5 ms·

Such is the consequence of a housing crisis and the downstream homelessness, despair, and of course mental illness. Don't give someone a roof and a toilet and

• deltasevennine 4y ago
  Nah even the dog walkers here don't give a shit. The dogs piss and shit all over the entire city and the rich SF owners don't care.
  • atoav 4y ago
    This is what living in a society where winning more than the next person is the only thing that counts will give you. Why should anybody fulfill their part of the unspoken contract with the rest of society, if solidarity only goes one way? If people shall care about collective goods, there needs to be an actual collective spirit first. Places where this type of public infrastructure actually works are also places where people realized that you can't create a good society by letting the rich hoard their wealth and build walls while the homeless are beaten instead of helped. SF is a truly dystopian place in a certain sense.
    • jbuhbjlnjbn 4y ago
      Every company I have worked for has a certain number of people that are not capable, or willing, to leave the sanitary facilities in an acceptable state. From people actively soiling the facilities, to people not giving a fuck about leaving a mess (making a 'seat cover' out of tp, then leaving it on the floor; not cleaning after themselfes), to people with a 'not my job' egocentrical attitude. Those are studied engineers with good salaries, workplace stability. In Europe. The facilities are nice, bright and clean. Until those people leave them... From these lifelong experiences, I would guess there is a certain, not so small amount of people that are secretly incapable of altruistic behavior. For numerous reasons. Those ruin it for the rest of us. For this reason, as brutal and as it seems at first glance, I would really like to see such people identified and punished harshly for their parasitic selfishness.
      • ryandrake 4y ago
        • robk 4y ago
          • BeMoreSpecific 4y ago
      • deltasevennine 4y ago
        Japan is a strange counterexample. Not sure how they do it without identification.
        • runamok 4y ago
          They actively teach the value of collectivism vs. individualism. When I visited a few years ago I read an article in a local paper that asked high school kids what the biggest danger to Japan was. They replied "individualism".
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • Gareth321 4y ago
      This is why I do not support multiculturalism. This is contentious today for a number of reasons. Moreso because the research is so divided. There are plenty of studies which find in both directions. However, having lived in highly multicultural societies and more culturally homogenous societies, I firmly believe that it damages the social contract. When neighbours hold different and often incompatible values, not only are they less inclined to help each other as part of that unspoken social agreement, but they're more likely to vote for their own interests ahead of those of society at large. A nation needs a unified direction with unified values. Eating different food is fine. Disagreeing about core tenets of society like free speech, equal rights, and law and justice, is not.
      • wildrhythms 4y ago
        Why have you chosen to inject 'multiculturalism' into a topic about conceptually 'winning' in society? Do you think maybe there is a common economic system underlying everything that enables the concept 'winning'?
        • deltasevennine 4y ago
          Yeah, Money is the system. The more you have of it, the more you've won. It can be measured in terms of dollars or when you compare countries it's GDP or GDP per capita. You can get all moral about it with his opinion or her opinion or whatever and I get that happiness != money and all that jazz. But in general the one quantitative metric closest to the concept of "winning" is money.
        • tjs8rj 4y ago
          The economic system as the root doesn’t make sense. Why is the decay so sudden despite capitalism dominating western markets for nearly half a thousand years? Why are there so many capitalist economies like Japan or Norway without these issues (almost at all)? Those 2 cannot be true if the blame is on capitalism.
          • deltasevennine 4y ago
    • deltasevennine 4y ago
      You're wrong about homeless people in SF. There's a huge liberal movement here. Homeless people are coddled and taken care of. Free syringes so they don't get HIV. Homeless people aren't beaten. If you're homeless SF is paradise.
  • Overtonwindow 4y ago
    Remember when that guy took a shit in Nancy Pelosi‘s driveway? That got noticed real quick
• samatman 4y ago
  It's a consequence of a political machine and culture which tolerates it. People who pretend that SF having drug addicts with open sores assaulting each other and the rest of the citizenry is a housing crisis disgust me. It's a policy which actively aids and abets human misery.
  • zbentley 4y ago
    > actively aids and abets human misery The implication being that without policies that are friendly to struggling/addicted/ill/homeless folks there would somehow be less of them?
    • snapplebobapple 4y ago
• survirtual 4y ago
  The crisis is one of poverty. While a large portion if the population (and almost everyone on HN) lives in massive, safe homes with upscale communities, good food, good human connection, support networks, they deny nearly everyone else access to the same. Where can someone on a bartenders wage buy a house and work where they work? Where can they even buy land? Yet there are vast swaths of land unused. Countless gigantic homes take up enormous spaces. And all the policy protects the people with those homes and property instead of the majority of people. We don’t have a homeless crisis. We have a resource allocation crisis.