10 ms·

The Oakland homeless problem is beyond belief

48 points by wombatmobile 5y ago

tabtab 5y ago
The burden is falling on fair-weather states as the down-and-out from cold states find their way to coastal states to avoid freezing to death. There are plenty of empty houses in the rust belt. We need to find a way to get the homeless into those.
- pknomad 5y ago
  Not necessarily disagreeing with you but homelessness issue won't be solved by simply moving people into rust belt. Even if people were to be moved... how would we fix the issue that caused them to become homeless (and helpless)? Part of the reason why homelessness is so visible in places like Oakland because the governing body in cali cities tend to decriminalize homelessness. I've also known homeless in east coast go down to the southern states during the winter... only to come back up north during the summer. We also need to consider the fact that homelessness is multi-facted. There are folks who are employed but still gets classified as homeless due to high CoL.
  - tabtab 5y ago
    > Part of the reason why homelessness is so visible in places like Oakland because the governing body in cali cities tend to decriminalize homelessness. That's what Jesus would do. The evangelicals seem to skip reading the full New Testament, as they arrest and harass homeless for being homeless.
  - kylehotchkiss 5y ago
    The rust belt solved their problems with homelessness by simply giving them a bus ticket to wherever else they wanted to go https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/dec/20/bussed-out-america-moves-homeless-people-country-study https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/dec/...
    - robotnixon 5y ago
      What cities with relocation programs in that article are in the rust belt?
    - fearfulofview4 5y ago
- 29824665 5y ago
  >We need to find a way to get the homeless into those. This is a logical conclusion, but one that isn't compatible with one of the fundamental tenants of US culture: liberty. You could offer a free house to a homeless person in the Rust Belt, and even pay them to live there, but would they want that? We will not force the homeless from where they want to be. As well, such a solution would end up raising the ire of homeowners, who see costal homeless as strictly Not Their Problem. Especially costal homeless who are Black and Latino.
- scotuswroteus 5y ago
  Most Bay Area homeless are from the Bay Area originally
  - GenerocUsername 5y ago
    Can you cite that source? In the past, these types of surveys are filled with methodology errors. A Seattle based survey I see regurgitated often simply asked where their LAST place of residence before becoming homeless was, and it included stays in shelters as residence... So essentially anyone who had been there more than a few months was counted.
    - zactato 5y ago
      This is SF specific, but I bet it holds true for the whole bay area Page 18 https://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/FINAL-PIT-Report-2019-San-Francisco-1.pdf https://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/FINAL-PIT-R...
      - gruez 5y ago
        >>A Seattle based survey I see regurgitated often simply asked where their LAST place of residence before becoming homeless was, and it included stays in shelters as residence... So essentially anyone who had been there more than a few months was counted. >Page 18 https://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/FINAL-PIT-R https://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/FINAL-PIT-R... that doesn't seem to refute the parent comment at all.
- onecommentman 5y ago
  The lived experience of the Okies in California in the 1930s might be worth investigating before developing any grand schemes restricting internal migration. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1992-10-18-me-622-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1992-10-18-me-622-st... https://www.sidmartinbio.org/how-were-the-okies-treated-when-they-came-to-california/ https://www.sidmartinbio.org/how-were-the-okies-treated-when... https://www.legendsofamerica.com/ca-bumblockade/ https://www.legendsofamerica.com/ca-bumblockade/ Does the Pacific Coast want to reinstitute “bum blockades”? Past Pacific Coast strategies for managing the unwanted included offering a reward for scalps of the unwanted, like the State of California had implemented for First Nations peoples in the 1850s… https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2008/8/14/567667/- https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2008/8/14/567667/- The Pacific Coast States in the US era have made some really bad missteps in addressing problems like this over the years. May just be a case of taking the “good” (weather) with the “bad” US citizens (that just aren’t as socially or economically desirable). The homeless/van life are living a lifestyle that, for hundreds of years prior to the Anglos/RR, was perfectly acceptable in that/your part of the country. Not an easy problem to address.
yehudalouis 5y ago
I remember going out to Oakland for work and having to step over the bodies of people who were passed out from taking drugs (heroin and/or alcohol, I presume?). Let me repeat that: I had to navigate the sidewalk by stepping over the bodies of human beings scattered on the ground to get to work.
- cityzen 5y ago
  Head down to LA where you can navigate around human poop on the walk of fame. America is a wild place.
  - adamrezich 5y ago
    California is a wild place, and by no means representative of the rest of the country.
    - lukewoods300 5y ago
      Yeah it's the best part
      - more_corn 5y ago
        It is the best part, it is the worst part. This is terrifying.
    - jyounker 5y ago
      California is an example of what happens you cap property tax rate increases.
pydry 5y ago
I remember seeing favelas in Brazil next door to ultraluxury apartments 10 years ago thinking that this is probably what the future of the US was going to be like if wealth inequality steadily kept climbing. And here it is. r > g in the flesh - the other side of "the magic of compounding".
- nine_k 5y ago
