10 ms·

Realistically, the only way we can solve this is with incarceration. This has little to do with the availability of housing, or the cost of housing. Some peopl

Realistically, the only way we can solve this is with incarceration. This has little to do with the availability of housing, or the cost of housing. Some people will simply refuse to live in the housing that is provided. Many are so mentally ill and addicted to drugs that no amount of money we give them, either directly or indirectly, will get them off the streets. Proposed solutions that don't involve incarceration should be ignored as unserious and unrealistic. Is that harsh? Is it "not progressive?" Yep. Progressive attempts to solve this problem have all failed. Progressives have allowed San Francisco to turn into an open-air drug den, attracting homeless people from all over the country, and nobody should listen to their ideas anymore.

hezralig 4y ago
I know plenty of homeless people in San Francisco without drug issues. The reason they are on the street or living in their cars or crashing on a friends couch in between either other spot? They cannot afford rent. Both friends I am currently in contact with are also CURRENTLY employed.
- chimineycricket 4y ago
  come on this is anecdotal
  - clint 4y ago
    Everything in this thread is anecdotal
- closeparen 4y ago
  I know lots of normally functioning adults who cannot afford rent in San Francisco. Many of them have bigger, nicer houses than my apartment - elsewhere than San Francisco.
  - hezralig 4y ago
    That's dope. Are any of them employed in SF, grew up in SF, and have no social supports outside of SF?
    - closeparen 4y ago
      I can think of more people who switched languages and continents than who still live in the city where they grew up. Establishing yourself in a new place where you don't know anyone isn't easy or painless, but compared to literally sleeping under a bridge? Come on.
    - caminante 4y ago
      > Both friends I am currently in contact with are also CURRENTLY employed. Genuinely curious, what is the estimated income of your two homeless friends? And do they have any limitations on their salary potential?
- yucky 4y ago
  You know people who can't afford rent in one of the most expensive cities in the world to rent in? Shocked - shocked I tell you! If only there were a solution...
  - munk-a 4y ago
    As a Vancouverite I'd appreciate it if you didn't compare your extremely affordable city to my own. /s
- nostromo 4y ago
  If you're crashing on a friend's couch, you're not homeless. Everyone cohabitates with family and friends at some point in life. It's very different than sleeping on the street.
  - hezralig 4y ago
    When you live on the street and sometimes can crash on a friend's couch, you are homeless.
- conductr 4y ago
  yet this part of their statement is still true, let's focus on solving 70% of the problem and then we can debate the rest > This has little to do with the availability of housing, or the cost of housing. Some people will simply refuse to live in the housing that is provided. Many are so mentally ill and addicted to drugs that no amount of money we give them, either directly or indirectly, will get them off the streets.
  - hezralig 4y ago
    I agree. Most people who are homeless at any given time are not homeless due to chronic drug abuse.
    - conductr 4y ago
      People that choose to make a lifestyle of it should be dealt with forcefully. And no I'm not saying to beat them up although I'm not against rounding them up and dropping them in the wilderness just like a racoon. It's not a permanent solution but deters the lifestyle and is much cheaper than rehabilitating people that don't want it.
alsetmusic 4y ago
This is the most cynical and heartless response I’ve seen in perhaps ever.
- LawTalkingGuy 4y ago
  You want to leave drugs users, on the most potent substances ever created, in open-air drug camps full of violence, rape, filth, more drugs, etc? Do you expect them to one day pull the fentanyl out of their arm and walk over to the Apple store to get a job? The drugs, and the camps, kill people. If they don't have the wherewithal to move then we need to do it for them. They can't get better while living in filth and honestly can't choose to do better. Once they're imprisoned, in a drug program - not a jail, for the 3-5 years it takes to actually detox they'll be ready to start to get clean and on their feet.
  - triceratops 4y ago
    I don't think GP was only talking about imprisoning lawbreakers (not including laws for sleeping rough, or vagrancy).
  - masterof0 4y ago
    Yup, I would love to see all this people contributing to solve the problem, or actually taking a homeless person to live with them, etc...
    - LawTalkingGuy 4y ago
      Taking a druggie to live with you will destroy your home and your life. It's not voluntary. Once they get detoxed though they're going to be looking for a room to rent and a friend and now your offer of help is both wanted and sustainable.
- twblalock 4y ago
  Responding with feelings, rather than objective logical solutions, is why the homelessness problem got so bad in the first place.
notch656a 4y ago
I've been homeless without using drugs and without being mentally ill. Honestly I don't see the big deal if you sleep in a tent and use appropriate sanitation. I was always careful to pack in pack out, to respect the community, to not become intoxicated, and to dispose of waste appropriately. IMO the homeless issue is San Francisco is because they've practically incentivized being homeless by subsidizing the homeless and also making any defense against the crimes of homeless toothless (misdemeanor theft is barely enforced, it is illegal to use violent self defense to defend property, and weapons laws are among the most restrictive in the nation.) You don't even have to incarcerate them. Just make city policies such that there's no advantage to being homeless in SF, other than maybe the weather.
- triceratops 4y ago
  > Just make city policies such that there's no advantage to being homeless in SF I don't see any advantage to being homeless. Literally every human being without mental issues would prefer having a roof over their head. This is a market failure.
  - notch656a 4y ago
    >I don't see any advantage to being homeless You missed the "in SF" part of the sentence. In a sense you're correct, it is in part a market failure in SF for subsidizing homelessness. >Literally every human being without mental issues would prefer having a roof over their head I have a few times, on purpose. Not being responsible for a house can be liberating, depending on your life circumstances -- if you're not addicted, you're healthy and able bodied, and not mentally ill. It can be like an adventure where you see where you like to go, can get all the money you need for a week in only a day of day labor (which is trivial to get if you're able bodied and have an ID). Homelessness with serious personal problems is awful, but otherwise it can be an enjoyable lifestyle. I would probably choose periodic homelessness still today were it not I have a child, whom CPS would probably take away if I enjoyed some of the liberties of my youth.
