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> Jennifer Friedenbach, the executive director of the Coalition on Homelessness, a nonprofit in the city, said a lack of reasonably priced housing was the bigge
by fredkbloggs 11y ago
> Jennifer Friedenbach, the executive director of the Coalition on Homelessness, a nonprofit in the city, said a lack of reasonably priced housing was the biggest problem.
Ms. Friedenbach, you make yourself and your ideological camp appear naive and out of touch. No doubt, there are a handful of gainfully employed, productive and law-abiding citizens of SF who are homeless solely or primarily because they cannot afford an apartment. I am sure that the time they are forced to spend living in shelters, sitting on the BMR housing waiting lists, and looking for better opportunities in other cities with more affordable housing is painful, degrading, and infuriating. That sucks.
As for the other 6600+ of SF's 6700 homeless population, it's not going to make any difference whether housing is $10,000 a month or $100. These are people with no marketable skills (not even the ability to show up), no desire to work, major addictions (usually following multiple treatment interventions), severe mental illnesses, a preference for the street lifestyle, or some combination of those. Most live in SF not because they were born there or because they have jobs or family there but because there is no freezing weather and the City is accommodating, like spending a large fraction of the $330m SFFD budget sending trained firefighters to pick up the same few hundred people twice a day every single day of the year. All the free housing in the world isn't going to get them off the streets.
Bitching about the cost of housing in SF is fashionable. But I would really expect someone who works directly on the problems of homelessness and with homeless people to know better. The cost of housing is at most a very minor contribution to the problem. When you can show me that most of the people in the City who are homeless have jobs and are reasonably healthy, it'll be time to pin the blame on the housing market. Until then, get serious about addressing the real problems, or just accept that you're never going to and stop pretending.
- netfire 11y agoYou obviously need to address the core issues of homelessness first. But then what? Once someone has marketable skills, mental health treatment and is in a better condition to contribute to society, do you ask them to leave the city because there isn't anywhere they can afford to live? Unaffordable housing may not be the reason someone is on the street, but its definitely a problem on the path away from that situation.
- jff 11y ago> You obviously need to address the core issues of homelessness first. But then what? Once someone has marketable skills, mental health treatment and is in a better condition to contribute to society, do you ask them to leave the city because there isn't anywhere they can afford to live? There are plenty of jobs in the rest of the state or the country, places where you can get an apartment for a couple hundred bucks a month. Given a choice between living on the streets in San Francisco or working minimum wage in Turlock, I know which I'd choose.
- netfire 11y agoAgreed, that's what I would choose as well, but would the people that are already homeless make that decision as well? It seems like part of getting someone off the street is building a support system to help them stay on the path to recovery. If you establish that system in the bay area (maybe with local friends, family, social workers, etc) and then ship that person out of the city or state, what are the chances that they will return to homelessness when things get tough?
- fredkbloggs 11y ago> do you ask them to leave the city because there isn't anywhere they can afford to live? I would expect most people in that situation to make that call on their own. Personally, if my choices were to live in a homeless shelter in SF or in an apartment in Cleveland, I'd head east. But the point is that the City does have a lot of programs to help people who have a job and family in SF but can't afford market-rate housing. Someone in that situation has many options, of which leaving the City is only one. Someone lying in a pool of vomit on Tehama St. waiting for his fourth SFFD pickup of the day doesn't have any of those options.
- tsotha 11y ago>Once someone has marketable skills, mental health treatment and is in a better condition to contribute to society, do you ask them to leave the city because there isn't anywhere they can afford to live? Why not? There are a lot of people outside the city who would move there if they could afford it.
- jdavis703 11y agoI think that you're think of the homeless who "sleep in the rough." There are many, many homeless and near-homeless people who do not fit the prototypical image of a homeless street person, and these are the type of people who are greatly affected by rising rents.
- fredkbloggs 11y agoThose are not the people we are talking about, and they are not the people the article was talking about either. People who are homeless but living with friends or relatives or staying at a shelter are unlikely to be the people the SFFD is picking up off the sidewalks twice a day every day. And SF in particular has a very large population of people who are in fact sleeping in the rough, living on the streets, however you want to put it. I am well aware that this is not true everywhere, but it absolutely is true in SF, and it has zilch to do with housing prices.
- noahlt 11y agoIt's easy to blame the homeless for not having a job, but it seems hard to get a job without having a home.