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What do you guys think is the biggest lever for this crisis?

by shafyy 8y ago

olivermarks 8y ago
I've lived in the area for twenty five plus years and have known local social workers and city employees. I also have friends who are effectively homeless (living in RV's) having grown up in silicon valley and been evicted from family rental homes and can't afford massively increased rents. There's a huge number of people who wind up in San Francisco for all sorts of reasons and the civic reputation for being less harsh on homeless plus relatively mild weather makes it a place people wind up staying in. There's always been flop houses in the tenderloin and people on the streets but the disparity between the wealthy and the poor is very striking now. The opioid crisis is a big thing in SF but the levers are unaffordable rents, no care for the insane (who often self medicate with street drugs), an attractive place with lots of dumpster diving lifestyles behind classy restaurants and a general romanticism that dates back to the beats and hippies. There are huge numbers of people living in their cars and couch surfing who are less visible than the unwashed zombie insane that you see at most downtown intersections and passed out on sidewalks but this is in essence a have and have not crisis
grandmczeb 8y ago
High housing costs.
tomatotomato37 8y ago
As an outsider looking in I would say decent weather and constraining geography that prevents the usual urban reaction to high housing prices, which is to sprawl like mad.
InclinedPlane 8y ago
There are many but the biggest is probably the destruction of unions, destruction of the social safety net (e.g. welfare et al), and especially the stagnation of wages for nearly the last half century. If the minimum wage had kept pace with, say, per capita GDP since the 1960s it would be at around $20/hr by now, and if it had been increased gradually over time to keep parity with economic growth (as it had been for decades in the past) then there would be no great immediate economic shock to having the minimum wage "so high". And such a high minimum wage would also raise the wages of a lot of other folks as well, pushing up the bottom end of the wage scale, forcing a lot more of the economic growth since the '80s to have gone to workers instead of just corporate and millionaire profits/income. All of which would have led to a situation where it was much more difficult for climbing housing prices to force huge numbers of people into a homelessness that represented a huge uphill climb to get out of. On top of that there's the insane SF zoning problems and many other issues, but those are really just the icing on the cake, the core problem is the massive wealth/income inequality that exists in the US today.
njarboe 8y ago
Maybe listing 10 levers and your estimate percentage would be more useful in thinking about the very complex problem.

What do you guys think is the biggest lever for this crisis?

by shafyy 8y ago

What do you guys think is the biggest lever for this crisis?

I've lived in the area for twenty five plus years and have known local social workers and city employees. I also have friends who are effectively homeless (living in RV's) having grown up in silicon valley and been evicted from family rental homes and can't afford massively increased rents. There's a huge number of people who wind up in San Francisco for all sorts of reasons and the civic reputation for being less harsh on homeless plus relatively mild weather makes it a place people wind up staying in. There's always been flop houses in the tenderloin and people on the streets but the disparity between the wealthy and the poor is very striking now. The opioid crisis is a big thing in SF but the levers are unaffordable rents, no care for the insane (who often self medicate with street drugs), an attractive place with lots of dumpster diving lifestyles behind classy restaurants and a general romanticism that dates back to the beats and hippies. There are huge numbers of people living in their cars and couch surfing who are less visible than the unwashed zombie insane that you see at most downtown intersections and passed out on sidewalks but this is in essence a have and have not crisis

grandmczeb 8y ago

High housing costs.

tomatotomato37 8y ago

As an outsider looking in I would say decent weather and constraining geography that prevents the usual urban reaction to high housing prices, which is to sprawl like mad.

InclinedPlane 8y ago

There are many but the biggest is probably the destruction of unions, destruction of the social safety net (e.g. welfare et al), and especially the stagnation of wages for nearly the last half century. If the minimum wage had kept pace with, say, per capita GDP since the 1960s it would be at around $20/hr by now, and if it had been increased gradually over time to keep parity with economic growth (as it had been for decades in the past) then there would be no great immediate economic shock to having the minimum wage "so high". And such a high minimum wage would also raise the wages of a lot of other folks as well, pushing up the bottom end of the wage scale, forcing a lot more of the economic growth since the '80s to have gone to workers instead of just corporate and millionaire profits/income. All of which would have led to a situation where it was much more difficult for climbing housing prices to force huge numbers of people into a homelessness that represented a huge uphill climb to get out of. On top of that there's the insane SF zoning problems and many other issues, but those are really just the icing on the cake, the core problem is the massive wealth/income inequality that exists in the US today.

njarboe 8y ago

Maybe listing 10 levers and your estimate percentage would be more useful in thinking about the very complex problem.