I was really swept up in this article and the portrait of Amanda Barrows - what a unique and strong person and this city is incredibly lucky to have her.
Unlike some here, I came away with a deep sense of empathy, and today’s HN snark and frustration bounced off me pretty hard. The public order issues - homelessness in parks, the challenges of shared spaces—have certainly impacted me. But more than that, I struggle with how to translate the state of the world to my boys. I always remind them: every unhoused person was once a little boy or girl. We might be older now, but we’re still kids inside, and nobody dreams of growing up in these circumstances.
What struck me most was the balance of compassion and pragmatism that Amanda brings to her work. It’s easy to be frustrated with the policies and bureaucratic inefficiencies that slow down real solutions - but they are, in some ways, understandable.
The biggest frustration for me is the gap between the mental state of many unhoused individuals and the requirements needed to secure housing. The city surely understands the long-term costs of its policies, and it’s run by highly pragmatic people with limited budgets. But rules are rules, and at some point, top-down accommodations (including medical interventions...) are necessary to bridge this gap.
> What struck me most was the balance of compassion and pragmatism that Amanda brings to her work.
Nothing about this article strikes me as pragmatic. She's spending all her energy attempting to help people with the least likelihood of success and then gets angry at the system when they inevitably fail. The city didn't kick Morrisette out of the hotel because they like zero-tolerance policies, but because other people deserve a chance a chance to live in a free hotel room as well.
This is one of the core problems and I don't think people want to admit it "can't be solved."
When I was naive, out on my own after 18 I found a low-income/income-restricted apartment complex and thought I got a steal. It was $1k a month for a 2 bed when everywhere else was closer to $1.5k.
I soon realized I would _never_ live in a low income place if I could help it. Someone was killed in our building. Fights in the parking lot every other day. People leaving trash in the hall ways. People smoking 24/7. Of course, maybe only 25% of the people were "problematic" but that was more than enough to make you feel totally uncomfortable in your own home. The last straw was potheads causing a fire alarm at 3 AM and having to evacuate into the cold night in a panic.
Some people are simply selfish and will not be able to live close to/with others without causing problems. _Most_ people do not want to live next to them.
There are two kinds of 'low income.' There is a working-class neighborhood where people are not rich; life is hard, and stuff is a bit run down, but people are normal. Employed-ish, don't start fights and are respectful. The sense of community and friendliness might even be better than a 'normal' place because you need community to survive. Living in these places is fine. Then there is the kind of 'low income' you describe, which is a very different kind of place and people.
When people talk about this topic, people get into big debates about it because they are thinking of 2 very different kinds of low-income places.
The comment you replied to said "income-restricted", so they probably mean a building covered by government programs that give preferential tax, planning, or other treatment to developers who commit to below-market rent, with tenancy restricted to households meeting income limits.
These are common in large American cities. The problem tenants are a minority, but the landlord lacks the usual incentive to address them since the building will always be full, since it's below-market. The landlord may also be a social benefit organization that's politically disinclined to evict.
Non-market housing tends to go badly in the USA, including programs closely resembling those that have succeeded in other countries. The reasons for that are complex, though I strongly suspect that the weak mental health system (many of the worst problem tenants would be institutionalized elsewhere) contributes.
My understanding is that countries who have "solved" homelessness either -
• Societally and culturally produce so few individuals who would behave the way America's most problematic homeless do that direct 1on1 intervention is feasible. There are school districts in the US where the truancy rate exceeds 70%. There are other countries where this is not the case. Switzerland and Norway come to mind.
• Involuntarily commit or arrest individuals who are mentally unfit to function in normal society. Institutionalization, basically. China and Russia come to mind.
If there was a silver bullet which was politically acceptable to "solve" America's homeless problem I ensure you, folks in California would have tried it.
1. Yes, it's cultural and we keep encouraging people to be selfish. Our influencers, the media, this push of "make it in your own" despite no one in history truly being self made. And if we're being frank, prejudice is still alive and well which underfunded certain kinds of areas. We don't want to help those people. And we have 50 mini countries to balance this between.
2. Almost. They don't use for profit prisons who are incentivized to punish. Other countries actually focus on minimizing recidivism. But America keeps falling for "Hard on Crime". Again, that selfishness: "I would never do that, that person deserves to suffer".
>If there was a silver bullet which was politically acceptable to "solve" America's homeless problem I ensure you, folks in California would have tried it.
I agree. But politically people treat reformation as "free handouts". With that attitude nothing will change.
>But America keeps falling for "Hard on Crime". Again, that selfishness: "I would never do that, that person deserves to suffer".
We really need to repeal the 93 crime bill. We have the most incarcerated population in the world by both ratio and total numbers. Way too many offenses are felonies and once people get marked by the system, they will most likely never excel in society, much less get by.
And what happens if they don’t find a job? Do they become homeless? I know a few Americans who moved to Finland. They accepted lower wages for a better quality of life.
At a certain point after decades of low wages, the “quality of life” you speak of has been eroded severely. But hey, at least there aren’t any rich people around.
California, like most of the USA, contains a very broad spectrum of political opinion. There are plenty of conservative right wing folk there, it just so happens that the current state of things there leads to them not holding huge amounts of power at the level of the state legislature or governor's office.
This is marked contrast to, for example, most European countries (particularly the two you've mentioned) where the number of people who simply do not see a role for non-carceral government action (i.e. the first solution you've described) is quite small.
Combine that with a referendum process, and you've got a situation in which there are lots of things that could theoretically be tried but will not be, even in California.
The problem isn't "solved." The problem is you have to deal with it in a way that most/everyone would be OK with and vote for. I don't think we can do that in the US.
We could "solve" the problem like Singapore or China (some of these 'many countries'), and simply throw everyone in jail for petty crimes. In fact, IIRC Singapore is one of the safest places on earth. I'm sure SF (and California, and the country at large) would probably take issue with a sudden step up in policing.
Singapore doesn’t have a homelessness problem because they build as much public housing as possible, sell it to citizens at a massively subsidised rate, and follow up with schemes to rent to people who fall through the system for practically nothing.
If you want to reduce homelessness, you need to build a large volume of housing. San Francisco is doing the exact opposite and getting the exact opposite results.
Do the math on the execution rate. You do _not_ want to be a criminal in Singapore. You especially do not want to be a criminal involved with drugs (which is the highest % offense of prisoners in the US).
> Singapore doesn’t have a homelessness problem because they build as much public housing as possible, sell it to citizens at a massively subsidised rate, and follow up with schemes to rent to people who fall through the system for practically nothing.
How policed are these public housing projects? I wouldn't have a problem living near or even in a place like that if there weren't criminals running around.
The problem I was referencing was the problem of trying to get the general populace to live with antisocial types. I don't think that can be "solved" in the US anytime soon.
> If you want to reduce homelessness, you need to build a large volume of housing. San Francisco is doing the exact opposite and getting the exact opposite results.
Sure. I just don't see that happening in the US without it turning into a dump. I didn't even live in a homeless shelter. I lived in an income restricted place. It was a magnet for criminals and non-criminals are punished for it.
You basically have to bring drugs into the country to be executed. So as long as you don’t do that, this statistic doesn’t affect you at all.
> How policed are these public housing projects? I wouldn't have a problem living near or even in a place like that if there weren't criminals running around.
Three quarters of Singaporeans live in these places, and there is no significant police presence. There doesn’t have to be because the crime rate is so low. Criminals aren’t running around.
> Sure. I just don't see that happening in the US without it turning into a dump. I didn't even live in a homeless shelter. I lived in an income restricted place. It was a magnet for criminals and non-criminals are punished for it.
I think you read “public housing” and interpreted it as something like you have in America, with high crime and poverty. That’s a misinterpretation. This is the type of place most people live in Singapore. They are nice places to live, they are just massively subsidised by the government.
Your (likely rhetorical) question presumes that a nation which is devoted to free markets would require housing to be distributed via free markets, but that's not necessarily true. In fact I'd say there's a lot of evidence built up now that the free market is in fact, not actually that great at distributing property, because necessarily to engage with a market, one must have money, and everyone needs a home, but not everyone has money.
Personally in my ideal world, we would distribute life's essentials in such a way as to be free at point of use, and then leave markets to handle things they're actually good at, like televisions and such.
You're assuming that US federal/states do not also subsidize housing.
They are a "a paragon of free markets" because their social safeties actually work. Housing probably isn't a stock to hoard like in the US, nor owned by private equity to treat as a business. so you can focus on more than just staying alive and do actual work/passions.
The "housing crisis" all over the world is not really a housing crisis per se. The problem is not with the cost of building more shelter. It's a crisis of land values (they aren't making any more of it, so the free market cannot "provide" it in any real sense) and misguided government regulation, viz. zoning (that has nothing to do with the free market). If you want to improve free market dynamics in the housing sector, get rid of Prop 13 and put a higher property tax on urban land values (that are seeing most of the actual "crisis") while untaxing the built structures. Then local governments will be incented to provide the best living arrangements, since these will directly translate into higher tax revenues.
It’s a “housing crisis” in the very straightforward sense that a lot of people need a house and don’t have one. Your comment is like saying “this ‘famine’ is not really a famine per se, as the problem is not with the cost of growing more food, …”
Not at all. I'm curious about those who seek to import Singapore's authoritarian climate while praising its free market and rebuking social welfare policies at home
As pointed out above, we in the US incarcerate way more people as a percentage of the population than Singapore. Singapore's Police don't have qualified immunity making them above the law. Not sure what qualifies more as 'authoritarian' but I'd go with the country that imprisons more people and whose Police are immune from consequences.
You don't have to compare Singapore or other places. Just comparing the USA to other English countries shows stark differences. The UK, Canada, Australia, Ireland, and NZ have way less of the bad kind of "low income", better incarceration rates, homeless and more than the USA. And in many ways, people are poorer in those countries than the USA too. It's not money, it's political will and organization.
You are mentally on a wrong track there. If imprisonment solved your problem, it would already be solved. The US has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world (see: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarce...). Fifth place versus Singapore on 105th. The US incarcerates 3.5 times more of it's population than Singapore.
If you have the money to imprison the homeless you could use that very same money to just build more affordable housing and that would give you more in terms of results per dollar spent.
But that doesn't jive well with the American idea of having to morally punish unwanted behavior, instead of just helping people.
Jailing homeless people is like jailing people who break a leg: Nobody plans to break a leg, so jailing people who do won't reduce the number of people who do. The only thing criminalization of such involuntary traits achieves is to reduce visibility and pushing people to hide it.
There is a _huge_ difference between how crime is handled in the US and how it is handled in Singapore.
> If you have the money to imprison the homeless you could use that very same money to just build more affordable housing and that would give you more in terms of results per dollar spent.
I'm not talking about the homeless. The people I lived next to had homes (that were unfortunately adjacent to mine). They would constantly commit crime and face 0 repercussions for it. I knew of someone in the building that was on their 5th DUI somehow. They were still driving, still causing problems nearly every week.
In 2024 Singapore executed 9 people, that is a rate of 0.149 per 100k of their population.
The rate of people shot by police in the US is 0.34 per 100k of its population. Who needs capital punishment when you shoot people your police doesn't like even before they have been found guilty?
And your anecdotal evidence is not really valuable in the discussion at hand. Somebody else can say the opposite, I for example live in a country where crime is treated differently and we have less violent crime. You can leave your doors unlocked in a major city, despite living in a red light district with its own share of homeless, drug addicts and mentally ill.
Singapore might execute more people, but now go and compare how many people get killed by the state. I always think its hilarious how people argue about execution when the police kills astronomically more people to the point where actual executions are a statistically insignificant.
> They were still driving, still causing problems nearly every week.
That's what you get when you build a car dependent society. You can't actually prevent people from driving because people can't practically live without driving.
540 ish executions in 35 years. 50 executions last decade. I don't think these are the statistics that make me thing Singapore is a kill happy country.
>m not talking about the homeless. The people I lived next to had homes (that were unfortunately adjacent to mine). They would constantly commit crime and face 0
Anecdotes are just that. I've been in a nice neighborhood. I don't think people are naturally evil.
——
If you have the money to imprison the homeless you could use that very same money to just build more affordable housing and that would give you more in terms of results per dollar spent.
But that doesn't jive well with the American idea of having to morally punish unwanted behavior, instead of just helping people.
Jailing homeless people is like jailing people who break a leg:
—-
Forgive me if i misinterpret you.
But i think theirs three relevant perspectives here whereof two and a half disagree with your points that americans dont punish people down on their luck.
first perspective is the common american sympathetic or not to homeless and their perspective on penal code. then 2nd, theres reactive use and enforcement of code, which is the main punishment for homelessness. and third is the figurative cognitive behavior modifiers but instead of being therapists they are american rulers who want subjects to behave in a certain manner ( more on that at the end).
first perspective is divided into two camps i think. empathetic yes lets not punish homelessness, lets help them out. they seem to have more influence in liberal states. then theres the “lazy bum” castigators, like trump said or would say. no sympathy, get a job types.
2nd perspective matters more because homelessness in-effect criminalized if police enforce laws and the laws are sufficient to cause more than a minor inconvenience to the homeless. Most states technically have all types of laws to put homeless people in jail, but in certain states and certain contexts do homelessness get more aggressively targeted and thus punished. its in the form of no body wants to deal with homeless people where they hang out at (nimbyism) so they have police remove them however the police are instructed and allowed to do, which might be making and enforcing laws incidentally target behavior homeless are more likely to do but everyone does like loitering.
3rd perspective is more conjecture but is based on academic documented equivalent cases in french and british colonies (found in david graebers writings) and extrapolated to say that people who make the laws in america must think like cognitive behaviorists specifically to wielding the threat of homelessness as a tool to modify the populations behavior to their agendas. this is conjecture but not unreasonable, and its substantiated.
But places in America do penalize homelessness if not intentionally implicitly. examples include hostile archtecture, no sitting rules in transportation hubs, sleep police in new york, and consequences for being, acting, or appearing homeless in various municipalities which sometimes results in jail.
People get jailed/locked up when they are a physical danger to those around them. The reason jails are the way they are is not so much to punish the inmates but far more relevantly, to protect them from one another. As it turns out, unfortunately, much of the supposed problem with the really long term homeless is that, rightly or wrongly, they are perceived as a physical threat to others. So, even assuming the best possible intentions on your part, whatever place you put the homeless is going to look a lot like jail.
This was a valid perspective in the 1960s - jobs grew on trees, most people who didn't have a job just didn't want a job. Some people built that perspective in the 1960s, and then never updated it despite jobs no longer growing on trees.
> But that doesn't jive well with the American idea of having to morally punish unwanted behavior, instead of just helping people.
I advocate a Singapore-style justice system then thanks to atoav's revelation that they do much better on crime than we do with punishments like caning and execution for most hard drug offenses.
> We could "solve" the problem like Singapore or China (some of these 'many countries'), and simply throw everyone in jail for petty crimes.
This clearly isn’t true, as the US has a per capita prison population four to five times that of China & Singapore! We jail far, far more people than they do.
You're right, but progressives treat crime statistics as dog whistles for racism, which to be fair isn't uncommon. However, you can make a very similar "woke" argument. Much of crime is caused by centuries of systemic racism that Singapore and China never experienced, so you can't do an apple to apple comparison between incarcerations per capita.
Overall, Singapore and China are significantly more willing to sacrifice freedom in exchange for security. There is more surveillance and no trial by jury, for example.
US Police have qualified immunity, protecting them from their actions against the people, Singapore's Police don't. Who's sacrificing their morals in exchange for security?
What gives you the idea that police in Singapore don't have qualified immunity? It sounds like you're treating it as a buzzword. The police anywhere are not liable for the actions they take as part of their job.
It could simply be that more people in China and Singapore are afraid to commit crimes. Their prison sentences and punishments are much worse. In 2022, they executed 11 people, the US executed 18. The US has a ~50x larger population.
I'm not even saying the solution is more/harsher policing. I'm saying it is a solution that seemingly works.
It could also be that they didn't governmental distribute drugs to their population with the purpose of mass arresting for petty crimes. So half their criminal population aren't just in for smoking pit.
If the bottom line were actually king, we'd have a VAT, LVT, functional public transit, and sensible zoning laws among other things. Hell, even a fully socialized healthcare system would be more economically efficient than the public-private Frankenstein we have today.
A common meme on both sides of the political aisle is that public spending that they don't like is motivated by someone else's profit, but that's never the why the spending happens. I'd like the government to give me a million bucks to dig a hole in my backyard, but that's not going to happen unless if the voters agree to it.
if you think prison privatization is the problem... you should see state run prisons. while studies show that private prisons are "statistically" worse (lots of problems with the statistics, e.g. commingling criminal incarceration contracts with migrant incarceration contracts), the difference is marginal, at best.
The incentive structure is the bigger issue here, not necessarily prisoner treatment (though yes, we can address that too). A state wants to minimize prisons. A profit run prison wants to keep getting prisoners.
state run prisons and prison guard unions also have this problem. and these orgs are known to have successfully put legislative pressure on laws that will increase incarceration rates
You don’t have to even go to more authoritarian places to see the “solved” phenomenon. Many conservative states have harsher sentences or are more proactive in enforcement of petty crimes to “solve” undesirable/nonconformist behavior. Also solve is a funny word to describe dealing with people who ultimately dont want to conform to arbitrary restrictions on behavior.
Humans naturally evolved in a hunter gathering setting, yet certain governing “civilizing” forces had the audacity to eliminate that as possible lifestyle, and then label people who defy that restriction on lifestyle choice as problemmatic.
yeah the pattern is indiscernible because i was talking about petty crimes and related behavior (specifically homelessness) that have a lower per capita rate. violence isnt petty and i assume many drugs offenses arent considered petty. a quick google has validating statistics, although i cant find sources better than business insider at the moment. homeless population per capita by state and homelessness criminalization by state.
> Humans naturally evolved in a hunter gathering setting
Frequently asserted, but not really well substantiated. Plenty of new (or previously) ignored archeological and anthropological evidence that humans moved back and forth fairly seamlessly between hunting, gathering and cultivating in many differents part of the world.
You sound like the kind of person who would have somehow managed to read "The Dawn of Everything" by Graeber & Wengrow, but apparently either did not or for some reason disagree with one of their fundamental conclusions.
The US seems to be a text book case of treating the symptom rather than the cause (and not just in terms of homelessness either). Culturally we:
- Seem to tolerate high income inequality or even see it as a good thing.
- Value "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps" and devalue social safety nets and other avenues of providing opportunity to the masses
- Have given up on higher crime rates, lower education, poorer health care and health outcomes compared to other wealthy nations
Instead of trying to prevent homelessness in the first place, we try to tackle it once it's already there, then throw up our hands and say it's not possible to deal with.
>Seem to tolerate high income inequality or even see it as a good thing.
A free society will by definition be unequal; people have different priorities and abilities, and wealth acquisition isn't a zero sum game. If anything, instead of vilifying billionaires, take a look at the unelected but taxpayer funded and vastly bloated bureaucracies in every country around the world. The shocking revelations of USAID spending billions upon billions to interfere in other countries is example enough.
Prisons are the most equal places in the world in terms of living standards and options available to prisoners; nobody sees them as ideal.
Now lack of upward class mobility - that's a separate problem area to focus on.
It is hard to imagine a nation without this sort of thing to some degree without a total police state. These are issues with poor living in apartments in Europe too you know; a tragedy of the commons situation as the community shoulders the burden of those of it that have vice or mental illness that the government authority doesn’t effectively treat because this class is invisible in local mass media.
yeah, ive heard not having a home was illegal of sorts in the Soviet Union, meaning eviction was illegal or something equivolent.
I know what you mean by police state, but i wonder why america doesn’t consider themselves a police state, with such a large prison population and all the innocuous behaviors that can land you in legal trouble. i guess americans get indoctrinated in a certain way of thinking, where their subset of freedoms which they can mostly practice, makes them think they are free but ignore all the numerous other penalized behaviors. for example: i cant possess cocaine regardless if it wont be consumed as a drug, cant drink in public, cant lay down in public, cant sleep in public(ny), etc etc. a lot of intermediary stuff gets penalized because its the only way to control some tangentially related detrimental behavior, or its penalized for making people feel odd (nudity).
but more on point: america polices property taxes. Any property owned gets taxed automatically. this creates a forced work state to accumulate money to pay Uncle Sam. Failure to comply with this system and you get policed or pushed around as a homeless. David Graeber talks about Madagascar colonies set up with a similar system (underline) intentionally(/u) to produce a productive populace. similarly he mentions ways monarchies created rules and systems to force markets and force productivity elsewhere. I think homelessness circumstances is by design, and this free nonpolice state we call america is actually an artificial created police state. we can choose different governing setups that have different features emergent and by design. Its what Mao attempted to do, its what the French and British monarch did. But i see the coercive force in all the government setups even the ones that claim to be free.
America is a Police state. Qualifiers:
1. Surveillance state. The amount of surveillance information our police now purchase from private companies would make the old Soviets drule.
2. Separate rules for the Police with qualified immunity protections. Singapore doesn't give it's Police qualified immunity protections unless serving warrants. There are two different rules of law in the US, those that apply to the normies, and those that apply to law enforcement.
3. Mass incarceration.
4. Making so much illegal that 'selective enforcement' can be used as a tool of coercion. Just coming up on the Police radar (even if you are someone that reported something) leads to a significantly higher chance of incarceration in the US.
During the late 19th to early 20th century, asylums were launched all over the US. They were commonly public-private partnerships but tended to be spearheaded by altruistic individuals. They were genuinely positive places and were constantly lauded by the public/press/pols.
The focus on humane care was universal. The methods sometimes suffered from incomplete understanding but that improved over time.
From 1930s to 1960s, the responsible individuals died off and no one replaced them. The p/p/p quit caring. Locations transitioned to gov-only. The public/press weren't interested so neither were pols. The quality of care steeply fell off as budgets (read 'efficiency') were prioritized over everything.
By the 1970s, asylums were associated with hellholes for mostly good reasons. By the 1980s most were shuttered. The public justification was the inhumane conditions (typically true). The motivating reason was to recapture the remaining funds that were spent on them. There was little/no interest in funding replacements.
FF to today. Florida has 5 state criminal mental health institutions. Their long history is that patients and staff die there with some regularity. After that came out in a news series, reporters lost access and that's where that's at.
source: 10y genealogy research & 25y caring for mi spouse.
Also: 10y supporting developmentally disabled care facilities (public/private) that are still spearheaded by caring, invested individuals. They are models of what is possible.
>This is one of the core problems and I don't think people want to admit it "can't be solved."
It certainly can be solved. The real think is people in power don't want to solve it, and the voters don't want to invest in solving it. Admitting your own folly and vainness is much more difficult than dismissing it as an "impossible problem".
>Some people are simply selfish and will not be able to live close to/with others without causing problems. _Most_ people do not want to live next to them.
And those people do not get the help they need. Again, and investment no one cares to put in. Better to sweep it under the rug and try to rely on the security of higher income areas to deal with it than taking preventative measures.
I’m not sure what the right answer is, but asking people who are used to rough and tumble life outside to then behave civilly indoors with zero tolerance seems…set for failure?
There are those that do succeed but those are certainly the most motivated to do so. Others are in transition: know they should get indoors but know their difficulties.
Rather than kicking them out, maybe they are required to attend some mandatory psych sessions. Maybe they go maybe they don’t but at least there support to help them work thru their issues of why they blew up at the staff (as in this instance).
> I’m not sure what the right answer is, but asking people who are used to rough and tumble life outside to then behave civilly indoors with zero tolerance seems…set for failure?
This is true, and that's why housing first is a terrible policy (I've seen it fail spectacularly first hand). Many of these people simply can't take care of themselves, and putting them in free apartments doesn't fix their situation, but it does make life miserable for long-term residents. All while being extremely expensive.
> Maybe they go maybe they don’t
Here they have frequent wellness checks. It doesn't solve anything. This shouldn't be a surprise - someone who's incapable of living civilly when given a free apartment likely isn't going to be a person who's going to put the time and effort into mental health classes.
You seem to be assuming a specific version of housing first that is by no means the only option, and then dismissing the concept as a whole on that basis.
My "specific version" is the version used by government agencies, which specifically states that the government is giving people free permanent housing without requiring prerequisites.
HUD[1]:
"Housing First is an approach to quickly and successfully connect individuals and families experiencing homelessness to permanent housing without preconditions and barriers to entry, such as sobriety, treatment or service participation requirements."
California Department of Housing and Community Development[2]:
"Housing First is an approach to serving people experiencing homelessness that recognizes a homeless person must first be able to access a decent, safe place to live, that does not limit length of stay (permanent housing)...Under the Housing First approach, anyone experiencing homelessness should be connected to a permanent home as quickly as possible, and programs should remove barriers to accessing the housing, like requirements for sobriety or absence of criminal history."
Presumably you're aware that's not the only option, as your last comment before the one above was on a thread about the Finnish approach, which has found it to be cheaper and to act as a gateway to get people other help.
The classic US exceptionalism "but we're bigger" argument is almost always nonsense because you can subdivide. You're already split in 50 states. You have cities, counties. A system doesn't need to be perfectly applied everywhere at once to start to help.
Furthermore, the Finnish example shows savings per homeless, despite a far cheaper healthcare system. US savings vs. having these people cost a fortune of ER capacity would likely be far higher per homeless.
US potential savings are vastly higher.
Why US taxpayers are so consistently willing to burn taxpayer money to keep things worse when there are more efficient alternatives always confuses me.
Well we spent more time ignoring the issue. Of course we need to climb more to get out. I don't think "but it's hard" is a good mentality when it comes to solving hard problems.
It's not even "but it is hard", but the perennial excuse of "scale", as if the US isn't split in states, and cities, and counties. This comes up so often when someone don't want to acknowledge a solution that works elsewhere (everything from trains to, well, this), and ignoring that you don't need to solve the entire problem everywhere at once to make things better.
If this was some super-costly policy that needed a big apparatus around it, then they'd have a point, but e.g. in Finland, one estimate is that it costs them up to 9,600 euro a year less to house a person first vs. leaving them homeless. As such, just starting to provide some housing units and gradually grow it would be a win for every local government with a homeless person.
It only starts to become a challenge if a few local governments reaches such a level of provision that it attracts homeless people from surrounding areas that don't do anything themselves, but that's not a reason not to start.
Sometimes it feels like US taxpayers wants the government to burn money if the alternative is to do something that might help other people with it.
> asking people who are used to rough and tumble life outside to then behave civilly indoors with zero tolerance seems…set for failure?
This is what I'm saying the ranger is doing. Someone who gets extremely distressed by indoor living is not a good candidate taxpayer funded indoor living. On the other hand, that housing given to someone who is capable of navigating welfare bureaucracy on their own may actually enable someone who is at risk spiraling down a path of no return to turn their life around.
I've always wondered why such people don't live in a rural area. You could literally set aside parks for people wanting to live in this fashion, used to living in this fashion, but also provide facilities (bedding, small cabins, water supplies, washing machines, etc, etc).
You'd need, I think, to have security guards on hand. Not to stop drug use, but instead to stop violence against other homeless, to intervene if medical attention is required, and so on.
While the costs would be higher than some other solutions, it would be lower (I think) than paying for private housing.
Of course, you'd have to force move people, and that's not going to happen. That is, unless you make squatting in a park a crime, and the result is "you're going to be incarcerated in this very nice outdoor place" the "jail".
Maybe a medical order.
My point is, I don't see an issue with some of your logic. Some people won't transition to inside living, or being close to others.
But if you take people used to living in parks, move them to a park with cabins(tiny homes), and state run water/facilities, the cost might be the same, but they'd have a warm bed, etc.
What everyone wants, and these people want more than most perhaps, is autonomy. Your idea might work so long as there are few rules that would cause people to be kicked out and so long as money is also provided. It probably won't work if people are forced into it because being forced into things is one of the reason they are in their situation already.
More carrot and less stick, more compassion and less puritanism might have a chance of working.
A few people might be cut out to be rural hermits, but most need other people to fuel their lifestyle with food, booze and drugs, etc. Hard to buy fent by stealing bicycles if you're in a remote park.
I don't understand the reflexive nature many people present in jumping this kind of framing. Of course it's taxpayer funded. Everything is taxpayer funded. Even when it's not literally paid from taxes collected by the government, it's probably funded by people who pay taxes.
The price you pay for your groceries funds not just the wholesale purchase of the goods you pay for but also the labor, facilities, equipment and resources used to purchase, deliver, store and sell those goods. Considering the total amount of taxes collected versus the revenue of the place you get your groceries, you probably contribute more of your income to operating that place than to any single service funded directly from taxes. The amount of those grocery expenses that goes directly into profits alone is probably still greater than that. Housing first specifically also literally is cheaper than the previous approach by reducing expenses for medical services, policing and incarceration.
So "taxpayer funded" is neither a meaningful qualifier if taken literally nor do its implications stand up to scrutiny.
The most common reason for using this phrase is an emotional appeal to selfishness. Your money is being spent without your say on services you don't benefit from. I find that framing morally appalling but even so, what is the alternative? What the US did before was more expensive. Not housing people means more health issues and ER visits. Throwing them in prison means housing and feeding them at a massive multiple of the cost of a housing first initiative. If you want to save costs without spending money on housing, I guess you could cut their access to medical services but then you might as well allow law enforcement to shoot them on sight as the outcome will be the same.
> On the other hand, that housing given to someone who is capable of navigating welfare bureaucracy on their own
What you're describing is triage, not housing the homeless. If your housing program is small enough that you have to engage in triage and turn people away, it's not addressing homelessness, it's addressing a fraction of the homeless population. It's better than nothing, sure, but it's not enough.
Also triage means weighing the necessary resources for treatment against the likelihood of recovery and the likely extent of the recovery. You don't treat someone who can walk it off but you also don't treat someone who's in very poor health or too far gone to be saved without using a disproportionate amount of resources.
Triage is not how you organize a hospital. Triage is how you respond to an overwhelming emergency situation without access to necessary resources. Triage is a last resort measure to reduce the number of people who will die, not a strategy for helping people survive and thrive.
Homelessness is not a natural disaster, not a spontaneous pandemic. Homelessness is a longstanding social issue most often directly arising from poverty and lack of mental health support. If your concern is with the support being wasted on people with worse chances and not support being insufficiently funded for that kind of decision not having to be made, I think you might be overestimating your humanitarianism.
Also, to repeat a point I often make about this ...
Until sometime around the 1980s, even in the USA poverty and homelessness were scene as systemic failures - "our system should not lead to those results". Post-Reagan, the attitude has shifted dramatically and now poverty and homelessness are broadly seen as personal failures, a mixture of poor morals, bad character and weak decision making. We even used to be a little inclined towards a potential role for the state in helping individuals deal with bad luck, but now bad luck is seen as "gravitating" towards individuals whose fault is all theirs.
This has necessarily drastically altered government policies at the local, state and federal level. We are much, much worse for it, no matter which interpretation of poverty and homelessness is more factually correct.
"Taxpayer funded" pretty obviously means "paid for or subsidized by the government directly" and it seems bad faith to pretend you don't know that.
Of course you can probably find some government subsidy somewhere and trace it to grocery stores but nobody realistically claims grocery stores are taxpayer funded.
The government directly putting homeless in hotels over and over again is very clearly taxpayer funded and everybody knows what is meant when someone says that.
Grocery stores are subsidized by the government. I would call pretty much any grocery chain store that gets government handouts to be taxpayer funded, yes.
>The government directly putting homeless in hotels over and over again is very clearly taxpayer funded and everybody knows what is meant when someone says that.
And why are we framing is as bad? You're either funding their low income housing, or you are funding their jail cell (and they are not generating any real sense of income to stimulate the economy).
Thanks. To clarify for those who can't muster the attention span to make it to the second paragraph: my point is that the phrase is a red herring designed to trigger an emotional response because we're bad at comprehending how miniscule our relative contribution to each "taxpayer funded" expense actually is.
The parent of your post is a good example of how effective it is at doing that, especially when combined with the claim of an apparent wasteful use of that money. If you pay tens of thousands of dollars in taxes and hear about a million dollars of "taxpayer money" being supposedly wasted, your emotional response reflects an imagined scenario where all of your taxes went into that alleged waste even if individual income taxes alone represent over $2 trillion (i.e. million million, or thousand billion) of the US federal budget and your actual relative lifetime contribution to that individual project can't even be measured in cents.
Not to mention that the news sources referring to that spending as waste may be reporting on inaccurate or incomplete information (even when deferring to an official source) and may be misrepresenting or omitting the actual economic efficiency of that spending (e.g. the entire "condoms to Hamas" incident where the official announcement turned out to not only apparently have mistaken about US medical aid in Gaza specifically but also misrepresent the total spending on contraceptives for AIDS relief by the US across the globe as going to a single place - the benefit to Americans of providing contraceptives to HIV hotspots should be obvious enough).
Social housing programs in Europe were first invented in the 19th century. Part of it was altruism to be sure. But the richer part of society also understood that the slums were hotbeds for disease, crime and revolution.
> Your money is being spent without your say on services you don't benefit from.
I don't mind strangers benefitting from my tax dollars. No where do I even imply this, so this idea is completely coming from your own preconceived ideas about those who disagree with you. The problem with this case is that I'm not sure anyone is benefiting from these tax dollars. These men aren't asking for help. They're being pressured into accepting help. Someone resourceful enough to trap racoons isn't fundamentally so helpless that they require 7 months of handholding to apply for temporary housing. He required 7 months because that wasn't something he was interested in the first place but is willing to occasionally humor a pretty ranger. She would have much more success meeting them where they're at. For example, she can set up an arrangement where the rangers will stop harassing the campers and tearing down their encampments if they keep the surroundings clean.
> What you're describing is triage, not housing the homeless
Yes, I'm talking about triage because that's exactly what the ranger is doing.
> She would have much more success meeting them where they're at. For example, she can set up an arrangement where the rangers will stop harassing the campers and tearing down their encampments if they keep the surroundings clean.
We must have read different articles because the one I read stated that her job description is literally to remove people from these parks, just in a more humane way than just harassing the campers and tearing down the campsites. You can make an argument that they should be allowed to let them live there but her job isn't simply to keep the park clean but to stop people from living there.
> Yes, I'm talking about triage because that's exactly what the ranger is doing.
Again, we seem to have read different articles because to me it didn't read like she was prioritizing specific individuals for movement into housing using any of the considerations I described.
Doubling down on the preconceived judgments I see. Yes I read the article, and from it, I can tell she is given a lot of autonomy. I don't thinking allowing a "client" to camp for seven months while you file for paperwork is part of her job description either.
> it didn't read like she was prioritizing specific individuals for movement into housing
She is convincing people who otherwise would have refused offers for housing to take housing. If that's not triage, then you shouldn't have brought that up to begin with.
The ranger is a hero. And hero’s are often toxic in long running scenarios for exactly the reason outlined - they are trying to make up for a systemic failure through self sacrifice, therefore enabling the underlying system failure.
This is needlessly cynical. The hero isn't toxic. The narrative of an individual effort in lieu of calling out the systemic issue is what's toxic. I don't see any way she could have better spent her energy contributing to systemic change whereas by doing what she does she literally improves the lives of others.
Favoring narratives of individual heroes over narratives of systemic changes is a cultural problem. Whether it's Atlas Shrugged, the Odyssey or Harry Potter. It instills a learned helplessness and an artificial desire for a "strong man fix things" that can be very difficult to overcome. But it also atomizes and fractures society and benefits those with the most individual wealth and power.
The ranger is a hero. What she is doing is good. But she shouldn't have to do it. And nobody should have to do so much. The article intentionally buries its lede: if this is what it takes to save one person, how can we save thousands? The implied answer is again helplessness: of course this isn't scalable so we can't. What she is doing is too much for one person, so we can't expect it of others. But the real answer is that literally none of this would be necessary if the system were actually built to help these people.
Her work does not require a herculean effort because it is difficult. It requires so much effort because it is being made difficult. The right question isn't how can we scale this, the right question is how can we make it easy enough that we don't need her to be a hero. The question of scalability answers itself once you've removed the obstacles.
Those are two different things. She likely doesn't consinder herself heroic. The story about her however is written in such a way to portray her as heroic. It doesn't leave room for any other option than helplessness and hoping for more heroes to emerge.
Framing it as heroes being toxic and enabling the system suggests accelerationism: if things only get bad enough (i.e. if we stop "enabling" the system by trying to work around it), the people will see how bad things are and demand change. But accelerationism doesn't work. When things are bad enough, the people will want a simple answer and a promise of a fast change. Stable systemic changes don't work fast and they are rarely simple.
To put it another way, heroes aren't toxic, heroes are harm reduction. Harm reduction is good because it helps people in the here and now. But harm reduction is not a solution to problems. Solving problems requires putting in the ground work of building bottom-up social structures. There's no reason to believe she would be just as good and enduring in doing that as she is in what she does now. And most importantly, she wouldn't be helping those she helps now because she might not even see it resulting in change within her lifetime.
So given that heroism doesn't work and letting things get worse doesn't work, what now? It sounds like we need a hero to take on the herculean task of dismantling the individualist atomizing culture norms - oh.
You might want to actually read my comment? The details in the article re-enforce the point.
The noted person she was ‘saving’ attacked someone when she was on vacation, and she is lamenting how if she had been there she could have stopped him from being kicked out again. And she’s angry (and reading between the lines, probably burning out) and lashing out at people. And not assigning any agency to the person she was ‘helping’. That is toxic. Regardless of her hero status. I’m sure she didn’t start this way, but this is a result of being put in this position over and over again and trying to do the right thing.
Like a combat vet with PTSD who attacks a random clerk at a grocery store due to a sudden trigger, or goes around yelling at everyone all the time because they’re always pissed off. That isn’t usually because of a one time event.
That she is also doing what she is doing, is also enabling the brokenness of the system by not allowing it to fail in a terrible way so the public or those in charge actually do something different.
Expecting heros to solve systemic issues by going so above and beyond that they ruin themselves is also toxic. That’s that I’m calling out.
Someone who jumps on a grenade in a foxhole is a hero - and those around them owe them their lives. That should be celebrated.
That someone got close enough to throw a grenade into that foxhole was likely due to many screwups, and if we ignore that, and even reinforce the environment that resulted in it, we’re just murdering heros, aren’t we?
Not that anyone wants to think long and hard about that of course.
It doesn’t mean all of these problems are solvable - some parts of life are, and likely always will be, meat grinders for a number of reasons. Maybe this is one of them.
Thoughts? I think we’re actually in agreement frankly.
I know the common human fallback is going to the ‘strongman’ (the ultimate hero fantasy).
IMO, that will almost certainly ultimately fail, and is toxic for anyone to try to even ask, because really we need to take a legitimately honest accounting of what we need/want, what price we’re willing to pay for it, and then actually follow through.
As a society. So there don’t need to have heros constantly ruining themselves to try to save us.
Notably, however, some people will still try to martyr themselves, even in those situations, to be the hero no one was asking for. But that is a different kind of problem.
perhaps the pervasive narratives of systemic toxicity and chronic social issues that get us down? are those good for society? should we listen to those news stories all day? and believe that things are so awful that There Oughtta Be A Law And Reform?
those who cried out to quote Tax The Rich unquote, were likewise upset by the tariffs being imposed which are taxes on the rich... a really uniform and effective one! taxing corporations by tariffs is much father reaching than taxing individuals. individual heroes.
those who cannot interpret epic fantasy sagas as allegory or larger than Life metaphors are already helpless and they just need entertainment and some opiates.
> maybe they are required to attend some mandatory psych session
According to the social workers I know who work with this population, there is a persistent fear that any form of offered mental health help is a trap for institutionalizing people.
By and large, people who are chronically homeless due to mental health issues will prefer to remain homeless over being required to see a psychiatrist and having to take medicine, or so I'm told.
The issue is also that it’s selection bias - folks who permanently benefit from the treatment leave the system, so you end up with a more and more concentrated population of people who don’t (or refuse to) permanently benefit from it.
The point of drugs is not to benefit the patient!! The drugs and treatments protect the community and serve the collective good.
The drugs are administered first to foster obedience, credulity, and fidelity. The patient learns to keep their appointments, lest the drugs be withdrawn. The patient becomes a regular customer at the pharmacy, which must also be done on precise schedules. The drugs must be taken as directed, and the patient learns how to read and understand and follow intricate rubrics for rituals at home, and what foods to avoid, how to coordinate meals with the drugs, etc.
The patient, having demonstrated obedience and fidelity is well-supervised now by the clinic and provider. The drugs are "virtual shackles" that stand in for actual restraints and confinement methods. Just as "chemical castration" substitutes for surgical mutilation, any patient who's on drugs and making regular appointments can be let loose, a feral in the human population, often undetected and blending in.
It's important to consider that Mental/BH has never been a medical discipline, and while today's scrubs and white coats are the priestly raiment of BHT, NP-LPN-RPh-BH, and M.D.s alike, they take blood pressure and do labs, and they prescribe drugs and work in clinical systems, even Western-style BH is, fundamentally, a religious temple cult of profound spirituality. In order to fit the mold of modernist secularism, the BH temple must array itself in trappings of science and respectable, professional jargon. The BH orthodox profession is that mental illness begins and ends in the body, somewhere, hopefully the brain, or at least where the neurotransmitters flow, to be manipulated by sacramental means. Because if mental illness is not bound or subject to the body, or the secret HIPAA-protected rites and liturgies are not concrete and high-tech, then treatments become subjective, outcomes are unpredictable, and evidence cedes ground to superstition or faith in deities and the intangible world of spirit, which must be ignored in order to promote and foster D.E.I.
Ramp up drug regimes trying to blunt aggression, anxiety, restlessness, independent thought and reason, resistance to authority, and other compulsions to harm others, or sometimes the drugs magnify those compulsions and homicidal ideations, and the patient just goes totally apeshit, until the hospital can get to billing their insurance in earnest. But since President Reagan "closed the asylums" the paradigm shifted to keeping people out and free and at-liberty. Because institutionalization is an excessive burden on taxpayers, families, and insurance carriers, and it's labor-intensive: this is recapitulated in the past 5 years because the "Flatten the Curve" mantra was promulgated because there are widespread staff shortages and a lack of skilled, certified HCPs, especially for Defence Against the Dark Arts. I recommend viewing the critically acclaimed, award-winning film "Ladybird" starring Saorsie Ronan; her mother is a psychiatric nurse played by Laurie Metcalf, and see how Ladybird herself turned out
Even for the HCPs on staff, BH facilities are closer to meat-grinders than revolving-doors, as they burn out, train up, move up, drink their own Flavor-Aid, circulate within the system. So those homeless psychos meet a new team of strangers every month or so. Over 25 years, I personally witnessed one clinic that changed its name/brand/ownership 5-6 times, expanded/moved at least 3 times, and there are literally dozens of BH systems that didn't exist 10 years ago, including 8-story hospitals with no 6th floor.
Would you believe dozens of New Religious Movements operating under auspices of BH services? You may find yourself in a shotgun shack, worshipping Shiva or Kali, or I don't know, in a UFO cult, or practicing tantric yoga with authentic Punjabi Guru, because Medicaid funding. BH Funding for Treatment is Public Safety and a National Security concern: every time a mass shooting is reported on the news, Congress acts to bolster BH funding and services, and so "every time a shell casing pings, someone's clinic builds a wing!"
Ask anyone working in hospice/palliative care and they may confide that drugs are administered when family or staff are irritated or vexed by the patient, rather than basing it on the needs of patient herself. An incoherent or insane patient may be unable to articulate their needs, but when they act out, or become criminally dangerous, they must needs smacked down. "The Squeaky Wheel Gets the Grease" indeed.
The patient works with the provider to identify and treat more and more conditions. The drugs layer-up, and sometimes extra drugs are shoveled on top, to complement really debilitating effects. But in general, the drugs are exacerbating and magnifying the patient's sins and proclivities. The drugs are interacting and the patient is increasingly entangled in the intricate ritual of provider->pharmacy->daily pill rituals->pharmacy->provider->pills.
It's impossible to know whether recovery is attributable to a true underlying change or whether the drugs have papered over the worst symptoms. Therefore, it's never advisable to stop those drugs or titrate off them, because they don't get labeled with maximums or limits like the OTC stuff can be (this guy once OD'd on fiber supplements).
In the case of "lunatics" and other folks who just had a temporary nervous breakdown or trauma-based freakout, they certainly can recover and exit the system--anyone can exit the system until they're court-ordered or incarcerated, anyway.
There's plenty of other non-drug treatment for outpatients on the streets; counseling/therapy can be done 1:1 or in groups and other supports in the clinic for building life skills, etc. The homeless nutjob population can typically get benefits from us taxpayers to keep them in the clinic 3-5 days a week, just doin' stuff, because the clinic is pretty much a church, and the mentally ill need a religion with structure, rituals, priests, and sacraments like Prozac.
It's typically illegal and possibly immoral to die by suicide, but again, as a matter of national security, it contributes to the collective good when insane persons fall by the wayside and lessen the harms and burdens for the proletariat, taxpayers and institutions. There are dozens of medications to help foment ideations and actual attempts of self-harm, so the patient benefits by staying out of courts and prisons and teenagers
The more cooperation that can be elicited from the mentally ill, in terms of becoming sicker, and medicated, and incapacitated or dead, the easier it becomes for citizens who support spouses and sane children, for citizens who work and pay taxes, for sane citizens who own property and generate revenue by leveraging assets, for free humans pumping iron, or those exercising the rights to liberty and the pursuit of happyness.
All of the above are increasingly threatened unless mentally ill humans stop procreating, and be removed from law-abiding democratic communities, and until then, controlled and supervised. An incapacitated patient won't leave home, won't start any fights, and won't disrupt a workplace or elementary schools, if the patient struggles for existence, barely able to prepare meals or get sufficient sleep.
The USA is deeply in debt, overpopulated, gripped and choked by a dark, imperceptible 6-year pandemic that marches through every corridor and vehicle, and still the immigrants flow inwards through the Golden Door, ready to work and assimilate, but is our national Zeitgeist on life support? The feeble-minded and mentally ill, malcontents: especially those without caregivers or supportive families, human weeds! They hinder progress, hinder democracy, and they threaten national security.
Yes. I borrowed plenty of tired rhetoric and I'm deeply troubled by the knock-on effects of eugenic policies, but from a grassroots view here among the human weeds, I confess that I'm also describing the status quo in the developed West, and the duty of citizens of that Western culture to engage and participate in the darker side and a culture of death, according to the Divine Plan for each of us.
From across the pond, it seemed that Nazism resulted in the expelling/extermination of foreign, undesirable influences and a stirring up of nativist fervor in order to validate those actions.
Also here across the pond, we've had major immigration by Eastern Bloc or Soviet refugees in the past century. They're a huge influence on our culture and ideology and the direction we've taken since the Civil War. And we see nativist fears and xenophobia in things like the McCarthy "Red Scare", but were they entirely unjustified when today we're screaming about Facebook and soviet interference in elections? ... And our voices are raised in chorus of "get these homeless off the streets, expand [mental] [women's] [right-to-die] health care, defund Churches [and mosques, synagogues and Wiccans?] will no-one rid us of these troublesome [cops, judges]?"
Surprise plot twist: the vicious military expansion that was nipped in the bud left more of a historical mark than the mass emigrations and migrant movements going on underneath the wars. The USA got Albert Einstein, rocket science, a regime change in Hollywood, new captains of industry and finance, and lifeboats full of philanthropists. We children of the Cold War wouldn't know one another at all if it weren't for the IETF, NSF, ARPA-DoD, and TLAs that you can't stand.
Eugenics may be a pseudoscience or a discredited ideology, but is it also entirely without merit, or unjustified? What does a nation do when she's deeply in debt, and more people are struggling for smaller pieces of the pie, and her reputation and huge tracts of land are an attractive destination for refugees and migrants? I guess some of her citizens log into free websites and give unpaid "Billion Keyboard Monkeys" labor to the guys who host the servers.
The obvious problem is that that fear is entirely justified and rational.
Even if you disregard history, the current POTUS literally talked about concentrating homeless populations into centralized camps away from the general population.
How realistic this fear is and how probable it is, is of course debatable. But given that these people probably didn't have any positive experiences with mental healthcare and institutions and that the public discourse often describes them as analogous to vermin or disease and focuses on "removing them" rather than helping them, trusting a psychiatrist - especially if it means having to go to them, especially into a clinical environment - let alone taking psychopharmaceuticals seems like it would require quite the leap of faith.
It is and it isn't. The conversations I'm referencing happened back when Obama was in office.
Every state does have some form of civil / involuntary commitment, though nothing like before the 80's.
Many drugs also come with unpleasant side effects, especially if someone steals them from you and you're stuck with withdrawals. I'm reminded of one person my friend was helping who hated taking his medicine, but if he didn't, he would inevitably become increasingly paranoid that vampires were out to get him. Helping the poor guy live anything close to a "normal" life was a constant challenge.
We used to have work farms, SF had a few. They were shut down by the same counterculture types that said turning a blind eye to drugs and vagrancy wouldn't be a problem.
there are 7 billion people who want to live in free tiny private flat in San Francisco and US in general. More lanes - more traffic - more traffic jams.
That's kinda the whole point, but noone is framing that situation as the problem. They would rather think that homeless people are innately inferior and thus deserve to suffer, rather than victims of circumstance in one way or another.
No one is framing it that way because it misses the nuance of these homeless peoples individual issues and how we might actually treat them. When people complain about homeless people in their neighborhood, they aren’t talking about the invisible homeless who are only homeless due to economic circumstance and might be couch surfing or living in their car. They are talking almost exclusively about the most visible population of homeless people, those who have severe mental health or drug addictions and need in patient services for potentially all their life.
I meant here, though I think there is also tendency in general
As a side note I think the state of current discourse has shown that anything other than concrete language presents too much opportunity to talk past each other. So I don't think talking about yimbys is specific enough (and its too tempting to strawman). Same for magas and libs, they are broad labels for a broad spectrum of people
I just went to apartments.com. Palo Alto (not the cheapest place), shows loads of 1 and 2 bedroom apartments under and at 3k/month. That's under $40k/year.
This tax calculator shows the generic case of $120k (low 'six figures'), as being more than $80k takehome:
That means less than 1/2 of a 'low end' engineering salary is taken for housing, and that's without a room-mate. Something most people have at the start of their career, and before being married (which is another way to have a room mate).
Do you actually live in the region? Why do you think almost $4k/month of cash in hand, left over after rent paid and taxes paid, isn't much?
Why do you think no one can find a place to live, when apartments.com show places aplenty?
Are you referring to a specific area, instead of a more central place such as Palo Alto?
Well, in the US the median pre-tax household income is $80k and the median renter spends <35% of their income on rent.
Imagine singlehandedly earning 150% of what the average family earns, in one of the richest countries in the world and living in a one-bedroom apartment - and such a low standard of living isn't even cheap.
The landlords must be laughing all the way to the bank!
I was responding to an assertion that engineers making 6 figures could not afford apartments.
