8 ms·

I moved to SF in the early 90s. I think you can pin the large homeless population on several things. One is the climate. If you had to pick a place to be homele

I moved to SF in the early 90s. I think you can pin the large homeless population on several things. One is the climate. If you had to pick a place to be homeless, this would be one of the best places. Another is it is relatively safe compared to other cities. But most importantly you can blame Ronald Reagan for dismantling the states mental health infrastructure. Institutionalizing people has its downsides, but its more humane than letting people overdose on a sidewalk. It also doesn't help that other municipalities have a habit of dumping their social services burdens on San Francisco (one way buses from Nevada, etc). I don't see anything changing until we have a national or at least regional mental health system that can actually deal with the scale of the problem.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
Implicated 10y ago
> One is the climate. If you had to pick a place to be homeless, this would be one of the best places. My experience here in Portland OR seems to reflect the same feeling on this. During the spring/summer months the homeless population explodes... then they move down south for the fall/winter seasons.
- M_Grey 10y ago
  When you don't have a home, cold and damp are literal killers.
kjksf 10y ago
None of that is specific to San Francisco. All of South California and North California has great weather, including other big cities like LA, San Diego, San Jose. As to crime, I don't have the stats but again I doubt SF has meaningfully lower crime rate than other cities. Generic "crime stats" are pretty meaningless anyway. I doubt anyone keeps stats that would be specific to homeless people (we have stats for "homicide rates" but not "homeless homicide rates"). And even if Reagan is to blame, it was a national thing, so doesn't explain why San Francisco has more homeless.
- seanmcdirmid 10y ago
  Reagan was governor of California before he was president.
  - gedy 10y ago
    And California has had both assembly and state senate dominated by Democrats for 50 years or so.
    - seanmcdirmid 10y ago
      The republicans earned their way to obscurity with Reagan and the likes of Pete Wilson. It goes without saying that the governor can do a lot of damage in California.
- lubujackson 10y ago
  SF spends $241 million on homelessness. Per year. The reason SF has so many homeless is because it provides the most services, the most programs, the best support network and a sympathetic population (not to mention rich tourists and locals to panhandle from, and a good mix of urban and park areas).
merpnderp 10y ago
I thought Reagan had little choice since the Supreme Court ruled forceful institutionalizations deprived people of their civil rights if they weren't an immediate threat to themselves or others.
- M_Grey 10y ago
  There was a choice to fund education for families and former patients, and attempt a transition to outpatient care. Dumping them on the streets and into prisons most definitely was a choice.
refurb 10y ago
But most importantly you can blame Ronald Reagan for dismantling the states mental health infrastructure. Please do some reading on this. Your comment is a gross oversimplification and ignores a lot of other factors, namely the fact that institutionalizing people against their will was regarded as inhumane. Mental health was defunded after it was decided to release these folks. Just like in most western countries.
- iamdave 10y ago
  Care to point towards any resources, authors, or links for those of us who might want to do more reading of our own? Seems like you have some knowledge on the subject, these would be much more helpful.
  - M_Grey 10y ago
    American Psychosis is an excellent book on this topic. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/14/health/american-psychosis-attacks-mental-health-care.html http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/14/health/american-psychosis-...
  - hga 10y ago
    My mother, as first a nursing resident, and then a nurse anesthetist in the '50s, saw the most important input into this process, the "major tranquilizers" AKA first generation anti-psychotics, which came into wide use in-between those two, she was astounded one day when she saw a "hopeless" patient she knew from her 3 months residency in a psych ward working in the same hospital as she was, in some custodial or runner role. But I strongly suspect he had an informal network in that hospital, which made sure he took his nasty meds (and they are nasty, I had to take Zyprexa at full strength for a while to end a hypomanic episode caused by a doctor prescribing a drug which turned out to be a big mistake, and then not realizing it for a month until my GP noticed and mentioned this to him over lunch; if you're worried about this happening to you, and all sorts of drugs can cause it, keep a diary of your sleep, and if it e.g. has an entry of 3 periods of 30 minutes, seek competent help fast, uncontrolled like this mania is serious medical emergency, and insidious for the patient suffering from it). See, the thing was, after millennia of psychosis being untreatable, and soon bipolar disorder falling to lithium carbonate, we'd achieved a true miracle. But the transition to a new management regime for these particularly severe disorders was utterly botched. It started with a commission in the '50s, leading to Federal legislation signed by JFK less than a month before his assassination, and only 4 years later does Reagan even come into the picture, seeing as how he wasn't even a position of power until 1967 (read the bare facts in the intro to this article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Mental_Health_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Mental_Health_Act). In short, blaming it on Reagan is Not Even Wrong; a wonderful opportunity for humane treatment of the most mentally ill was botched for a bunch of reasons, and he was only following the scheme "The Best And Brightest" came up with before its failings became all too apparent, in part due to the ACLU and willing courts eliminating the necessary force to make it work, e.g. forcing people to take their nasty meds or otherwise get fully institutionalized again. A cynic would also note that redirecting money from mental hospitals to transfer payments was a much better way to buy votes.... And it's still happening, in the last year or two Missouri Governor Jay Nixon shut one down for the "retarded" just a bit north of me.
