6 ms·

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 d

by 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.
epistasis 4y ago
The great lie is that there's greater mental illness or addiction in San Francisco than other places. There's not. What SF does have is very expensive housing, which directly causes homelessness. And homelessness also leads to addiction and mental illness, due to the extreme situation of not having a home. And if the first-principles logical argument doesn't convince, go look at the data. Every $100 increase in average rent is associated with an increase in homelessness.
- olivermarks 4y ago
  'What SF does have is very expensive housing, which directly causes homelessness'. This is completely illogical. The upper east side side and Beverley Hills have very expensive housing which hasn't 'directly caused homelessness'. SF is a tiny densely populated 49 sq mile peninsula with people like politician Nancy Pelosi owning vast hill top homes they rarely visit and an ultra permissive approach to drug use in some districts which has resulted in a catastrophic influx of addicts who have often also developed serious mental illnesses. You can be sure there are no tent/RV encampments outside the Pelosi's or other wealthy estates yet those same people are selling completely unrealistic YIYBY utopianism, which is cruel and wildly impractical.
  - epistasis 4y ago
    You don't think that high housing prices cause homelessness? People don't become homeless because they can't afford the most expensive homes, they become homeless because the least expensive homes are still priced too high. This is not a hard concept to understand. When I say "SF has expensive housing" I'm not talking about mansions, I'm talking about the crappiest, worst possible studio or bedroom under a staircase being rented for exorbitant amounts of money.
    - olivermarks 4y ago
      'You don't think that high housing prices cause homelessness?' It's a factor but not a fundamental as I previously said. SF has always had a large transient population - great climate, dumpster diving, permissive culture - which has now exploded due to the Fentanyl & meth disaster. There are lots of generational blue collar renter families really struggling to survive in the bay area and an acute shortage of housing primarily due to tech and over capacity of residents until recently. What we now have is a mass exodus of tax paying residents and a huge influx of non contributing drug and smi casualties which is really tarting to hurt the tourism that pays the blue collar families rent via their jobs.
kelnos 4y ago
> 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 You have the causality reversed; mental illness and drug addiction is caused by the stress and hopelessness of homelessness.

by fosk 4y ago

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.

epistasis 4y ago

The great lie is that there's greater mental illness or addiction in San Francisco than other places. There's not. What SF does have is very expensive housing, which directly causes homelessness. And homelessness also leads to addiction and mental illness, due to the extreme situation of not having a home. And if the first-principles logical argument doesn't convince, go look at the data. Every $100 increase in average rent is associated with an increase in homelessness.

olivermarks 4y ago
'What SF does have is very expensive housing, which directly causes homelessness'. This is completely illogical. The upper east side side and Beverley Hills have very expensive housing which hasn't 'directly caused homelessness'. SF is a tiny densely populated 49 sq mile peninsula with people like politician Nancy Pelosi owning vast hill top homes they rarely visit and an ultra permissive approach to drug use in some districts which has resulted in a catastrophic influx of addicts who have often also developed serious mental illnesses. You can be sure there are no tent/RV encampments outside the Pelosi's or other wealthy estates yet those same people are selling completely unrealistic YIYBY utopianism, which is cruel and wildly impractical.
- epistasis 4y ago
  You don't think that high housing prices cause homelessness? People don't become homeless because they can't afford the most expensive homes, they become homeless because the least expensive homes are still priced too high. This is not a hard concept to understand. When I say "SF has expensive housing" I'm not talking about mansions, I'm talking about the crappiest, worst possible studio or bedroom under a staircase being rented for exorbitant amounts of money.
  - olivermarks 4y ago
    'You don't think that high housing prices cause homelessness?' It's a factor but not a fundamental as I previously said. SF has always had a large transient population - great climate, dumpster diving, permissive culture - which has now exploded due to the Fentanyl & meth disaster. There are lots of generational blue collar renter families really struggling to survive in the bay area and an acute shortage of housing primarily due to tech and over capacity of residents until recently. What we now have is a mass exodus of tax paying residents and a huge influx of non contributing drug and smi casualties which is really tarting to hurt the tourism that pays the blue collar families rent via their jobs.

kelnos 4y ago

> 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 You have the causality reversed; mental illness and drug addiction is caused by the stress and hopelessness of homelessness.