I validated that they certainly can, on their own, and in an expensive area (Palo Alto) too.
I then said that the dynamic is even better with a room mate.
From this you infer I spoke of all affordability?
Why?
Understand, making wild unsubstantiatable and exaggerative assertions about affordability can invalidate a discussion. Stating fact instead of hyperbole is more appropriate.
Sure you can many countries have a social housing program... Cities across the world run into the same problems SF does you know it is not particularly unique or unusual.
Although I am a bit perturbed that there is still such a huge problem with drugs when the economy is booming and unemployment so low.
It points to deeper problems within the fabric of American society.
> Although I am a bit perturbed that there is still such a huge problem with drugs when the economy is booming and unemployment so low. It points to deeper problems within the fabric of American society.
I think you’re coming at this from the wrong angle. A lot of people just really like drugs (and alcohol) and it has nothing to do with society getting them down. Surely there are plenty of people abusing substances as a coping mechanism but I think there are likely a lot more who just want to have a good time.
No I don't believe anyone voluntarily chooses to become a drug zombie. I think that if you were able to communicate with these people you would hear a lot of sob stories.
A prerequisite to building social housing is to allow building housing at all. Social housing projects also have to pay for artificially inflated land prices and wait years to obtain permits. SF has spent billions of dollars on building new social housing in the past decade, but that doesn't make a difference when they cost millions of dollars a unit to construct.
Well that's your first problem. We're hiding the underemplyment crisis with "but unemployment is so low!". Quality of life for underemplyment is a lot closer to homelessness than middle class.
The deeper problem that America is more and more trying to focus on the elite over the working class.
What causes NIMBYism, though? ("lot of things, but...")
My pet theory is that cars are a substantial cause - people don't want more housing because it will result in more traffic and more people using the nearby 'free' parking. Cities that are less car-centric will therefore have less NIMBYism.
Lawmakers not having the moral courage to stand up to NIMBYs are part of the problem, along with people not voting for them. Cutting people off at the knees to make the grass taller is not a solution.
I can't agree with this. At various times over the last 30 years, there has been roughly two classes of people in SF: "tech workers", and "everyone else." The "everyone else" comprises teachers, restaurant workers, retail workers, delivery drivers, and others, who cater to the whims of "tech workers." "Everyone else" works in industries subject to competition, market forces, and the ruthless demand for profitability (try keeping a restaurant open for 3 losing quarters). "Tech workers" work in an industry often shielded from these exigencies, cossetted in a pillowy cocoon of VC money. "Everyone else" serves the local community. "Tech workers", if they serve anybody, tend to be disconnected from the local economy and serve national or global markets. Relatedly, "tech workers" are paid high salaries that rise quickly. "Everyone else" is paid much more modest salaries that tend to stagnate. To add insult to injury, not only did this set of circumstances arrive in SF, it also arrived quickly, in waves, representing a series of shocks. Then came the last and possibly the most serious shock: remote work. Altogether, this is a recipe for: spiraling costs, social fragmentation, homelessness, and political turbulence.
Put another way, an ocean of money was poured into a thimble and no amount of "increasing supply" is going to make a difference. Make it two thimbles, ten thimbles, a hundred thimbles, it's still going to leave a mess.
Every time I read this sort of stuff, I ask - do you think that the demand to live in San Francisco is infinite? For a city that’s less than one-half as densely populated as Brooklyn, NY, no less? This problem was solved 150 years ago.
Even if demand was so large as to be practically infinite, all it would mean is that San Francisco becomes the local Manhattan equivalent on the West Coast. Which in turn means big-government California progressives gets a whole lot of additional tax revenue to play with, at zero extra cost to the rest of the economy. How is that supposed to be a bad thing, exactly?
>do you think that the demand to live in San Francisco is infinite?
In practical terms, because of the inevitable feedback loop, yes. Building more housing creates more demand for housing.
If SF built more houses, then rent would drop and thus more businesses/jobs could be profitable at the same standard of living. The more jobs there are, the more demand for housing there is. And if people move into those new houses then the city has a larger userbase for any locally-focused businesses.
This whole loop is why cities keep growing.
In other words, meeting the demand for housing creates more demand for housing.
Of course it is. You claim that it’s impossible for San Francisco to satiate demand. That implies that it’s functionally infinite seeing as it’s currently less dense than Brooklyn or the north side of Chicago - dense places but not quite Manhattan or Manila.
So then there’s obviously infinite demand to live in San Francisco. It’s not difficult - we’re actively accomplishing it in other cities that have tons of wealthy people (detached single family in my neighborhood is >$2mm) and relatively affordable housing (an apartment is under $1000/bd).
Chicago's tech sector, while growing, is still smaller than SF's and was much smaller in the past.
> Letting people who want to live in San Francisco live there
Obviously, that's not being accomplished.
> If you’re not saying that San Francisco can’t build enough housing to satiate demand, what are you saying, exactly?
I'm saying such a program would be unlikely to succeed and would be too disruptive to satisfy me, personally (and evidently many other San Franciscans as well). I'm also saying there's another option to increasing supply to meet demand: reducing demand to meet supply.
> Put another way, an ocean of money was poured into a thimble and no amount of "increasing supply" is going to make a difference.
So? The problem is not "too much money", it's too little housing. Having lots of highly-paid folks around is good for local workers' incomes; housing scarcity is really bad for them. Homelessness happens when people can't afford to pay for a home.
> Having lots of highly-paid folks around is good for local workers' incomes
You're describing income inequality. Personally, I don't believe income inequality is good for everybody. I think it tends to benefit some people at the expense of others.
It's also a kind of "income inequality" that those who are "disadvantaged" most from it can avoid very easily, by voting with their feet. But you don't see very many people moving from the highest-income cities in the U.S. to places like Appalachia, or for that matter to the poorest places in Mexico. People tend to do the exact opposite, funnily enough.
And if you were speaking faithfully you know there are mechanisms by coincidence or design that make it harder for the disadvantaged to vote. It's no coincidence that your rep is probably only available every other Tuesday at 1pm while the disadvantaged are working at one of their two jobs.
> But you don't see very many people moving from the highest-income cities in the U.S. to places like Appalachia
> At various times over the last 30 years, there has been roughly two classes of people in SF: "tech workers", and "everyone else."
You can always arbitrarily divide people into two groups by making one "everybody else", but the two groups you name are not coherent classes. (Not even the first, which overlaps both [a relatively well paid segment of] the working class and the petite bourgeoisie, but especially not the second, which spans from the lowest of the working class to the highest end of the rentier/capitalist class.)
> the two groups you name are not coherent classes
Sure, they are. "tech workers" tend to work in tech companies. "everyone else" tend not to work in tech companies. It's quite coherent. Are there exceptions? Of course. Does the presence of exceptions mean the classes are incoherent? Of course not.
Why are you curious? I didn't say there were only two classes. I said there's been "roughly" two classes over the last 30 years. Add other classes if you want (billionaire tech owners who don't code, billionaires in non-tech fields like real estate or agriculture or petroleum, old-money San Franciscans, millionaire non-working property owners who don't know how to open a Google Doc), it doesn't affect the conclusions: "tech workers" (and the "tech owners" who pay them) are an important factor causing many of the problems in SF.
The problem with rich people is not that they are rich, it's the side effects of them being rich which cause other people to be poorer. I have no problem with Elon owning 10 megayachts if he wants to. Unless he's buying so much steel to build his megayachts that no one else can get steel things. Then it's a problem. And only then.
Even then, the problem could be Elon buying so much steel, or it could be steel manufacturers deliberately limiting steel production and only selling it to Elon to keep prices high. The latter is what is happening with landlords and building restrictions.
Except that the "side effects" of being rich aren't "side effects", they're the essential effects. Being richer than other people by definition means you can outcompete those other people for goods and services. That's the whole purpose.
Elon owning 10 megayachts means 10 megayachts (as much as $5 billion) worth of productive capacity being redirected away from other uses that benefit many people, to a use that is frivolous insofar as it largely benefits just one person.
Elon got rich by creating goods and services for other people - such as EV cars, or low-cost space launches. It's a wash. Oh wait, actually it isn't because every trade of goods and services is advantageous to both parties by definition.
(There are of course some who only got rich by transferring wealth away from others - but they're not the ones people mostly complain about wrt. 'the rich'.)
I met a nursing student in Shanghai who ended up marrying a "driver". (For reference, the way you get into nursing school in China is by flunking the college entrance exam.)
Attending Fudan University, I also met several students there and at the school across the street, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics. Both are highly prestigious.
Everyone's graduated by now, and the most materially successful of all the contacts I made, by far, is the nurse. She already owns a Tesla and an apartment in Shanghai. (She also has a child, which is true of only one of the university students.) What's her secret?
The couple's parents bought those things for them.
What's her secret? She works in healthcare, which is very expensive in the United States and especially in the Bay Area, and tends to pay nurses very very well (especially in the Bay Area). This illustrates my point. Her high salary as a nurse comes at the cost of many people around her, in many ways: we all pay higher healthcare costs, in part because of the high pay for doctors and nurses (as well as to hospital administrators, insurance companies, drug companies, etc.), and she's yet another highly-paid professional with the ability to outcompete other people for things like housing. Is she working class? I'm not convinced that she is.
Well, for example, you referred to my acquaintance's "high salary as a nurse" despite the fact that she doesn't have one. You strongly implied that you believe she is located in the United States, despite the fact that I mentioned her location in China in roughly every other sentence of my comment. Nothing in your comment suggested that you were able to understand any complete sentence from mine.
Was that all an illusion? If so, what image were you trying to present? Why?
Just as I thought. You said you know a working-class person who can afford a Tesla, in a thread about homelessness in San Francisco which, last time I checked, is in the United States. You said she was a nursing student in Shanghai in the past, and does own an apartment in Shanghai now. I know people from China who are nurses in California now, and I know people who live in California who own property abroad, and nothing you wrote ruled out any of that.
So, if it turns out your friend isn't a nurse, doesn't have a high salary, and doesn't live in San Francisco, or some combination thereof, I'm going to score that as a giant lapse in reading comprehension in a thread about high salaries in San Francisco.
The median price for a Tesla Model 3 in 2024 was ~$47k. The median price for a 4-door compact sedan in 2024 was ~$26k, or almost half as much. I'm sure some working-class people can afford a Tesla. None of these are hard and fast rules, and there are exceptions. But, which do you think is going to be more affordable to a typical working class person? The $47k car or the $26k car?
Then perhaps you should clarify it in the beginning as to not have these exchanges on semantics. Anyway, of course a cheaper product is more affordable than a more expensive one, that's a vacuous, trivially true statement that does not add anything to the discussion being made in this thread.
> Then perhaps you should clarify it in the beginning as to not have these exchanges on semantics
Well, nobody's perfect. After all, perhaps you could've been perceptive enough to understand that I meant that for a long time, and even now, Elon's cars have been premium products at the high end in their category, priced accordingly, and tend to be less affordable for working class people than the alternatives (and even out of reach for some of them), without getting wound around the axle on these "exchanges on semantics." And yet, here we are.
> Anyway, of course a cheaper product is more affordable than a more expensive one, that's a vacuous, trivially true statement that does not add anything to the discussion being made in this thread.
In my experience, it's the trivially true propositions that internet debaters most readily overlook.
> In my experience, it's the trivially true propositions that internet debaters most readily overlook.
I could say the same if I had no real argument to provide too. I understood perfectly fine what you are saying about Teslas being premium products, but I don't see how it is relevant to the question at hand, because the person above said "Elon got rich by creating goods and services for other people," so saying that you personally don't know anyone who is middle class who could afford them is a non-sequitur; no one said anything about Teslas being affordable for middle class at all (even though they are now starting to be, whether there are more affordable options or not), as "goods and services for other people" does not specify anything about the types of people or their income levels; if he sold superyachts to only the rich, then he'd have also gotten rich himself.
If you'll then say something about how "he should make things more affordable for people," or "he shouldn't have gotten so rich selling rich things to rich people," well, I'm not sure what to tell you, that's shifting the goalposts at the very least, and it looks like you have an axe to grind against rich people in general. "[Billions of dolalrs] worth of productive capacity [are] being redirected away from other uses that benefit many people" is not how economics and value creation works, much as you believe so.
> the person above said "Elon got rich by creating goods and services for other people,"
That's not all they said. They also said, "such as EV cars, or low-cost space launches. It's a wash. Oh wait, actually it isn't because every trade of goods and services is advantageous to both parties by definition."
What's the significance of "low-cost" for space launches? What do they mean by, "It's a wash." What do they mean by, "every trade of goods an services is advantageous to both parties."? Do they mean that low-cost space launches benefit all or most Americans, because we all benefit from satellites for weather and GPS? Maybe. Do they mean that with both space launches and EV cars, the benefits of Elon's activities to all or most Americans wash out any drawbacks of him being rich? Maybe. Do they mean that this balancing of benefits and drawbacks always occurs because it's built into free-market capitalism? Maybe. Those interpretations aren't ruled out so far. You can't be certain they aren't what they intended any more than I can be certain that they are. It certainly would be in keeping with a common line of argument, which is that wealthy people return as much or more to any economy as they extract from it. I don't know that this is this person's line of argument, but it could be, and if it is then it's not a non-sequitur to attack that line of argument by throwing into doubt the universality of the benefits of Elon's products.
> If you'll then say something about how "he should make things more affordable for people,"
Let me stop you right there. I practically never hand out recommendations for what people "should" do.
You are reading universality where that was not implied whatsoever. "Both parties" simply means the buyer and seller (it is indeed a restatement of the principle of comparative advantage if you look in any economics textbook, both the buyer and seller in a market benefit from the transaction because both produce provide what the other cannot, and facilitate it through money as the medium of exchange), where are you getting the idea that that relates to the American people at large? In the case of Teslas, people who give money to the company get a car back and the company gets to continue to do RND and create more cars. In the case of SpaceX, it's the governments or private corporations that want to send things to space. That's it, nothing was said as to whether these transactions benefit the average American, that is why I said your comment is a non sequitur.
> You are reading universality where that was not implied whatsoever
I'm not persuaded you're in a position to know what zozbot234 implied.
> where are you getting the idea that that relates to the American people at large
From my experience talking to other people on related topics.
> nothing was said as to whether these transactions benefit the average American
Something was said as to whether the class of people to which one of the parties to these transactions (Elon Musk, that is) belongs benefits the average American. It was said by me near the root of this sub-thread, in the comment to which zozbot234 replied.
> that is why I said your comment is a non sequitur.
If you're handing out non-sequitur demerits, hand one to zozbot234 then, if that person's comment and everything after it doesn't relate to the American people at large, as you seem to imply. Or, hand one to yourself. Take your pick.
> Something was said as to whether the class of people to which one of the parties to these transactions (Elon Musk, that is) belongs benefits the average American. It was said by me near the root of this sub-thread, in the comment to which zozbot234 replied
> hand one to zozbot234 then
No, they were directly responding to your claim that
> Elon owning 10 megayachts means 10 megayachts (as much as $5 billion) worth of productive capacity being redirected away from other uses that benefit many people, to a use that is frivolous insofar as it largely benefits just one person.
They are saying that there is no relationship to wealth by billionaires and helping "the average American," only that they can get rich by creating value, whether it be for one person or many, and that it is not redirection but creation of wealth that benefits both parties. Their statement does not have anything to do with "the average American" because they were directly refuting that there may (or may not be) "uses that benefit many people," yet you misunderstood to thinking that they were still somehow talking about the "many people" part. This is quite clear in their comment but I still don't think you quite understood the thread of logic of the thread, particularly how their refutation redirected the topic of conversation, to which I replied.
> I'm not persuaded you're in a position to know what zozbot234 implied.
If you do not know the basics of the economics of comparative advantage, particularly in terms of how people talk about "both parties" in a transaction, then I can see why you are not persuaded.
> From my experience talking to other people on related topics.
Sure, but that is not this thread however.
Again, sounds like you have an axe to grind against billionaires which is biasing your argumentation.
> They are saying that there is no relationship to wealth by billionaires and helping "the average American," only that they can get rich by creating value, whether it be for one person or many,
I know they're saying that (or more accurately, that's what I infer...neither of us knows for certain what zozbot234 is saying). And, I'm saying they're wrong.
> and that it is not redirection but creation of wealth that benefits both parties.
Well, now you're both wrong because it is a redirection of productive capacity (which is the term I used in the parent comment) and that has drawbacks for "many people." That a few megayachts might have benefits for a few people doesn't change that.
> yet you misunderstood to thinking that they were still somehow talking about the "many people" part
Neither of use knows what they were thinking, so you're in no position to say whether there was or wasn't a misunderstanding.
> I still don't think you quite understood the thread of logic of the thread, particularly how their refutation redirected the topic of conversation
If they redirected the topic of the conversation, then I'm going to score that as a non-sequitur once again.
> If you do not know the basics of the economics of comparative advantage
Give yourself yet another non-sequitur demerit. Why? Because the "basics of the economics of comparative advantage" can't tell you anything about what was in zozbot234's head. Perhaps they don't understand those basics. How do you know they do? Did you ask them?
> Sure, but that is not this thread however.
I'm starting to doubt you even understand the role that experience plays.
> sounds like you have an axe to grind against billionaires which is biasing your argumentation.
Mea culpa. I do have an axe to grind against billionaires. Don't you? I also have an axe to grind against autocrats and despots. Don't you? Or would you score any critique of [insert geopolitical villain here] as "biased"?
Okay, if you want to argue about what you thought was being said (ironic) instead of what words were put on the page, then I cannot help you any further. Goodbye.
I never wanted to argue with you at all. You replied to me, not the other way around. Also, it would be impossible for you to "help [me] any further" because, despite your bid for self-flattery, you haven't "helped" me at all. If you don't want to discuss the matter any longer, suit yourself. No one held a gun to your head.
In a debate tactic I've seen a million times you committed the "begging the question" fallacy, so I drew attention to it. If you don't like it then--what were the words you used?--oh right, "I honestly don't know what to tell you."
Sounds like goalpost moving for the common use of the word "afford," but even if we take it to be what you mean, that's still an assumption you're making, as they can afford it theoretically, and the fact that they do or don't buy is ancillary; I can also afford a Lamborghini, but I'm not going to buy one.
zozbot234, why do you say that Elon got rich by creating goods and services for other people? What I mean is, what do you expect your readers to infer from this, or what do you hope us to conclude from it?
That's what the article was written for-- and it's one valid perspective on it.
To those whose lives have been irreparably harmed by the violent mentally ill people inhabiting SF's streets and parks while the police stand idle and billions of their tax dollars are spent annually failing to solve the problem-- it might hit a bit differently. That isn't the story here, but when you see people taking it differently than you it isn't necessarily because are in any way lacking in compassion.
The article paints the person in question as a harmless Garden Hermit ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_hermit ), perhaps he is but many of the support-resistant homeless are certainly not harmless.
If a black person attacks you, does that mean that black people are then violent? All the statistics I've ever seen indicate that while the homeless and mentally ill are particularly prone to being victims of violence, they don't seem to actually pose a higher issue of safety than anyone else you encounter in your daily life.
It makes sense that would be the case when you think of it - do the rates of violence decrease as you move up the socioeconomic ladder? By all indications the rate of violence among the very wealthy is not dissimilar from those lower on the socioeconomic ladder. Why would you think homelessness is a cliff through which people suddenly become drastically more violent, especially considering how people like Putin and drug lords are extremely wealthy while paying people lower on the socioeconomic rung to do violence on their behalf to protect their economic interests?
The message you are responding to did not say anything about homeless people in general, nor anything about race, nor economic standing.
Being a victim of violence is entirely compatible with being a perpetrator of violence. I believe that is very often the case.
But if you ever have a person in a crisp tailored suit come out nowhere at you with a knife in an effort to murder you for no reason than delusion or perhaps a desire to steal your backpack, please let me know.
This isn't a remark on wealthy people being more or less capable of physical violence, but rather that untreated serious mental illness is usually incompatible with maintaining a high maintenance lifestyle. While headwinds probably mean that many of the violent people on the SF streets did come from unprivileged backgrounds, I'm sure people from all different starting points end up there too.
I was highlighting the logical fallacy being made with this provocative statement:
> To those whose lives have been irreparably harmed by the violent mentally ill people inhabiting SF's streets and parks while the police stand idle and billions of their tax dollars are spent annually failing to solve the problem-- it might hit a bit differently
The logic is that if your life is harmed by a violent mentally ill homeless person, then all homeless mentally ill people are more prone to causing such behavior. It’s flawed and I was purposefully making a provocative statement. A statement I might add that has actually been made in the past with much of the same emotional reasoning - I was hoping the jarring racism would resonante and share much of the same callous tone being displayed.
> This isn't a remark on wealthy people being more or less capable of physical violence, but rather that untreated serious mental illness is usually incompatible with maintaining a high maintenance lifestyle
I remember when Bob Lee was murdered in SF and everyone came out of the woodwork claiming it’s the supposedly violent mentally ill homeless people who clearly must have been responsible (it wasn’t). It’s important to separate the baseless narrative from the actual facts on the ground. Mentally ill and homeless make people feel uneasy and unsafe but the actual data suggests in reality they’re not so much different.
> I remember when Bob Lee was murdered in SF and everyone came out of the woodwork claiming it’s the supposedly violent mentally ill homeless people who clearly must have been responsible (it wasn’t). ... not so much different
We can go back through the threads if you like, but it certainly wasn't everyone. My bet was on it being related to the yet unresolved theft of a ~billion dollars from FTX using phenomenal amounts of mobilcoin.
Instead it was a less interesting story: A drug user under the influence killed another drug user they knew well over an interpersonal dispute.
People doing dumb shit attacking other people they know who are also engaged in dumb shit is enormously different from being attacked by a stranger out of nowhere while minding your own business. People rightfully feel less safe regarding risk that they don't have much control over vs risk they have more control over.
And we should treat it differently. No amount of policing can ever make you safe-- ultimately we all have to keep ourselves safe. FAFO is a law of the universe that we can't legislate out of existence, but we can adopt policies that increase or decrease the risk of random violence.
> San Francisco is home to much in the way of visible public misery, unnerving street behavior and overt drug use. Its property crime rate has long been high, and the police clearance rate for property crimes has long been minimal. But the city’s violent crime rate is at a near-historic low, and is lower than most mid-to-large-sized cities.
[1]
Seems like violence is at an all time low, meaning the city is actually safer than ever. In fact, in 2024 violent crimes fell another 14% [2]. So if the goal truly is safety, we should keep doing whatever it is we’re doing because we’re on a fantastic roll of making the city safer.
You know what also causes low police reports? Police dissuading people from making them or refusing to take them, and people not bothering to contact police because they believe (correctly or otherwise) the police won't do anything about it, or because they believe police response will be dangerous or overkill... also people self-protecting by avoiding dangerous areas or times, avoiding being alone, or leaving the city entirely (e.g. SF population decreased 9.42% in 2024 according to the internets).
Homicide rates are more reliable, since it's not something that can easily go unreported. But there is a lot of room for violent crime that is short of homicide.
> The 2024 downward trend was evident early in the year and was clearer by July, when police statistics showed a 39% drop in homicides from the first half of 2023, alongside significant declines in some violent and property crimes.
Wouldn’t it make sense that if homicides are down then so is violent crime? It would be strange if they didn’t track together for the most part.
It’s interesting the kind of alternative explanations that you start bringing out when the narrative you have doesn’t agree with the data.
Oh and look:
> Between 2022 and 2024, chronic homelessness increased by 11% with 2,989 people experiencing chronic homelessness in 2024. Thirty-five percent of the total homeless population is chronically homeless, a rate similar to 2022.
Weird how the homeless population stayed the same yet violent crime decreased. It’s almost like they’re not the ones that are behind the violence statistics.
It’s definitely funny along the lines of “A Modest Proposal” from Swift. If you can’t detect sarcasm that’s on you, not the author, especially for something so obviously sarcastic to drive the point home about the ridiculousness of the theory that jailing homeless people will somehow produce less violence in the broader community by making a similar comparison correlating murder and people playing music loudly in public which is a minor annoyance at worst.
Most policy is set by gut because we lack the data and lack a sufficient understanding of the limitations of the data we have. Sometimes we launder gut through truthy data strawmen, to our detriment.
At this point it sounds like you'd just flip the board, not matter how many comparisons, studies, case studies, and anecdotes are noted. Can't make a horse drink.
Yeah, it's pretty clear by now that the meddling of Romulan Time Travelers keeps pushing the events further into the future. So I'd expect WW3 no sooner than 2027.
Stopping Bell Riots from happening was quite a feat, though. Based on the real-world reports of the last few years, I was sure that this particular event is bound to happen exactly when Star Trek originally predicted it.
I think it is an understandable reaction. They're a long history of articles like "man saves multiple orphans from the orphan crushing machine" and people go "ahhh that's so sweet" and nobody stops to ask "why do we have an orphan crushing machine and why can't do anything about that?"
We don't have anything like a machine that causes homelessness though. Homelessness has existed for thousands of years if not all of human existence and we are probably the closest any society has gotten to eradicating it entirely. We are dealing with probably the hard last 10% of a hard problem. It's just not at all as if we have a terrible system that leads to these outcomes. On the contrary, we've built many systems to successfully prevent these outcomes. They're just not perfect
If you were talking about disease or poverty, you might have a point, but homelessness has never been as big of an issue as it is in certain parts of California or more broadly the USA today, except for certain refugee crises.
And a very basic part of it is simply geometry: the more people you have in a limited area, the harder it is to build homes for all of them. Historically, there simply were FAR fewer people, and so finding place for homes was never a huge issue. The cost of housing is mostly property, not construction costs.
The US is huge with a low population density, why not just expand the cities a bit or build a few new ones? Is there some reason why this can't be done?
Unfortunately the majority of the USA, even where people don't live, is valuable private property one way or another. Back when there were fewer people and especially agriculture was much more manual labor intensive, it simply wasn't possible to work every last bit of land, so building new houses at the edge of town was not generally a huge problem (not that people didn't care about ownership, of course, but they cared less - i.e. it was cheaper). Today it is, since every bit of land you build houses on means removing that land from some other economic purpose.
This is more or less what the trump administration says they want to do
> Throughout his campaign, Trump focused on deregulation, tax cuts and reducing mortgage rates. In speeches, including one at the Economic Club of New York in September and a press conference in August, Trump reiterated his promise to reduce regulatory barriers and vowed to make federal land available for extensive housing projects.
Funding what? What are you asking? They are selling the land to developers, there is no need for the federal government to fund anything. They will be the ones receiving money.
We do, but it's not as opaque and obvious as an orphan crushing machine. There's still systems in place that at best ignore and at best accelerate such homelessness issues.
SF is the left wing version of the headline ‘nothing can be done about school shootings, says the only nation where this regularly occurs’.
And while it is a magnet for this kind of problem, San Jose and Los Angeles have similar issues.
Part of the problem being, they’re one of the easiest places to be/exist if you’re homeless. Not that it’s necessarily easy or pleasant, but compared to Chicago, New York City, or some random suburb? You bet.
Nyc has more homeless people, but they're sheltered. [1] California homeless have higher rates of mental illness and drug abuse.
It's this trifecta that people complain about - unsheltered, mentally ill and addicted. If we can solve any one, that feeling of abject squalor goes away.
SF is one of the only places in the developed world that battles homelessness? What are you talking about. I'm talking about humanity generally. For almost all of human history there has been homelessness and vagrancy. We, as a global human population, are doing better at solving this problem than basically any time before in human history, long term, even if things may have declined since COVID in SF
I get the impression that the reaction right now is more likely to be caused by someone in government turning off a lot of those orphan crushing machines recently.
And the only thing to show for it is gangs of feral orphans raping and pillaging. (If I can stretch the metaphor a bit too much.)
I suspect if someone did a survey, they'd find that most places in the internet have grown consistently less empathetic in terms of social policy since mid 2020.
Did you read the article? It seems like the cycle of doom these people are in where a) there’s an impossible to navigate beauracracy b) the beauracracy is setting up zero tolerance policy to kick them out when they’re just starting to try to make their way. It doesn’t sound like the orphan crushing machines were ever truly turned off.
I did. The main zero-tolerance policy referred to in the article is someone getting into a fight with staff and roommates at a social care facility.
You condemn that policy, so I suppose you think this should be tolerated to a degree?
Let's say that a homeless shelter abolished it's zero-tolerance policy. Staff and other occupants can now be assaulted a few times, before someone gets kicked out.
Who'd work at this facility? At this point, you aren't looking for social workers, you're looking for prison guards. They'd treat their charges with the same love and compassion that correctional officers are known for.
Who'd go into this facility? Would a non-violent peaceful person even want to be sheltered there?
Do you really think a facility like that will help anyone?
Suddenly a zero-tolerance policy towards violence isn't such a bad idea, is it? Maybe, just maybe there is no orphan crushing machine, is there?
You’re seeing up a false dichotomy. For one, the fight wasn’t with staff, it was with a random roommate he was paired with. Your equating the two when they’re not equal at all. I don’t know about you but I’ve always gotten to pick my roommates.
> Ronnie was always very clear about his needs. He knows he’s a volatile person. He doesn’t want to be in a shared room, especially with a stranger
So perhaps listening to what the people need instead of forcing them into unwinnable situations is the right answer. If your question is how you scale personalized care in a way that’s financially sustainable I don’t know. But pretending like the orphan crushing machine was turned off, to use your words, isn’t capturing the picture as I’m seeing it. Seems pretty crush happy.
Read the article again. There was a violent incident with the staff as well. The system did listen to that man's needs. It provided him with a hotel room all to himself. Here's the result:
> All seemed to be going well. But in September, Morrisette got into a fight with staff at the Monarch and was evicted. “It was devastating,” Barrows said. Because she was out of town dealing with a family crisis, she couldn’t intervene or help him lodge an appeal.
> It angered her that one bout of bad behavior could cost him so dearly. Given his background and mental health issues, the Monarch should have cut him more slack, she thought.
Nowhere did I suggest that housing homeless in general purpose hotels is a good idea. If that’s the housing that’s available, then the staff need to be trained and capable of handling such issues. And since density might be higher than normal, you need lots of people around who can help deescalate situations before they reach violence and to council the people who have such needs on how to better manage their anger. But all of that costs money to run well, money most people aren’t willing to spend because “eww homeless” or “it’s their mess, I shouldn’t be paying for it”. So you end up spending a lot on half measures that helps no one.
Or perhaps, and this is going to sound purely insane, they person requires a higher level of care, and we need comprehensive healthcare and social safety nets that are equipped to deal with most cases whether that be a person with a cold, a single mom, or someone with mental illness. It literally costs more to keep these people in the revolving door of prisons and institutions than it does to just give everyone proper care. On top of that now you don't have that person being violent in the streets or doing petty theft for drug money.
Those could all be true (and likely are) but "we don't have what we should, so low-paid hotel staff are conscripted to provide it" is a particularly unworkable situation.
Most people I met when homeless didn't want the help the government offered. There's a direct conflict between people who lead and those that actually want to help.
Unfortunately, a lot of the homeless I knew were very proud, arrogant, angry, bitter and many other emotions that made it nearly impossible to get them to take care of themselves through any intervention.
And if people refuse to take care of themselves, they will always be in a state where they need others to step in. Once they become destructive to society, I don't think any expectation of mercy from leadership should be expected. That leads to the situations we currently see in some places today.
It's not the lack of shelter that's the issue. There's plenty of shelter and housing if you want it.
When programming, when engineering, I often run into these sorts of intractable problems.
Changing the rules, changing the preconditions or some aspect of the problem itself, that's usually how I solve them.
In this article, it looks like the Park Ranger is changing the rules by making the system work for the person who is experiencing homelessness instead of forcing the person to go alone into a system that they don't like and they don't necessarily see the value of.
SO it is possible to fix with the appropriate smart thinking and willingness to maintain multiple simultaneous perspectives, it seems.
Indeed. But I have another point of view: what if our society is utterly broken? To see what I mean, imagine a world where that level of effort would cure any disease, even aging. How would that split us?
The biggest problem with our society is that no one knows or helps their neighbors anymore. I work in the emergency department and maybe a third of the patients are more in need of a good support system than medical treatment.
Met a guy whose elderly wife isn't strong enough to lift him when he falls out of bed, so once a week they call EMS or the fire department to get him back in bed. So many things that you used to call on your neighbors for help with, but life for many Americans in 2025 is isolating and lonely.
Did that ever work, except maybe in tribal societies?
Anything I read about middle ages or later was even worse. At best, they put such people into poorhouses.
A big family under one roof helped the best I guess? But in any less ideal situations I doubt even the children would have gone out of their way to devote their lives to the care of the elderly or the disabled. Examples from primitive societies: https://www.international.ucla.edu/cnes/article/113384
> Did that ever work, except maybe in tribal societies?
Maybe I don't understand your comment, but I think our societies were/are tighter in many places and epochs. Maybe it's not so in cities and suburbs in the modern West, but, I think it used to be different in Medieval Europe and before, in villages at least. Neighbors were your support community. I know there are parts of the world where it's still the case.
I'm not that old and I was raised by my neighbors, because both of my parents were working. When my dad was dying last year, I couldn't be there because I was their only economic support, working abroad, and I don't have any wealth to be so if I'm not working. There was more family, but the neighbors were the ones day to day helping my mom with shores and the care of my dad.
>> But in any less ideal situations I doubt even the children would have gone out of their way to devote their lives to the care of the elderly or the disabled.
It was the children, in most sane cases. Not that I argue it's a good thing to bring children to the world to take care of you when you are dying.
It's not capitalism, per se. It's a society that overvalues individualism and devalues family. IMO, of course. One part of the social compact used to be that in return for parents taking care of you as a child, you took care of them when they were old. It worked for literally 1000's of generations.
Basically, it looks like a significant propaganda effort was used to get people to act that way. That means it wasn't automatic at all.
It works best when the parent/child relationship is pretty good, and when the child is not under a lot of pressure him- or herself.
It was the ideal, sure, but how much of it is actually true IRL? There seem to be plenty of bad parents, in which case the children would require quite a bit of pressure and/or brainwashing to take care of them I would think.
Given that the framing here is based on accounts of the most extreme cases, I would trust this reflects their society as well as Ripley's Belive it or Not does.
And you're too focused on families. This society relied on villages that were all somewhat connected. Modern 3rd world countries still have an arguably richer social support than the US because overall their burdens are not theirs to share alone. They pitch in the care for children, provide food, maintain housing, and much more. Having a big family can simulate this clan feeling but the scale is still a magnitude smaller than a village working together.
>in which case the children would require quite a bit of pressure and/or brainwashing to take care of them I would think.
In the same way kids are "brainwashed" to get kicked out at 18 and make a life for themselves in America with minimum support, sure. Any upbringing can be framed as "brainwashing" if you don't agree with it.
You only need to go back 50 years. Have we already forgotten "it takes a village to raise a child"?
Even in my childhood I had remnants of this. My uncles or not-grandma grandma neighbors could be trusted to take care of my when my mom or grandparents weren't around. Nowadays that dynamic is spending $30+ on a credible babysitter. Those are the sort of dynamics that have recently weathered away.
>I doubt even the children would have gone out of their way to devote their lives to the care of the elderly or the disable
1. Yes they did and do. Many people still love their parents and want to make sure they are taken care for.
2. It isn't really that deep for neighbors. It's just a matter of checking up in them every few days. It isn't full time care. Of course if they get hurt they can either help out in minor cases or call emergency if it's more than minor.
These days you may sadly accept dying alone and not being discovered for weeks if people don't regularly contact you. What does that say about modern society?
That is similar to the many family movies today: It shows the situation of specifically those where this ideal idea of family actually works. I doubt that was common in the middle ages. It worked best for those who owned something, like craftspeople or land-owning farmers, and then for their first heir who would inherit it all.
Landowning farmers is a gigantic chunk of the population, far bigger than you seem to be imagining. (Technically, many of them "rented", but "renting" land in medieval Europe was a stronger form of ownership than "owning" it in the modern United States is.)
Homelessness isn't totally solved any where else but if we look at comparable countries (Canada, Australia, New Zealand etc), the magnitude is much lower. Not to mention other issues like healthcare, crime, education, life expectancy etc. But there seems to be a huge resistance to doing things in the US how it's done in other places.
Tokyo is also well known for needing to pay to be practically anywhere except public parks which are relatively few. Yet the homelessness problem is near nonexistent. I don’t think this is the reason either, though it doesn’t hurt to have.
Look Americans just hate it when poor people get things for free. Despite the fact that the US economy can afford it- certainly better than the Japanese economy nowadays.
It is perversely CHEAPER to give someone a flat and 1000 eurodollars per month than to have them roam the street, using drugs and being a nuisance.
This is the wisdom that all first world countries have learned. Pay people money to shut the fuck up. The bread and games of the Romans.
Society is far from perfect and some are definitely leaning more towards broken than perfect. I don't know how many people really see themselves as part of society vs individuals living among other unconnected individuals.
Homelessness, poor physical or mental health, crime, domestic violence, discrimination. There's a long list of social ills that get worse when a society is inequitable and unequal. These problems and their effects go down significantly when a society acts to maintain its own health and distribution of resources is more equal, there is social mobility, individuals are under less financial stress, etc... Number will never go to zero or even close but there are countries where the base homelessness rate is similar to the US but the manifestation of problem is very different as is the approach, mostly that being homeless isn't considered criminal. e.g. very few people sleep rough, their homelessness period is shorter and living in cars is not normal.
Just that last fact, that living in cars is relatively common and that includes children, makes me look at the US and decide that yes, US society is broken.
This comment captured a lot of my thoughts about the article, Amanda and many of the other comments on this thread, except that you put them into words much more capably and eloquently than I was able to do. Well stated.
> The city surely understands the long-term costs of its policies, and it’s run by highly pragmatic people with limited budgets.
Is that the case? maybe there are highly pragmatic people in the org, but i dont think they are "running" things. and the city's budget for homelessness is astoundingly high (look it up)
If anyone is wondering, it's ~1 billion dollars per year, for a homeless population of less than 10,000. With this money, they have achieved basically zero change in that number for years. Staggering, incredible levels of waste.
It might be more appropriate to look at the numbers of people being brought off the streets. They have over 14,000 supportive housing units and 4,200 shelter beds. 5,000 of the supportive housing units were added in the last 5 years."More than 20,000 people seek homeless services in San Francisco over the course of a full year" [0].
At the Jan 2024 Point-in-Time count, 4,354 unsheltered people were counted, a 1% decrease since 2022 and a 16% decrease since 2019. There was a 20% decrease in the number of people living in cars since 2019.
To compare, NYC spends $4 billion per year and has 62,000 supportive housing units and 130,000 shelter beds (these NYC numbers come from GPT4o Search and are unverified).
That's not necessarily the right measure though right? If that money wasn't spent (or less of it was spent), what would things be like? Hard to A/B test this, but seems like the "problem" would get worse rather than stay steady state.
Ah Empathy is not what screwed up these guys' childhoods. Don't blame empathy without acknowledging that both of these people are black in America.
There are so many reasons why this happened and it's way more than just San Francisco being supposedly more empathetic.
Rhetorically speaking, how about the fact that China is quite happy to supply precursor drugs to help make fentanyl cheap? How is that related to San Francisco's perceived empathy? Again, rhetorically.
It makes me angry that this problem is reduced so frequently when it's been proven time and time and time to be a complex problem. It's almost like citizens / voters / taxpayers are willing to play sport with this problem in order to score some kinds of points around being right, or to avoid the sense of blaming oneself, because they know they can do something about it and yet they aren't.
Being honest is a big part of making progress with this, and I think honestly this problem is way more complex than many of us have actually appropriately characterized.
The article goes a long way towards characterizing the problem well, by talking about each individuals, perspectives, situations, and how the system succeeded or fails, knocking them off the path to gaining public support.
If you want to focus on the housing crisis aspect and not the policies that enable addiction, then the answer is still yes.
Capped property tax increases is a moronic empathy law based on “protecting little old ladies on fixed incomes”. It has resulted in an incentive structure that means all home owners are incentivized to block all new housing and keep the value of their homes sky rocketing.
The second level of empathy laws causing the housing issue is all if the ones that empower NIMBYs to stop housing developments.
“Preventing gentrification”, “stopping the character of the neighborhood from changing”, “delays for a 1 year impact study” are all empathy motivated laws that caused the housing crisis in Cali.
You are right. Empathy in the literal sense of only being able to relate with others that have the same experiences and interests. I appreciate that clarity.
To act like housing policy is controlled by developers, even in this contemptuous jest you exude, is delirious and is the remainder of the problem with San Francisco.
I was the person you replied to, and there was no "energy", whatever that is, in what I said. Just: you blame the state for state corruption, because we pay them taxes to not be corrupt.
Housing is too expensive for many people in many places. The normal healthy response to housing being too expensive in an area is to live in another area. Only a very small minority of people who can't afford housing in a place they'd like to live respond by becoming homeless in that place. It's simply not a rational response to housing being too expensive.
The housing crisis extends across the bay area and SF is noticeably shittier then most places int he bay area. So it's likely not the housing crisis that is the reason why SF is particularly bad.
San Francisco doesn't even have free Narcan, which many US cities do. And of course syringes will flood the streets when you don't have safe injection sites. SF needs to learn from Portugal on how to address the drug crises. Also, it just needs to build denser to accommodate housing demand.
People always say this, and yet it just seems more like SF is the tip of the spear to changes that the rest of the area faces. I remember when people were decrying the homeless epidemic in SF only for El Camino in South Bay to start having significant homeless population spring up. And then LA’s housing problem also got markedly worse. And people decry that it’s “Californian” politics only for the same problems to pop up later in their neck of the woods. These are growing systemic national and global problems with our social fabric falling apart and the response for many seems to be “take care of me first”. You even see it with the huge political backlash globally.
> People always say this, and yet it just seems more like SF is the tip of the spear to changes that the rest of the area faces.
This is not correct. SF gets a superset.
Car break-ins in SF were commonplace 25 years ago. They never became bad in the South Bay. SF just has legitimately bad policies that directly cause a lot of their issues.
The housing crisis is about the only thing it has in common with the South Bay and that’s because it is a state issue.
But keep in mind that police only ever make positive progress on policies in order to extract concessions from the city
> "I'm optimistic about the progress we've made in reducing the number of auto burglaries in San Francisco, but this is just a start," Chief Bill Scott said. "I want to thank our officers for their tireless work. The SFPD hopes to build on this progress with additional tools, like automated license plate readers, to continue making arrests and holding perpetrators accountable."
> The City has also reached a 5 year high in applicants to join SFPD, which is essential for adding more police officers back.
Oh look, the police force is becoming more politically powerful & crime is down. Wonder how that happens.
Most other cities that have large homeless populations aren’t on a peninsula so they can eventually shuffle them to places that are “out of sight, out of mind.”
> empathy for a criminal is ensuring they have their day in court. Free counsel if they can’t afford. Innocent until proven guilty
That's not empathy. Empathy is being sympathetic to someone based on how similar they are to you. You're talking about much older, less relative concepts, such as equality under the law and limits on what the state can do to people.
What does that snopes article have to do with what you said?
Free syringes make sense because people will find disease-prone means to get their fix, and then they end up in emergency rooms requiring more expensive care.
Which part of that link is the part you mean to emphasize? Is it just Prop 47? Cause then a more direct link to it than to a picture of a fake sign would probably be more compelling. (And in that case, that's not a city-level law anyway.)
> SF ... created laws that were empathetic to robbers and thieves.
You're right in that SF does way too much to accommodate robber barons, tech moguls, heavily-subsidized Silicon Valley industries, and housing speculators.
"We have to face reality" is a thought-terminating cliche. The causes of homelessness are myriad and there's a ton of conservative propaganda denigrating left-leaning politics. Also, many would beg to differ that SF is a "gigantic pile of shit."
So? Did I say it wasn't myriad? Tons of SF policies are responsible for it.
>Also, many would beg to differ that SF is a "gigantic pile of shit."
It's like the myriad of people living in North Korea who think it's the greatest country in the world. There's reality and then there's people who don't face it.
Are you not aware that San Francisco was the site of the biggest population exodus out of any city? You may not be miserable but if you’re unable to comprehend why that exodus happened then you’re completely out of touch.
I’m too lazy to find stats and stats may not exist anyway. You don’t need science to prove to you the ground exists when you get up in the morning. You use your common sense for that.
I'm hearing a lot of appeal to emotion, not facts.
With regard to migration, I frequently see expensive CoL and remote work vis-a-vis the pandemic cited as primary reasons, not homelessness or crime. If you have reputable sources saying otherwise, please cite them.
There’s tons and tons of facts. Just no stats. I can point you or you can point yourself to dozens of articles and opinion pieces. But stats I’m too lazy to find and they likely don’t exist.
You go continue to live in a universe where you ignore general sentiment and fill in reality with your own happy construct where a void of stats and science exists. Did they do a research study on whether people enjoy eating feces? No? I guess I can make up whatever garbage I want around this area now. Yes people love eating shit. (This is what you and all the science maniacs around HN love doing).
No science exists on how much people hate San Francisco even though there are reams and reams of people talking about how bad things are? Ok fill it in with your own delusion of reality. San Francisco is great. I love the whiff of fresh human shit I occasionally get when the right breeze just waffs by under my nose. I love stepping on broken syringes when I go run.
In the spirit of tech conversations, here was my original input from my history:
---
I was swept up in this article and the portrait for Amanda (barrows) - what a unique and strong person - this city is soo lucky to have her.
I want to respond that unlike some here, I came away with huge empathy and today's HN snark and frustration bounced off me pretty hard accordingly. The public order issues such as homelessness in the park have impacted me, but more so, how to translate the state of the world to my children. I always remind them that this person was once a little boy / girl and we might be older, but we're still kids inside and nobody dreamt to grow up in this environment.
The compassion and my own empathy shown here coupled with the pragmatic approach shown by Amanda washed over me and the policies and bureaucratic inefficiencies that make solutions slow and ineffecient are understandable, but also highly frustrating.
The unhoused individuals and their mental state vs the requirements to find a home are very frustrating - the city surely understands the cost of housing policies and is run by highly pragmatic people, but rules are rules and some top down accommodations and medications are needed to help merge this.
---
I personally don't see my opinions changed here - I think the posted text is a bit better but also agree on the uncanny valley issue. A little less brain swelling and I would have been all over the small signals :)
Personally, I find AI and the derivatives extremely helpful when it comes to communication (a booster for the mind!) and use it all the time when translating into other languages and also removing my northern British dialect from communication over in California.
A lesson to take from this is, "if a post expresses strong opinions, and you believe AI was involved in it's generation, then they probably used AI to edit, not to generate whole cloth." A hallmark of ChatGPT is an unwillingness to take a position, and instead to describe what positions it's possible to take. By the time you've prompted it enough to take a strong position, you've probably crossed into "editing" rather than "generating".
You can disagree with someone's view, but editing their words with AI doesn't make them wrong or disingenuous any more than asking another human to critique your post would be. And to imply otherwise is, itself, disingenuous and disruptive.
The exception would be if you thought there was no human involvement in the account at all, in which case, as another commenter noted, the appropriate thing would be to email the mods.
a.) While I can't possibly know, yes, I think there's a very good chance. I think it's the top comment chiefly because it expressed a view that was popular with commenters. It's not like AI is a magic spell that bewitches people into upvoting.
b.) Another way to look at it is, "do you think it would be the top comment if the author didn't solicit feedback and thoughtfully edit their comment?" To which I would say, "who cares? Editing is fair play. Let's talk about our actual points of disagreement."
c.) To be frank I think this response from you is very telling. I haven't seen you engage at all with the substance of the comment. But you press very hard on this "AI" angle. The commenter has now shown us their pre-AI draft, and it's much the same - I think if you had a good-faith concern that it was "manipulated," that would satisfy you. Since it hasn't, I infer that your concern is either puritanical ("no AI must ever be used in any way") or that you are attacking the style of the comment when your real issue is it's substance.
Putting aside the particular accusation that I have raised for a moment, I am curious to understand whether Hacker News (HN) has established any formal, informal, or otherwise broadly accepted community guidelines, rules, policies, or best practices regarding the usage of comments generated with the assistance of artificial intelligence, specifically through ChatGPT or similar AI-driven language models.
My inquiry is motivated by the observation that AI-generated text has become increasingly prevalent in online discourse, and different platforms have adopted varying stances on whether such content is acceptable, encouraged, discouraged, or outright prohibited. Some online communities prefer organic, human-generated discussions to preserve authenticity, while others are more permissive, provided that AI-generated responses align with the spirit and intent of meaningful discourse.
Thus, within the context of HN’s commenting system, does the platform have an explicit policy, a tacit expectation, or any historical precedent regarding whether AI-assisted comments are permissible? If so, are there any specific constraints, recommendations, or guiding principles that users should adhere to when leveraging AI for participation in discussions? Furthermore, if such a policy exists, is it officially documented within HN’s guidelines, or is it more of an unwritten cultural norm that has evolved over time through community moderation and feedback?
I would appreciate any insights on whether this matter has been formally addressed or discussed in past threads, as well as any pointers to relevant resources that shed light on HN’s stance regarding AI-assisted participation.
What's tricky is that accusing other commenters of being bots/AIs is, at the same time, a new twist on the "you're a shill/astroturfer/troll/bot/spy" etc. swipe that internet users love to hurl at each other, and which we do have a guideline against (for good reason).
Between those two rules (or quasi-rules) there's a lot of room to get things wrong and I'm sorry I misread the above case!
Thank you. Maybe you can remove my slow-ban, and we'll call it even: HN often tells me I am posting too fast, which makes me think my account was flagged at some point.
We rate limit accounts when they post too many low-quality comments and/or get involved in flamewars. I'd be happy to take the rate limit off your account, but when I look at your recent comments, I still see too many that match that description:
If you want to build up a track record of using HN as intended for a while, you'd be welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and we can take a look and hopefully take the rate limit off your account.
No, I have not noticed that at all. I see plenty of content that reeks of LLM generation where the ideas expressed in it are ones I agree with. I still don't like to see it.
I have a genuine question for you here dang. In another comment in this thread [1], the poster admitted that he did indeed generate (or at least rephrase) his comment with AI. I didn't find this surprising, and at least a few other people apparently didn't either. For "uncanny valley" reasons that are difficult to put my finger on, the wording of the comment just jumped out to me as LLM generated.
So the user "searealist" who you're responding to was correct in saying the comment was written by AI. Are we not supposed to call that out when we notice it? It's difficult because it's typically impossible to prove, and most people won't be as honest as the OP was here.
If what "searealist" did here is not acceptable even though he was right, what are we supposed to do? Flag, downvote?
Personally, I do not want to see any LLM generated content in HN comments, unless it's explicitly identified by the person posting it as a relevant part of some conversation about LLMs themselves.
We don't want LLM-generated comments (or any other kind of generated comments) here. Downvoting or flagging comments that you think are generated is fine. "Calling out" is more of a grey area because there are also a lot of ways to get it wrong and break the site guidelines by doing so. But I got it wrong the opposite way in the above case, so I'm not really sure how to make all this precise yet.
