5 ms·

There is now enough vacant office space in San Francisco to give every homeless person in the city 2000 square feet. (From the article: 16 Million square feet

There is now enough vacant office space in San Francisco to give every homeless person in the city 2000 square feet. (From the article: 16 Million square feet of vacant office space, and a quick Google search gave me a homeless population of 8000)

fleshdaddy 5y ago
Is that an accurate count? That actually sounds surprisingly low. I figured it was quite a bit higher.
- redis_mlc 5y ago
  - The reported SF outdoors homeless numbers vary from 5,000 - 10,000 - But it depends on what data you have and how you slice it: - 60% of the $300 - $350 million homeless budget goes to welfare rentals (single women and moms are eligible for that, rarely men), so that's 15,000+ adults plus children alone - there's probably more than 10,000 on the street, and growing daily as average rents are over $3,500/month now. As you can see, with a population of only 500,000 and almost 5% of thoe homeless, SF has a major problem. What the EU learned from African economic migration is that once somebody is in their regionn, authoriities have to process them one by one, which can take years per case. So once a city gets behind, there's no good story.
- katabatic 5y ago
  That's nearly 1% of the population of San Francisco. It's already shockingly high.
umeshunni 5y ago
There's always enough X in San Francisco to give every homeless person X/n of it. What's lacking in San Francisco is the political will to do anything meaningful about homelessness (or crime, or the housing crisis, or infrastructure, or the schools or anything other than vague virtue signaling)
- throwkeep 5y ago
  To their credit, they've found new ways of using resources in the most inefficient way possible. "San Francisco is paying $16.1 million to shelter homeless people in 262 tents placed in empty lots around the city where they also get services and food — a steep price tag that amounts to more than $61,000 per tent per year." https://www.sfchronicle.com/local/article/S-F-pays-61-000-a-year-for-one-tent-to-house-16001074.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/local/article/S-F-pays-61-000-a-...
  - admax88q 5y ago
    At that cost they could just pay the homeless 61k per year and they could rent their own homes
    - ngokevin 5y ago
      While I imagine there are a lot of detractors here, I like universal basic income. We could try to slice it and have a system to pick and choose who gets it, but as we've seen, the waste that goes into the bureaucracy when it's not just "give everyone a check".
    - rgblambda 5y ago
      That was my first thought as well but then remembered that often the reason for homelessness is mental health issues. Many homeless people are just incapable of taking care of themselves. e.g. not paying rent/bills when they physically have the money to do so, gambling addict so getting into massive amounts of debt, getting evicted due to antisocial behaviour/vandalism of property.
      - Apocryphon 5y ago
        Convert the empty real estate to the mental health facilities that Reagan emptied?
      - kelnos 5y ago
        Maybe that's the case, but instead why not rent apartments on behalf of the homeless people, put them there, and get them evaluated and treated by a mental health professional? Living in an actual building rather than a tent in a parking lot ("protected" or otherwise) seems like a great first step and healing some of those mental health issues. When the treatment starts working to a degree that the formerly-homeless person can be trusted with the cash, give it to them, along with the rent bills.
pengaru 5y ago
Isn't it already well established SF has far more space allocated to jobs than housing for the workers? In other news, the sky is blue, and water is wet.
woah 5y ago
I always wonder what the point of these comparisons is. Can you imagine cramming 8000 homeless people with hardcore drug addictions and untreated mental illness in a vacant office tower?
- unixhero 5y ago
  It would make for a hellofa janitor survival simulator game. Maybe as a story pack to SimTower.
- astrange 5y ago
  Note most of them aren't homeless because they did drugs, they're doing drugs because they're homeless because they lost their homes. Ain't nothing else to do.
  - mycologos 5y ago
    I was curious about this claim. A 2004 study of ~500 homeless adults in Pennsylvania found that roughly 70% reported that they did not use more drugs after becoming homeless, though about 80% reported regularly using drugs [1]. But there are other studies that claim the opposite, for example this 1990 study of ~1400 homeless adults in California that finds "[p]revalences of alcohol abuse, illegal drug use, and psychiatric hospitalization when adults first became homeless were 15% to 33% lower than prevalences following homelessness". But it's hard to dig into the second result, because the paper is paywalled, like most of the papers about this topic. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1448345/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1448345/ [2] https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/abs/10.2105/AJPH.82.10.1394 https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/abs/10.2105/AJPH.82.10...
spoonjim 5y ago
What’s your prediction for the outcome of doing that? Parceling the office space into 2,000 square foot spaces and giving them free of charge to each homeless person in SF? Please be specific.
paxys 5y ago
What would a homeless person do with an office?
- sky_rw 5y ago
  Start a SoLoMo app company, obviously.
Decker87 5y ago
That's great to hear!

