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I’m not American but have been to SF many times for work. Few places have made me feel more at risk than SF. Can I ask some naïve questions here and have them

I’m not American but have been to SF many times for work. Few places have made me feel more at risk than SF. Can I ask some naïve questions here and have them interpreted kindly, I’m not trying to point to suggest anything or push any agendas. I don’t and won’t live there just trying to understand the dynamics. A proportion of the population will have mental health issues that are perhaps incurable and treatable to certain degrees. Couple severe mental health issues with lack of free and competent medical treatment and access to hard drugs. Now also make it known country wide that there is a place where you’ll be given (relatively generous) financial assistance and little to no oversight and lax police enforcement when you use drugs. Now also build more housing and shelters and combine with amenable weather. Isn’t SF just the most attractive place for self destructing mentally I’ll people to flood to? Anyone in the US from any state can walk into California and receive the benefits and get handled by California police and funded by California tax dollars. This feels like having your cake and eating it to? Shouldn’t this be a federal problem? What would happen if people from Alabama and Texas were shipped back to their states or deprived of financial assistance, or maybe assigned the assistance they get back home? Many of my questions here are based on assumptions and “facts” that are possibly totally wrong. So be kind. I’m just wondering, doesn’t the problem need to be handled at a “systems thinking” level?

davidw 4y ago
Homelessness is mostly a factor of housing costs, as this deep dive into the data shows: https://homelessnesshousingproblem.com/ https://homelessnesshousingproblem.com/
- holografix 4y ago
  Thanks David I’ll have a a look. I hate to categorize people in such a conveniently black and white way but there seems to be a group that desperately need social assistance: housing, health, some upskilling etc and they would rejoin society and live happy productive lives drug free. But also a group that just needs ongoing mental health treatment. I expect the second group to be way smaller of course.
- diogenescynic 4y ago
  This is propaganda. Nearly all the homeless you see on the streets are addicted to heroin, fentanyl, or meth, or some combination. You cannot afford housing at any level when you’re doing those kind of drugs. And most of the homeless in San Francisco aren’t locals.. the vast majority come here for the permissive drug laws, social benefits like SF’s homeless assistance program that pays them $500, and the weather.
  - Pxtl 4y ago
    Yes but every city has heroin and fentanyl problems and yet the addicts don't flood the streets. These drugs weren't invented in SF and Vancouver, and yet those cities are blighted by them. Across the board, on a city-but-city basis, homelessness correlates with housing costs more than any other factor
    - shuckles 4y ago
      Atherton is way more expensive than San Francisco yet no sidewalk fentanyl dens. What gives?
  - davidw 4y ago
    It's odd how people pretty intuitively understand that not many people have, say, Ferraris because they're expensive, but housing? It's like some kind of 10th dimension twilight zone where the laws of supply and demand have ceased to exist. No... someone who's homeless in a city where the average house costs 1.5 million dollars must perforce have moral failings! I mean, not to say there aren't homeless people with problems, but there are also filthy rich people with raging drug addictions in that area...
    - ralusek 4y ago
      A person's options aren't limited to: A.) Live in most expensive city in world or B.) Be homeless in most expensive city in world If housing prices have become unaffordable for many people in SF, there are other places on the planet. I moved out of SF 2 years ago, after living there for 7, partly due to outrageous cost. Nobody is making the claim that supply and demand doesn't exist for housing, they're claiming that supply isn't limited to the highly sought after, geographically contained peninsula of the bay. They're also claiming that "housing first" is an absurd oversimplification of the problem, and disregards all manner of highly important factors.
- diebeforei485 4y ago
  Correlation is not causation, as you learned in high school statistics. This is the equivalent of saying murders are correlated with ice cream sales.
  - davidw 4y ago
    Why don't you try actually reading what they write? The book goes into some detail.
- shuckles 4y ago