The overlap of people who use unicode emdash and real dash in the same comment is close to 0%. It also has the obvious cadence and filler words of chatgpt.
Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
It's an incredibly complicated problem, but if there is one message I can share it is this: homeless people are, first and foremost, people. They span the full range of human experience (the main subject of my movie had a masters degree in psychology) and there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Homelessness is not one problem, it is a symptom of at least half a dozen different problems, all of which need different solutions. (And, BTW, some homeless people voluntarily choose the lifestyle. It's definitely a minority, but it's not zero.)
Yea, I'm a regular HN reader and I've been stuck on the street for going on 7 years. Used to be commended for persevering against the odds and the like, as a child and young programmer at 15 onward, home owner at 22.
I've left SF and landed in a college town in Sac Valley last year. Rent is $750/mo here. Been working in a kitchen for a year. Am I housed yet? Nope. Just gotta save a few thousand dollars. I have about the same amount of bills as a housed person, between gym + storage + take out food + car insurance.
But then the social aspect, my old relatives and network need to distance themselves from me. Any kind of old reference or something, non starter.
I will beat this. I only keep posting here on these threads because as you say, we span the full range of human existence. I like to think I'll use my approach as a template to help others. Get out of the big metro and into a peaceful place with cheap rent and lots of opportunity, yadda yadda.
That is really interesting, do you mind sharing more info about how you went from a skilled engineer (skilled enough to get a house at 22) to homeless? If you make it back up you will have a pretty fascinating life story.
You just need to remember that homeless people have most of the same constraints and ties to location that you do. Everyone grew up somewhere, a lot of homeless people had relatively "normal" lives before the street and most have some connections lingering from that time.
So they probably still have family connections there, friends, maybe a church or AA group, case worker, friendly coffee shop owner, etc. They aren't any more eager to break these ties than you would be.
I think it's hard to imagine someone who prefers homelessness to living somewhere cheap. I understand there's a lot of nuance and for the majority of homeless folks, $750 rent isn't necessarily more realistic than the $3000 rent I remember in NYC, but for the people for whom cheap living _is_ a viable option, I'm struggling to believe that their AA group or a friendly coffee shop owner are their reasoning for choosing NYC over a highway town outside of Rochester.
I actually think it's a bit infantilizing to suggest that any otherwise capable person would choose sleeping on the streets or in shelters over a basement apartment in a cheap, boring town.
Speaking personally, I'd prefer living in quite literally any town in the entire country if it meant a roof over my head.
I'm not speaking out of my ass, I was homeless myself on and off for nearly twenty years, and have relationships with homeless people in my community still.
Almost no one "prefers homelessness" to anything else per se, but they may decline the terms on which housing is offered. For example "break all your social ties and move away from the only city you know" is extremely hard for anyone to accept.
Look at some other conversations in this comment section! A lot of people want to "solve homelessness" but a lot of them also don't care what happens to the homeless people on the way. "Come with us, to a place you've never heard of and know nothing about, where all your needs are met"? No thanks my man I have read Maus.
Truthfully, for all intents and purposes, I'm the one speaking out of my ass on this topic. These are some really good points. You describe a real-life experience which I clearly lack; I definitely concede my previous point. My apologies.
FWIW I think it's really admirable of you to maintain those community connections, not everyone would do the same.
Can you explain what is so difficult to move to another place? I mean choosing homelessness or new life where you don’t know anyone but have roof over your head makes me pick only one choice here… I am an immigrant and changed my locations several times.
Yeah, I should have made this clearer. When I wrote, "some homeless people voluntarily choose the lifestyle" I did not mean to imply that they prefer it to all other possible lifestyles, simply that they could get indoors if they wanted to, but that would come with downsides that they choose not to accept. But I did meet one person who explicitly said, "I have a home but I have no desire to live in it." But much more common was the sentiment that they could get a place to live but then they'd have no money left for anything else.
Manhattan is great to be homeless in. free food available every couple of blocks, lots of social services. can sleep in hospitals, on the subway or elsewhere. good free transportation in the form of the subway. subways not a bad place to sleep, certain comedians did it getting started in new york. I do it.
cold isnt a big problem if u know what ur doing. during the summers u can spend all day at the beach and that makes up for it.
spend the day at the library working on the computer. police and security are relatively lax so long as you know how to blend in, some homeless people are less socially adept and dont take care of themselves so they are magnets for reprisals in a manner of speaking.
Does that mean we need some kind of big brother/sister program but for the homeless? Would having one capable volunteer who met with them for an hour a week or something and could advocate and help them navigate the system make a big change?
I really struggle with this because it feels like helping as much as possible is the only moral stance to have, but I also question what level of responsibility the homeless have for their own situation. If we keep approaching them with these 0 consequence strategies does that encourage failure? Would the second guy who was smoking meth have benefited if he got thrown in jail for two months, forcing him into sobriety and then released into some kind of temporary housing with strict work and curfew rules?
We balk at the idea of limiting someones freedoms, but it seems like a mercy to take someone who is killing themselves and endangering others and putting them through some kind of rehabilitation that forces them to get physically and mentally healthy. It might be a relief to have a schedule and safety and some kind of guiding hand.
The fully honest answer is that I don't know. I have some first-hand data but no actual expertise in this area. But my personal advice is this: one of the best things you can do for a homeless person is simply to talk to them, to make them feel seen. One of the worst things about being homeless is that you become invisible. For many people that's almost as bad as the physical hardship.
I’m 24 (which I think is younger than most people in here) and I live in San Francisco. I’m pretty ashamed to live here and hope to move soon.
The “on the ground” feeling is bad. Every issue we had 5 years ago is worse (except the drought).
Daily life involves walking calculated circles around drug addicts to avoid agroing them (like Dead Island).
I’m seeing more trash on the streets, more graffiti covering highway signs.
People have given up trying to change anything and just tolerate it now. I thought I’d meet high agency tech people when I moved here. The tech scene is way better than Boston but the sprit of SF is really dead. All the money in the world and they can’t run a city half a well as was done before cars…
Where in SF do you live? I'm guessing Soma, or near downtown? Get out of your neighborhood now and then. Most of the city does not have a drug addict or three on every block, and trash everywhere.
You need to get out of SoMa. The rest of SF is pretty nice, there are definite hot zones like near Bayview but generally what you describe is just SF. I left to raise a family and one of the reasons was the homelessness BUT SF has always been like this and if it was not the homeless it was the gangs or other issues in different parts of the city. Try living in a different part of the city, it might change things up a bit.
My experience suggests the opposite; the city was an upwards trajectory until 2018 or so but it's taken a turn for the worse since.
I lived in SF from 2009 to 2024. Every part of the city has gotten worse. When I moved, parts of Mission were definitely rough and they've cleaned up quite a bit. Even SoMa became somewhat interesting, as much as area like that could have before Covid.
It can take time to get to know any city, but SF has the advantage of being relatively dense and walkable.
I moved here in 2015, and I was about the same age when I arrived. It was an adjustment for me back then too. The problems don’t really seem worse to me overall, but I will say that market street and SoMa in general feel worse than I remember but not really because of homeless people or drug use (that was already a highly visible problem); I think it’s important to point out how much commercial real estate has gone fallow since tons of stuff was shuttered during the pandemic. That’s the most noticeable change to me, and it just makes the whole area that much more depressing.
So before writing off the city entirely as has-been or whatever, maybe try a day of walking around the northeast corner when the weather is nicer. Nob Hill into Chinatown, then North Beach. From there you can enjoy a view from Coit Tower before taking one of the semi-famous stairways down to the Embarcadero. Levi plaza is a nice spot to rest your feet. If you need a place to stop and work, and you don’t mind tethering, find your way up into the Embarcadero center. The upper portion is an open air walkway over the streets with really well-kept gardens/trees along the way (at least once winter passes). Below you’ll find shelter from cold or wet weather, with lots of places to sit. It’s kind of the best kept secret of the city if you work remotely.
> All the money in the world and they can’t run a city half a well as was done before cars…
This is hardly unique to SF. Hell, the city is a diamond in the rough among other post-industrial cities anywhere in the world.
If not the northeastern corner, maybe try the mission near 24th and Valencia, or Fillmore near Japan Town. There are other spots too of course but these are all places I walk or take the train to regularly and I will miss them dearly if I leave.
Same with NYC. People just moving here are unaware of the history and think OMG so much homelessness, so much crime! Meanwhile I grew up remembering seeing crack vials all over the street, the mob was ever present actively extorting and murdering people, numerous abandoned buildings creating ghost towns of squatters, and the homeless camps were quite elaborate - I remember a big encampment around the foot of the Manhattan Bridge complete with burning trash barrels and a large teepee. Today's NYC is sterile compared to the 80's I grew up in.
You’re ashamed? I have to be honest with you - I just moved into the city last year after living in the suburbs since 2018. SF is the most beautiful city I’ve ever been in. Do you not have a strong attachment to the communities here? I’m finding the city surprisingly good at cultivating niches.
lol San Franciscans never tried to change anything for the last 50 years, they never gave up since they never tried to begin with - they actually prefer it this way.
Overpaid tech workers like yourself have done much more to destroy the "spirit" of San Fransisco than some homeless people sleeping in a park. You can look all the way back to the 1960s and see the same complaints about "lawlessness" in San Fransisco, there's always a marginalized scapegoat to blame - first the beatniks, then the hippies, then the gays, now the homeless. The homeless are not an aberration or a new phenomenon in San Fransisco. It's the entitled, overpaid tech transplants rampaging through the city that are destroying it.
Lol… yea, definitely the people who’ve moved here to make a better life for themselves and not the native population doing whatever they can to try an preserve a 1970’s nostalgic lifestyle without thinking about how their own children would need a place to live.
The xenophobia of the late-comer San Franciscan is one of the most cliched examples of why the utopian fantasies many leftist have are doomed to fail.
The transplants didn’t cause the housing crisis. That was built piece by piece by San Francisco over the last 50 years all in an effort to grant people with seniority special privileges.
This was the reason I gave up trying to change SF and left. It was clear that the locals like it dysfunctional and hate newcomers like me who want to change things. Then suddenly you’re the bad guy.
> shepherding him through what one Recreation and Parks Department official described as the “arduous and achingly bureaucratic tasks” necessary just to be eligible for housing.
I'm going to risk a political statement and say that this is why I'm mostly hopeful about DOGE, even if parts of it are a shit show.
Building civilization comes with a hefty dose of institutional entropy, which keeps accumulating, despite (or often because) good intentions and competence. Everybody is improving their piece of the map, but this means you get stuck in a lot of spots of local maxima. Some can be fixed from a level above, but some need a round of creative destruction every 10 years or so.
It's a good read and a good blog for many reasons, but the relevant part to this conversation: Japan managed to keep a very high level of living even through decades of economic stagnation and aging population in large part by having a sane zoning system. Yes, that simple. They have 12, nation-wide, mostly inclusive zoning types. This means the permitted building types carry over as you move up the categories, allowing mixed-use development by default.
And indeed, you can actually go to Japan and buy a house for about the price of a decent car - which coincidently used to be the case in most of the world, before the double pressure of zoning/coding on one hand, and migration towards urban centers on the other squeezed the housing pricing way above what actual costs would have it be.
How in the world is randomly firing people supposed to make anything more efficient? They literally don't even know what the people they're firing do, as seen with the latest mess with the Department of Energy.
Fiery take, but Elon eviscerated twitter and just kept kicking people out seemingly randomly. Anyone who didn't like it was encouraged walk out too on top of that. Twitter was doomed and the internet was rife with how it's collapse was immanent.
But he we are three years later and twitter is still running and still top dog in the message-post space.
I can't help but feel that in the presence of lots of money, organizations just bloat and bloat and bloat, and all that bloat will be sure to have a long winded explanation for why it is _critical_ to stay in existence.
twitter corporate bonds are trading at 97 cents on the dollar now, they were trading closer to 40 cents shortly after the acquisition. I would not assume they are still losing money
"The banks marketed the deal last week with an intention to sell down the debt at 90-95 cents to the dollar but managed to price it at a higher price of 97 cents... In late 2022, an attempt to sell the unsecured loan attracted bids in the 60 cents to the dollar range which would have seen the banks take on a large loss on the face value of the debt."
Twitter has become a hive of racism and hate that is a shadow of its former self. I literally can't keep racist slurs from my homepage, if you think musk has improved it since he took over man so I have a bridge to sell you
He also eviserated 75% of Twitter's market cap. The only metric Twitter is a success is Elon leveraged it to get Trump elected and Trump is now showering him with favors.
Agreed. Maybe the government is terribly inefficient. I don't know. However, this isn't the most efficient way to make it better. Moreover, efficiency is not just saving money which seems to be all that is going on.
The explicit point of dismantling some agencies is to leave it to the states. Aka they want to reduce state funding. So the state choices are generate more income or let certain institutions rot.
The necessity for delicately traversing the path to a solution that's more long-term sustainable than that which already exists seems to be something that DOGE is entirely incapable of.
Musk seems to want things to scale; fewer people to achieve more productivity. People that already fall through the cracks aren't going to suddenly find themselves better off via a system that scales better, because better scaling actually creates wider cracks.
The median flows better, at the cost of the fringes.
Your comments regarding Japan are interesting. Japan's definitely an interesting example to use due to the odd, unenviable economic situation, but that makes your point stand out more rather than less, I think.
The problem is if you want lower bureaucracy you have to change laws and not fire people.
Most of the time you still need them, they just have no time to do what they are supposed to do.
For instance, would you fire doctors to reduce bureaucracy in medical services?
Great point. And if you fire all the insurance middlemen, but don’t get rid of the legal requirements which spawned those middlemen in the first place, you end up with medical professionals swamped with paperwork they shouldn’t have to deal with it.
The problem is if you want lower bureaucracy you have to change laws and not fire people.
Not every excessive process is the result of legislation. Some of these processes arise gradually and unnecessarily, because, in an organization without competition, there's no pressure to be efficient (i.e. focus on increasing output).
There is plenty of pressure on the organizations to be efficient
What you say may be true in certain parts of the US. But we're talking about San Francisco. I've lived here for over 5 years, and my observations during that time do not tell me there's any pressure on governmental organizations here to be efficient, let alone 'plenty of pressure'.
Efficiency isn't the number one goal of a democracy. You want pure efficiency, dictatorships are the way to go.
But for the most part, the things I expect the SF city government to do, get done. The roads are paved, the schools function, crime is kept in check, elections are held, permits are issued, inspections get done, etc. All to varying degrees of course. And the people get to change leadership if they feel things aren't going well (as they did in the last election).
I don't know what you mean about crime being kept in check. Right now there are several cars on my street with expired registration. Two of them have no license plates at all. I doubt they are insured. I have been the victim of crime in my home.
There are people openly selling illegal drugs on the street, with no fear of arrest or prosecution.
The schools spent $27k per student per year (i.e. $500k per classroom), and FEWER THAN HALF of students meet grade level standards in math and English.
It takes many many permits to open a restaurant, and many would-be restaurant owners give up part way through the ordeal. 'Permits are issued' doesn't indicate efficiency when the number of permits required is beyond what's reasonable.
The expectations we have of the government have to be related, to some extent, to the resources it takes from us.
If you spend $27k per student per year, yes I expect schools to run efficiently enough such that students graduate high school able to read and write.
Are you looking in the right places? I'm sure all the big tech leaders put pressure on? But their definition of "efficient" may not align with yours or mine.
Personally I can get behind the stated intentions of DOGE (although I don't think that's the real intent). I can also see the logic of having to break a few things / start over to really get to a clean state. But the way it's done doesn't seem intentional or calculated, it's just randomly smash things and seeing what breaks.
To put it in software terms, this is like doing a refactor without knowing what the current code base does, what the intended functionalities are and without having a design. Instead, someone just goes in to delete chunks of code based on the file name and see what happens.
With a random CRUD app that might be ok to some extent, but we're talking about people's livelihood, national security matters, environmental and consumer protection and such. The current DOGE approach using the most charitable take is either reckless or hubris.
Despite the hype, DOGE is about replacing government employees with private contractors rather that actually saving money. Therefore it will almost certainly end up costing more in the long run.
At a high level, the current administration is seeking ways to cut tax for the wealthy and pay and conditions for workers. As a property developer, Trump has a literal vested interest in maintaining high property values.
Its really difficult to see how this will translate into more affordable housing for poor people.
Indeed there is administrative bloat everywhere, and I can sympathize with your hope that tearing down the current system will leave room for building anew.
However, it's hubris to assume that everything is bloat. There is the adage of Chesterton's fence, which reads: "...reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood." Many things that appear to be bloat that serves a useful function, and tearing them blindly is going to do irreparable damage.
Cool. The US is the third largest country in the world; not all of us have to live above a restaurant or laundry. Or in apartments or other multi-tenant housing.
Those of us that want to can move to San Francisco or New York.
The state i live in has fewer people than metro Los Angeles. What works for them for housing is unnecessary for us.
Really not seeing the forest through the trees on this one. The president is not supposed to have unilateral authority to axe written law. He's trimming the legislative branch, not the budget.
But DOGE, Elon Musk and Donald Trump don't have zoning on the agenda.
Trump's campaign platform was verbatim in favor of single family zoning according to his website. Harris's official platform was to ease permitting restrictions and provide incentives to states to reduce these regulations, according to their website and the multiple times they discussed this on the campaign trail.
Look past the marketing hype of DOGE and see that it's not actually deregulating anything that matters. The regulations that are blocking housing and energy are only going to be accelerated under this administration -- wilfully so.
The technocratic center-right have at times embraced deregulations like this, but not the new populist-right. The populist-right, if anything, see these regulations as useful because it empowers the immigrant scapegoat tactic as an explanation for housing costs.
I mean, the other conclusion from that article is a negative, namely: constant GDP growth is not a great measure of success. Who cares if GDP goes up or down? What matters is quality of life.
DOGE comes from the political machine that believes more restrictions on eligibility for government assistance are a GOOD thing and that spending on such assistance should be dramatically cut.
So good luck with that.
Zoning as a silver bullet? When you have a huge economic difference as a conflating factor? If the US had had decades of economic stagnation the housing price pressure caused by the beneficiaries of many sectors of the economy NOT stagnating, but instead of booming at more-than-anywhere-else-in-the-world-levels, seen in SF in particular, would be far less.) Look at housing prices in hollowing-out former industrial towns in the Midwest. Economic stagnation and lower cost of living go hand in hand. Japan stagnated at a pretty high level, quality-of-living-wise. That doesn't seem like a bad thing. It's certainly not comparable to Nigeria, Pakistan, or Chile. It's also not comparable to the US. And do you know who else doesn't want the US to stagnate like that for the elite professional class? Elon Musk. (And Japan's economic situation has more than a few darker aspects to it.)
(Republicans also fucking love zoning, so..... again... wtf)
> If the US had had decades of economic stagnation the housing price pressure caused by the beneficiaries of many sectors of the economy NOT stagnating, but instead of booming at more-than-anywhere-else-in-the-world-levels, seen in SF in particular, would be far less.) Look at housing prices in hollowing-out former industrial towns in the Midwest.
But the article isn't wrong though. Zoning things like Tokyo in San Francisco would be a silver bullet to the woes there and it would go a long way to making people feel prosperous. If you live in the bay area, you'll be shocked to see people with quite large net worths, feel like they have nothing because the only place they can afford near their workplace is $1M or more and we're talking about condos here.
Zoning while important isn't a silver bullet. Often cities who change zoning reform realize there is a whole lot of other issues that cause problems. But yes, zoning one of the most important ones.
Elon Musk is a liar with zero credibility. All his claims about government "inefficiency" are lies used to make people like you OK with him shutting down agencies he doesn't like.
You think conservatives care about actually helping the unhoused? Their ultimate goal is to funnel money from public services into private hands; and their "solution" to homelessness involves prison, concentration camps[1], or exile[2] — because they see the problem as undesirables reducing quality of life for the worthy rich, not abject human misery. (Indeed, Musk considers recipients of federal aid to be part of the "parasite class."[3])
For those who live in San Francisco and witness homelessness and drug addiction across the city, this article feels deeply out of touch and even insulting.
We need to acknowledge that San Francisco has spent billions over decades on homelessness programs, yet the crisis persists, leaving us to ask: Is this truly the best we can do? Are we investing efficiently, or are we simply maintaining a broken system?
The core problem imo is there is simply not good enough treatments for addiction (yet?). For opioid addiction there is methadone and buprenorphine etc. But I suspect these have became even less effective with so much fentanyl around now, requiring much higher doses. But these all really work (simplifying massively) by replacing the addiction with something that is easier to eventually titrate down.
For meth, crack, etc there are effectively no pharmacological interventions available. And many (most?) of the street homeless have dual addictions to a stimulant and an opioid, so even if they did manage to switch from fentanyl to buprenorphine they would almost certainly be extremely unstable with their stimulant addiction.
Obviously there are psychological interventions and peer support groups, but these require quite a lot of stability to stick to and get to, which I think is extremely difficult for someone in a very chaotic addiction cycle.
To me, it seems some of the billions that cities spent on social services for homeless should be diverted (or in addition to) to pharmacological research. There is so little funding available for this - I read Prof David Nutt was doing an interesting PET study for kappa opioid response in addiction but ran out of funding. The funding requirements were low-medium hundreds of thousands of dollars and couldn't find it to continue the research.
The current status quo seems a bit like trying to treat TB without antibiotics. The treatment back then was basically similar to current 'rehab' programs - send them to a quiet place and give them care and help. Obviously not a bad thing to do; but once you had antibiotics the prognosis improved by many orders of magnitude almost overnight (and a lot less costly to provide).
> The core problem imo is there is simply not good enough treatments for addiction (yet?).
Isn't that still treating a symptom, rather than the core problem? If homelessness is caused by drug addiction, what causes drug addiction? Underlying mental health? Lack of opportunity? Government welfare dependence?
I think if we could treat that, we'd also know the core problem.
My hunch (not as an expert) is that people who are very prone to addiction have a maladapted brain system of some kind. I think this system 'malfunction' can either be genetic and/or caused by trauma/environmental reasons in their life. I suspect this because nearly everyone I know that has had addiction problems has had a parent with similar. It's surprisingly rare to find someone with an addiction problem that isn't in the family. Strangely, not all siblings seem to have the same issue.
Problem is, we don't know which system(s) it is yet. The research on kappa opioid receptors is very interesting as the KOR regulates stress response, and we know that stress causes many relapses in previously addicted individuals in recovery.
I also think we may find there are multiple types of addiction, caused by different systems/reasons. These all present very similarly, but similar to the discovery years ago that some infections were caused by viruses and some bacteria, it could be similar for addiction.
So really I think it goes something like this:
People are predisposed to addiction -> they become addicted -> they become homeless and trapped in a chaotic loop which a tiny percent of people can recover from
When I believe the best response for people that are affected by addiction would be something like this
Addicted person (homeless or otherwise) -> some sort of diagnostic (genetic testing?) -> new tailored medication -> recovery
It may be also these maladaptations cause all the mental health problems themselves. But not everyone that has mental health problems becomes addicted, despite experimenting with substances.
In my experience, having watched friends enter that position, it's drugs which cause drug addiction. Mental health might play a factor, but if I gave the average HN user meth or crack every day for three weeks, their brain chemistry would be almost irreversibly changed and would spend years, if not the rest of their life, wanting more. Same goes for powerful opioids.
One can argue that certain people are more predisposed to enjoy being high, I'm one of those people. When you see incredibly rich and successful people like Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Chris Farley, and Philip Seymour Hoffman ultimately losing it all to that desire, I feel like it's hard to blame something like lack of opportunity or government welfare dependence.
The "bad" drugs, crack/meth/opioids/etc. make your brain feel a way sober-type people can't really imagine. I don't know what the answer is.
Not like people in other countries don't have access to the same drugs. It's not solved 100% anywhere, but the magnitude is very different in say Canada.
End of the day, it's still societal issues that's causing some people to go down this path. Most of the drug addicts have some level of "atypical" upbringing. Maybe abusive childhood, constant foster care, growing up in a bad neighborhood with the wrong influence etc. Seems like we should be focusing on solving those issues, which not only benefits the topic at hand but society and communities in general.
I don't think this is true. "Only" a quarter of people that try heroin become addicted. Similar numbers with alcohol (15% of people that try alcohol develop a problem with it), but given alcohol is more widespread, there is some selection bias because only a subset of people try heroin, whereas nearly everyone tries alcohol. I would not be surprised if the overall addiction risk is very similar between alcohol and heroin.
I think it's much more likely some sort of genetic trait underlying it.
> In my experience, having watched friends enter that position, it's drugs which cause drug addiction. Mental health might play a factor, but if I gave the average HN user meth or crack every day for three weeks, their brain chemistry would be almost irreversibly changed and would spend years, if not the rest of their life, wanting more. Same goes for powerful opioids.
I bet if you gave the average HN user meth or crack every day for three weeks, almost certainly nothing would change except their toilet flushing slightly more frequently!
My point was not about basic mechanism of dependence which sure will happen to anybody. It was about what causes them to seek out and take those things in excess in the first place.
> One can argue that certain people are more predisposed to enjoy being high, I'm one of those people. When you see incredibly rich and successful people like Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Chris Farley, and Philip Seymour Hoffman ultimately losing it all to that desire, I feel like it's hard to blame something like lack of opportunity or government welfare dependence.
Individual cases and especially these extreme outliers are no good. It's not that one single government policy or social problem is the cause of all drug addiction, but they could contribute to the issue on a population level.
The problem is that money cannot solve homelessness, because you cannot live in it or eat it or be treated by it. It's just money - numbers in a computer.
Things that might help would be housing, food or treatments. But those real-world things are often very hard to come by, and often encumbered by the very people who profess to want to help.
For example, maybe building more homes would help - but developers are often hamstrung in their ability to do so - and often by exactly the same people that want to fund homeless programs.
So what happens when we give people a lot of money to "solve" a problem, but then prevent them from taking the actions that might help? Well, they still will always find a way to "use" the money (I'm not necessarily implying fraud here), but the results will never materialize. What this looks like in practice is funding studies, working groups, paper-pushing bureaucracies, etc.
So the money is gone, any we don't have anything to show for it.
Please try to speak only for yourself, not all SF residents.
I’ve lived here for a decade, in 6 different neighborhoods (including 6th street). I now live near Golden Gate Park where this article is mostly set. I found it inspiring, not insulting.
I can't speak for SF, but LA had judges recently come down very hard on housing organizations for having basicslly zero data on where 20 billion dollars went. The judge forced actual audits and homelessness is actually slightly improving as of late 2024.
I would nlt he shocked if similar issues are happening in SF. at best very inefficient spending on minor factors, at medium they may be "fixing homelessness" by paying for more security than actual homes (this was one of the LA factors). Or at the damndest it's hurt outright Embezzlement.
You are online way too much. Come see the world say hi to some people. The US isn't a death cult it's just more heavily influenced by propaganda than most smaller countries.
Viewed from 10,000ft it could even be cheaper in the long term, as an overall outcome. Personal attention, guidance through the system, vs constant background EMT interventions, more costly health outcomes, Policing and ultimately incarceration risks.
I don't like reductive economics logic over what is a humane response, but I do like that it may not only be nicer, but actually financially sensible.
What you're describing is universal healthcare being cheaper in the long term, which I would agree with. What is described in this article absolutely does not sound like a productive use of taxpayer money at all. Any one of the ranger's clients that gets semi-permanent shelter is someone else who doesn't. At best, we're pay a full-time salary for someone to play a zero sum game. IMO, it's actually worse than that because such housing is more efficiently allocated to those who are able and willing to navigate the bureaucracy of public housing themselves are more likely to rebound successfully.
Nitpick, but $1M in unpaid bills is nowhere near $1M in costs. Obviously this is still a troubling result but in all likelihood it was less than 10% of that in actual costs and the costs weren’t in fact borne by “the taxpayer” but rather by slightly inflated fees for everyone else, since US hospitals must bill according to an assumption that some percentage of bills will go unpaid, due to the relationship between themselves, the insurers, and uninsured patients.
$580k?! As an European, I can only imagine you got 5 organ transplants, 4 titanium limb replacements, and, idk, night vision or something, while staying in a penthouse suite with masages and coconut milk treatments...
(Obviously joking and I know 2 weeks in a hospital is very unpleasant - I'm sorry for your experience and hope you're doing well).
Indeed. Those clearly-bonkers initial bills are clearly meant to a) intimidate and terrify the uninsured, and b) present a sympathetic facade to politicians and possibly the IRS about how much cost the hospital absorbs from non-paying patients.
In that case, why not move all the homeless from a park in a metropolis to a park in a cheaper/remote area? Then you can actually employ cheaper custodians in those areas to look after these homeless.
It's a lot hard to re-enter society if you're separated from everyone and everyplace you know. Sure, it could be cheaper in some ways to ship the homeless out to bumfuck nowhere, but might be less cost-effective than you think, and certainly less humane.
If drugs are strongly intertwined I wonder if an opportunity to voluntarily seperate from familiar drug triggers and sources might provide some balancing to the downsides.
Drugs & alcohol is the majority of why they are homeless from San Francisco to Grand Junction, CO (drove through & saw they have an unofficial homeless park) to Portland to Seattle to Calgary, etc, etc.
"A survey by the United States Conference of Mayors found that 68 percent of cities reported that substance abuse was the largest cause of homelessness for single adults."
That’s not actually what you want to ask: Drug use is an additional risk factor for becoming homeless, which tells you that the people who are homeless are likely to be drug users - but that really just sorts out who is likely to become homeless, not how many people. If drug use caused homelessness then places with higher substance abuse rates would have higher homelessness rates. But they don’t! The rate of homelessness is driven most clearly by the difference between area income and area housing cost, and does not correlate well to any measures of drug use in the area.
A nice pair of contrasting data points here is WA and West Virginia. Drug usage and addiction, as well as mental health problems, in West Virginia far outstrips Washington - see https://www.kff.org/statedata/mental-health-and-substance-us... However homelessness in Washington is far, far worse than in West Virginia. West Virginia had almost the lowest rate of homelessness in the country.
You do when you subset the homeless population from couch surfers and people living in their car to the people actually finding a wink of sleep under some tarps under a noisy overpass
No you don’t. If 50% of society uses drugs, 5% of society is homeless, and 100% of homeless people uses drugs - then you’d see that all homeless people use drugs, but most drug users are not homeless, so it’s not well correlated at all.
Yes it is harder, but it's also harder for society to offer you the services like free room and board, help getting a job, and the thousand other services we offer in a high cost of living area.
Since society is taking up the bulk of the work in helping you re-enter, you have to make some compromises, and potentially moving to a new place seems like a reasonable one to make. If we want a robust and strong social safety net, we cannot commit to providing all these services in the most expensive place to do so.
Genuine question: is a social darwinist society something folks (perhaps you?) feel like they would survive in? Suppose your community decide it hates people who post online and wanted to ship them to Alaska. You cool with that?
No, but I could see why that is where your mind started.
You have a deep, implicit assumption of a social contract in your statement here:
> Since society is taking up the bulk of the work in helping you re-enter, you have to make some compromises, and potentially moving to a new place seems like a reasonable one to make. If we want a robust and strong social safety net, we cannot commit to providing all these services in the most expensive place to do so.
Some people can't. I know several schizophrenia sufferers who would never be able to hit an expected checklist. Some are brilliant. Some think they talk to an esoteric God and babble prophecy. None are functional.
We used to lock those folks up in sanitoriums for their safety, but due to systemic abuse this ended. Go back further, and the folks were tribal shamans, village jesters, and other elements of society which were supported by others until their (often untimely) deaths.
The latter support more or less ended when we as a species started settling down out of nomadic lives.
As a society, we dramatically underfund infrastructure (crumbling bridges and suburbs), healthcare (exploding costs without quality improvement), education (teachers salary is uncompetitive), government action (court systems aren't expedient, legislators xna be bought).
If we don't want these things, we should have the society decide so. This would be through legislation. But we haven't. We ignore these friction instead of addressing them.
Resolving friction takes effort, and effort has costs.
You have a deep implicit assumption that throwing money at the problem solves it. That's rarely true. In the case of schizophrenics, we have solved it a long time ago, but they refuse to take their meds. No amount of money in social programs will change that. It just shifts the "systemic abuse" (which I agree with you on) from (asylums abusing the ill) to the (the mentally ill abusing the general public). I think abuse is a great way to phrase it. We all get abused by the public excrement, petty crime, needles and trash, loss of use of common areas, etc. We all are being abused by that population.
Park Ranges and Social Services Workers are much cheaper than Police, Paramedics, and Emergency Room Staff.
Your reductive suggestion could be implemented by busing the homeless to prisons.
That's probably not what you were proposing, but it's one interpretation.
See, thats why I don't like the reductive reasoning. After all, when you're moving them why bother with seat belts and comfy chairs? Just use a flatbed truck and they can hold their pathetic possessions on with string, if they have any. And you also neatly assume the resources in the remote location can cope with the burden rather than already being behind the cost curve, compared to rangers in the SF metro area with direct access to the agencies.
Wait a minute, isn't this why it "paid" for the Texan and Floridan governors to ship their problems to the sanctuary cities?
you might have misunderstood; if the homeless is now in a cheaper COL park, then more park custodians can be hired to take care of the homeless. And why should we assume that SF metro agencies are more apt to take care of these downtrodden than small town Nevada City? They haven't exactly done a stellar job so far for decades.
>In fiscal year 2023–2024, San Francisco spent $690 million on homelessness, notes the San Francisco Chronicle. This is a 142% increase from five years ago.
Spending $700M/year on homelessness crisis is straight up insane. There has to be a better way that doesnt cost as much. SF is kinda fucked.
When there is an enormous budget somehow used up but with barely any noticeable effect (and frankly, without much of an expectation that there’s noticeable effect), you can bet there’s someone or a lot of someones siphoning from it.
Btw even $690m isn’t the full picture:
> While that amount does not include what the Department of Public Health or SF Public Works or many other departments spend related to the crisis
They could just take that $700M and divide it up among the ~8000 homeless in the city. That $87,500 per year would be enough to help get someone on their feet pretty quickly. Probably more effective than whatever the hell they’re spending it on today. Salaries for administrators administrating other administrators?
It's half facetious but also half serious, as the amounts of money are simply staggering.
There has to be some middle ground between "homeless in a park" and "living their own life with a job" and "locked up in prison at great cost" that would be satisfactory to everyone.
Park rangers make $30k-40k in small cities/towns. Not to mention big cities can help pay for some of the transition costs for these homeless, with their 15 billion budget. Also, it would be way cheaper to house these homeless once they choose to transition from park to an apartment.
The point would be to still use SF's money to do this, I assume. The point was that SF's money would be better spent on park rangers in a smaller city than in SF itself.
Now, I think there are otherajor issues with this idea (mostly that having a 0.1% population of assisted people is much more workable than a 10% population, as would happen if SF moved every homeless person to a smaller city).
SF park workers are closer to 120K from those I know. A lot of labor intensive hand weeding because the city shuns herbicide. However, this is less than the median SF city employee, which makes 150k
If they could get the guy with asthma regularly seeing a PCP, the money the public is spending on his constant ER trips would more than pay for housing and the time the ranger has to spend on helping him.
(Also note that if that's your general policy then you effectively allow anyone to blackmail you to get whatever they want, just by making it slightly more expensive to not give them what they want)
Maybe. Reductive reasoning is usually a good idea.
> devils advocating
No.
> functionally an artefact of the US health system economics?
So what? If and when you manage to fix the US health system for the working poor then it might become reasonable to provide free healthcare to the disruptive homeless, sure. But until then it isn't.
I think we have fundamentally different views on this. It's also true that disruptive homeless have to be managed in state funded healthsystems worldwide and that includes denying them service when they do bad things, I'm not naieve enough to believe somehow this is a uniquely american problem (disruptive people) but I do think the aspect of reductive health economics here is a pretty unique problem to the US health economy. And I say that living in an economy which has private emergency services alongside the public ones. We just don't have the same problem at scale, because we don't have the underlying health charge model.
I have a moral objection to the government providing more support to a socially disruptive person than they give to someone who is more prosocial. I'm all for a government-provided healthcare that's free for everyone, but prioritising person A because they're more disruptive than person B is morally bankrupt.
It's not about morality, it's about incentives. Under the current system in the US, if you're broke and you have no insurance:
1. The ER is free to you, because they legally cannot refuse to treat you based on your ability to pay.
2. A regular doctor's visit costs $250 and your medicine costs $5-$500/month depending on what you need, because those businesses won't give you things they don't think you'll pay for.
One need not be morally bankrupt to make choice #1. We all choose things that are more expensive for society because they are more convenient or less expensive for us - lots of regular activities of what patio11 calls the professional/managerial class have negative externalities that the rest of society pays for: air travel, personal automobiles, and lawns all come immediately to mind.
If you want people to get their medical care from a PCP and their medicine from the pharmacy, then make it cheaper for them. Health insurance companies know this; that's why many plans lets you see your PCP for a small fixed price even before your deductible is met - because they want to incentivise you to get your care in the way that's cheapest for them.
> One need not be morally bankrupt to make choice #1
I'm talking about the people making the decisions about who gets free doctor's visits, not the people on the receiving end.
> We all choose things that are more expensive for society because they are more convenient or less expensive for us - lots of regular activities of what patio11 calls the professional/managerial class have negative externalities that the rest of society pays for: air travel, personal automobiles, and lawns all come immediately to mind.
That doesn't make it ok. Most people have at least some semblance of conscience and try to cut down on those things - of course no-one is perfect, but that doesn't mean we should allow whataboutism to get in the way of good policymaking. (FWIW I'm all for taxing those things at a fair rate that covers the costs of those externalities)
> If you want people to get their medical care from a PCP and their medicine from the pharmacy, then make it cheaper for them.
Sure. But make it cheaper for all of them. I agree that "it's about incentives" - so don't make it so that the incentive is to do the antisocial thing until the system pays you to stop. It should be easy to extrapolate where that leads.
It’s worth pointing out that he probably qualified for expanded Medicaid in California, so the PCP visits would be covered by that. It’s just a matter of getting him to actually go.
Exactly. The economic argument shouldn't be the only reason to push for better solutions, but it's a compelling one (especially in a system that often prioritizes cost over compassion)
I have a pet theory that love is a basic human need (and a requirement for good mental health), and governments are notoriously bad at providing love no matter how much money you throw at mental health therapy, treatment programs, UBI, etc. Barrows is setting a good example here, but how to get more citizens involved so the burden isn't all on a few rangers?
I suspect that few people want to be involved. It is difficult and dangerous work. It requires a personality that both cares for others, while being resilient enough to face the challenges of those in their care. By in large, it is also a thankless job. Just look at many of the responses here. The public don't care about the time and effort involved. Many think that it is best to just lock them up. Quite often the recipients don't care. They are too busy battling their own demons.
It's probably best to have safety nets in place so that people don't reach these depths in the first place.
> It requires a personality that both cares for others, while being resilient enough to face the challenges of those in their care.
Not only resilience to the challenges, but resilience to the fact that some people you will just fail to help. The more you care about those in your care, the more it will generally consume you when they don't succeed.
This is a hugely difficult thing to overcome, and it's a big reason why, for example, hospital doctors typically end up with relatively little empathy for patients: it's very hard to maintain your mental health while empathizing with people hurting and dying every day. You really have to build some kind of wall between you and them to cope with the inevitable losses.
We have social safety nets in the US. We just don't have one robust enough that you can live in housing and have enough income without working in San Francisco permanently.
The safety net for everyone is your friends and family. Drug addiction destroys that, so you are left alone. They kind of don't have anyone else. People see homelessness, but all I see is a slow trek to a suicide for many. They are dying slowly - and do not make any mistake about that. It's fatal.
Overall, there are many drugs addicts and homeless people in the world. It only bothers us when it obstructs our vision, very disgusting sentences like I cant even visit the beach anymore. I think that's fine, there are many beaches and many other places. You can visit the beach somewhere else, these people are dying.
Millionaire Rogan found the sight of homeless people unbearable so he had to leave the state (could be the taxes, but he's also filthy rich. I don't want to say he's just rotten, that's mean. I'll say a few other things instead).
Your society creates an inordinate amount of homeless people, that's first. Worry about the view later. You are lucky that you even get to see poverty up close, most just move the living fuck away from it.
Wait.
Edit:
I bring Rogan up because if you go through his entire catalog, you will see he has hours and hours of content that just bullies homeless people. He has done that to a few other groups, literal hours if you stack them side by side in a compilation. So there was already a lot of damage done in terms of mindshare by this media-arm.
Trivializing other people's concerns and worries is not the best way to get their help - even when priorities are pretty clear. It is very similar to trivializing "oh you shouldn't be an addict in the first place"
We are dealing with humans here, and all of them, including the homeless and people complaining about views, make up our society.
Again, I said a specific sentence, and I think it's the most important sentence to me. You have to be lucky to be witness to poverty, it provides incredible perspective. I undermine other's concerns about the unsightly view because I believe their attitude is immoral, and I have no issue drawing a red line there.
Having been homeless a couple times the way out is rather simple in most cases if you're sane and sober. A days day labor is enough for food, propane, and bus passes for a week. Anything beyond that us enough to buy a shower at a truck stop and get cleaned up for an interview at a warehouse. You can trivially survive outside with a weeks day labor wages worth of REI gear on the coasts and most the lower 49 ( of course a junky would hawk this as soon as they are dope sick )
On both occasions I used this equation homeless -> day labor for Airbnb to clean up for warehouse/factory interview -> work in factory until deposit on apartment earned to get out.
Most the people actually on the street are nuts or drugged out. People like me would clean construction site, then take a bus to edge of town and climb a flat roof and sleep where no one sees us.
What you're witnessing isn't so much poverty but insanity.
I can't even find work with experience and a clean record. I can't imagine how bad it'd be to find minimum wage work while not having an address to full a form out with. If it's been a whine for you it's gotten so much worse.
>Most the people actually on the street are nuts or drugged out
The most obvious, in your face example are the crazy ones. For basic human survival we remember those the most. But I bet most homeless people are just a person on the streets getting by. Not even the ones begging for change. It's a lot harder to get by in CA though.
If nothing else works I've also fallen back on commercial fishing in the Bering Sea near AK (free food and board included), and hitch hiking to north Dakota to work on the oil rush. I don't know if they still hire but usually they'll hire anyone and maybe give you free board.
The address you out down generally isn't checked, I'll leave it at that.
Putting professional work experience is a no no for minimum wage job. Word your experience to make it sound much more laborious and uneducated.
You're both talking past each other in a high-handed way that speaks perfectly to why this is a problem that's not only unsolved, but toxic to try and solve.
I'm not even sure it's a problem so much as a symptom. If you see someone with shortness of breath, normally offering some oxygen might help them. Unless of course they have COPD, in which case that may very well kill them.
Yes, you can draw a line wherever your moral compass tells you to. My point was not about morality. It is just that regardless of what you think of morals as an individual, these people are all still part of the same society, and parts of both problems and solutions.
And in many parts of the world you have to be lucky not to see/experience poverty from up close.
The thing is that being homeless is a constant state of emergency for homeless people and we don't talk about it like that.
Imagine if someone spent their time complaining about how pulling over for an ambulance or firetruck made them late to an important life event, so we should stop doing that. I don't think most of us would say "hey wait a minute, this person has a genuine concern. Let's not trivialize it".
I disagree with the idea that we should accept that homelessness and crippling drug addiction are socially acceptable and normal aspects of society just because the people going through them are suffering more than you are. I think it’s totally reasonable to express that the beach feeling dangerous and disgusting is in fact awful and that you do not like the state of things, and I do not want to live in a society where you can’t state opinions like this straightforwardly (which is why I left SF).
Unlike what you may have assumed, I was active in local politics campaigning for change while I was there. What I found is that San Franciscans themselves neither wanted things to change nor did they want people like me who disagree with them to be there. I realized not only that it was a losing battle to try to change the nature of the people there, but also that I didn’t want to martyr myself for a city that clearly didn’t want me to call it home.
Can I ask what you do on a regular basis to help homeless people? Was moving away your only actionable item?
I don’t go out of my way to help the homeless either, but I also don’t go out of my way expressing how disgusted I am with them, or rally behind politics that are net bad for everyone just because I really agree that SF is really not to my liking.
You moving away was the adult thing to do. You adding to the carrion call of maga voices is reprehensible.
I am a liberal who believed at some point in my 20s when I lived there that what we needed to fix society’s problems is just to… empathize more. Unfortunately we see how far that gets, as there’s no shortage of “caring” in SF.
I did not vote for Trump, and in fact I was active in SF local politics campaigning for politicians whose platforms I believed would make a real dent in the homelessness problem. Which you’re evidently not interested in doing besides admonishing people for not saying the politically correct thing.
Unfortunately, San Franciscan home owners, when push comes to shove, want a pretty view, the image of a SF frozen how it was when they were young hippies, and inflated housing costs that they profit from, over actually solving any of these problems.
Since then I’ve moved somewhere that prioritizes actually doing things that actually work, and not just feeling bad for people who are downtrodden.
Enjoy your abject human misery and disgusting public spaces, I hope you feeling miserable somehow fixes the issue.
I think what you're saying is particularly true on this subject-- the people with skeptical or negative remarks are likely people who they or their families have personally suffered harm. When someone denies your own experience it's natural to write them off if not to actively oppose their position.
Widely contentious issues are usually contentious precisely because the different perspectives are all simultaneously valid.
Comments from the left in the style of your posting is what finally made me stop voting for left leaning parties. I can not associate with so much hate and prejudice anymore. This rhetoric is alienating the center, but folks like you don't seem to care. But then again, you lost the election... And you still haven't learnt a single thing. The more aggressively you sweep everyone under the same rug, less and less people will be willing to support your causes.
At least "we" are the majority. And people like you ensure that "we" will stay the majority. No sane person can support people like you.
Besides, I am blind. I dont even see the skin colour of a person. Its very hard to be racist in a state like that, but the hardcore left acivist like you will still put me in a basket.
The reason it's a popular target is because it's such an embarrassment, denying it or diminishing it makes it more powerful as a war drum. It makes it more excusable for the drummers to exaggerate it, to the extent that the audience feels the alternative view is just flat out wrong.
When there legitimately is no issue then it is what it is, when there is an issue and we can respond "we know, we're working on it, here are the difficulties we face" that's also understandable. But when a political opponent is committed to outright denying something that many people can see for themselves, that's manna from heaven.
I think if you default to seeing things in terms of "alignment" it means that every time your opponent has a point, even a weak one, it harms all the positions that you've bundled together because it's a wedge for someone to go "well team yellow clearly has a point on X while team green is gaslighting, so ...".
Especially when we generalize on one set of opinions to conclude the person we're talking to is 'the other team' and are according evil unpersons devoid of moral value. Every false positive on that judgement call sends another person in to the arms of people who don't jump to conclusions on them.
To depower a political faction we must depower political factionalism -- because factions are primarily created by their opponents.
>The reason it's a popular target is because it's such an embarrassment
Exactly. SF is one of the most democratic cities in the most democratic states. It is extremely hard for Democrats to blame failure to deliver on Republican obstructionists, it just doesn't ring true when the cities conservatives are left of the median democrat.
It is an outrage for most people on the social progressives too. Why can't we fix this and do better? Los Angeles passed a 1.2 billion dollar homeless housing Bond, and got a bunch of Home Depot sheds for 800k each.
Some critiques are valid, indefensible, and should trigger introspection.
I find your way of downplaying the worries of other citizens way more disgustng then the comment you replied to can ever be. This "your problems are a joke" attitude is very condescending and patronising.
I was called a racist to my face. I chose to go the route of compassion, instead of throwing the same, useless energy back at them. And yes, I think people with such an aggressive style DO need help, it can't be healthy to think such toxic thoughts all the time.
If you meant it sincerely that's nice to hear, but people don't take it that way, similarly to how they don't take getting a referral to the suicide prevention hotline in their DMs as a genuine attempt to save their lives. It doesn't come off as genuine, it comes off as sarcastic concern trolling.
It is unfortunate they called you racist, though. The comments were flagged and hidden before I could ever see them, so all I could really read and respond to were your own response.
There's this thing called religion where we chant hymns and sing songs in an attempt to reorient our psyche to suppress our innate selfishness. By raising our oxytocin levels amongst our community via shared belief and communal celebration, we leave the room in an exuberant mood to serve others.
I know people think the prayer meetings et al are corny, but when you realize what comes afterwards (or should) then it really all makes sense.
And it's not just about helping strangers it's about helping others who are maybe not your best friend but still in your circle.
Congregational religion is one of the most tragically trampled upon secular fences.
It's no surprised that the same methodology was arrived at by the world's great religions. Buddhist and Christian mendicant and service-based monastic orders come to mind
Get more folks involved in local volunteering opportunities, especially ones with direct outreach to people in need.
I'm heavily involved with Austin Bicycle Meals [1]. When a homeless person already knows you are there to help, it creates an entirely different social dynamic than normal. You get opportunities to make conversation and connections, which humanizes how we view these issues.
That's a total reversal to how most people interact with the homeless: in an entirely avoidant manner either randomly on the street or through a car window. That's why so much of the general public is numb to their plight.
The change in mindset that happens is really powerful, can take only a couple of hours of volunteering to happen, and something I hope more people seek out.
Great article highlighting a complex problem, and the steps required to solve it.
EDIT: May be a situation that would call for "Dog Fooding", to solve for the detailed use-cases?
USA does not spend enough resources to get a highly effective suite of services together, nor appreciate enough the value of human life to consistently provide care to people, ironically.
I'm currently dealing with the impact of a homeless, mutually abusive (shouting, fighting), drug-using couple camping either on the strip of grass directly in front of my home (most recently for weeks) or various sidewalks / bus stops in a 2 block radius, here in Seattle.
Worse, they attract "pals" who are : heavier drug users, very very disruptive to the neighborhood by causing nuisances including walking into traffic and being struck / killed here, creating public health issues with drug paraphernalia and human waste, etc.
This article reminds me of the complexity the couple faces, freeing themselves from the shackles of their abusive relationship, moving away from the homeo-statically well-know life on the streets.
I want them gone. I see it's difficult. I wish more Civil Servants were available to guide them.
There aren't that many. The Seattle Unified Care Team has been ineffective for this couple, they have been here for over four years, and it has not improved.
The last time I was in San Francisco was 8.5 years ago. My family had a cabbie with a pile of new tube socks in front seat. When he’d have to stop at a light, he would look for any homeless near the intersection, get their attention, and hand them new socks.
The title let me down; I was hoping this would be an article about a trebuchet. [edit: I see the post title has changed, the original one was something like "park ranger uses extraordinary methods to remove homeless from SF parks"]
I lived next to the park for several years and grew to loathe the dynamic where the lives of people sleeping rough in Golden Gate Park or Civic Center merit months of one-on-on outreach, while the lives of all of those who can't walk through the park in safety, can't send their kids there to play, and can't sit on the grass for fear of stepping on a used needle or a pile of human excrement, don't seem to matter.
