6 ms·

San Francisco, Hostage to the Homeless

49 points by Reedx 7y ago

msie 7y ago
And homeowners.
- eranimo 7y ago
  Arguably a more important problem as it impacts the vast majority of the population.
inferiorhuman 7y ago
Repost of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21188178 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21188178
hypatiahypatia 7y ago
"If San Francisco wanted to give its homeless addicts their best shot at stability, it would go after the open-air drug trade with every possible tool, including immigration law" "Taxpayer subsidies should go to citizens, not individuals who are defying the rule of law." "The tales veer from one confused and improbable situation to the next, against a backdrop of drug use, petty crime, and chaotic child-rearing. Behind this chaos lies the dissolution of those traditional social structures that once gave individuals across the economic spectrum the ability to withstand setbacks and lead sober, self-disciplined lives: marriage, parents who know how to parent, and conventional life scripts that create purpose and meaning." This is all indistinguishable from fascist rhetoric. The author presumably has no problem with the wealthy doing drugs, sleeping around, and violating laws, but simply cannot tolerate living beside the disenfranchised and poor.
- creddit 7y ago
  I'm not sure how I follow this being fascist rhetoric and I certainly don't understand how you've inferred that the author has no problem with the wealthy doing the above. Can you expand on your reasoning?
- rayiner 7y ago
  As a Bangladeshi (and I suspect folks from almost any Asian country) these views seem to be a given, and entirely consistent with what my parents might say. I’d wager it’s a very small group of people, especially outside the West, who would consider these ideas fascist, or at all controversial.
  - zanny 7y ago
    And those policies, internationally, alienate the disenfranchized and lead them to a life of crime and likely an early grave. Asia has a bit of an escape hatch in how essential and inescapable family is - its rare you have someone so thoroughly hopeless there because its the obligation of their blood relatives to do something about them before they are publicly homeless and drug addled. So you don't see people in this state as often, but when they are, it is the worst place to be homeless and helpless. Its casting a wide net of "Asian" but Japan (or at least greater Tokyo) has a housing first imitative of their own that does work resoundingly well for their very infrequent homelessness cases. Its legitimately hard to perfectly "fall through the cracks" there between familial obligation and state support programs.
    - rayiner 7y ago
      The article isn’t taking issue with housing first initiatives or the like. It’s taking issue with the normalization and enablement of deviant and anti-social behavior. Enforcement of laws and norms against such conduct is very aggressive in Japan (and Singapore, etc.). That doesn’t mean that, for people who are mentally incapable of following those norms, there can’t be compassionate care in an institutional setting. But they aren’t permitted to disrupt normal society.
- vondur 7y ago
  I don’t think you know what fascism is.
- wyxuan 7y ago
  I think that while the wealthy doing drugs is bad, arguably, when they do drugs, they can both easily seek help for it, and pay for that help. When the homeless do it, the public health system picks up the tab, and it there are higher barriers for help.
- lainga 7y ago
  >The author presumably has no problem with the wealthy doing drugs, sleeping around, and violating laws What makes you say that?
- herostratus101 7y ago
  You're putting words in her mouth, and you should try living in China or reading more history if you read anything above as remotely resembling fascism. Also as someone who does not do drugs, I consider it a bigger problem when a homeless person who survives off of government programs does drugs than when an otherwise functional adult does drugs, especially given how much likelier the homeless are to be psychotic and violent.
  - kjeetgill 7y ago
