8 ms·
These are mentally ill people who are living in tents on the street. What are they supposed to do? How are the city managers supposed to solve that problem?
by phobosanomaly 6y ago
These are mentally ill people who are living in tents on the street.
What are they supposed to do?
How are the city managers supposed to solve that problem?
Would love to hear policy proposals for how to tackle it in a humanitarian fashion. I don't have any answers. It's a tremendously complex problem.
LA hasn't solved it either. Neither has Las Vegas, or San Diego.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- olivermarks 6y agoWhen Gavin Newsom was San Francisco mayor he issued a proclamation in 2004 that he would end 'homelessness' within ten years. https://www.sfchronicle.com/archive/item/A-decade-of-homelessness-Thousands-in-S-F-30431.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/archive/item/A-decade-of-homeles... As California governor he is now rolling out that failed policy across the state, attracting indigents and itinerants from far and wide with substance abuse, mental health and/or economic hardship problems. People who aren't thinking assume 'not in my back yard' is the problem with resisting including these hordes of people 'into their community'. The latest fiasco is a half billion dollars being spent on buying hotels to 'convert into housing' across California. This destroys bed tax revenue, places for tourists to stay while introducing a sizable contingent of people with serious issues into downtown areas. Proven approaches are projects like loaves and fishes in Austin Texas but California is ignoring cost effective and practical solutions, instead behaving like the well meaning but naive parents of an addict, lavishing money and help on their very sick child until it runs out with no success. https://mlf.org https://mlf.org California's autocratic political class are going to have a serious reckoning soon...
- phobosanomaly 6y agoAlthough undoubtedly an excellent program, Loaves and fishes is projected to provides housing for 200 people at some point in the future. SF currently has somewhere between 8,000 and 10,000 homeless people living on the streets right now. From that SF Chronicle article: "A decade and roughly $1.5 billion later, the city has succeeded in moving 19,500 homeless people off its streets, roughly equivalent to relocating the entire Castro district. But despite that major effort, the homeless population hasn’t budged, showing that as one homeless person is helped, another takes his place." I mean, that's just incredible. They relocated nearly 20,000 people off the streets. What else are they supposed to do? You can't accuse them of not trying. They moved 100x more people off the streets than that Loaves and Fishes housing project is projected to do at some point in the future. It's a tremendously difficult problem to actually solve within the constraints of the constitution, and human decency.
- olivermarks 6y agoYou've missed the fundamental flaw in the logic - as you spend lavishly to 'house' (actually pay to put in a flophouse) one person another shows up, having heard through the grapevine the pickings are excellent in San Francisco. The 'nearly 20k people off the streets' was proven to be wildly inaccurate. Austin's Loaves and Fishes was just a small scale example, there are lots of practical ways to manage the rapidly increasing transient population and help with addiction and mental health issues that don't involve inner city camp sites and hotel rooms.
- phobosanomaly 6y agoThis is a problem I want to see solved very much. If there are practical ways, throw some bullet-points down, and I'll be happy to consider them. It there are easy solutions, I am as interested in anyone to see them.
- smaryjerry 6y agoThe general principle is that incentives work. Make one option better than another and people will flock to it. Current implementation is that you will get fed, housed, medical care, and even paid with no participation on your part. You are incentivized to continue what got you homeless, usually drug use or not attempting to work. The simple solution is require recovery to receive benefits - require drug tests, require attendance to lectures, require applying for jobs or that you get one. The point is to make good behavior better than the alternative. Another way to incentivize good behavior is to make programs benefit both parties. Can collecting was one such program, litter is collected and people without other options make at least some money. When you give people the money there is little benefit to a city in return. A lot of the complaints can be rectified by cleaning jobs in particular.
- phobosanomaly 6y agoThat is a great approach for people without mental illness.
