13 ms·

San Francisco's homeless problem: A civic disgrace

52 points by thanatosmin 10y ago

e40 10y ago
The fact is it can't just be SF's problem, because SF is a magnet for homeless people from all over CA and the US. That makes it a US problem, and yes, it is a disgrace.
- mdorazio 10y ago
  But isn't SF a magnet because of its policies and programs making it a desirable destination for the homeless? Homelessness is definitely a nation-wide program with all kinds of root causes that need to be addressed, but the city of SF is somewhat unique among other "top tier" US cities in the scope of its homeless "problem".
  - brown 10y ago
    The unique part of SF is our extreme inefficiency. We spend huge sums of money without much to show for it. Homelessness is a crisis that is growing all over the US. Homeless crisis in Hawaii sparks state of emergency http://www.cbsnews.com/videos/homeless-crisis-in-hawaii-sparks-state-of-emergency/ http://www.cbsnews.com/videos/homeless-crisis-in-hawaii-spar... L.A. County supervisors call for a state emergency declaration on homelessness http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-homeless-emergency-20160614-snap-story.html http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-homeless-emergen... Mayor, county exec declare ‘state of emergency’ over homelessness http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/mayor-county-exec-declare-state-of-emergency-over-homelessness/ http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/mayor-coun...
  - e40 10y ago
    1. The police in SF don't put people on buses to other places. Other places do. 2. The weather in the Bay Area makes us a target for homeless people everywhere. 3. Related to #1, but different: not being "anti homeless people" is a reason people come to SF and Berkeley. I don't this is the same as encouraging homeless people to come to SF and Berkeley.
JPKab 10y ago
The programs that SF puts in place as part of the "non-profit industrial complex" that's risen up worsens the problem in two ways: 1) Too many of the programs enable, rather than help the root cause, of homeless folks. 2) These enabling programs are very efficiently communicated among the homeless population, drawing them from all over the state and the country. I'm not some asshole who hates homeless people. I was raised by a single father because my mother was a mentally-ill and drug addicted person who was homeless or in and out of shelters for the majority of the last 25 years before she died in 2014. I watched as numerous programs did nothing but enable her addiction and undermine me and my siblings efforts to eliminate her addiction and get her to work.
- yeahwhatever10 10y ago
  Interested to hear what from your perspective is the root cause and how these programs enable it.
  - JPKab 10y ago
    Not having a job or some collective sense of mission is bad for people, period. We are, at our evolutionary root, not designed to be idle or not tied up in some sense of collective effort to survive. ANY PROGRAM that doesn't provide this very much needed element of the human condition is going to fail. My ideal drug rehabilitation program for homeless addicts is this: give them drugs, and make them work at some kind of job to continue to receive them, as well as a basic income. This is based on a more recent theory of addiction (that I wholeheartedly embrace) following the "rat park" model of psychological isolation and emotional injury being a bigger contributor to compulsive drug use than the chemical dependencies. Edit: Forgot to say that the above would likely result in the majority of folks in the program to quit drugs in a few years on their own as they became happier and more socially connected individuals. All the programs my mom ever had available basically treated her like a helpless victim: stay away from drugs, take your lithium, and "of course we don't expect you to work. Just sit around and do nothing all day and here's your disability check". And let me add this: most addicts are actually pretty functional and capable of work if provided some amount of drugs. The cases where an addict won't be able to work are going to involve folks who are in withdrawal and need their fix. They aren't going to be doing clerical work or anything, but day labor and other basic work like that is 100% doable. This is the kind of work that cities like SF have available in large quantities for their public infrastructure.
FussyZeus 10y ago
In one of the most left-leaning states in the union, in one of it's richest cities, all the most well-meaning welfare programs have failed to make a dent in the problem. If that isn't a fantastic argument for Basic Income I don't know what could be more persuasive. Edit: Commenter below summarized my (admittedly poorly phrased) point better than I can: > The current programs are focussed around spending the minimum amount of money possible on as few people as possible, which is an expensive and inefficient proposal. The parent's suggestion is to give people the power in their own lives, which studies have shown can result in huge turnarounds for people in unpleasant situations. > So OP is suggesting that overly complicated, byzantine, and underfunded welfare programs aren't working, so maybe we should give up and do what experts have been suggesting, and studies have shown results from, instead. And no, this does not address the problem of mental illness but if we're going to continue to ignore this problem until we can find a solution that works for all homeless, just shoot them now and limit their suffering because it will never happen.