I would like to see the city adopt a compassionate approach that doesn't at the same time enable years of lawbreaking by people who make nominally public spaces off-limits to the law-abiding. I'd like to see a San Francisco where there can be at least one clean, safe, working public toilet.
My solution to this was to sell my home and leave San Francisco after living there 19 years. The moment I had a baby on the way, it no longer became tenable for me to deal with the lack of cleanliness or safety on the streets.
The irony is that I moved to Mexico City. It’s a far safer place than San Francisco.
Just for the record, CDMX has a crime rate of over 50,000 per 100,000 residents, meaning that there’s one crime for every two residents each year. SF’s crime rate is about 6,000 per 100,000 - so about eight times safer. CDMX might feel safer than SF to you, but it is unequivocally much, much more dangerous.
When the housing crisis there reaches its breaking point (driven by gentrifying transplants), we’ll see if even the feeling lasts.
Someone in SF with a $2M home can buy something pretty significantly away from the crime areas of Mexico City, and probably has a remote salary that can afford private gun toting security.
Sure, and all cities of all sizes have crime hotspots, but even the rich transplant epicenter, Roma, has a crime rate of about 8 per 100 [1]. That’s well above the SF average, which itself is skewed by a few high-crime outliers like the Tenderloin.
The same is true with San Francisco, even if it isn’t as big. We could cherry pick compare the best neighborhood of Mexico City against the worst neighborhood of SF to falsify a claim that Mexico City is safer than San Francisco.
When my friend got robbed in SF the police didnt even show up for 2hrs and the owner of the bar I was at laughed at the idea of calling the police like they'd care. I highly doubt crime statistics reflect how bad it really is. Besides most of the worst of SF is the dirtiness and petty crime that police care even less about. Come out of the subway and see a homeless guy urinating right in front of the steps without even turning away is not something people are calling the police over but is a typical day-to-day experience.
OK, but the police in Mexico City are corrupt, abusive, and untrusted by the public, so the stats there are likely at least as skewed. You think people there are calling the cops when they get robbed? There’s a neighborhood a few blocks from the presidential palace (and tourist center) that the cops don’t even enter. SF has issues, but this thread was contrasting it with CDMX, and my point is that that’s ridiculous.
As someone who has enjoyed your writing, I find your trebuchet comment to be so distasteful I’ll have a hard time not hearing it if I read your posts again in the future. These are human beings you’re talking about.
And before you say I don’t get to have a say, I’d like to point out I live only 3 blocks from Golden Gate Park and I’m raising my child here. I’ve lived all over the city including in some of the worst areas (6th Street). I do understand the problems we have here, but I don’t think it’s appropriate to suggest we trebuchet people.
You should tell your elected officials that you support more initiatives to help the unhoused then.
I've ben homeless. It's not fun. Nobody does it because they want to. Ending up on the street trying to make the most basic of normality work is really hard work. I didn't end up on meth or anything (I stuck to alcohol), but I understand why some people facing this do. When your life is utter shite, drugs help.
Without any kind of social safety net the people who fall out of the bottom of society have nowhere to go except this. Build a decent safety net and they won't be living in the park and the park becomes the better place you'd like it to be.
So, on behalf of the unhoused: sorry your kids can't play in the park but we're facing bigger problems. Helping us with our problems will help you with yours.
I left San Francisco 20 years ago, but, speaking to the situation in Chicagoland: our municipality funds long-term housing, support, and bridge services for local unhoused, and my understand is that the biggest problem we have with problematic unhoused people --- the people shooting up out in the open, or using vestibules as toilets, or accosting passers-by --- is getting them to take up those services.
It is the case that we have difficulty placing public toilets because of the risks their abuse will pose to unsuspecting users. I don't think it does anybody any good to pretend that these aren't real problems, or that we can moralize past them.
I think, at least in most major metros, we're past the point of it being a live issue whether to fund services to transition homeless people off the streets. Residents will fund those services simply because the alternatives are so disruptive. With that in mind, I feel like any response to this problem that centers on "well we should fund more services" is basically stalling.
I've lived in Chicago since 2001 and when I got here it was pretty rare to see homeless people (and I lived in Uptown for a while back when Broadway was still borderline skid row).
First big wave of it (when you started to see tents appear under the highways and such) was 2008. Second big wave where that seemed to metastasize were Rahm Emmanuel's budget cuts. In particular, he shut down all the mental health clinics, and you ended up with a lot of people getting forced off their meds.
EDIT: Another thing, when I moved here there were still quite a few housing projects. I am not going to pretend they weren't rough. I walked through the ABLA homes most days and watched them get torn down. I had a kid hit me with a rock while biking through Cabrini. But there was a place where people could be off the streets back then. Now where do you go? What's waitlist for section 8 up to?
I'm in Oak Park, for what it's worth. I went to high school next to the ABLA homes. I don't think redeveloping the projects is why we have homeless people; those buildings weren't full of mentally ill people, they were full of families. We replaced the CHA homes with Section 8 vouchers, and that has, I think, improved things.
Well I don't think you're a renter then. I am so glad I bought a house in 2016 because everyone I know who rents has been on a wild ride.
Section 8 has long wait lists. It seems kinda unbelievable to argue that destruction of thousands of units of low income housing didn't cause people to not have housing.
I don't doubt that many people are mentally ill. Before Rahm's cuts, we had a taxpayer-ran system of caring for the mentally ill.
I'm just saying: the ABLA homes weren't a relief valve for people who could not safely take care of themselves. It wasn't where all the people in tents on the streets came from. The CHA projects were overrun with gangs, for sure, but the median CHA tenant was a taxpaying full-time employee. I guess what I'm snagging on here is the assumption that there's an equivalence to draw between an ABLA tenant and a fentanyl addict.
(I've been a renter and a homeowner in Chicago; I grew up here).
Your premise seems to be that homelessness is caused by mental illness. I think homelessness is very often caused by not being able to afford homes. Chicago has a lot less low-income housing now than it did when I got here. There's some basic arithmetic you can do.
To the extent that your premise is true (and I believe that, for many individuals, it is) that also speaks to our city pulling up the ladder on people. I was living in Logan Square when Rahm shut the mental health clinics down. There was one on Milwaukee. People protested for months. People on the streets obviously being in a very bad place and not getting help became a lot more noticeable after.
I’m just not convinced homeless drug addicts are on the street because they’re shy of a house payment. The ones I’ve know have wound up there because they became drug addicts, and that addiction drove them into the abyss, exploiting family and friends and every relationship until they’re under a bridge.
We’ve spent billions and billions on the “homes are the solution to homelessness” crowd. And the problem has only grown worse.
> We’ve spent billions and billions on the “homes are the solution to homelessness” crowd. And the problem has only grown worse.
The agenda for during my adult life has been cutting services for needy (public housing, mental health, etc). Since we seem to agree that homelessness is getting worse isn't it also rational to agree that cutting these services is, at the very least, not helping.
I don't think it's true that funding for services for the homeless have been consistently cut in Chicagoland (or San Francisco) during your adult lifetime. In fact, I'm not even sure that would be true for public housing --- again, a different problem than the one we're talking about --- I think if you look you might find that we spend more on housing assistance now, in constant dollars, than we did in 1980.
I'm a zoning reform person. I believe that increasing the supply of housing will reduce homelessness. But I have evidence to support my belief that it won't resolve the problem of people shooting up in the CTA vestibules, because I know many of those people have been offered secure housing and refused it.
My spouse works in homeless outreach in Texas. Essentially doing the exact thing mentioned in the article that the park rangers are doing - Helping people jump the bureaucratic hurdles of no ID, no birth certificate, etc that preclude the client from obtaining housing or employment. 80% of the clients are grateful and work towards housing. The other 20% refuse any help whatsoever.
This is the nuanced perspective that’s sorely needed in our society. Some people refuse help, and it becomes a talking point and a reason to never offer help— but that simply shouldn’t be the case.
Totally agree, and I'm not trying to minimise the harm that this does to our spaces.
Decades ago there were institutions that these people were placed in. We decided not to do that any more, for good reasons and bad, and I think maybe we should revisit that decision.
Sounds like a parallel issue. Homes won't help with addiction. If Nixon didn't utterly ruin the term, a "war on drugs" would be applicable here. Or rather a "war on addiction".
Hard to make compulsory though. Nixon didn't do it, but that era also gave asylums a horrible reputation.
Isn’t it so stupid how cities don’t just install port a potties everywhere? Same issues here where they aren’t installed because people will make them gross. Well the alternative to a gross port a pottie is to have people poop and pee in the road which I’d say is a lot worse. Like none of our train stations in LA have bathrooms because they would get “gross” so instead people piss in the elevator on the floor because that is better apparently than having a dirty bathroom. Not building bathrooms doesn’t stop biology from happening.
Port-a-potties require frequent emptying and other kinds of maintenance. Other kinds of dry toilets are under development which would address this issue in a variety of ways (e.g. composting toilets) and be applicable to all sorts of interesting scenarios (e.g. remote places in the developing world, where proper disposal of human excreta is a severe public health concern) but overall they're not yet ready for prime time.
The elevator at the train station also requires frequent power washing because people pee in it. The maintenance of the porta pottie is already being paid by society especially by our metro in added custodial needs. Why not just implement it then? Contain the piss and poop?
It took my muni months of meetings to come to the conclusion we could not safely set up public toilets. No, cities can't simply install port a potties everywhere.
San Francisco's homelessness budget in 2021 was $1.1 billion, for a homeless population of maybe 10,000. That works out to $110K per person before you add in state and Federal money.
Say this budget was doubled. What should that money be spent on, that isn't being funded now?
We had this mathematical problem during the Venezuelan migrant crisis. A group of well-intentioned activists bussed about 100 migrants from the CPD station on Grand to Village Hall in Oak Park. By the time the dust had settled, we'd allocated enough money to each family --- through in-kind services, temporary housing, bridge services, etc --- that most of them could have bought a small house (outright!) in the south suburbs. Most of those families would have been way better off with the money than with the program design we came up instead.
Yes I am too. I have no problem with them entering at least facially. I'm saying if we're to provide for them I see even more cost effective options in areas Venezuelans can reside in.
Really hard to say. Many of them ended up in specially-arranged multi-month lease situations; I don't know where they would have gone when the leases ended.
I'll take the next $1.1 and provide them with new tents and sleeping bags and shoes.
More seriously, you get grafts like these. $800k for sheds in Los Angeles [1] or 300k for shipping containers in Oakland [2]. These are the type of stories that destroy hope that government us up to the task of handling the problem, no matter how much money they throw at it.
I'm not familiar with SF finances. I gather the problem with any kind of public works in the USA is that it immediately gets drowned in graft, pork and bureaucracy.
I suspect the bulk of the money in that budget is being spent on civil servants and very little of it actually reaches the people who need the help.
Doubling the budget will just attract more graft and not double the amount of help getting through. But I'm not an expert, so I may well be wrong.
I support initiatives to get really aggressive with drug dealers/users. I wish we could better help the unhoused in humane ways, but when 99% of our social resources we allocate to that effort are forced to go to fent zombies to no appreciable effect, I am very pessimistic we will make any progress no matter how many billions we throw at it.
We lost the War on Drugs. Every attempt to treat drug users as criminals has failed to achieve anything useful.
Portugal (as an example) treats drug use as a health problem and has much better results.
Addiction is a disease, a health problem, not something you can beat out of people by imprisoning them or being "really aggressive". That just makes the problem worse.
The core problem is that there are a large contingent of homeless drug users who just want to be left alone so that they can continue to be homeless drug users. Any services given to them will just be redirected by them towards enabling continued drug use. It's like an inbuilt self-sabotage that is totally alien to regular folks, but the choice way of living for those with it.
This isn't talk about much at all, because the story book tale is that homeless people are just regular people who are down on the luck, and if we could just show them some respect, compassion, and spare a few resources, they'd be right back on their feet again. But that story is just a fairy tale used to sell a feel good idea, reality is way more fucked up than that.
Regular people who are down on their luck are at severe risk of becoming the drug-addict permanent homeless. Living on the street is real hard in an environment like SF, and subjects you to all sorts of wildly stressful circumstances that must be coped with somehow. Taking drugs then becomes a vicious cycle.
The vast majority of people who are simply down on their luck have friends and family that will help them. It’s not like you lose your job and go straight to living under a bridge. Not everyone, but most.
The people who end up in truly dire circumstances have backstabbed everyone who ever trusted or helped them. They have burned every bridge, and nobody they know wants anything to do with them. All to feed a ravenous addiction.
Well yes, but keep in mind the homeless population is still a minority. Apparently SF has a homeless population of 10k out of 900k people. This is your minority.
>The people who end up in truly dire circumstances have backstabbed everyone who ever trusted or helped them.
Or their family backstabbed them, if they ever had one (this article has a case study on someone raised out of an orphanage). Or this continually individualistic society has loosened support networks so you never truly got "friends". Or you simply got priced out because rent became 3k and you're not a silicon valley engineer.
Not all homeless people are drug users. Just the ones you remember most.
I'm sorry, but there is no-one who wants to be a homeless drug user.
They're refusing treatment because they're addicted. They're refusing shelter because the shelters have policies (like not using drugs, or from the article; no pets) that they can't meet.
A lot of them have been abused by the institutions that were supposed to help them in the past, so understandably don't trust that they will be helped by similar institutions now.
Any of us, put in the same situation, would find it impossibly hard to deal with. I was lucky; I had friends who could help and I got lucky with some work that allowed me to get out of that situation. If I'd not had that luck, I could easily have gone down the same road.
I think war on drugs only works on the user side anyhow. The edge in game theory is always to the smuggler not the inspector after all.
Anecdotally during covid la metro cut a ton of staff, including security, and people started smoking meth and crack and fent in the station platforms openly. It was disturbing and made the few of us still riding the system then feel very unsafe and complain to metro leadership and the press. As a result they hired more staff to arrest and kick these people out and ridership constantly improves. I haven’t seen someone smoke from a glass pipe on metro station property in probably years now, going from seeing it at one point or another basically every workday.
I'm reminded of being a tourist in Moscow a few years ago and being pleasantly surprised by the lack of unhoused folks on the streets.
A friend of mine who lived there for a while commented that that's because the police round them up and ship them out to the suburbs where they're not being seen by the tourists. They then migrate back to the centre over time because that's where they can beg, and the cycle repeats. Nothing is solved, no-one wins, and people die because of this policy, but at least the tourists are impressed by the lack of street people.
Moving drug addicts off the subway does literally nothing to solve the problem, except it keeps the subways nice and clean and allows everyone to think the problem doesn't exist any more.
Portuguese complain about the drug zombies a lot more than I do.
We lost the war, so let’s just admit it and move on. Like you say, there is nothing we can do, so we should redirect our resources to unhoused cases that we have a much better chance of solving. We can liberalize drugs if you want, let them do all the fent they want; society just shouldn’t be on the hook for fixing them, which doesn’t seem to work very well anyways, even if we spend all of our money on it.
> Portuguese complain about the drug zombies a lot more than I do.
[0] USA has the highest drug use per head of population in the entire world. Portugal is way down the list.
I don't think there's "nothing we can do". I think it's more of a question of how we approach the problem. We have always approached it as a failure of the individual in question, requiring correction by punishment. This has clearly not worked (ever) but everyone seems reluctant to abandon it.
If we approach addiction as a disease, like cancer, that affects some people against their will, rather than something they chose because they're junkie scum, we might help them more [1]
> society just shouldn’t be on the hook for fixing them
In the USA society is never on the hook for fixing people. All that rugged individualism. Other societies work differently, and that seems to get better results.
It's kinda interesting. In terms of % of GDP on social welfare spending it's halfway down the list (but still just above Australia and Canada which surprises me).
In terms of government taxation and spending it's very close to the top on taxation and #10 on spending, which is definitely not what the USA tells itself.
This implies that the USA taxes folks heavily and then doesn't spend it on social welfare (which seems consistent with the vast military spending).
Would you say military jumps out?[0] Medicare + Social Security + Health + Income Security add up to 44% already; much larger than the 15.5% military budget. Or am I misreading it?
Something like loading up Swains Island chalk full of every potent drug imaginable by the barge full and then offering free one way tickets to whoever wants them might have an effect.
Just an anecdote but I was with my young child in GG park not too long ago and perhaps 50 meters from the artierial road encountered a homeless guy brandishing an axe. This in in a spot that routinely fields families.
I lived near this particular park, so the article struck a chord with me.
For things to be better, we need to start doing things differently, and one starting point is to have compassion for the people who are denied the use of public spaces by the hardcore homeless who refuse outreach and aid.
Let’s not exaggerate here. I’ve been to Golden Gate Park many times in recent months and it is bustling with activity. It’s also a massive area. People are not scrambling over encampments or wading through needles to access most public spaces in the city (though there are certainly some hot spots).
The problem with trebuchets though is that the trebuchet makers are less well connected politically, so there's less opportunities for graft along the way.
Blame the rapacious capitalists that have essentially ripped away the safety nets that Americans used to enjoy. Cost of living has skyrocketed while labor wages have stagnated.
Blame awful economic theory such as neoliberalism, “trickle down economics” that has allowed a few people and corporations to acquire a significant amounts of wealth while not paying back into the system that helped them get there.
Decades of tax cuts to the wealthy while cutting funding for federal/state programs.
Corporations are buying up all of the property and jacking up the rates. Minimum wage hasn’t been increased since 2009.
What we need is a political party that _fights_ for the middle class. We need power to shift back to labor instead of the rapacious capitalists that instead of investing the profits into the company (ie, increase wages for labor) it’s reinvested into stock manipulation tactics such as stock buybacks. The shareholders, often foreigners as well, get paid while labor holds the bag.
Fuck the culture war. The next war is a class war and it won’t end well if this country continues at its current trajectory.
I don't like saying this much as an ex-redditors. But it's a shame seeing this downvoted as if a huge cause of a lot of things isn't our gridlocked politics bribed/powered by donors and billionaires robbing the country blind.
It's nice to read an article showing someone with serious empathy and understanding. We need more of that these days.
But it's also immediately obvious that more of this cannot possibly be the solution. This article is basically the "California liberal" solution turned up to 11: maximum personalized attention, empathy, "softness" plus several opportunities for housing. And yet as the article shows, you put a homeless person with extreme mental illness and/or addiction into a shelter/apartment/SRO/wherever and they will usually end up homeless again. And this system has an extremely high cost. People harassed or attacked by the homeless. Volunteers and government employees with their own trauma from the things they deal with when working with the homeless. Sections of cities that are unlivable. Even when there's a "success story" it is usually "this person's life still sucks, they're still addicted and have the same other demons but now life sucks in a shitty apartment in a shitty neighborhood instead of in a park where it's other people's problem."
The only real option is prevention. We need stronger communities, stronger families, mentorship for young people. The interventions from the article, across the small handful of homeless men described, cost at least several million dollars. Take a fraction of that money and invest it in new windows and fresh paint and flowerbeds in the neighborhoods they grew up in. Give them access to nutritious food and exercise. Provide for regular contact with community leaders and mentors and people who can make a difference in their lives. Allocate money to wholesome community activities (sports, robotics, arts, etc) such that they can vacuum up all the free time of a teenager with nothing better to do. Every dollar invested in each of these things will repay itself a hundredfold.
Much of homelessness is a disease without a cure. What do you do with a disease without a cure? Prevent it.
The frustration of some of the people in the comments is clear - "the city is spending a lot of our tax money on these criminals, savages and addicts and they don't even want help".
It's incredibly privileged and reductive to think of it that way - that, after surviving in a park for 10 YEARS, struggling for food and shelter, surviving the seasons, rest of society and getting beat down to square 1 so many times -and basically being in constant fight or flight mode as the article states - you think you wouldn't resort to escaping through alcohol or drugs, and could simply "decide to get your act together" and adapt to anything the govt agencies expect from you on daily basis in some of those housing solutions.
Those people did not cheerfully decide one day to dedicate their life to shitting all over a park and be addicted to meth. A lot of homeless people got there either by being let down by the society very early on, or by 1-2 bad events in life making it impossible to pay rent and getting dragged into a downward spiral from there.
Solutions should be focused on the root causes, and not the symptoms. If the country is such a late-stage capitalism shithole that so many people are 1 medical emergency away from not being able to pay rent, and there's no safety net or effective government support to prevent them from going homeless, the cost of trying to rehabilitate someone after years on the streets / in the parks is going to be multiplied. I'd like to see how those large budgets are being targetted first at number of new people coming into this situation being reduced, and then additionally decreasing the existing homeless population.
As usually, there are methods being successfully (at least to a larger extent) used in other societies - but USA is very often dismissive of them, because it's special and different.
Nah — usually they decided to do meth and the rest followed. I used to be pretty libertarian about drugs. Victimless crime and all. But in the last ten years, it’s become clear to me that they exploit fundamental human weaknesses. TBH - I’ve become a much bigger fan of the war on drugs, and very heavy penalties for dealers.
Cuz they like it. I’ve known plenty of meth heads in my life despite never trying it myself. Most of them took it because it was powerful, cheap, and they liked the way they felt on it. These were people with decent jobs or trade jobs and it fucked a few of them out of work and I know one girl who died because of her abuse.
In the war against drugs, you're losing very, very, badly.
What, though, is 'pretty libertarian' about drugs? I ask, 'cus every professed-libertarian I've met doesn't seem to be very clear in their arguments about anything really.
the hn cynicism is crazy but unsurprising. turns out can really easily spend your whole life obsessed with a pragmatism that betrays taking any action, however directionally correct
The park rangers empathic personal approach is interesting, she is working within a system not worth navigating as even that best case outcome is still a poor case outcome
> For him, “it was overwhelming,”
I’ve dealt with people that take 15 years to do some basic action because of something considered overwhelming. The only thing I observe is that you could literally start from scratch, the age of zero, and be competent in any field by this time
In this guys case, it took 7 months to get basic identifying paperwork regenerated, so that he can walk into one of those classic grifter housing projects
So many issues with that, masqueraded as a solution
California is simply amazing. In so many areas they have problems simply nobody else has (wildfires due to bad fire control policy, homelessness and public drug usage as discussed here) or is at magnitudes worse scale than elsewhere, and then policymakers handwring about how “nothing can be done”. Nowhere else I have ever been even comes close to what I see in California.
Yeah, meanwhile California alone is a top 10 economy and houses more billionaires than any other place. I wonder if it's a coincidence that increased greed fuels (or buys) less empathy?
Gotta love the change in terminology. 'Unhoused' people instead of homeless, as though their being without a place to live is now someone else's (the American taxpayers') responsibility.
If this person wants to be left alone and live by himself, why doesn't he find some place in the wilderness, away from a city; maybe an area managed by BLM where he won't be bothered? Why does he have to fuck up one of the few parks in a city of 850,000 people?
> Barrows slowly learned that he’d had a rough childhood and had grown up in a foster family. The park was his childhood refuge, a place where he’d spend afternoons wandering around and riding the carousel. She understood then why he had such a deep attachment to the place.
This story shows a rare instance where the system actually helped someone... But unfortunately I think without a truly personal approach, most initiatives (in this field) end up as half-measures at best
Because this is a person wants to sleep rough in a park and has to be pushed through every step of the process to leave it. I would imagine things go much faster if you hate sleeping in a park and want a roof over your head.
Sorry but the idea that such a system of personal involvement is a practical solution is a pipe dream. We need some system of involuntary confinement that isn't prison or psych hospitals imo. A place where we can put these people in humane conditions that is meant to transition them into being able to take care of themselves. A place where they can have private rooms and be given useful work to do, as well as counseling for their mental health issues.
Yep, thought the same thing when reading the article. Christian morality. I think it's a good thing for society to care for the poor and downtrodden, but when it reaches the point of self-flaggelation, it's gone too far. Imo, we need some form of institutionalization that's milder than what we have for the criminally insane, but still coercive.
The rising homeless crisis is a symptom of a much larger issue: poor economic policy propagated by decades of awful neoclassical economic theory and neoliberalism (ie, “trickle down economics” or Reagon-omics)
So I've been looking through overhead map views, and identified possible swastikas near Mental Health Care facilities. For example, This "Specialized Pharmacy" dispenses BH drugs
Is this clockwise or widdershins? I need to squint and ponder the shape before the swastika spins out. Like the arrow in the FedEx logo.
Activate the Satellite Photo view to see the building design
This area in Glendale, AZ is a large medical complex, and the two "spins counterclockwise swastika style" buildings are "Advanced Health" which is boutique cosmetics and upgrades for the wealthy, mostly, and there are dentists and imaging/radiology and vision care. You can Street View the shingles hung outside. No BH here that I found.
Another interesting clockwise swastika, if I am not hallucinating it, is by road design in Tempe 85288:
It's at Priest Drive, [psychiatrists and physicians are a priestly class who practice a religion of Aesclepius, wearing casual blue or dressy white vestments and stethoscope rosary, in temples that smell sanitized and sterile], and there is a little international food court with good falafel and Hindu fare, cybersecurity/IT firms kitty-corner to that, homes going up, a train station, and oh yeah, up the road to NW there's the central behavioral health authorities and crisis line operators, a large disability center, the D.E.S. services for SNAP, unemployment, not far actually from the Phoenix Zoo, etc, (is the Zoo hiring this month? any vacancies for carbon-based homeless?) and a housing agency for the Mentally Ill, Disabled and Chronically Homeless, commercial blood testing lab, etc.
Now of course a Swastika is not automatically rabid Nazi supremacist style, but it helps to understand the positioning of Mental Health Care and ordinary normal physicians and hospitals, the legal authority they carry to route patients out of the community, and into court-ordered drugging, or the penal/corrections/prison system, and the pipeline to cemeteries such as White Tanks or crematoria. Of course many mentally ill people also die or become gravely disabled, or felons, without any treatment.
But I just looked at the graceful curved arms of Priest & Washington as the wheel spins clockwise, I suppose.
Don't forget that the WWII losers and refugees migrated to elsewhere and contributed all their research and intellect to receiving nations. Herr Mengele drowned off South American coast. So it goes.
> Wow, this is almost a parody. An able-bodied meth addict and convicted felon was illegally living in a public park for 20 years, littering the land around him and forcing rangers to spend countless time and resources cleaning up the mess he left behind, making regular emergency room visits due to his unhealthy lifestyle costing the city hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, constantly doing illegal drugs while not holding down a job and suspiciously acquiring new supplies for his encampment after every sweep (how much do you want to be he engages in illegal activity), and giving an extremely hard time to caseworkers and HHS staff who already have a busy workload (including leaving/getting kicked out of housing multiple times). That one Golden Gate Park Dweller has probably cost the city millions of dollars over the last few years while consuming valuable time from caseworkers and park rangers who could be helping someone else (they're already overloaded). Not to mention the potential damage to the park's environment caused by his littering. What this guy needs is outpatient mental health treatment, and it's honestly criminal that our country has basically no resources for people with mental illness and shoves them into jail or shelters without treating their underlying problems.
In australia, they put the people with mental illness or addiction in their own apartment and give them pills, and check in with them regularly. Definitely costs less than 50k/year. Most of them do end up getting better after several years.
It seems US has a system that extracts maximumly from their tax payers and just keeps things in (bad) status quo as long as they can. A babying system if you well.
I have some insight into this, and it might be possible that with good intervention the ongoing costs are low... That being said, in our current system the cases that are severe enough to be in public housing easily cost 10 times that...
I believe the homeless are kept around as a threat to the poor housed Americans. On top of that, those poor people are struggling so greatly that they too don't want to see the homeless helped too much. They don't want to see someone without any job live an easier life than they do with 3.
I think it's a much simpler model. No one wants to help them, funds to help them are mosproportioned and are treating symptoms instead of the cause. It's also politically heated to give more funding because people are less fine using tax dollars to fix and sacrifice their mental health to avoid the issue.
I don't think government thinks far enough ahead to use this as a fear tactic. Most homeless are not some drug users hopelessly addicted.
It's not even remotely true, to any degree. It's very conspiratorial thinking. If "they" were competent, unified, and powerful enough to create a situation like you describe "they" wouldn't need to.
Which gets to the heart of why conspiracy thinking doesn't hold water, who in your theory are "they"?
“They” in my above comment is only used to refer to common people voting myopically. Usually conservatives who vote against social services.
As for my claim of homelessness being a threat - I’m not saying that there’s any grand conspiracy. But in the scheme of capitalism it helps to have an underclass that receive undue blame and keep people from sliding down the ladder further out of fear. No one needs to intentionally keep anyone homeless for this to be a functioning part of the system.
It’s like evolution but on a societal scale. Whatever we have now has persisted for a while. The threat of homelessness is part of why it’s persisted. Imagine if there was no uncomfortable bottom to society. All wage slaves that sell their body and time would simply choose to not work because not working would be a better life. It’s memetics. And of course we need people to do work. But we could be optimizing for happiness instead of GDP growth.
Think of religion. When a religion mandates evangelism it’s not necessarily out of a nefarious central planner trying to gain control over more people. But for religions that do mandate evangelism there is a greater chance the religion thrives. Because obviously recruiting people means you have a bigger religion. But the believers might simply each want to share their religion out of genuine belief in an afterlife.
I was raised in a specifically anti-evangelical religion. It’s pretty small as a result. There were the Shakers, a now extinct sect of Christianity. They considered sex ungodly and thus had no children. That killed the religion. Other sects promote having many children and survive.
This is true, I've heard the SF DA and police departments say so as well. They no longer prosecute or convict people of things here also, because there is no purpose, no where for them to be sent for rehabilitation. As a result we have created an open air mental institution combined with an open air drug market. It's getting pretty wild to live here.
Things are still bad in the city, but the state of homelessness has improved. The article states that the number of tents in Golden Gate Park has gone down by 10x in the last 8 years. I would say there's been a similar decrease on the sidewalks of the city in just the last 4. I walked much of the length of Mission Street yesterday, and there are still a lot of sad scenes to bear witness to. But it's clearly improving.
It's absolutely nuts to me that the government finds ways to spend money on literally anything but providing shelter, clothing, food, and support to people. UBI would be cheaper and far more humane than practically any policy--or lack thereof--they can think of.
This is an article about a man who was given all those things, repeatedly, and went back to sleeping rough in the park. How would giving him money make any difference?
The whole UBI thing has always seemed absurdly naive. What do you think a junky is going to do with that money? That's a rhetorical question. I really seriously doubt having a few extra dollars in the first place is going to either slow mental illness or people picking up drugs, and frankly having a bunch of people out of work with money, for the vast majority of people in my experience, only leads to them picking up bad things like drugs in the first place. One of the most myopic views I read on sites like this, that are obviously heavily biased in their readership, is that if we give people some amount of money for nothing, they'll magically pick up art and entrepreneurship and other productive outlets spontaneously.
What's going to happen, if we're foolish enough to try UBI, is we're going to bleed a bunch more money that immediately gets vaporized (or at least put in the pockets of pushers and alcohol distributors), and then we still will have the same problems for at least 50% of the people that needed the focused benefits like SNAP or Medicaid anyways. We'd be much better served getting very medieval on anyone and everyone selling drugs, and then going from there.
>What do you think a junky is going to do with that money?
Go to a mental institute if we tie the UBI to some basic factors. UBI isn't just some altruistic factor that gives money to everyone without condition. They at least want to make sure you're a citizen and not going to fund the destruction of society with it.
>if we give people some amount of money for nothing, they'll magically pick up art and entrepreneurship and other productive outlets spontaneously.
Talking about non-homeless, it has shown to increase recreation. Not necessarily businesses, but it's nice having time to breathe when you aren't spending half your like just to make sure you can pay rent.
>What's going to happen, if we're foolish enough to try UBI,
You can speculate or you can actually read studies done. Domestically and worldwide.
> We'd be much better served getting very medieval on anyone and everyone selling drugs, and then going from there.
Ironic, isn’t it? Right back to where we started. Portugal has tried the “empathy” approach too and is now going through the slow and long process of rolling it back
He would have still become homeless with UBI. The home he lived in was owned by his grandfather and was sold when he passed away, leaving him with no home at 18 when he could not possibly earn enough to rent or prove to anyone renting that he had enough stability and income to be given a place
>when he could not possibly earn enough to rent or prove to anyone renting that he had enough stability and income to be given a place
Why do you think that's a fault of UBI, rather than the fault of your hypothetical UBI being insufficient? AFAIK any actual implementation of UBI would be intended to be feasible to have housing on, even if it's not very good housing. With UBI, there's a level of income that people are guaranteed to have without needing any proof, that's the whole concept!
> Recreation and Parks Department rangers would cite him and tell him to move
> The department’s environmental services crew...would tear down his tent when he was out and haul away his possessions.
> For Barrows, trying to forcibly remove Kaine from Golden Gate Park seemed both ineffective and cruel
> She embarked on a slow campaign of earning his trust and shepherding him through what one Recreation and Parks Department official described as the “arduous and achingly bureaucratic tasks” necessary just to be eligible for housing
> Kaine had no ID. All of his required public documents, from a birth certificate to criminal records, were under a different name, and they all had to be aligned to move his housing applications forward. Getting everything in order meant trips to various agencies — and the only way to ensure Kaine went was if someone accompanied him: either a member of HOT or Barrows and another ranger who was her partner at the time. Even then, Kaine repeatedly balked. For him, “it was overwhelming,” Barrows recalled.
> After seven months of cajoling, hand-holding, and advocacy by Barrows, Kaine in October 2021 was granted a room at the Civic Center Hotel Navigation Center, where he could stay until he was assigned permanent housing. Barrows and her partner helped him pack and hauled his two suitcases — heavy with gear, broken electronics, and sticks and rocks he’d collected in the park — up to his fifth-floor room. They helped him settle in by donating furniture and clothes, including the boots and pants worn by rangers. “We knew that’s what it was going to take to make it happen,” Barrows said.
..and long story short, the housing he got, sucked.
So they started by trying literally everything else first, including kicking his butt out, destroying his belongings, etc and then eventually had to have someone basically personally escort him through the system, to a get a shitty room and then get yelled at by his neighbors, and you're telling me that "he was given all those things, repeatedly". You didn't read the same article I did.
Besides, this article is just ONE anecdote. The system helps most people absolutely zero--on the contrary, it's a cruel as possible to homeless people in hopes they just move on.
There are people UBI would help. But not the people in this article. The 2nd person in the article had free housing twice, but lost it both times because he kept fighting with people.
On one side, having compassion for vulnerable people is fine, but resources are finite.
The government can help people, but who would they rather help?
- a kid full of potential needing shelter, food, clothing
- a brilliant student needing a scholarship
- a scientist that needs funding for important research
- a family affected by natural disasters
- a veteran with PTSD
- the guy in this article
Should a kid go to bed hungry, or a student be denied access to education so that the government can subsidize the self destructive lifestyle of a person that doesn't even care about the people paying for it?
If you pay taxes on your income, plus taxes on everything you buy, etc... you worked at least 5 out of 12 months of the year for the government. So the government not only can waste it but also end up in debt that will be repaid by your children?
The US is a first world country. Resources are not so finite that we cannot help that entire list and then some. It should not be worrying about funding any of this.
well, one major problem is that you can't force people to get mental health treatment. the courts can, but that means things need to be brought before a judge.
And now with RFK wanting to put people with ADHD into labor camps, any chances of a program to help mentally ill homeless people is close to zero. I am sure that they would accept that "help" :>
Reopen mental institutions and enable forced is institutionalization. Engage this at the federal level. So sick of this crap.
These “homeless” are not the kind who need clean clothes and shelter and some help getting a job. They want to live like this at the expense of the public’s money and enjoyment of public amenities.
I'm pretty far left but I have to agree that some people are not mentally capable of independence, cause public harm, and need to be forcibly committed. I want that to be done carefully and humanely. I don't want someone who sleeps on the street and causes no trouble to get institutionalized. But the worst of them should get jailed, tried, and then sent away.
We also need to support people at risk when they're young. If their parents had mental health support, if they didn't experience a loss of housing as children, if losing their job didn't make opioids looks so attractive, we wouldn't have that many people unable to care for themselves.
What a horrible problem with such a simple solution. Give people adequate and decent housing at reasonable prices or for free if necessary. Laughable this is still a question in the richest country in world history.
Did you read the article? Some of these people don’t want to live in housing. I think what they’d prefer (and it’s not realistic) is to live in the woods on a few acres of their own in a cabin with all of their needs met.
But I agree if housing was more affordable the problem would not be as bad.
Do you really believe that if people had access to cheap / free housing there would an enormous homelessness problem? How many weirdos do you really think are out there??
I was really swept up in this article and the portrait of Amanda Barrows - what a unique and strong person and this city is incredibly lucky to have her.
Unlike some here, I came away with a deep sense of empathy, and today’s HN snark and frustration bounced off me pretty hard. The public order issues - homelessness in parks, the challenges of shared spaces—have certainly impacted me. But more than that, I struggle with how to translate the state of the world to my boys. I always remind them: every unhoused person was once a little boy or girl. We might be older now, but we’re still kids inside, and nobody dreams of growing up in these circumstances.
What struck me most was the balance of compassion and pragmatism that Amanda brings to her work. It’s easy to be frustrated with the policies and bureaucratic inefficiencies that slow down real solutions - but they are, in some ways, understandable.
The biggest frustration for me is the gap between the mental state of many unhoused individuals and the requirements needed to secure housing. The city surely understands the long-term costs of its policies, and it’s run by highly pragmatic people with limited budgets. But rules are rules, and at some point, top-down accommodations (including medical interventions...) are necessary to bridge this gap.
> What struck me most was the balance of compassion and pragmatism that Amanda brings to her work.
Nothing about this article strikes me as pragmatic. She's spending all her energy attempting to help people with the least likelihood of success and then gets angry at the system when they inevitably fail. The city didn't kick Morrisette out of the hotel because they like zero-tolerance policies, but because other people deserve a chance a chance to live in a free hotel room as well.
This is one of the core problems and I don't think people want to admit it "can't be solved."
When I was naive, out on my own after 18 I found a low-income/income-restricted apartment complex and thought I got a steal. It was $1k a month for a 2 bed when everywhere else was closer to $1.5k.
I soon realized I would _never_ live in a low income place if I could help it. Someone was killed in our building. Fights in the parking lot every other day. People leaving trash in the hall ways. People smoking 24/7. Of course, maybe only 25% of the people were "problematic" but that was more than enough to make you feel totally uncomfortable in your own home. The last straw was potheads causing a fire alarm at 3 AM and having to evacuate into the cold night in a panic.
Some people are simply selfish and will not be able to live close to/with others without causing problems. _Most_ people do not want to live next to them.
There are two kinds of 'low income.' There is a working-class neighborhood where people are not rich; life is hard, and stuff is a bit run down, but people are normal. Employed-ish, don't start fights and are respectful. The sense of community and friendliness might even be better than a 'normal' place because you need community to survive. Living in these places is fine. Then there is the kind of 'low income' you describe, which is a very different kind of place and people.
When people talk about this topic, people get into big debates about it because they are thinking of 2 very different kinds of low-income places.
The comment you replied to said "income-restricted", so they probably mean a building covered by government programs that give preferential tax, planning, or other treatment to developers who commit to below-market rent, with tenancy restricted to households meeting income limits.
These are common in large American cities. The problem tenants are a minority, but the landlord lacks the usual incentive to address them since the building will always be full, since it's below-market. The landlord may also be a social benefit organization that's politically disinclined to evict.
Non-market housing tends to go badly in the USA, including programs closely resembling those that have succeeded in other countries. The reasons for that are complex, though I strongly suspect that the weak mental health system (many of the worst problem tenants would be institutionalized elsewhere) contributes.
>I don't think people want to admit it "can't be solved".
The fact that many countries have solved it seems to indicate that you are wrong.
My understanding is that countries who have "solved" homelessness either -
• Societally and culturally produce so few individuals who would behave the way America's most problematic homeless do that direct 1on1 intervention is feasible. There are school districts in the US where the truancy rate exceeds 70%. There are other countries where this is not the case. Switzerland and Norway come to mind.
• Involuntarily commit or arrest individuals who are mentally unfit to function in normal society. Institutionalization, basically. China and Russia come to mind.
If there was a silver bullet which was politically acceptable to "solve" America's homeless problem I ensure you, folks in California would have tried it.
1. Yes, it's cultural and we keep encouraging people to be selfish. Our influencers, the media, this push of "make it in your own" despite no one in history truly being self made. And if we're being frank, prejudice is still alive and well which underfunded certain kinds of areas. We don't want to help those people. And we have 50 mini countries to balance this between.
2. Almost. They don't use for profit prisons who are incentivized to punish. Other countries actually focus on minimizing recidivism. But America keeps falling for "Hard on Crime". Again, that selfishness: "I would never do that, that person deserves to suffer".
>If there was a silver bullet which was politically acceptable to "solve" America's homeless problem I ensure you, folks in California would have tried it.
I agree. But politically people treat reformation as "free handouts". With that attitude nothing will change.
>But America keeps falling for "Hard on Crime". Again, that selfishness: "I would never do that, that person deserves to suffer".
We really need to repeal the 93 crime bill. We have the most incarcerated population in the world by both ratio and total numbers. Way too many offenses are felonies and once people get marked by the system, they will most likely never excel in society, much less get by.
> Involuntarily commit or arrest individuals who are mentally unfit to function in normal society.
Finland, the poster child for housing first, does this as well.
Students graduate high school in Finland and are ecstatic if they can get a job at a restaurant. I have a lot of family there…
And what happens if they don’t find a job? Do they become homeless? I know a few Americans who moved to Finland. They accepted lower wages for a better quality of life.
At a certain point after decades of low wages, the “quality of life” you speak of has been eroded severely. But hey, at least there aren’t any rich people around.
There is homelessness and then there is America with people using drugs in broad daylight and setting up tents on the side walk...
California, like most of the USA, contains a very broad spectrum of political opinion. There are plenty of conservative right wing folk there, it just so happens that the current state of things there leads to them not holding huge amounts of power at the level of the state legislature or governor's office.
This is marked contrast to, for example, most European countries (particularly the two you've mentioned) where the number of people who simply do not see a role for non-carceral government action (i.e. the first solution you've described) is quite small.
Combine that with a referendum process, and you've got a situation in which there are lots of things that could theoretically be tried but will not be, even in California.
The problem isn't "solved." The problem is you have to deal with it in a way that most/everyone would be OK with and vote for. I don't think we can do that in the US.
We could "solve" the problem like Singapore or China (some of these 'many countries'), and simply throw everyone in jail for petty crimes. In fact, IIRC Singapore is one of the safest places on earth. I'm sure SF (and California, and the country at large) would probably take issue with a sudden step up in policing.
> We could "solve" the problem like Singapore or China (some of these 'many countries'), and simply throw everyone in jail for petty crimes
The incarceration rate of the USA is 541/100k:
https://www.prisonstudies.org/country/united-states-america
The incarceration rate of Singapore is 164/100k:
https://www.prisonstudies.org/country/singapore
The homelessness rate in the USA is 19.5/10k. The homelessness rate in Singapore is 1.9/10k.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_ho...
Singapore doesn’t have a homelessness problem because they build as much public housing as possible, sell it to citizens at a massively subsidised rate, and follow up with schemes to rent to people who fall through the system for practically nothing.
If you want to reduce homelessness, you need to build a large volume of housing. San Francisco is doing the exact opposite and getting the exact opposite results.
Do the math on the execution rate. You do _not_ want to be a criminal in Singapore. You especially do not want to be a criminal involved with drugs (which is the highest % offense of prisoners in the US).
> Singapore doesn’t have a homelessness problem because they build as much public housing as possible, sell it to citizens at a massively subsidised rate, and follow up with schemes to rent to people who fall through the system for practically nothing.
How policed are these public housing projects? I wouldn't have a problem living near or even in a place like that if there weren't criminals running around.
The problem I was referencing was the problem of trying to get the general populace to live with antisocial types. I don't think that can be "solved" in the US anytime soon.
> If you want to reduce homelessness, you need to build a large volume of housing. San Francisco is doing the exact opposite and getting the exact opposite results.
Sure. I just don't see that happening in the US without it turning into a dump. I didn't even live in a homeless shelter. I lived in an income restricted place. It was a magnet for criminals and non-criminals are punished for it.
> Do the math on the execution rate. You do _not_ want to be a criminal in Singapore.
In 2023, Singapore executed 5 people, which is less than one in a million:
https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/policy-issues/policy/internatio...
You basically have to bring drugs into the country to be executed. So as long as you don’t do that, this statistic doesn’t affect you at all.
> How policed are these public housing projects? I wouldn't have a problem living near or even in a place like that if there weren't criminals running around.
Three quarters of Singaporeans live in these places, and there is no significant police presence. There doesn’t have to be because the crime rate is so low. Criminals aren’t running around.
> Sure. I just don't see that happening in the US without it turning into a dump. I didn't even live in a homeless shelter. I lived in an income restricted place. It was a magnet for criminals and non-criminals are punished for it.
I think you read “public housing” and interpreted it as something like you have in America, with high crime and poverty. That’s a misinterpretation. This is the type of place most people live in Singapore. They are nice places to live, they are just massively subsidised by the government.
Why are people always championing Singapore as a paragon of free markets while nearly all its residents live in government provided housing
Your (likely rhetorical) question presumes that a nation which is devoted to free markets would require housing to be distributed via free markets, but that's not necessarily true. In fact I'd say there's a lot of evidence built up now that the free market is in fact, not actually that great at distributing property, because necessarily to engage with a market, one must have money, and everyone needs a home, but not everyone has money.
Personally in my ideal world, we would distribute life's essentials in such a way as to be free at point of use, and then leave markets to handle things they're actually good at, like televisions and such.
You're assuming that US federal/states do not also subsidize housing.
They are a "a paragon of free markets" because their social safeties actually work. Housing probably isn't a stock to hoard like in the US, nor owned by private equity to treat as a business. so you can focus on more than just staying alive and do actual work/passions.
Given the numerous housing crisis's all over the world, are you sure that the free market is best positioned to provide housing?
The "housing crisis" all over the world is not really a housing crisis per se. The problem is not with the cost of building more shelter. It's a crisis of land values (they aren't making any more of it, so the free market cannot "provide" it in any real sense) and misguided government regulation, viz. zoning (that has nothing to do with the free market). If you want to improve free market dynamics in the housing sector, get rid of Prop 13 and put a higher property tax on urban land values (that are seeing most of the actual "crisis") while untaxing the built structures. Then local governments will be incented to provide the best living arrangements, since these will directly translate into higher tax revenues.
It’s a “housing crisis” in the very straightforward sense that a lot of people need a house and don’t have one. Your comment is like saying “this ‘famine’ is not really a famine per se, as the problem is not with the cost of growing more food, …”
Typically building housing is illegal without tons of difficult to impossible permits.
That makes it very far from a free market, even if the preexisting housing units are distributed on a fairly free market to the growing population.
Not at all. I'm curious about those who seek to import Singapore's authoritarian climate while praising its free market and rebuking social welfare policies at home
As pointed out above, we in the US incarcerate way more people as a percentage of the population than Singapore. Singapore's Police don't have qualified immunity making them above the law. Not sure what qualifies more as 'authoritarian' but I'd go with the country that imprisons more people and whose Police are immune from consequences.
You don't have to compare Singapore or other places. Just comparing the USA to other English countries shows stark differences. The UK, Canada, Australia, Ireland, and NZ have way less of the bad kind of "low income", better incarceration rates, homeless and more than the USA. And in many ways, people are poorer in those countries than the USA too. It's not money, it's political will and organization.
*English-speaking
Part of the UK is English, but none of the rest are.
You are mentally on a wrong track there. If imprisonment solved your problem, it would already be solved. The US has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world (see: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarce...). Fifth place versus Singapore on 105th. The US incarcerates 3.5 times more of it's population than Singapore.
If you have the money to imprison the homeless you could use that very same money to just build more affordable housing and that would give you more in terms of results per dollar spent.
But that doesn't jive well with the American idea of having to morally punish unwanted behavior, instead of just helping people.
Jailing homeless people is like jailing people who break a leg: Nobody plans to break a leg, so jailing people who do won't reduce the number of people who do. The only thing criminalization of such involuntary traits achieves is to reduce visibility and pushing people to hide it.
> The US incarcerates 3.5 times more of it's population than Singapore.
And Singapore executes ~3.5 times more of it's population than the US. Singapore is a heavily policed state. They still cane people there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caning_in_Singapore
There is a _huge_ difference between how crime is handled in the US and how it is handled in Singapore.
> If you have the money to imprison the homeless you could use that very same money to just build more affordable housing and that would give you more in terms of results per dollar spent.
I'm not talking about the homeless. The people I lived next to had homes (that were unfortunately adjacent to mine). They would constantly commit crime and face 0 repercussions for it. I knew of someone in the building that was on their 5th DUI somehow. They were still driving, still causing problems nearly every week.
In 2024 Singapore executed 9 people, that is a rate of 0.149 per 100k of their population.
The rate of people shot by police in the US is 0.34 per 100k of its population. Who needs capital punishment when you shoot people your police doesn't like even before they have been found guilty?
And your anecdotal evidence is not really valuable in the discussion at hand. Somebody else can say the opposite, I for example live in a country where crime is treated differently and we have less violent crime. You can leave your doors unlocked in a major city, despite living in a red light district with its own share of homeless, drug addicts and mentally ill.
Singapore might execute more people, but now go and compare how many people get killed by the state. I always think its hilarious how people argue about execution when the police kills astronomically more people to the point where actual executions are a statistically insignificant.
> They were still driving, still causing problems nearly every week.
That's what you get when you build a car dependent society. You can't actually prevent people from driving because people can't practically live without driving.
Caning is very cost effective!
Costs almost nothing compared to prisons, and has a comparable deterrence effect.
We don't actually execute that many people in the US, so this was an instant fail on the sniff test:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_Singap...
540 ish executions in 35 years. 50 executions last decade. I don't think these are the statistics that make me thing Singapore is a kill happy country.
>m not talking about the homeless. The people I lived next to had homes (that were unfortunately adjacent to mine). They would constantly commit crime and face 0
Anecdotes are just that. I've been in a nice neighborhood. I don't think people are naturally evil.
—— If you have the money to imprison the homeless you could use that very same money to just build more affordable housing and that would give you more in terms of results per dollar spent. But that doesn't jive well with the American idea of having to morally punish unwanted behavior, instead of just helping people. Jailing homeless people is like jailing people who break a leg: —- Forgive me if i misinterpret you. But i think theirs three relevant perspectives here whereof two and a half disagree with your points that americans dont punish people down on their luck.
first perspective is the common american sympathetic or not to homeless and their perspective on penal code. then 2nd, theres reactive use and enforcement of code, which is the main punishment for homelessness. and third is the figurative cognitive behavior modifiers but instead of being therapists they are american rulers who want subjects to behave in a certain manner ( more on that at the end).
first perspective is divided into two camps i think. empathetic yes lets not punish homelessness, lets help them out. they seem to have more influence in liberal states. then theres the “lazy bum” castigators, like trump said or would say. no sympathy, get a job types.