  I'd say that many of the homeless are homeless because they could not live in the society. This is why they ran out of money and housing, not the other way around. What could help them is psychological / psychiatric treatment, rehabilitation from addictions, and offering some better prospects in life than to get wasted every day. This is not a (purely) money distribution problem.
  - pydry 5y ago
    American investors who swing liberal try very hard to deal with the cognitive dissonance of "I'm a good person who cares about homeless people" and "I want my portfolio to really excel". The two are not compatible, though. This is very much reflected in American investor owned media (all media, pretty much). This is, realistically, why Americans perceive the cause and effect of homelessness and poor mental health to be reversed. The reality is seen in Finland where homelessness was completely solved just by adopting a "house people first" policy. This policy is at the same time going to keep a lid on house prices, rental income and REITS in your portfolio. Hence why it's politically impossible in America and why we strangely keep hearing from Very Smart Talking Heads on TV that 200% rent increases actually have very little to do with those homeless camps.
    - aerostable_slug 5y ago
      San Francisco's Housing First program has been an expensive failure. The only real beneficiaries were and are the owners of the SROs. My research indicates similar outcomes in some European locales, while Finland appears to be an outlier with markedly better success than, say, Scotland. Providing no-strings-attached housing in the United States appears to do little but get rain off people's heads. That is not really solving the problem — having lived near some of these projects, the street people continue being street people (substance abuse, crime, etc.) but now they can go inside when it rains or the SF Sheriffs show up to recover fugitives. They largely do not progress after getting the keys to the SRO room. That does not strike me as a 'win'.
vanusa 5y ago
I can definitely go with this "pay them to build and manage their own homes" idea. As long as what they build is up to code.
- blacksmith_tb 5y ago
  A program like Habitat For Humanity[1], which does exactly that, would have to scale up enormously to house everyone on the street, but could at least serve as a model. I have volunteered on single-family builds, but for big multi-unit buildings they tend to not use volunteers as they require more actual experience in the building trades (and being bonded and insured I think). 1: https://www.habitat.org/about/faq#homeownership https://www.habitat.org/about/faq#homeownership
  - vanusa 5y ago
    Yeah, there's only so much these people can do on their own. But the point is -- there's no reason not to at least try to take them seriously.
    - blacksmith_tb 5y ago
      For sure, you'd think even just paying everyone in a camp a small amount of money per bag of trash collected would be a short-term fix (yes, it could be gamed by taking trash from somewhere else, but that'd still be cleaning up town...) I have wondered if cities couldn't require that surface parking lots reserve a space or two for an RV or tiny house, and the residents could work as watchmen in exchange for living there.
      - blacksmith_tb 5y ago
        I see I am reinventing the wheel[1], at least for the trash pickup. 1: https://komonews.com/news/local/tacoma-launches-program-to-pay-homeless-people-to-pick-up-trash-debris https://komonews.com/news/local/tacoma-launches-program-to-p...
fearfulofview4 5y ago
rfwhyte 5y ago
So much of the discussion around homelessness these days essentially boils down to "How can we move these people to a place where we don't have to look at them" instead of "How do we build a society where homelessness doesn't happen in the first place." So many people also try to lay the blame at the feet of the victims here, but drug abuse, mental health problems, etc. are not the cause of homelessness, but rather symptoms of a broader societal pathology of which homelessness is just another symptom. As long as things keep going the way they're going, where wealth and power are increasingly concentrating in fewer and fewer hands, we're just going to see more and more homelessness, especially with the financialization of housing that's current ongoing at a disturbing and accelerating rate.
- nate_meurer 5y ago
  > drug abuse, mental health problems, etc. are not the cause of homelessness Evidence? I'd be very interested to see the research that supports your assertion that mental health/ substance abuse are not significant primary causal factors to homelessness, but rather merely coincident parallel "symptoms".
  - jseliger 5y ago
    They are a cause, but they're exacerbated by high housing prices that are in turn caused by land restrictions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29193206 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29193206
  - dragontamer 5y ago
    Even your crazed schizophrenic wants a home to sleep in. A warm bed during the cold, and a roof to keep out the rain. Its not like crazed schizophrenics are inhuman or whatever. And a home won't solve their mental problems. But getting them off the streets (by finding cheap enough housing for them to afford) solves a lot of other issues. They still have stress, both physical and mental. And that stress could be making it harder for them to deal with their mental issues. Depending on the state of their delusion, it might be possible for them to hold a job as well. Maybe you need some social-workers checking in on them depending on how bad the mental illness is, but even schizophrenics are still able to make meaningful contributions to society in the right environment (ex: John Forbes Nash Jr.). -------- The goal isn't to solve mental diseases, but to build environments where people inflicted with those mental diseases can still be of net-benefit to society. We all can agree that a __HOMELESS__ crazed schizophrinic is worse than a crazed schizophrinic, right? Solving the homeless problem is a step in the right direction, even if the delusions are unsolvable. And again: plenty of schizophrinics are high-functioning enough to check into the doctor, mental care, social workers, etc. etc. They can act independently, hold jobs and benefit society. That's probably one of the worst diseases to have but even then its not a hopeless situation.
ROTMetro 5y ago

