
SF’s appalling street life repels residents – now it’s driven away a convention - sethbannon
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/matier-ross/article/SF-s-appalling-street-life-repels-residents-13038748.php
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rleigh
I'm sure it's driving out smaller meetings as well, which might not make big
news but might add up to even bigger losses overall.

Some of my team went to a meeting in SF a few years back. They described
"running the gauntlet" from the hotel to a Mexican restaurant in an area where
the streets were full of homeless people. While none of them ran into direct
trouble, they felt uncomfortable and unsafe, and were disgusted at the state
of the place (human waste on the streets etc), "like a third-world country".

In subsequent years, when the company asked for volunteers to go, no one
wanted to, and no one volunteered. A week long all-expenses-paid trip from the
UK to SF is something which would previously have been considered a huge perk,
but is now considered to be a dangerous punishment. I certainly had no desire
to visit.

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vmarshall23
Part of the problem, if not a large-ish part of the problem, is that
apparently drugs and alcohol are usually restricted from homeless shelters.

And addiction is a large component of homelessness, but if you're still
addicted you're obviously not going to spend much time in a place where you
have to go cold turkey to enter.

So, my ( probably naive ) suggestion would be to allow drugs and alcohol in
the shelters, hopefully giving the residents long enough of a chance to
receive some help. No it's just a revolving door that doesn't appear to be
helping anyone.

Universal basic income too. :-)

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pasabagi
I think for people working at a shelter, that might be pretty annoying. To be
honest, the fundamental problem is obvious: SF has too high rent. Until
serious money and resources are devoted to solving that, you will have
homelessness.

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ralusek
You think that people who are now homeless should be looking for legitimate
residential opportunities in the most expensive city to live in in the
world...by mechanism of lowering rent in said city?

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pasabagi
What? It's like a conscious strategy on the part of homeless people? That
would be cool.

No, I really just think that people should stop overthinking problems like
this. You don't need to go around asking everybody's life story to work out
that homelessness is tightly coupled with rent prices. Fix one, you fix the
other. Or, if you think that's too expensive or onerous, own it. Accept that
you're basically OK with other people being homeless. Everything else is just
crocodile tears.

~~~
ralusek
My first question is, which I think you missed, is why do they need to be
given housing in the most expensive city in the world? There is a lot of space
in this country.

My second question is, how exactly do you propose rent be lowered? Do you just
think that rent is made up on the spot by evil rich white people, and we
should have the government force them to charge less? The reason rent is so
high in the first place is largely to do with government restrictions on new
developments...Rent is also high here because there is a large concentration
of high paying work in the area. Are these high earning people going to be
allowed to benefit from your proposed arbitrary lowering of rent, so that we
only disproportionately punish the wealthy landlords but not the wealthy tech
workers? If not, how many tech workers would you like to displace to make room
for homeless residents, and how do you determine which?

I feel foolish for not realizing how simple of a solution it was that you were
proposing, but not all of us operate in the intellectual 4th dimension.

~~~
pasabagi
Look, don't believe me. Just look at the history of public housing. It's
expensive. It works. People like to pretend there's a lot of complexity to
issues like these because they couldn't really care less about homeless
people, and they'd rather not spend the money to give them homes. Talking
about complex social issues is a great way to come across as both clever and
caring. Paying more taxes, however, is a pain in the ass.

~~~
DougN7
Naive, but honest quesrion: why don’t homeless move to where housing costs
less? That’s what I do if I can’t afford something: I find an alternative.

It seems to me something else is going on that pulls homeless people into San
Francisco. But I readily admit I don’t understand it all very well.

~~~
pasabagi
I think generally speaking, lowering housing costs isn't to allow a homeless
person to save up for a deposit and rent an apartment. It's to increase the
likelyhood that the sibling they always got along with will have a spare room,
or to increase the buffer between losing a job and being on the streets, or to
make it so the old friend doesn't mind it that much that somebody is sleeping
in their spare room, since they have a spare room.

On the individual level, I expect the reason why people stay is that being
homeless makes you very dependent on local knowledge and social network.
Knowing what bins contain food, where is good shelter, which police officers
are dangerous, and so on - is very important. If you move city, you're not
suddenly going to have the kind of money to pay a deposit. You'll just be
homeless in a place you don't know. That, and a lot of homeless people have
jobs.

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Gatsky
I’ve been to SF once for 3 days, and I have never seen so many frankly
mentally ill people wandering the streets. This always seems to be downplayed
as a factor in the homelessness problem. Difficult to be a part of any
solution when you have untreated chronic schizophrenia.