- wahern 6y ago> As California governor he is now rolling out that failed policy across the state No he's not. He's on the record as saying that the approach he applied in SF failed. I'm fairly certain he's said it more straightforwardly, but from a quick Google search with a 2014 quote, > "There’s a mythology that you can — quote unquote — end homelessness at any moment, but there are new people coming in, suffering through the cycles of their lives," he said. "It’s the manifestation of complete, abject failure as a society. We’ll never solve this at City Hall." Source: https://www.sfchronicle.com/archive/item/A-decade-of-homelessness-Thousands-in-S-F-30431.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/archive/item/A-decade-of-homeles... And here's what he said in a recent state of the state address: > "Of course, the fundamental building block of California’s solution has to be more housing. A comprehensive response to our collective failure to build enough of it. When we don’t build housing for people at all income levels, we worsen the homeless crisis. It’s a vicious cycle and we own it. And the only sustainable way out of it is to massively increase housing production." Source: https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article240435521.html https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-aler... Also noteworthy in that speech is that he spends more time discussing health care and mental health issues than housing, per se. Newsom's talking points on homelessness are often annoyingly vague (owing to his very ambitious career goals), but note what he doesn't say and what he doesn't support. Notably he doesn't support a legal right to housing, and is on the record saying so. His complete silence on Senator Wiener's bills was also deafening. Following his politics over the years it's fairly obvious he supports Weiner in principle but 1) knew it would never pass and 2) didn't want to burn his political capital on a loser. Also note the sums in his spending proposals for new, publicly subsidized construction; they're ridiculously paltry if the actual intent is to literally use public funds to build homes for all the homeless. Rather, it's obvious he's placating the far left without burning real cash--a strategy that many centrist SF politicians are actually quite adept at. The sad fact is that plenty of California politicians know exactly what needs to be happen, including and especially Newsom. But California voters, both liberal and conservative, don't want to loosen housing regulations state-wide (including overriding local restrictions), and far too many on the left unthinkingly assume it's feasible to publicly fund or exact, dollar-for-dollar, enough construction to "fix" the homeless issue. Newsom definitely no longer believes, and he, like Brown and many others, are also perfectly aware how hopeless the situation is in terms of electoral support for meaningful reform and choose to stay clear of attacking the issue head-on. Don't blame the politicians for failing to produce solutions according to the electorate's inconsistent and incoherent preferences. And especially don't blame a man who successfully[1] implemented a widely popular but destined to fail policy and then publicly went on the record as admitting to the fundamentally flawed premise. We need more politicians capable of doing that and fewer that simply point fingers. [1] He promised to create beds for every homeless person at the time, and by the time the program wrapped up it succeeded in creating that number of beds. Of course, for every homeless person given a bed and taken off the street someone else replaced them on the street. And he admits it--lesson learned.
- gamblor956 6y agoIt doesn't help that more than half of the homeless in California aren't from California. (See, e.g., a LA Times series of articles on homeless in LA, in which reporters found that more than half of the homeless were from Texas and the Midwest.) But the bigger problem is the ACLU and especially homeless advocacy groups, who have decided that being drunk, high, and shitting on the sidewalk are constitutional rights. It is literally impossible to get a homeless person the treatment they need for their mental illness or drug dependency because these groups have blocked all efforts by the city and county to administer such programs.
- phobosanomaly 6y agoThe alternative you are proposing is arresting them, right? I'm not saying you're wrong, and I'm not attacking you or anything. I just want to play this out, because if there's a good solution, god knows I'd love to discuss it. Is it constitutional to arrest mentally ill people for being mentally ill? That's a complex question. I don't think homeless advocacy groups have any interest in obstructing homeless people's access to municipally-administered mental health and substance-abuse programs? Sure, they don't want people harassed, but I see no evidence they're actively trying to prevent people from getting treatment.