ArkyBeagle 10y ago
I think "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" had a lot to do with this as well.
brandonmenc 10y ago
> But most importantly you can blame Ronald Reagan for dismantling the states mental health infrastructure. Again, with this. Any time the "Reagan dismantled mental health!" argument comes up, all I can ever find are references to the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act - which was co-authored by Democrats, and followed the accepted medical advice of the time - and vague accusations of acts by a Congress more often than not Democrat-controlled under Reagan's tenure. What specifically did Reagan himself do?
- hga 10y ago
  They all were following JFK's (and Eisenhower's) Best and Brightest, as enshrined in the Federal 1963 Community Mental Health Act (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Mental_Health_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Mental_Health_Act), all that done back when he was on the "rubber chicken circuit" for GE; he had no political power until becoming governor in 1967.
sevenless 10y ago
I've never seen any city with a homeless population like San Francisco's and I've been to much poorer places. Side by side with the artists and web developers is a parallel tent city, and it seems to have a lot of mentally ill, people with drug problems, and traumatized military veterans. People who in any other nation would be taken care of. Simply put Americans don't seem to care very much about other Americans.
- santaclaus 10y ago
  > I've never seen any city with a homeless population like San Francisco's The other west coast cities have massive homeless populations, too. LA has largely cleared the homeless encampments out of areas they are trying to spruce up (the revival of downtown LA and all that), but I've seen camps in LA rivaling those in SF. Portland and Seattle also get pretty large homeless populations during the spring and summer, although the homeless population drops precipitously during the rainy season up there.
- wyclif 10y ago
  Simply put Americans don't seem to care very much about other Americans Now there's a vast oversimplification if there ever was one. Using SF, which is highly anomalous economically and socially, to extrapolate out and project it on "Americans" and their attitudes toward poverty is a lot like saying the City of London's particularities are the same as the rest of England.
  - sevenless 10y ago
    It's kind of true, though. Compared to other developed nations, the US is a country that doesn't care if you get sick or die. It's about as social-Darwinist as it gets. SF is even much more liberal than the rest of the country, so it's a best-case. Don't mean to be inflammatory, just how I see it having traveled a lot. It's wonderful to be rich in the US, you can get anything you want, but there's no sympathy for the poor or unfortunate or social underclasses (immigrant labor, etc) at all.
    - 10y ago
whybroke 10y ago
>...One is the climate... 71% of homeless people were living in SF just before becoming homeless. Only 10% come from outside of California (and its climate)[0] This pretty clearly shows homeless has alot more to do with the cost of housing relative to wages jobs then good weather. [0]pg 33 of http://sfgov.org/lhcb/sites/default/files/2015%20San%20Francisco%20Homeless%20Count%20%20Report.pdf http://sfgov.org/lhcb/sites/default/files/2015%20San%20Franc...
- thaumasiotes 10y ago
  It shows nothing of the kind. Perhaps, if you were living somewhere with a lethal climate, and you became homeless, you would leave. Or perhaps you would stay, thinking "homeless presence has nothing to do with the weather", and die. In either of those cases, the weather has shrunk the homeless population.
nieksand 10y ago
It's been about 40 years since Reagan was governor of California. Using him as an excuse for conditions today is a bit bizarre.
terda12 10y ago
Not so sure about the mental health part. The article uses Bangkok's low homeless population as a counterpoint to San Fran's homelessness. I was born and raised in Thailand and occasionally visit or have Thai relatives over. I would say in Asia, mental health awareness is pretty nonexistant. The fact that they have a low homeless population and low mental health awareness does kind of refute your mental healthcare point imo. I think it's the fact that in Thailand, as the article mentions, there is a lot of gray area between "poor" and "rich". There's not many super wealthy people and not many super poor people. There's more of a "middle poor", "average", and "middle-rich", and the "middle poor" get by pretty well because of how cheap everything is. Healthcare is also dirt cheap compared to America, so you can get medical care for basic stuff and pay like $20 for it. My parents have even thought of doing some medical tourism to Thailand to do dentistry stuff because its just so damn cheap. Oh, one more thing, motorcycles are the poor man's transport, and just like everything else they are also dirt cheap. Cant afford rent? Well you can just go and live in a basic shack because a lot of people do that anyway. So yeah, if you're poor in Thailand you will generally get by pretty well because everything there is relatively cheap. In America, it's either you are above the average line or you sink to the bottom. Like, if you don't make enough money, you can't expect to pay rent and then have money for food/healthcare/car. And in America, you NEED a car. How are you gonna get from San Fran to LA if you have a job interview? Taxi is out of the question, trains are 200+, buses dont arrive early in the morning. So the only answer is a car. Oh you have a problem with drug abuse? Are you poor and cant afford health insurance? Then hospital or rehab visits will cost thousands. Cant afford rent? Guess you're homeless. It's a brutal system we have in America honestly. Lots of tech innovations, lots of good economics in Silicon Valley, but honestly it just sucks to be poor here. You need to be hovering in the neighborhood of the high GDP per capita if you want to survive. In Thailand, the GDP per capita is low enough that most people are near it, and the rich can enjoy a luxurious lifestyle with housemaids and stuff.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

