8 ms·

San Francisco, Hostage to the Homeless

67 points by wyclif 7y ago

jsnider3 7y ago
City Journal is pretty weird. It used to be a mainstream magazine of urban planning, but now it seems to have been infected with the far-right brain virus. Edit: I also can't believe that an article on San Francisco homelessness never once mentions zoning laws.
- lend000 7y ago
  I'm not aware of the local news outlets or leanings, but my visits over the last few years are pretty consistent with what I've read in this article. It's an undeniable problem and the current response is clearly not working.
- etaioinshrdlu 7y ago
  I'm quite curious, what did you find far-right about this article? I thought it was quite centrist, moderate, gentle.
  - awayyyythrow 7y ago
    Far-right isn't a synonym for bad, aggressive, abrasive (although in practice many people would argue that the two are linked, and that could explain why some people tend to recoil from the term even though they hold similar positions, such as all the people beginning their sentence with I'm pretty left-wing, but... but I digress). Just because a text is moderate and gentle in tone doesn't mean it's not heavily slanted one way or another in content. In this case it's very easy to see the right-wing slant through the cracks of the 'gentle' tone.
- highhedgehog 7y ago
  How is talking about an obvious problem a far-right brain virus?
  - m0nsoon 7y ago
    It’s not. Just a straw man argument avoiding the deeper truths which the article is exposing and the commenter is disinclined to admit.
  - ianleeclark 7y ago
    The brain-worms comes in at the otherizing rhetoric. They're "homeless", not people without homes; they're besieging us, making us hostages. I love this quote: > The city enables the entire homeless lifestyle, not just drug use. Free food is everywhere. It's clear the author is happy with their hierarchical position and thinks that those below them ought to die in the streets.
flurdy 7y ago
Was just listening to https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p07q4ngz https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p07q4ngz (WS More or Less: Does San Francisco have more rough sleepers than Britain). Spoiler: Yes. The city of 900,000 has more rough sleepers / homeless than the country of 65 million. And I think England has way too many homeless. Don't really see any out where I live (rural town in Hampshire) but I do see a lot of unfortunate ones in the cities. At least compared to where I grew up where there were very few homeless people https://www.quora.com/Are-there-homeless-people-in-Norway https://www.quora.com/Are-there-homeless-people-in-Norway
- trevyn 7y ago
  There was a Ross Kemp episode about how the British counts of rough sleepers could be very wrong; many towns with official counts of zero having visible dozens, etc.
  - dagw 7y ago
    That was covered in the podcast. Their conclusion however was that since England and San Francisco both used the same methodology, they're probably wrong in the same direction and by roughly the same amount. So while you cannot conclusively say that SF has more rough sleepers than all of England (not Britain) it's not unreasonable to believe so, and either way the actual numbers are probably very close.
airnomad 7y ago
Why do we expect that people should live in house or have a home? Maybe we need to design our cities and public places in a way that they would be approachable for people living outside? Why we wouldn't have camping spots in cities with infrastructure that supports living outside?
- awayyyythrow 7y ago
  Why should we expect people to have affordable healthcare? Why should we expect people to have enough to eat? Why should we expect people to have rights? Can't we just let people die outside from the cold or something?
  - coldtea 7y ago
    Yeah, why not kill them outright? Humanely of course! Problem solved! Out of sight (in a ditch), out of mind! /adding to the parent sarcasm
- romwell 7y ago
  >Why do we expect that people should live in house or have a home? Because we aren't cavemen anymore. And a tent is a home, just a shabby, crappy, small one. >Why we wouldn't have camping spots in cities with infrastructure that supports living outside? Because people also need to eat and poop and shower somewhere, and be protected from the elements, and once you incorporate all that, you get a hostel/shelter. I'll take your comment as an opportunity to say this: Yes, we absolutely should have more infrastructure for the homeless. Let's have public baths, public toilets, storage facilities, communal kitchens perhaps. Internet access (libraries do that, but that shouldn't be the only place). Travelers would appreciate many of these as well.
  - airnomad 7y ago
    Have you ever camped in a camping spot somewhere? You get electricity, bathrooms, access to kitchen etc. If we could accept the fact that some people want to live on the streets, we would be able to make their life much easier and better without imposing a certain philosophy on how they should be living.
m0llusk 7y ago
