushed a large number of people into penury, and some of them are coping with their extreme deprivation by using drugs. Not that SF has somehow become a national destination for homeless (who exist everywhere in the country, and every city seems to think that they are somehow a magnet for them).
I am sympathetic to people who prefer not to have encampments in the public space, but I think we need to be clear-eyed about the causes and potential solutions. Simply "cracking down" with aggressively enforced urban camping bans hasn't worked in pretty much any city its been tried in (see Denver, where the cops have spent the better part of two years pushing the city's 4K homeless from block to block, with overall levels only increasing). Presumably it would be better to (a) stop the flow of people into homelessness with a stronger social safety net and a better housing supply and (b) increase the flow out of homelessness with better rehabilitation programs.
A part of American capitalism uses people up and spits them out when they stumble and fall. Broken bodies and broken minds look for some sort of balm to try to numb the pain. It's just that many people don't realize that they do it too, with addictions to alcohol, games, social media, pornography, or hatred.
We're blindly rushing headlong into a massive crisis of environment, society, government, and people. Homelessness, mass murder, harmful drug use, and fascism are all symptoms of this and no one wants to think about it.
Now if someone has a job, you can't move them, that much is clear, but if you move out the rest, you will have more shelter space for the rest.
And while you are at it, nobody wants to be in an unsafe or unclean shelter - a shelter is not an appropriate place for a mentally ill person, who is not properly medicated.
Of course none of this matters, because nobody is listening to a bunch of people on a messaging board, even though we are smarter than they are.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/727847/homelessness-rate...
> Many homeless prefer to live on the streets where they can freely use drugs
Says who? When I was there what I saw was (majorly) people with untreated mental health issues.
> San Francisco’s homeless epidemic is a result in large part of the familiar problems of drug addiction and mental illness.
Again, according to whom? If half of the issue is mental illness, why is this the only mention, while drugs are mentioned several times?
> Localities can’t use the threat of jail to induce addicts to receive treatment.
That's because putting someone in jail for stealing less than $950 worth of goods is bonkers. The problem is when the only response localities have for addicts is the threat of jail.
I really can't believe you still think that way. Have you been to a Walgreens/CVS in the city lately? Where everything's locked up, and security guards are shooting people on their own now? And you think it was "bonkers" before all of that started happening, wow.
In case you are not, then I am glad you don't get to dictate laws where I live.
You cannot expect the severely mentally ill to "voluntarily" seek medical help - this is the current prerequisite for medical intervention in SF. If a child runs into the street, you don't ask for consent before moving them out of the way of oncoming traffic. The severely ill in this city have less mental capacity than a child and yet we expect them to consent like any other adult. If you truly understand these illnesses you will recognize the futility of throwing money, housing, etc. at this problem.
This is flat out wrong. MANY shelters will alter their curfew hours based around a person's employment status. Talk to the actual shelters about this policy and you will realize most are more than willing to adapt hours around a person's legitimate employment status.