- lostlogin 10y ago
  Is anyone able to explain what this view is being down voted? I'm picking that the second paragraph is the problem - there must be hard data on that thought somewhere?
  - yeahwhatever10 10y ago
    He says well-meaning welfare programs aren't working, and then suggests another well-meaning welfare program.
    - ZanyProgrammer 10y ago
      I think we need Basic Housing in addition to Basic Income.
      - mdorazio 10y ago
        The two are largely the same thing. If you have basic income, you can spend it on cheap housing and effectively have Basic Housing with no additional administrative overhead. If you're saying that we need to specifically provide free housing to the homeless and/or poor then that's a program that some cities have already tried with mixed results. Homelessness is often tied to drug addiction and mental health issues, neither of which are really directly helped by free housing or free money.
jkot 10y ago
> The city needs to evaluate and track people in homeless programs > San Francisco, which gets an influx of about 450 chronically homeless people a year, needs to shed any perception that it is a sanctuary for people who are unwilling to participate in programs designed to get them off, > It is neither inhumane nor “criminalizing poverty” to enforce laws against aggressive panhandling, tent encampments or defecation and urination in public places....are no longer afforded the option to flout the law with impunity. So plan is to build a few houses and put everyone who is left into jail.
- sp332 10y ago
  Yup. SF has a dearth of public restrooms (and almost no public showers). Criminalizing public urination is criminalizing homelessness.
  - sidereal1 10y ago
    This is becoming an issue in Sacramento as they continue to shut down public restrooms. There's is talk of setting up port-a-potties with full time attendants, so we will see how that goes.
breatheoften 10y ago
I was in sf for wwdc a few weeks ago - as a separate notion to humanitarian ideas, the mental ill and homeless in the streets really struck me as having a very adverse effect on the vibe of the city -- worse than my impressions as a visitor during previous experiences in the area. - if you are in the city and need to find a bathroom, good luck -- hearts and minds of the people are closed to you and there is nowhere a restroom accessible as service jobs are constantly under assault from the mentally ill. It's extremely dehumanizing -- I would invite anyone who wants to feel the homeless experience to put on some decent but non fashionable clothes, wait until they urgently need to pee while in an unfamiliar area of the city, and then see how the city feels to you. - the battery in my phone died and I asked a random passerby if he had the time -- he said "no". Just an isolated sketch -- but the people in that city generally struck me as terrible and generally very close to depressed -- and I attribute at least some of that to the fact that they are constantly barraged by the souls of the crushed masses dwelling all around them. Cities have psyches, and sf strikes me as very sick right now.
- partycoder 10y ago
  I was in a restaurant in SF near embarcadero. A 70+ year old woman eating in another table got her check, about $18, but realized that left her purse at home. She wanted to leave to get her purse in order to return, and pay. But the lady that runs the restaurant started yelling "where is the money?". There were also some cops eating at the restaurant, and asked if there was anything wrong, and then proceeded to arrest her. The restaurant was full of people. Many of them seemed to have a good living standard. But nobody got involved in helping an honest senior person in distress. I got involved. I paid the bill and the cops set the woman free. Even if it was intentional (unlikely), if you are stealing food then you probably need help anyways, especially if you are old. I was horrified to see how a society so prosper can be so dehumanized. Shame on you people.
  - ohnomrbill 10y ago
    "I was horrified to see how a society so prosper can be so dehumanized." In fairness, where should their morals come from? I'm not religious myself, but it seems that for all their faults religions provide a shared morality. Why should a society without a fixed set of morals be humane? There's no source of truth as to what humane even means. Why is helping an old woman humane? Why should I believe you, or feel shame when something like this happens?
ksenzee 10y ago
Can we s/Fransisco/Francisco/ in the headline?
sixQuarks 10y ago
I never realized the San Francisco Chronicle has two versions of its site. I always used to go to http://www.sfgate.com http://www.sfgate.com (which has become like a gossip site). I now realize the more traditional newspaper is at http://www.sfchronicle.com/ http://www.sfchronicle.com/ (although they have an overlap of articles). Why would they do this?
- bzalasky 10y ago
  sfchronicle.com is their premium, subscription-based offering. I suppose it'll only allow you to read 10 or so articles before putting up a paywall. sfgate.com is their free ad-based offering.