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lnanek2
One person told me that area is so bad in particular because that's the area
unemployment checks are obtained. So a lot of the poorest people without an
address besides a shelter have to go there regularly, and they don't exactly
have spare money to travel much. It might be better for them and the rich
doctors who want to run their conventions if the city found a better site to
disburse the checks.

The city built a transportation center, surely they can dedicate a government
building to being a combination shelter and benefits center. Or place it near
a place that handles the homeless better like people's park does in Berkeley
where, yes there are campers, but they keep it pretty clean and respectful.

~~~
masonic
Why would the _city_ be disbursing unemployment checks?

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dingo_bat
Who else would?

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toomuchtodo
It’s usually a state department.

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dqpb
The open drug use, rampant homelessness, and shit on the sidewalks is really
sad, and has been that way for at least 10 years.

Given the high gdp and high tax rate, why isn't SF better than it is?

I'm would really like to understand this. Is it politics, economics, cost of
living?

~~~
beavisthegenius
Serious response: where do you propose someone go who's been high or drunk for
30 years?

~~~
Yetanfou
Serious answer: to the countryside, away from the city and its lures, away
from the dealers and with a bit of luck also away from the legal dealers of
alcohol, even though that would be harder to achieve.

~~~
growlist
It seems to me it would be cheaper to give the committed substance abuser
their drug of choice for free in a safe, separated and controlled setting,
rather than maintain this magical thinking that one day they will turn things
around on their own in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

~~~
Yetanfou
Cheaper money-wise, maybe. Probably if and when the supply of those drugs has
been taken out of criminal hands - something which is long overdue as the 'war
on drugs' does nothing but guarantee high prices for criminals while it does
next to nothing at all to limit the amount of drugs on the market. As to
whether the 'move to the country' scenario works depends on the reason for the
addiction. For some it probably will, others will either keep their addiction
or change it for another one.

It will improve the quality of life for the addicts as well as the city
climate, as to whether this is worth the extra costs compared to a state-
supplied drug stash is up to society to decide.

~~~
growlist
I was thinking move them to the country AND supply them with their drug of
choice, at least until hopefully someone discovers a miracle cure for
addictive behaviour, which would be a better solution. Or why not relocate
them to a closed environment with no abusable substances whatsoever?

Some people are incapable of looking after themselves, or fall into addiction
after horrible experiences, and leaving these people to stew in their own
juices rather than intervene is inhumane. We do after all section people that
are a risk to themselves or others, so this is not without precedent.

~~~
maxerickson
Opposition to institutionalization (which any program of isolation will tend
to be) is not particularly rooted in magical thinking.

A slim majority has recognized that consent and autonomy are important rights
and chooses to deal with the consequences of maximizing them.

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beatpanda
It's hilarious to me that this _exact same newspaper_ ran an article less than
a week ago showing that by all available measures, homelessness is improving
and there are fewer people on the streets in San Francisco.
([https://projects.sfchronicle.com/sf-homeless/2018-state-
of-h...](https://projects.sfchronicle.com/sf-homeless/2018-state-of-
homelessness/))

Just like our current national hysteria around crime or immigration, the
notion that homelessness is somehow getting worse, or that San Francisco is
doing a bad job handling it, are flatly contradicted by the data. San
Francisco is in fact doing a better job handling homelessness than most of its
peer cities in the United States.

Readers of Hacker News should go to the data first. Matier & Ross have a long
history of this kind of ugly sensationalism and it has no place here.

~~~
captain_perl
Things have gotten worse in the last decade, with homeless invading hotel
lobbies and scaring people checking in.

Market St. is a war zone.

The city spends $300 - $400 million a year on the homeless industry, but
virtually none trickles down to the actual homeless.

~~~
hospes
In 2017 SF had about 7500 Homeless people, if your numbers are correct (cannot
find the source), then it means city spends per homeless person annually
somewhere between $40K to $53K, which seems to be insane amount of money.

~~~
ironchief
It is and its worse than you think. Here's a 2016 article
[https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/S-F-spends-
recor...](https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/S-F-spends-
record-241-million-on-homeless-6808319.php)

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rjkennedy98
Medical association feels uncomfortable around mentally ill people. So much
for trying to "get rid of the stigma".

~~~
thatswrong0
Multiple coworkers of mine have been assaulted in that area. And from the
article:

> It didn’t help that one board member had been assaulted near Moscone Center
> last year.

It's not just a stigma. It's not safe.

