
San Francisco, Hostage to the Homeless - wyclif
https://www.city-journal.org/san-francisco-homelessness
======
flurdy
Was just listening to
[https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p07q4ngz](https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p07q4ngz)
(WS More or Less: Does San Francisco have more rough sleepers than Britain).

Spoiler: Yes. The city of 900,000 has more rough sleepers / homeless than the
country of 65 million.

And I think England has way too many homeless. Don't really see any out where
I live (rural town in Hampshire) but I do see a lot of unfortunate ones in the
cities.

At least compared to where I grew up where there were very few homeless people
[https://www.quora.com/Are-there-homeless-people-in-
Norway](https://www.quora.com/Are-there-homeless-people-in-Norway)

~~~
trevyn
There was a Ross Kemp episode about how the British counts of rough sleepers
could be very wrong; many towns with official counts of zero having visible
dozens, etc.

~~~
dagw
That was covered in the podcast. Their conclusion however was that since
England and San Francisco both used the same methodology, they're probably
wrong in the same direction and by roughly the same amount.

So while you cannot conclusively say that SF has more rough sleepers than all
of England (not Britain) it's not unreasonable to believe so, and either way
the actual numbers are probably very close.

------
jahaja
Wow, that article's rhetoric is seething with social darwinistic class hatred.
All these voluntary homeless seems to be conspicuously absent in western
Europe. At least at this scale.

Insisting on, which the author clearly does according to a quick googling,
firmly supporting and perpetuating an economic system that creates these
dystopian features and then calling for their forceful removal, through weasel
language, is cynical at best, and evil in practice.

~~~
ltbarcly3
Lets do an experiment. Go to a park in the middle of London, and set up a
tent, and scatter used needles on the sidewalk. You'll be involuntarily moved
out of the park within a couple of hours.

Since your governments go ahead and remove people who are trying to live in
public spaces, you don't see them, and you assume they don't exist.

[https://www.citylab.com/equity/2017/10/berlin-has-been-
payin...](https://www.citylab.com/equity/2017/10/berlin-has-been-paying-
migrants-to-go-away/544484/)

[https://www.politico.eu/article/homelessness-qa-freek-
spinne...](https://www.politico.eu/article/homelessness-qa-freek-spinnewijn-
down-and-out-in-paris-london-and-the-rest-of-europe/)

~~~
MrAlex94
> Since your governments go ahead and remove people who are trying to live in
> public spaces, you don't see them, and you assume they don't exist.

From this, I assume you aren’t from the UK and don’t actually have any idea
about homelessness here?

[Shelter]([https://england.shelter.org.uk/housing_advice/homelessness](https://england.shelter.org.uk/housing_advice/homelessness))
and [Centrepoint]([https://centrepoint.org.uk/](https://centrepoint.org.uk/))
are two of the biggest homeless charities here and they do a lot of work and
are closely related with the local councils. Maybe do some research, the
provide so much good information.

Please also bear in mind, the local councils have a [legal
responsibility]([https://www.compactlaw.co.uk/free-legal-
information/public-h...](https://www.compactlaw.co.uk/free-legal-
information/public-housing/homeless-people.html)) to look after homeless in
their borough.

And this is purely anecdotal, but a lot of people I know here care a lot about
homeless people. Walk around London and see how often you’ll see people buying
a homeless person a coffee or some food.

Whereas in the US, I heard a lot of people say that homelessness is a choice
and that they should just stop being homeless. Bewildering.

~~~
twelve40
In the US, in San Francisco specifically, many homeless get not just a free
coffee, but free needles, methadone, and pretty much a blind eye to all drug
circulation downtown. The city spends $300 million on homeless every year, yet
in the other thread here they say that SF has more homeless than all of the
UK, and that number keeps growing every year. There are people defecating
every day in the street around my office in the Financial District, I guess I
should start buying them coffee or some food and things will get back on
track.

~~~
cpr
Isn't it obvious that way you pay for, you get more of?

I don't mean that cynically--just seems like common sense.

~~~
MrAlex94
I imagine it also depends on what it’s being spent on. If it’s not used
effectively, no amount of money will make any difference - and as you said
probably exacerbate the problem.

------
m0nsoon
An excellent article that beautifully summarizes the frustration of many
residents and highlights obvious policy solutions to address them, such as
Proposition Q.

>>>Providing the mentally ill with the “liberty” to decompose on the streets
is cruelty, not compassion.

The policies employed by Breed’s government misuse resources in a quixotic
effort at fighting addiction by providing more means to be addicted. The “need
more housing zoning” argument is absurd and employs a fallacious premise that
homeless people need to be housed in-situ.

This article provides great relief for residents, homeless folks, and drug-
dealing scum.

~~~
jahaja
No, cruelty is _causing_ the problem. Not being unable hide it.

------
m0llusk
It is strange that this subject gets so much attention but so little actual
investigation. It is asserted that San Francisco simply backed off from
enforcement and then this happened, but the reality is far more complex. Heavy
ongoing use of incarceration caused both a backlash and extreme expense.
Troubled people from all over the globe come to San Francisco. Most homeless
only stay in the City for a couple of weeks before moving on. Making it sound
like deciding to enforce crimes would be easy and cheap and fix the problem is
a gross distortion of what is going on and what resources are available.

~~~
rob74
Deciding to enforce crimes would not fix the problem, but move it somewhere
else and/or make it less visible - which is what most other cities are
doing...