2nd perspective matters more because homelessness in-effect criminalized if police enforce laws and the laws are sufficient to cause more than a minor inconvenience to the homeless. Most states technically have all types of laws to put homeless people in jail, but in certain states and certain contexts do homelessness get more aggressively targeted and thus punished. its in the form of no body wants to deal with homeless people where they hang out at (nimbyism) so they have police remove them however the police are instructed and allowed to do, which might be making and enforcing laws incidentally target behavior homeless are more likely to do but everyone does like loitering.
3rd perspective is more conjecture but is based on academic documented equivalent cases in french and british colonies (found in david graebers writings) and extrapolated to say that people who make the laws in america must think like cognitive behaviorists specifically to wielding the threat of homelessness as a tool to modify the populations behavior to their agendas. this is conjecture but not unreasonable, and its substantiated.
But places in America do penalize homelessness if not intentionally implicitly. examples include hostile archtecture, no sitting rules in transportation hubs, sleep police in new york, and consequences for being, acting, or appearing homeless in various municipalities which sometimes results in jail.
People get jailed/locked up when they are a physical danger to those around them. The reason jails are the way they are is not so much to punish the inmates but far more relevantly, to protect them from one another. As it turns out, unfortunately, much of the supposed problem with the really long term homeless is that, rightly or wrongly, they are perceived as a physical threat to others. So, even assuming the best possible intentions on your part, whatever place you put the homeless is going to look a lot like jail.
>no sympathy, get a job types.
This was a valid perspective in the 1960s - jobs grew on trees, most people who didn't have a job just didn't want a job. Some people built that perspective in the 1960s, and then never updated it despite jobs no longer growing on trees.
> But that doesn't jive well with the American idea of having to morally punish unwanted behavior, instead of just helping people.
I advocate a Singapore-style justice system then thanks to atoav's revelation that they do much better on crime than we do with punishments like caning and execution for most hard drug offenses.
> We could "solve" the problem like Singapore or China (some of these 'many countries'), and simply throw everyone in jail for petty crimes.
This clearly isn’t true, as the US has a per capita prison population four to five times that of China & Singapore! We jail far, far more people than they do.
Why do you count "per capita" when it should be counted "per crime"? Per capita means nothing for this argument.
You're right, but progressives treat crime statistics as dog whistles for racism, which to be fair isn't uncommon. However, you can make a very similar "woke" argument. Much of crime is caused by centuries of systemic racism that Singapore and China never experienced, so you can't do an apple to apple comparison between incarcerations per capita.
Overall, Singapore and China are significantly more willing to sacrifice freedom in exchange for security. There is more surveillance and no trial by jury, for example.
US Police have qualified immunity, protecting them from their actions against the people, Singapore's Police don't. Who's sacrificing their morals in exchange for security?
What gives you the idea that police in Singapore don't have qualified immunity? It sounds like you're treating it as a buzzword. The police anywhere are not liable for the actions they take as part of their job.
The fact that police in Singapore only have qualified immunity when serving warrants/etc.
Qualified immunity was made up the United States Supreme Court in the 1960s. It is a buzzword.
It could simply be that more people in China and Singapore are afraid to commit crimes. Their prison sentences and punishments are much worse. In 2022, they executed 11 people, the US executed 18. The US has a ~50x larger population.
I'm not even saying the solution is more/harsher policing. I'm saying it is a solution that seemingly works.
It could also be that they didn't governmental distribute drugs to their population with the purpose of mass arresting for petty crimes. So half their criminal population aren't just in for smoking pit.
This is speculation, the parent replied with statistics.
As far as I can tell, the bottom line is king in the US.
So the way I figure, you spend money on imprisoning (though private prisons make more money and can sell non-violent labor).
Or spend money on housing and social workers and maybe a good chunk of this individuals rejoin the workforce and pay taxes.
Or you spend money on cleaning up after, paying for medical emergencies, and increased private security costs.
The option selected is either the one that the invisible hand found to be the most efficient or a better option was not sold well enough.
If the bottom line were actually king, we'd have a VAT, LVT, functional public transit, and sensible zoning laws among other things. Hell, even a fully socialized healthcare system would be more economically efficient than the public-private Frankenstein we have today.
A common meme on both sides of the political aisle is that public spending that they don't like is motivated by someone else's profit, but that's never the why the spending happens. I'd like the government to give me a million bucks to dig a hole in my backyard, but that's not going to happen unless if the voters agree to it.
if you think prison privatization is the problem... you should see state run prisons. while studies show that private prisons are "statistically" worse (lots of problems with the statistics, e.g. commingling criminal incarceration contracts with migrant incarceration contracts), the difference is marginal, at best.
The incentive structure is the bigger issue here, not necessarily prisoner treatment (though yes, we can address that too). A state wants to minimize prisons. A profit run prison wants to keep getting prisoners.
state run prisons and prison guard unions also have this problem. and these orgs are known to have successfully put legislative pressure on laws that will increase incarceration rates
You don’t have to even go to more authoritarian places to see the “solved” phenomenon. Many conservative states have harsher sentences or are more proactive in enforcement of petty crimes to “solve” undesirable/nonconformist behavior. Also solve is a funny word to describe dealing with people who ultimately dont want to conform to arbitrary restrictions on behavior.
Humans naturally evolved in a hunter gathering setting, yet certain governing “civilizing” forces had the audacity to eliminate that as possible lifestyle, and then label people who defy that restriction on lifestyle choice as problemmatic.
I don't see a pattern of conservative states solving drugs or violent crime.
https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/place-based-...
https://americaninequality.substack.com/p/violent-crime-and-...
yeah the pattern is indiscernible because i was talking about petty crimes and related behavior (specifically homelessness) that have a lower per capita rate. violence isnt petty and i assume many drugs offenses arent considered petty. a quick google has validating statistics, although i cant find sources better than business insider at the moment. homeless population per capita by state and homelessness criminalization by state.
> Humans naturally evolved in a hunter gathering setting
Frequently asserted, but not really well substantiated. Plenty of new (or previously) ignored archeological and anthropological evidence that humans moved back and forth fairly seamlessly between hunting, gathering and cultivating in many differents part of the world.
You sound like the kind of person who would have somehow managed to read "The Dawn of Everything" by Graeber & Wengrow, but apparently either did not or for some reason disagree with one of their fundamental conclusions.
yup, in the process of reading Wengrow
The US seems to be a text book case of treating the symptom rather than the cause (and not just in terms of homelessness either). Culturally we:
- Seem to tolerate high income inequality or even see it as a good thing.
- Value "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps" and devalue social safety nets and other avenues of providing opportunity to the masses
- Have given up on higher crime rates, lower education, poorer health care and health outcomes compared to other wealthy nations
Instead of trying to prevent homelessness in the first place, we try to tackle it once it's already there, then throw up our hands and say it's not possible to deal with.
>Seem to tolerate high income inequality or even see it as a good thing.
A free society will by definition be unequal; people have different priorities and abilities, and wealth acquisition isn't a zero sum game. If anything, instead of vilifying billionaires, take a look at the unelected but taxpayer funded and vastly bloated bureaucracies in every country around the world. The shocking revelations of USAID spending billions upon billions to interfere in other countries is example enough.
Prisons are the most equal places in the world in terms of living standards and options available to prisoners; nobody sees them as ideal.
Now lack of upward class mobility - that's a separate problem area to focus on.
It is hard to imagine a nation without this sort of thing to some degree without a total police state. These are issues with poor living in apartments in Europe too you know; a tragedy of the commons situation as the community shoulders the burden of those of it that have vice or mental illness that the government authority doesn’t effectively treat because this class is invisible in local mass media.
yeah, ive heard not having a home was illegal of sorts in the Soviet Union, meaning eviction was illegal or something equivolent.
I know what you mean by police state, but i wonder why america doesn’t consider themselves a police state, with such a large prison population and all the innocuous behaviors that can land you in legal trouble. i guess americans get indoctrinated in a certain way of thinking, where their subset of freedoms which they can mostly practice, makes them think they are free but ignore all the numerous other penalized behaviors. for example: i cant possess cocaine regardless if it wont be consumed as a drug, cant drink in public, cant lay down in public, cant sleep in public(ny), etc etc. a lot of intermediary stuff gets penalized because its the only way to control some tangentially related detrimental behavior, or its penalized for making people feel odd (nudity).
but more on point: america polices property taxes. Any property owned gets taxed automatically. this creates a forced work state to accumulate money to pay Uncle Sam. Failure to comply with this system and you get policed or pushed around as a homeless. David Graeber talks about Madagascar colonies set up with a similar system (underline) intentionally(/u) to produce a productive populace. similarly he mentions ways monarchies created rules and systems to force markets and force productivity elsewhere. I think homelessness circumstances is by design, and this free nonpolice state we call america is actually an artificial created police state. we can choose different governing setups that have different features emergent and by design. Its what Mao attempted to do, its what the French and British monarch did. But i see the coercive force in all the government setups even the ones that claim to be free.
America is a Police state. Qualifiers: 1. Surveillance state. The amount of surveillance information our police now purchase from private companies would make the old Soviets drule. 2. Separate rules for the Police with qualified immunity protections. Singapore doesn't give it's Police qualified immunity protections unless serving warrants. There are two different rules of law in the US, those that apply to the normies, and those that apply to law enforcement. 3. Mass incarceration. 4. Making so much illegal that 'selective enforcement' can be used as a tool of coercion. Just coming up on the Police radar (even if you are someone that reported something) leads to a significantly higher chance of incarceration in the US.
Which countries have solved it, and how? I'm genuinely curious.
If we believe the stories of old, even this country used to have this solved.
It all started to change with O'Connor v. Donaldson. Prior to that, a person could be committed for basically life for just about anything...
Reference: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
I think outrage from that movie and the conditions of the Asylums around that time period was why many of the public asylums were shuttered.
During the late 19th to early 20th century, asylums were launched all over the US. They were commonly public-private partnerships but tended to be spearheaded by altruistic individuals. They were genuinely positive places and were constantly lauded by the public/press/pols.
The focus on humane care was universal. The methods sometimes suffered from incomplete understanding but that improved over time.
From 1930s to 1960s, the responsible individuals died off and no one replaced them. The p/p/p quit caring. Locations transitioned to gov-only. The public/press weren't interested so neither were pols. The quality of care steeply fell off as budgets (read 'efficiency') were prioritized over everything.
By the 1970s, asylums were associated with hellholes for mostly good reasons. By the 1980s most were shuttered. The public justification was the inhumane conditions (typically true). The motivating reason was to recapture the remaining funds that were spent on them. There was little/no interest in funding replacements.
FF to today. Florida has 5 state criminal mental health institutions. Their long history is that patients and staff die there with some regularity. After that came out in a news series, reporters lost access and that's where that's at.
>This is one of the core problems and I don't think people want to admit it "can't be solved."
It certainly can be solved. The real think is people in power don't want to solve it, and the voters don't want to invest in solving it. Admitting your own folly and vainness is much more difficult than dismissing it as an "impossible problem".
>Some people are simply selfish and will not be able to live close to/with others without causing problems. _Most_ people do not want to live next to them.
And those people do not get the help they need. Again, and investment no one cares to put in. Better to sweep it under the rug and try to rely on the security of higher income areas to deal with it than taking preventative measures.
I’m not sure what the right answer is, but asking people who are used to rough and tumble life outside to then behave civilly indoors with zero tolerance seems…set for failure?
There are those that do succeed but those are certainly the most motivated to do so. Others are in transition: know they should get indoors but know their difficulties.
Rather than kicking them out, maybe they are required to attend some mandatory psych sessions. Maybe they go maybe they don’t but at least there support to help them work thru their issues of why they blew up at the staff (as in this instance).
> I’m not sure what the right answer is, but asking people who are used to rough and tumble life outside to then behave civilly indoors with zero tolerance seems…set for failure?
This is true, and that's why housing first is a terrible policy (I've seen it fail spectacularly first hand). Many of these people simply can't take care of themselves, and putting them in free apartments doesn't fix their situation, but it does make life miserable for long-term residents. All while being extremely expensive.
> Maybe they go maybe they don’t
Here they have frequent wellness checks. It doesn't solve anything. This shouldn't be a surprise - someone who's incapable of living civilly when given a free apartment likely isn't going to be a person who's going to put the time and effort into mental health classes.
You seem to be assuming a specific version of housing first that is by no means the only option, and then dismissing the concept as a whole on that basis.
My "specific version" is the version used by government agencies, which specifically states that the government is giving people free permanent housing without requiring prerequisites.
HUD[1]:
"Housing First is an approach to quickly and successfully connect individuals and families experiencing homelessness to permanent housing without preconditions and barriers to entry, such as sobriety, treatment or service participation requirements."
California Department of Housing and Community Development[2]:
"Housing First is an approach to serving people experiencing homelessness that recognizes a homeless person must first be able to access a decent, safe place to live, that does not limit length of stay (permanent housing)...Under the Housing First approach, anyone experiencing homelessness should be connected to a permanent home as quickly as possible, and programs should remove barriers to accessing the housing, like requirements for sobriety or absence of criminal history."
[1] https://files.hudexchange.info/resources/documents/Housing-F... [2] https://www.hcd.ca.gov/grants-funding/active-funding/docs/ho...
The versions used by US government agencies.
Presumably you're aware that's not the only option, as your last comment before the one above was on a thread about the Finnish approach, which has found it to be cheaper and to act as a gateway to get people other help.
The finnish approach isn’t on the same scale as the number of homeless people in the US and is hard to apply.
The classic US exceptionalism "but we're bigger" argument is almost always nonsense because you can subdivide. You're already split in 50 states. You have cities, counties. A system doesn't need to be perfectly applied everywhere at once to start to help.
Furthermore, the Finnish example shows savings per homeless, despite a far cheaper healthcare system. US savings vs. having these people cost a fortune of ER capacity would likely be far higher per homeless.
US potential savings are vastly higher.
Why US taxpayers are so consistently willing to burn taxpayer money to keep things worse when there are more efficient alternatives always confuses me.
Well we spent more time ignoring the issue. Of course we need to climb more to get out. I don't think "but it's hard" is a good mentality when it comes to solving hard problems.
It's not even "but it is hard", but the perennial excuse of "scale", as if the US isn't split in states, and cities, and counties. This comes up so often when someone don't want to acknowledge a solution that works elsewhere (everything from trains to, well, this), and ignoring that you don't need to solve the entire problem everywhere at once to make things better.
If this was some super-costly policy that needed a big apparatus around it, then they'd have a point, but e.g. in Finland, one estimate is that it costs them up to 9,600 euro a year less to house a person first vs. leaving them homeless. As such, just starting to provide some housing units and gradually grow it would be a win for every local government with a homeless person.
It only starts to become a challenge if a few local governments reaches such a level of provision that it attracts homeless people from surrounding areas that don't do anything themselves, but that's not a reason not to start.
Sometimes it feels like US taxpayers wants the government to burn money if the alternative is to do something that might help other people with it.
Its been a success in Canada when tried https://www.cba.org/Publications-Resources/Practice-Tools/Ta...
> asking people who are used to rough and tumble life outside to then behave civilly indoors with zero tolerance seems…set for failure?
This is what I'm saying the ranger is doing. Someone who gets extremely distressed by indoor living is not a good candidate taxpayer funded indoor living. On the other hand, that housing given to someone who is capable of navigating welfare bureaucracy on their own may actually enable someone who is at risk spiraling down a path of no return to turn their life around.
I've always wondered why such people don't live in a rural area. You could literally set aside parks for people wanting to live in this fashion, used to living in this fashion, but also provide facilities (bedding, small cabins, water supplies, washing machines, etc, etc).
You'd need, I think, to have security guards on hand. Not to stop drug use, but instead to stop violence against other homeless, to intervene if medical attention is required, and so on.
While the costs would be higher than some other solutions, it would be lower (I think) than paying for private housing.
Of course, you'd have to force move people, and that's not going to happen. That is, unless you make squatting in a park a crime, and the result is "you're going to be incarcerated in this very nice outdoor place" the "jail".
Maybe a medical order.
My point is, I don't see an issue with some of your logic. Some people won't transition to inside living, or being close to others.
But if you take people used to living in parks, move them to a park with cabins(tiny homes), and state run water/facilities, the cost might be the same, but they'd have a warm bed, etc.
The people who are capable of this do this on their own.
The California high desert is full of variations of this in shacks and trailers across the nearly uninhabited expanse.
The biggest problem is support, but if they can navigate enough to get government assistance they can survive for quite a long time.
What everyone wants, and these people want more than most perhaps, is autonomy. Your idea might work so long as there are few rules that would cause people to be kicked out and so long as money is also provided. It probably won't work if people are forced into it because being forced into things is one of the reason they are in their situation already.
More carrot and less stick, more compassion and less puritanism might have a chance of working.
A few people might be cut out to be rural hermits, but most need other people to fuel their lifestyle with food, booze and drugs, etc. Hard to buy fent by stealing bicycles if you're in a remote park.
Your last idea reminds me of https://mlf.org/community-first/
From what I hear, it is quite successful, giving their residents the dignity and autonomy they need to stand on their own.
Neat. I was thinking more rural, but if this works, it works!
> taxpayer funded
I don't understand the reflexive nature many people present in jumping this kind of framing. Of course it's taxpayer funded. Everything is taxpayer funded. Even when it's not literally paid from taxes collected by the government, it's probably funded by people who pay taxes.
The price you pay for your groceries funds not just the wholesale purchase of the goods you pay for but also the labor, facilities, equipment and resources used to purchase, deliver, store and sell those goods. Considering the total amount of taxes collected versus the revenue of the place you get your groceries, you probably contribute more of your income to operating that place than to any single service funded directly from taxes. The amount of those grocery expenses that goes directly into profits alone is probably still greater than that. Housing first specifically also literally is cheaper than the previous approach by reducing expenses for medical services, policing and incarceration.
So "taxpayer funded" is neither a meaningful qualifier if taken literally nor do its implications stand up to scrutiny.
The most common reason for using this phrase is an emotional appeal to selfishness. Your money is being spent without your say on services you don't benefit from. I find that framing morally appalling but even so, what is the alternative? What the US did before was more expensive. Not housing people means more health issues and ER visits. Throwing them in prison means housing and feeding them at a massive multiple of the cost of a housing first initiative. If you want to save costs without spending money on housing, I guess you could cut their access to medical services but then you might as well allow law enforcement to shoot them on sight as the outcome will be the same.
> On the other hand, that housing given to someone who is capable of navigating welfare bureaucracy on their own
What you're describing is triage, not housing the homeless. If your housing program is small enough that you have to engage in triage and turn people away, it's not addressing homelessness, it's addressing a fraction of the homeless population. It's better than nothing, sure, but it's not enough.
Also triage means weighing the necessary resources for treatment against the likelihood of recovery and the likely extent of the recovery. You don't treat someone who can walk it off but you also don't treat someone who's in very poor health or too far gone to be saved without using a disproportionate amount of resources.
Triage is not how you organize a hospital. Triage is how you respond to an overwhelming emergency situation without access to necessary resources. Triage is a last resort measure to reduce the number of people who will die, not a strategy for helping people survive and thrive.
Homelessness is not a natural disaster, not a spontaneous pandemic. Homelessness is a longstanding social issue most often directly arising from poverty and lack of mental health support. If your concern is with the support being wasted on people with worse chances and not support being insufficiently funded for that kind of decision not having to be made, I think you might be overestimating your humanitarianism.
Also, to repeat a point I often make about this ...
Until sometime around the 1980s, even in the USA poverty and homelessness were scene as systemic failures - "our system should not lead to those results". Post-Reagan, the attitude has shifted dramatically and now poverty and homelessness are broadly seen as personal failures, a mixture of poor morals, bad character and weak decision making. We even used to be a little inclined towards a potential role for the state in helping individuals deal with bad luck, but now bad luck is seen as "gravitating" towards individuals whose fault is all theirs.
This has necessarily drastically altered government policies at the local, state and federal level. We are much, much worse for it, no matter which interpretation of poverty and homelessness is more factually correct.
"Taxpayer funded" pretty obviously means "paid for or subsidized by the government directly" and it seems bad faith to pretend you don't know that.
Of course you can probably find some government subsidy somewhere and trace it to grocery stores but nobody realistically claims grocery stores are taxpayer funded.
The government directly putting homeless in hotels over and over again is very clearly taxpayer funded and everybody knows what is meant when someone says that.
Grocery stores are subsidized by the government. I would call pretty much any grocery chain store that gets government handouts to be taxpayer funded, yes.
>The government directly putting homeless in hotels over and over again is very clearly taxpayer funded and everybody knows what is meant when someone says that.
And why are we framing is as bad? You're either funding their low income housing, or you are funding their jail cell (and they are not generating any real sense of income to stimulate the economy).
If you think this is a reply to their comment, you must not have read it.
Thanks. To clarify for those who can't muster the attention span to make it to the second paragraph: my point is that the phrase is a red herring designed to trigger an emotional response because we're bad at comprehending how miniscule our relative contribution to each "taxpayer funded" expense actually is.
The parent of your post is a good example of how effective it is at doing that, especially when combined with the claim of an apparent wasteful use of that money. If you pay tens of thousands of dollars in taxes and hear about a million dollars of "taxpayer money" being supposedly wasted, your emotional response reflects an imagined scenario where all of your taxes went into that alleged waste even if individual income taxes alone represent over $2 trillion (i.e. million million, or thousand billion) of the US federal budget and your actual relative lifetime contribution to that individual project can't even be measured in cents.
Not to mention that the news sources referring to that spending as waste may be reporting on inaccurate or incomplete information (even when deferring to an official source) and may be misrepresenting or omitting the actual economic efficiency of that spending (e.g. the entire "condoms to Hamas" incident where the official announcement turned out to not only apparently have mistaken about US medical aid in Gaza specifically but also misrepresent the total spending on contraceptives for AIDS relief by the US across the globe as going to a single place - the benefit to Americans of providing contraceptives to HIV hotspots should be obvious enough).
Social housing programs in Europe were first invented in the 19th century. Part of it was altruism to be sure. But the richer part of society also understood that the slums were hotbeds for disease, crime and revolution.
> Your money is being spent without your say on services you don't benefit from.
I don't mind strangers benefitting from my tax dollars. No where do I even imply this, so this idea is completely coming from your own preconceived ideas about those who disagree with you. The problem with this case is that I'm not sure anyone is benefiting from these tax dollars. These men aren't asking for help. They're being pressured into accepting help. Someone resourceful enough to trap racoons isn't fundamentally so helpless that they require 7 months of handholding to apply for temporary housing. He required 7 months because that wasn't something he was interested in the first place but is willing to occasionally humor a pretty ranger. She would have much more success meeting them where they're at. For example, she can set up an arrangement where the rangers will stop harassing the campers and tearing down their encampments if they keep the surroundings clean.
> What you're describing is triage, not housing the homeless
Yes, I'm talking about triage because that's exactly what the ranger is doing.
> She would have much more success meeting them where they're at. For example, she can set up an arrangement where the rangers will stop harassing the campers and tearing down their encampments if they keep the surroundings clean.
We must have read different articles because the one I read stated that her job description is literally to remove people from these parks, just in a more humane way than just harassing the campers and tearing down the campsites. You can make an argument that they should be allowed to let them live there but her job isn't simply to keep the park clean but to stop people from living there.
> Yes, I'm talking about triage because that's exactly what the ranger is doing.
Again, we seem to have read different articles because to me it didn't read like she was prioritizing specific individuals for movement into housing using any of the considerations I described.
> We must have read different articles
Doubling down on the preconceived judgments I see. Yes I read the article, and from it, I can tell she is given a lot of autonomy. I don't thinking allowing a "client" to camp for seven months while you file for paperwork is part of her job description either.
> it didn't read like she was prioritizing specific individuals for movement into housing
She is convincing people who otherwise would have refused offers for housing to take housing. If that's not triage, then you shouldn't have brought that up to begin with.
The ranger is a hero. And hero’s are often toxic in long running scenarios for exactly the reason outlined - they are trying to make up for a systemic failure through self sacrifice, therefore enabling the underlying system failure.
This is needlessly cynical. The hero isn't toxic. The narrative of an individual effort in lieu of calling out the systemic issue is what's toxic. I don't see any way she could have better spent her energy contributing to systemic change whereas by doing what she does she literally improves the lives of others.
Favoring narratives of individual heroes over narratives of systemic changes is a cultural problem. Whether it's Atlas Shrugged, the Odyssey or Harry Potter. It instills a learned helplessness and an artificial desire for a "strong man fix things" that can be very difficult to overcome. But it also atomizes and fractures society and benefits those with the most individual wealth and power.
The ranger is a hero. What she is doing is good. But she shouldn't have to do it. And nobody should have to do so much. The article intentionally buries its lede: if this is what it takes to save one person, how can we save thousands? The implied answer is again helplessness: of course this isn't scalable so we can't. What she is doing is too much for one person, so we can't expect it of others. But the real answer is that literally none of this would be necessary if the system were actually built to help these people.
Her work does not require a herculean effort because it is difficult. It requires so much effort because it is being made difficult. The right question isn't how can we scale this, the right question is how can we make it easy enough that we don't need her to be a hero. The question of scalability answers itself once you've removed the obstacles.
that’s what i said?
You said heroes are enabling the system.
Hero narratives are enabling the system.
Those are two different things. She likely doesn't consinder herself heroic. The story about her however is written in such a way to portray her as heroic. It doesn't leave room for any other option than helplessness and hoping for more heroes to emerge.
Framing it as heroes being toxic and enabling the system suggests accelerationism: if things only get bad enough (i.e. if we stop "enabling" the system by trying to work around it), the people will see how bad things are and demand change. But accelerationism doesn't work. When things are bad enough, the people will want a simple answer and a promise of a fast change. Stable systemic changes don't work fast and they are rarely simple.
To put it another way, heroes aren't toxic, heroes are harm reduction. Harm reduction is good because it helps people in the here and now. But harm reduction is not a solution to problems. Solving problems requires putting in the ground work of building bottom-up social structures. There's no reason to believe she would be just as good and enduring in doing that as she is in what she does now. And most importantly, she wouldn't be helping those she helps now because she might not even see it resulting in change within her lifetime.
So given that heroism doesn't work and letting things get worse doesn't work, what now? It sounds like we need a hero to take on the herculean task of dismantling the individualist atomizing culture norms - oh.
You might want to actually read my comment? The details in the article re-enforce the point.
The noted person she was ‘saving’ attacked someone when she was on vacation, and she is lamenting how if she had been there she could have stopped him from being kicked out again. And she’s angry (and reading between the lines, probably burning out) and lashing out at people. And not assigning any agency to the person she was ‘helping’. That is toxic. Regardless of her hero status. I’m sure she didn’t start this way, but this is a result of being put in this position over and over again and trying to do the right thing.
Like a combat vet with PTSD who attacks a random clerk at a grocery store due to a sudden trigger, or goes around yelling at everyone all the time because they’re always pissed off. That isn’t usually because of a one time event.
That she is also doing what she is doing, is also enabling the brokenness of the system by not allowing it to fail in a terrible way so the public or those in charge actually do something different.
Expecting heros to solve systemic issues by going so above and beyond that they ruin themselves is also toxic. That’s that I’m calling out.
Someone who jumps on a grenade in a foxhole is a hero - and those around them owe them their lives. That should be celebrated.
That someone got close enough to throw a grenade into that foxhole was likely due to many screwups, and if we ignore that, and even reinforce the environment that resulted in it, we’re just murdering heros, aren’t we?
Not that anyone wants to think long and hard about that of course.
It doesn’t mean all of these problems are solvable - some parts of life are, and likely always will be, meat grinders for a number of reasons. Maybe this is one of them.
Thoughts? I think we’re actually in agreement frankly.
I know the common human fallback is going to the ‘strongman’ (the ultimate hero fantasy).
IMO, that will almost certainly ultimately fail, and is toxic for anyone to try to even ask, because really we need to take a legitimately honest accounting of what we need/want, what price we’re willing to pay for it, and then actually follow through.
As a society. So there don’t need to have heros constantly ruining themselves to try to save us.
Notably, however, some people will still try to martyr themselves, even in those situations, to be the hero no one was asking for. But that is a different kind of problem.
perhaps the pervasive narratives of systemic toxicity and chronic social issues that get us down? are those good for society? should we listen to those news stories all day? and believe that things are so awful that There Oughtta Be A Law And Reform?
those who cried out to quote Tax The Rich unquote, were likewise upset by the tariffs being imposed which are taxes on the rich... a really uniform and effective one! taxing corporations by tariffs is much father reaching than taxing individuals. individual heroes.
those who cannot interpret epic fantasy sagas as allegory or larger than Life metaphors are already helpless and they just need entertainment and some opiates.
> maybe they are required to attend some mandatory psych session
According to the social workers I know who work with this population, there is a persistent fear that any form of offered mental health help is a trap for institutionalizing people.
By and large, people who are chronically homeless due to mental health issues will prefer to remain homeless over being required to see a psychiatrist and having to take medicine, or so I'm told.
The issue is also that it’s selection bias - folks who permanently benefit from the treatment leave the system, so you end up with a more and more concentrated population of people who don’t (or refuse to) permanently benefit from it.
Barring other factors, of course.
The point of drugs is not to benefit the patient!! The drugs and treatments protect the community and serve the collective good.
The drugs are administered first to foster obedience, credulity, and fidelity. The patient learns to keep their appointments, lest the drugs be withdrawn. The patient becomes a regular customer at the pharmacy, which must also be done on precise schedules. The drugs must be taken as directed, and the patient learns how to read and understand and follow intricate rubrics for rituals at home, and what foods to avoid, how to coordinate meals with the drugs, etc.
The patient, having demonstrated obedience and fidelity is well-supervised now by the clinic and provider. The drugs are "virtual shackles" that stand in for actual restraints and confinement methods. Just as "chemical castration" substitutes for surgical mutilation, any patient who's on drugs and making regular appointments can be let loose, a feral in the human population, often undetected and blending in.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_psychiatry#/media/F...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippe_Pinel
It's important to consider that Mental/BH has never been a medical discipline, and while today's scrubs and white coats are the priestly raiment of BHT, NP-LPN-RPh-BH, and M.D.s alike, they take blood pressure and do labs, and they prescribe drugs and work in clinical systems, even Western-style BH is, fundamentally, a religious temple cult of profound spirituality. In order to fit the mold of modernist secularism, the BH temple must array itself in trappings of science and respectable, professional jargon. The BH orthodox profession is that mental illness begins and ends in the body, somewhere, hopefully the brain, or at least where the neurotransmitters flow, to be manipulated by sacramental means. Because if mental illness is not bound or subject to the body, or the secret HIPAA-protected rites and liturgies are not concrete and high-tech, then treatments become subjective, outcomes are unpredictable, and evidence cedes ground to superstition or faith in deities and the intangible world of spirit, which must be ignored in order to promote and foster D.E.I.
Ramp up drug regimes trying to blunt aggression, anxiety, restlessness, independent thought and reason, resistance to authority, and other compulsions to harm others, or sometimes the drugs magnify those compulsions and homicidal ideations, and the patient just goes totally apeshit, until the hospital can get to billing their insurance in earnest. But since President Reagan "closed the asylums" the paradigm shifted to keeping people out and free and at-liberty. Because institutionalization is an excessive burden on taxpayers, families, and insurance carriers, and it's labor-intensive: this is recapitulated in the past 5 years because the "Flatten the Curve" mantra was promulgated because there are widespread staff shortages and a lack of skilled, certified HCPs, especially for Defence Against the Dark Arts. I recommend viewing the critically acclaimed, award-winning film "Ladybird" starring Saorsie Ronan; her mother is a psychiatric nurse played by Laurie Metcalf, and see how Ladybird herself turned out
Even for the HCPs on staff, BH facilities are closer to meat-grinders than revolving-doors, as they burn out, train up, move up, drink their own Flavor-Aid, circulate within the system. So those homeless psychos meet a new team of strangers every month or so. Over 25 years, I personally witnessed one clinic that changed its name/brand/ownership 5-6 times, expanded/moved at least 3 times, and there are literally dozens of BH systems that didn't exist 10 years ago, including 8-story hospitals with no 6th floor.
https://www.azahcccs.gov/Fraud/Downloads/ProviderSuspensions...
Would you believe dozens of New Religious Movements operating under auspices of BH services? You may find yourself in a shotgun shack, worshipping Shiva or Kali, or I don't know, in a UFO cult, or practicing tantric yoga with authentic Punjabi Guru, because Medicaid funding. BH Funding for Treatment is Public Safety and a National Security concern: every time a mass shooting is reported on the news, Congress acts to bolster BH funding and services, and so "every time a shell casing pings, someone's clinic builds a wing!"
Ask anyone working in hospice/palliative care and they may confide that drugs are administered when family or staff are irritated or vexed by the patient, rather than basing it on the needs of patient herself. An incoherent or insane patient may be unable to articulate their needs, but when they act out, or become criminally dangerous, they must needs smacked down. "The Squeaky Wheel Gets the Grease" indeed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosemary_Kennedy#Lobotomy
The patient works with the provider to identify and treat more and more conditions. The drugs layer-up, and sometimes extra drugs are shoveled on top, to complement really debilitating effects. But in general, the drugs are exacerbating and magnifying the patient's sins and proclivities. The drugs are interacting and the patient is increasingly entangled in the intricate ritual of provider->pharmacy->daily pill rituals->pharmacy->provider->pills.
It's impossible to know whether recovery is attributable to a true underlying change or whether the drugs have papered over the worst symptoms. Therefore, it's never advisable to stop those drugs or titrate off them, because they don't get labeled with maximums or limits like the OTC stuff can be (this guy once OD'd on fiber supplements).
In the case of "lunatics" and other folks who just had a temporary nervous breakdown or trauma-based freakout, they certainly can recover and exit the system--anyone can exit the system until they're court-ordered or incarcerated, anyway.
There's plenty of other non-drug treatment for outpatients on the streets; counseling/therapy can be done 1:1 or in groups and other supports in the clinic for building life skills, etc. The homeless nutjob population can typically get benefits from us taxpayers to keep them in the clinic 3-5 days a week, just doin' stuff, because the clinic is pretty much a church, and the mentally ill need a religion with structure, rituals, priests, and sacraments like Prozac.
It does benefit the patient to not have to be smacked down by society, kill themselves, die of exposure, etc. right?
There is a reason why the old saw of ‘if you’re poor, you’re crazy. If you’re rich, you’re just eccentric.’ is largely true.
If you’re a threat to society, society will become a problem to you. If you don’t have the resources to deal with that, then you have a real problem.
It's typically illegal and possibly immoral to die by suicide, but again, as a matter of national security, it contributes to the collective good when insane persons fall by the wayside and lessen the harms and burdens for the proletariat, taxpayers and institutions. There are dozens of medications to help foment ideations and actual attempts of self-harm, so the patient benefits by staying out of courts and prisons and teenagers
The more cooperation that can be elicited from the mentally ill, in terms of becoming sicker, and medicated, and incapacitated or dead, the easier it becomes for citizens who support spouses and sane children, for citizens who work and pay taxes, for sane citizens who own property and generate revenue by leveraging assets, for free humans pumping iron, or those exercising the rights to liberty and the pursuit of happyness.
All of the above are increasingly threatened unless mentally ill humans stop procreating, and be removed from law-abiding democratic communities, and until then, controlled and supervised. An incapacitated patient won't leave home, won't start any fights, and won't disrupt a workplace or elementary schools, if the patient struggles for existence, barely able to prepare meals or get sufficient sleep.
The USA is deeply in debt, overpopulated, gripped and choked by a dark, imperceptible 6-year pandemic that marches through every corridor and vehicle, and still the immigrants flow inwards through the Golden Door, ready to work and assimilate, but is our national Zeitgeist on life support? The feeble-minded and mentally ill, malcontents: especially those without caregivers or supportive families, human weeds! They hinder progress, hinder democracy, and they threaten national security.
Uh, did you intend to literally write an argument for authoritarian eugenics? Aka, that darkest part of Nazi’ism?
Yes. I borrowed plenty of tired rhetoric and I'm deeply troubled by the knock-on effects of eugenic policies, but from a grassroots view here among the human weeds, I confess that I'm also describing the status quo in the developed West, and the duty of citizens of that Western culture to engage and participate in the darker side and a culture of death, according to the Divine Plan for each of us.
From across the pond, it seemed that Nazism resulted in the expelling/extermination of foreign, undesirable influences and a stirring up of nativist fervor in order to validate those actions.
Also here across the pond, we've had major immigration by Eastern Bloc or Soviet refugees in the past century. They're a huge influence on our culture and ideology and the direction we've taken since the Civil War. And we see nativist fears and xenophobia in things like the McCarthy "Red Scare", but were they entirely unjustified when today we're screaming about Facebook and soviet interference in elections? ... And our voices are raised in chorus of "get these homeless off the streets, expand [mental] [women's] [right-to-die] health care, defund Churches [and mosques, synagogues and Wiccans?] will no-one rid us of these troublesome [cops, judges]?"
Surprise plot twist: the vicious military expansion that was nipped in the bud left more of a historical mark than the mass emigrations and migrant movements going on underneath the wars. The USA got Albert Einstein, rocket science, a regime change in Hollywood, new captains of industry and finance, and lifeboats full of philanthropists. We children of the Cold War wouldn't know one another at all if it weren't for the IETF, NSF, ARPA-DoD, and TLAs that you can't stand.
Eugenics may be a pseudoscience or a discredited ideology, but is it also entirely without merit, or unjustified? What does a nation do when she's deeply in debt, and more people are struggling for smaller pieces of the pie, and her reputation and huge tracts of land are an attractive destination for refugees and migrants? I guess some of her citizens log into free websites and give unpaid "Billion Keyboard Monkeys" labor to the guys who host the servers.
The obvious problem is that that fear is entirely justified and rational.
Even if you disregard history, the current POTUS literally talked about concentrating homeless populations into centralized camps away from the general population.
How realistic this fear is and how probable it is, is of course debatable. But given that these people probably didn't have any positive experiences with mental healthcare and institutions and that the public discourse often describes them as analogous to vermin or disease and focuses on "removing them" rather than helping them, trusting a psychiatrist - especially if it means having to go to them, especially into a clinical environment - let alone taking psychopharmaceuticals seems like it would require quite the leap of faith.
It is and it isn't. The conversations I'm referencing happened back when Obama was in office.
Every state does have some form of civil / involuntary commitment, though nothing like before the 80's.
Many drugs also come with unpleasant side effects, especially if someone steals them from you and you're stuck with withdrawals. I'm reminded of one person my friend was helping who hated taking his medicine, but if he didn't, he would inevitably become increasingly paranoid that vampires were out to get him. Helping the poor guy live anything close to a "normal" life was a constant challenge.
We used to have work farms, SF had a few. They were shut down by the same counterculture types that said turning a blind eye to drugs and vagrancy wouldn't be a problem.
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I am sorry to hear that the richest country on earth cannot afford tiny private flats for anyone and everyone unhoused.
there are 7 billion people who want to live in free tiny private flat in San Francisco and US in general. More lanes - more traffic - more traffic jams.
I wouldn't live in SF is someone paid me... and not because of the homeless
Nah, count me out of that 7 billion.
Heck, Id2be surprised if we got even a plurality of Americans who said they'd want to live in San Francisco.
The issue is that a lot of homeless actively destroy any housing they are put into.
I mean yes. When engineers making six figures can't afford a flat in the bay area thanks to nimbyism, then you can't expect the government to either.
That's kinda the whole point, but noone is framing that situation as the problem. They would rather think that homeless people are innately inferior and thus deserve to suffer, rather than victims of circumstance in one way or another.
No one is framing it that way because it misses the nuance of these homeless peoples individual issues and how we might actually treat them. When people complain about homeless people in their neighborhood, they aren’t talking about the invisible homeless who are only homeless due to economic circumstance and might be couch surfing or living in their car. They are talking almost exclusively about the most visible population of homeless people, those who have severe mental health or drug addictions and need in patient services for potentially all their life.
> but noone is framing that situation as the problem.
I think yimbys are framing that situation as THE problem.
I meant here, though I think there is also tendency in general
As a side note I think the state of current discourse has shown that anything other than concrete language presents too much opportunity to talk past each other. So I don't think talking about yimbys is specific enough (and its too tempting to strawman). Same for magas and libs, they are broad labels for a broad spectrum of people
So, what do we talk about then? Humans are pretty bad at multitasking so when speaking generally to a public you want to focus on one issue at a time.
I'm saying be more specific not less
The solution increasingly looks like completely replacing SF governance - not just be the people and laws but the structure too.
That seems a weird assertion.
I just went to apartments.com. Palo Alto (not the cheapest place), shows loads of 1 and 2 bedroom apartments under and at 3k/month. That's under $40k/year.
This tax calculator shows the generic case of $120k (low 'six figures'), as being more than $80k takehome:
https://www.talent.com/tax-calculator/California-120000
That means less than 1/2 of a 'low end' engineering salary is taken for housing, and that's without a room-mate. Something most people have at the start of their career, and before being married (which is another way to have a room mate).
Do you actually live in the region? Why do you think almost $4k/month of cash in hand, left over after rent paid and taxes paid, isn't much?
Why do you think no one can find a place to live, when apartments.com show places aplenty?
Are you referring to a specific area, instead of a more central place such as Palo Alto?
Well, in the US the median pre-tax household income is $80k and the median renter spends <35% of their income on rent.
Imagine singlehandedly earning 150% of what the average family earns, in one of the richest countries in the world and living in a one-bedroom apartment - and such a low standard of living isn't even cheap.
The landlords must be laughing all the way to the bank!
Where do you think the grocery store workers are going to live when highly skilled professionals have to roommate to make rent?
I was responding to an assertion that engineers making 6 figures could not afford apartments.
I validated that they certainly can, on their own, and in an expensive area (Palo Alto) too.
I then said that the dynamic is even better with a room mate.
From this you infer I spoke of all affordability?
Why?
Understand, making wild unsubstantiatable and exaggerative assertions about affordability can invalidate a discussion. Stating fact instead of hyperbole is more appropriate.
Hence my response.
I wasn't clear. By "afford a flat" I meant outright purchase property, which the government would need to do to actually solve homelessness.
Sure you can many countries have a social housing program... Cities across the world run into the same problems SF does you know it is not particularly unique or unusual.
Although I am a bit perturbed that there is still such a huge problem with drugs when the economy is booming and unemployment so low. It points to deeper problems within the fabric of American society.
> Although I am a bit perturbed that there is still such a huge problem with drugs when the economy is booming and unemployment so low. It points to deeper problems within the fabric of American society.
I think you’re coming at this from the wrong angle. A lot of people just really like drugs (and alcohol) and it has nothing to do with society getting them down. Surely there are plenty of people abusing substances as a coping mechanism but I think there are likely a lot more who just want to have a good time.
No I don't believe anyone voluntarily chooses to become a drug zombie. I think that if you were able to communicate with these people you would hear a lot of sob stories.
This just sounds like some random-ass assumption if you ask me.
A prerequisite to building social housing is to allow building housing at all. Social housing projects also have to pay for artificially inflated land prices and wait years to obtain permits. SF has spent billions of dollars on building new social housing in the past decade, but that doesn't make a difference when they cost millions of dollars a unit to construct.
>the economy is booming and unemployment so low.
Well that's your first problem. We're hiding the underemplyment crisis with "but unemployment is so low!". Quality of life for underemplyment is a lot closer to homelessness than middle class.
The deeper problem that America is more and more trying to focus on the elite over the working class.
What causes NIMBYism, though? ("lot of things, but...")
My pet theory is that cars are a substantial cause - people don't want more housing because it will result in more traffic and more people using the nearby 'free' parking. Cities that are less car-centric will therefore have less NIMBYism.
"engineers making six figures" is the cause of San Francisco's problems, not "nimbyism."
Lawmakers not having the moral courage to stand up to NIMBYs are part of the problem, along with people not voting for them. Cutting people off at the knees to make the grass taller is not a solution.
I can't agree with this. At various times over the last 30 years, there has been roughly two classes of people in SF: "tech workers", and "everyone else." The "everyone else" comprises teachers, restaurant workers, retail workers, delivery drivers, and others, who cater to the whims of "tech workers." "Everyone else" works in industries subject to competition, market forces, and the ruthless demand for profitability (try keeping a restaurant open for 3 losing quarters). "Tech workers" work in an industry often shielded from these exigencies, cossetted in a pillowy cocoon of VC money. "Everyone else" serves the local community. "Tech workers", if they serve anybody, tend to be disconnected from the local economy and serve national or global markets. Relatedly, "tech workers" are paid high salaries that rise quickly. "Everyone else" is paid much more modest salaries that tend to stagnate. To add insult to injury, not only did this set of circumstances arrive in SF, it also arrived quickly, in waves, representing a series of shocks. Then came the last and possibly the most serious shock: remote work. Altogether, this is a recipe for: spiraling costs, social fragmentation, homelessness, and political turbulence.
Put another way, an ocean of money was poured into a thimble and no amount of "increasing supply" is going to make a difference. Make it two thimbles, ten thimbles, a hundred thimbles, it's still going to leave a mess.
Every time I read this sort of stuff, I ask - do you think that the demand to live in San Francisco is infinite? For a city that’s less than one-half as densely populated as Brooklyn, NY, no less? This problem was solved 150 years ago.
Even if demand was so large as to be practically infinite, all it would mean is that San Francisco becomes the local Manhattan equivalent on the West Coast. Which in turn means big-government California progressives gets a whole lot of additional tax revenue to play with, at zero extra cost to the rest of the economy. How is that supposed to be a bad thing, exactly?
Not necessarily.
https://www.wired.com/story/no-more-deals-san-francisco-cons...
>do you think that the demand to live in San Francisco is infinite?
In practical terms, because of the inevitable feedback loop, yes. Building more housing creates more demand for housing.
If SF built more houses, then rent would drop and thus more businesses/jobs could be profitable at the same standard of living. The more jobs there are, the more demand for housing there is. And if people move into those new houses then the city has a larger userbase for any locally-focused businesses.
This whole loop is why cities keep growing.
In other words, meeting the demand for housing creates more demand for housing.
No, I don't think that the demand to live in San Francisco ever has been or ever will be "infinite." I also don't think that's a relevant question.
Of course it is. You claim that it’s impossible for San Francisco to satiate demand. That implies that it’s functionally infinite seeing as it’s currently less dense than Brooklyn or the north side of Chicago - dense places but not quite Manhattan or Manila.
> You claim that it’s impossible for San Francisco to satiate demand
No, I don't. I claim it's difficult and unlikely.
EDIT: so long as it offers an urban playground to people earning high salaries, that is
So then there’s obviously infinite demand to live in San Francisco. It’s not difficult - we’re actively accomplishing it in other cities that have tons of wealthy people (detached single family in my neighborhood is >$2mm) and relatively affordable housing (an apartment is under $1000/bd).
Continue to say there's infinite demand if you like, but I won't be joining you.
As for "we're actively accomplishing it in other cities", I'm interested in these questions:
1. Who's "we"?
2. Which cities?
3. What exactly is being accomplished?
>1. Who's "we"?
Humans.
>2. Which cities?
My example is Chicago.
>3. What exactly is being accomplished?
Letting people who want to live in San Francisco live there.
If you’re not saying that San Francisco can’t build enough housing to satiate demand, what are you saying, exactly?
> Humans
Can you be more specific?
> Chicago
Chicago's tech sector, while growing, is still smaller than SF's and was much smaller in the past.
> Letting people who want to live in San Francisco live there
Obviously, that's not being accomplished.
> If you’re not saying that San Francisco can’t build enough housing to satiate demand, what are you saying, exactly?
I'm saying such a program would be unlikely to succeed and would be too disruptive to satisfy me, personally (and evidently many other San Franciscans as well). I'm also saying there's another option to increasing supply to meet demand: reducing demand to meet supply.
> Put another way, an ocean of money was poured into a thimble and no amount of "increasing supply" is going to make a difference.
So? The problem is not "too much money", it's too little housing. Having lots of highly-paid folks around is good for local workers' incomes; housing scarcity is really bad for them. Homelessness happens when people can't afford to pay for a home.
> Having lots of highly-paid folks around is good for local workers' incomes
You're describing income inequality. Personally, I don't believe income inequality is good for everybody. I think it tends to benefit some people at the expense of others.
It's also a kind of "income inequality" that those who are "disadvantaged" most from it can avoid very easily, by voting with their feet. But you don't see very many people moving from the highest-income cities in the U.S. to places like Appalachia, or for that matter to the poorest places in Mexico. People tend to do the exact opposite, funnily enough.
And if you were speaking faithfully you know there are mechanisms by coincidence or design that make it harder for the disadvantaged to vote. It's no coincidence that your rep is probably only available every other Tuesday at 1pm while the disadvantaged are working at one of their two jobs.
> But you don't see very many people moving from the highest-income cities in the U.S. to places like Appalachia
CA declined in population this decade until 2024:
https://apnews.com/article/california-population-growth-pand...
So yes, people are moving out.
People did vote with their feet, moving out of the core of the Bay Area to its periphery.
https://chatgpt.com/share/67b36262-3c7c-8013-aa61-f1ff8088fb...
> At various times over the last 30 years, there has been roughly two classes of people in SF: "tech workers", and "everyone else."
You can always arbitrarily divide people into two groups by making one "everybody else", but the two groups you name are not coherent classes. (Not even the first, which overlaps both [a relatively well paid segment of] the working class and the petite bourgeoisie, but especially not the second, which spans from the lowest of the working class to the highest end of the rentier/capitalist class.)
> the two groups you name are not coherent classes
Sure, they are. "tech workers" tend to work in tech companies. "everyone else" tend not to work in tech companies. It's quite coherent. Are there exceptions? Of course. Does the presence of exceptions mean the classes are incoherent? Of course not.
Which of the two classes does San Francisco’s billionaire capitalist class fit into in your analysis - “tech workers?”
Equally curious which the non-working property owners fall into as well?
Why are you curious? I didn't say there were only two classes. I said there's been "roughly" two classes over the last 30 years. Add other classes if you want (billionaire tech owners who don't code, billionaires in non-tech fields like real estate or agriculture or petroleum, old-money San Franciscans, millionaire non-working property owners who don't know how to open a Google Doc), it doesn't affect the conclusions: "tech workers" (and the "tech owners" who pay them) are an important factor causing many of the problems in SF.
Gentrification where crimes goes down, schools get better and home prices go up because people want to live there is the real problem.
Indeed
I’m sure there’s room for both.
I'm sure there isn't.
The problem with rich people is not that they are rich, it's the side effects of them being rich which cause other people to be poorer. I have no problem with Elon owning 10 megayachts if he wants to. Unless he's buying so much steel to build his megayachts that no one else can get steel things. Then it's a problem. And only then.