  Cheap housing certainly allows social services to house severely drug addicted or mentally ill people more cost effectively, but that doesn’t solve the open air drug dealing and psychosis you see in parts of San Francisco. Many of the people in those states publicly in SF have or had offers for shelter or housing available to them, which is part of why the scenes are concentrated near SRO districts. In other words, housing isn’t the only issue with San Francisco’s poor stewardship of the public realm.
  - davidw 4y ago
    No one said it's a simple problem. What the book looks at, high level, is that high housing costs are what correlate most strongly with homelessness. West Virginia, for instance, has a huge opioid problem. And far lower rates of homelessness, because housing is cheap.
    - shuckles 4y ago
      You’re missing the point. For many people, the endless petty crime, assaults by mentally ill people, open air drug abuse, and more are the issues to fix, and there isn’t much evidence giving impoverished people a shelter fixes that. WV and other poor regions have plenty of antisocial behavior, even if the antisocial are housed. Santa Clara County did a randomized assignment apartments for homeless study 2 years ago, and those housed used emergency services and died of drug overdose at the same, if not higher, rates than those who were not housed. Separately, all the antisocial people make living in subsidized housing awful. SROs are the most prolific evictors in San Francisco because their residents commonly have behavioral health issues or are outright criminals. So what problem does giving a homeless person a house actually solve?
      - bombcar 4y ago
        The problem of you seeing them. Out of sight, out of mind.
        shuckles 4y ago
DoreenMichele 4y ago
I think you more or less have it right. I've said similar things in the past and I'm American, have been homeless, have had a class on Homelessness and Public Policy etc. https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2021/08/i-believe-california-is-dumping-ground.html https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2021/08/i-believe-c...
junofan 4y ago
SF is known by homeless to have the most gullible locals.
- shuckles 4y ago
  It's way less simple than that. There is an entire political machine of patronage jobs, nonprofit executives, etcetera that form an incentive system to maintain status quo.
- DoreenMichele 4y ago
  Homeless gravitate to big cities -- in part because that's where the soup kitchens are -- and certain kinds of weather. Climate and Unsheltered Homeless in the Continental United States https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2019/10/climate-and-unsheltered-homeless-in.html https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2019/10/climate-and...
deleted 4y ago
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holografix 4y ago
It seems like there’s no safety net nationally so people flock to the most welcoming place, that’s totally natural. But not enough funding is provided to treat the problem as what it is: a national issue. Then it creates this horrendous impasse between helping and providing medical care but also wanting to live in a clean, safe city. Seems to me the problem is California is dealing with a National problem but without national funding.
- briandear 4y ago
  - lazyasciiart 4y ago
    There are not plenty of resources. There are people on the street willing and desperate to enter rehab - and no rehab facility they can enter. There are people living in hospital emergency rooms waiting for a space to open in mental health treatment facilities. This is absolutely false, and spreading this misinformation directly contributes to redirecting time and money and public sentiment away from creation of these resources, and towards the pointless, inhumane attempts to punish people for not taking advantage of opportunities that do not exist.
    - rjbwork 4y ago
      I think what they mean is in general, resources. Like funding and willing workers to help if it was a viable career path to actually help society. Not that there are currently enough resources deployed in such a way as to help them all.
carapace 4y ago
> Isn’t SF just the most attractive place for self destructing mentally I’ll people to flood to? Well, yeah. I grew up here. The joke is, "Folks too crazy for the rest of the country come to California. The folks too crazy for California move to San Francisco." (And then we mutter under our breath, "And if you're too crazy for San Francisco you go to Berkeley.") Go look for footage of San Francisco from about 1965 to 1980, it's a freak Mecca. Before that it was "Bohemia by the bay". California was Alta Mexico, basically Outer Mongolia, and then moments after some USA-ians took it by force from the Spanish, who had taken it by force from the Ohlone, gold was discovered, only about a hundred and fifty years ago. Most of those folks were pretty wild. That was like the day before yesterday. Seriously, go check it out... God Bless Emperor Norton III Anyway, the really crazy thing was when silicon valley (that's about an hour south of SF) transformed into the Dot Com Boom and invaded the City. Y'all fucked it up pretty good (and I say that as a computer nerd) and now it's a weird 90's Cyberpunk Dystopia version of what it used to be. To sum up, yes, SF is and always has been crazy town literally. (I don't know what it was like when it was just the Ohlone here.)