hiou 10y ago
The reality is that most mid to long term homeless are 100% unemployable. There is no solution for most of these people in our current system. This is not a San Francisco problem but a national problem as it is a direct side effect of our chosen system of resource allocation. We as a country need to either change our current methods of allocating resources or accept it as a price we are willing to pay.
- brown 10y ago
  Indeed, but as the article points out, we can do a much better job of managing the problem. Paying $150,000 per year per person is simply ridiculous. We can look at Salt Lake City and Houston for proven examples of better solutions.
- ethanbond 10y ago
  There actually is a solution: employing them or incentivizing the employment of them.
  - sidereal1 10y ago
    It's not just about money. Someone who is severely mentally ill isn't going to able to perform tasks, let alone function without a caregiver. Living on the streets is very dangerous and stressful. Somewhere around 25% of homeless people have traumatic brain injuries. Not the sort of people you can put in a cubical to do data entry.
    - ethanbond 10y ago
      Mental illness is a huge component to this, I agree. I think it's pessimistic to say that a sizable portion of this group couldn't become employed in some way. First, not all of them are mentally ill to begin with. Second, a lot of mental illnesses are quite manageable with the right care. Care requires money, and money is acquired by working. Further, no mental illness has ever been alleviated through boredom, malnutrition, lack of sleep, social exile, and maltreatment. Also, not every job involves sitting at a computer ;)
- 10y ago
hnbroseph 10y ago
are these "legacy inhabitants" or whatever the gentrifiers refer to them as?
- brown 10y ago
  Not all of them. As the article states, SF "gets an influx of about 450 chronically homeless people a year". Part of the problem is that SF has become known as a sanctuary city for the homeless. People come from all over the US. That is good, from the perspective that we have some positive karma for treating people better than other cities. It is bad, from the perspective that we bear more of the burden.
dragontamer 10y ago
Can we seriously not have an article that enlarges specific text as you're scrolling? It completely distracts me from reading the article. Please stick with the tired-but-true way of making headlines or pulling text to the side to break-up text. Don't dynamically resize text while you're scrolling. This has to be the dumbest web design I've seen in a while.
- stephenitis 10y ago
  I found it somewhat useful or similar to asides and enlarged quotations. I for one am fine with publishers trying to experiment with the creative display of their work al la New York Times so long as they don't paywall it off. free content is free content.
powera 10y ago
I think "people who are homeless because they can't afford homes" and "people who are homeless because they voluntarily enjoy living on the street" are two different problems and should be addressed differently. In particular, I have no problem criminalizing the latter if we can address the former. Criminal laws are supposed to prevent mass unpleasant behavior in public. Pooping in the street is not a lifestyle choice we should encourage or support. (though "having public toilets" might be a better solution)
teslaberry 10y ago
there is an entire complex of private contractors who name themselves as 'non-profits' that profit heavily off of 'helping' this system. if you just eliminated ALL nonprofits, ensured that money donated to them was NOT tax deductible and taxed ANY and ALL ownership of non-profit owned property, you would have more than enough money to feed and house all the homeless. the only problem is you'd have a lot more people who work int he non-profit sector unemployed. it is a form of corporate welfare for supposed do gooding where 90%+ of the money winds up in the pockets of administrators employees and contractors all in the name of 'helping' people. homeless people would literally be better off if there were aboslutely no government or tax subsidized services offering them help and NO WAR ON THE HOMELESS LAWS punishing individual non-institutionally affiliated people for helping/feeding/housing the homeless using informal resources.
gtf21 10y ago
Very anecdotally, this was something that I noticed not just in SF, but also LA. The marked difference for me as a Londoner between the huge homelessness problem we have in London and what I saw in SF/LA was the levels of mental illness coupled with dehumanising levels of despair that I saw in the homeless populations of SF/LA. Does anyone have a good idea of why SF/LA (the US in general?) exhibited this characteristic of homelessness more markedly than in London (where I almost never see the sort of extremely obvious health issues that I saw in SF/LA every time I've been there)? Is it because of the US healthcare system, perhaps? Incidentally, there is a good episode of the BBC's "The Inquiry" which asks about one route of dealing with this: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03rh5my http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03rh5my