- gamblor956 6y agoIs it constitutional to arrest mentally ill people for being mentally ill? It's possible to involuntarily commit someone to a mental hospital. That's not an arrest, it's a civil commitment of a medical nature without any criminal implications. Sure, they don't want people harassed, but I see no evidence they're actively trying to prevent people from getting treatment. Homeless advocacy groups recently blocked the construction of a homeless shelter in Lancaster because they didn't like the location. They've blocked multiple attempts by the city to force violently mentally ill homeless individuals from being treated, even though such individuals are a harm to themselves and to others...especially others. More than dozen homeless individuals have been murdered this year by other homeless persons who were prevented from receiving medical treatment by homeless advocacy groups. The problem is that the idiot advocates base their views of "harassment" on academic ivory-tower views of personhood, and don't understand what it means to be mentally ill and homeless. It means to be shitting yourself every day, to be eating food off the streets, to spend your days and nights fighting off rats and cockroaches, and to avoiding drug dealers and persons more ill than yourself, to be lost in haze or to be seeing people and creatures that don't exist. Nobody wants to be mentally ill, and once treated, the individual always prefers sanity. The problem with most mental illnesses that lead to homelessness, especially the schizophrenic family of disorders, is that the disorder itself makes the individual paranoid of treatment, and the homeless advocates focus all of their attention on that refusal instead of actually making the person better. A homeless person that has their mental illness under control can transition to permanent housing and become a functioning member of society again. But in order to do that, you need to let them be treated, even if they don't want the treatment.
- fiblye 6y ago> What are they supposed to do? America's, and particularly the west coast's, homeless problem is uniquely bad. It'd probably be worthwhile to just scrap whatever they've been trying these past few decades and adopting methods used by almost any other country out there. And I know this is an incredibly unpopular statement in HN, but the lax attitude towards drugs is a big contributor to the problem. I don't think people should be in prison for smoking or swallowing whatever they want, but I don't think public intoxication should be permissible either. When I lived in a certain large west coast city, it wasn't uncommon to see someone sitting down on a street corner and pulling out a syringe. It wasn't uncommon to see someone who clearly just took a solid hit of meth and decided to start stripping off their clothes on the streetcar. It was just part of city life there. The attitudes towards this behavior are known pretty far and wide. Some people actively move to west coast cities because they know they can just give up on everything and abuse drugs all day without a care in the world. Treating drug addiction as some unavoidable pitiable disease hasn't been helping. Sometimes people do need a kick in the butt to get up and get their life together, and I think some cities are afraid of perpetuating the equally harmful effects of the drug war and end up doing nothing at all. Some have legitimate mental illnesses and can be treated in other ways, but most of the people I encountered were people living a completely carefree life in a place with good weather.
- phobosanomaly 6y agoWhat would be the approach you're describing? I'd love some bullet-points and I'd be happy to take them into consideration. The only way to implement what you're describing I can see is arresting people and putting them in prison on non-violent drug offences. That brings with it it's own set of problems.
- afiori 6y agoThe other option is to put more efforts into availability of treatments: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_policy_of_Portugal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_policy_of_Portugal
- 6y ago
- fwip 6y agoGive them housing. It's not that hard, lots of people have done it. It saves money and it's more humane.
- quercusgrisea 6y agoExactly, the main problem these people are having is not a mystery - it's that they don't have housing. There are often addiction or mental health issues, but anyone who has experienced these problems in the past understands that being homeless at the same time is catastrophic. Giving people housing while they get on their feet is the simplest, cheapest, most humane, and most effective policy. It's been proven to work in Finland and other places to great effect: https://amp.theguardian.com/cities/2019/jun/03/its-a-miracle-helsinkis-radical-solution-to-homelessness https://amp.theguardian.com/cities/2019/jun/03/its-a-miracle... I think it says a lot about the HN crowd that people are downvoting you for saying this. Everyone wants either to police/arrest homeless people (even more than they already are, apparently) or to make their lives even harder so they'll go somewhere else. Neither of those "solutions" addresses the root of the problem - that these people have nowhere to go - and homelessness will continue until they are provided with housing. People love to wring their hands about how homelessness is such a hard problem but they don't want to even consider the obvious solution that would both fix the root problem and treat people with dignity.