Implicated 10y ago

> One is the climate. If you had to pick a place to be homeless, this would be one of the best places. My experience here in Portland OR seems to reflect the same feeling on this. During the spring/summer months the homeless population explodes... then they move down south for the fall/winter seasons.

M_Grey 10y ago
When you don't have a home, cold and damp are literal killers.

kjksf 10y ago

None of that is specific to San Francisco. All of South California and North California has great weather, including other big cities like LA, San Diego, San Jose. As to crime, I don't have the stats but again I doubt SF has meaningfully lower crime rate than other cities. Generic "crime stats" are pretty meaningless anyway. I doubt anyone keeps stats that would be specific to homeless people (we have stats for "homicide rates" but not "homeless homicide rates"). And even if Reagan is to blame, it was a national thing, so doesn't explain why San Francisco has more homeless.

seanmcdirmid 10y ago
Reagan was governor of California before he was president.
- gedy 10y ago
  And California has had both assembly and state senate dominated by Democrats for 50 years or so.
  - seanmcdirmid 10y ago
    The republicans earned their way to obscurity with Reagan and the likes of Pete Wilson. It goes without saying that the governor can do a lot of damage in California.
lubujackson 10y ago
SF spends $241 million on homelessness. Per year. The reason SF has so many homeless is because it provides the most services, the most programs, the best support network and a sympathetic population (not to mention rich tourists and locals to panhandle from, and a good mix of urban and park areas).

merpnderp 10y ago

I thought Reagan had little choice since the Supreme Court ruled forceful institutionalizations deprived people of their civil rights if they weren't an immediate threat to themselves or others.