fleshdaddy 5y ago

Is that an accurate count? That actually sounds surprisingly low. I figured it was quite a bit higher.

redis_mlc 5y ago
- The reported SF outdoors homeless numbers vary from 5,000 - 10,000 - But it depends on what data you have and how you slice it: - 60% of the $300 - $350 million homeless budget goes to welfare rentals (single women and moms are eligible for that, rarely men), so that's 15,000+ adults plus children alone - there's probably more than 10,000 on the street, and growing daily as average rents are over $3,500/month now. As you can see, with a population of only 500,000 and almost 5% of thoe homeless, SF has a major problem. What the EU learned from African economic migration is that once somebody is in their regionn, authoriities have to process them one by one, which can take years per case. So once a city gets behind, there's no good story.
katabatic 5y ago
That's nearly 1% of the population of San Francisco. It's already shockingly high.

umeshunni 5y ago

There's always enough X in San Francisco to give every homeless person X/n of it. What's lacking in San Francisco is the political will to do anything meaningful about homelessness (or crime, or the housing crisis, or infrastructure, or the schools or anything other than vague virtue signaling)

throwkeep 5y ago
To their credit, they've found new ways of using resources in the most inefficient way possible. "San Francisco is paying $16.1 million to shelter homeless people in 262 tents placed in empty lots around the city where they also get services and food — a steep price tag that amounts to more than $61,000 per tent per year." https://www.sfchronicle.com/local/article/S-F-pays-61-000-a-year-for-one-tent-to-house-16001074.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/local/article/S-F-pays-61-000-a-...
- admax88q 5y ago
  At that cost they could just pay the homeless 61k per year and they could rent their own homes
  - ngokevin 5y ago
    While I imagine there are a lot of detractors here, I like universal basic income. We could try to slice it and have a system to pick and choose who gets it, but as we've seen, the waste that goes into the bureaucracy when it's not just "give everyone a check".
  - rgblambda 5y ago
    That was my first thought as well but then remembered that often the reason for homelessness is mental health issues. Many homeless people are just incapable of taking care of themselves. e.g. not paying rent/bills when they physically have the money to do so, gambling addict so getting into massive amounts of debt, getting evicted due to antisocial behaviour/vandalism of property.
    - Apocryphon 5y ago
      Convert the empty real estate to the mental health facilities that Reagan emptied?
    - kelnos 5y ago
      Maybe that's the case, but instead why not rent apartments on behalf of the homeless people, put them there, and get them evaluated and treated by a mental health professional? Living in an actual building rather than a tent in a parking lot ("protected" or otherwise) seems like a great first step and healing some of those mental health issues. When the treatment starts working to a degree that the formerly-homeless person can be trusted with the cash, give it to them, along with the rent bills.

pengaru 5y ago

Isn't it already well established SF has far more space allocated to jobs than housing for the workers? In other news, the sky is blue, and water is wet.

woah 5y ago

I always wonder what the point of these comparisons is. Can you imagine cramming 8000 homeless people with hardcore drug addictions and untreated mental illness in a vacant office tower?

unixhero 5y ago
It would make for a hellofa janitor survival simulator game. Maybe as a story pack to SimTower.
astrange 5y ago
Note most of them aren't homeless because they did drugs, they're doing drugs because they're homeless because they lost their homes. Ain't nothing else to do.
- mycologos 5y ago
  I was curious about this claim. A 2004 study of ~500 homeless adults in Pennsylvania found that roughly 70% reported that they did not use more drugs after becoming homeless, though about 80% reported regularly using drugs [1]. But there are other studies that claim the opposite, for example this 1990 study of ~1400 homeless adults in California that finds "[p]revalences of alcohol abuse, illegal drug use, and psychiatric hospitalization when adults first became homeless were 15% to 33% lower than prevalences following homelessness". But it's hard to dig into the second result, because the paper is paywalled, like most of the papers about this topic. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1448345/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1448345/ [2] https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/abs/10.2105/AJPH.82.10.1394 https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/abs/10.2105/AJPH.82.10...

spoonjim 5y ago

What’s your prediction for the outcome of doing that? Parceling the office space into 2,000 square foot spaces and giving them free of charge to each homeless person in SF? Please be specific.

paxys 5y ago

What would a homeless person do with an office?

sky_rw 5y ago
Start a SoLoMo app company, obviously.

Decker87 5y ago

That's great to hear!