- fwip 6y agoPointing out that Hacker News tends to be white (and more importantly wealthy or have strong aspirations of wealth), or that the demographics present here affect the discussions on this site, doesn't tend to go over well. :P Here at the orange site, we like to think we're all rational machines of pure logic, and all of our opinions on how humanity should live are simply the obvious and objective truth. Bonus points if it matches the status quo. Homelessness is simple to fix. Build homes, let people live in them. But the framework we've created, our beliefs about capitalism, fairness, and that survival should be "earned," prevent a lot of people from even considering the obvious options. When some people look at homeless people, sometimes they think "This is gross, I wish I did not have to look at homeless person," and they stop their analysis there. The empathy of "wow damn, imagine being that guy and how much it would suck" doesn't really happen, for whatever reason. Maybe it's just a self-assurance "that could never happen to me, because I make good choices. Conversely, that guy must have made bad choices, and that is why he deserves to be swept away from my sight. His crime of looking weird on public transit is yet more evidence of his unworthiness." Y'know, the Just World fallacy, and all that. The "empathy gap" talked about in Big Tech is a bit of a misnomer, I think. I don't think that the kinds of people running FAANG are any less empathetic than the oil tycoons were, or Ma Bell, or the leaders of any other profitable industries. But we didn't expect Big Oil to help out the little guy, to give a damn if their procurement pipelines were ethical. We all know the guys running BP Gas only rebranded "green" in a cynical attempt to clean up their image after the Deepwater Horizon spill. Big Tech, though, is different in what it promises. It promises not to sell you cheaper oil, but a better life. Voice assistants are the Star Trek future, Facebook is a way to stay in touch with Grandma, OKCupid is a site to help people find their soulmates. Robots will free us from toil and drudgery, Uber empowers drivers, Nextdoor brings communities together, and a hundred other obvious lies get told to us. The "empathy gap," when it comes to tech, is the gap between what they promise, and what they deliver. Twitter doesn't ban Nazis and encourages "engagement". Facebook spreads political misinformation. AirBNB and Uber are just barely-regulated clones of hotels & taxis. Github sells services to ICE. Amazon works their employees to the bone. Google promotes slot-machine apps on the Android store because they get a cut of their users' gambling addictions. Youtube directs people to white nationalist videos. And, when a company is clearly unethical, but it's making you rich, how could that select for employees with high empathy? How could the workplace culture not tend toward siding with the rich over the poor, when everyone there is making 6 figures and dreaming of the day they'll cash out on 8 figures? SF's tech boom not only attracts people who aren't empathetic, it selects for it and encourages it. As rents rise ever higher and gentrification continues to squeeze out those on the margins, how could the result not be a growing anti-poor-people sentiment? When all your coworkers are wealthy, when all your neighbors are wealthy, that guy who hasn't bathed in a week (because he has no way to) stands out like a sore, gross thumb. They don't see anything of themselves in him, or of anyone they know. People who are poor, or who have been poor, consistently rate higher on empathy. A pool of rich people (or people who strongly value wealth) congregating in an area and driving everyone else out, is going to reduce the empathy in that space. Whether that space is San Francisco or Hacker News, the culture changes, and people stop caring so much about those who aren't as fortunate.
- SiVal 6y agoTreasure Island in the middle of the bay was military because of its militarily strategic location. That strategic location gives it both breathtaking views and easy access to SF business. When the military left and said the city could have it, the city gov't declared that one of the uses of this incredible windfall was to build low-income/homeless housing projects on the island. They claimed that "justice" meant that the poor had as much right to beautiful views as the rich. I suggested that if their goal was to house the needy, they could house far more of them by developing the spectacular real estate for the rich and using the tax revenue to fund housing and services for a much larger number of poor elsewhere than by insisting that a few of them be housed with million-dollar views. They reacted with the predictable Godwin's Law economic and personal analysis, so I wished them luck with their homeless utopia. I have no idea what eventually happened to housing projects on the island (I left them to it), but it came as no big surprise that as tech wealth exploded in the city, it somehow didn't translate to better housing for the poor.
