This is actually an interesting problem if people gave it a minute. Here's the initial conditions: We don't lock up mentally ill people anymore in California because "patient rights" including the right to non-neurotypical. This results in mentally ill people wandering the streets. They are too sick to respectfully use commerical establishment bathrooms, so they rely on public bathrooms. Since there is a shortage of those, they end up using the street. So SF wants to build an indesctructible public toilet for them so they don't use the street, which turns out to be hard because the mentally ill are often clever and find ways to make it a nightmare for everyone, so it ends up costing 1.7 million dollars and take a long time. What would you do?
Tackle the social conditions that lead to mentally unwell people being helpless and homeless and foodless on the streets.
There are enough resources in this world to take care of everyone. We should not tolerate the fact that so many people struggle all their lives at no fault of their own, simply because of the conditions they're born into.
You can help mentally unwell people without locking them up, what are you on about?
I don't know where you're from but it wasn't just Governors Brown and Reagan who created the problem, it was the Psychiatric survivors movement which was against forced treatment and forced medication.
I voluntarily take my medication and look upon those poor schizophrenics on the street screaming at birds with pity and sadness because well meaning do gooders don't believe they should be forced to take meds or accept treatment of any kind (because freedom) so they are left to suffer like wounded animals on the street.
Homelessness isnt a side effect of a mental illness epidemic. Mental illness is a side effect of a homelessness epidemic.
The reason for the focus on mental illness as a cause is that it stops people from drawing a direct line between a cult of landlord greed and drug addicts defecating outside of your local drugstore.
The non-mentally ill homeless aren't shitting on the sidewalk requiring 1.7 million dollar toilets. You should give functional homeless, which I've been, more credit than that.
They tend to be the ones who have been homeless the longest. Homeless -> drugs -> crippling mental illness -> shitting on the street. It can take years.
It's not coincidence that there are armies of them where the rents are highest. We're told is is though.
It's kinda both. In NZ in the 90s, residential care for people with severe mental illness was replaced with "community care" where all those patients be helped to go flatting the community, and have their condition treated so well that there was no need for residential care facilities.
It's far better! It's more respectful! It's also incidentally going to let us trim millions from the Health budget so we can pay for the tax cuts for high earners!
The care provided in the community was wisely delegated to the Almighty Invisible Hand of the Free Market, so a bunch of fly-by-night sub-par contractors sprung up to get the government cash and then provide very little care at all, and so large numbers of former patients ended up homeless due to their poorly controlled illness, and well gosh, hard to care for them in the community when you don't know where they live right?
It's an absolute debacle, and a great demonstration that neoliberalism is nothing more a belief set for business people who don't like paying tax.
But I fully agree that homelessness is a great medium for developing mental illness and drug dependencies.
> residential care was replaced with "community care" where all those patients be helped to go flatting the community, and have their condition treated so well that there was no need for residential care facilities.
I think you posted this in good faith but reads like a fairy tale. By definition, folks who need long-term inpatient care aren't going to be sufficiently treated by outpatient programs.
My spouse needs long-term, inpatient care. Not permanent care but the adjustments she needs aren't going to take place over 72 hours or 7 days. They're going to take months.
She didn't get the needed months of treatment. She got decades of the fairy tale. She's homeless now and likely will be until it kills her.
I wish it was make believe. It's what happened in NZ in the 90s.
It wasn't just mental illness patients affected, it was also those with significant intellectual disabilities. At least there's an NGO sector that could develop the ability to provide housing and care for them.
People who cant pay rent end up on the street. They take drugs to salve the pain of being on the street. How would you expect that to end?
Are you asking about the connection between rents, regulatory capture and greed? High rents and being on the streets? Or living on the streets being a bit of a cause of mental issues?
A good summary. I would add, mental health illnesses tend to present themselves in high stress situations. So while not the cause of the illness, being unable to afford reasonable housing while also being unable to find work with reasonable wages can cause illness to present.
Deinstitutionalization was supposed to be coupled with community mental health centers, which would have been places for these people to go when they fell through the cracks to get help without being segregated from society. The problem is that deinstitutionalization happened. Federal funding was removed from institutions but then never materialized for CMHCs.
