5 ms·

http://sfist.com/2016/02/11/71_of_sf_homeless_once_had_homes_in.php http://sfist.com/2016/02/11/71_of_sf_homeless_once_had_homes... 70%+ of homeless people in

by habosa 9y ago

http://sfist.com/2016/02/11/71_of_sf_homeless_once_had_homes_in.php http://sfist.com/2016/02/11/71_of_sf_homeless_once_had_homes... 70%+ of homeless people in SF were previously housed in SF. Yes they are attracted to SF but it's in the same way that you and I may be attracted to the city. They came for the weather, the jobs, the culture, and they got left behind. You're right about drug abuse and mental illness, but neither of those should leave someone to a life on the streets. Treatment is the answer for people with mental health issues or addictions.

rcpt 9y ago
Thank you for pointing this out. It's far to common to hear that the increase in homelessness is the result of out-of-town transients invading from afar and then settling here. Here's the relevant study 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...
chrissnell 9y ago
Speaking as someone with multiple addicts in his immediate family (some with 40+ year addiction histories), I promise you that treatment is rarely the "answer". Most addicts don't want to go to treatment. They want to maximize their draw from society and minimize their effort to get that draw so that they can continue to use drugs as much as possible.
- nitrogen 9y ago
  Maybe that's the best we can accomplish -- grant them some of what they want so they are otherwise prevented from harming society and the ripple effects of a black market supply chain are eliminated.
- tcj_phx 9y ago
  > I promise you that treatment is rarely the "answer". Most addicts don't want to go to treatment. Most addicts don't want to go to treatment because treatment doesn't work - mostly it gets people to focus on their failures and feel bad about themselves. Someone responded to my previous quip about AA's miserable success rate with... I'd say 12-step is closer to "takes credit for the ~10-15% of people who'd beat their addictions anyways". [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15024780 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15024780 (168 days ago - above quote is from the response to this comment) My girlfriend was doing fine with her addictions. The main factor was that I did not approve, and she liked me more than the drugs. She's spent the last two years getting 'treated' by the mental health professionals, who have reversed cause (self-medicating) and effect ('mental illness'). Some months ago her treatment provider did a genetic test, and decided she'd benefit from Vitamin B-9 - grains fortified with folic acid doesn't work for poor methylators. It's too bad the treatment providers don't start with healthy diets and supplements for all their patients.
jpeg_hero 9y ago
Disengeous comment. “Homlessness” is a much broader concept than the yelling szizophric on the street with that weird “missing hair syndrome” on his head that a lot of them have. It covers things like eviction, family unit disruption, etc. Yeah sure 70% of homeless fall into “previously housed here and fell on hard times.” While sad and should be addressed it is not the homelessness that is greatly affecting quality of life. It is the small fraction of chronically sick, chronically insane and chronically addicted that are literally dying on the streets in front of people.
- euyyn 9y ago
  You mean affecting the quality of life of the ones that do have a home?
meri_dian 9y ago
They may have previously been housed in SF, but they lost their shelter for one reason or another - likely drugs or mental illness, given statistics - and stayed in SF for the reasons I gave. Your data isn't really at odds with what I said.
wahern 9y ago
That number is self-reported and ostensibly includes crashing on someone's couch for a month before getting kicked out. (IIRC, the head of Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing admitted as much recently on Michael Krasny's Forum show.) Plus, most forms of public assistance require being a California or San Francisco resident. The legal definition and logic of residency doesn't translate easily into non-lawyer speak, so like with many such things there are common myths about meeting residency requirements, such as having lived in a place for at least 1 year, etc.[1] And it doesn't matter that the legal requirements are rarely enforced, people needing assistance will often follow a script. If you know anything about how evictions work in this city, like the fact that Ellis Act evictions require a _ridiculous_ amount of compensation (think at least $20-$30k), it's obvious the real problem with homelessness in the city is drugs and mental health and the fact that, for whatever reasons, homeless from around the Bay Area, California, and Western U.S. inflate our numbers. My mother is part of a jobs program that pays her to tend to some disabled people in public housing[2]. That is, she's intimately familiar with many assistance programs from the perspective of both beneficiary and provider. In San Francisco, if you live on the streets but are willing to enter treatment (for mental health or drugs), it's _very_ easy to be housed. It's actually a source of resentment because plenty of people who could really use public housing, but who otherwise work their butts off to stay off the streets, can't get it in favor of people who can get housing (plus cash benefits) merely by stopping drugs. Drug and mental health issues are legitimate problems that people need and deserve help overcoming (often in perpetuity), and I don't have a problem funding programs to help those people. But IMO using the housing crisis to explain street homelessness is self-serving and counter-productive rhetoric by people effected by high rents, who have every incentive to link the two problems considering that the city actually puts resources into addressing homelessness. The cost of housing no doubt plays a part at the margins (e.g. by taking extremely low-end housing off the market that once upon a time might have been more tolerant of drug addicted and mentally ill tenants causing trouble and missing rent), but based on the facts on the ground I can't see how it's even close to being the primary cause of the magnitude of the problem today. [1] It doesn't help that during the 1990s many states, including California, tried to make many of those myths the law, but SCOTUS shot them down (I think because of the Privileges & Immunities Clause). Still, Republican pundits today still push for hard requirements like 1 year of residency, having had a job, etc. This lends the myths credibility and keeps them circulating. [2] Disabled in a very technical, legal sense. Every one of her "clients" is at least as physically capable as others of similar age. Most disabled in these programs are people who, because of psychiatric or cognitive issues, simply have trouble taking care of themselves or mastering life skills more generally, even if in conversation they seem perfectly normal and intelligent. The public housing they live in would deteriorate into garbage dumps and drug dens if people didn't come in and clean up after them and tamp down on bad behavior Involving police or social workers would be far too expensive, and such blatant exercise of authority would drive these people back out onto the streets. IOW, you literally need to _pay_ these people to stay off the street. Humans are... complex....