Even then, the problem could be Elon buying so much steel, or it could be steel manufacturers deliberately limiting steel production and only selling it to Elon to keep prices high. The latter is what is happening with landlords and building restrictions.
Except that the "side effects" of being rich aren't "side effects", they're the essential effects. Being richer than other people by definition means you can outcompete those other people for goods and services. That's the whole purpose. Elon owning 10 megayachts means 10 megayachts (as much as $5 billion) worth of productive capacity being redirected away from other uses that benefit many people, to a use that is frivolous insofar as it largely benefits just one person.
Elon got rich by creating goods and services for other people - such as EV cars, or low-cost space launches. It's a wash. Oh wait, actually it isn't because every trade of goods and services is advantageous to both parties by definition.
(There are of course some who only got rich by transferring wealth away from others - but they're not the ones people mostly complain about wrt. 'the rich'.)
Personally, I don't know any working-class people who can afford a Tesla, let alone a space launch vehicle.
I do!
I met a nursing student in Shanghai who ended up marrying a "driver". (For reference, the way you get into nursing school in China is by flunking the college entrance exam.)
Attending Fudan University, I also met several students there and at the school across the street, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics. Both are highly prestigious.
Everyone's graduated by now, and the most materially successful of all the contacts I made, by far, is the nurse. She already owns a Tesla and an apartment in Shanghai. (She also has a child, which is true of only one of the university students.) What's her secret?
The couple's parents bought those things for them.
What's her secret? She works in healthcare, which is very expensive in the United States and especially in the Bay Area, and tends to pay nurses very very well (especially in the Bay Area). This illustrates my point. Her high salary as a nurse comes at the cost of many people around her, in many ways: we all pay higher healthcare costs, in part because of the high pay for doctors and nurses (as well as to hospital administrators, insurance companies, drug companies, etc.), and she's yet another highly-paid professional with the ability to outcompete other people for things like housing. Is she working class? I'm not convinced that she is.
This is one of the worst failures of reading comprehension I've ever seen.
Quick question: what is the only country mentioned in my comment above?
Quick question: why do you ask?
Well, for example, you referred to my acquaintance's "high salary as a nurse" despite the fact that she doesn't have one. You strongly implied that you believe she is located in the United States, despite the fact that I mentioned her location in China in roughly every other sentence of my comment. Nothing in your comment suggested that you were able to understand any complete sentence from mine.
Was that all an illusion? If so, what image were you trying to present? Why?
Just as I thought. You said you know a working-class person who can afford a Tesla, in a thread about homelessness in San Francisco which, last time I checked, is in the United States. You said she was a nursing student in Shanghai in the past, and does own an apartment in Shanghai now. I know people from China who are nurses in California now, and I know people who live in California who own property abroad, and nothing you wrote ruled out any of that.
So, if it turns out your friend isn't a nurse, doesn't have a high salary, and doesn't live in San Francisco, or some combination thereof, I'm going to score that as a giant lapse in reading comprehension in a thread about high salaries in San Francisco.
I do, especially the cheaper ones. Many people buy F150s as well (best selling vehicle in the US), as they are about the same prices.
The median price for a Tesla Model 3 in 2024 was ~$47k. The median price for a 4-door compact sedan in 2024 was ~$26k, or almost half as much. I'm sure some working-class people can afford a Tesla. None of these are hard and fast rules, and there are exceptions. But, which do you think is going to be more affordable to a typical working class person? The $47k car or the $26k car?
No one said more affordable, the commenter above simply said affordable to which I rebutted.
The commenter above that introduced the word affordable, that commenter was me, and I'm free to clarify what I meant, which I just did.
Then perhaps you should clarify it in the beginning as to not have these exchanges on semantics. Anyway, of course a cheaper product is more affordable than a more expensive one, that's a vacuous, trivially true statement that does not add anything to the discussion being made in this thread.
> Then perhaps you should clarify it in the beginning as to not have these exchanges on semantics
Well, nobody's perfect. After all, perhaps you could've been perceptive enough to understand that I meant that for a long time, and even now, Elon's cars have been premium products at the high end in their category, priced accordingly, and tend to be less affordable for working class people than the alternatives (and even out of reach for some of them), without getting wound around the axle on these "exchanges on semantics." And yet, here we are.
> Anyway, of course a cheaper product is more affordable than a more expensive one, that's a vacuous, trivially true statement that does not add anything to the discussion being made in this thread.
In my experience, it's the trivially true propositions that internet debaters most readily overlook.
> In my experience, it's the trivially true propositions that internet debaters most readily overlook.
I could say the same if I had no real argument to provide too. I understood perfectly fine what you are saying about Teslas being premium products, but I don't see how it is relevant to the question at hand, because the person above said "Elon got rich by creating goods and services for other people," so saying that you personally don't know anyone who is middle class who could afford them is a non-sequitur; no one said anything about Teslas being affordable for middle class at all (even though they are now starting to be, whether there are more affordable options or not), as "goods and services for other people" does not specify anything about the types of people or their income levels; if he sold superyachts to only the rich, then he'd have also gotten rich himself.
If you'll then say something about how "he should make things more affordable for people," or "he shouldn't have gotten so rich selling rich things to rich people," well, I'm not sure what to tell you, that's shifting the goalposts at the very least, and it looks like you have an axe to grind against rich people in general. "[Billions of dolalrs] worth of productive capacity [are] being redirected away from other uses that benefit many people" is not how economics and value creation works, much as you believe so.
> the person above said "Elon got rich by creating goods and services for other people,"
That's not all they said. They also said, "such as EV cars, or low-cost space launches. It's a wash. Oh wait, actually it isn't because every trade of goods and services is advantageous to both parties by definition."
What's the significance of "low-cost" for space launches? What do they mean by, "It's a wash." What do they mean by, "every trade of goods an services is advantageous to both parties."? Do they mean that low-cost space launches benefit all or most Americans, because we all benefit from satellites for weather and GPS? Maybe. Do they mean that with both space launches and EV cars, the benefits of Elon's activities to all or most Americans wash out any drawbacks of him being rich? Maybe. Do they mean that this balancing of benefits and drawbacks always occurs because it's built into free-market capitalism? Maybe. Those interpretations aren't ruled out so far. You can't be certain they aren't what they intended any more than I can be certain that they are. It certainly would be in keeping with a common line of argument, which is that wealthy people return as much or more to any economy as they extract from it. I don't know that this is this person's line of argument, but it could be, and if it is then it's not a non-sequitur to attack that line of argument by throwing into doubt the universality of the benefits of Elon's products.
> If you'll then say something about how "he should make things more affordable for people,"
Let me stop you right there. I practically never hand out recommendations for what people "should" do.
You are reading universality where that was not implied whatsoever. "Both parties" simply means the buyer and seller (it is indeed a restatement of the principle of comparative advantage if you look in any economics textbook, both the buyer and seller in a market benefit from the transaction because both produce provide what the other cannot, and facilitate it through money as the medium of exchange), where are you getting the idea that that relates to the American people at large? In the case of Teslas, people who give money to the company get a car back and the company gets to continue to do RND and create more cars. In the case of SpaceX, it's the governments or private corporations that want to send things to space. That's it, nothing was said as to whether these transactions benefit the average American, that is why I said your comment is a non sequitur.
> You are reading universality where that was not implied whatsoever
I'm not persuaded you're in a position to know what zozbot234 implied.
> where are you getting the idea that that relates to the American people at large
From my experience talking to other people on related topics.
> nothing was said as to whether these transactions benefit the average American
Something was said as to whether the class of people to which one of the parties to these transactions (Elon Musk, that is) belongs benefits the average American. It was said by me near the root of this sub-thread, in the comment to which zozbot234 replied.
> that is why I said your comment is a non sequitur.
If you're handing out non-sequitur demerits, hand one to zozbot234 then, if that person's comment and everything after it doesn't relate to the American people at large, as you seem to imply. Or, hand one to yourself. Take your pick.
> Something was said as to whether the class of people to which one of the parties to these transactions (Elon Musk, that is) belongs benefits the average American. It was said by me near the root of this sub-thread, in the comment to which zozbot234 replied
> hand one to zozbot234 then
No, they were directly responding to your claim that
> Elon owning 10 megayachts means 10 megayachts (as much as $5 billion) worth of productive capacity being redirected away from other uses that benefit many people, to a use that is frivolous insofar as it largely benefits just one person.
They are saying that there is no relationship to wealth by billionaires and helping "the average American," only that they can get rich by creating value, whether it be for one person or many, and that it is not redirection but creation of wealth that benefits both parties. Their statement does not have anything to do with "the average American" because they were directly refuting that there may (or may not be) "uses that benefit many people," yet you misunderstood to thinking that they were still somehow talking about the "many people" part. This is quite clear in their comment but I still don't think you quite understood the thread of logic of the thread, particularly how their refutation redirected the topic of conversation, to which I replied.
> I'm not persuaded you're in a position to know what zozbot234 implied.
If you do not know the basics of the economics of comparative advantage, particularly in terms of how people talk about "both parties" in a transaction, then I can see why you are not persuaded.
> From my experience talking to other people on related topics.
Sure, but that is not this thread however.
Again, sounds like you have an axe to grind against billionaires which is biasing your argumentation.
>> hand one to zozbot234 then
> No
Then hand one to yourself.
> They are saying that there is no relationship to wealth by billionaires and helping "the average American," only that they can get rich by creating value, whether it be for one person or many,
I know they're saying that (or more accurately, that's what I infer...neither of us knows for certain what zozbot234 is saying). And, I'm saying they're wrong.
> and that it is not redirection but creation of wealth that benefits both parties.
Well, now you're both wrong because it is a redirection of productive capacity (which is the term I used in the parent comment) and that has drawbacks for "many people." That a few megayachts might have benefits for a few people doesn't change that.
> yet you misunderstood to thinking that they were still somehow talking about the "many people" part
Neither of use knows what they were thinking, so you're in no position to say whether there was or wasn't a misunderstanding.
> I still don't think you quite understood the thread of logic of the thread, particularly how their refutation redirected the topic of conversation
If they redirected the topic of the conversation, then I'm going to score that as a non-sequitur once again.
> If you do not know the basics of the economics of comparative advantage
Give yourself yet another non-sequitur demerit. Why? Because the "basics of the economics of comparative advantage" can't tell you anything about what was in zozbot234's head. Perhaps they don't understand those basics. How do you know they do? Did you ask them?
> Sure, but that is not this thread however.
I'm starting to doubt you even understand the role that experience plays.
> sounds like you have an axe to grind against billionaires which is biasing your argumentation.
Mea culpa. I do have an axe to grind against billionaires. Don't you? I also have an axe to grind against autocrats and despots. Don't you? Or would you score any critique of [insert geopolitical villain here] as "biased"?
Okay, if you want to argue about what you thought was being said (ironic) instead of what words were put on the page, then I cannot help you any further. Goodbye.
I never wanted to argue with you at all. You replied to me, not the other way around. Also, it would be impossible for you to "help [me] any further" because, despite your bid for self-flattery, you haven't "helped" me at all. If you don't want to discuss the matter any longer, suit yourself. No one held a gun to your head.
If you take even small turns of phrase so literally to continue to argue about, then I honestly don't know what to tell you. Have a nice day.
In a debate tactic I've seen a million times you committed the "begging the question" fallacy, so I drew attention to it. If you don't like it then--what were the words you used?--oh right, "I honestly don't know what to tell you."
Toodle-loo!
GP said afford, not that they are buying them anyway despite living paycheck to paycheck.
Sounds like goalpost moving for the common use of the word "afford," but even if we take it to be what you mean, that's still an assumption you're making, as they can afford it theoretically, and the fact that they do or don't buy is ancillary; I can also afford a Lamborghini, but I'm not going to buy one.
zozbot234, why do you say that Elon got rich by creating goods and services for other people? What I mean is, what do you expect your readers to infer from this, or what do you hope us to conclude from it?
[dead]
There is honor is such a quest. https://blog.granneman.com/2005/09/30/cuchullin-fights-the-o...
That's what the article was written for-- and it's one valid perspective on it.
To those whose lives have been irreparably harmed by the violent mentally ill people inhabiting SF's streets and parks while the police stand idle and billions of their tax dollars are spent annually failing to solve the problem-- it might hit a bit differently. That isn't the story here, but when you see people taking it differently than you it isn't necessarily because are in any way lacking in compassion.
The article paints the person in question as a harmless Garden Hermit ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_hermit ), perhaps he is but many of the support-resistant homeless are certainly not harmless.
If a black person attacks you, does that mean that black people are then violent? All the statistics I've ever seen indicate that while the homeless and mentally ill are particularly prone to being victims of violence, they don't seem to actually pose a higher issue of safety than anyone else you encounter in your daily life.
It makes sense that would be the case when you think of it - do the rates of violence decrease as you move up the socioeconomic ladder? By all indications the rate of violence among the very wealthy is not dissimilar from those lower on the socioeconomic ladder. Why would you think homelessness is a cliff through which people suddenly become drastically more violent, especially considering how people like Putin and drug lords are extremely wealthy while paying people lower on the socioeconomic rung to do violence on their behalf to protect their economic interests?
The message you are responding to did not say anything about homeless people in general, nor anything about race, nor economic standing.
Being a victim of violence is entirely compatible with being a perpetrator of violence. I believe that is very often the case.
But if you ever have a person in a crisp tailored suit come out nowhere at you with a knife in an effort to murder you for no reason than delusion or perhaps a desire to steal your backpack, please let me know.
This isn't a remark on wealthy people being more or less capable of physical violence, but rather that untreated serious mental illness is usually incompatible with maintaining a high maintenance lifestyle. While headwinds probably mean that many of the violent people on the SF streets did come from unprivileged backgrounds, I'm sure people from all different starting points end up there too.
I was highlighting the logical fallacy being made with this provocative statement:
> To those whose lives have been irreparably harmed by the violent mentally ill people inhabiting SF's streets and parks while the police stand idle and billions of their tax dollars are spent annually failing to solve the problem-- it might hit a bit differently
The logic is that if your life is harmed by a violent mentally ill homeless person, then all homeless mentally ill people are more prone to causing such behavior. It’s flawed and I was purposefully making a provocative statement. A statement I might add that has actually been made in the past with much of the same emotional reasoning - I was hoping the jarring racism would resonante and share much of the same callous tone being displayed.
> This isn't a remark on wealthy people being more or less capable of physical violence, but rather that untreated serious mental illness is usually incompatible with maintaining a high maintenance lifestyle
I remember when Bob Lee was murdered in SF and everyone came out of the woodwork claiming it’s the supposedly violent mentally ill homeless people who clearly must have been responsible (it wasn’t). It’s important to separate the baseless narrative from the actual facts on the ground. Mentally ill and homeless make people feel uneasy and unsafe but the actual data suggests in reality they’re not so much different.
> I remember when Bob Lee was murdered in SF and everyone came out of the woodwork claiming it’s the supposedly violent mentally ill homeless people who clearly must have been responsible (it wasn’t). ... not so much different
We can go back through the threads if you like, but it certainly wasn't everyone. My bet was on it being related to the yet unresolved theft of a ~billion dollars from FTX using phenomenal amounts of mobilcoin.
Instead it was a less interesting story: A drug user under the influence killed another drug user they knew well over an interpersonal dispute.
People doing dumb shit attacking other people they know who are also engaged in dumb shit is enormously different from being attacked by a stranger out of nowhere while minding your own business. People rightfully feel less safe regarding risk that they don't have much control over vs risk they have more control over.
And we should treat it differently. No amount of policing can ever make you safe-- ultimately we all have to keep ourselves safe. FAFO is a law of the universe that we can't legislate out of existence, but we can adopt policies that increase or decrease the risk of random violence.
> San Francisco is home to much in the way of visible public misery, unnerving street behavior and overt drug use. Its property crime rate has long been high, and the police clearance rate for property crimes has long been minimal. But the city’s violent crime rate is at a near-historic low, and is lower than most mid-to-large-sized cities.
[1]
Seems like violence is at an all time low, meaning the city is actually safer than ever. In fact, in 2024 violent crimes fell another 14% [2]. So if the goal truly is safety, we should keep doing whatever it is we’re doing because we’re on a fantastic roll of making the city safer.
[1] https://missionlocal.org/2023/04/bob-lee-killing-arrest-made...
[2] https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/san-francisco-2024...
You know what also causes low police reports? Police dissuading people from making them or refusing to take them, and people not bothering to contact police because they believe (correctly or otherwise) the police won't do anything about it, or because they believe police response will be dangerous or overkill... also people self-protecting by avoiding dangerous areas or times, avoiding being alone, or leaving the city entirely (e.g. SF population decreased 9.42% in 2024 according to the internets).
Homicide rates are more reliable, since it's not something that can easily go unreported. But there is a lot of room for violent crime that is short of homicide.
https://sfstandard.com/2024/12/31/homicides-down-san-francis...
> The 2024 downward trend was evident early in the year and was clearer by July, when police statistics showed a 39% drop in homicides from the first half of 2023, alongside significant declines in some violent and property crimes.
Wouldn’t it make sense that if homicides are down then so is violent crime? It would be strange if they didn’t track together for the most part.
It’s interesting the kind of alternative explanations that you start bringing out when the narrative you have doesn’t agree with the data.
Oh and look:
> Between 2022 and 2024, chronic homelessness increased by 11% with 2,989 people experiencing chronic homelessness in 2024. Thirty-five percent of the total homeless population is chronically homeless, a rate similar to 2022.
Weird how the homeless population stayed the same yet violent crime decreased. It’s almost like they’re not the ones that are behind the violence statistics.
https://www.sf.gov/reports--september-2024--2024-point-time-...
If we imprisoned people for playing their music on speakerphone in public there would be a lot fewer murders
No, there wouldn’t be.
You may want to go see the doctor about your humor bone. It seems to have been amputated.
It wasn't a funny joke given the context.
It’s definitely funny along the lines of “A Modest Proposal” from Swift. If you can’t detect sarcasm that’s on you, not the author, especially for something so obviously sarcastic to drive the point home about the ridiculousness of the theory that jailing homeless people will somehow produce less violence in the broader community by making a similar comparison correlating murder and people playing music loudly in public which is a minor annoyance at worst.
> they don't seem to actually pose a higher issue of safety than anyone else you encounter in your daily life.
Not sure what the studies say, but I don’t need a weatherman to tell me when it’s raining outside.
Facts schmacts. We should make decisions by what feels true.
Most policy is set by gut because we lack the data and lack a sufficient understanding of the limitations of the data we have. Sometimes we launder gut through truthy data strawmen, to our detriment.
If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts. When you don’t, pound the table. Please stop pounding the proverbial table and stick to facts.
At this point it sounds like you'd just flip the board, not matter how many comparisons, studies, case studies, and anecdotes are noted. Can't make a horse drink.
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In America, there are plenty of housed drug addicts. Your question is too simple to represent reality.
You didn’t answer the question.
So the logic is we should jail all the people I don't want my kids around?
This is exactly how you get Bell Riots.
Which are, surprisingly, half a year overdue by now!
Wait until you see what happens in 2026.
Yeah, it's pretty clear by now that the meddling of Romulan Time Travelers keeps pushing the events further into the future. So I'd expect WW3 no sooner than 2027.
Stopping Bell Riots from happening was quite a feat, though. Based on the real-world reports of the last few years, I was sure that this particular event is bound to happen exactly when Star Trek originally predicted it.
If a black person attacks you, does that mean that black people are then violent?
That’s the playbook. Do they not do this with black people? Immigrants? Trans? China? Homeless?
It’s all they do. It’s their one play, and this playbook that they all subscribe to caused a lot of problems. That’s all.
We must look at the package of beliefs, none of this is isolated.
I’m not sure why this is downvoted. Blaming marginalized groups for social ills is indeed a very old political playbook.
Closet maga in the house, just cutting the tall grass to see the snake heads.
I think it is an understandable reaction. They're a long history of articles like "man saves multiple orphans from the orphan crushing machine" and people go "ahhh that's so sweet" and nobody stops to ask "why do we have an orphan crushing machine and why can't do anything about that?"
I think it's important to do both.
HN readers might be interested to know that the machine's codebase was recently ported to C++ 17 from Fortran. It was a nightmare to maintain!
> why can't do anything about that
Maybe because it's not the orphan crushing machine, but the lack of the low functioning orphan saving machine. Or a mix of both.
Wonderful analogy
We don't have anything like a machine that causes homelessness though. Homelessness has existed for thousands of years if not all of human existence and we are probably the closest any society has gotten to eradicating it entirely. We are dealing with probably the hard last 10% of a hard problem. It's just not at all as if we have a terrible system that leads to these outcomes. On the contrary, we've built many systems to successfully prevent these outcomes. They're just not perfect
If you were talking about disease or poverty, you might have a point, but homelessness has never been as big of an issue as it is in certain parts of California or more broadly the USA today, except for certain refugee crises.
And a very basic part of it is simply geometry: the more people you have in a limited area, the harder it is to build homes for all of them. Historically, there simply were FAR fewer people, and so finding place for homes was never a huge issue. The cost of housing is mostly property, not construction costs.
> the more people you have in a limited area,
The US is huge with a low population density, why not just expand the cities a bit or build a few new ones? Is there some reason why this can't be done?
Unfortunately the majority of the USA, even where people don't live, is valuable private property one way or another. Back when there were fewer people and especially agriculture was much more manual labor intensive, it simply wasn't possible to work every last bit of land, so building new houses at the edge of town was not generally a huge problem (not that people didn't care about ownership, of course, but they cared less - i.e. it was cheaper). Today it is, since every bit of land you build houses on means removing that land from some other economic purpose.
This is more or less what the trump administration says they want to do
> Throughout his campaign, Trump focused on deregulation, tax cuts and reducing mortgage rates. In speeches, including one at the Economic Club of New York in September and a press conference in August, Trump reiterated his promise to reduce regulatory barriers and vowed to make federal land available for extensive housing projects.
https://www.housingwire.com/articles/trump-housing-build-fed...
So, how we funding this while getting less taxes, especially for the rich?
Funding what? What are you asking? They are selling the land to developers, there is no need for the federal government to fund anything. They will be the ones receiving money.
We do, but it's not as opaque and obvious as an orphan crushing machine. There's still systems in place that at best ignore and at best accelerate such homelessness issues.
Like what systems?
lol you make it sound like SF is the normal state of things when it’s one of the only places in the developed world with these issues
SF is the left wing version of the headline ‘nothing can be done about school shootings, says the only nation where this regularly occurs’.
And while it is a magnet for this kind of problem, San Jose and Los Angeles have similar issues.
Part of the problem being, they’re one of the easiest places to be/exist if you’re homeless. Not that it’s necessarily easy or pleasant, but compared to Chicago, New York City, or some random suburb? You bet.
Nyc has more homeless people, but they're sheltered. [1] California homeless have higher rates of mental illness and drug abuse.
It's this trifecta that people complain about - unsheltered, mentally ill and addicted. If we can solve any one, that feeling of abject squalor goes away.
[1] - https://open.substack.com/pub/dynomight/p/homeless
SF is one of the only places in the developed world that battles homelessness? What are you talking about. I'm talking about humanity generally. For almost all of human history there has been homelessness and vagrancy. We, as a global human population, are doing better at solving this problem than basically any time before in human history, long term, even if things may have declined since COVID in SF
No, we have a system that needs low degree of poverty to scare everyone into compliance.
That's why they say capitalism is based in fear. That's why we have dreams of Star Trek.
I get the impression that the reaction right now is more likely to be caused by someone in government turning off a lot of those orphan crushing machines recently.
And the only thing to show for it is gangs of feral orphans raping and pillaging. (If I can stretch the metaphor a bit too much.)
I suspect if someone did a survey, they'd find that most places in the internet have grown consistently less empathetic in terms of social policy since mid 2020.
Did you read the article? It seems like the cycle of doom these people are in where a) there’s an impossible to navigate beauracracy b) the beauracracy is setting up zero tolerance policy to kick them out when they’re just starting to try to make their way. It doesn’t sound like the orphan crushing machines were ever truly turned off.
I did. The main zero-tolerance policy referred to in the article is someone getting into a fight with staff and roommates at a social care facility.
You condemn that policy, so I suppose you think this should be tolerated to a degree?
Let's say that a homeless shelter abolished it's zero-tolerance policy. Staff and other occupants can now be assaulted a few times, before someone gets kicked out.
Who'd work at this facility? At this point, you aren't looking for social workers, you're looking for prison guards. They'd treat their charges with the same love and compassion that correctional officers are known for.
Who'd go into this facility? Would a non-violent peaceful person even want to be sheltered there?
Do you really think a facility like that will help anyone?
Suddenly a zero-tolerance policy towards violence isn't such a bad idea, is it? Maybe, just maybe there is no orphan crushing machine, is there?
You’re seeing up a false dichotomy. For one, the fight wasn’t with staff, it was with a random roommate he was paired with. Your equating the two when they’re not equal at all. I don’t know about you but I’ve always gotten to pick my roommates.
> Ronnie was always very clear about his needs. He knows he’s a volatile person. He doesn’t want to be in a shared room, especially with a stranger
So perhaps listening to what the people need instead of forcing them into unwinnable situations is the right answer. If your question is how you scale personalized care in a way that’s financially sustainable I don’t know. But pretending like the orphan crushing machine was turned off, to use your words, isn’t capturing the picture as I’m seeing it. Seems pretty crush happy.
Read the article again. There was a violent incident with the staff as well. The system did listen to that man's needs. It provided him with a hotel room all to himself. Here's the result:
> All seemed to be going well. But in September, Morrisette got into a fight with staff at the Monarch and was evicted. “It was devastating,” Barrows said. Because she was out of town dealing with a family crisis, she couldn’t intervene or help him lodge an appeal.
> It angered her that one bout of bad behavior could cost him so dearly. Given his background and mental health issues, the Monarch should have cut him more slack, she thought.
It’s always easy to volunteer others to be assaulted.
Prison guards get extra pay compared to the work they do, and great benefits, to compensate for the assaults.
Hotel staff do not.
Nowhere did I suggest that housing homeless in general purpose hotels is a good idea. If that’s the housing that’s available, then the staff need to be trained and capable of handling such issues. And since density might be higher than normal, you need lots of people around who can help deescalate situations before they reach violence and to council the people who have such needs on how to better manage their anger. But all of that costs money to run well, money most people aren’t willing to spend because “eww homeless” or “it’s their mess, I shouldn’t be paying for it”. So you end up spending a lot on half measures that helps no one.
You didn't, but she clearly thought that in the circumstances they should have "given him more chances":
> Given his background and mental health issues, the Monarch should have cut him more slack, she thought.
Which is the equivalent of "hotel staff should just take abuse".
Or perhaps, and this is going to sound purely insane, they person requires a higher level of care, and we need comprehensive healthcare and social safety nets that are equipped to deal with most cases whether that be a person with a cold, a single mom, or someone with mental illness. It literally costs more to keep these people in the revolving door of prisons and institutions than it does to just give everyone proper care. On top of that now you don't have that person being violent in the streets or doing petty theft for drug money.
Those could all be true (and likely are) but "we don't have what we should, so low-paid hotel staff are conscripted to provide it" is a particularly unworkable situation.
Most people I met when homeless didn't want the help the government offered. There's a direct conflict between people who lead and those that actually want to help.
Unfortunately, a lot of the homeless I knew were very proud, arrogant, angry, bitter and many other emotions that made it nearly impossible to get them to take care of themselves through any intervention.
And if people refuse to take care of themselves, they will always be in a state where they need others to step in. Once they become destructive to society, I don't think any expectation of mercy from leadership should be expected. That leads to the situations we currently see in some places today.
It's not the lack of shelter that's the issue. There's plenty of shelter and housing if you want it.
It's a good set of points you make.
When programming, when engineering, I often run into these sorts of intractable problems.
Changing the rules, changing the preconditions or some aspect of the problem itself, that's usually how I solve them.
In this article, it looks like the Park Ranger is changing the rules by making the system work for the person who is experiencing homelessness instead of forcing the person to go alone into a system that they don't like and they don't necessarily see the value of.
SO it is possible to fix with the appropriate smart thinking and willingness to maintain multiple simultaneous perspectives, it seems.
Amanda's work is proof that personal engagement makes a difference, but scaling that kind of approach is incredibly difficult
what happened to "do things that don't scale"?
We're missing all the rest of the steps, but besides, I'm not sure how that applies when there's no profit motive.
charity: water
Indeed. But I have another point of view: what if our society is utterly broken? To see what I mean, imagine a world where that level of effort would cure any disease, even aging. How would that split us?
The biggest problem with our society is that no one knows or helps their neighbors anymore. I work in the emergency department and maybe a third of the patients are more in need of a good support system than medical treatment.
Met a guy whose elderly wife isn't strong enough to lift him when he falls out of bed, so once a week they call EMS or the fire department to get him back in bed. So many things that you used to call on your neighbors for help with, but life for many Americans in 2025 is isolating and lonely.
Did that ever work, except maybe in tribal societies?
Anything I read about middle ages or later was even worse. At best, they put such people into poorhouses.
A big family under one roof helped the best I guess? But in any less ideal situations I doubt even the children would have gone out of their way to devote their lives to the care of the elderly or the disabled. Examples from primitive societies: https://www.international.ucla.edu/cnes/article/113384
> Did that ever work, except maybe in tribal societies?
Maybe I don't understand your comment, but I think our societies were/are tighter in many places and epochs. Maybe it's not so in cities and suburbs in the modern West, but, I think it used to be different in Medieval Europe and before, in villages at least. Neighbors were your support community. I know there are parts of the world where it's still the case.
I'm not that old and I was raised by my neighbors, because both of my parents were working. When my dad was dying last year, I couldn't be there because I was their only economic support, working abroad, and I don't have any wealth to be so if I'm not working. There was more family, but the neighbors were the ones day to day helping my mom with shores and the care of my dad.
>> But in any less ideal situations I doubt even the children would have gone out of their way to devote their lives to the care of the elderly or the disabled.
It was the children, in most sane cases. Not that I argue it's a good thing to bring children to the world to take care of you when you are dying.
Capitalism makes us more atomic, not a surprise.
It's not capitalism, per se. It's a society that overvalues individualism and devalues family. IMO, of course. One part of the social compact used to be that in return for parents taking care of you as a child, you took care of them when they were old. It worked for literally 1000's of generations.
> It worked for literally 1000's of generations.
Did it?
There is an interesting discussion for a picture on reddit's //r/wtf right now: https://old.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/1ioz5xy/carved_ivory_c...
Basically, it looks like a significant propaganda effort was used to get people to act that way. That means it wasn't automatic at all.
It works best when the parent/child relationship is pretty good, and when the child is not under a lot of pressure him- or herself.
It was the ideal, sure, but how much of it is actually true IRL? There seem to be plenty of bad parents, in which case the children would require quite a bit of pressure and/or brainwashing to take care of them I would think.
Given that the framing here is based on accounts of the most extreme cases, I would trust this reflects their society as well as Ripley's Belive it or Not does.
And you're too focused on families. This society relied on villages that were all somewhat connected. Modern 3rd world countries still have an arguably richer social support than the US because overall their burdens are not theirs to share alone. They pitch in the care for children, provide food, maintain housing, and much more. Having a big family can simulate this clan feeling but the scale is still a magnitude smaller than a village working together.
>in which case the children would require quite a bit of pressure and/or brainwashing to take care of them I would think.
In the same way kids are "brainwashed" to get kicked out at 18 and make a life for themselves in America with minimum support, sure. Any upbringing can be framed as "brainwashing" if you don't agree with it.
You only need to go back 50 years. Have we already forgotten "it takes a village to raise a child"?
Even in my childhood I had remnants of this. My uncles or not-grandma grandma neighbors could be trusted to take care of my when my mom or grandparents weren't around. Nowadays that dynamic is spending $30+ on a credible babysitter. Those are the sort of dynamics that have recently weathered away.
>I doubt even the children would have gone out of their way to devote their lives to the care of the elderly or the disable
1. Yes they did and do. Many people still love their parents and want to make sure they are taken care for.
2. It isn't really that deep for neighbors. It's just a matter of checking up in them every few days. It isn't full time care. Of course if they get hurt they can either help out in minor cases or call emergency if it's more than minor.
These days you may sadly accept dying alone and not being discovered for weeks if people don't regularly contact you. What does that say about modern society?
> Anything I read about middle ages or later was even worse. At best, they put such people into poorhouses.
No, in the middle ages that job would have been done by the guy's son, who would have been living in the home.
That is similar to the many family movies today: It shows the situation of specifically those where this ideal idea of family actually works. I doubt that was common in the middle ages. It worked best for those who owned something, like craftspeople or land-owning farmers, and then for their first heir who would inherit it all.
Landowning farmers is a gigantic chunk of the population, far bigger than you seem to be imagining. (Technically, many of them "rented", but "renting" land in medieval Europe was a stronger form of ownership than "owning" it in the modern United States is.)
Going to need a source for that. Pretty much everything I've read on the subject (ex. [1]) contradicts that.
A poorhouse would still be better than freezing to death in a tent.
Homelessness isn't totally solved any where else but if we look at comparable countries (Canada, Australia, New Zealand etc), the magnitude is much lower. Not to mention other issues like healthcare, crime, education, life expectancy etc. But there seems to be a huge resistance to doing things in the US how it's done in other places.
Nobody knows or helps their neighbors here in Japan or any number of places on earth and yet it’s not like it is there.
Third places and overall closer proximity plays a factor too. Do you have a place you can just "meet people" without needing to pay in?
Tokyo is also well known for needing to pay to be practically anywhere except public parks which are relatively few. Yet the homelessness problem is near nonexistent. I don’t think this is the reason either, though it doesn’t hurt to have.
Look Americans just hate it when poor people get things for free. Despite the fact that the US economy can afford it- certainly better than the Japanese economy nowadays.
It is perversely CHEAPER to give someone a flat and 1000 eurodollars per month than to have them roam the street, using drugs and being a nuisance. This is the wisdom that all first world countries have learned. Pay people money to shut the fuck up. The bread and games of the Romans.
So, not the majority of the country’s population.
I would repeat the same for all highly developed countries.
What are you trying to say in your response?
Society is far from perfect and some are definitely leaning more towards broken than perfect. I don't know how many people really see themselves as part of society vs individuals living among other unconnected individuals.
Homelessness, poor physical or mental health, crime, domestic violence, discrimination. There's a long list of social ills that get worse when a society is inequitable and unequal. These problems and their effects go down significantly when a society acts to maintain its own health and distribution of resources is more equal, there is social mobility, individuals are under less financial stress, etc... Number will never go to zero or even close but there are countries where the base homelessness rate is similar to the US but the manifestation of problem is very different as is the approach, mostly that being homeless isn't considered criminal. e.g. very few people sleep rough, their homelessness period is shorter and living in cars is not normal.
Just that last fact, that living in cars is relatively common and that includes children, makes me look at the US and decide that yes, US society is broken.
Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water. This isn’t an unprofitable codebase at some VC funded atrocity where consequences don’t exist.
This is the real world where societal structures save hundreds of millions every year.
The amount of suffering that would exist if society dissolved is unfathomable.
This comment captured a lot of my thoughts about the article, Amanda and many of the other comments on this thread, except that you put them into words much more capably and eloquently than I was able to do. Well stated.
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Please don't do this here.
Is your reaction to someone eloquently saying something that it must be fake?
https://xkcd.com/810/
> The city surely understands the long-term costs of its policies, and it’s run by highly pragmatic people with limited budgets.
Is that the case? maybe there are highly pragmatic people in the org, but i dont think they are "running" things. and the city's budget for homelessness is astoundingly high (look it up)
If anyone is wondering, it's ~1 billion dollars per year, for a homeless population of less than 10,000. With this money, they have achieved basically zero change in that number for years. Staggering, incredible levels of waste.
It might be more appropriate to look at the numbers of people being brought off the streets. They have over 14,000 supportive housing units and 4,200 shelter beds. 5,000 of the supportive housing units were added in the last 5 years."More than 20,000 people seek homeless services in San Francisco over the course of a full year" [0].
At the Jan 2024 Point-in-Time count, 4,354 unsheltered people were counted, a 1% decrease since 2022 and a 16% decrease since 2019. There was a 20% decrease in the number of people living in cars since 2019.
To compare, NYC spends $4 billion per year and has 62,000 supportive housing units and 130,000 shelter beds (these NYC numbers come from GPT4o Search and are unverified).
0. https://www.sf.gov/reports--september-2024--2024-point-time-...
That's not necessarily the right measure though right? If that money wasn't spent (or less of it was spent), what would things be like? Hard to A/B test this, but seems like the "problem" would get worse rather than stay steady state.
If the population is increasing YoY and the number of homeless remains the same, is it?
jesus, the amount has increased since last i checked -- it was 80k/homeless person before.
> basically zero change
i would have to be persuaded the change hasn't been negative
Obviously some secular external effects (like fentanyl) have been causing a large part of the problem, but still.
I wish that park rangers didn't have to bear the cost of this problem. Nobody has the appetite to do anything effective about it.
I mean the article dances around it. I hate to say this, but we have to face reality.
It is empathy that is in great part responsible for for the crime ridden shit show that is much of SF.
How do we balance empathy while making SF not a gigantic pile of shit? I don't think there is an answer here. It's choose one, or choose the other.
Ah Empathy is not what screwed up these guys' childhoods. Don't blame empathy without acknowledging that both of these people are black in America.
There are so many reasons why this happened and it's way more than just San Francisco being supposedly more empathetic.
Rhetorically speaking, how about the fact that China is quite happy to supply precursor drugs to help make fentanyl cheap? How is that related to San Francisco's perceived empathy? Again, rhetorically.
It makes me angry that this problem is reduced so frequently when it's been proven time and time and time to be a complex problem. It's almost like citizens / voters / taxpayers are willing to play sport with this problem in order to score some kinds of points around being right, or to avoid the sense of blaming oneself, because they know they can do something about it and yet they aren't.
Being honest is a big part of making progress with this, and I think honestly this problem is way more complex than many of us have actually appropriately characterized.
The article goes a long way towards characterizing the problem well, by talking about each individuals, perspectives, situations, and how the system succeeded or fails, knocking them off the path to gaining public support.
Empathy created the housing crisis?
If you want to focus on the housing crisis aspect and not the policies that enable addiction, then the answer is still yes.
Capped property tax increases is a moronic empathy law based on “protecting little old ladies on fixed incomes”. It has resulted in an incentive structure that means all home owners are incentivized to block all new housing and keep the value of their homes sky rocketing.
The second level of empathy laws causing the housing issue is all if the ones that empower NIMBYs to stop housing developments.
“Preventing gentrification”, “stopping the character of the neighborhood from changing”, “delays for a 1 year impact study” are all empathy motivated laws that caused the housing crisis in Cali.
You are right. Empathy in the literal sense of only being able to relate with others that have the same experiences and interests. I appreciate that clarity.
Not quite, anti gentrification empathy is about relating to poor people. Same with the property tax cap.
It’s empathy for people with problems you don’t fully understand the cause of that turns into ham fisted destructive regulation.
Yes. Bad feel-good policies are the vast majority of the problem
Thank you for expounding. I can only assume we're talking about empathy from the real estate lobbyists who control housing policy.
I promise you, its not the "real estate lobbyists" who fought to block subsidized housing for teachers in the Sunset.
The state controls housing policy.
Everyone is so informative here. Thank you.
To be direct, construction would look much more like Austin, which has lowered rents by actually builds things, if your vision of the case were true.
https://x.com/sp6runderrated/status/1879257360344199255?s=46...
To act like housing policy is controlled by developers, even in this contemptuous jest you exude, is delirious and is the remainder of the problem with San Francisco.
I misinterpreted you as implying a libertarian anti-state argument. I had thought I was returning the same energy.
My apologies.
I was the person you replied to, and there was no "energy", whatever that is, in what I said. Just: you blame the state for state corruption, because we pay them taxes to not be corrupt.
Housing is too expensive for many people in many places. The normal healthy response to housing being too expensive in an area is to live in another area. Only a very small minority of people who can't afford housing in a place they'd like to live respond by becoming homeless in that place. It's simply not a rational response to housing being too expensive.
It's not easy to leave your social network, job, and home to look for better opportunities while living hand to mouth. Things happen unexpectedly.
And it's not particularly insightful to point out that people who are homeless often have difficulties coping with the demands and challenges of life.
prop 47 and free syringes.
The housing crisis extends across the bay area and SF is noticeably shittier then most places int he bay area. So it's likely not the housing crisis that is the reason why SF is particularly bad.
San Francisco doesn't even have free Narcan, which many US cities do. And of course syringes will flood the streets when you don't have safe injection sites. SF needs to learn from Portugal on how to address the drug crises. Also, it just needs to build denser to accommodate housing demand.
> San Francisco doesn't even have free Narcan
It does: https://www.sf.gov/information--overdose-prevention-resource...
People always say this, and yet it just seems more like SF is the tip of the spear to changes that the rest of the area faces. I remember when people were decrying the homeless epidemic in SF only for El Camino in South Bay to start having significant homeless population spring up. And then LA’s housing problem also got markedly worse. And people decry that it’s “Californian” politics only for the same problems to pop up later in their neck of the woods. These are growing systemic national and global problems with our social fabric falling apart and the response for many seems to be “take care of me first”. You even see it with the huge political backlash globally.
> People always say this, and yet it just seems more like SF is the tip of the spear to changes that the rest of the area faces.
This is not correct. SF gets a superset.
Car break-ins in SF were commonplace 25 years ago. They never became bad in the South Bay. SF just has legitimately bad policies that directly cause a lot of their issues.
The housing crisis is about the only thing it has in common with the South Bay and that’s because it is a state issue.
Except housing is a growing problem in other states & countries as well.
Car break-ins are because the police were not doing anything. They have started trying to finally do something about it and made a dent: https://www.sf.gov/news--increased-enforcement-against-car-b...
But keep in mind that police only ever make positive progress on policies in order to extract concessions from the city
> "I'm optimistic about the progress we've made in reducing the number of auto burglaries in San Francisco, but this is just a start," Chief Bill Scott said. "I want to thank our officers for their tireless work. The SFPD hopes to build on this progress with additional tools, like automated license plate readers, to continue making arrests and holding perpetrators accountable."
> The City has also reached a 5 year high in applicants to join SFPD, which is essential for adding more police officers back.
Oh look, the police force is becoming more politically powerful & crime is down. Wonder how that happens.
The police are part of the city policy and politics. I’m not sure what your point is
SF literally is the tip - it’s a peninsula.
Most other cities that have large homeless populations aren’t on a peninsula so they can eventually shuffle them to places that are “out of sight, out of mind.”
Because it was re-using the dirty syringes that was keeping people off the streets before.
I mean, empathy for a criminal is ensuring they have their day in court. Free counsel if they can’t afford. Innocent until proven guilty.
But their rights can’t trump victims, that’s not justice. Like someone else mentioned prop 47 was a bad idea.
> empathy for a criminal is ensuring they have their day in court. Free counsel if they can’t afford. Innocent until proven guilty
That's not empathy. Empathy is being sympathetic to someone based on how similar they are to you. You're talking about much older, less relative concepts, such as equality under the law and limits on what the state can do to people.
I thought it was expensive housing.
You thought wrong. SF gave out free syringes and created laws that were empathetic to robbers and thieves.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/san-francisco-sign-stolen-...
What does that snopes article have to do with what you said?
Free syringes make sense because people will find disease-prone means to get their fix, and then they end up in emergency rooms requiring more expensive care.
The sign is a satirical prank made to show awareness of a specific law.
Which part of that link is the part you mean to emphasize? Is it just Prop 47? Cause then a more direct link to it than to a picture of a fake sign would probably be more compelling. (And in that case, that's not a city-level law anyway.)
The sign illustrates the spirit of the law. I'd rather talk about that then the technicalities of a legal document.
The sign refers to Proposition 47 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_California_Proposition_47), a statewide initiative that passed in 2014; it's absurd to blame the city of San Francisco for it.
> SF ... created laws that were empathetic to robbers and thieves.
You're right in that SF does way too much to accommodate robber barons, tech moguls, heavily-subsidized Silicon Valley industries, and housing speculators.
That link proves you wrong
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"We have to face reality" is a thought-terminating cliche. The causes of homelessness are myriad and there's a ton of conservative propaganda denigrating left-leaning politics. Also, many would beg to differ that SF is a "gigantic pile of shit."
So? Did I say it wasn't myriad? Tons of SF policies are responsible for it.
>Also, many would beg to differ that SF is a "gigantic pile of shit."
It's like the myriad of people living in North Korea who think it's the greatest country in the world. There's reality and then there's people who don't face it.
> Tons of SF policies are responsible for it.
Which ones? Are there stats showing before/after unhoused numbers?
> There's reality and then there's people who don't face it.
I guess I'm just too brainwashed to be miserable living in the Mission.
Are you not aware that San Francisco was the site of the biggest population exodus out of any city? You may not be miserable but if you’re unable to comprehend why that exodus happened then you’re completely out of touch.
I’m too lazy to find stats and stats may not exist anyway. You don’t need science to prove to you the ground exists when you get up in the morning. You use your common sense for that.
I'm hearing a lot of appeal to emotion, not facts.
With regard to migration, I frequently see expensive CoL and remote work vis-a-vis the pandemic cited as primary reasons, not homelessness or crime. If you have reputable sources saying otherwise, please cite them.
There’s tons and tons of facts. Just no stats. I can point you or you can point yourself to dozens of articles and opinion pieces. But stats I’m too lazy to find and they likely don’t exist.
You go continue to live in a universe where you ignore general sentiment and fill in reality with your own happy construct where a void of stats and science exists. Did they do a research study on whether people enjoy eating feces? No? I guess I can make up whatever garbage I want around this area now. Yes people love eating shit. (This is what you and all the science maniacs around HN love doing).
No science exists on how much people hate San Francisco even though there are reams and reams of people talking about how bad things are? Ok fill it in with your own delusion of reality. San Francisco is great. I love the whiff of fresh human shit I occasionally get when the right breeze just waffs by under my nose. I love stepping on broken syringes when I go run.
This was written by AI.
In the spirit of tech conversations, here was my original input from my history:
---
I was swept up in this article and the portrait for Amanda (barrows) - what a unique and strong person - this city is soo lucky to have her.
I want to respond that unlike some here, I came away with huge empathy and today's HN snark and frustration bounced off me pretty hard accordingly. The public order issues such as homelessness in the park have impacted me, but more so, how to translate the state of the world to my children. I always remind them that this person was once a little boy / girl and we might be older, but we're still kids inside and nobody dreamt to grow up in this environment.
The compassion and my own empathy shown here coupled with the pragmatic approach shown by Amanda washed over me and the policies and bureaucratic inefficiencies that make solutions slow and ineffecient are understandable, but also highly frustrating.
The unhoused individuals and their mental state vs the requirements to find a home are very frustrating - the city surely understands the cost of housing policies and is run by highly pragmatic people, but rules are rules and some top down accommodations and medications are needed to help merge this.
---
I personally don't see my opinions changed here - I think the posted text is a bit better but also agree on the uncanny valley issue. A little less brain swelling and I would have been all over the small signals :)
Personally, I find AI and the derivatives extremely helpful when it comes to communication (a booster for the mind!) and use it all the time when translating into other languages and also removing my northern British dialect from communication over in California.
A lesson to take from this is, "if a post expresses strong opinions, and you believe AI was involved in it's generation, then they probably used AI to edit, not to generate whole cloth." A hallmark of ChatGPT is an unwillingness to take a position, and instead to describe what positions it's possible to take. By the time you've prompted it enough to take a strong position, you've probably crossed into "editing" rather than "generating".
You can disagree with someone's view, but editing their words with AI doesn't make them wrong or disingenuous any more than asking another human to critique your post would be. And to imply otherwise is, itself, disingenuous and disruptive.
The exception would be if you thought there was no human involvement in the account at all, in which case, as another commenter noted, the appropriate thing would be to email the mods.
Do you think this would be the top comment were it not manipulated with AI? I don't think so.
a.) While I can't possibly know, yes, I think there's a very good chance. I think it's the top comment chiefly because it expressed a view that was popular with commenters. It's not like AI is a magic spell that bewitches people into upvoting.
b.) Another way to look at it is, "do you think it would be the top comment if the author didn't solicit feedback and thoughtfully edit their comment?" To which I would say, "who cares? Editing is fair play. Let's talk about our actual points of disagreement."
c.) To be frank I think this response from you is very telling. I haven't seen you engage at all with the substance of the comment. But you press very hard on this "AI" angle. The commenter has now shown us their pre-AI draft, and it's much the same - I think if you had a good-faith concern that it was "manipulated," that would satisfy you. Since it hasn't, I infer that your concern is either puritanical ("no AI must ever be used in any way") or that you are attacking the style of the comment when your real issue is it's substance.
Please don't do this here.
Edit: I called this wrong - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43075184. Sorry!
Putting aside the particular accusation that I have raised for a moment, I am curious to understand whether Hacker News (HN) has established any formal, informal, or otherwise broadly accepted community guidelines, rules, policies, or best practices regarding the usage of comments generated with the assistance of artificial intelligence, specifically through ChatGPT or similar AI-driven language models.
My inquiry is motivated by the observation that AI-generated text has become increasingly prevalent in online discourse, and different platforms have adopted varying stances on whether such content is acceptable, encouraged, discouraged, or outright prohibited. Some online communities prefer organic, human-generated discussions to preserve authenticity, while others are more permissive, provided that AI-generated responses align with the spirit and intent of meaningful discourse.
Thus, within the context of HN’s commenting system, does the platform have an explicit policy, a tacit expectation, or any historical precedent regarding whether AI-assisted comments are permissible? If so, are there any specific constraints, recommendations, or guiding principles that users should adhere to when leveraging AI for participation in discussions? Furthermore, if such a policy exists, is it officially documented within HN’s guidelines, or is it more of an unwritten cultural norm that has evolved over time through community moderation and feedback?
I would appreciate any insights on whether this matter has been formally addressed or discussed in past threads, as well as any pointers to relevant resources that shed light on HN’s stance regarding AI-assisted participation.
Yes, generated comments aren't allowed here and that has been the case since before the advent of GPTS.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
(see also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22427782 and similar)
We haven't added a specific rule to the guidelines about it (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) but we may end up having to.
What's tricky is that accusing other commenters of being bots/AIs is, at the same time, a new twist on the "you're a shill/astroturfer/troll/bot/spy" etc. swipe that internet users love to hurl at each other, and which we do have a guideline against (for good reason).
Between those two rules (or quasi-rules) there's a lot of room to get things wrong and I'm sorry I misread the above case!
Thank you. Maybe you can remove my slow-ban, and we'll call it even: HN often tells me I am posting too fast, which makes me think my account was flagged at some point.
