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SF’s appalling street life repels residents – now it’s driven away a convention
- rjkennedy98 8y agoMedical association feels uncomfortable around mentally ill people. So much for trying to "get rid of the stigma".
- basic1 8y agoGetting stabbed for drugs/money isn't part of their job description.
- thatswrong0 8y agoMultiple coworkers of mine have been assaulted in that area. And from the article: > It didn’t help that one board member had been assaulted near Moscone Center last year. It's not just a stigma. It's not safe.
- lnanek2 8y agoOne person told me that area is so bad in particular because that's the area unemployment checks are obtained. So a lot of the poorest people without an address besides a shelter have to go there regularly, and they don't exactly have spare money to travel much. It might be better for them and the rich doctors who want to run their conventions if the city found a better site to disburse the checks. The city built a transportation center, surely they can dedicate a government building to being a combination shelter and benefits center. Or place it near a place that handles the homeless better like people's park does in Berkeley where, yes there are campers, but they keep it pretty clean and respectful.
- masonic 8y agoWhy would the city be disbursing unemployment checks?
- dingo_bat 8y agoWho else would?
- toomuchtodo 8y agoIt’s usually a state department.
- sfrancisco 8y agoShows what a deep thinker the typical Californian is. I am being sarcastic. The checks are welfare checks. Not unemployment checks. Most Californians seem to use their heads as navigation ornaments. Nothing more.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- dqpb 8y agoThe open drug use, rampant homelessness, and shit on the sidewalks is really sad, and has been that way for at least 10 years. Given the high gdp and high tax rate, why isn't SF better than it is? I'm would really like to understand this. Is it politics, economics, cost of living?
- beavisthegenius 8y agoSerious response: where do you propose someone go who's been high or drunk for 30 years?
- Yetanfou 8y agoSerious answer: to the countryside, away from the city and its lures, away from the dealers and with a bit of luck also away from the legal dealers of alcohol, even though that would be harder to achieve.
- beavisthegenius 8y agoGreat. Set up the program to get it done.
- aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA 8y agoAnd then they do what, exactly?
- Yetanfou 8y agoThen try to find a way to live a life which does not solely revolve around getting the next hit. This will work for some, it won't for others. An alcoholic will find it hard to quit drinking while living in a pub so getting her out of that place is one way to give her a hand in breaking the addiction.
- growlist 8y agoIt seems to me it would be cheaper to give the committed substance abuser their drug of choice for free in a safe, separated and controlled setting, rather than maintain this magical thinking that one day they will turn things around on their own in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
- beatpanda 8y agoIt's hilarious to me that this exact same newspaper ran an article less than a week ago showing that by all available measures, homelessness is improving and there are fewer people on the streets in San Francisco. (https://projects.sfchronicle.com/sf-homeless/2018-state-of-homelessness/ https://projects.sfchronicle.com/sf-homeless/2018-state-of-h...) Just like our current national hysteria around crime or immigration, the notion that homelessness is somehow getting worse, or that San Francisco is doing a bad job handling it, are flatly contradicted by the data. San Francisco is in fact doing a better job handling homelessness than most of its peer cities in the United States. Readers of Hacker News should go to the data first. Matier & Ross have a long history of this kind of ugly sensationalism and it has no place here.
- captain_perl 8y agoThings have gotten worse in the last decade, with homeless invading hotel lobbies and scaring people checking in. Market St. is a war zone. The city spends $300 - $400 million a year on the homeless industry, but virtually none trickles down to the actual homeless.
- beatpanda 8y agoGoing to need a citation here, because all of the data says things are getting better. I live in SF, I have worked in mid-market and I edited the Street Sheet and worked directly with homeless people for several years. I'm not super interested in your one anecdote about the one time a homeless person scared you.
- vmarshall23 8y agoPart of the problem, if not a large-ish part of the problem, is that apparently drugs and alcohol are usually restricted from homeless shelters. And addiction is a large component of homelessness, but if you're still addicted you're obviously not going to spend much time in a place where you have to go cold turkey to enter. So, my ( probably naive ) suggestion would be to allow drugs and alcohol in the shelters, hopefully giving the residents long enough of a chance to receive some help. No it's just a revolving door that doesn't appear to be helping anyone. Universal basic income too. :-)
- pasabagi 8y agoI think for people working at a shelter, that might be pretty annoying. To be honest, the fundamental problem is obvious: SF has too high rent. Until serious money and resources are devoted to solving that, you will have homelessness.
- ralusek 8y agoYou think that people who are now homeless should be looking for legitimate residential opportunities in the most expensive city to live in in the world...by mechanism of lowering rent in said city?
- pasabagi 8y agoWhat? It's like a conscious strategy on the part of homeless people? That would be cool. No, I really just think that people should stop overthinking problems like this. You don't need to go around asking everybody's life story to work out that homelessness is tightly coupled with rent prices. Fix one, you fix the other. Or, if you think that's too expensive or onerous, own it. Accept that you're basically OK with other people being homeless. Everything else is just crocodile tears.
- ralusek 8y agoMy first question is, which I think you missed, is why do they need to be given housing in the most expensive city in the world? There is a lot of space in this country. My second question is, how exactly do you propose rent be lowered? Do you just think that rent is made up on the spot by evil rich white people, and we should have the government force them to charge less? The reason rent is so high in the first place is largely to do with government restrictions on new developments...Rent is also high here because there is a large concentration of high paying work in the area. Are these high earning people going to be allowed to benefit from your proposed arbitrary lowering of rent, so that we only disproportionately punish the wealthy landlords but not the wealthy tech workers? If not, how many tech workers would you like to displace to make room for homeless residents, and how do you determine which? I feel foolish for not realizing how simple of a solution it was that you were proposing, but not all of us operate in the intellectual 4th dimension.
- paulie_a 8y agoI really can't understand why anyone would want to live in SF. There are plenty of tech hubs elsewhere. Edit: you would literally have to pay me a million a year to even consider living there.
- Gatsky 8y agoI’ve been to SF once for 3 days, and I have never seen so many frankly mentally ill people wandering the streets. This always seems to be downplayed as a factor in the homelessness problem. Difficult to be a part of any solution when you have untreated chronic schizophrenia.
- terbear 8y agoThe filth, stench and DANGER has forced my business down to Burlingame. WHAT A DIFFERENCE! I wish I had done it years ago
- terbear 8y agoThe filth, stench and danger were my reasons for relocating my business to Burlingame. Wish I had done it YEARS ago. What a remarkable difference!!!
- fmpaul 8y agoThe result of liberal Democratic policies. Failed politics
- fmpaul 8y agoWalking SF first and Market people openly shooting up with their free needles. Thanks Democrats. Mainly RATS
- rleigh 8y agoI'm sure it's driving out smaller meetings as well, which might not make big news but might add up to even bigger losses overall. Some of my team went to a meeting in SF a few years back. They described "running the gauntlet" from the hotel to a Mexican restaurant in an area where the streets were full of homeless people. While none of them ran into direct trouble, they felt uncomfortable and unsafe, and were disgusted at the state of the place (human waste on the streets etc), "like a third-world country". In subsequent years, when the company asked for volunteers to go, no one wanted to, and no one volunteered. A week long all-expenses-paid trip from the UK to SF is something which would previously have been considered a huge perk, but is now considered to be a dangerous punishment. I certainly had no desire to visit.