48 points by wombatmobile 5y ago

The burden is falling on fair-weather states as the down-and-out from cold states find their way to coastal states to avoid freezing to death. There are plenty of empty houses in the rust belt. We need to find a way to get the homeless into those.

pknomad 5y ago
Not necessarily disagreeing with you but homelessness issue won't be solved by simply moving people into rust belt. Even if people were to be moved... how would we fix the issue that caused them to become homeless (and helpless)? Part of the reason why homelessness is so visible in places like Oakland because the governing body in cali cities tend to decriminalize homelessness. I've also known homeless in east coast go down to the southern states during the winter... only to come back up north during the summer. We also need to consider the fact that homelessness is multi-facted. There are folks who are employed but still gets classified as homeless due to high CoL.
- tabtab 5y ago
  > Part of the reason why homelessness is so visible in places like Oakland because the governing body in cali cities tend to decriminalize homelessness. That's what Jesus would do. The evangelicals seem to skip reading the full New Testament, as they arrest and harass homeless for being homeless.
- kylehotchkiss 5y ago
  The rust belt solved their problems with homelessness by simply giving them a bus ticket to wherever else they wanted to go https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/dec/20/bussed-out-america-moves-homeless-people-country-study https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/dec/...
  - robotnixon 5y ago
    What cities with relocation programs in that article are in the rust belt?
  - fearfulofview4 5y ago
29824665 5y ago
>We need to find a way to get the homeless into those. This is a logical conclusion, but one that isn't compatible with one of the fundamental tenants of US culture: liberty. You could offer a free house to a homeless person in the Rust Belt, and even pay them to live there, but would they want that? We will not force the homeless from where they want to be. As well, such a solution would end up raising the ire of homeowners, who see costal homeless as strictly Not Their Problem. Especially costal homeless who are Black and Latino.
scotuswroteus 5y ago
Most Bay Area homeless are from the Bay Area originally
- GenerocUsername 5y ago
  Can you cite that source? In the past, these types of surveys are filled with methodology errors. A Seattle based survey I see regurgitated often simply asked where their LAST place of residence before becoming homeless was, and it included stays in shelters as residence... So essentially anyone who had been there more than a few months was counted.
  - zactato 5y ago
    This is SF specific, but I bet it holds true for the whole bay area Page 18 https://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/FINAL-PIT-Report-2019-San-Francisco-1.pdf https://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/FINAL-PIT-R...
    - gruez 5y ago
      >>A Seattle based survey I see regurgitated often simply asked where their LAST place of residence before becoming homeless was, and it included stays in shelters as residence... So essentially anyone who had been there more than a few months was counted. >Page 18 https://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/FINAL-PIT-R https://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/FINAL-PIT-R... that doesn't seem to refute the parent comment at all.
onecommentman 5y ago