    > I consider it a bigger problem when a homeless person who survives off of government programs does drugs than when an otherwise functional adult does drugs I agree! But I think the ugliness GP alludes to comes from the fact that this boils down to: the law that people want is essentially selective enforcement weighed against the people who presumably have the least as is (a consequence of their own choices or otherwise). Alternatively, you can't legislate root causes: you have to legislate against symptoms; the problematic results of drug use. But that seems to be too hard to do too and does seem like a round about way of attacking populations in need. I think it's a hard question that needs to start with: what rights and options do we want to extend people who for one reason or another find themselves in conflict with "civilized society."
    - herostratus101 7y ago
      It's stupidly easy to legislate against the results. Enforce drug laws against people shooting up in public. Problem solved. The fact that the San Francisco public is too brainwashed to do so is a big part of why I would never consider taking a job there, and I can think of no greater karmic justice than the fact that they have to suffer the consequences of their idiotic policies towards homelessness. Whatever rights "we want to extend people who [...] find themselves in conflict with 'civilized society'" shouldn't include defecating on and leaving discarded, infectious needles strewn over the streets of the most coveted neighborhoods in the United States.
      - kjeetgill 7y ago
        > The fact that the San Francisco public is too brainwashed ... > why I would never consider taking a job there, > of the most coveted neighborhoods in the United States. Look, I agree more could and should be done, but hmm... you've convinced me that maybe the system works. Stay where you are bud. It's more their city yours. I can't fathom how you've managed to feel more entitlement over a city you happily feel has been karmicly punished.
- surfallday 7y ago
  >>The author presumably has no problem with the wealthy doing drugs 1. Probably true and 2. Probably because "the wealthy" doing drugs generally does not result in outbreaks of typhus and typhoid fever; and MASSIVE rat infestations like we see in LA.
GrassFedAltCoin 7y ago
Something annoying about this kind of reporting is that the writer constantly refers to the homeless population as a monolithic group called "the homeless." The writer ascribes all kinds of attitudes and beliefs onto them, ostensibly based on the writer's interactions with homeless people in investigating this story. There's a weird self-fulfilling prophecy going on in which the writer only interacts with homeless people who are behaving in the way the writer would like them to. You aren't, for instance, going to get a homeless person who doesn't do drugs to test your fentanyl for you. Feels like an inherently biased sort of investigation.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- PeterisP 7y ago
  One particular inconsistency in the article is that it intersperses mentions of a sizeable mentally ill homeless population with an expectation and recommendation that they can be supported or housed in a manner that requires these people to accept responsibility for themselves and keep to a "single standard of behavior for all" - which is not really compatible with many of the involved mental illnesses. The author does mention relevant aspects of multiple different subgroups, but still suggests various universal "solutions" that might work for one group but obviously can't work for another.
- surfallday 7y ago
  >>"You aren't, for instance, going to get a homeless person who doesn't do drugs" what does that even mean (like they only abuse alcohol?)? There are not thousands but 10s of thousands of discarded needles being cleaned up monthly and weekly (https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2019/09/04/the-city-picks-discarded-needles-each-week/G1Ue4UygRjOy3Kpgvk10mO/story.html https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2019/09/04/the-city-picks-...) >> Feels like an inherently biased sort of investigation. this is a weird call out. What is the proposed alternative here?
  - gbear605 7y ago