52 points by thanatosmin 10y ago

e40 10y ago

The fact is it can't just be SF's problem, because SF is a magnet for homeless people from all over CA and the US. That makes it a US problem, and yes, it is a disgrace.

mdorazio 10y ago
But isn't SF a magnet because of its policies and programs making it a desirable destination for the homeless? Homelessness is definitely a nation-wide program with all kinds of root causes that need to be addressed, but the city of SF is somewhat unique among other "top tier" US cities in the scope of its homeless "problem".
- brown 10y ago
  The unique part of SF is our extreme inefficiency. We spend huge sums of money without much to show for it. Homelessness is a crisis that is growing all over the US. Homeless crisis in Hawaii sparks state of emergency http://www.cbsnews.com/videos/homeless-crisis-in-hawaii-sparks-state-of-emergency/ http://www.cbsnews.com/videos/homeless-crisis-in-hawaii-spar... L.A. County supervisors call for a state emergency declaration on homelessness http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-homeless-emergency-20160614-snap-story.html http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-homeless-emergen... Mayor, county exec declare ‘state of emergency’ over homelessness http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/mayor-county-exec-declare-state-of-emergency-over-homelessness/ http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/mayor-coun...
- e40 10y ago
  1. The police in SF don't put people on buses to other places. Other places do. 2. The weather in the Bay Area makes us a target for homeless people everywhere. 3. Related to #1, but different: not being "anti homeless people" is a reason people come to SF and Berkeley. I don't this is the same as encouraging homeless people to come to SF and Berkeley.

JPKab 10y ago

The programs that SF puts in place as part of the "non-profit industrial complex" that's risen up worsens the problem in two ways: 1) Too many of the programs enable, rather than help the root cause, of homeless folks. 2) These enabling programs are very efficiently communicated among the homeless population, drawing them from all over the state and the country. I'm not some asshole who hates homeless people. I was raised by a single father because my mother was a mentally-ill and drug addicted person who was homeless or in and out of shelters for the majority of the last 25 years before she died in 2014. I watched as numerous programs did nothing but enable her addiction and undermine me and my siblings efforts to eliminate her addiction and get her to work.

yeahwhatever10 10y ago
Interested to hear what from your perspective is the root cause and how these programs enable it.
- JPKab 10y ago
  Not having a job or some collective sense of mission is bad for people, period. We are, at our evolutionary root, not designed to be idle or not tied up in some sense of collective effort to survive. ANY PROGRAM that doesn't provide this very much needed element of the human condition is going to fail. My ideal drug rehabilitation program for homeless addicts is this: give them drugs, and make them work at some kind of job to continue to receive them, as well as a basic income. This is based on a more recent theory of addiction (that I wholeheartedly embrace) following the "rat park" model of psychological isolation and emotional injury being a bigger contributor to compulsive drug use than the chemical dependencies. Edit: Forgot to say that the above would likely result in the majority of folks in the program to quit drugs in a few years on their own as they became happier and more socially connected individuals. All the programs my mom ever had available basically treated her like a helpless victim: stay away from drugs, take your lithium, and "of course we don't expect you to work. Just sit around and do nothing all day and here's your disability check". And let me add this: most addicts are actually pretty functional and capable of work if provided some amount of drugs. The cases where an addict won't be able to work are going to involve folks who are in withdrawal and need their fix. They aren't going to be doing clerical work or anything, but day labor and other basic work like that is 100% doable. This is the kind of work that cities like SF have available in large quantities for their public infrastructure.

FussyZeus 10y ago

In one of the most left-leaning states in the union, in one of it's richest cities, all the most well-meaning welfare programs have failed to make a dent in the problem. If that isn't a fantastic argument for Basic Income I don't know what could be more persuasive. Edit: Commenter below summarized my (admittedly poorly phrased) point better than I can: > The current programs are focussed around spending the minimum amount of money possible on as few people as possible, which is an expensive and inefficient proposal. The parent's suggestion is to give people the power in their own lives, which studies have shown can result in huge turnarounds for people in unpleasant situations. > So OP is suggesting that overly complicated, byzantine, and underfunded welfare programs aren't working, so maybe we should give up and do what experts have been suggesting, and studies have shown results from, instead. And no, this does not address the problem of mental illness but if we're going to continue to ignore this problem until we can find a solution that works for all homeless, just shoot them now and limit their suffering because it will never happen.