The lived experience of the Okies in California in the 1930s might be worth investigating before developing any grand schemes restricting internal migration. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1992-10-18-me-622-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1992-10-18-me-622-st... https://www.sidmartinbio.org/how-were-the-okies-treated-when-they-came-to-california/ https://www.sidmartinbio.org/how-were-the-okies-treated-when... https://www.legendsofamerica.com/ca-bumblockade/ https://www.legendsofamerica.com/ca-bumblockade/ Does the Pacific Coast want to reinstitute “bum blockades”? Past Pacific Coast strategies for managing the unwanted included offering a reward for scalps of the unwanted, like the State of California had implemented for First Nations peoples in the 1850s… https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2008/8/14/567667/- https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2008/8/14/567667/- The Pacific Coast States in the US era have made some really bad missteps in addressing problems like this over the years. May just be a case of taking the “good” (weather) with the “bad” US citizens (that just aren’t as socially or economically desirable). The homeless/van life are living a lifestyle that, for hundreds of years prior to the Anglos/RR, was perfectly acceptable in that/your part of the country. Not an easy problem to address.

yehudalouis 5y ago

I remember going out to Oakland for work and having to step over the bodies of people who were passed out from taking drugs (heroin and/or alcohol, I presume?). Let me repeat that: I had to navigate the sidewalk by stepping over the bodies of human beings scattered on the ground to get to work.

cityzen 5y ago
Head down to LA where you can navigate around human poop on the walk of fame. America is a wild place.
- adamrezich 5y ago
  California is a wild place, and by no means representative of the rest of the country.
  - lukewoods300 5y ago
    Yeah it's the best part
    - more_corn 5y ago
      It is the best part, it is the worst part. This is terrifying.
  - jyounker 5y ago
    California is an example of what happens you cap property tax rate increases.

pydry 5y ago

I remember seeing favelas in Brazil next door to ultraluxury apartments 10 years ago thinking that this is probably what the future of the US was going to be like if wealth inequality steadily kept climbing. And here it is. r > g in the flesh - the other side of "the magic of compounding".

nine_k 5y ago
I'd say that many of the homeless are homeless because they could not live in the society. This is why they ran out of money and housing, not the other way around. What could help them is psychological / psychiatric treatment, rehabilitation from addictions, and offering some better prospects in life than to get wasted every day. This is not a (purely) money distribution problem.
- pydry 5y ago
  American investors who swing liberal try very hard to deal with the cognitive dissonance of "I'm a good person who cares about homeless people" and "I want my portfolio to really excel". The two are not compatible, though. This is very much reflected in American investor owned media (all media, pretty much). This is, realistically, why Americans perceive the cause and effect of homelessness and poor mental health to be reversed. The reality is seen in Finland where homelessness was completely solved just by adopting a "house people first" policy. This policy is at the same time going to keep a lid on house prices, rental income and REITS in your portfolio. Hence why it's politically impossible in America and why we strangely keep hearing from Very Smart Talking Heads on TV that 200% rent increases actually have very little to do with those homeless camps.
  - aerostable_slug 5y ago
    San Francisco's Housing First program has been an expensive failure. The only real beneficiaries were and are the owners of the SROs. My research indicates similar outcomes in some European locales, while Finland appears to be an outlier with markedly better success than, say, Scotland. Providing no-strings-attached housing in the United States appears to do little but get rain off people's heads. That is not really solving the problem — having lived near some of these projects, the street people continue being street people (substance abuse, crime, etc.) but now they can go inside when it rains or the SF Sheriffs show up to recover fugitives. They largely do not progress after getting the keys to the SRO room. That does not strike me as a 'win'.

