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When Gavin Newsom was San Francisco mayor he issued a proclamation in 2004 that he would end 'homelessness' within ten years. https://www.sfchronicle.com/archiv

When 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 ago
Although 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 ago
  You'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 ago
    This 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 ago
      The 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 ago
        That 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.

phobosanomaly 6y ago

Although 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 ago
You'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 ago
  This 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 ago
    The 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 ago
      That 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.