
San Francisco, Hostage to the Homeless - Reedx
https://www.city-journal.org/html/san-francisco-hostage-homeless-16980.html
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inferiorhuman
Repost of this:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21188178](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21188178)

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aazaa
> San Francisco’s progressive self-image soon trumped common sense, and in
> 1996, at the urging of the Coalition on Homelessness, voters turned Jordan
> out of city hall in favor of former state assembly speaker Willie Brown.
> Brown had run on a compassion platform, but he soon came to repudiate it,
> observing with amazement that many of the homeless didn’t actually want to
> come off the streets. ...

When people think of the Great Depression, they tend to imagine bread lines,
lots of unemployment, and general poverty.

What if a modern depression in the US looks like San Francisco? A deep divide
between haves and have-nots. The have-nots spiral ever further downward,
propelled by abundant drugs, while the haves struggle to comprehend (or even
notice) what's happening. Leaders have run out of ideas about how to solve the
problem, contenting themselves with damage control.

All the while drip, drip drip... the problems continue to compound.

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GrassFedAltCoin
Something annoying about this kind of reporting is that the writer constantly
refers to the homeless population as a monolithic group called "the homeless."

The writer ascribes all kinds of attitudes and beliefs onto them, ostensibly
based on the writer's interactions with homeless people in investigating this
story.

There's a weird self-fulfilling prophecy going on in which the writer only
interacts with homeless people who are behaving in the way the writer would
like them to. You aren't, for instance, going to get a homeless person who
doesn't do drugs to test your fentanyl for you.

Feels like an inherently biased sort of investigation.

~~~
surfallday
>>"You aren't, for instance, going to get a homeless person who doesn't do
drugs"

what does that even mean (like they only abuse alcohol?)?

There are not thousands but 10s of thousands of discarded needles being
cleaned up monthly and weekly
([https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2019/09/04/the-city-
picks-...](https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2019/09/04/the-city-picks-
discarded-needles-each-week/G1Ue4UygRjOy3Kpgvk10mO/story.html))

>> Feels like an inherently biased sort of investigation.

this is a weird call out.

What is the proposed alternative here?

~~~
gbear605
> what does that even mean (like they only abuse alcohol?)?

Only about 35% of the homeless population has an addiction. Less than half of
the homeless population neither has an addiction nor a mental illness. [1]
Just because there is lots of substance abuse (and yes, there certainly is),
doesn't mean that the average homeless person does drugs. When you talk about
the homeless population, you have to include people who are really quite like
you but had a bad turn. Many of them have a story like "I got a mortgage with
a large down payment just before 2008, when I lost my job and then shortly my
house. I had to go to the streets because I had nowhere else to go."

[1]: [https://sunrisehouse.com/addiction-demographics/homeless-
pop...](https://sunrisehouse.com/addiction-demographics/homeless-population/)

~~~
surfallday
I am extremely skeptical of the 35% number.

>>Less than half of the homeless population neither has an addiction nor a
mental illness.

Above quote implies close to half. I just find it hard to believe.

If a person is otherwise "functional" (or as you say "like you") I would
really want to know more about their situation if their time on the street is
longer than one month.

For contrast id like to point out that in the cases of migrant caravans
comprised of THOUSANDS
([https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2018/10/20/migrant...](https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2018/10/20/migrant-
caravan-honduras-migrants-mexico-border/1709896002/)) of people and families.
Caravan migrants are so poor they cant afford a bus/train ticket. As far as i
know most of those people do not WALK to the US to sleep on the streets. As
far as i know they are able to find housing.

Just to recap people with almost no education/English/money and minimal social
network DO NOT endup on the streets of major cities in their thousands.

I make a point of this - because for this problem to get resolved we have to
think critically about what the problem actually is.

And to be super clear - we absolutely need a better safety net for people who
fell on hard times and could no longer keep their previously expensive home.

But also we need to be clear about the causes of homelessness we see in major
US cities.

~~~
orwin
I was homeless for 9 month in Paris (until i got my first internship), i did
not live on the street, i slept at my school or took friends beds when they
were out of town, and i think most homeless do the same. And i was not alone,
i think we were ~20 to do the out of 400 students. None of us had addiction (i
can't tell about mental issue, after all we wanted to be devs).

I went to San Francisco 3 years ago with my familly and my sister made some
homeless friends. They were not living in the street but in their cars, they
had low-pay (or illegal) jobs and did not seems to have any addictions.

I think this is a definition issue. Homeless just mean you don't have a home.

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bemeurer
Why was this flagged?

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msie
And homeowners.

~~~
eranimo
Arguably a more important problem as it impacts the vast majority of the
population.

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enterx
"A 33-year-old woman from Alabama, who now lives in a tent in an industrial
area outside downtown"

migration issue, rule of law failure and a healthcare problem.

since there is no expansion of the middle class layer to pay more taxes for
the extra cost of new social housing IMHO this is going to progress.

~~~
wahern
At an even 90% income tax rate there's not enough money in the city to _build_
new housing for the homeless and financially insecure. It's insane to think
this is even possible. (Not that I assume _you_ do.) It's like saying we
should buy new cars for the carless, rural population rather than subsidize
used car purchases.

But there would be no cheap, used cars to buy if we severely limited the
manufacture of new cars. Yet somehow people still believe that building new,
market rate[1] housing is _not_ a prerequisite to improving the housing
situation in the city. To be sure, it's _not_ _sufficient_ ; but it's
absolutely _necessary_.

[1] Thus leveraging the hundreds of trillions of global capital.

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bparsons
San Francisco in 2019 arguably has more wealth concentrated within it than any
place at any other time in history.

Making poor and mentally ill people sleep on the street is a choice you have
made as a society. Places with far, far fewer resources have somehow managed
to sort this problem out.

~~~
aeternum
What's the solution?

~~~
gbear605
Build houses for them, for one. Make housing cheaper in the first place, so
they don't go on the streets. At a bare minimum, at least have sufficient
shelters for them so they don't have to sleep on the streets. (Almost) no one
wants to sleep on the street, and San Francisco has more than enough money to
make it so they don't have to. Heck, some individual Bay Area companies have
enough money for it, not that they would ever spend it on the homeless.

