I can't believe that SF spends $240M dollars per year on homelessness, and the current environment is the outcome of all that money. Even worse, there is zero accountability so there must be mass corruption and waste taking place because based on what I see every single day, none of that money is being spent properly.
The social services provided, combined with milder weather, make SF a better place to be homeless than other areas. Surely homeless people, just like the rest of us, are attracted to cities that serve them better.
If you built every homeless person a house I don't think there would be any less homeless on the streets of SF. Homeless in LA who desire a house would simply migrate to SF. A Greyhound bus ticket is not that expensive.
So until you find a solution to homelessness in the entire USA, or at least the Western USA, I can't see any one city solving the problem (as opposed to moving the problem to a different city).
Not that that survey is completely worthless, but it's also very far from a peer reviewed scientific study. And even among those, 1/3 turn out to be wrong.
Several things are obviously questionable:
* Relying of people self reporting their motives and history is problematic even for sober and sane people.
* Who made the study? What's the methodology? What are their incentives?
A peer-reviewed scientific survey would reign supreme, but in the absence of one, we're left with a pretty-good survey that says one thing, and someone's gut feeling the says another.
How do you know it's pretty good? It doesn't even appear to be sourced (looking at the Google Cache, I suppose a footnote could have been lost in formatting)?
A non-peer-reviewed survey is just a gut-feeling with a budget, doubly so when we're reading about in a newspaper with an explicitly stated agenda on the subject.
But to put it in perspective, it was posted in response to a random person saying a random thing on the internet, citing nothing but what they thought that they might do if they were homeless.
Where did you see that? I see 21%, and even then, only 22% of that 21% (or around 5% overall) moved to SF because they heard we have attractive homeless-assistance programs.
The issue of why you came and why you stayed are inter-connected. Some examples:
> Other reasons for moving to San Francisco cited in the homeless count were that they were looking for work
So they move for work, and a part of that, at least, is benefits if/when they don't find it. "If I go to SF, I can get welfare, which means I've got an extra month to find a job. I'll get one for sure in three months".
> that they were traveling through
And the benefits encouraged them to stay vs move on? Who knows?
I'm not saying it is true that stopping welfare would SOLVE the problem. Rather, homelessness in SF is at least partly a result of the benefits and caring, and that may not be a bad thing. An extra X homeless in SF vs in a less caring city may be a net positive for the USA. To say that SF's welfare options don't affect the total homeless population is overstating the case.
The deeper problem is EVERYONE is biased here, and the truth is hidden beneath 400 layers of guilt, emotion and in-group signalling, and no one is clear on what a "solution" means.
Not you; you seem to just be making up a series of random reasons that people might do things off the top of your head, and using them as some sort of evidence that listening to people who actually spoke to and surveyed the effected people and the people who work with them is equally as worthless as what you're saying.
> The deeper problem is EVERYONE is biased here, and the truth is hidden beneath 400 layers of guilt, emotion and in-group signalling, and no one is clear on what a "solution" means.
This is not the deeper problem. We were talking about the homeless.
"The social services provided, combined with milder weather, make SF a better place to be homeless than other areas. Surely homeless people, just like the rest of us, are attracted to cities that serve them better."
I'll bet there is an interesting analysis to be made with Minneapolis - a city that is, for the most part, as liberal and progressive as SF is - and comparing the "pull effect" of their funding with their weather, etc.
Of course there is massive corruption and waste at all levels of SF government. It is the inevitable outcome when a single party is permanently in power.
This. It's almost all this. Even worse, these politicians and bureaucrats are later nominated by the machine for higher office. Where they try to screw things up on a grander scale (and only face opposition on the federal level).
This is what San Franciscans want and what they get. If you self select to such a narrow mindset, this is the outcome.
I can see two factors at play. The first, of course, is corruption and waste.
But the second is that we don't know the counterfactual. It's very difficult to guess how many homeless people there would be in SF if that money hadn't been spent. If $240M moved the needle from 10k down to 6k (for a net drop of 4k), was it worth it? What if it was 20k (net -14k)? We have no idea what that number actually is. We're looking solely at the difference and trying to make a judgment on the subtrahend.
If you were building cheap homes, say at 120k a pop, you could build 2,000 such homes every year. The total homeless pop in SF is 6,000. In three years you could build 6,000 such homes in say Mississippi or some other middle of nowhere place where land is very cheap.
Homelessness isn't necessarily about not having homes, it's about being unable to hold on to one. There obviously are homeless people who have a work and their lives mostly in order but who just can't literally afford to rent but in general, homelessness is more of a symptom rather than the actual problem. The problems are social, medical, mental, addictions, abuse, and many others and they make these people deranged enough to prevent them from functioning fully in the society.
Not all homeless people are like that, there are significant ones that would live in homes if you gave them one. So you might as well as give them one so they are not staying on the streets. And perhaps provide some sort of care for them, just enough to keep them going. 6,000 people is not a lot of people. Yet it causes huge problems for everyone else.