    > what does that even mean (like they only abuse alcohol?)? Only about 35% of the homeless population has an addiction. Less than half of the homeless population neither has an addiction nor a mental illness. [1] Just because there is lots of substance abuse (and yes, there certainly is), doesn't mean that the average homeless person does drugs. When you talk about the homeless population, you have to include people who are really quite like you but had a bad turn. Many of them have a story like "I got a mortgage with a large down payment just before 2008, when I lost my job and then shortly my house. I had to go to the streets because I had nowhere else to go." [1]: https://sunrisehouse.com/addiction-demographics/homeless-population/ https://sunrisehouse.com/addiction-demographics/homeless-pop...
bparsons 7y ago
San Francisco in 2019 arguably has more wealth concentrated within it than any place at any other time in history. Making poor and mentally ill people sleep on the street is a choice you have made as a society. Places with far, far fewer resources have somehow managed to sort this problem out.
- aeternum 7y ago
  What's the solution?
  - i_am_proteus 7y ago
    Any variation on "add new housing units," which is something San Francisco seems to be allergic to.
  - soperj 7y ago
    Spend some of the money on social good.
  - failrate 7y ago
    Free housing, food, and healthcare for every human being. Figure out how they can contribute back to society once they are no longer sleeping at a bus stop.
  - gbear605 7y ago
    Build houses for them, for one. Make housing cheaper in the first place, so they don't go on the streets. At a bare minimum, at least have sufficient shelters for them so they don't have to sleep on the streets. (Almost) no one wants to sleep on the street, and San Francisco has more than enough money to make it so they don't have to. Heck, some individual Bay Area companies have enough money for it, not that they would ever spend it on the homeless.
- MaupitiBlue 7y ago
  Have you actually been to SF? Nobody makes these people do anything. In any sane polis, you'd institutionalize the ones that require it, and run the rest off. SF's leaders pride themselves on adopting the opposite approach.
aazaa 7y ago
> San Francisco’s progressive self-image soon trumped common sense, and in 1996, at the urging of the Coalition on Homelessness, voters turned Jordan out of city hall in favor of former state assembly speaker Willie Brown. Brown had run on a compassion platform, but he soon came to repudiate it, observing with amazement that many of the homeless didn’t actually want to come off the streets. ... When people think of the Great Depression, they tend to imagine bread lines, lots of unemployment, and general poverty. What if a modern depression in the US looks like San Francisco? A deep divide between haves and have-nots. The have-nots spiral ever further downward, propelled by abundant drugs, while the haves struggle to comprehend (or even notice) what's happening. Leaders have run out of ideas about how to solve the problem, contenting themselves with damage control. All the while drip, drip drip... the problems continue to compound.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
enterx 7y ago
"A 33-year-old woman from Alabama, who now lives in a tent in an industrial area outside downtown" migration issue, rule of law failure and a healthcare problem. since there is no expansion of the middle class layer to pay more taxes for the extra cost of new social housing IMHO this is going to progress.
- wahern 7y ago
  At an even 90% income tax rate there's not enough money in the city to build new housing for the homeless and financially insecure. It's insane to think this is even possible. (Not that I assume you do.) It's like saying we should buy new cars for the carless, rural population rather than subsidize used car purchases. But there would be no cheap, used cars to buy if we severely limited the manufacture of new cars. Yet somehow people still believe that building new, market rate[1] housing is not a prerequisite to improving the housing situation in the city. To be sure, it's not sufficient; but it's absolutely necessary. [1] Thus leveraging the hundreds of trillions of global capital.
bemeurer 7y ago
Why was this flagged?