These would have been places with maybe a psychiatrist and some therapists and social workers on staff who would work with the chronically mentally ill to help them navigate society so they didn't fall through the cracks. It was the same idea behind the "Least Restrictive Environment" requirement for No Child Left Behind--people who have problems in society should still be allowed to navigate society with support.
It's almost like treating symptoms is better than doing nothing about the cause, which is all you can do, because we don't have control over what causes human brains to malfunction like this.
I think we do have control over what causes human brains to malfunction like this and that's why there is a heterogeneous rather then homogenous distribution of mental illness or social pathogens. The rate of homelessness, drug addiction, petty crime like fare evasion or more serious violent crime are not equal across all places and all groups. Instead it seems like humans respond to incentives and those incentives are what is different across places and groups.
Sounds great, why do you think your opinion isn't shared by more people? On the surface everything you are saying makes sense, but its almost like there is some deeper reality that keeps it from being true.
If we have a $1.7M budget, we could hire people to handle each of those twelve points for $100k a pop. I got dibs on “crisis information”. This toilet is going to have the most informative signage you’ve ever seen.
You don't have to search anything, other users asked you to stop, let you know about the site's conventions and also flagged your generated comments. So all you have to do is not post any more generated comments, you don't need to search or parse irony.
I still don’t understand why AI generated comments aren’t allowed. What’s to stop anyone from creating thousands of bots and flooding this site with thousands or millions of AI generated comments?
Obviously someone is going to do this. It may not be me, it may not be done today or tomorrow, but it’s coming. You can’t stop innovation or what’s coming. This site is woefully unprepared. So unless you figure out a way of keeping up with the times and allowing, you are in for a RUDE awakening. AI is faster, better, and smarter than any moderator.
bots aren’t allowed either, so the question is just ‘how does HN prevent abuse’. I don’t know the details but it seems to do fine in most cases.
One really effective mechanism is users notice and squish misbehavior - with flags (as you found out) or by telling site admins about iffy things.
As to why generated comments aren’t allowed, that’s mentioned in the mod verbiage I linked - it’s a site for human conversation and llm output is not that.
> We don't lock up mentally ill people anymore in California because "patient rights"
Sure we do. That's what prisons are for. Because that's the only reliable offering for folks with chronic mental health needs.
Going past that: If patient rights weren't a factor, nothing would change. Long-term, inpatient mental healthcare is an impossibility for most folks who need it.
source: 25 years of marriage to spouse who needed long-term, inpatient treatment but is now homeless instead.
It's Noe Valley. The article doesn't mention anything about the homeless population, but does mention it's known as "stroller valley".
It's _not_ a hard problem to provide a small number of toilets for the homeless population. SF does have a "pit stop" program of public toilets, which in some cases are just chemical toilets, set up on the sidewalk, with a person that cleans them and logs their use. I walk by one on 14th regularly. It doesn't need to be "indestructible". It doesn't need to be a hard problem.
This was not an extraordinary toilet. It wasn't a pilot for a super duper new kind of public toilet. It wasn't an art project. It was just a toilet. This isn't an extreme case, it's normal. It just got attention because of our scatological fetish.
I'm not sure this is unusual to San Francisco. Just a couple days ago, I saw Honolulu suggest a new public toilet would cost $1-2 million, along with $400,000 annually in maintenance and damage from vandalism.
Still. You need about 1000 8 inch cmu at $2 each, a mixerload of 10 yards concrete, a few hundred feet of pex line and a bit of 4 inch pvc, plus a toilet on the next indestructible prison toilet order.
I could build that for under 100k easy and it would be nearly indestructible and easily cleaned, I know because I've done something similar; the materials cost is at best 20k and could be built mostly by unskilled homeless
in need of jobs rather than some weird engineered design that demands skilled tradesman.
If you spent $500/day/toilet cleaning a conventional toilet that costs $30k, it would take you 3400 days to break even. And you could have that conventional toilet installed in under a month.
I didn't know about these, but they really seem like they are extremely well designed:
1. First, they look pretty nice from the outside.
2. Stainless steel, so easy to clean.
3. It's really hard to balance privacy with keeping things from being a haven from drug use and prostitution in urban areas, they seem like they did a great job with that.