masonic 4y ago
>lack of free and competent medical treatment In CA, people with low/no income can get fully subsidized Obamacare plans for $1/month... even if here illegally.
- dkjaudyeqooe 4y ago
  That's not correct. Obamacare doesn't cover undocumented immigrants. You're thinking of Medi-Cal which covers the undocumented and others. Which makes sense since the goal is to reduce the number of uninsured and the undocumented are mostly taxpayers as well.
  - masonic 4y ago
    >Obamacare doesn't cover undocumented immigrants. In California, yes it (Covered CA) does.
    - dkjaudyeqooe 4y ago
      "Immigrants who are not lawfully present do not qualify for a health plan through Covered California; however, they may qualify for coverage through Medi-Cal if they are younger than 26 or are 50 or older, if they are a DACA recipient, if they are currently pregnant or were recently pregnant." https://www.coveredca.com/learning-center/information-for-immigrants/ https://www.coveredca.com/learning-center/information-for-im...
nonameiguess 4y ago
I happen to live in Dallas, near enough to the downtown cluster of homeless shelters and highway junctions where panhandling seems to be most lucrative than I'm more or less guaranteed to see quite a few homeless about when I'm out walking. And I walk a lot. Enough to see the same people repeatedly, for years. People living in tents or just tarps attached to trees, walking from there to the same highway exit, day after day, then back again. I usually go for my walks before sunrise and after sunset, which is around the same time they're doing their within-day migrations from wherever they sleep to wherever they beg. Since I can see the same people day after day, see where they sleep, I'm reasonably sure they largely don't seem to have mobile devices with data plans, no regular Internet, they probably know how to read but don't seem to be spending time in libraries researching comparative crime enforcement strategies from cities around the nation. I'm not seeing a whole lot of people who seem to be picking from among everywhere in the US they might go and then figuring out a way to go there. Instead, I see them yelling at ghosts that aren't really there. As you said, these are often people with severe mental illnesses. Maybe on the margins a few are leaving for greener pastures, but I'm not sure the resources and capacity for rational decision making are really there for a whole lot of them to be doing that, at least the truly worst-off that are going to be homeless basically no matter what if we don't provide free long-term care facilities for mentally ill that are not effectively prisons. Plus, I can see they largely aren't leaving since I see the same people here years later from when I first saw them (usually men, mind you - I'm guessing the women are more likely to just get killed at some point). While I don't want to doubt your personal feelings of safety in one city versus another, it's worth considering that, for whatever reason, San Francisco does a worse job or just doesn't try to keep the homeless out of the places richer people might frequent, but they exist in other cities as well, including cities in Texas and Alabama. Are they dangerous? I don't know. I know one guy my wife and I used to call "Santa Claus" because of his long white beard was arrested a while back for stabbing a guy to death, and is probably in prison now since we haven't seen him in five years, but the guy he stabbed was another homeless person. I've never heard of one of them attacking a "citizen." The few times I've had contentious interactions, usually due to my past spine problems that led to some serious pain and anger issues on my part, I'm pretty sure I scared them more than they scared me. After all, I'm well-fed, sleep in a bed, and have access to a gym. I should be and probably am a lot stronger than they are. All that said, while I'm not convinced that the very worst of the more or less permanent homeless due to mental health are really migratory enough to be considered a national problem, that doesn't mean federal funding of solutions wouldn't help. Realistically, while I think cities should be the ones doing something about this, they either don't or their solution is to round up the homeless on buses and send them to other cities. That practice should definitely be banned and that would have to happen at a level of government higher than cities.