M_Grey 10y ago
There was a choice to fund education for families and former patients, and attempt a transition to outpatient care. Dumping them on the streets and into prisons most definitely was a choice.

refurb 10y ago

But most importantly you can blame Ronald Reagan for dismantling the states mental health infrastructure. Please do some reading on this. Your comment is a gross oversimplification and ignores a lot of other factors, namely the fact that institutionalizing people against their will was regarded as inhumane. Mental health was defunded after it was decided to release these folks. Just like in most western countries.

iamdave 10y ago
Care to point towards any resources, authors, or links for those of us who might want to do more reading of our own? Seems like you have some knowledge on the subject, these would be much more helpful.
- M_Grey 10y ago
  American Psychosis is an excellent book on this topic. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/14/health/american-psychosis-attacks-mental-health-care.html http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/14/health/american-psychosis-...
- hga 10y ago
  My mother, as first a nursing resident, and then a nurse anesthetist in the '50s, saw the most important input into this process, the "major tranquilizers" AKA first generation anti-psychotics, which came into wide use in-between those two, she was astounded one day when she saw a "hopeless" patient she knew from her 3 months residency in a psych ward working in the same hospital as she was, in some custodial or runner role. But I strongly suspect he had an informal network in that hospital, which made sure he took his nasty meds (and they are nasty, I had to take Zyprexa at full strength for a while to end a hypomanic episode caused by a doctor prescribing a drug which turned out to be a big mistake, and then not realizing it for a month until my GP noticed and mentioned this to him over lunch; if you're worried about this happening to you, and all sorts of drugs can cause it, keep a diary of your sleep, and if it e.g. has an entry of 3 periods of 30 minutes, seek competent help fast, uncontrolled like this mania is serious medical emergency, and insidious for the patient suffering from it). See, the thing was, after millennia of psychosis being untreatable, and soon bipolar disorder falling to lithium carbonate, we'd achieved a true miracle. But the transition to a new management regime for these particularly severe disorders was utterly botched. It started with a commission in the '50s, leading to Federal legislation signed by JFK less than a month before his assassination, and only 4 years later does Reagan even come into the picture, seeing as how he wasn't even a position of power until 1967 (read the bare facts in the intro to this article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Mental_Health_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Mental_Health_Act). In short, blaming it on Reagan is Not Even Wrong; a wonderful opportunity for humane treatment of the most mentally ill was botched for a bunch of reasons, and he was only following the scheme "The Best And Brightest" came up with before its failings became all too apparent, in part due to the ACLU and willing courts eliminating the necessary force to make it work, e.g. forcing people to take their nasty meds or otherwise get fully institutionalized again. A cynic would also note that redirecting money from mental hospitals to transfer payments was a much better way to buy votes.... And it's still happening, in the last year or two Missouri Governor Jay Nixon shut one down for the "retarded" just a bit north of me.

ArkyBeagle 10y ago

I think "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" had a lot to do with this as well.

brandonmenc 10y ago

> But most importantly you can blame Ronald Reagan for dismantling the states mental health infrastructure. Again, with this. Any time the "Reagan dismantled mental health!" argument comes up, all I can ever find are references to the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act - which was co-authored by Democrats, and followed the accepted medical advice of the time - and vague accusations of acts by a Congress more often than not Democrat-controlled under Reagan's tenure. What specifically did Reagan himself do?

hga 10y ago
They all were following JFK's (and Eisenhower's) Best and Brightest, as enshrined in the Federal 1963 Community Mental Health Act (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Mental_Health_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Mental_Health_Act), all that done back when he was on the "rubber chicken circuit" for GE; he had no political power until becoming governor in 1967.

sevenless 10y ago

I've never seen any city with a homeless population like San Francisco's and I've been to much poorer places. Side by side with the artists and web developers is a parallel tent city, and it seems to have a lot of mentally ill, people with drug problems, and traumatized military veterans. People who in any other nation would be taken care of. Simply put Americans don't seem to care very much about other Americans.

