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Not a delight if you’re raising a family, in my experience. I loved living in densely populated areas when I was single. You end up having to subject your kids

Not a delight if you’re raising a family, in my experience. I loved living in densely populated areas when I was single. You end up having to subject your kids to mountains of homeless folks’ garbage or explaining the irregular behavior of the local crack head to your curious 5 year old. Then again maybe that was just my neighborhood and no other densely populated area has ever dealt with such things.

tptacek 4y ago
That was indeed an idiosyncrasy of your neighborhood.
cheriot 4y ago
When we don't have enough housing it means people end up on the street. But people on the street is an argument against more housing? The crackheads on the street phenomena is an American thing, not a dense housing thing.
astrange 4y ago
You had homeless people because you didn't build enough housing; it probably wasn't densely populated enough then. (Homelessness is caused by most of the old cheap forms of housing like SROs/boarding houses being made illegal, causing locals to fall out of the system when they can't afford the nicer types - this is why you see it in cities and not in, say, West Virginia.)
- fosk 4y ago
  This is a great lie, since homelessness is - often and especially in San Francisco - not the result of lack of a home, rather the result of mental illness and drug addiction. This is also reinforced by the great amount of non-native homeless people that travel cross-state to cities like San Francisco. Give your typical SF homeless a home, and they will rip the sink out the next day to raise enough money for more drugs. It is not always lack of housing. Sometimes it is, very often it is not.
  - astrange 4y ago
    No, it's what I said. The reason I said "not West Virginia" is because I knew you'd reply this way ;) Homelessness in the US does not correlate with drug use, or else the homeless would be in Appalachia with meth and opioid users. It's in SF because housing is expensive there. And they're locals[1]. Now, they might be getting into drugs, but that's because there's nothing better to do when you're homeless and the police keep taking your stuff. NYC does better because they build more shelters, but more importantly because New Jersey is next to them and is good at building affordable housing to make up for New York's NIMBYism. [1] Santa Cruz also has a big homeless problem, and they aren't locals - but they're not druggies either, they're literally university students. The city just hates that it has a UC and refuses to build student housing for it.
    - jjav 4y ago
      > Santa Cruz also has a big homeless problem, and they aren't locals - but they're not druggies either, they're literally university students. That's quite a generalization and simplication of Santa Cruz situation. A non-trivial percentage of UCSC students are homeless, yes. That doesn't mean the homeless are literally all students, far from it. Most of them are well past university age and have no association with UCSC. > The city just hates that it has a UC and refuses to build student housing for it. Again it's complex. Santa Cruz is a very small slice of land between the ocean and unbuildable steep mountains (a lot of it protected forest land, state parks and so on). It can't expand to the north nor to the south. The only direction to build is east (towards Watsonville) but transportation there and back is a huge problem so building to the east without addressing transportation won't solve anything. UCSC itself isn't helping, since they keep driving aggressive student population growths without any regard to where any of them are going to be able to live.
    - dclowd9901 4y ago
      I think people need to sit down a bit. Why do _all_ places need to have affordable housing? It’s not as simple a question as you might think. I am actually asking: why shouldn’t the San Francisco’s of the world spend $12 on a banana to ensure that their grocery baggers make $60k a year? This is how we actually fight the problem rather than having arbitrary amounts of low income housing courtesy of Title IX. If you want to live in an expensive place, be prepared to spend some goddamn money. Or let’s hurry up and get to a post scarcity world. I don’t honestly care how it happens. Just pick and stick.
- xienze 4y ago
  > You had homeless people because you didn't build enough housing Ehh I think it has just a _little_ bit more to do with it than just “lack of housing.” If you think the only thing keeping the homeless guy who shits on the sidewalk and shoots up heroin in broad daylight from being a functioning member of society is a house, you are being quite naive. San Francisco’s housing costs don’t help, but people waaaay underestimate just how much having a permissive attitude towards “the homeless lifestyle” (for lack of a better term) plays a part in attracting people who are incapable of living within the margins of society.
  - astrange 4y ago
    You don't know his life story or how representative he is, so that's not very useful for anything. A lot of homeless people live in cars rather than shooting up in the street and are respectable looking people who just can't afford rent.
kelnos 4y ago
If you have homeless people on your "dense" streets, it just means they aren't actually dense, or at least not dense enough.