lostlogin 10y ago
Is anyone able to explain what this view is being down voted? I'm picking that the second paragraph is the problem - there must be hard data on that thought somewhere?
- yeahwhatever10 10y ago
  He says well-meaning welfare programs aren't working, and then suggests another well-meaning welfare program.
  - ZanyProgrammer 10y ago
    I think we need Basic Housing in addition to Basic Income.
    - mdorazio 10y ago
      The two are largely the same thing. If you have basic income, you can spend it on cheap housing and effectively have Basic Housing with no additional administrative overhead. If you're saying that we need to specifically provide free housing to the homeless and/or poor then that's a program that some cities have already tried with mixed results. Homelessness is often tied to drug addiction and mental health issues, neither of which are really directly helped by free housing or free money.

jkot 10y ago

> The city needs to evaluate and track people in homeless programs > San Francisco, which gets an influx of about 450 chronically homeless people a year, needs to shed any perception that it is a sanctuary for people who are unwilling to participate in programs designed to get them off, > It is neither inhumane nor “criminalizing poverty” to enforce laws against aggressive panhandling, tent encampments or defecation and urination in public places....are no longer afforded the option to flout the law with impunity. So plan is to build a few houses and put everyone who is left into jail.

sp332 10y ago
Yup. SF has a dearth of public restrooms (and almost no public showers). Criminalizing public urination is criminalizing homelessness.
- sidereal1 10y ago
  This is becoming an issue in Sacramento as they continue to shut down public restrooms. There's is talk of setting up port-a-potties with full time attendants, so we will see how that goes.

breatheoften 10y ago

I was in sf for wwdc a few weeks ago - as a separate notion to humanitarian ideas, the mental ill and homeless in the streets really struck me as having a very adverse effect on the vibe of the city -- worse than my impressions as a visitor during previous experiences in the area. - if you are in the city and need to find a bathroom, good luck -- hearts and minds of the people are closed to you and there is nowhere a restroom accessible as service jobs are constantly under assault from the mentally ill. It's extremely dehumanizing -- I would invite anyone who wants to feel the homeless experience to put on some decent but non fashionable clothes, wait until they urgently need to pee while in an unfamiliar area of the city, and then see how the city feels to you. - the battery in my phone died and I asked a random passerby if he had the time -- he said "no". Just an isolated sketch -- but the people in that city generally struck me as terrible and generally very close to depressed -- and I attribute at least some of that to the fact that they are constantly barraged by the souls of the crushed masses dwelling all around them. Cities have psyches, and sf strikes me as very sick right now.

partycoder 10y ago
I was in a restaurant in SF near embarcadero. A 70+ year old woman eating in another table got her check, about $18, but realized that left her purse at home. She wanted to leave to get her purse in order to return, and pay. But the lady that runs the restaurant started yelling "where is the money?". There were also some cops eating at the restaurant, and asked if there was anything wrong, and then proceeded to arrest her. The restaurant was full of people. Many of them seemed to have a good living standard. But nobody got involved in helping an honest senior person in distress. I got involved. I paid the bill and the cops set the woman free. Even if it was intentional (unlikely), if you are stealing food then you probably need help anyways, especially if you are old. I was horrified to see how a society so prosper can be so dehumanized. Shame on you people.
- ohnomrbill 10y ago
  "I was horrified to see how a society so prosper can be so dehumanized." In fairness, where should their morals come from? I'm not religious myself, but it seems that for all their faults religions provide a shared morality. Why should a society without a fixed set of morals be humane? There's no source of truth as to what humane even means. Why is helping an old woman humane? Why should I believe you, or feel shame when something like this happens?

ksenzee 10y ago

Can we s/Fransisco/Francisco/ in the headline?

sixQuarks 10y ago

I never realized the San Francisco Chronicle has two versions of its site. I always used to go to http://www.sfgate.com http://www.sfgate.com (which has become like a gossip site). I now realize the more traditional newspaper is at http://www.sfchronicle.com/ http://www.sfchronicle.com/ (although they have an overlap of articles). Why would they do this?