Call me old school but id build a block hut with a drain at the bottom and run a sprinkler at the top of every hour to flush out any lingering addicts who haven't passed out and put a time limit on the continuity of the prostitution.
> run a sprinkler at the top of every hour to flush out any lingering addicts who haven't passed out and put a time limit on the continuity of the prostitution
a good public restroom needs to be able to be used by the public. i'm guessing that if you were visiting a foreign city/country and needed to use the restroom and found a nice, clean public restroom to use, you'd probably not want to be rained on while relieving yourself.
Probably not. Quite seriously I would propose building a bunch of different designs and have the tourists rate their experience, as there are many competing factors here.
Exactly, which is why I was impressed with the Portland Loo. You want a toilet that is nice, clean and private so that people using it for its intended purpose will feel comfortable using it. You also can't make it too private or else it will be destroyed by drug addicts and prostitutes. I think they did as good a job as possible balancing these two opposing needs.
"Inefficiency" is a dishonest euphemism. This is the result of corruption. The former SF public works director is in prison (https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndca/pr/former-san-francisco-pu...), but SF city government is structured in a way that there are many agencies that each get a chance to create a delay if not bribed. From the article:
> Under city law, for example, installing the Noe Valley toilet — even the free one — requires that the Recreation and Parks Department coordinate with or seek approval from San Francisco Public Works, the Planning Department, the Department of Building Inspection, the Arts Commission, the Public Utilities Commission, the Mayor’s Office on Disability, and Pacific Gas and Electric.
Bribes are expensive. The structures created these organizations created in order to make it possible for them to extract bribes are also expensive, even to those who do not pay.
San Francisco government suffers from NIH syndrome.
This is just one example. The school district is trying to invent a way to teach algebra to 8th graders. Like it's never been done before, and no other district is doing it successfully:
78 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 137 ms ] threadThere are enough resources in this world to take care of everyone. We should not tolerate the fact that so many people struggle all their lives at no fault of their own, simply because of the conditions they're born into.
You can help mentally unwell people without locking them up, what are you on about?
I voluntarily take my medication and look upon those poor schizophrenics on the street screaming at birds with pity and sadness because well meaning do gooders don't believe they should be forced to take meds or accept treatment of any kind (because freedom) so they are left to suffer like wounded animals on the street.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychiatric_survivors_movement
The reason for the focus on mental illness as a cause is that it stops people from drawing a direct line between a cult of landlord greed and drug addicts defecating outside of your local drugstore.
It's not coincidence that there are armies of them where the rents are highest. We're told is is though.
I believe you are neither wrong nor right. I lived adjacent to a massive homeless community, in a (then) low-cost rural county.
It's been there for decades. It's still there but is larger since housing costs are >2x what they were in 2020.
It's far better! It's more respectful! It's also incidentally going to let us trim millions from the Health budget so we can pay for the tax cuts for high earners!
The care provided in the community was wisely delegated to the Almighty Invisible Hand of the Free Market, so a bunch of fly-by-night sub-par contractors sprung up to get the government cash and then provide very little care at all, and so large numbers of former patients ended up homeless due to their poorly controlled illness, and well gosh, hard to care for them in the community when you don't know where they live right?
It's an absolute debacle, and a great demonstration that neoliberalism is nothing more a belief set for business people who don't like paying tax.
But I fully agree that homelessness is a great medium for developing mental illness and drug dependencies.
I think you posted this in good faith but reads like a fairy tale. By definition, folks who need long-term inpatient care aren't going to be sufficiently treated by outpatient programs.
My spouse needs long-term, inpatient care. Not permanent care but the adjustments she needs aren't going to take place over 72 hours or 7 days. They're going to take months.
She didn't get the needed months of treatment. She got decades of the fairy tale. She's homeless now and likely will be until it kills her.
I read GP's post as sarcastic, I think you both agree. Thank you for the explanation on why it isn't great though.
It wasn't just mental illness patients affected, it was also those with significant intellectual disabilities. At least there's an NGO sector that could develop the ability to provide housing and care for them.
For an anecdote.