That is a separate question, and it would be better sent to hn@ycombinator.com (this is in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html btw). But since you asked here, I'll respond here:
We rate limit accounts when they post too many low-quality comments and/or get involved in flamewars. I'd be happy to take the rate limit off your account, but when I look at your recent comments, I still see too many that match that description:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43086219
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43073768
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42528111
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42301901
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42242363
If you want to build up a track record of using HN as intended for a while, you'd be welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and we can take a look and hopefully take the rate limit off your account.
I see. I guess succinctness is punished here. I guess I'll use AI to puff up my comments in the future. Thanks!
For reference, the GGGP comment was generated using this prompt:
Succinctness isn't the issue.
> My inquiry is motivated by the observation that AI-generated text has become increasingly prevalent in online discourse
You ever notice that only stuff you disliked is AI?
No, I have not noticed that at all. I see plenty of content that reeks of LLM generation where the ideas expressed in it are ones I agree with. I still don't like to see it.
I have a genuine question for you here dang. In another comment in this thread [1], the poster admitted that he did indeed generate (or at least rephrase) his comment with AI. I didn't find this surprising, and at least a few other people apparently didn't either. For "uncanny valley" reasons that are difficult to put my finger on, the wording of the comment just jumped out to me as LLM generated.
So the user "searealist" who you're responding to was correct in saying the comment was written by AI. Are we not supposed to call that out when we notice it? It's difficult because it's typically impossible to prove, and most people won't be as honest as the OP was here.
If what "searealist" did here is not acceptable even though he was right, what are we supposed to do? Flag, downvote?
Personally, I do not want to see any LLM generated content in HN comments, unless it's explicitly identified by the person posting it as a relevant part of some conversation about LLMs themselves.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43075184
According to them, these were the edits that AI made: https://www.diffchecker.com/g2uiWItY/
Thanks—I appreciate the correction. I posted more here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43085954.
We don't want LLM-generated comments (or any other kind of generated comments) here. Downvoting or flagging comments that you think are generated is fine. "Calling out" is more of a grey area because there are also a lot of ways to get it wrong and break the site guidelines by doing so. But I got it wrong the opposite way in the above case, so I'm not really sure how to make all this precise yet.
If it takes an AI to display empathy, perhaps we should surrender to the AI overlords.
AI overlords worked pretty well for the Culture (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_series).
[flagged]
The overlap of people who use unicode emdash and real dash in the same comment is close to 0%. It also has the obvious cadence and filler words of chatgpt.
Mail hn@ycombinator.com. Don't litigate it on the thread.
He's free to do whatever he wants, it's within the guidelines.
I also found his comment mildly interesting.
Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Sounds like that needs to be updated to include accusations of AI. What a world
was the post edited? I don't see any emdashes.
It's still there: —
Sorry - I hate these as well with an intense passion, but ran through grammar checking :(
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Almost 20 years ago I spent two years trying to get a homeless person off the street and made a movie about it:
https://graceofgodmovie.com/
It's an incredibly complicated problem, but if there is one message I can share it is this: homeless people are, first and foremost, people. They span the full range of human experience (the main subject of my movie had a masters degree in psychology) and there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Homelessness is not one problem, it is a symptom of at least half a dozen different problems, all of which need different solutions. (And, BTW, some homeless people voluntarily choose the lifestyle. It's definitely a minority, but it's not zero.)
Yea, I'm a regular HN reader and I've been stuck on the street for going on 7 years. Used to be commended for persevering against the odds and the like, as a child and young programmer at 15 onward, home owner at 22.
I've left SF and landed in a college town in Sac Valley last year. Rent is $750/mo here. Been working in a kitchen for a year. Am I housed yet? Nope. Just gotta save a few thousand dollars. I have about the same amount of bills as a housed person, between gym + storage + take out food + car insurance.
But then the social aspect, my old relatives and network need to distance themselves from me. Any kind of old reference or something, non starter.
I will beat this. I only keep posting here on these threads because as you say, we span the full range of human existence. I like to think I'll use my approach as a template to help others. Get out of the big metro and into a peaceful place with cheap rent and lots of opportunity, yadda yadda.
Cheers.
That is really interesting, do you mind sharing more info about how you went from a skilled engineer (skilled enough to get a house at 22) to homeless? If you make it back up you will have a pretty fascinating life story.
> Get out of the big metro and into a peaceful place with cheap rent and lots of opportunity
This always comes to mind when I see folks on the street here in NYC/Brooklyn. Is it too simple a solution? Is a dense metro better in some ways?
You just need to remember that homeless people have most of the same constraints and ties to location that you do. Everyone grew up somewhere, a lot of homeless people had relatively "normal" lives before the street and most have some connections lingering from that time.
So they probably still have family connections there, friends, maybe a church or AA group, case worker, friendly coffee shop owner, etc. They aren't any more eager to break these ties than you would be.
I think it's hard to imagine someone who prefers homelessness to living somewhere cheap. I understand there's a lot of nuance and for the majority of homeless folks, $750 rent isn't necessarily more realistic than the $3000 rent I remember in NYC, but for the people for whom cheap living _is_ a viable option, I'm struggling to believe that their AA group or a friendly coffee shop owner are their reasoning for choosing NYC over a highway town outside of Rochester.
I actually think it's a bit infantilizing to suggest that any otherwise capable person would choose sleeping on the streets or in shelters over a basement apartment in a cheap, boring town.
Speaking personally, I'd prefer living in quite literally any town in the entire country if it meant a roof over my head.
I'm not speaking out of my ass, I was homeless myself on and off for nearly twenty years, and have relationships with homeless people in my community still.
Almost no one "prefers homelessness" to anything else per se, but they may decline the terms on which housing is offered. For example "break all your social ties and move away from the only city you know" is extremely hard for anyone to accept.
Look at some other conversations in this comment section! A lot of people want to "solve homelessness" but a lot of them also don't care what happens to the homeless people on the way. "Come with us, to a place you've never heard of and know nothing about, where all your needs are met"? No thanks my man I have read Maus.
Truthfully, for all intents and purposes, I'm the one speaking out of my ass on this topic. These are some really good points. You describe a real-life experience which I clearly lack; I definitely concede my previous point. My apologies.
FWIW I think it's really admirable of you to maintain those community connections, not everyone would do the same.
Can you explain what is so difficult to move to another place? I mean choosing homelessness or new life where you don’t know anyone but have roof over your head makes me pick only one choice here… I am an immigrant and changed my locations several times.
Yeah, I should have made this clearer. When I wrote, "some homeless people voluntarily choose the lifestyle" I did not mean to imply that they prefer it to all other possible lifestyles, simply that they could get indoors if they wanted to, but that would come with downsides that they choose not to accept. But I did meet one person who explicitly said, "I have a home but I have no desire to live in it." But much more common was the sentiment that they could get a place to live but then they'd have no money left for anything else.
Manhattan is great to be homeless in. free food available every couple of blocks, lots of social services. can sleep in hospitals, on the subway or elsewhere. good free transportation in the form of the subway. subways not a bad place to sleep, certain comedians did it getting started in new york. I do it.
cold isnt a big problem if u know what ur doing. during the summers u can spend all day at the beach and that makes up for it.
spend the day at the library working on the computer. police and security are relatively lax so long as you know how to blend in, some homeless people are less socially adept and dont take care of themselves so they are magnets for reprisals in a manner of speaking.
Goodluck and Godspeed my friend
Have you looked into joining the merchant fleet? They need people working in their galleys as well, and you'll have no bills to pay.
Good luck, sincerely.
Does that mean we need some kind of big brother/sister program but for the homeless? Would having one capable volunteer who met with them for an hour a week or something and could advocate and help them navigate the system make a big change?
I really struggle with this because it feels like helping as much as possible is the only moral stance to have, but I also question what level of responsibility the homeless have for their own situation. If we keep approaching them with these 0 consequence strategies does that encourage failure? Would the second guy who was smoking meth have benefited if he got thrown in jail for two months, forcing him into sobriety and then released into some kind of temporary housing with strict work and curfew rules?
We balk at the idea of limiting someones freedoms, but it seems like a mercy to take someone who is killing themselves and endangering others and putting them through some kind of rehabilitation that forces them to get physically and mentally healthy. It might be a relief to have a schedule and safety and some kind of guiding hand.
The fully honest answer is that I don't know. I have some first-hand data but no actual expertise in this area. But my personal advice is this: one of the best things you can do for a homeless person is simply to talk to them, to make them feel seen. One of the worst things about being homeless is that you become invisible. For many people that's almost as bad as the physical hardship.
I’m 24 (which I think is younger than most people in here) and I live in San Francisco. I’m pretty ashamed to live here and hope to move soon.
The “on the ground” feeling is bad. Every issue we had 5 years ago is worse (except the drought).
Daily life involves walking calculated circles around drug addicts to avoid agroing them (like Dead Island).
I’m seeing more trash on the streets, more graffiti covering highway signs.
People have given up trying to change anything and just tolerate it now. I thought I’d meet high agency tech people when I moved here. The tech scene is way better than Boston but the sprit of SF is really dead. All the money in the world and they can’t run a city half a well as was done before cars…
Where in SF do you live? I'm guessing Soma, or near downtown? Get out of your neighborhood now and then. Most of the city does not have a drug addict or three on every block, and trash everywhere.
You need to get out of SoMa. The rest of SF is pretty nice, there are definite hot zones like near Bayview but generally what you describe is just SF. I left to raise a family and one of the reasons was the homelessness BUT SF has always been like this and if it was not the homeless it was the gangs or other issues in different parts of the city. Try living in a different part of the city, it might change things up a bit.
My experience suggests the opposite; the city was an upwards trajectory until 2018 or so but it's taken a turn for the worse since.
I lived in SF from 2009 to 2024. Every part of the city has gotten worse. When I moved, parts of Mission were definitely rough and they've cleaned up quite a bit. Even SoMa became somewhat interesting, as much as area like that could have before Covid.
It can take time to get to know any city, but SF has the advantage of being relatively dense and walkable.
I moved here in 2015, and I was about the same age when I arrived. It was an adjustment for me back then too. The problems don’t really seem worse to me overall, but I will say that market street and SoMa in general feel worse than I remember but not really because of homeless people or drug use (that was already a highly visible problem); I think it’s important to point out how much commercial real estate has gone fallow since tons of stuff was shuttered during the pandemic. That’s the most noticeable change to me, and it just makes the whole area that much more depressing.
So before writing off the city entirely as has-been or whatever, maybe try a day of walking around the northeast corner when the weather is nicer. Nob Hill into Chinatown, then North Beach. From there you can enjoy a view from Coit Tower before taking one of the semi-famous stairways down to the Embarcadero. Levi plaza is a nice spot to rest your feet. If you need a place to stop and work, and you don’t mind tethering, find your way up into the Embarcadero center. The upper portion is an open air walkway over the streets with really well-kept gardens/trees along the way (at least once winter passes). Below you’ll find shelter from cold or wet weather, with lots of places to sit. It’s kind of the best kept secret of the city if you work remotely.
> All the money in the world and they can’t run a city half a well as was done before cars…
This is hardly unique to SF. Hell, the city is a diamond in the rough among other post-industrial cities anywhere in the world.
If not the northeastern corner, maybe try the mission near 24th and Valencia, or Fillmore near Japan Town. There are other spots too of course but these are all places I walk or take the train to regularly and I will miss them dearly if I leave.
Weird. I’ve lived here for 12 years. Things seem slightly better if not the same.
Same with NYC. People just moving here are unaware of the history and think OMG so much homelessness, so much crime! Meanwhile I grew up remembering seeing crack vials all over the street, the mob was ever present actively extorting and murdering people, numerous abandoned buildings creating ghost towns of squatters, and the homeless camps were quite elaborate - I remember a big encampment around the foot of the Manhattan Bridge complete with burning trash barrels and a large teepee. Today's NYC is sterile compared to the 80's I grew up in.
You’re ashamed? I have to be honest with you - I just moved into the city last year after living in the suburbs since 2018. SF is the most beautiful city I’ve ever been in. Do you not have a strong attachment to the communities here? I’m finding the city surprisingly good at cultivating niches.
lol San Franciscans never tried to change anything for the last 50 years, they never gave up since they never tried to begin with - they actually prefer it this way.
Overpaid tech workers like yourself have done much more to destroy the "spirit" of San Fransisco than some homeless people sleeping in a park. You can look all the way back to the 1960s and see the same complaints about "lawlessness" in San Fransisco, there's always a marginalized scapegoat to blame - first the beatniks, then the hippies, then the gays, now the homeless. The homeless are not an aberration or a new phenomenon in San Fransisco. It's the entitled, overpaid tech transplants rampaging through the city that are destroying it.
Lol… yea, definitely the people who’ve moved here to make a better life for themselves and not the native population doing whatever they can to try an preserve a 1970’s nostalgic lifestyle without thinking about how their own children would need a place to live.
The xenophobia of the late-comer San Franciscan is one of the most cliched examples of why the utopian fantasies many leftist have are doomed to fail.
The transplants didn’t cause the housing crisis. That was built piece by piece by San Francisco over the last 50 years all in an effort to grant people with seniority special privileges.
This was the reason I gave up trying to change SF and left. It was clear that the locals like it dysfunctional and hate newcomers like me who want to change things. Then suddenly you’re the bad guy.
> shepherding him through what one Recreation and Parks Department official described as the “arduous and achingly bureaucratic tasks” necessary just to be eligible for housing.
I'm going to risk a political statement and say that this is why I'm mostly hopeful about DOGE, even if parts of it are a shit show.
Building civilization comes with a hefty dose of institutional entropy, which keeps accumulating, despite (or often because) good intentions and competence. Everybody is improving their piece of the map, but this means you get stuck in a lot of spots of local maxima. Some can be fixed from a level above, but some need a round of creative destruction every 10 years or so.
I've read this yesterday: https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/why-japan-succ...
It's a good read and a good blog for many reasons, but the relevant part to this conversation: Japan managed to keep a very high level of living even through decades of economic stagnation and aging population in large part by having a sane zoning system. Yes, that simple. They have 12, nation-wide, mostly inclusive zoning types. This means the permitted building types carry over as you move up the categories, allowing mixed-use development by default.
And indeed, you can actually go to Japan and buy a house for about the price of a decent car - which coincidently used to be the case in most of the world, before the double pressure of zoning/coding on one hand, and migration towards urban centers on the other squeezed the housing pricing way above what actual costs would have it be.
How in the world is randomly firing people supposed to make anything more efficient? They literally don't even know what the people they're firing do, as seen with the latest mess with the Department of Energy.
Fiery take, but Elon eviscerated twitter and just kept kicking people out seemingly randomly. Anyone who didn't like it was encouraged walk out too on top of that. Twitter was doomed and the internet was rife with how it's collapse was immanent.
But he we are three years later and twitter is still running and still top dog in the message-post space.
I can't help but feel that in the presence of lots of money, organizations just bloat and bloat and bloat, and all that bloat will be sure to have a long winded explanation for why it is _critical_ to stay in existence.
Twitter is losing more money than before Musk, so I personally don't see how this is working out except as a mechanism to extract power.
twitter corporate bonds are trading at 97 cents on the dollar now, they were trading closer to 40 cents shortly after the acquisition. I would not assume they are still losing money
That only means that the borrowers think that the interest payments will be made.
The massive interest payments he added match or exceed the entire company revenue. There is no way the company is even close to making money.
> shortly after the acquisition
I would expect this to be a particularly low point. Can you link some data?
"The banks marketed the deal last week with an intention to sell down the debt at 90-95 cents to the dollar but managed to price it at a higher price of 97 cents... In late 2022, an attempt to sell the unsecured loan attracted bids in the 60 cents to the dollar range which would have seen the banks take on a large loss on the face value of the debt."
https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/banks-sell-down-55-...
so I was wrong to say they were as low as 40 cents, but the point stands that twitter's financials have improved a great deal
Twitter is barely breaking even because Musk's stupid policies have chased away a lot of advertisers.
> twitter is still running and still top dog in the message-post space
He just hasn’t finished the job.
Twitter has become a hive of racism and hate that is a shadow of its former self. I literally can't keep racist slurs from my homepage, if you think musk has improved it since he took over man so I have a bridge to sell you
He also eviserated 75% of Twitter's market cap. The only metric Twitter is a success is Elon leveraged it to get Trump elected and Trump is now showering him with favors.
Agreed. Maybe the government is terribly inefficient. I don't know. However, this isn't the most efficient way to make it better. Moreover, efficiency is not just saving money which seems to be all that is going on.
It's probably not. At this point I would place my hope in second order effects. But I'm not the sort of person to do that.
Maybe it forces the people who're left to prioritize which civil services to keep.
And forces states, especially poorer ones, to raise their taxes.
Or lower their taxes, now they don't have to fund useless bs
The explicit point of dismantling some agencies is to leave it to the states. Aka they want to reduce state funding. So the state choices are generate more income or let certain institutions rot.
You think the states will get more federal money now?
The trend of stealing money from New York, shutting down the Department of Education, and FEMA would make me think otherwise.
The necessity for delicately traversing the path to a solution that's more long-term sustainable than that which already exists seems to be something that DOGE is entirely incapable of.
Musk seems to want things to scale; fewer people to achieve more productivity. People that already fall through the cracks aren't going to suddenly find themselves better off via a system that scales better, because better scaling actually creates wider cracks.
The median flows better, at the cost of the fringes.
Your comments regarding Japan are interesting. Japan's definitely an interesting example to use due to the odd, unenviable economic situation, but that makes your point stand out more rather than less, I think.
Musk is using DOGE to shut down agencies he doesn't like. The dude likes firing people WAY too much.
The problem is if you want lower bureaucracy you have to change laws and not fire people. Most of the time you still need them, they just have no time to do what they are supposed to do.
For instance, would you fire doctors to reduce bureaucracy in medical services?
Great point. And if you fire all the insurance middlemen, but don’t get rid of the legal requirements which spawned those middlemen in the first place, you end up with medical professionals swamped with paperwork they shouldn’t have to deal with it.
What legal requirements spawned insurance middlemen?
A business can become more efficient by focusing on the most profitable customers. The government is not a business, nor should it be.
There is plenty of pressure on the organizations to be efficient, the American people never saw a tax cut they didn't like.
Efficiency isn't the number one goal of a democracy. You want pure efficiency, dictatorships are the way to go.
But for the most part, the things I expect the SF city government to do, get done. The roads are paved, the schools function, crime is kept in check, elections are held, permits are issued, inspections get done, etc. All to varying degrees of course. And the people get to change leadership if they feel things aren't going well (as they did in the last election).
I didn't say I want pure efficiency.
I don't know what you mean about crime being kept in check. Right now there are several cars on my street with expired registration. Two of them have no license plates at all. I doubt they are insured. I have been the victim of crime in my home.
There are people openly selling illegal drugs on the street, with no fear of arrest or prosecution.
The schools spent $27k per student per year (i.e. $500k per classroom), and FEWER THAN HALF of students meet grade level standards in math and English.
It takes many many permits to open a restaurant, and many would-be restaurant owners give up part way through the ordeal. 'Permits are issued' doesn't indicate efficiency when the number of permits required is beyond what's reasonable.
The expectations we have of the government have to be related, to some extent, to the resources it takes from us.
If you spend $27k per student per year, yes I expect schools to run efficiently enough such that students graduate high school able to read and write.
You want better govt, that's great, so do I. I don't think randomly firing workers like it's a video game will accomplish that, however.
Are you looking in the right places? I'm sure all the big tech leaders put pressure on? But their definition of "efficient" may not align with yours or mine.
> . The government is not a business, nor should it be.
And it's not a charity either. So get rid of these wasteful programs that redistribute other peoples money that don't even work.
If not working is so lucrative why don't you try it? I'll tell you this, it's not nearly as pleasant as you think.
For insurance companies? Yes doctors can be fired. They do not provide treatment.
You most definitely have to fire people. After all, their number one aim is to make sure their job still exists in a decade.
But their job doesn't exist for another month of you fire them. They aren't replacing "unproductive" workers.
Such a thing requires a redesign, not an uncontrolled demolition.
I think zoning is THE reason for what the article explains (and thanks for sharing it by the way, it was very insightful, imo).
But how does fixing our zoning issues translate to, for example, firing thousands of IRS workers?
Yup. Top bad Trump's actual political stance wants to focus on single family households.
Personally I can get behind the stated intentions of DOGE (although I don't think that's the real intent). I can also see the logic of having to break a few things / start over to really get to a clean state. But the way it's done doesn't seem intentional or calculated, it's just randomly smash things and seeing what breaks.
To put it in software terms, this is like doing a refactor without knowing what the current code base does, what the intended functionalities are and without having a design. Instead, someone just goes in to delete chunks of code based on the file name and see what happens.
With a random CRUD app that might be ok to some extent, but we're talking about people's livelihood, national security matters, environmental and consumer protection and such. The current DOGE approach using the most charitable take is either reckless or hubris.
Despite the hype, DOGE is about replacing government employees with private contractors rather that actually saving money. Therefore it will almost certainly end up costing more in the long run.
At a high level, the current administration is seeking ways to cut tax for the wealthy and pay and conditions for workers. As a property developer, Trump has a literal vested interest in maintaining high property values.
Its really difficult to see how this will translate into more affordable housing for poor people.
Indeed there is administrative bloat everywhere, and I can sympathize with your hope that tearing down the current system will leave room for building anew.
However, it's hubris to assume that everything is bloat. There is the adage of Chesterton's fence, which reads: "...reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood." Many things that appear to be bloat that serves a useful function, and tearing them blindly is going to do irreparable damage.
[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Chesterton%27s_fence
> This means the permitted building types carry over as you move up the categories, allowing mixed-use development by default.
That is more or less how it works all around the world except the US. Or rather: mixed use is the default, outside of specific cases
Cool. The US is the third largest country in the world; not all of us have to live above a restaurant or laundry. Or in apartments or other multi-tenant housing.
Those of us that want to can move to San Francisco or New York.
The state i live in has fewer people than metro Los Angeles. What works for them for housing is unnecessary for us.
Okay, no one was talking about your town. I'm not even sure if your state/town has zoning laws.
SF and LA have a lot less "living above a restaurant" because of those.
Really not seeing the forest through the trees on this one. The president is not supposed to have unilateral authority to axe written law. He's trimming the legislative branch, not the budget.
But DOGE, Elon Musk and Donald Trump don't have zoning on the agenda.
Trump's campaign platform was verbatim in favor of single family zoning according to his website. Harris's official platform was to ease permitting restrictions and provide incentives to states to reduce these regulations, according to their website and the multiple times they discussed this on the campaign trail.
Look past the marketing hype of DOGE and see that it's not actually deregulating anything that matters. The regulations that are blocking housing and energy are only going to be accelerated under this administration -- wilfully so.
The technocratic center-right have at times embraced deregulations like this, but not the new populist-right. The populist-right, if anything, see these regulations as useful because it empowers the immigrant scapegoat tactic as an explanation for housing costs.
I mean, the other conclusion from that article is a negative, namely: constant GDP growth is not a great measure of success. Who cares if GDP goes up or down? What matters is quality of life.
DOGE comes from the political machine that believes more restrictions on eligibility for government assistance are a GOOD thing and that spending on such assistance should be dramatically cut.
So good luck with that.
Zoning as a silver bullet? When you have a huge economic difference as a conflating factor? If the US had had decades of economic stagnation the housing price pressure caused by the beneficiaries of many sectors of the economy NOT stagnating, but instead of booming at more-than-anywhere-else-in-the-world-levels, seen in SF in particular, would be far less.) Look at housing prices in hollowing-out former industrial towns in the Midwest. Economic stagnation and lower cost of living go hand in hand. Japan stagnated at a pretty high level, quality-of-living-wise. That doesn't seem like a bad thing. It's certainly not comparable to Nigeria, Pakistan, or Chile. It's also not comparable to the US. And do you know who else doesn't want the US to stagnate like that for the elite professional class? Elon Musk. (And Japan's economic situation has more than a few darker aspects to it.)
(Republicans also fucking love zoning, so..... again... wtf)
> If the US had had decades of economic stagnation the housing price pressure caused by the beneficiaries of many sectors of the economy NOT stagnating, but instead of booming at more-than-anywhere-else-in-the-world-levels, seen in SF in particular, would be far less.) Look at housing prices in hollowing-out former industrial towns in the Midwest.
But the article isn't wrong though. Zoning things like Tokyo in San Francisco would be a silver bullet to the woes there and it would go a long way to making people feel prosperous. If you live in the bay area, you'll be shocked to see people with quite large net worths, feel like they have nothing because the only place they can afford near their workplace is $1M or more and we're talking about condos here.
Zoning while important isn't a silver bullet. Often cities who change zoning reform realize there is a whole lot of other issues that cause problems. But yes, zoning one of the most important ones.
Can you point out the parts which aren’t a shit-show?
Elon Musk is a liar with zero credibility. All his claims about government "inefficiency" are lies used to make people like you OK with him shutting down agencies he doesn't like.
You think conservatives care about actually helping the unhoused? Their ultimate goal is to funnel money from public services into private hands; and their "solution" to homelessness involves prison, concentration camps[1], or exile[2] — because they see the problem as undesirables reducing quality of life for the worthy rich, not abject human misery. (Indeed, Musk considers recipients of federal aid to be part of the "parasite class."[3])
[1]: https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-polit...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_homeless_relocation_pr...
[3]: https://atlantablackstar.com/2025/02/14/elon-musk-faces-back...
Musk is the biggest parasite in the parasite class.
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I'm with you in that hope. There has been wild growth for a very long time. Realignments are painful but necessary.
For those who live in San Francisco and witness homelessness and drug addiction across the city, this article feels deeply out of touch and even insulting.
We need to acknowledge that San Francisco has spent billions over decades on homelessness programs, yet the crisis persists, leaving us to ask: Is this truly the best we can do? Are we investing efficiently, or are we simply maintaining a broken system?
The core problem imo is there is simply not good enough treatments for addiction (yet?). For opioid addiction there is methadone and buprenorphine etc. But I suspect these have became even less effective with so much fentanyl around now, requiring much higher doses. But these all really work (simplifying massively) by replacing the addiction with something that is easier to eventually titrate down.
For meth, crack, etc there are effectively no pharmacological interventions available. And many (most?) of the street homeless have dual addictions to a stimulant and an opioid, so even if they did manage to switch from fentanyl to buprenorphine they would almost certainly be extremely unstable with their stimulant addiction.
Obviously there are psychological interventions and peer support groups, but these require quite a lot of stability to stick to and get to, which I think is extremely difficult for someone in a very chaotic addiction cycle.
To me, it seems some of the billions that cities spent on social services for homeless should be diverted (or in addition to) to pharmacological research. There is so little funding available for this - I read Prof David Nutt was doing an interesting PET study for kappa opioid response in addiction but ran out of funding. The funding requirements were low-medium hundreds of thousands of dollars and couldn't find it to continue the research.
The current status quo seems a bit like trying to treat TB without antibiotics. The treatment back then was basically similar to current 'rehab' programs - send them to a quiet place and give them care and help. Obviously not a bad thing to do; but once you had antibiotics the prognosis improved by many orders of magnitude almost overnight (and a lot less costly to provide).
> The core problem imo is there is simply not good enough treatments for addiction (yet?).
Isn't that still treating a symptom, rather than the core problem? If homelessness is caused by drug addiction, what causes drug addiction? Underlying mental health? Lack of opportunity? Government welfare dependence?
I think if we could treat that, we'd also know the core problem.
My hunch (not as an expert) is that people who are very prone to addiction have a maladapted brain system of some kind. I think this system 'malfunction' can either be genetic and/or caused by trauma/environmental reasons in their life. I suspect this because nearly everyone I know that has had addiction problems has had a parent with similar. It's surprisingly rare to find someone with an addiction problem that isn't in the family. Strangely, not all siblings seem to have the same issue.
Problem is, we don't know which system(s) it is yet. The research on kappa opioid receptors is very interesting as the KOR regulates stress response, and we know that stress causes many relapses in previously addicted individuals in recovery.
I also think we may find there are multiple types of addiction, caused by different systems/reasons. These all present very similarly, but similar to the discovery years ago that some infections were caused by viruses and some bacteria, it could be similar for addiction.
So really I think it goes something like this:
People are predisposed to addiction -> they become addicted -> they become homeless and trapped in a chaotic loop which a tiny percent of people can recover from
When I believe the best response for people that are affected by addiction would be something like this
Addicted person (homeless or otherwise) -> some sort of diagnostic (genetic testing?) -> new tailored medication -> recovery
It may be also these maladaptations cause all the mental health problems themselves. But not everyone that has mental health problems becomes addicted, despite experimenting with substances.
In my experience, having watched friends enter that position, it's drugs which cause drug addiction. Mental health might play a factor, but if I gave the average HN user meth or crack every day for three weeks, their brain chemistry would be almost irreversibly changed and would spend years, if not the rest of their life, wanting more. Same goes for powerful opioids.
One can argue that certain people are more predisposed to enjoy being high, I'm one of those people. When you see incredibly rich and successful people like Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Chris Farley, and Philip Seymour Hoffman ultimately losing it all to that desire, I feel like it's hard to blame something like lack of opportunity or government welfare dependence.
The "bad" drugs, crack/meth/opioids/etc. make your brain feel a way sober-type people can't really imagine. I don't know what the answer is.
Not like people in other countries don't have access to the same drugs. It's not solved 100% anywhere, but the magnitude is very different in say Canada.
End of the day, it's still societal issues that's causing some people to go down this path. Most of the drug addicts have some level of "atypical" upbringing. Maybe abusive childhood, constant foster care, growing up in a bad neighborhood with the wrong influence etc. Seems like we should be focusing on solving those issues, which not only benefits the topic at hand but society and communities in general.
I don't think this is true. "Only" a quarter of people that try heroin become addicted. Similar numbers with alcohol (15% of people that try alcohol develop a problem with it), but given alcohol is more widespread, there is some selection bias because only a subset of people try heroin, whereas nearly everyone tries alcohol. I would not be surprised if the overall addiction risk is very similar between alcohol and heroin.
I think it's much more likely some sort of genetic trait underlying it.
> In my experience, having watched friends enter that position, it's drugs which cause drug addiction. Mental health might play a factor, but if I gave the average HN user meth or crack every day for three weeks, their brain chemistry would be almost irreversibly changed and would spend years, if not the rest of their life, wanting more. Same goes for powerful opioids.
I bet if you gave the average HN user meth or crack every day for three weeks, almost certainly nothing would change except their toilet flushing slightly more frequently!
My point was not about basic mechanism of dependence which sure will happen to anybody. It was about what causes them to seek out and take those things in excess in the first place.
> One can argue that certain people are more predisposed to enjoy being high, I'm one of those people. When you see incredibly rich and successful people like Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Chris Farley, and Philip Seymour Hoffman ultimately losing it all to that desire, I feel like it's hard to blame something like lack of opportunity or government welfare dependence.
Individual cases and especially these extreme outliers are no good. It's not that one single government policy or social problem is the cause of all drug addiction, but they could contribute to the issue on a population level.
The problem is that money cannot solve homelessness, because you cannot live in it or eat it or be treated by it. It's just money - numbers in a computer.
Things that might help would be housing, food or treatments. But those real-world things are often very hard to come by, and often encumbered by the very people who profess to want to help.
For example, maybe building more homes would help - but developers are often hamstrung in their ability to do so - and often by exactly the same people that want to fund homeless programs.
So what happens when we give people a lot of money to "solve" a problem, but then prevent them from taking the actions that might help? Well, they still will always find a way to "use" the money (I'm not necessarily implying fraud here), but the results will never materialize. What this looks like in practice is funding studies, working groups, paper-pushing bureaucracies, etc.
So the money is gone, any we don't have anything to show for it.
Please try to speak only for yourself, not all SF residents.
I’ve lived here for a decade, in 6 different neighborhoods (including 6th street). I now live near Golden Gate Park where this article is mostly set. I found it inspiring, not insulting.
Ditto. (Except I live in the Mission.)
I can't speak for SF, but LA had judges recently come down very hard on housing organizations for having basicslly zero data on where 20 billion dollars went. The judge forced actual audits and homelessness is actually slightly improving as of late 2024.
I would nlt he shocked if similar issues are happening in SF. at best very inefficient spending on minor factors, at medium they may be "fixing homelessness" by paying for more security than actual homes (this was one of the LA factors). Or at the damndest it's hurt outright Embezzlement.
The latter
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You are online way too much. Come see the world say hi to some people. The US isn't a death cult it's just more heavily influenced by propaganda than most smaller countries.
Viewed from 10,000ft it could even be cheaper in the long term, as an overall outcome. Personal attention, guidance through the system, vs constant background EMT interventions, more costly health outcomes, Policing and ultimately incarceration risks.
I don't like reductive economics logic over what is a humane response, but I do like that it may not only be nicer, but actually financially sensible.
What you're describing is universal healthcare being cheaper in the long term, which I would agree with. What is described in this article absolutely does not sound like a productive use of taxpayer money at all. Any one of the ranger's clients that gets semi-permanent shelter is someone else who doesn't. At best, we're pay a full-time salary for someone to play a zero sum game. IMO, it's actually worse than that because such housing is more efficiently allocated to those who are able and willing to navigate the bureaucracy of public housing themselves are more likely to rebound successfully.
Reminds me of an article from a while ago about a homeless alcoholic that ran up over $1M in hospital and ambulance costs over the years.
https://centerforhealthjournalism.org/our-work/insights/mill...
Nitpick, but $1M in unpaid bills is nowhere near $1M in costs. Obviously this is still a troubling result but in all likelihood it was less than 10% of that in actual costs and the costs weren’t in fact borne by “the taxpayer” but rather by slightly inflated fees for everyone else, since US hospitals must bill according to an assumption that some percentage of bills will go unpaid, due to the relationship between themselves, the insurers, and uninsured patients.
And for useful reference: I was in hospital last year for ~2 weeks, and my insurance was sent a bill for ~$580k. The insurance actually paid $32k.
Hospital bills are clearly works of fiction.
$580k?! As an European, I can only imagine you got 5 organ transplants, 4 titanium limb replacements, and, idk, night vision or something, while staying in a penthouse suite with masages and coconut milk treatments...
(Obviously joking and I know 2 weeks in a hospital is very unpleasant - I'm sorry for your experience and hope you're doing well).
Indeed. Those clearly-bonkers initial bills are clearly meant to a) intimidate and terrify the uninsured, and b) present a sympathetic facade to politicians and possibly the IRS about how much cost the hospital absorbs from non-paying patients.
It’s like a tax scam right? Or is it like once in a blue moon they get wealthy whale without insurance?
In that case, why not move all the homeless from a park in a metropolis to a park in a cheaper/remote area? Then you can actually employ cheaper custodians in those areas to look after these homeless.
It's a lot hard to re-enter society if you're separated from everyone and everyplace you know. Sure, it could be cheaper in some ways to ship the homeless out to bumfuck nowhere, but might be less cost-effective than you think, and certainly less humane.
If drugs are strongly intertwined I wonder if an opportunity to voluntarily seperate from familiar drug triggers and sources might provide some balancing to the downsides.
Drugs & alcohol is the majority of why they are homeless from San Francisco to Grand Junction, CO (drove through & saw they have an unofficial homeless park) to Portland to Seattle to Calgary, etc, etc.
No, it isn’t. If that was true you’d see a much stronger correlation between drug and alcohol use and homelessness.
"A survey by the United States Conference of Mayors found that 68 percent of cities reported that substance abuse was the largest cause of homelessness for single adults."
https://endhomelessness.org/resource/opioid-abuse-and-homele...
i do not have any idea how to solve housed people turning to drugs/alcohol to try and solve internal emotional pain...maybe more & more education.
That’s not actually what you want to ask: Drug use is an additional risk factor for becoming homeless, which tells you that the people who are homeless are likely to be drug users - but that really just sorts out who is likely to become homeless, not how many people. If drug use caused homelessness then places with higher substance abuse rates would have higher homelessness rates. But they don’t! The rate of homelessness is driven most clearly by the difference between area income and area housing cost, and does not correlate well to any measures of drug use in the area.
A nice pair of contrasting data points here is WA and West Virginia. Drug usage and addiction, as well as mental health problems, in West Virginia far outstrips Washington - see https://www.kff.org/statedata/mental-health-and-substance-us... However homelessness in Washington is far, far worse than in West Virginia. West Virginia had almost the lowest rate of homelessness in the country.
https://mountainstatespotlight.org/2024/07/16/wv-new-data-ho...
https://247wallst.com/state/how-the-homelessness-problem-in-...
You do when you subset the homeless population from couch surfers and people living in their car to the people actually finding a wink of sleep under some tarps under a noisy overpass
No you don’t. If 50% of society uses drugs, 5% of society is homeless, and 100% of homeless people uses drugs - then you’d see that all homeless people use drugs, but most drug users are not homeless, so it’s not well correlated at all.
Then maybe the easy solution to this whole issue is to just give the homeless free cars.
Yes it is harder, but it's also harder for society to offer you the services like free room and board, help getting a job, and the thousand other services we offer in a high cost of living area.
Since society is taking up the bulk of the work in helping you re-enter, you have to make some compromises, and potentially moving to a new place seems like a reasonable one to make. If we want a robust and strong social safety net, we cannot commit to providing all these services in the most expensive place to do so.
Why?
Because you either make it where you grew up or we'll ship you to the Midwest where you're cheaper to deal with, ya fuckin' bum.
Genuine question: is a social darwinist society something folks (perhaps you?) feel like they would survive in? Suppose your community decide it hates people who post online and wanted to ship them to Alaska. You cool with that?
Are you asking why things have costs?
No, but I could see why that is where your mind started.
You have a deep, implicit assumption of a social contract in your statement here:
> Since society is taking up the bulk of the work in helping you re-enter, you have to make some compromises, and potentially moving to a new place seems like a reasonable one to make. If we want a robust and strong social safety net, we cannot commit to providing all these services in the most expensive place to do so.
Some people can't. I know several schizophrenia sufferers who would never be able to hit an expected checklist. Some are brilliant. Some think they talk to an esoteric God and babble prophecy. None are functional.
We used to lock those folks up in sanitoriums for their safety, but due to systemic abuse this ended. Go back further, and the folks were tribal shamans, village jesters, and other elements of society which were supported by others until their (often untimely) deaths.
The latter support more or less ended when we as a species started settling down out of nomadic lives.
As a society, we dramatically underfund infrastructure (crumbling bridges and suburbs), healthcare (exploding costs without quality improvement), education (teachers salary is uncompetitive), government action (court systems aren't expedient, legislators xna be bought).
If we don't want these things, we should have the society decide so. This would be through legislation. But we haven't. We ignore these friction instead of addressing them.
Resolving friction takes effort, and effort has costs.
You have a deep implicit assumption that throwing money at the problem solves it. That's rarely true. In the case of schizophrenics, we have solved it a long time ago, but they refuse to take their meds. No amount of money in social programs will change that. It just shifts the "systemic abuse" (which I agree with you on) from (asylums abusing the ill) to the (the mentally ill abusing the general public). I think abuse is a great way to phrase it. We all get abused by the public excrement, petty crime, needles and trash, loss of use of common areas, etc. We all are being abused by that population.
Park Ranges and Social Services Workers are much cheaper than Police, Paramedics, and Emergency Room Staff.
Your reductive suggestion could be implemented by busing the homeless to prisons. That's probably not what you were proposing, but it's one interpretation.
Then they'll have much further distances to commute on foot to their jobs.
If they could have a job they wouldn't be homeless.
My understanding is that there are plenty of homeless folks with jobs.
Identifying and assisting these people first would seem to be the thing to do.
But reducing those homeless to 0% would likely not move the needle at all on the “problematic homeless” - the type everyone complains about.
Nobody cares about Steve Wallis sleeping in a bush.
Why would a job automatically mean housing? This is America, a job only means enough money for housing in some markets.
See, thats why I don't like the reductive reasoning. After all, when you're moving them why bother with seat belts and comfy chairs? Just use a flatbed truck and they can hold their pathetic possessions on with string, if they have any. And you also neatly assume the resources in the remote location can cope with the burden rather than already being behind the cost curve, compared to rangers in the SF metro area with direct access to the agencies.
Wait a minute, isn't this why it "paid" for the Texan and Floridan governors to ship their problems to the sanctuary cities?
you might have misunderstood; if the homeless is now in a cheaper COL park, then more park custodians can be hired to take care of the homeless. And why should we assume that SF metro agencies are more apt to take care of these downtrodden than small town Nevada City? They haven't exactly done a stellar job so far for decades.
> custodians can be hired
SF has one of the largest city budgets in the country — >$15billion — and struggles to staff park workers making $70-90k.
If the park workers only make $60k, but the city budget is 1/10th, 1/20th, 1/100th of SF’s, how does the math here ever work?
>In fiscal year 2023–2024, San Francisco spent $690 million on homelessness, notes the San Francisco Chronicle. This is a 142% increase from five years ago.
Spending $700M/year on homelessness crisis is straight up insane. There has to be a better way that doesnt cost as much. SF is kinda fucked.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/homeless-questions-an...
When there is an enormous budget somehow used up but with barely any noticeable effect (and frankly, without much of an expectation that there’s noticeable effect), you can bet there’s someone or a lot of someones siphoning from it.
Btw even $690m isn’t the full picture:
> While that amount does not include what the Department of Public Health or SF Public Works or many other departments spend related to the crisis
They could just take that $700M and divide it up among the ~8000 homeless in the city. That $87,500 per year would be enough to help get someone on their feet pretty quickly. Probably more effective than whatever the hell they’re spending it on today. Salaries for administrators administrating other administrators?
There’s got to be some Appalachian town that would love to get paid $700m/yr to house and care for 8,000 people.
Maybe its facetious, but I also do not understand why they have to be accommodated in a top 5 most expensive place in the world to live in.
It's half facetious but also half serious, as the amounts of money are simply staggering.
There has to be some middle ground between "homeless in a park" and "living their own life with a job" and "locked up in prison at great cost" that would be satisfactory to everyone.
I think it's impossible for everyone to be satisfied no matter what the solution is.
Park rangers make $30k-40k in small cities/towns. Not to mention big cities can help pay for some of the transition costs for these homeless, with their 15 billion budget. Also, it would be way cheaper to house these homeless once they choose to transition from park to an apartment.
The point would be to still use SF's money to do this, I assume. The point was that SF's money would be better spent on park rangers in a smaller city than in SF itself.
Now, I think there are otherajor issues with this idea (mostly that having a 0.1% population of assisted people is much more workable than a 10% population, as would happen if SF moved every homeless person to a smaller city).
SF park workers are closer to 120K from those I know. A lot of labor intensive hand weeding because the city shuns herbicide. However, this is less than the median SF city employee, which makes 150k
https://opengovpay.com/employer/ca/san-francisco
SF budget is city and county services, fwiw. It is good to make apples to apples comparison.
It’s also services for less than a million people
If they could get the guy with asthma regularly seeing a PCP, the money the public is spending on his constant ER trips would more than pay for housing and the time the ranger has to spend on helping him.
If
(Also note that if that's your general policy then you effectively allow anyone to blackmail you to get whatever they want, just by making it slightly more expensive to not give them what they want)
Is this not only reductive reasoning, but also both devils advocating, and functionally an artefact of the US health system economics?
> Is this not only reductive reasoning
Maybe. Reductive reasoning is usually a good idea.
> devils advocating
No.
> functionally an artefact of the US health system economics?
So what? If and when you manage to fix the US health system for the working poor then it might become reasonable to provide free healthcare to the disruptive homeless, sure. But until then it isn't.
I think we have fundamentally different views on this. It's also true that disruptive homeless have to be managed in state funded healthsystems worldwide and that includes denying them service when they do bad things, I'm not naieve enough to believe somehow this is a uniquely american problem (disruptive people) but I do think the aspect of reductive health economics here is a pretty unique problem to the US health economy. And I say that living in an economy which has private emergency services alongside the public ones. We just don't have the same problem at scale, because we don't have the underlying health charge model.
Do you have a moral objection to a homeless man with asthma getting a primary care provider paid for by the government?
I have a moral objection to the government providing more support to a socially disruptive person than they give to someone who is more prosocial. I'm all for a government-provided healthcare that's free for everyone, but prioritising person A because they're more disruptive than person B is morally bankrupt.
It's not about morality, it's about incentives. Under the current system in the US, if you're broke and you have no insurance:
1. The ER is free to you, because they legally cannot refuse to treat you based on your ability to pay.
2. A regular doctor's visit costs $250 and your medicine costs $5-$500/month depending on what you need, because those businesses won't give you things they don't think you'll pay for.
One need not be morally bankrupt to make choice #1. We all choose things that are more expensive for society because they are more convenient or less expensive for us - lots of regular activities of what patio11 calls the professional/managerial class have negative externalities that the rest of society pays for: air travel, personal automobiles, and lawns all come immediately to mind.
If you want people to get their medical care from a PCP and their medicine from the pharmacy, then make it cheaper for them. Health insurance companies know this; that's why many plans lets you see your PCP for a small fixed price even before your deductible is met - because they want to incentivise you to get your care in the way that's cheapest for them.
> One need not be morally bankrupt to make choice #1
I'm talking about the people making the decisions about who gets free doctor's visits, not the people on the receiving end.
> We all choose things that are more expensive for society because they are more convenient or less expensive for us - lots of regular activities of what patio11 calls the professional/managerial class have negative externalities that the rest of society pays for: air travel, personal automobiles, and lawns all come immediately to mind.
That doesn't make it ok. Most people have at least some semblance of conscience and try to cut down on those things - of course no-one is perfect, but that doesn't mean we should allow whataboutism to get in the way of good policymaking. (FWIW I'm all for taxing those things at a fair rate that covers the costs of those externalities)
> If you want people to get their medical care from a PCP and their medicine from the pharmacy, then make it cheaper for them.
Sure. But make it cheaper for all of them. I agree that "it's about incentives" - so don't make it so that the incentive is to do the antisocial thing until the system pays you to stop. It should be easy to extrapolate where that leads.
It’s worth pointing out that he probably qualified for expanded Medicaid in California, so the PCP visits would be covered by that. It’s just a matter of getting him to actually go.
You've made quite a jump here from "has asthma" to "socially disruptive".
The post I replied to was arguing from "the money the public is spending".
On ER care.
Exactly. The economic argument shouldn't be the only reason to push for better solutions, but it's a compelling one (especially in a system that often prioritizes cost over compassion)
I have a pet theory that love is a basic human need (and a requirement for good mental health), and governments are notoriously bad at providing love no matter how much money you throw at mental health therapy, treatment programs, UBI, etc. Barrows is setting a good example here, but how to get more citizens involved so the burden isn't all on a few rangers?
I suspect that few people want to be involved. It is difficult and dangerous work. It requires a personality that both cares for others, while being resilient enough to face the challenges of those in their care. By in large, it is also a thankless job. Just look at many of the responses here. The public don't care about the time and effort involved. Many think that it is best to just lock them up. Quite often the recipients don't care. They are too busy battling their own demons.
It's probably best to have safety nets in place so that people don't reach these depths in the first place.
> It requires a personality that both cares for others, while being resilient enough to face the challenges of those in their care.
Not only resilience to the challenges, but resilience to the fact that some people you will just fail to help. The more you care about those in your care, the more it will generally consume you when they don't succeed.
This is a hugely difficult thing to overcome, and it's a big reason why, for example, hospital doctors typically end up with relatively little empathy for patients: it's very hard to maintain your mental health while empathizing with people hurting and dying every day. You really have to build some kind of wall between you and them to cope with the inevitable losses.
We have social safety nets in the US. We just don't have one robust enough that you can live in housing and have enough income without working in San Francisco permanently.
The safety net for everyone is your friends and family. Drug addiction destroys that, so you are left alone. They kind of don't have anyone else. People see homelessness, but all I see is a slow trek to a suicide for many. They are dying slowly - and do not make any mistake about that. It's fatal.
Overall, there are many drugs addicts and homeless people in the world. It only bothers us when it obstructs our vision, very disgusting sentences like I cant even visit the beach anymore. I think that's fine, there are many beaches and many other places. You can visit the beach somewhere else, these people are dying.
Millionaire Rogan found the sight of homeless people unbearable so he had to leave the state (could be the taxes, but he's also filthy rich. I don't want to say he's just rotten, that's mean. I'll say a few other things instead).
Your society creates an inordinate amount of homeless people, that's first. Worry about the view later. You are lucky that you even get to see poverty up close, most just move the living fuck away from it.
Wait.
Edit:
I bring Rogan up because if you go through his entire catalog, you will see he has hours and hours of content that just bullies homeless people. He has done that to a few other groups, literal hours if you stack them side by side in a compilation. So there was already a lot of damage done in terms of mindshare by this media-arm.
Trivializing other people's concerns and worries is not the best way to get their help - even when priorities are pretty clear. It is very similar to trivializing "oh you shouldn't be an addict in the first place"
We are dealing with humans here, and all of them, including the homeless and people complaining about views, make up our society.
Again, I said a specific sentence, and I think it's the most important sentence to me. You have to be lucky to be witness to poverty, it provides incredible perspective. I undermine other's concerns about the unsightly view because I believe their attitude is immoral, and I have no issue drawing a red line there.
Having been homeless a couple times the way out is rather simple in most cases if you're sane and sober. A days day labor is enough for food, propane, and bus passes for a week. Anything beyond that us enough to buy a shower at a truck stop and get cleaned up for an interview at a warehouse. You can trivially survive outside with a weeks day labor wages worth of REI gear on the coasts and most the lower 49 ( of course a junky would hawk this as soon as they are dope sick )
On both occasions I used this equation homeless -> day labor for Airbnb to clean up for warehouse/factory interview -> work in factory until deposit on apartment earned to get out.
Most the people actually on the street are nuts or drugged out. People like me would clean construction site, then take a bus to edge of town and climb a flat roof and sleep where no one sees us.
What you're witnessing isn't so much poverty but insanity.
I can't even find work with experience and a clean record. I can't imagine how bad it'd be to find minimum wage work while not having an address to full a form out with. If it's been a whine for you it's gotten so much worse.
>Most the people actually on the street are nuts or drugged out
The most obvious, in your face example are the crazy ones. For basic human survival we remember those the most. But I bet most homeless people are just a person on the streets getting by. Not even the ones begging for change. It's a lot harder to get by in CA though.
If nothing else works I've also fallen back on commercial fishing in the Bering Sea near AK (free food and board included), and hitch hiking to north Dakota to work on the oil rush. I don't know if they still hire but usually they'll hire anyone and maybe give you free board.
The address you out down generally isn't checked, I'll leave it at that.
Putting professional work experience is a no no for minimum wage job. Word your experience to make it sound much more laborious and uneducated.
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You're both talking past each other in a high-handed way that speaks perfectly to why this is a problem that's not only unsolved, but toxic to try and solve.
I'm not even sure it's a problem so much as a symptom. If you see someone with shortness of breath, normally offering some oxygen might help them. Unless of course they have COPD, in which case that may very well kill them.
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Yes, you can draw a line wherever your moral compass tells you to. My point was not about morality. It is just that regardless of what you think of morals as an individual, these people are all still part of the same society, and parts of both problems and solutions.