It is strange that this subject gets so much attention but so little actual investigation. It is asserted that San Francisco simply backed off from enforcement and then this happened, but the reality is far more complex. Heavy ongoing use of incarceration caused both a backlash and extreme expense. Troubled people from all over the globe come to San Francisco. Most homeless only stay in the City for a couple of weeks before moving on. Making it sound like deciding to enforce crimes would be easy and cheap and fix the problem is a gross distortion of what is going on and what resources are available.
- rob74 7y ago
  Deciding to enforce crimes would not fix the problem, but move it somewhere else and/or make it less visible - which is what most other cities are doing...
  - kelnos 7y ago
    Well the alternative, not enforcing laws, is clearly not working. Law enforcement everywhere is about moving crime out to the margins. It will never stamp out all crime, but it does tend to reduce the quantity of it. And I'm not even convinced that "moving it elsewhere" is necessarily a bad thing. I'd rather have most crime concentrated in a small area than distributing it over a large area. Regardless, people should be allowed to feel safe in their communities, and that just isn't the case for embarrassingly large amounts of SF.
    - awayyyythrow 7y ago
      The alternative is building houses. When you put people in houses they cease to be homeless. They did it in Helsinki, and it worked: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/jun/03/its-a-miracle-helsinkis-radical-solution-to-homelessness https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/jun/03/its-a-miracle... Very simple deductive reasoning actually, I wonder how people did not come up with it yet.
      - m0nsoon 7y ago
trevyn 7y ago
A New York author suggesting to Californians how to police is a bit... tilting at windmills?
- oh_sigh 7y ago
  The homeless in NY are extremely pleasant relative to the ones in SF(this wasn't the case in the early 90s though). And NY has multiples of the SF population.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
jahaja 7y ago
Wow, that article's rhetoric is seething with social darwinistic class hatred. All these voluntary homeless seems to be conspicuously absent in western Europe. At least at this scale. Insisting on, which the author clearly does according to a quick googling, firmly supporting and perpetuating an economic system that creates these dystopian features and then calling for their forceful removal, through weasel language, is cynical at best, and evil in practice.
- ltbarcly3 7y ago
  Lets do an experiment. Go to a park in the middle of London, and set up a tent, and scatter used needles on the sidewalk. You'll be involuntarily moved out of the park within a couple of hours. Since your governments go ahead and remove people who are trying to live in public spaces, you don't see them, and you assume they don't exist. https://www.citylab.com/equity/2017/10/berlin-has-been-paying-migrants-to-go-away/544484/ https://www.citylab.com/equity/2017/10/berlin-has-been-payin... https://www.politico.eu/article/homelessness-qa-freek-spinnewijn-down-and-out-in-paris-london-and-the-rest-of-europe/ https://www.politico.eu/article/homelessness-qa-freek-spinne...
  - chii 7y ago
    where are they moved to? Police station/overnight jail? Or a shelter of sorts?
    - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
      Europe in general has MUCH tougher laws against "anti social" behavior and public nuisances that the homeless by definition of their lifestyle are bound to violate. They also have better safety nets and support systems (shelters, discounted housing, addiction treatment, etc). Details vary by country and city, obviously. To stereotype the heck out of it: In the US a homeless person pitches a tent under an overpass and everyone tries their hardest to ignore it. In Europe a homeless person pitches a tent under an overpass and within the hour the cops show up, rough him up for constructing an unauthorized shelter on the crown's land and then cart him off to a shelter that keeps him a few nights and then sends him on his way with all the support he needs to not be homeless anymore.
ptah 7y ago
> ongoing effort to decriminalize attacks on civilized order this article sounds like a drunken conservative rant
- anonthrowaway28 7y ago
  Yeap. Blame the "other": migrants, homeless, minorities, Jews, Muslims, gypsies, gays and other such scapegoats for one's current situation and angsty anomie. Fox News, Newsmax and talk radio rebuilt fascism and millions conveniently pretended it didn't happen.
- oh_sigh 7y ago
  And your comment is completely contentless. The author may be ranting, and it may be conservative, but it is clearly not "drunken".
m0nsoon 7y ago
An excellent article that beautifully summarizes the frustration of many residents and highlights obvious policy solutions to address them, such as Proposition Q. >>>Providing the mentally ill with the “liberty” to decompose on the streets is cruelty, not compassion. The policies employed by Breed’s government misuse resources in a quixotic effort at fighting addiction by providing more means to be addicted. The “need more housing zoning” argument is absurd and employs a fallacious premise that homeless people need to be housed in-situ. This article provides great relief for residents, homeless folks, and drug-dealing scum.
- jahaja 7y ago
  No, cruelty is _causing_ the problem. Not being unable hide it.