There are unfortunately, metric tons of libertarian, Ayn Rand-bible thumping, neoliberal, utopian, upper-middle class opinionated tech workers whom have never had to sleep just one night awkwardly at a railway station on outdoor benches purposely made to be as uncomfortable as possible. Lord of the Flies is just as toxic of an over-reaction as the condition it's supposedly out to prevent (Communism). Every other country in the world other than America seems to do just about every social net program better (see also: Where to Invade Next) with ideas that originated in America.
Since you just finished insulting me, here's my story:
My petite SO made the mistake of parking in the wrong parking spot outside a verizon store next to Tenderloin and a homeless person chased her around our car trying to stab her with a screwdriver. In the middle of the afternoon on a weekday. And because it's sf, a couple guys saw what was happening and crossed the street to avoid getting involved, and the useless sf police took 8+ minutes to show up.
SF tolerates street trash acting up and acting out in ways real cities -- eg nyc -- simply don't.
I get off at the civic center bart station and coworkers are regularly worried about their safety.
I don't know what the solution is, but I don't care about them. It's fundamentally unreasonable to expect people to be unsafe walking around sf in the middle of the afternoon.
SF tolerates street trash acting up and acting out in ways real cities -- eg nyc -- simply don't.
"street trash" is a particularly nasty way to refer to people. They might be mentally ill, drug-addicted, and perhaps criminal, but they're still human beings. Maybe, just maybe, if society treated people who find themselves at rock bottom with a bit of respect and compassion then they wouldn't end up in a situation where they chase women around cars with screwdrivers.
There's an interesting theory that suggests there's two different sorts of wealth - private wealth and public wealth. Private wealth is living in a nice house and driving a fancy car. Public wealth is living in a clean, beautiful community where it's safe to walk around without fear. If you want to be happy then both sorts of wealth are equally important.
You've managed to mix in victim blaming, middle class guilt, and tolerance of crime into a wonderful stew.
Here's a tip; if someone is engaging in crime, they're a criminal. In this case it sounds like at least assault. This isn't a downtrodden Okie with his family in a hooptie trying to make ends meet until the Depression is over, it's a nutjob trying to attack someone with a lethal weapon.
if someone is engaging in crime, they're a criminal
There are reasons why people turn to crime. If we deal with those reasons before the crime happens then, in general, everyone is better off.
it's a nutjob trying to attack someone with a lethal weapon.
Someone who is dangerously insane probably shouldn't be living on the streets. They represent a danger to the public. It's clearly preferable that those people are given aid in whatever ways necessary so no one gets stabbed. That's the problem with looking down on these people and referring to them as trash - you put yourself in the position of thinking they shouldn't be helped at all, so you end up having to live with the threat they pose.
Never called them trash, never looked down on them. But this person is clearly a criminal; we don't know their mental status. Not all people with mental conditions turn to crime, nor do all homeless people. Crime is crime however.
I would prefer to give aid to the poor women accosted and assaulted by this criminal, than give aid to the criminal. Life is full of choices.
That is a bit short-sighted, though. People can end up labled criminal without doing much of anything - plenty bad stories about that. Then there are folks with psychological issues - you can't blame somebody with a psychosis for what they do. Then there are people who have been abused and never got a decent chance in life to be decent people - not fair to lock them up without furtherfurther help either.
Now therr might be people who had a good upbringing and education, no psychological issues and all opportunities in life but they still become criminals. These are generally corrupt politicians and bankers and asshole CEO's and such, NOT the kind of people who would be hurt by harsh anti-crime policy.
Just how anti-encryption laws don't hinder cruminals, only good-meaning activists and journalists, neither do harsh laws against crime help against actual crime. See how Denmark and other nordic countries treat criminals - they have extremely low crime rates as result.
We don't know the root causes in this specific case, just the outcome. Barring a psych eval, we have to assume this is just a violent person, and restrict their freedom appropriately. In the end, it doesn't really matter the root cause, since we can't go back in time to ameliorate those factors; violent criminals need to have their freedom restricted. I'm not talking about "criminals" who misunderstand the law and get caught in a technicality. That's your strawman. I'm talking specifically about a violent person committing assault and battery.
A very similar thing happened to me in SOMA when I was apartment hunting. I was walking to the next scheduled apartment viewing, when a homeless man started following me. He started shouting "Fight me faggot!", clearly trying to provoke me. Much like in your SO's case, there were bystanders that didn't want to get involved; they simply stared blankly at the spectacle.
Then he spit on me.
I can't describe in words the pure unadulterated rage and anger I felt in that moment. I wanted to pulverize every single bone in his body, over and over again, until he was a bloody pulp. Until there was nothing left, except a blood stain on the ground. But I didn't. I turned the other cheek, but not for a pretty reason. I simply didn't want to get his blood on me.