tptacek 4y ago

That was indeed an idiosyncrasy of your neighborhood.

cheriot 4y ago

When we don't have enough housing it means people end up on the street. But people on the street is an argument against more housing? The crackheads on the street phenomena is an American thing, not a dense housing thing.

astrange 4y ago

You had homeless people because you didn't build enough housing; it probably wasn't densely populated enough then. (Homelessness is caused by most of the old cheap forms of housing like SROs/boarding houses being made illegal, causing locals to fall out of the system when they can't afford the nicer types - this is why you see it in cities and not in, say, West Virginia.)

fosk 4y ago
This is a great lie, since homelessness is - often and especially in San Francisco - not the result of lack of a home, rather the result of mental illness and drug addiction. This is also reinforced by the great amount of non-native homeless people that travel cross-state to cities like San Francisco. Give your typical SF homeless a home, and they will rip the sink out the next day to raise enough money for more drugs. It is not always lack of housing. Sometimes it is, very often it is not.
- astrange 4y ago
  No, it's what I said. The reason I said "not West Virginia" is because I knew you'd reply this way ;) Homelessness in the US does not correlate with drug use, or else the homeless would be in Appalachia with meth and opioid users. It's in SF because housing is expensive there. And they're locals[1]. Now, they might be getting into drugs, but that's because there's nothing better to do when you're homeless and the police keep taking your stuff. NYC does better because they build more shelters, but more importantly because New Jersey is next to them and is good at building affordable housing to make up for New York's NIMBYism. [1] Santa Cruz also has a big homeless problem, and they aren't locals - but they're not druggies either, they're literally university students. The city just hates that it has a UC and refuses to build student housing for it.
  - jjav 4y ago
    > Santa Cruz also has a big homeless problem, and they aren't locals - but they're not druggies either, they're literally university students. That's quite a generalization and simplication of Santa Cruz situation. A non-trivial percentage of UCSC students are homeless, yes. That doesn't mean the homeless are literally all students, far from it. Most of them are well past university age and have no association with UCSC. > The city just hates that it has a UC and refuses to build student housing for it. Again it's complex. Santa Cruz is a very small slice of land between the ocean and unbuildable steep mountains (a lot of it protected forest land, state parks and so on). It can't expand to the north nor to the south. The only direction to build is east (towards Watsonville) but transportation there and back is a huge problem so building to the east without addressing transportation won't solve anything. UCSC itself isn't helping, since they keep driving aggressive student population growths without any regard to where any of them are going to be able to live.
  - dclowd9901 4y ago
    I think people need to sit down a bit. Why do _all_ places need to have affordable housing? It’s not as simple a question as you might think. I am actually asking: why shouldn’t the San Francisco’s of the world spend $12 on a banana to ensure that their grocery baggers make $60k a year? This is how we actually fight the problem rather than having arbitrary amounts of low income housing courtesy of Title IX. If you want to live in an expensive place, be prepared to spend some goddamn money. Or let’s hurry up and get to a post scarcity world. I don’t honestly care how it happens. Just pick and stick.
xienze 4y ago
> You had homeless people because you didn't build enough housing Ehh I think it has just a _little_ bit more to do with it than just “lack of housing.” If you think the only thing keeping the homeless guy who shits on the sidewalk and shoots up heroin in broad daylight from being a functioning member of society is a house, you are being quite naive. San Francisco’s housing costs don’t help, but people waaaay underestimate just how much having a permissive attitude towards “the homeless lifestyle” (for lack of a better term) plays a part in attracting people who are incapable of living within the margins of society.
- astrange 4y ago
  You don't know his life story or how representative he is, so that's not very useful for anything. A lot of homeless people live in cars rather than shooting up in the street and are respectable looking people who just can't afford rent.

kelnos 4y ago

If you have homeless people on your "dense" streets, it just means they aren't actually dense, or at least not dense enough.