67 points by wyclif 7y ago

City Journal is pretty weird. It used to be a mainstream magazine of urban planning, but now it seems to have been infected with the far-right brain virus. Edit: I also can't believe that an article on San Francisco homelessness never once mentions zoning laws.

lend000 7y ago
I'm not aware of the local news outlets or leanings, but my visits over the last few years are pretty consistent with what I've read in this article. It's an undeniable problem and the current response is clearly not working.
etaioinshrdlu 7y ago
I'm quite curious, what did you find far-right about this article? I thought it was quite centrist, moderate, gentle.
- awayyyythrow 7y ago
  Far-right isn't a synonym for bad, aggressive, abrasive (although in practice many people would argue that the two are linked, and that could explain why some people tend to recoil from the term even though they hold similar positions, such as all the people beginning their sentence with I'm pretty left-wing, but... but I digress). Just because a text is moderate and gentle in tone doesn't mean it's not heavily slanted one way or another in content. In this case it's very easy to see the right-wing slant through the cracks of the 'gentle' tone.
highhedgehog 7y ago
How is talking about an obvious problem a far-right brain virus?
- m0nsoon 7y ago
  It’s not. Just a straw man argument avoiding the deeper truths which the article is exposing and the commenter is disinclined to admit.
- ianleeclark 7y ago
  The brain-worms comes in at the otherizing rhetoric. They're "homeless", not people without homes; they're besieging us, making us hostages. I love this quote: > The city enables the entire homeless lifestyle, not just drug use. Free food is everywhere. It's clear the author is happy with their hierarchical position and thinks that those below them ought to die in the streets.

flurdy 7y ago

Was just listening to https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p07q4ngz https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p07q4ngz (WS More or Less: Does San Francisco have more rough sleepers than Britain). Spoiler: Yes. The city of 900,000 has more rough sleepers / homeless than the country of 65 million. And I think England has way too many homeless. Don't really see any out where I live (rural town in Hampshire) but I do see a lot of unfortunate ones in the cities. At least compared to where I grew up where there were very few homeless people https://www.quora.com/Are-there-homeless-people-in-Norway https://www.quora.com/Are-there-homeless-people-in-Norway

trevyn 7y ago
There was a Ross Kemp episode about how the British counts of rough sleepers could be very wrong; many towns with official counts of zero having visible dozens, etc.
- dagw 7y ago
  That was covered in the podcast. Their conclusion however was that since England and San Francisco both used the same methodology, they're probably wrong in the same direction and by roughly the same amount. So while you cannot conclusively say that SF has more rough sleepers than all of England (not Britain) it's not unreasonable to believe so, and either way the actual numbers are probably very close.

airnomad 7y ago

Why do we expect that people should live in house or have a home? Maybe we need to design our cities and public places in a way that they would be approachable for people living outside? Why we wouldn't have camping spots in cities with infrastructure that supports living outside?

awayyyythrow 7y ago
Why should we expect people to have affordable healthcare? Why should we expect people to have enough to eat? Why should we expect people to have rights? Can't we just let people die outside from the cold or something?
- coldtea 7y ago
  Yeah, why not kill them outright? Humanely of course! Problem solved! Out of sight (in a ditch), out of mind! /adding to the parent sarcasm
romwell 7y ago
>Why do we expect that people should live in house or have a home? Because we aren't cavemen anymore. And a tent is a home, just a shabby, crappy, small one. >Why we wouldn't have camping spots in cities with infrastructure that supports living outside? Because people also need to eat and poop and shower somewhere, and be protected from the elements, and once you incorporate all that, you get a hostel/shelter. I'll take your comment as an opportunity to say this: Yes, we absolutely should have more infrastructure for the homeless. Let's have public baths, public toilets, storage facilities, communal kitchens perhaps. Internet access (libraries do that, but that shouldn't be the only place). Travelers would appreciate many of these as well.
- airnomad 7y ago
  Have you ever camped in a camping spot somewhere? You get electricity, bathrooms, access to kitchen etc. If we could accept the fact that some people want to live on the streets, we would be able to make their life much easier and better without imposing a certain philosophy on how they should be living.

m0llusk 7y ago

It is strange that this subject gets so much attention but so little actual investigation. It is asserted that San Francisco simply backed off from enforcement and then this happened, but the reality is far more complex. Heavy ongoing use of incarceration caused both a backlash and extreme expense. Troubled people from all over the globe come to San Francisco. Most homeless only stay in the City for a couple of weeks before moving on. Making it sound like deciding to enforce crimes would be easy and cheap and fix the problem is a gross distortion of what is going on and what resources are available.

