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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The fact that many countries have solved it seems to indicate that you are wrong.
• 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.
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.
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.
Finland, the poster child for housing first, does this as well.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Part of the UK is English, but none of the rest are.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Costs almost nothing compared to prisons, and has a comparable deterrence effect.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Qualified immunity was made up the United States Supreme Court in the 1960s. It is a buzzword.
I'm not even saying the solution is more/harsher policing. I'm saying it is a solution that seemingly works.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/place-based-...
https://americaninequality.substack.com/p/violent-crime-and-...
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
Reference: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
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.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.
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).
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
More carrot and less stick, more compassion and less puritanism might have a chance of working.
From what I hear, it is quite successful, giving their residents the dignity and autonomy they need to stand on their own.
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.
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.
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.
>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).
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Barring other factors, of course.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Heck, Id2be surprised if we got even a plurality of Americans who said they'd want to live in San Francisco.
I think yimbys are framing that situation as THE problem.
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:
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?
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.wired.com/story/no-more-deals-san-francisco-cons...
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. I claim it's difficult and unlikely.
EDIT: so long as it offers an urban playground to people earning high salaries, that is
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
https://chatgpt.com/share/67b36262-3c7c-8013-aa61-f1ff8088fb...
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.)
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.
Equally curious which the non-working property owners fall into as well?
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.
(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.
Quick question: what is the only country mentioned in my comment above?
Was that all an illusion? If so, what image were you trying to present? Why?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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"?
Toodle-loo!
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
[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...
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.
https://www.sf.gov/reports--september-2024--2024-point-time-...
Not sure what the studies say, but I don’t need a weatherman to tell me when it’s raining outside.
Which are, surprisingly, half a year overdue by now!
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.
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 think it's important to do both.
Maybe because it's not the orphan crushing machine, but the lack of the low functioning orphan saving machine. Or a mix of both.
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?
> 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...
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.
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.
That's why they say capitalism is based in fear. That's why we have dreams of Star Trek.
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.
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?
> 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.
> 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.
Prison guards get extra pay compared to the work they do, and great benefits, to compensate for the assaults.
Hotel staff do not.
> 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".
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
No, in the middle ages that job would have been done by the guy's son, who would have been living in the home.
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.
> Nobody knows or helps their neighbors here in Japan
What are you trying to say in your response?
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 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.
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)
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-...
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
It’s empathy for people with problems you don’t fully understand the cause of that turns into ham fisted destructive regulation.
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.
My apologies.
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.
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.
It does: https://www.sf.gov/information--overdose-prevention-resource...
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.
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.
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.”
But their rights can’t trump victims, that’s not justice. Like someone else mentioned prop 47 was a bad idea.
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.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/san-francisco-sign-stolen-...
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.
You're right in that SF does way too much to accommodate robber barons, tech moguls, heavily-subsidized Silicon Valley industries, and housing speculators.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
For reference, the GGGP comment was generated using this prompt:
turn this small reply into an extremely verbose, very long
comment: Outside of my accusation. Does HN have any
guidelines on using chatgpt comments?You ever notice that only stuff you disliked is AI?
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.
---
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.
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.
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.
I also found his comment mildly interesting.
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.)
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.
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?
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 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.
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.
FWIW I think it's really admirable of you to maintain those community connections, not everyone would do the same.
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.
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 “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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I would expect this to be a particularly low point. Can you link some data?
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
He just hasn’t finished the job.
The trend of stealing money from New York, shutting down the Department of Education, and FEMA would make me think otherwise.
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.
For instance, would you fire doctors to reduce bureaucracy in medical services?
The problem is if you want lower bureaucracy you have to change laws and not fire people.
There is plenty of pressure on the organizations to be efficient, the American people never saw a tax cut they didn't like.
There is plenty of pressure on the organizations to be efficient
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.
And it's not a charity either. So get rid of these wasteful programs that redistribute other peoples money that don't even work.
But how does fixing our zoning issues translate to, for example, firing thousands of IRS workers?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
SF and LA have a lot less "living above a restaurant" because of those.
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.
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)
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.
[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...
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?
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).
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?
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.
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.
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 think it's much more likely some sort of genetic trait underlying it.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
https://centerforhealthjournalism.org/our-work/insights/mill...
Hospital bills are clearly works of fiction.
(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).
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.
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-...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Wait a minute, isn't this why it "paid" for the Texan and Floridan governors to ship their problems to the sanctuary cities?
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?
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...
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
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.
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).
(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.
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.
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 probably best to have safety nets in place so that people don't reach these depths in the first place.
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.
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.
We are dealing with humans here, and all of them, including the homeless and people complaining about views, make up our society.
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.
>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.
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.
And in many parts of the world you have to be lucky not to see/experience poverty from up close.
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".
But I'd hope someone in a thread like this would be interested in a deeper understanding on what factors lead to that.
What are you doing for the problem?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sometimes, awareness is just as much about identifying who to not bother with as it is about empowering future allies.
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.
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.
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
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.
I've read a lot around this, happy to provide some suggestions if you choose to dive into this.
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.
We gave the cabbie a good tip.
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.
The irony is that I moved to Mexico City. It’s a far safer place than San Francisco.
When the housing crisis there reaches its breaking point (driven by gentrifying transplants), we’ll see if even the feeling lasts.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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've been a renter and a homeowner in Chicago; I grew up here).
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.
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.
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.
Hard to make compulsory though. Nixon didn't do it, but that era also gave asylums a horrible reputation.
Say this budget was doubled. What should that money be spent on, that isn't being funded now?
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...
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 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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[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
Can you cite this? How much does the US spend on entitlements vs other countries?
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).
So the question is how do you plan to change that?
Trying to convince random HN readers seems pointless if that’s your goal.
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.
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.
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.
Have some compassion, then you might qualify for some.
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 even find a weird sense of respect for the folks who want to build concentration camps because at least they are honest.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
> 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.
If the park was -40° for a few months a year things would be drastically different.
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.
which is an Islamic Sharia legal term... probably just
accidental coincidence; you know how PSTN RBOC companies can be
> 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.
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 don't think government thinks far enough ahead to use this as a fear tactic. Most homeless are not some drug users hopelessly addicted.
Which gets to the heart of why conspiracy thinking doesn't hold water, who in your theory are "they"?
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.
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.
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.
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
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!
> 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.
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 perspective where the US has infinite money is wrong. The US is accumulating debt.
My reaction to the OP article is: Oh... so that is why...
A rare aha moment of mine on HN.
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.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpIJJPvn_ZI
Edit: This got downvoted because it's a direct retort to what the GP is suggesting.
But I agree if housing was more affordable the problem would not be as bad.