by habosa 9y ago

rcpt 9y ago

Thank you for pointing this out. It's far to common to hear that the increase in homelessness is the result of out-of-town transients invading from afar and then settling here. Here's the relevant study 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...

chrissnell 9y ago

Speaking as someone with multiple addicts in his immediate family (some with 40+ year addiction histories), I promise you that treatment is rarely the "answer". Most addicts don't want to go to treatment. They want to maximize their draw from society and minimize their effort to get that draw so that they can continue to use drugs as much as possible.

nitrogen 9y ago
Maybe that's the best we can accomplish -- grant them some of what they want so they are otherwise prevented from harming society and the ripple effects of a black market supply chain are eliminated.
tcj_phx 9y ago
> I promise you that treatment is rarely the "answer". Most addicts don't want to go to treatment. Most addicts don't want to go to treatment because treatment doesn't work - mostly it gets people to focus on their failures and feel bad about themselves. Someone responded to my previous quip about AA's miserable success rate with... I'd say 12-step is closer to "takes credit for the ~10-15% of people who'd beat their addictions anyways". [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15024780 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15024780 (168 days ago - above quote is from the response to this comment) My girlfriend was doing fine with her addictions. The main factor was that I did not approve, and she liked me more than the drugs. She's spent the last two years getting 'treated' by the mental health professionals, who have reversed cause (self-medicating) and effect ('mental illness'). Some months ago her treatment provider did a genetic test, and decided she'd benefit from Vitamin B-9 - grains fortified with folic acid doesn't work for poor methylators. It's too bad the treatment providers don't start with healthy diets and supplements for all their patients.

jpeg_hero 9y ago

Disengeous comment. “Homlessness” is a much broader concept than the yelling szizophric on the street with that weird “missing hair syndrome” on his head that a lot of them have. It covers things like eviction, family unit disruption, etc. Yeah sure 70% of homeless fall into “previously housed here and fell on hard times.” While sad and should be addressed it is not the homelessness that is greatly affecting quality of life. It is the small fraction of chronically sick, chronically insane and chronically addicted that are literally dying on the streets in front of people.

euyyn 9y ago
You mean affecting the quality of life of the ones that do have a home?

meri_dian 9y ago

They may have previously been housed in SF, but they lost their shelter for one reason or another - likely drugs or mental illness, given statistics - and stayed in SF for the reasons I gave. Your data isn't really at odds with what I said.

wahern 9y ago

That number is self-reported and ostensibly includes crashing on someone's couch for a month before getting kicked out. (IIRC, the head of Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing admitted as much recently on Michael Krasny's Forum show.) Plus, most forms of public assistance require being a California or San Francisco resident. The legal definition and logic of residency doesn't translate easily into non-lawyer speak, so like with many such things there are common myths about meeting residency requirements, such as having lived in a place for at least 1 year, etc.[1] And it doesn't matter that the legal requirements are rarely enforced, people needing assistance will often follow a script. If you know anything about how evictions work in this city, like the fact that Ellis Act evictions require a _ridiculous_ amount of compensation (think at least $20-$30k), it's obvious the real problem with homelessness in the city is drugs and mental health and the fact that, for whatever reasons, homeless from around the Bay Area, California, and Western U.S. inflate our numbers. My mother is part of a jobs program that pays her to tend to some disabled people in public housing[2]. That is, she's intimately familiar with many assistance programs from the perspective of both beneficiary and provider. In San Francisco, if you live on the streets but are willing to enter treatment (for mental health or drugs), it's _very_ easy to be housed. It's actually a source of resentment because plenty of people who could really use public housing, but who otherwise work their butts off to stay off the streets, can't get it in favor of people who can get housing (plus cash benefits) merely by stopping drugs. Drug and mental health issues are legitimate problems that people need and deserve help overcoming (often in perpetuity), and I don't have a problem funding programs to help those people. But IMO using the housing crisis to explain street homelessness is self-serving and counter-productive rhetoric by people effected by high rents, who have every incentive to link the two problems considering that the city actually puts resources into addressing homelessness. The cost of housing no doubt plays a part at the margins (e.g. by taking extremely low-end housing off the market that once upon a time might have been more tolerant of drug addicted and mentally ill tenants causing trouble and missing rent), but based on the facts on the ground I can't see how it's even close to being the primary cause of the magnitude of the problem today. [1] It doesn't help that during the 1990s many states, including California, tried to make many of those myths the law, but SCOTUS shot them down (I think because of the Privileges & Immunities Clause). Still, Republican pundits today still push for hard requirements like 1 year of residency, having had a job, etc. This lends the myths credibility and keeps them circulating. [2] Disabled in a very technical, legal sense. Every one of her "clients" is at least as physically capable as others of similar age. Most disabled in these programs are people who, because of psychiatric or cognitive issues, simply have trouble taking care of themselves or mastering life skills more generally, even if in conversation they seem perfectly normal and intelligent. The public housing they live in would deteriorate into garbage dumps and drug dens if people didn't come in and clean up after them and tamp down on bad behavior Involving police or social workers would be far too expensive, and such blatant exercise of authority would drive these people back out onto the streets. IOW, you literally need to _pay_ these people to stay off the street. Humans are... complex....