49 points by Reedx 7y ago

msie 7y ago

And homeowners.

eranimo 7y ago
Arguably a more important problem as it impacts the vast majority of the population.

inferiorhuman 7y ago

Repost of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21188178 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21188178

hypatiahypatia 7y ago

"If San Francisco wanted to give its homeless addicts their best shot at stability, it would go after the open-air drug trade with every possible tool, including immigration law" "Taxpayer subsidies should go to citizens, not individuals who are defying the rule of law." "The tales veer from one confused and improbable situation to the next, against a backdrop of drug use, petty crime, and chaotic child-rearing. Behind this chaos lies the dissolution of those traditional social structures that once gave individuals across the economic spectrum the ability to withstand setbacks and lead sober, self-disciplined lives: marriage, parents who know how to parent, and conventional life scripts that create purpose and meaning." This is all indistinguishable from fascist rhetoric. The author presumably has no problem with the wealthy doing drugs, sleeping around, and violating laws, but simply cannot tolerate living beside the disenfranchised and poor.

creddit 7y ago
I'm not sure how I follow this being fascist rhetoric and I certainly don't understand how you've inferred that the author has no problem with the wealthy doing the above. Can you expand on your reasoning?
rayiner 7y ago
As a Bangladeshi (and I suspect folks from almost any Asian country) these views seem to be a given, and entirely consistent with what my parents might say. I’d wager it’s a very small group of people, especially outside the West, who would consider these ideas fascist, or at all controversial.
- zanny 7y ago
  And those policies, internationally, alienate the disenfranchized and lead them to a life of crime and likely an early grave. Asia has a bit of an escape hatch in how essential and inescapable family is - its rare you have someone so thoroughly hopeless there because its the obligation of their blood relatives to do something about them before they are publicly homeless and drug addled. So you don't see people in this state as often, but when they are, it is the worst place to be homeless and helpless. Its casting a wide net of "Asian" but Japan (or at least greater Tokyo) has a housing first imitative of their own that does work resoundingly well for their very infrequent homelessness cases. Its legitimately hard to perfectly "fall through the cracks" there between familial obligation and state support programs.
  - rayiner 7y ago
    The article isn’t taking issue with housing first initiatives or the like. It’s taking issue with the normalization and enablement of deviant and anti-social behavior. Enforcement of laws and norms against such conduct is very aggressive in Japan (and Singapore, etc.). That doesn’t mean that, for people who are mentally incapable of following those norms, there can’t be compassionate care in an institutional setting. But they aren’t permitted to disrupt normal society.
vondur 7y ago
I don’t think you know what fascism is.
wyxuan 7y ago
I think that while the wealthy doing drugs is bad, arguably, when they do drugs, they can both easily seek help for it, and pay for that help. When the homeless do it, the public health system picks up the tab, and it there are higher barriers for help.
lainga 7y ago
>The author presumably has no problem with the wealthy doing drugs, sleeping around, and violating laws What makes you say that?
herostratus101 7y ago
You're putting words in her mouth, and you should try living in China or reading more history if you read anything above as remotely resembling fascism. Also as someone who does not do drugs, I consider it a bigger problem when a homeless person who survives off of government programs does drugs than when an otherwise functional adult does drugs, especially given how much likelier the homeless are to be psychotic and violent.
- kjeetgill 7y ago
  > I consider it a bigger problem when a homeless person who survives off of government programs does drugs than when an otherwise functional adult does drugs I agree! But I think the ugliness GP alludes to comes from the fact that this boils down to: the law that people want is essentially selective enforcement weighed against the people who presumably have the least as is (a consequence of their own choices or otherwise). Alternatively, you can't legislate root causes: you have to legislate against symptoms; the problematic results of drug use. But that seems to be too hard to do too and does seem like a round about way of attacking populations in need. I think it's a hard question that needs to start with: what rights and options do we want to extend people who for one reason or another find themselves in conflict with "civilized society."
  - herostratus101 7y ago
    It's stupidly easy to legislate against the results. Enforce drug laws against people shooting up in public. Problem solved. The fact that the San Francisco public is too brainwashed to do so is a big part of why I would never consider taking a job there, and I can think of no greater karmic justice than the fact that they have to suffer the consequences of their idiotic policies towards homelessness. Whatever rights "we want to extend people who [...] find themselves in conflict with 'civilized society'" shouldn't include defecating on and leaving discarded, infectious needles strewn over the streets of the most coveted neighborhoods in the United States.
    - kjeetgill 7y ago
      > The fact that the San Francisco public is too brainwashed ... > why I would never consider taking a job there, > of the most coveted neighborhoods in the United States. Look, I agree more could and should be done, but hmm... you've convinced me that maybe the system works. Stay where you are bud. It's more their city yours. I can't fathom how you've managed to feel more entitlement over a city you happily feel has been karmicly punished.
surfallday 7y ago
>>The author presumably has no problem with the wealthy doing drugs 1. Probably true and 2. Probably because "the wealthy" doing drugs generally does not result in outbreaks of typhus and typhoid fever; and MASSIVE rat infestations like we see in LA.