- phobosanomaly 6y agoI love this anecdote. It's actually really interesting. You've obviously been thinking about this issue for a long time. I want to gather your opinion though: A) Where do we put these folks? B) Can you constitutionally 'put' someone somewhere they may not want to be put? C) How do you help mentally ill people without resorting to dystopian means?
- SiVal 6y agoSorry for not getting back until now. Homelessness is a result with several very different causes. That means that any single answer to "the problem" will be wrong most of the time. The answer must be a combination of programs that each deal with a different category. Some people are desperate to get off the street and have safe housing but can't obtain it for various reasons. Others want to stay on the street for various reasons. Some of them might be willing to move under certain conditions, and you might move different sub-groups of them with different combinations of carrot and stick. Some are mentally ill, some are ruled by chemical addictions, some are hardcore predators wanting to stay near their prey (mostly other homeless), some are scammers (pretending to be homeless, because they prefer begging to being at the mercy of an employer), etc., etc. So, a good (not showpiece) solution could have no one place to "put" them. Any solution optimized for the needs of the homeless rather than for their advocates will necessarily be an ever-adapting patchwork based on lots of experiments that are allowed to fail, one that can't ever fully solve the problem but gradually gets better at it, like genuine, evidence-based medicine addressing the needs of sick people. I don't believe you can constitutionally put someone anywhere they don't want to go unless they threaten others, but you can tell them that they "can't stay here" and let them decide where else to put themselves. Like all of the patches, that will only work for some. Others are unable to put themselves someplace safe, so options have to be created--again different options for different categories. "You can't stay here but you can go here" will be an important patch in the patchwork. But it still leaves many categories uncovered. Those who are predators can constitutionally be taken off the streets and locked up and need to be. Their most likely prey are other homeless, who need to be kept safe even if you haven't found a housing solution for them. And the mentally ill? There are categories of mental impairments, too. Some aren't too bad off and might be "bribed" in various ways to take their meds. And I have to repeat, some things will help these people, some things will help those people, and there will always remain unsolved categories. I can no more provide the solution to homelessness than the solution to all illness, but an adapting, experimental, evidence-based approach to solving it in pieces--focused on measured reduction in homelessness rather than on benefits to the service providers--is the most likely to succeed, as is the case with medicine.
- koonsolo 6y agoIn Europe we put mentally ill people in institutions, so they get the care they need. What else would you do? Throw them on the streets? We're not a 3rd world country.
- scruple 6y agoWell, the difference in perspective is that the mentally ill in this country have rights that forbid them from being forcibly locked up (under most conditions). I don't know who has the better approach. All that I know that our (US) approach isn't working for most of the population that is homeless and mentally ill.
- rswail 6y agoProvide mentally ill people with treatment for their illness. Don't throw them on the street and make it a police/crime problem. Decriminalize drugs and provide injection facilities and treatment options. Provide homeless people with homes. Provide hungry people with food. Maslow's hierarchy of needs is pretty understandable.
- scruple 6y agoWhat if they don't want treatment? What if they flat out reject it? What if they refuse help? What if part of their mental illness is a form of extreme paranoia that prevents them from accepting help, especially when it comes from those in positions of supposed authority? This is one of my family members. There is no amount of help that anyone can give this person other than cash donations that they will accept because _they do not want to "get better"_.
- phobosanomaly 6y agoThat's sort of the crux of the problem, right? That's where people seem to split. How do you balance individual, constitutional rights with the need to help people who are ill. We either force people to undergo treatment, or leave them alone to live in a cardboard box, scream at mailboxes, and self medicate with heroin and amphetamines. I have heard, and am swayed, by arguments on both sides. I tend to lean in the direction of getting people help (maybe against their will), but at the moment we have zero infrastructure to accomplish that in a remotely humane way. We have some short-term systems in place, but they don't extend beyond the duration of a 51-50 hold. Enough voters are not confronted with the issue of homelessness and mental illness on a regular enough basis for it to have become a national talking point, but damned if it shouldn't be.