Are you asking about the connection between rents, regulatory capture and greed? High rents and being on the streets? Or living on the streets being a bit of a cause of mental issues?
These would have been places with maybe a psychiatrist and some therapists and social workers on staff who would work with the chronically mentally ill to help them navigate society so they didn't fall through the cracks. It was the same idea behind the "Least Restrictive Environment" requirement for No Child Left Behind--people who have problems in society should still be allowed to navigate society with support.
There are options to hellholes that aren't abandonment. But they have to compete with fat justice system budgets.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Obviously someone is going to do this. It may not be me, it may not be done today or tomorrow, but it’s coming. You can’t stop innovation or what’s coming. This site is woefully unprepared. So unless you figure out a way of keeping up with the times and allowing, you are in for a RUDE awakening. AI is faster, better, and smarter than any moderator.
One really effective mechanism is users notice and squish misbehavior - with flags (as you found out) or by telling site admins about iffy things.
As to why generated comments aren’t allowed, that’s mentioned in the mod verbiage I linked - it’s a site for human conversation and llm output is not that.
Sure we do. That's what prisons are for. Because that's the only reliable offering for folks with chronic mental health needs.
Going past that: If patient rights weren't a factor, nothing would change. Long-term, inpatient mental healthcare is an impossibility for most folks who need it.
source: 25 years of marriage to spouse who needed long-term, inpatient treatment but is now homeless instead.
It's like free housing and free healthcare combined; neither of which are possible in the US.
It's _not_ a hard problem to provide a small number of toilets for the homeless population. SF does have a "pit stop" program of public toilets, which in some cases are just chemical toilets, set up on the sidewalk, with a person that cleans them and logs their use. I walk by one on 14th regularly. It doesn't need to be "indestructible". It doesn't need to be a hard problem.
http://sfpublicworks.org/pitstop
There are too many words in that sentence, here's a fixed version:
"An expensive public project has come to symbolize bureaucratic inefficiencies."
It applies worldwide.
https://archive.ph/2024.01.24-205525/https://www.nytimes.com...
I'm not sure this is unusual to San Francisco. Just a couple days ago, I saw Honolulu suggest a new public toilet would cost $1-2 million, along with $400,000 annually in maintenance and damage from vandalism.
Where do I apply for this job?
It’s a bit different of a use-case.
I could build that for under 100k easy and it would be nearly indestructible and easily cleaned, I know because I've done something similar; the materials cost is at best 20k and could be built mostly by unskilled homeless in need of jobs rather than some weird engineered design that demands skilled tradesman.
they work well, are actually pleasant to use, and are nigh indestructible.
editing to add that they are for sale for $95000 each.
This was probably a deal breaker in San Francisco.
1. First, they look pretty nice from the outside.
2. Stainless steel, so easy to clean.
3. It's really hard to balance privacy with keeping things from being a haven from drug use and prostitution in urban areas, they seem like they did a great job with that.
4. Price seems reasonable.
a good public restroom needs to be able to be used by the public. i'm guessing that if you were visiting a foreign city/country and needed to use the restroom and found a nice, clean public restroom to use, you'd probably not want to be rained on while relieving yourself.
Exactly, which is why I was impressed with the Portland Loo. You want a toilet that is nice, clean and private so that people using it for its intended purpose will feel comfortable using it. You also can't make it too private or else it will be destroyed by drug addicts and prostitutes. I think they did as good a job as possible balancing these two opposing needs.
The planning process for this toilet has been expedited by city officials.
> Under city law, for example, installing the Noe Valley toilet — even the free one — requires that the Recreation and Parks Department coordinate with or seek approval from San Francisco Public Works, the Planning Department, the Department of Building Inspection, the Arts Commission, the Public Utilities Commission, the Mayor’s Office on Disability, and Pacific Gas and Electric.
Bribes are expensive. The structures created these organizations created in order to make it possible for them to extract bribes are also expensive, even to those who do not pay.
This is just one example. The school district is trying to invent a way to teach algebra to 8th graders. Like it's never been done before, and no other district is doing it successfully:
https://sfeducation.substack.com/p/trash-cans-and-math-polic...
https://www.ktvu.com/news/san-francisco-pilots-6-competing-t...