santaclaus 10y ago
> I've never seen any city with a homeless population like San Francisco's The other west coast cities have massive homeless populations, too. LA has largely cleared the homeless encampments out of areas they are trying to spruce up (the revival of downtown LA and all that), but I've seen camps in LA rivaling those in SF. Portland and Seattle also get pretty large homeless populations during the spring and summer, although the homeless population drops precipitously during the rainy season up there.
wyclif 10y ago
Simply put Americans don't seem to care very much about other Americans Now there's a vast oversimplification if there ever was one. Using SF, which is highly anomalous economically and socially, to extrapolate out and project it on "Americans" and their attitudes toward poverty is a lot like saying the City of London's particularities are the same as the rest of England.
- sevenless 10y ago
  It's kind of true, though. Compared to other developed nations, the US is a country that doesn't care if you get sick or die. It's about as social-Darwinist as it gets. SF is even much more liberal than the rest of the country, so it's a best-case. Don't mean to be inflammatory, just how I see it having traveled a lot. It's wonderful to be rich in the US, you can get anything you want, but there's no sympathy for the poor or unfortunate or social underclasses (immigrant labor, etc) at all.
  - 10y ago

whybroke 10y ago

>...One is the climate... 71% of homeless people were living in SF just before becoming homeless. Only 10% come from outside of California (and its climate)[0] This pretty clearly shows homeless has alot more to do with the cost of housing relative to wages jobs then good weather. [0]pg 33 of http://sfgov.org/lhcb/sites/default/files/2015%20San%20Francisco%20Homeless%20Count%20%20Report.pdf http://sfgov.org/lhcb/sites/default/files/2015%20San%20Franc...

thaumasiotes 10y ago
It shows nothing of the kind. Perhaps, if you were living somewhere with a lethal climate, and you became homeless, you would leave. Or perhaps you would stay, thinking "homeless presence has nothing to do with the weather", and die. In either of those cases, the weather has shrunk the homeless population.

nieksand 10y ago

It's been about 40 years since Reagan was governor of California. Using him as an excuse for conditions today is a bit bizarre.

terda12 10y ago

Not so sure about the mental health part. The article uses Bangkok's low homeless population as a counterpoint to San Fran's homelessness. I was born and raised in Thailand and occasionally visit or have Thai relatives over. I would say in Asia, mental health awareness is pretty nonexistant. The fact that they have a low homeless population and low mental health awareness does kind of refute your mental healthcare point imo. I think it's the fact that in Thailand, as the article mentions, there is a lot of gray area between "poor" and "rich". There's not many super wealthy people and not many super poor people. There's more of a "middle poor", "average", and "middle-rich", and the "middle poor" get by pretty well because of how cheap everything is. Healthcare is also dirt cheap compared to America, so you can get medical care for basic stuff and pay like $20 for it. My parents have even thought of doing some medical tourism to Thailand to do dentistry stuff because its just so damn cheap. Oh, one more thing, motorcycles are the poor man's transport, and just like everything else they are also dirt cheap. Cant afford rent? Well you can just go and live in a basic shack because a lot of people do that anyway. So yeah, if you're poor in Thailand you will generally get by pretty well because everything there is relatively cheap. In America, it's either you are above the average line or you sink to the bottom. Like, if you don't make enough money, you can't expect to pay rent and then have money for food/healthcare/car. And in America, you NEED a car. How are you gonna get from San Fran to LA if you have a job interview? Taxi is out of the question, trains are 200+, buses dont arrive early in the morning. So the only answer is a car. Oh you have a problem with drug abuse? Are you poor and cant afford health insurance? Then hospital or rehab visits will cost thousands. Cant afford rent? Guess you're homeless. It's a brutal system we have in America honestly. Lots of tech innovations, lots of good economics in Silicon Valley, but honestly it just sucks to be poor here. You need to be hovering in the neighborhood of the high GDP per capita if you want to survive. In Thailand, the GDP per capita is low enough that most people are near it, and the rich can enjoy a luxurious lifestyle with housemaids and stuff.