And in many parts of the world you have to be lucky not to see/experience poverty from up close.
The thing is that being homeless is a constant state of emergency for homeless people and we don't talk about it like that.
Imagine if someone spent their time complaining about how pulling over for an ambulance or firetruck made them late to an important life event, so we should stop doing that. I don't think most of us would say "hey wait a minute, this person has a genuine concern. Let's not trivialize it".
I disagree with the idea that we should accept that homelessness and crippling drug addiction are socially acceptable and normal aspects of society just because the people going through them are suffering more than you are. I think it’s totally reasonable to express that the beach feeling dangerous and disgusting is in fact awful and that you do not like the state of things, and I do not want to live in a society where you can’t state opinions like this straightforwardly (which is why I left SF).
You're free to leave. Running is always the fastest solution to avoiding an issue, and you probably can't fix that issue alone.
But I'd hope someone in a thread like this would be interested in a deeper understanding on what factors lead to that.
Unlike what you may have assumed, I was active in local politics campaigning for change while I was there. What I found is that San Franciscans themselves neither wanted things to change nor did they want people like me who disagree with them to be there. I realized not only that it was a losing battle to try to change the nature of the people there, but also that I didn’t want to martyr myself for a city that clearly didn’t want me to call it home.
What are you doing for the problem?
Can I ask what you do on a regular basis to help homeless people? Was moving away your only actionable item?
I don’t go out of my way to help the homeless either, but I also don’t go out of my way expressing how disgusted I am with them, or rally behind politics that are net bad for everyone just because I really agree that SF is really not to my liking.
You moving away was the adult thing to do. You adding to the carrion call of maga voices is reprehensible.
Enjoy your beaches.
You’re making a lot of assumptions.
I am a liberal who believed at some point in my 20s when I lived there that what we needed to fix society’s problems is just to… empathize more. Unfortunately we see how far that gets, as there’s no shortage of “caring” in SF.
I did not vote for Trump, and in fact I was active in SF local politics campaigning for politicians whose platforms I believed would make a real dent in the homelessness problem. Which you’re evidently not interested in doing besides admonishing people for not saying the politically correct thing.
Unfortunately, San Franciscan home owners, when push comes to shove, want a pretty view, the image of a SF frozen how it was when they were young hippies, and inflated housing costs that they profit from, over actually solving any of these problems.
Since then I’ve moved somewhere that prioritizes actually doing things that actually work, and not just feeling bad for people who are downtrodden.
Enjoy your abject human misery and disgusting public spaces, I hope you feeling miserable somehow fixes the issue.
Thank you.
I think what you're saying is particularly true on this subject-- the people with skeptical or negative remarks are likely people who they or their families have personally suffered harm. When someone denies your own experience it's natural to write them off if not to actively oppose their position.
Widely contentious issues are usually contentious precisely because the different perspectives are all simultaneously valid.
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Comments from the left in the style of your posting is what finally made me stop voting for left leaning parties. I can not associate with so much hate and prejudice anymore. This rhetoric is alienating the center, but folks like you don't seem to care. But then again, you lost the election... And you still haven't learnt a single thing. The more aggressively you sweep everyone under the same rug, less and less people will be willing to support your causes.
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At least "we" are the majority. And people like you ensure that "we" will stay the majority. No sane person can support people like you.
Besides, I am blind. I dont even see the skin colour of a person. Its very hard to be racist in a state like that, but the hardcore left acivist like you will still put me in a basket.
Thanks for being frank.
The reason it's a popular target is because it's such an embarrassment, denying it or diminishing it makes it more powerful as a war drum. It makes it more excusable for the drummers to exaggerate it, to the extent that the audience feels the alternative view is just flat out wrong.
When there legitimately is no issue then it is what it is, when there is an issue and we can respond "we know, we're working on it, here are the difficulties we face" that's also understandable. But when a political opponent is committed to outright denying something that many people can see for themselves, that's manna from heaven.
I think if you default to seeing things in terms of "alignment" it means that every time your opponent has a point, even a weak one, it harms all the positions that you've bundled together because it's a wedge for someone to go "well team yellow clearly has a point on X while team green is gaslighting, so ...".
Especially when we generalize on one set of opinions to conclude the person we're talking to is 'the other team' and are according evil unpersons devoid of moral value. Every false positive on that judgement call sends another person in to the arms of people who don't jump to conclusions on them.
To depower a political faction we must depower political factionalism -- because factions are primarily created by their opponents.
>The reason it's a popular target is because it's such an embarrassment
Exactly. SF is one of the most democratic cities in the most democratic states. It is extremely hard for Democrats to blame failure to deliver on Republican obstructionists, it just doesn't ring true when the cities conservatives are left of the median democrat.
It is an outrage for most people on the social progressives too. Why can't we fix this and do better? Los Angeles passed a 1.2 billion dollar homeless housing Bond, and got a bunch of Home Depot sheds for 800k each.
Some critiques are valid, indefensible, and should trigger introspection.
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Freaking Poe's law. :)
To be frank, they never wanted to help to begin with. Why would I care about coddling their concerns if they are being selfish all this time?
Sometimes, awareness is just as much about identifying who to not bother with as it is about empowering future allies.
Where did the $640B+ that was spent to help the homeless came from? Thin air?
I find your way of downplaying the worries of other citizens way more disgustng then the comment you replied to can ever be. This "your problems are a joke" attitude is very condescending and patronising.
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The topic was homelessness. Where did you get the racist bit from?
I am sorry for you, hope you get well soon and find some help.
> I am sorry for you, hope you get well soon and find some help.
They clearly don't need "help", please do not concern troll here.
I was called a racist to my face. I chose to go the route of compassion, instead of throwing the same, useless energy back at them. And yes, I think people with such an aggressive style DO need help, it can't be healthy to think such toxic thoughts all the time.
If you meant it sincerely that's nice to hear, but people don't take it that way, similarly to how they don't take getting a referral to the suicide prevention hotline in their DMs as a genuine attempt to save their lives. It doesn't come off as genuine, it comes off as sarcastic concern trolling.
It is unfortunate they called you racist, though. The comments were flagged and hidden before I could ever see them, so all I could really read and respond to were your own response.
You got waxed, don’t even bother.
Which means?
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There's this thing called religion where we chant hymns and sing songs in an attempt to reorient our psyche to suppress our innate selfishness. By raising our oxytocin levels amongst our community via shared belief and communal celebration, we leave the room in an exuberant mood to serve others.
I know people think the prayer meetings et al are corny, but when you realize what comes afterwards (or should) then it really all makes sense.
And it's not just about helping strangers it's about helping others who are maybe not your best friend but still in your circle.
Congregational religion is one of the most tragically trampled upon secular fences.
It's no surprised that the same methodology was arrived at by the world's great religions. Buddhist and Christian mendicant and service-based monastic orders come to mind
Get more folks involved in local volunteering opportunities, especially ones with direct outreach to people in need.
I'm heavily involved with Austin Bicycle Meals [1]. When a homeless person already knows you are there to help, it creates an entirely different social dynamic than normal. You get opportunities to make conversation and connections, which humanizes how we view these issues.
That's a total reversal to how most people interact with the homeless: in an entirely avoidant manner either randomly on the street or through a car window. That's why so much of the general public is numb to their plight.
The change in mindset that happens is really powerful, can take only a couple of hours of volunteering to happen, and something I hope more people seek out.
https://linktr.ee/austinbicyclemeals
You'll be glad to know that your "pet theory" is a topic that has extensive literature around it, even going back milennia.
I've read a lot around this, happy to provide some suggestions if you choose to dive into this.
I search through the internet looking for these type of stories that renew my faith in humanity. Thank you for sharing.
Great article highlighting a complex problem, and the steps required to solve it.
EDIT: May be a situation that would call for "Dog Fooding", to solve for the detailed use-cases?
USA does not spend enough resources to get a highly effective suite of services together, nor appreciate enough the value of human life to consistently provide care to people, ironically.
I'm currently dealing with the impact of a homeless, mutually abusive (shouting, fighting), drug-using couple camping either on the strip of grass directly in front of my home (most recently for weeks) or various sidewalks / bus stops in a 2 block radius, here in Seattle.
Worse, they attract "pals" who are : heavier drug users, very very disruptive to the neighborhood by causing nuisances including walking into traffic and being struck / killed here, creating public health issues with drug paraphernalia and human waste, etc.
This article reminds me of the complexity the couple faces, freeing themselves from the shackles of their abusive relationship, moving away from the homeo-statically well-know life on the streets.
I want them gone. I see it's difficult. I wish more Civil Servants were available to guide them.
There aren't that many. The Seattle Unified Care Team has been ineffective for this couple, they have been here for over four years, and it has not improved.
The last time I was in San Francisco was 8.5 years ago. My family had a cabbie with a pile of new tube socks in front seat. When he’d have to stop at a light, he would look for any homeless near the intersection, get their attention, and hand them new socks.
We gave the cabbie a good tip.
The title let me down; I was hoping this would be an article about a trebuchet. [edit: I see the post title has changed, the original one was something like "park ranger uses extraordinary methods to remove homeless from SF parks"]
I lived next to the park for several years and grew to loathe the dynamic where the lives of people sleeping rough in Golden Gate Park or Civic Center merit months of one-on-on outreach, while the lives of all of those who can't walk through the park in safety, can't send their kids there to play, and can't sit on the grass for fear of stepping on a used needle or a pile of human excrement, don't seem to matter.
I would like to see the city adopt a compassionate approach that doesn't at the same time enable years of lawbreaking by people who make nominally public spaces off-limits to the law-abiding. I'd like to see a San Francisco where there can be at least one clean, safe, working public toilet.
My solution to this was to sell my home and leave San Francisco after living there 19 years. The moment I had a baby on the way, it no longer became tenable for me to deal with the lack of cleanliness or safety on the streets.
The irony is that I moved to Mexico City. It’s a far safer place than San Francisco.
That’s pretty debatable and entirely depends on how you define safety. I live in cdmx btw.
Just for the record, CDMX has a crime rate of over 50,000 per 100,000 residents, meaning that there’s one crime for every two residents each year. SF’s crime rate is about 6,000 per 100,000 - so about eight times safer. CDMX might feel safer than SF to you, but it is unequivocally much, much more dangerous.
When the housing crisis there reaches its breaking point (driven by gentrifying transplants), we’ll see if even the feeling lasts.
Someone in SF with a $2M home can buy something pretty significantly away from the crime areas of Mexico City, and probably has a remote salary that can afford private gun toting security.
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Mexico City is absolutely enormous. I don’t know for sure, but I’m betting crime rates city-wide don’t tell the whole story.
Sure, and all cities of all sizes have crime hotspots, but even the rich transplant epicenter, Roma, has a crime rate of about 8 per 100 [1]. That’s well above the SF average, which itself is skewed by a few high-crime outliers like the Tenderloin.
[1]: https://hoyodecrimen.com/en/sectores-map/
The same is true with San Francisco, even if it isn’t as big. We could cherry pick compare the best neighborhood of Mexico City against the worst neighborhood of SF to falsify a claim that Mexico City is safer than San Francisco.
When my friend got robbed in SF the police didnt even show up for 2hrs and the owner of the bar I was at laughed at the idea of calling the police like they'd care. I highly doubt crime statistics reflect how bad it really is. Besides most of the worst of SF is the dirtiness and petty crime that police care even less about. Come out of the subway and see a homeless guy urinating right in front of the steps without even turning away is not something people are calling the police over but is a typical day-to-day experience.
OK, but the police in Mexico City are corrupt, abusive, and untrusted by the public, so the stats there are likely at least as skewed. You think people there are calling the cops when they get robbed? There’s a neighborhood a few blocks from the presidential palace (and tourist center) that the cops don’t even enter. SF has issues, but this thread was contrasting it with CDMX, and my point is that that’s ridiculous.
As someone who has enjoyed your writing, I find your trebuchet comment to be so distasteful I’ll have a hard time not hearing it if I read your posts again in the future. These are human beings you’re talking about.
And before you say I don’t get to have a say, I’d like to point out I live only 3 blocks from Golden Gate Park and I’m raising my child here. I’ve lived all over the city including in some of the worst areas (6th Street). I do understand the problems we have here, but I don’t think it’s appropriate to suggest we trebuchet people.
You should tell your elected officials that you support more initiatives to help the unhoused then.
I've ben homeless. It's not fun. Nobody does it because they want to. Ending up on the street trying to make the most basic of normality work is really hard work. I didn't end up on meth or anything (I stuck to alcohol), but I understand why some people facing this do. When your life is utter shite, drugs help.
Without any kind of social safety net the people who fall out of the bottom of society have nowhere to go except this. Build a decent safety net and they won't be living in the park and the park becomes the better place you'd like it to be.
So, on behalf of the unhoused: sorry your kids can't play in the park but we're facing bigger problems. Helping us with our problems will help you with yours.
I left San Francisco 20 years ago, but, speaking to the situation in Chicagoland: our municipality funds long-term housing, support, and bridge services for local unhoused, and my understand is that the biggest problem we have with problematic unhoused people --- the people shooting up out in the open, or using vestibules as toilets, or accosting passers-by --- is getting them to take up those services.
It is the case that we have difficulty placing public toilets because of the risks their abuse will pose to unsuspecting users. I don't think it does anybody any good to pretend that these aren't real problems, or that we can moralize past them.
I think, at least in most major metros, we're past the point of it being a live issue whether to fund services to transition homeless people off the streets. Residents will fund those services simply because the alternatives are so disruptive. With that in mind, I feel like any response to this problem that centers on "well we should fund more services" is basically stalling.
I've lived in Chicago since 2001 and when I got here it was pretty rare to see homeless people (and I lived in Uptown for a while back when Broadway was still borderline skid row).
First big wave of it (when you started to see tents appear under the highways and such) was 2008. Second big wave where that seemed to metastasize were Rahm Emmanuel's budget cuts. In particular, he shut down all the mental health clinics, and you ended up with a lot of people getting forced off their meds.
EDIT: Another thing, when I moved here there were still quite a few housing projects. I am not going to pretend they weren't rough. I walked through the ABLA homes most days and watched them get torn down. I had a kid hit me with a rock while biking through Cabrini. But there was a place where people could be off the streets back then. Now where do you go? What's waitlist for section 8 up to?
I'm in Oak Park, for what it's worth. I went to high school next to the ABLA homes. I don't think redeveloping the projects is why we have homeless people; those buildings weren't full of mentally ill people, they were full of families. We replaced the CHA homes with Section 8 vouchers, and that has, I think, improved things.
Well I don't think you're a renter then. I am so glad I bought a house in 2016 because everyone I know who rents has been on a wild ride.
Section 8 has long wait lists. It seems kinda unbelievable to argue that destruction of thousands of units of low income housing didn't cause people to not have housing.
I don't doubt that many people are mentally ill. Before Rahm's cuts, we had a taxpayer-ran system of caring for the mentally ill.
I'm just saying: the ABLA homes weren't a relief valve for people who could not safely take care of themselves. It wasn't where all the people in tents on the streets came from. The CHA projects were overrun with gangs, for sure, but the median CHA tenant was a taxpaying full-time employee. I guess what I'm snagging on here is the assumption that there's an equivalence to draw between an ABLA tenant and a fentanyl addict.
(I've been a renter and a homeowner in Chicago; I grew up here).
Your premise seems to be that homelessness is caused by mental illness. I think homelessness is very often caused by not being able to afford homes. Chicago has a lot less low-income housing now than it did when I got here. There's some basic arithmetic you can do.
To the extent that your premise is true (and I believe that, for many individuals, it is) that also speaks to our city pulling up the ladder on people. I was living in Logan Square when Rahm shut the mental health clinics down. There was one on Milwaukee. People protested for months. People on the streets obviously being in a very bad place and not getting help became a lot more noticeable after.
I’m just not convinced homeless drug addicts are on the street because they’re shy of a house payment. The ones I’ve know have wound up there because they became drug addicts, and that addiction drove them into the abyss, exploiting family and friends and every relationship until they’re under a bridge.
We’ve spent billions and billions on the “homes are the solution to homelessness” crowd. And the problem has only grown worse.
> We’ve spent billions and billions on the “homes are the solution to homelessness” crowd. And the problem has only grown worse.
The agenda for during my adult life has been cutting services for needy (public housing, mental health, etc). Since we seem to agree that homelessness is getting worse isn't it also rational to agree that cutting these services is, at the very least, not helping.
I don't think it's true that funding for services for the homeless have been consistently cut in Chicagoland (or San Francisco) during your adult lifetime. In fact, I'm not even sure that would be true for public housing --- again, a different problem than the one we're talking about --- I think if you look you might find that we spend more on housing assistance now, in constant dollars, than we did in 1980.
I'm a zoning reform person. I believe that increasing the supply of housing will reduce homelessness. But I have evidence to support my belief that it won't resolve the problem of people shooting up in the CTA vestibules, because I know many of those people have been offered secure housing and refused it.
My spouse works in homeless outreach in Texas. Essentially doing the exact thing mentioned in the article that the park rangers are doing - Helping people jump the bureaucratic hurdles of no ID, no birth certificate, etc that preclude the client from obtaining housing or employment. 80% of the clients are grateful and work towards housing. The other 20% refuse any help whatsoever.
This is the nuanced perspective that’s sorely needed in our society. Some people refuse help, and it becomes a talking point and a reason to never offer help— but that simply shouldn’t be the case.
Totally agree, and I'm not trying to minimise the harm that this does to our spaces.
Decades ago there were institutions that these people were placed in. We decided not to do that any more, for good reasons and bad, and I think maybe we should revisit that decision.
Sounds like a parallel issue. Homes won't help with addiction. If Nixon didn't utterly ruin the term, a "war on drugs" would be applicable here. Or rather a "war on addiction".
Hard to make compulsory though. Nixon didn't do it, but that era also gave asylums a horrible reputation.
Isn’t it so stupid how cities don’t just install port a potties everywhere? Same issues here where they aren’t installed because people will make them gross. Well the alternative to a gross port a pottie is to have people poop and pee in the road which I’d say is a lot worse. Like none of our train stations in LA have bathrooms because they would get “gross” so instead people piss in the elevator on the floor because that is better apparently than having a dirty bathroom. Not building bathrooms doesn’t stop biology from happening.
Port-a-potties require frequent emptying and other kinds of maintenance. Other kinds of dry toilets are under development which would address this issue in a variety of ways (e.g. composting toilets) and be applicable to all sorts of interesting scenarios (e.g. remote places in the developing world, where proper disposal of human excreta is a severe public health concern) but overall they're not yet ready for prime time.
The elevator at the train station also requires frequent power washing because people pee in it. The maintenance of the porta pottie is already being paid by society especially by our metro in added custodial needs. Why not just implement it then? Contain the piss and poop?
Shouldn't a train station have restrooms somewhere already?
It took my muni months of meetings to come to the conclusion we could not safely set up public toilets. No, cities can't simply install port a potties everywhere.
San Francisco's homelessness budget in 2021 was $1.1 billion, for a homeless population of maybe 10,000. That works out to $110K per person before you add in state and Federal money.
Say this budget was doubled. What should that money be spent on, that isn't being funded now?
We had this mathematical problem during the Venezuelan migrant crisis. A group of well-intentioned activists bussed about 100 migrants from the CPD station on Grand to Village Hall in Oak Park. By the time the dust had settled, we'd allocated enough money to each family --- through in-kind services, temporary housing, bridge services, etc --- that most of them could have bought a small house (outright!) in the south suburbs. Most of those families would have been way better off with the money than with the program design we came up instead.
For the price of a home here they could live in a shack in the jungle of Venezuela off the mere interest and never work again.
I'm making a point about program design, not about the advisability of allowing economic refugees into the country.
Yes I am too. I have no problem with them entering at least facially. I'm saying if we're to provide for them I see even more cost effective options in areas Venezuelans can reside in.
Where are those families now?
Really hard to say. Many of them ended up in specially-arranged multi-month lease situations; I don't know where they would have gone when the leases ended.
I'll take the next $1.1 and provide them with new tents and sleeping bags and shoes.
More seriously, you get grafts like these. $800k for sheds in Los Angeles [1] or 300k for shipping containers in Oakland [2]. These are the type of stories that destroy hope that government us up to the task of handling the problem, no matter how much money they throw at it.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-03-05/lopez-co...
https://oaklandside.org/2024/07/10/oakland-fbi-investigation...
If I may give you some optimism for LA:
https://abc7.com/post/federal-judge-frustrated-missing-data-...
"frustrated" is an understatement.
"You're not working on your time frame now. You're working on mine," Carter said.
And surprise. LA is getting small improvements on the homeless situation.
I'm not familiar with SF finances. I gather the problem with any kind of public works in the USA is that it immediately gets drowned in graft, pork and bureaucracy.
I suspect the bulk of the money in that budget is being spent on civil servants and very little of it actually reaches the people who need the help.
Doubling the budget will just attract more graft and not double the amount of help getting through. But I'm not an expert, so I may well be wrong.
I support initiatives to get really aggressive with drug dealers/users. I wish we could better help the unhoused in humane ways, but when 99% of our social resources we allocate to that effort are forced to go to fent zombies to no appreciable effect, I am very pessimistic we will make any progress no matter how many billions we throw at it.
We lost the War on Drugs. Every attempt to treat drug users as criminals has failed to achieve anything useful.
Portugal (as an example) treats drug use as a health problem and has much better results.
Addiction is a disease, a health problem, not something you can beat out of people by imprisoning them or being "really aggressive". That just makes the problem worse.
>That just makes the problem worse.
The core problem is that there are a large contingent of homeless drug users who just want to be left alone so that they can continue to be homeless drug users. Any services given to them will just be redirected by them towards enabling continued drug use. It's like an inbuilt self-sabotage that is totally alien to regular folks, but the choice way of living for those with it.
This isn't talk about much at all, because the story book tale is that homeless people are just regular people who are down on the luck, and if we could just show them some respect, compassion, and spare a few resources, they'd be right back on their feet again. But that story is just a fairy tale used to sell a feel good idea, reality is way more fucked up than that.
Regular people who are down on their luck are at severe risk of becoming the drug-addict permanent homeless. Living on the street is real hard in an environment like SF, and subjects you to all sorts of wildly stressful circumstances that must be coped with somehow. Taking drugs then becomes a vicious cycle.
The vast majority of people who are simply down on their luck have friends and family that will help them. It’s not like you lose your job and go straight to living under a bridge. Not everyone, but most.
The people who end up in truly dire circumstances have backstabbed everyone who ever trusted or helped them. They have burned every bridge, and nobody they know wants anything to do with them. All to feed a ravenous addiction.
Well yes, but keep in mind the homeless population is still a minority. Apparently SF has a homeless population of 10k out of 900k people. This is your minority.
>The people who end up in truly dire circumstances have backstabbed everyone who ever trusted or helped them.
Or their family backstabbed them, if they ever had one (this article has a case study on someone raised out of an orphanage). Or this continually individualistic society has loosened support networks so you never truly got "friends". Or you simply got priced out because rent became 3k and you're not a silicon valley engineer.
Not all homeless people are drug users. Just the ones you remember most.
I'm sorry, but there is no-one who wants to be a homeless drug user.
They're refusing treatment because they're addicted. They're refusing shelter because the shelters have policies (like not using drugs, or from the article; no pets) that they can't meet.
A lot of them have been abused by the institutions that were supposed to help them in the past, so understandably don't trust that they will be helped by similar institutions now.
Any of us, put in the same situation, would find it impossibly hard to deal with. I was lucky; I had friends who could help and I got lucky with some work that allowed me to get out of that situation. If I'd not had that luck, I could easily have gone down the same road.
I think war on drugs only works on the user side anyhow. The edge in game theory is always to the smuggler not the inspector after all.
Anecdotally during covid la metro cut a ton of staff, including security, and people started smoking meth and crack and fent in the station platforms openly. It was disturbing and made the few of us still riding the system then feel very unsafe and complain to metro leadership and the press. As a result they hired more staff to arrest and kick these people out and ridership constantly improves. I haven’t seen someone smoke from a glass pipe on metro station property in probably years now, going from seeing it at one point or another basically every workday.
I'm reminded of being a tourist in Moscow a few years ago and being pleasantly surprised by the lack of unhoused folks on the streets.
A friend of mine who lived there for a while commented that that's because the police round them up and ship them out to the suburbs where they're not being seen by the tourists. They then migrate back to the centre over time because that's where they can beg, and the cycle repeats. Nothing is solved, no-one wins, and people die because of this policy, but at least the tourists are impressed by the lack of street people.
Moving drug addicts off the subway does literally nothing to solve the problem, except it keeps the subways nice and clean and allows everyone to think the problem doesn't exist any more.
Portuguese complain about the drug zombies a lot more than I do.
We lost the war, so let’s just admit it and move on. Like you say, there is nothing we can do, so we should redirect our resources to unhoused cases that we have a much better chance of solving. We can liberalize drugs if you want, let them do all the fent they want; society just shouldn’t be on the hook for fixing them, which doesn’t seem to work very well anyways, even if we spend all of our money on it.
> Portuguese complain about the drug zombies a lot more than I do.
[0] USA has the highest drug use per head of population in the entire world. Portugal is way down the list.
I don't think there's "nothing we can do". I think it's more of a question of how we approach the problem. We have always approached it as a failure of the individual in question, requiring correction by punishment. This has clearly not worked (ever) but everyone seems reluctant to abandon it.
If we approach addiction as a disease, like cancer, that affects some people against their will, rather than something they chose because they're junkie scum, we might help them more [1]
> society just shouldn’t be on the hook for fixing them
In the USA society is never on the hook for fixing people. All that rugged individualism. Other societies work differently, and that seems to get better results.
[0] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/drug-use-... the USA has the highest world
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6633066/
> In the USA society is never on the hook for fixing people
Can you cite this? How much does the US spend on entitlements vs other countries?
Let me Google that for you:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_social_we...
It's kinda interesting. In terms of % of GDP on social welfare spending it's halfway down the list (but still just above Australia and Canada which surprises me).
In terms of government taxation and spending it's very close to the top on taxation and #10 on spending, which is definitely not what the USA tells itself.
This implies that the USA taxes folks heavily and then doesn't spend it on social welfare (which seems consistent with the vast military spending).
Would you say military jumps out?[0] Medicare + Social Security + Health + Income Security add up to 44% already; much larger than the 15.5% military budget. Or am I misreading it?
[0] https://www.usaspending.gov/explorer/budget_function
Something like loading up Swains Island chalk full of every potent drug imaginable by the barge full and then offering free one way tickets to whoever wants them might have an effect.
Clearly the local electorate has decided such desires and aspirations are not worthwhile enough to change their voting behaviour…
So the question is how do you plan to change that?
Trying to convince random HN readers seems pointless if that’s your goal.
This isn't true btw. In San Francisco the constant homeless and drug and crime issues have led to voting changes.
Since when did changes in one electoral cycle automatically equate to changes in long term voting behaviour?
e.g. Swing states are a well known concept, so it’s unclear how you could confuse that.
It has to be credibly sustained and durable for a few cycles, at the very least.
It has been durable for a few cycles. There was the Boudin recall and now the recent election
Can you provide sources for the relevant electoral districts…?
At the very least, whatever has been imagined hasn’t translated into a ground reality expected by the parent. So I doubt it’s true.
As Rob Henderson said "San Francisco is the only city where dogs tread in human shit."
Just an anecdote but I was with my young child in GG park not too long ago and perhaps 50 meters from the artierial road encountered a homeless guy brandishing an axe. This in in a spot that routinely fields families.
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I lived near this particular park, so the article struck a chord with me.
For things to be better, we need to start doing things differently, and one starting point is to have compassion for the people who are denied the use of public spaces by the hardcore homeless who refuse outreach and aid.
Let’s not exaggerate here. I’ve been to Golden Gate Park many times in recent months and it is bustling with activity. It’s also a massive area. People are not scrambling over encampments or wading through needles to access most public spaces in the city (though there are certainly some hot spots).
The problem with trebuchets though is that the trebuchet makers are less well connected politically, so there's less opportunities for graft along the way.
You ask for compassion, yet give none.
Have some compassion, then you might qualify for some.
Blame the rapacious capitalists that have essentially ripped away the safety nets that Americans used to enjoy. Cost of living has skyrocketed while labor wages have stagnated.
Blame awful economic theory such as neoliberalism, “trickle down economics” that has allowed a few people and corporations to acquire a significant amounts of wealth while not paying back into the system that helped them get there.
Decades of tax cuts to the wealthy while cutting funding for federal/state programs.
Corporations are buying up all of the property and jacking up the rates. Minimum wage hasn’t been increased since 2009.
What we need is a political party that _fights_ for the middle class. We need power to shift back to labor instead of the rapacious capitalists that instead of investing the profits into the company (ie, increase wages for labor) it’s reinvested into stock manipulation tactics such as stock buybacks. The shareholders, often foreigners as well, get paid while labor holds the bag.
Fuck the culture war. The next war is a class war and it won’t end well if this country continues at its current trajectory.
I don't like saying this much as an ex-redditors. But it's a shame seeing this downvoted as if a huge cause of a lot of things isn't our gridlocked politics bribed/powered by donors and billionaires robbing the country blind.
America has no social safety net and a drug epidemic. What did you seriously think was going to happen?
I even find a weird sense of respect for the folks who want to build concentration camps because at least they are honest.
It's nice to read an article showing someone with serious empathy and understanding. We need more of that these days.
But it's also immediately obvious that more of this cannot possibly be the solution. This article is basically the "California liberal" solution turned up to 11: maximum personalized attention, empathy, "softness" plus several opportunities for housing. And yet as the article shows, you put a homeless person with extreme mental illness and/or addiction into a shelter/apartment/SRO/wherever and they will usually end up homeless again. And this system has an extremely high cost. People harassed or attacked by the homeless. Volunteers and government employees with their own trauma from the things they deal with when working with the homeless. Sections of cities that are unlivable. Even when there's a "success story" it is usually "this person's life still sucks, they're still addicted and have the same other demons but now life sucks in a shitty apartment in a shitty neighborhood instead of in a park where it's other people's problem."
The only real option is prevention. We need stronger communities, stronger families, mentorship for young people. The interventions from the article, across the small handful of homeless men described, cost at least several million dollars. Take a fraction of that money and invest it in new windows and fresh paint and flowerbeds in the neighborhoods they grew up in. Give them access to nutritious food and exercise. Provide for regular contact with community leaders and mentors and people who can make a difference in their lives. Allocate money to wholesome community activities (sports, robotics, arts, etc) such that they can vacuum up all the free time of a teenager with nothing better to do. Every dollar invested in each of these things will repay itself a hundredfold.
Much of homelessness is a disease without a cure. What do you do with a disease without a cure? Prevent it.
The frustration of some of the people in the comments is clear - "the city is spending a lot of our tax money on these criminals, savages and addicts and they don't even want help".
It's incredibly privileged and reductive to think of it that way - that, after surviving in a park for 10 YEARS, struggling for food and shelter, surviving the seasons, rest of society and getting beat down to square 1 so many times -and basically being in constant fight or flight mode as the article states - you think you wouldn't resort to escaping through alcohol or drugs, and could simply "decide to get your act together" and adapt to anything the govt agencies expect from you on daily basis in some of those housing solutions.
Those people did not cheerfully decide one day to dedicate their life to shitting all over a park and be addicted to meth. A lot of homeless people got there either by being let down by the society very early on, or by 1-2 bad events in life making it impossible to pay rent and getting dragged into a downward spiral from there.
Solutions should be focused on the root causes, and not the symptoms. If the country is such a late-stage capitalism shithole that so many people are 1 medical emergency away from not being able to pay rent, and there's no safety net or effective government support to prevent them from going homeless, the cost of trying to rehabilitate someone after years on the streets / in the parks is going to be multiplied. I'd like to see how those large budgets are being targetted first at number of new people coming into this situation being reduced, and then additionally decreasing the existing homeless population.
As usually, there are methods being successfully (at least to a larger extent) used in other societies - but USA is very often dismissive of them, because it's special and different.
Nah — usually they decided to do meth and the rest followed. I used to be pretty libertarian about drugs. Victimless crime and all. But in the last ten years, it’s become clear to me that they exploit fundamental human weaknesses. TBH - I’ve become a much bigger fan of the war on drugs, and very heavy penalties for dealers.
Why did they decide to do meth?
Cuz they like it. I’ve known plenty of meth heads in my life despite never trying it myself. Most of them took it because it was powerful, cheap, and they liked the way they felt on it. These were people with decent jobs or trade jobs and it fucked a few of them out of work and I know one girl who died because of her abuse.
The real answer is the war on drugs, which was actually a war on minorities. Of course some non-minorities get hit in the cross fire too.
It’s a fun high? Is this even a serious question?
Is this a serious answer or do you really not know your history?
Yes, some of us on HN do not exhibit the left wing progressive chops your comment history does.
In the war against drugs, you're losing very, very, badly.
What, though, is 'pretty libertarian' about drugs? I ask, 'cus every professed-libertarian I've met doesn't seem to be very clear in their arguments about anything really.
That was the point on the War in Dugs, so Nixon would say it's a smashing success.
the hn cynicism is crazy but unsurprising. turns out can really easily spend your whole life obsessed with a pragmatism that betrays taking any action, however directionally correct
The park rangers empathic personal approach is interesting, she is working within a system not worth navigating as even that best case outcome is still a poor case outcome
> For him, “it was overwhelming,”
I’ve dealt with people that take 15 years to do some basic action because of something considered overwhelming. The only thing I observe is that you could literally start from scratch, the age of zero, and be competent in any field by this time
In this guys case, it took 7 months to get basic identifying paperwork regenerated, so that he can walk into one of those classic grifter housing projects
So many issues with that, masqueraded as a solution
California is simply amazing. In so many areas they have problems simply nobody else has (wildfires due to bad fire control policy, homelessness and public drug usage as discussed here) or is at magnitudes worse scale than elsewhere, and then policymakers handwring about how “nothing can be done”. Nowhere else I have ever been even comes close to what I see in California.
Yeah, meanwhile California alone is a top 10 economy and houses more billionaires than any other place. I wonder if it's a coincidence that increased greed fuels (or buys) less empathy?
Gotta love the change in terminology. 'Unhoused' people instead of homeless, as though their being without a place to live is now someone else's (the American taxpayers') responsibility.
If this person wants to be left alone and live by himself, why doesn't he find some place in the wilderness, away from a city; maybe an area managed by BLM where he won't be bothered? Why does he have to fuck up one of the few parks in a city of 850,000 people?
The article speaks explicitly to this point:
> Barrows slowly learned that he’d had a rough childhood and had grown up in a foster family. The park was his childhood refuge, a place where he’d spend afternoons wandering around and riding the carousel. She understood then why he had such a deep attachment to the place.
How do you expect them to get necessities to survive in the wilderness?
Then why are the parks still full of homeless? Maybe they need to re-evaluate such extraordinary methods.
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This story shows a rare instance where the system actually helped someone... But unfortunately I think without a truly personal approach, most initiatives (in this field) end up as half-measures at best
Why does it take seven months and a team in order to fill out the paperwork to make one eligible for a room at a state SRO?
Because this is a person wants to sleep rough in a park and has to be pushed through every step of the process to leave it. I would imagine things go much faster if you hate sleeping in a park and want a roof over your head.
The problem is CA weather is too nice.
If the park was -40° for a few months a year things would be drastically different.
Well he stayed there for over a decade. Yoj have to pay thst cost if you took that long to resolve things. Or fail to resolve the root issues.
Sorry but the idea that such a system of personal involvement is a practical solution is a pipe dream. We need some system of involuntary confinement that isn't prison or psych hospitals imo. A place where we can put these people in humane conditions that is meant to transition them into being able to take care of themselves. A place where they can have private rooms and be given useful work to do, as well as counseling for their mental health issues.
Root cause of this issue all wonderfully explained in the Tom Holland's Dominion (not to be confused with the Spiderman actor).
Yep, thought the same thing when reading the article. Christian morality. I think it's a good thing for society to care for the poor and downtrodden, but when it reaches the point of self-flaggelation, it's gone too far. Imo, we need some form of institutionalization that's milder than what we have for the criminally insane, but still coercive.
The rising homeless crisis is a symptom of a much larger issue: poor economic policy propagated by decades of awful neoclassical economic theory and neoliberalism (ie, “trickle down economics” or Reagon-omics)
So I've been looking through overhead map views, and identified possible swastikas near Mental Health Care facilities. For example, This "Specialized Pharmacy" dispenses BH drugs
https://maps.app.goo.gl/ktnBzitvbKjPrFp78
Is this clockwise or widdershins? I need to squint and ponder the shape before the swastika spins out. Like the arrow in the FedEx logo.
Activate the Satellite Photo view to see the building design
This area in Glendale, AZ is a large medical complex, and the two "spins counterclockwise swastika style" buildings are "Advanced Health" which is boutique cosmetics and upgrades for the wealthy, mostly, and there are dentists and imaging/radiology and vision care. You can Street View the shingles hung outside. No BH here that I found.
https://maps.app.goo.gl/srBLyNUkMLNmD3gt6
Another interesting clockwise swastika, if I am not hallucinating it, is by road design in Tempe 85288:
It's at Priest Drive, [psychiatrists and physicians are a priestly class who practice a religion of Aesclepius, wearing casual blue or dressy white vestments and stethoscope rosary, in temples that smell sanitized and sterile], and there is a little international food court with good falafel and Hindu fare, cybersecurity/IT firms kitty-corner to that, homes going up, a train station, and oh yeah, up the road to NW there's the central behavioral health authorities and crisis line operators, a large disability center, the D.E.S. services for SNAP, unemployment, not far actually from the Phoenix Zoo, etc, (is the Zoo hiring this month? any vacancies for carbon-based homeless?) and a housing agency for the Mentally Ill, Disabled and Chronically Homeless, commercial blood testing lab, etc.
https://maps.app.goo.gl/PXz44uHWc4vTw8hR9
Now of course a Swastika is not automatically rabid Nazi supremacist style, but it helps to understand the positioning of Mental Health Care and ordinary normal physicians and hospitals, the legal authority they carry to route patients out of the community, and into court-ordered drugging, or the penal/corrections/prison system, and the pipeline to cemeteries such as White Tanks or crematoria. Of course many mentally ill people also die or become gravely disabled, or felons, without any treatment.
But I just looked at the graceful curved arms of Priest & Washington as the wheel spins clockwise, I suppose.
Don't forget that the WWII losers and refugees migrated to elsewhere and contributed all their research and intellect to receiving nations. Herr Mengele drowned off South American coast. So it goes.
Almost forgot - dial the peer support line at Solari: the last four digits on your phone's standard TouchTone keypad spell "FIQH",
which is an Islamic Sharia legal term... probably just
accidental coincidence; you know how PSTN RBOC companies can be
Quoting a reddit comment:
> Wow, this is almost a parody. An able-bodied meth addict and convicted felon was illegally living in a public park for 20 years, littering the land around him and forcing rangers to spend countless time and resources cleaning up the mess he left behind, making regular emergency room visits due to his unhealthy lifestyle costing the city hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, constantly doing illegal drugs while not holding down a job and suspiciously acquiring new supplies for his encampment after every sweep (how much do you want to be he engages in illegal activity), and giving an extremely hard time to caseworkers and HHS staff who already have a busy workload (including leaving/getting kicked out of housing multiple times). That one Golden Gate Park Dweller has probably cost the city millions of dollars over the last few years while consuming valuable time from caseworkers and park rangers who could be helping someone else (they're already overloaded). Not to mention the potential damage to the park's environment caused by his littering. What this guy needs is outpatient mental health treatment, and it's honestly criminal that our country has basically no resources for people with mental illness and shoves them into jail or shelters without treating their underlying problems.
In australia, they put the people with mental illness or addiction in their own apartment and give them pills, and check in with them regularly. Definitely costs less than 50k/year. Most of them do end up getting better after several years.
It seems US has a system that extracts maximumly from their tax payers and just keeps things in (bad) status quo as long as they can. A babying system if you well.
So shipping homeless from SF to Australia and paying $100k/yr per would be a win/win?
I have some insight into this, and it might be possible that with good intervention the ongoing costs are low... That being said, in our current system the cases that are severe enough to be in public housing easily cost 10 times that...
I believe the homeless are kept around as a threat to the poor housed Americans. On top of that, those poor people are struggling so greatly that they too don't want to see the homeless helped too much. They don't want to see someone without any job live an easier life than they do with 3.
Do you honestly believe this or are you just being snarky?
I don't think it's the whole picture. But I do believe those are two components of the situation. I'm happy to hear your insights.
I think it's a much simpler model. No one wants to help them, funds to help them are mosproportioned and are treating symptoms instead of the cause. It's also politically heated to give more funding because people are less fine using tax dollars to fix and sacrifice their mental health to avoid the issue.
I don't think government thinks far enough ahead to use this as a fear tactic. Most homeless are not some drug users hopelessly addicted.
It's not even remotely true, to any degree. It's very conspiratorial thinking. If "they" were competent, unified, and powerful enough to create a situation like you describe "they" wouldn't need to.
Which gets to the heart of why conspiracy thinking doesn't hold water, who in your theory are "they"?
“They” in my above comment is only used to refer to common people voting myopically. Usually conservatives who vote against social services.
As for my claim of homelessness being a threat - I’m not saying that there’s any grand conspiracy. But in the scheme of capitalism it helps to have an underclass that receive undue blame and keep people from sliding down the ladder further out of fear. No one needs to intentionally keep anyone homeless for this to be a functioning part of the system.
It’s like evolution but on a societal scale. Whatever we have now has persisted for a while. The threat of homelessness is part of why it’s persisted. Imagine if there was no uncomfortable bottom to society. All wage slaves that sell their body and time would simply choose to not work because not working would be a better life. It’s memetics. And of course we need people to do work. But we could be optimizing for happiness instead of GDP growth.
Think of religion. When a religion mandates evangelism it’s not necessarily out of a nefarious central planner trying to gain control over more people. But for religions that do mandate evangelism there is a greater chance the religion thrives. Because obviously recruiting people means you have a bigger religion. But the believers might simply each want to share their religion out of genuine belief in an afterlife.
I was raised in a specifically anti-evangelical religion. It’s pretty small as a result. There were the Shakers, a now extinct sect of Christianity. They considered sex ungodly and thus had no children. That killed the religion. Other sects promote having many children and survive.
Or a George Carlin fan
Definitely a Carlin fan. I don't think how he does on everything, but his way of viewing the world is valid.
IMO he went overboard on the cynicism in his later years but he was always funny.
This is true, I've heard the SF DA and police departments say so as well. They no longer prosecute or convict people of things here also, because there is no purpose, no where for them to be sent for rehabilitation. As a result we have created an open air mental institution combined with an open air drug market. It's getting pretty wild to live here.
Things are still bad in the city, but the state of homelessness has improved. The article states that the number of tents in Golden Gate Park has gone down by 10x in the last 8 years. I would say there's been a similar decrease on the sidewalks of the city in just the last 4. I walked much of the length of Mission Street yesterday, and there are still a lot of sad scenes to bear witness to. But it's clearly improving.
In my daily walk to work it's gotten far worse. Often the "problem" just moves from neighborhood to neighborhood in my experience.
Yeah I’ve seen things shift around as well. But I walk a lot in the city - all over the city. It’s better overall now than it was a few years ago.
Getting? It has been for years. Frank Jordan was the last mayor that tried a real plan.
It's absolutely nuts to me that the government finds ways to spend money on literally anything but providing shelter, clothing, food, and support to people. UBI would be cheaper and far more humane than practically any policy--or lack thereof--they can think of.
This is an article about a man who was given all those things, repeatedly, and went back to sleeping rough in the park. How would giving him money make any difference?
The hope is that UBI would prevent him and people like him from falling into homelessness in the first place.
The whole UBI thing has always seemed absurdly naive. What do you think a junky is going to do with that money? That's a rhetorical question. I really seriously doubt having a few extra dollars in the first place is going to either slow mental illness or people picking up drugs, and frankly having a bunch of people out of work with money, for the vast majority of people in my experience, only leads to them picking up bad things like drugs in the first place. One of the most myopic views I read on sites like this, that are obviously heavily biased in their readership, is that if we give people some amount of money for nothing, they'll magically pick up art and entrepreneurship and other productive outlets spontaneously.
What's going to happen, if we're foolish enough to try UBI, is we're going to bleed a bunch more money that immediately gets vaporized (or at least put in the pockets of pushers and alcohol distributors), and then we still will have the same problems for at least 50% of the people that needed the focused benefits like SNAP or Medicaid anyways. We'd be much better served getting very medieval on anyone and everyone selling drugs, and then going from there.
>What do you think a junky is going to do with that money?
Go to a mental institute if we tie the UBI to some basic factors. UBI isn't just some altruistic factor that gives money to everyone without condition. They at least want to make sure you're a citizen and not going to fund the destruction of society with it.
>if we give people some amount of money for nothing, they'll magically pick up art and entrepreneurship and other productive outlets spontaneously.
Talking about non-homeless, it has shown to increase recreation. Not necessarily businesses, but it's nice having time to breathe when you aren't spending half your like just to make sure you can pay rent.
>What's going to happen, if we're foolish enough to try UBI,
You can speculate or you can actually read studies done. Domestically and worldwide.
https://basicincome.stanford.edu/research/ubi-visualization/ is a pretty good place to start on reading studies.
We've been "foolish" enough to try UBI. Studies show that it doesn't tend to increase spend on alcohol or tobacco.
> We'd be much better served getting very medieval on anyone and everyone selling drugs, and then going from there.
Ironic, isn’t it? Right back to where we started. Portugal has tried the “empathy” approach too and is now going through the slow and long process of rolling it back
He would have still become homeless with UBI. The home he lived in was owned by his grandfather and was sold when he passed away, leaving him with no home at 18 when he could not possibly earn enough to rent or prove to anyone renting that he had enough stability and income to be given a place
>when he could not possibly earn enough to rent or prove to anyone renting that he had enough stability and income to be given a place
Why do you think that's a fault of UBI, rather than the fault of your hypothetical UBI being insufficient? AFAIK any actual implementation of UBI would be intended to be feasible to have housing on, even if it's not very good housing. With UBI, there's a level of income that people are guaranteed to have without needing any proof, that's the whole concept!
> Recreation and Parks Department rangers would cite him and tell him to move
> The department’s environmental services crew...would tear down his tent when he was out and haul away his possessions.
> For Barrows, trying to forcibly remove Kaine from Golden Gate Park seemed both ineffective and cruel
> She embarked on a slow campaign of earning his trust and shepherding him through what one Recreation and Parks Department official described as the “arduous and achingly bureaucratic tasks” necessary just to be eligible for housing
> Kaine had no ID. All of his required public documents, from a birth certificate to criminal records, were under a different name, and they all had to be aligned to move his housing applications forward. Getting everything in order meant trips to various agencies — and the only way to ensure Kaine went was if someone accompanied him: either a member of HOT or Barrows and another ranger who was her partner at the time. Even then, Kaine repeatedly balked. For him, “it was overwhelming,” Barrows recalled.
> After seven months of cajoling, hand-holding, and advocacy by Barrows, Kaine in October 2021 was granted a room at the Civic Center Hotel Navigation Center, where he could stay until he was assigned permanent housing. Barrows and her partner helped him pack and hauled his two suitcases — heavy with gear, broken electronics, and sticks and rocks he’d collected in the park — up to his fifth-floor room. They helped him settle in by donating furniture and clothes, including the boots and pants worn by rangers. “We knew that’s what it was going to take to make it happen,” Barrows said.
..and long story short, the housing he got, sucked.
So they started by trying literally everything else first, including kicking his butt out, destroying his belongings, etc and then eventually had to have someone basically personally escort him through the system, to a get a shitty room and then get yelled at by his neighbors, and you're telling me that "he was given all those things, repeatedly". You didn't read the same article I did.
Besides, this article is just ONE anecdote. The system helps most people absolutely zero--on the contrary, it's a cruel as possible to homeless people in hopes they just move on.
There are people UBI would help. But not the people in this article. The 2nd person in the article had free housing twice, but lost it both times because he kept fighting with people.
On one side, having compassion for vulnerable people is fine, but resources are finite.
The government can help people, but who would they rather help?
- a kid full of potential needing shelter, food, clothing
- a brilliant student needing a scholarship
- a scientist that needs funding for important research
- a family affected by natural disasters
- a veteran with PTSD
- the guy in this article
Should a kid go to bed hungry, or a student be denied access to education so that the government can subsidize the self destructive lifestyle of a person that doesn't even care about the people paying for it?
If you pay taxes on your income, plus taxes on everything you buy, etc... you worked at least 5 out of 12 months of the year for the government. So the government not only can waste it but also end up in debt that will be repaid by your children?
The US is a first world country. Resources are not so finite that we cannot help that entire list and then some. It should not be worrying about funding any of this.
You are thinking US prior to 1971. You need to update your views a little bit.
The perspective where the US has infinite money is wrong. The US is accumulating debt.
I've heard that SF spent a lot of money on homelessness issues. But each time I visited SF, the situation seemed to get worse. I never understood why.
My reaction to the OP article is: Oh... so that is why...
A rare aha moment of mine on HN.
well, one major problem is that you can't force people to get mental health treatment. the courts can, but that means things need to be brought before a judge.
And now with RFK wanting to put people with ADHD into labor camps, any chances of a program to help mentally ill homeless people is close to zero. I am sure that they would accept that "help" :>
Given how hard it's gotten to force people to take vaccines, I would think that psychotropic drugs are probably off the table completely.
They can be forcibly given if committed with a judge's order.
no, it just tends to need to be a violent offense
Reopen mental institutions and enable forced is institutionalization. Engage this at the federal level. So sick of this crap.
These “homeless” are not the kind who need clean clothes and shelter and some help getting a job. They want to live like this at the expense of the public’s money and enjoyment of public amenities.
I'm pretty far left but I have to agree that some people are not mentally capable of independence, cause public harm, and need to be forcibly committed. I want that to be done carefully and humanely. I don't want someone who sleeps on the street and causes no trouble to get institutionalized. But the worst of them should get jailed, tried, and then sent away.
We also need to support people at risk when they're young. If their parents had mental health support, if they didn't experience a loss of housing as children, if losing their job didn't make opioids looks so attractive, we wouldn't have that many people unable to care for themselves.
Hey, that actually works really well in India:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpIJJPvn_ZI
Edit: This got downvoted because it's a direct retort to what the GP is suggesting.
What a horrible problem with such a simple solution. Give people adequate and decent housing at reasonable prices or for free if necessary. Laughable this is still a question in the richest country in world history.
Did you read the article? Some of these people don’t want to live in housing. I think what they’d prefer (and it’s not realistic) is to live in the woods on a few acres of their own in a cabin with all of their needs met.
But I agree if housing was more affordable the problem would not be as bad.
Do you really believe that if people had access to cheap / free housing there would an enormous homelessness problem? How many weirdos do you really think are out there??
Paul Graham approves.