rob74 7y ago
Deciding to enforce crimes would not fix the problem, but move it somewhere else and/or make it less visible - which is what most other cities are doing...
- kelnos 7y ago
  Well the alternative, not enforcing laws, is clearly not working. Law enforcement everywhere is about moving crime out to the margins. It will never stamp out all crime, but it does tend to reduce the quantity of it. And I'm not even convinced that "moving it elsewhere" is necessarily a bad thing. I'd rather have most crime concentrated in a small area than distributing it over a large area. Regardless, people should be allowed to feel safe in their communities, and that just isn't the case for embarrassingly large amounts of SF.
  - awayyyythrow 7y ago
    The alternative is building houses. When you put people in houses they cease to be homeless. They did it in Helsinki, and it worked: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/jun/03/its-a-miracle-helsinkis-radical-solution-to-homelessness https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/jun/03/its-a-miracle... Very simple deductive reasoning actually, I wonder how people did not come up with it yet.
    - m0nsoon 7y ago

trevyn 7y ago

A New York author suggesting to Californians how to police is a bit... tilting at windmills?

oh_sigh 7y ago
The homeless in NY are extremely pleasant relative to the ones in SF(this wasn't the case in the early 90s though). And NY has multiples of the SF population.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

jahaja 7y ago

Wow, that article's rhetoric is seething with social darwinistic class hatred. All these voluntary homeless seems to be conspicuously absent in western Europe. At least at this scale. Insisting on, which the author clearly does according to a quick googling, firmly supporting and perpetuating an economic system that creates these dystopian features and then calling for their forceful removal, through weasel language, is cynical at best, and evil in practice.

ltbarcly3 7y ago
Lets do an experiment. Go to a park in the middle of London, and set up a tent, and scatter used needles on the sidewalk. You'll be involuntarily moved out of the park within a couple of hours. Since your governments go ahead and remove people who are trying to live in public spaces, you don't see them, and you assume they don't exist. https://www.citylab.com/equity/2017/10/berlin-has-been-paying-migrants-to-go-away/544484/ https://www.citylab.com/equity/2017/10/berlin-has-been-payin... https://www.politico.eu/article/homelessness-qa-freek-spinnewijn-down-and-out-in-paris-london-and-the-rest-of-europe/ https://www.politico.eu/article/homelessness-qa-freek-spinne...
- chii 7y ago
  where are they moved to? Police station/overnight jail? Or a shelter of sorts?
  - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
    Europe in general has MUCH tougher laws against "anti social" behavior and public nuisances that the homeless by definition of their lifestyle are bound to violate. They also have better safety nets and support systems (shelters, discounted housing, addiction treatment, etc). Details vary by country and city, obviously. To stereotype the heck out of it: In the US a homeless person pitches a tent under an overpass and everyone tries their hardest to ignore it. In Europe a homeless person pitches a tent under an overpass and within the hour the cops show up, rough him up for constructing an unauthorized shelter on the crown's land and then cart him off to a shelter that keeps him a few nights and then sends him on his way with all the support he needs to not be homeless anymore.

ptah 7y ago

> ongoing effort to decriminalize attacks on civilized order this article sounds like a drunken conservative rant

anonthrowaway28 7y ago
Yeap. Blame the "other": migrants, homeless, minorities, Jews, Muslims, gypsies, gays and other such scapegoats for one's current situation and angsty anomie. Fox News, Newsmax and talk radio rebuilt fascism and millions conveniently pretended it didn't happen.
oh_sigh 7y ago
And your comment is completely contentless. The author may be ranting, and it may be conservative, but it is clearly not "drunken".

m0nsoon 7y ago

An excellent article that beautifully summarizes the frustration of many residents and highlights obvious policy solutions to address them, such as Proposition Q. >>>Providing the mentally ill with the “liberty” to decompose on the streets is cruelty, not compassion. The policies employed by Breed’s government misuse resources in a quixotic effort at fighting addiction by providing more means to be addicted. The “need more housing zoning” argument is absurd and employs a fallacious premise that homeless people need to be housed in-situ. This article provides great relief for residents, homeless folks, and drug-dealing scum.

jahaja 7y ago
No, cruelty is _causing_ the problem. Not being unable hide it.