~~~
kelnos
Well the alternative, not enforcing laws, is clearly not working.

Law enforcement everywhere is about moving crime out to the margins. It will
never stamp out all crime, but it does tend to reduce the quantity of it.

And I'm not even convinced that "moving it elsewhere" is necessarily a bad
thing. I'd rather have most crime concentrated in a small area than
distributing it over a large area. Regardless, people should be allowed to
feel safe in their communities, and that just isn't the case for
embarrassingly large amounts of SF.

~~~
awayyyythrow
The alternative is _building houses_. When you put people in houses they cease
to be homeless. They did it in Helsinki, and it worked:
[https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/jun/03/its-a-
miracle...](https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/jun/03/its-a-miracle-
helsinkis-radical-solution-to-homelessness)

Very simple deductive reasoning actually, I wonder how people did not come up
with it yet.

~~~
m0nsoon
>>>No other American city has built as much affordable housing per capita,
according to the Bay Area Council Economic Institute. From 2004 to 2014, the
city spent $2 billion on nearly 3,000 new units of permanent supportive
housing.

You’re conflating addressing “housing transience” with addressing “addiction,
mental illness, and criminal antisocial behavior”. Additional housing units
don’t resolve this problem.

~~~
Data_Junkie
Ever been to a developmental center ? Full of addiction, mental illness and
criminal anti-social behavior, at a level completely beyond anything seen in
any homeless group, not even close. You know what the answer the local
government in the area has done to improve the lives of the people they have
had locked away from society since the area has existed? Provided them
housing.

------
trevyn
A New York author suggesting to Californians how to police is a bit... tilting
at windmills?

~~~
oh_sigh
The homeless in NY are extremely pleasant relative to the ones in SF(this
wasn't the case in the early 90s though). And NY has multiples of the SF
population.

------
ptah
> ongoing effort to decriminalize attacks on civilized order

this article sounds like a drunken conservative rant

~~~
oh_sigh
And your comment is completely contentless. The author may be ranting, and it
may be conservative, but it is clearly not "drunken".

------
airnomad
Why do we expect that people should live in house or have a home?

Maybe we need to design our cities and public places in a way that they would
be approachable for people living outside?

Why we wouldn't have camping spots in cities with infrastructure that supports
living outside?

~~~
romwell
>Why do we expect that people should live in house or have a home?

Because we aren't cavemen anymore.

And a tent is a home, just a shabby, crappy, small one.

>Why we wouldn't have camping spots in cities with infrastructure that
supports living outside?

Because people also need to eat and poop and shower somewhere, and be
protected from the elements, and once you incorporate all that, you get a
hostel/shelter.

I'll take your comment as an opportunity to say this:

Yes, we absolutely should have more infrastructure for the homeless.

Let's have public baths, public toilets, storage facilities, communal kitchens
perhaps. Internet access (libraries do that, but that shouldn't be the only
place).

Travelers would appreciate many of these as well.

~~~
airnomad
Have you ever camped in a camping spot somewhere? You get electricity,
bathrooms, access to kitchen etc.

If we could accept the fact that some people want to live on the streets, we
would be able to make their life much easier and better without imposing a
certain philosophy on how they should be living.

~~~
kelnos
Civilization is exactly about imposing a philosophy on how people should live.
Like it or not, that's how it works. If you don't want to play ball, there are
plenty of open spaces in the US where people can live off the land without
creating a public health hazard.

If people don't want to be homeless, we should do everything in our power to
help them get into housing, sustainably. But if they do? No thanks, do that
somewhere else, where the land can be reasonably and cost-effectively set up
to support that. One of the most expensive, highly-regulated real estate
markets in the US is not that place.

~~~
airnomad
Philosophy on how people should live is not a set in stone.

It's a moving target and it should be moving in a direction of achieving the
best outcome for everyone, regardless if they're investment bankers or heroin
addicts.

People thinking like you have been trying to stop progress since we got down
from the trees. It's this ridiculous idea that how things are now is something
that has to be kept and preserved.

It is a disservice to humanity - those ideas never survive history test, just
cause better future for everyone to come later than it could.

~~~
ltbarcly3
> People thinking like you have been trying to stop progress since we got down
> from the trees. It's this ridiculous idea that how things are now is
> something that has to be kept and preserved.

Wait, aren't you the one arguing people should move back up into the trees?
Well, not even the trees, you are just arguing they should live on the ground,
and even our primitive primate ancestors weren't stupid enough to want to do
that.

~~~
airnomad
I'm arguing that everyone should be living as close to how they want as
possible

------
jsnider3
City Journal is pretty weird. It used to be a mainstream magazine of urban
planning, but now it seems to have been infected with the far-right brain
virus.

Edit: I also can't believe that an article on San Francisco homelessness never
once mentions zoning laws.

~~~
highhedgehog
How is talking about an obvious problem a far-right brain virus?

~~~
m0nsoon
It’s not. Just a straw man argument avoiding the deeper truths which the
article is exposing and the commenter is disinclined to admit.