GrassFedAltCoin 7y ago

Something annoying about this kind of reporting is that the writer constantly refers to the homeless population as a monolithic group called "the homeless." The writer ascribes all kinds of attitudes and beliefs onto them, ostensibly based on the writer's interactions with homeless people in investigating this story. There's a weird self-fulfilling prophecy going on in which the writer only interacts with homeless people who are behaving in the way the writer would like them to. You aren't, for instance, going to get a homeless person who doesn't do drugs to test your fentanyl for you. Feels like an inherently biased sort of investigation.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
PeterisP 7y ago
One particular inconsistency in the article is that it intersperses mentions of a sizeable mentally ill homeless population with an expectation and recommendation that they can be supported or housed in a manner that requires these people to accept responsibility for themselves and keep to a "single standard of behavior for all" - which is not really compatible with many of the involved mental illnesses. The author does mention relevant aspects of multiple different subgroups, but still suggests various universal "solutions" that might work for one group but obviously can't work for another.
surfallday 7y ago
>>"You aren't, for instance, going to get a homeless person who doesn't do drugs" what does that even mean (like they only abuse alcohol?)? There are not thousands but 10s of thousands of discarded needles being cleaned up monthly and weekly (https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2019/09/04/the-city-picks-discarded-needles-each-week/G1Ue4UygRjOy3Kpgvk10mO/story.html https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2019/09/04/the-city-picks-...) >> Feels like an inherently biased sort of investigation. this is a weird call out. What is the proposed alternative here?
- gbear605 7y ago
  > what does that even mean (like they only abuse alcohol?)? Only about 35% of the homeless population has an addiction. Less than half of the homeless population neither has an addiction nor a mental illness. [1] Just because there is lots of substance abuse (and yes, there certainly is), doesn't mean that the average homeless person does drugs. When you talk about the homeless population, you have to include people who are really quite like you but had a bad turn. Many of them have a story like "I got a mortgage with a large down payment just before 2008, when I lost my job and then shortly my house. I had to go to the streets because I had nowhere else to go." [1]: https://sunrisehouse.com/addiction-demographics/homeless-population/ https://sunrisehouse.com/addiction-demographics/homeless-pop...

bparsons 7y ago

San Francisco in 2019 arguably has more wealth concentrated within it than any place at any other time in history. Making poor and mentally ill people sleep on the street is a choice you have made as a society. Places with far, far fewer resources have somehow managed to sort this problem out.

aeternum 7y ago
What's the solution?
- i_am_proteus 7y ago
  Any variation on "add new housing units," which is something San Francisco seems to be allergic to.
- soperj 7y ago
  Spend some of the money on social good.
- failrate 7y ago
  Free housing, food, and healthcare for every human being. Figure out how they can contribute back to society once they are no longer sleeping at a bus stop.
- gbear605 7y ago
  Build houses for them, for one. Make housing cheaper in the first place, so they don't go on the streets. At a bare minimum, at least have sufficient shelters for them so they don't have to sleep on the streets. (Almost) no one wants to sleep on the street, and San Francisco has more than enough money to make it so they don't have to. Heck, some individual Bay Area companies have enough money for it, not that they would ever spend it on the homeless.
MaupitiBlue 7y ago
Have you actually been to SF? Nobody makes these people do anything. In any sane polis, you'd institutionalize the ones that require it, and run the rest off. SF's leaders pride themselves on adopting the opposite approach.

aazaa 7y ago

> San Francisco’s progressive self-image soon trumped common sense, and in 1996, at the urging of the Coalition on Homelessness, voters turned Jordan out of city hall in favor of former state assembly speaker Willie Brown. Brown had run on a compassion platform, but he soon came to repudiate it, observing with amazement that many of the homeless didn’t actually want to come off the streets. ... When people think of the Great Depression, they tend to imagine bread lines, lots of unemployment, and general poverty. What if a modern depression in the US looks like San Francisco? A deep divide between haves and have-nots. The have-nots spiral ever further downward, propelled by abundant drugs, while the haves struggle to comprehend (or even notice) what's happening. Leaders have run out of ideas about how to solve the problem, contenting themselves with damage control. All the while drip, drip drip... the problems continue to compound.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

enterx 7y ago

"A 33-year-old woman from Alabama, who now lives in a tent in an industrial area outside downtown" migration issue, rule of law failure and a healthcare problem. since there is no expansion of the middle class layer to pay more taxes for the extra cost of new social housing IMHO this is going to progress.

wahern 7y ago
At an even 90% income tax rate there's not enough money in the city to build new housing for the homeless and financially insecure. It's insane to think this is even possible. (Not that I assume you do.) It's like saying we should buy new cars for the carless, rural population rather than subsidize used car purchases. But there would be no cheap, used cars to buy if we severely limited the manufacture of new cars. Yet somehow people still believe that building new, market rate[1] housing is not a prerequisite to improving the housing situation in the city. To be sure, it's not sufficient; but it's absolutely necessary. [1] Thus leveraging the hundreds of trillions of global capital.

bemeurer 7y ago

Why was this flagged?