davidw 4y ago

Homelessness is mostly a factor of housing costs, as this deep dive into the data shows: https://homelessnesshousingproblem.com/ https://homelessnesshousingproblem.com/

holografix 4y ago
Thanks David I’ll have a a look. I hate to categorize people in such a conveniently black and white way but there seems to be a group that desperately need social assistance: housing, health, some upskilling etc and they would rejoin society and live happy productive lives drug free. But also a group that just needs ongoing mental health treatment. I expect the second group to be way smaller of course.
diogenescynic 4y ago
This is propaganda. Nearly all the homeless you see on the streets are addicted to heroin, fentanyl, or meth, or some combination. You cannot afford housing at any level when you’re doing those kind of drugs. And most of the homeless in San Francisco aren’t locals.. the vast majority come here for the permissive drug laws, social benefits like SF’s homeless assistance program that pays them $500, and the weather.
- Pxtl 4y ago
  Yes but every city has heroin and fentanyl problems and yet the addicts don't flood the streets. These drugs weren't invented in SF and Vancouver, and yet those cities are blighted by them. Across the board, on a city-but-city basis, homelessness correlates with housing costs more than any other factor
  - shuckles 4y ago
    Atherton is way more expensive than San Francisco yet no sidewalk fentanyl dens. What gives?
- davidw 4y ago
  It's odd how people pretty intuitively understand that not many people have, say, Ferraris because they're expensive, but housing? It's like some kind of 10th dimension twilight zone where the laws of supply and demand have ceased to exist. No... someone who's homeless in a city where the average house costs 1.5 million dollars must perforce have moral failings! I mean, not to say there aren't homeless people with problems, but there are also filthy rich people with raging drug addictions in that area...
  - ralusek 4y ago
    A person's options aren't limited to: A.) Live in most expensive city in world or B.) Be homeless in most expensive city in world If housing prices have become unaffordable for many people in SF, there are other places on the planet. I moved out of SF 2 years ago, after living there for 7, partly due to outrageous cost. Nobody is making the claim that supply and demand doesn't exist for housing, they're claiming that supply isn't limited to the highly sought after, geographically contained peninsula of the bay. They're also claiming that "housing first" is an absurd oversimplification of the problem, and disregards all manner of highly important factors.
diebeforei485 4y ago
Correlation is not causation, as you learned in high school statistics. This is the equivalent of saying murders are correlated with ice cream sales.
- davidw 4y ago
  Why don't you try actually reading what they write? The book goes into some detail.
shuckles 4y ago
Cheap housing certainly allows social services to house severely drug addicted or mentally ill people more cost effectively, but that doesn’t solve the open air drug dealing and psychosis you see in parts of San Francisco. Many of the people in those states publicly in SF have or had offers for shelter or housing available to them, which is part of why the scenes are concentrated near SRO districts. In other words, housing isn’t the only issue with San Francisco’s poor stewardship of the public realm.
- davidw 4y ago
  No one said it's a simple problem. What the book looks at, high level, is that high housing costs are what correlate most strongly with homelessness. West Virginia, for instance, has a huge opioid problem. And far lower rates of homelessness, because housing is cheap.
  - shuckles 4y ago
    You’re missing the point. For many people, the endless petty crime, assaults by mentally ill people, open air drug abuse, and more are the issues to fix, and there isn’t much evidence giving impoverished people a shelter fixes that. WV and other poor regions have plenty of antisocial behavior, even if the antisocial are housed. Santa Clara County did a randomized assignment apartments for homeless study 2 years ago, and those housed used emergency services and died of drug overdose at the same, if not higher, rates than those who were not housed. Separately, all the antisocial people make living in subsidized housing awful. SROs are the most prolific evictors in San Francisco because their residents commonly have behavioral health issues or are outright criminals. So what problem does giving a homeless person a house actually solve?
    - bombcar 4y ago
      The problem of you seeing them. Out of sight, out of mind.
      - shuckles 4y ago

DoreenMichele 4y ago

I think you more or less have it right. I've said similar things in the past and I'm American, have been homeless, have had a class on Homelessness and Public Policy etc. https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2021/08/i-believe-california-is-dumping-ground.html https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2021/08/i-believe-c...

junofan 4y ago

SF is known by homeless to have the most gullible locals.

shuckles 4y ago
It's way less simple than that. There is an entire political machine of patronage jobs, nonprofit executives, etcetera that form an incentive system to maintain status quo.
DoreenMichele 4y ago
Homeless gravitate to big cities -- in part because that's where the soup kitchens are -- and certain kinds of weather. Climate and Unsheltered Homeless in the Continental United States https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2019/10/climate-and-unsheltered-homeless-in.html https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2019/10/climate-and...

deleted 4y ago

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deleted 4y ago

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holografix 4y ago

It seems like there’s no safety net nationally so people flock to the most welcoming place, that’s totally natural. But not enough funding is provided to treat the problem as what it is: a national issue. Then it creates this horrendous impasse between helping and providing medical care but also wanting to live in a clean, safe city. Seems to me the problem is California is dealing with a National problem but without national funding.

briandear 4y ago
- lazyasciiart 4y ago
  There are not plenty of resources. There are people on the street willing and desperate to enter rehab - and no rehab facility they can enter. There are people living in hospital emergency rooms waiting for a space to open in mental health treatment facilities. This is absolutely false, and spreading this misinformation directly contributes to redirecting time and money and public sentiment away from creation of these resources, and towards the pointless, inhumane attempts to punish people for not taking advantage of opportunities that do not exist.
  - rjbwork 4y ago
    I think what they mean is in general, resources. Like funding and willing workers to help if it was a viable career path to actually help society. Not that there are currently enough resources deployed in such a way as to help them all.