It's hard to love someone that hates you and possibly wants to harm you, but I think that's the first step to solving the homeless problem in SF. Compassion is a difficult trait to master.
I go to San Francisco about once a year, and man, I can't imagine why anyone want to live or work there. San Francisco sucks. There are other tech cities, people.
I'm really sorry that that happened to your wife, and that no one helped her. That's a shitty situation, and it needs to be fixed. But it doesn't make sense to say that thousands of people are all the same because you had a bad experience with one of them. I got beat up by a black guy a couple of times, but I don't assume that all black guys are thugs.
That's not where the money goes. The money goes to responding to every drug addict with a stubbed toe with a giant firetruck and its crew, and then taking the aforementioned drug addict to SF General for the world's most expensive emergency room bath. A little bit of prevention here would be far cheaper.
Cheap homes are $20k a pop. $10k for materials, and $10k for contracted labor. If you allocate another $20k for the land itself, and completing utility connections to it whenever they do not already exist, that's $40k total.
If you had $240M to spend each year, you could build 5000 houses every year, and have $40M left over for rudimentary commercial strips, administrative buildings, libraries, schools, firehouses, and cop shops.
You could stamp out a new municipality every year in 10 undeveloped adjacent square-mile survey sections. 6400 acres would be 5000 for the houses, and 1400 for the commons and businesses. You don't even need to go as far as Mississippi from SF. There are huge tracts of undeveloped land on the Great Plains between I-25 and I-35. They're actually cheaper than Mississippi, mostly because they have a less reliable fresh water supply.
Now the only problem would be getting them from SF to the new town. There would have to be some kind of road of wretchedness, or boulevard of bitterness, or something...
Homelessness isn't caused by a lack of homes. These are people who have checked out of society; many of them are very mentally ill or addicted to drugs. Where I live in the Pacific Northwest there's also a tragically misguided subculture of people who choose to be homeless.
It's really dangerous to make generalizations like that. Some homeless people are societal dropouts, drug addicts, mentally disabled, etc. Some are people who are trying their best to make ends meet but just can't.
I used to know an older fellow who lived out of a van half-full of tools, and did odd jobs where he could. I saw him around my favorite coffee shop; I think he got free coffee in exchange for fixing stuff sometimes. There was an article on HN not too long ago about a guy who went from an nice house and a swanky tech job to homeless and living out of his car in less than a year; he managed to crawl back out by doing freelance work on his laptop, but things were pretty awful for him for a while.
It's way too easy to say that homeless people are all beyond help, and therefore we can ignore them and leave them to rot with a clear conscience. But it's not true. And even for the people you mentioned--die-hard "lifestyle" homeless may be out of reach, but public assistance programs can sometimes give the addicts and the crazies a hand up, or (better) prevent them from ever becoming homeless in the first place.
In fairness to marcoperaza, this is partly a problem with the term "homeless". It is ambiguous, and in a way that can cause problems in meaningful discussions.
San Francisco has a number of problems with "homelessness". Our most visible problem is a very serious one - there are a lot of alcoholic, drug addicted, and mentally ill people living on the street, some of whom are prone to erratic, aggressive, and violent behavior. There is also a large and less visible problem with people who are not addicted or mentally ill, but who are in difficult economic circumstances and who are having great difficulty finding a safe place to sleep. These two things are related some of the time, but I don't believe that they are simply two sides of the same coin, they also exist as acute if not orthogonal problems.
I appreciate that "homeless" was, at least in part, intended as a more humane term than various derisive terms like bum, vagrant, and so forth. This I am in favor of - regardless of how you feel, I see no benefit in derisive terms, I don't think it requires a derisive term to express an opinion, even if it's an unsympathetic one. But while it's a mouthful, I do think it's probably more descriptive to say that SF (and other cities as well) have a serious problem with "mentally ill and/or addicted people who live on the streets" when discussing that specific issue, rather than using the blanket term "homeless" which encompasses much more than this.
The story about the couple having sex in a tent on a busy street with the flaps open while a pit bull stands sentry, or a person getting chased around by a crazed man with a sharpened screwdriver - well, I hope we all know that there exists a large population of of people who desperately try to maintain appearances (and sanity) but are actually in pretty dire economic circumstances. You don't necessarily notice them. The two situations call for very different solutions.
Indeed. If homelessness would be caused by lazyness, encouraged by free money, nobody in europe would work anymore... yet things are not remotely like that. If you get in trouble, you are cought and helped back on your feet (a favor usually fully repaid in taxes). The few who have mental issues get into mental institutions, not under bridges or in jail. And the few who have enough issues to be unable or willing to get/keep a job and house, even with help, but are not troubled enough to be forcible taken in an institution are the only ones on the street. And lo amd behold, it neither results in massive taxes nor everybody stopping with working.
If instead the $240M helped every single homeless person become un-homeless except for 1, it's not the case that SF is spending $240M on the one homeless guy.
http://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/S-F-spends-record...