bzalasky 10y ago
sfchronicle.com is their premium, subscription-based offering. I suppose it'll only allow you to read 10 or so articles before putting up a paywall. sfgate.com is their free ad-based offering.

hiou 10y ago

The reality is that most mid to long term homeless are 100% unemployable. There is no solution for most of these people in our current system. This is not a San Francisco problem but a national problem as it is a direct side effect of our chosen system of resource allocation. We as a country need to either change our current methods of allocating resources or accept it as a price we are willing to pay.

brown 10y ago
Indeed, but as the article points out, we can do a much better job of managing the problem. Paying $150,000 per year per person is simply ridiculous. We can look at Salt Lake City and Houston for proven examples of better solutions.
ethanbond 10y ago
There actually is a solution: employing them or incentivizing the employment of them.
- sidereal1 10y ago
  It's not just about money. Someone who is severely mentally ill isn't going to able to perform tasks, let alone function without a caregiver. Living on the streets is very dangerous and stressful. Somewhere around 25% of homeless people have traumatic brain injuries. Not the sort of people you can put in a cubical to do data entry.
  - ethanbond 10y ago
    Mental illness is a huge component to this, I agree. I think it's pessimistic to say that a sizable portion of this group couldn't become employed in some way. First, not all of them are mentally ill to begin with. Second, a lot of mental illnesses are quite manageable with the right care. Care requires money, and money is acquired by working. Further, no mental illness has ever been alleviated through boredom, malnutrition, lack of sleep, social exile, and maltreatment. Also, not every job involves sitting at a computer ;)
10y ago

hnbroseph 10y ago

are these "legacy inhabitants" or whatever the gentrifiers refer to them as?

brown 10y ago
Not all of them. As the article states, SF "gets an influx of about 450 chronically homeless people a year". Part of the problem is that SF has become known as a sanctuary city for the homeless. People come from all over the US. That is good, from the perspective that we have some positive karma for treating people better than other cities. It is bad, from the perspective that we bear more of the burden.

dragontamer 10y ago

Can we seriously not have an article that enlarges specific text as you're scrolling? It completely distracts me from reading the article. Please stick with the tired-but-true way of making headlines or pulling text to the side to break-up text. Don't dynamically resize text while you're scrolling. This has to be the dumbest web design I've seen in a while.

stephenitis 10y ago
I found it somewhat useful or similar to asides and enlarged quotations. I for one am fine with publishers trying to experiment with the creative display of their work al la New York Times so long as they don't paywall it off. free content is free content.

powera 10y ago

I think "people who are homeless because they can't afford homes" and "people who are homeless because they voluntarily enjoy living on the street" are two different problems and should be addressed differently. In particular, I have no problem criminalizing the latter if we can address the former. Criminal laws are supposed to prevent mass unpleasant behavior in public. Pooping in the street is not a lifestyle choice we should encourage or support. (though "having public toilets" might be a better solution)

teslaberry 10y ago

there is an entire complex of private contractors who name themselves as 'non-profits' that profit heavily off of 'helping' this system. if you just eliminated ALL nonprofits, ensured that money donated to them was NOT tax deductible and taxed ANY and ALL ownership of non-profit owned property, you would have more than enough money to feed and house all the homeless. the only problem is you'd have a lot more people who work int he non-profit sector unemployed. it is a form of corporate welfare for supposed do gooding where 90%+ of the money winds up in the pockets of administrators employees and contractors all in the name of 'helping' people. homeless people would literally be better off if there were aboslutely no government or tax subsidized services offering them help and NO WAR ON THE HOMELESS LAWS punishing individual non-institutionally affiliated people for helping/feeding/housing the homeless using informal resources.

gtf21 10y ago

Very anecdotally, this was something that I noticed not just in SF, but also LA. The marked difference for me as a Londoner between the huge homelessness problem we have in London and what I saw in SF/LA was the levels of mental illness coupled with dehumanising levels of despair that I saw in the homeless populations of SF/LA. Does anyone have a good idea of why SF/LA (the US in general?) exhibited this characteristic of homelessness more markedly than in London (where I almost never see the sort of extremely obvious health issues that I saw in SF/LA every time I've been there)? Is it because of the US healthcare system, perhaps? Incidentally, there is a good episode of the BBC's "The Inquiry" which asks about one route of dealing with this: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03rh5my http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03rh5my