vanusa 5y ago

I can definitely go with this "pay them to build and manage their own homes" idea. As long as what they build is up to code.

blacksmith_tb 5y ago
A program like Habitat For Humanity[1], which does exactly that, would have to scale up enormously to house everyone on the street, but could at least serve as a model. I have volunteered on single-family builds, but for big multi-unit buildings they tend to not use volunteers as they require more actual experience in the building trades (and being bonded and insured I think). 1: https://www.habitat.org/about/faq#homeownership https://www.habitat.org/about/faq#homeownership
- vanusa 5y ago
  Yeah, there's only so much these people can do on their own. But the point is -- there's no reason not to at least try to take them seriously.
  - blacksmith_tb 5y ago
    For sure, you'd think even just paying everyone in a camp a small amount of money per bag of trash collected would be a short-term fix (yes, it could be gamed by taking trash from somewhere else, but that'd still be cleaning up town...) I have wondered if cities couldn't require that surface parking lots reserve a space or two for an RV or tiny house, and the residents could work as watchmen in exchange for living there.
    - blacksmith_tb 5y ago
      I see I am reinventing the wheel[1], at least for the trash pickup. 1: https://komonews.com/news/local/tacoma-launches-program-to-pay-homeless-people-to-pick-up-trash-debris https://komonews.com/news/local/tacoma-launches-program-to-p...

fearfulofview4 5y ago

rfwhyte 5y ago

So much of the discussion around homelessness these days essentially boils down to "How can we move these people to a place where we don't have to look at them" instead of "How do we build a society where homelessness doesn't happen in the first place." So many people also try to lay the blame at the feet of the victims here, but drug abuse, mental health problems, etc. are not the cause of homelessness, but rather symptoms of a broader societal pathology of which homelessness is just another symptom. As long as things keep going the way they're going, where wealth and power are increasingly concentrating in fewer and fewer hands, we're just going to see more and more homelessness, especially with the financialization of housing that's current ongoing at a disturbing and accelerating rate.

nate_meurer 5y ago
> drug abuse, mental health problems, etc. are not the cause of homelessness Evidence? I'd be very interested to see the research that supports your assertion that mental health/ substance abuse are not significant primary causal factors to homelessness, but rather merely coincident parallel "symptoms".
- jseliger 5y ago
  They are a cause, but they're exacerbated by high housing prices that are in turn caused by land restrictions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29193206 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29193206
- dragontamer 5y ago
  Even your crazed schizophrenic wants a home to sleep in. A warm bed during the cold, and a roof to keep out the rain. Its not like crazed schizophrenics are inhuman or whatever. And a home won't solve their mental problems. But getting them off the streets (by finding cheap enough housing for them to afford) solves a lot of other issues. They still have stress, both physical and mental. And that stress could be making it harder for them to deal with their mental issues. Depending on the state of their delusion, it might be possible for them to hold a job as well. Maybe you need some social-workers checking in on them depending on how bad the mental illness is, but even schizophrenics are still able to make meaningful contributions to society in the right environment (ex: John Forbes Nash Jr.). -------- The goal isn't to solve mental diseases, but to build environments where people inflicted with those mental diseases can still be of net-benefit to society. We all can agree that a __HOMELESS__ crazed schizophrinic is worse than a crazed schizophrinic, right? Solving the homeless problem is a step in the right direction, even if the delusions are unsolvable. And again: plenty of schizophrinics are high-functioning enough to check into the doctor, mental care, social workers, etc. etc. They can act independently, hold jobs and benefit society. That's probably one of the worst diseases to have but even then its not a hopeless situation.

ROTMetro 5y ago