carapace 4y ago

> Isn’t SF just the most attractive place for self destructing mentally I’ll people to flood to? Well, yeah. I grew up here. The joke is, "Folks too crazy for the rest of the country come to California. The folks too crazy for California move to San Francisco." (And then we mutter under our breath, "And if you're too crazy for San Francisco you go to Berkeley.") Go look for footage of San Francisco from about 1965 to 1980, it's a freak Mecca. Before that it was "Bohemia by the bay". California was Alta Mexico, basically Outer Mongolia, and then moments after some USA-ians took it by force from the Spanish, who had taken it by force from the Ohlone, gold was discovered, only about a hundred and fifty years ago. Most of those folks were pretty wild. That was like the day before yesterday. Seriously, go check it out... God Bless Emperor Norton III Anyway, the really crazy thing was when silicon valley (that's about an hour south of SF) transformed into the Dot Com Boom and invaded the City. Y'all fucked it up pretty good (and I say that as a computer nerd) and now it's a weird 90's Cyberpunk Dystopia version of what it used to be. To sum up, yes, SF is and always has been crazy town literally. (I don't know what it was like when it was just the Ohlone here.)

masonic 4y ago

>lack of free and competent medical treatment In CA, people with low/no income can get fully subsidized Obamacare plans for $1/month... even if here illegally.

dkjaudyeqooe 4y ago
That's not correct. Obamacare doesn't cover undocumented immigrants. You're thinking of Medi-Cal which covers the undocumented and others. Which makes sense since the goal is to reduce the number of uninsured and the undocumented are mostly taxpayers as well.
- masonic 4y ago
  >Obamacare doesn't cover undocumented immigrants. In California, yes it (Covered CA) does.
  - dkjaudyeqooe 4y ago
    "Immigrants who are not lawfully present do not qualify for a health plan through Covered California; however, they may qualify for coverage through Medi-Cal if they are younger than 26 or are 50 or older, if they are a DACA recipient, if they are currently pregnant or were recently pregnant." https://www.coveredca.com/learning-center/information-for-immigrants/ https://www.coveredca.com/learning-center/information-for-im...

nonameiguess 4y ago

I happen to live in Dallas, near enough to the downtown cluster of homeless shelters and highway junctions where panhandling seems to be most lucrative than I'm more or less guaranteed to see quite a few homeless about when I'm out walking. And I walk a lot. Enough to see the same people repeatedly, for years. People living in tents or just tarps attached to trees, walking from there to the same highway exit, day after day, then back again. I usually go for my walks before sunrise and after sunset, which is around the same time they're doing their within-day migrations from wherever they sleep to wherever they beg. Since I can see the same people day after day, see where they sleep, I'm reasonably sure they largely don't seem to have mobile devices with data plans, no regular Internet, they probably know how to read but don't seem to be spending time in libraries researching comparative crime enforcement strategies from cities around the nation. I'm not seeing a whole lot of people who seem to be picking from among everywhere in the US they might go and then figuring out a way to go there. Instead, I see them yelling at ghosts that aren't really there. As you said, these are often people with severe mental illnesses. Maybe on the margins a few are leaving for greener pastures, but I'm not sure the resources and capacity for rational decision making are really there for a whole lot of them to be doing that, at least the truly worst-off that are going to be homeless basically no matter what if we don't provide free long-term care facilities for mentally ill that are not effectively prisons. Plus, I can see they largely aren't leaving since I see the same people here years later from when I first saw them (usually men, mind you - I'm guessing the women are more likely to just get killed at some point). While I don't want to doubt your personal feelings of safety in one city versus another, it's worth considering that, for whatever reason, San Francisco does a worse job or just doesn't try to keep the homeless out of the places richer people might frequent, but they exist in other cities as well, including cities in Texas and Alabama. Are they dangerous? I don't know. I know one guy my wife and I used to call "Santa Claus" because of his long white beard was arrested a while back for stabbing a guy to death, and is probably in prison now since we haven't seen him in five years, but the guy he stabbed was another homeless person. I've never heard of one of them attacking a "citizen." The few times I've had contentious interactions, usually due to my past spine problems that led to some serious pain and anger issues on my part, I'm pretty sure I scared them more than they scared me. After all, I'm well-fed, sleep in a bed, and have access to a gym. I should be and probably am a lot stronger than they are. All that said, while I'm not convinced that the very worst of the more or less permanent homeless due to mental health are really migratory enough to be considered a national problem, that doesn't mean federal funding of solutions wouldn't help. Realistically, while I think cities should be the ones doing something about this, they either don't or their solution is to round up the homeless on buses and send them to other cities. That practice should definitely be banned and that would have to happen at a level of government higher than cities.