    - triceratops 4y ago
Bud 4y ago
- twblalock 4y ago
  > Long-term public support for the entire population, even the inconveniently vulnerable and expensive part of the population, is the only solution. Ok, what will you do about the people who actively refuse to accept that support? We are talking about non-rational, mentally ill, addicted people. You can't just offer support. If that worked, this problem would not exist.
  - munk-a 4y ago
    When shelter is offered without any strings attached it is almost never refused by homeless persons. Some people have developed serious trust issues with government authorities after decades of abuses but if the housing is presented as a thing they control it is almost universally accepted. The problem is that shelter is always offered with strings attached - you need to be actively seeking employment, you need to listen to our sermons, you can't use if you accept the housing, you can only sleep here for three nights then we need the bed for someone else. If SF built some new high-rises and offered every homeless person a condo free of charge that they will personally own after some amount of occupancy you'd pretty much solve homelessness and put a significant dent in mental health issues overnight.
    - pandaman 4y ago
      >If SF built some new high-rises and offered every homeless person a condo free of charge that they will personally own after some amount of occupancy you'd pretty much solve homelessness and put a significant dent in mental health issues overnight. And if that does not happen you can always say that some strings were attached after all: the requirement to pay utility bills, the requirement to dispose of trash, the requirement not to have open fire and/or chemical labs inside, the requirement not to assault neighbors and passersby etc. etc. After all there are always some "strings" required to live in the society and even more of those when you require that the society provides you with everything you need for nothing in return.
zarmin 4y ago
- masterof0 4y ago
  Worse than the people outside your windows screaming, having fights, r*ping each other, being abused, assaulting others? Is very easy to judge when you don't live the consequences.
  - caminante 4y ago
    Anecdotally, I have SF colleagues who surprisingly often have to interrupt phone calls to check on disturbances outside. Filing a police report does nothing even for battery. I'm still amazed by this Greater LA story where a vagrant has holed up on a woman's front porch, and the police won't do anything. [0] https://abc7.com/van-nuys-los-angeles-homeless-man-porch-takeover/12258443/ https://abc7.com/van-nuys-los-angeles-homeless-man-porch-tak...
    - masterof0 4y ago
      Yup, and the police let them out again[1] 1- https://www.amren.com/news/2022/02/seattle-homeless-man-cracks-female-amazon-engineers-skull-with-a-baseball-bat/ https://www.amren.com/news/2022/02/seattle-homeless-man-crac...
erellsworth 4y ago
Yes, because we certainly don't do enough of that in this country.
triceratops 4y ago
> This has little to do with the availability of housing, or the cost of housing. This is a startlingly ignorant take. Shelter is among the basic human needs. If people were starving to death, would you blame mental illness or food prices? > Progressive attempts to solve this problem have all failed Yes. Because they don't focus on creating more housing. Not "affordable" housing, just housing. They're called "progressive" attempts because the city's politics is dominated by progressives. But every property owner and voter, regardless of political stripe, is responsible for this state of affairs. There is exactly 1 solution to California's "housing crisis". More housing. Not "affordable" housing. Not mass transit alone. More. Housing. Moar. Build baby build. If that doesn't work, you know what you do? Build more housing. Beat those prices into the ground with construction cranes and hammers.
- twblalock 4y ago
  If there were a million empty houses in San Francisco that were available free of charge, there would still be a massive homelessness problem because the real issue is not lack of housing, it's drug addiction and mental illness.
  - triceratops 4y ago
    Why do you think so? What makes SF have so many more drug addicted or mentally ill people, compared to cities with sane housing prices?
    - twblalock 4y ago
      Because everyone knows that SF will tolerate behavior that other cities will not, and that attracts the most problematic homeless people from all over the country. It's practically a network effect for homeless encampments.
      - triceratops 4y ago
        > attracts the most problematic homeless people from all over the country Here's a study someone else posted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33010913 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33010913 "The data shows that over 70% of all of SF's unhoused people became homeless while living in San Francisco"
ineptech 4y ago
"The only solution to my problem is more candles", says the man with more candles than anyone else on Earth.
cpuguy83 4y ago
This is absolutely appalling. Considering we've historically incarcerated these people and it didn't fix anything, I don't see how you can blame "progressive" attempts to solve the crisis. Do more people come to these cities that have such policies? Probably... but that's not an indictment of the policy. We have a national crisis. We have some cities/states who literally pay for 1-way bus tickets out (as an alternative to jail). This solves nothing. Having more people in jail solves nothing.
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  It solves something for people at the destination of those bus tickets.
- twblalock 4y ago
  > This solves nothing. Having more people in jail solves nothing. Yes it does. It gets them off the streets. It is the only thing that will do it. The problem in the past is that we only incarcerated homeless people overnight. Jail was a revolving door, and people went right back onto the streets after being released, over and over again. The problem is that we released them before they had recovered from the problems that made them homeless! We put them right back on the streets! It was a stupid policy that achieved nothing. We need to be willing, as a society, to incarcerate people, and keep them incarcerated, until we have a good reason to believe they will not be homeless when released. This will require massive commitment and expenditure. The problem has become so great that nothing else will work. There are no other possible solutions. Plus, if you see the way these people currently live, you'd realize that being institutionalized is better than the hell that is currently their daily lives.
  - jonwithoutanh 4y ago
  - hodgesrm 4y ago
    > Yes it does. It gets them off the streets. It is the only thing that will do it. So does it follow that the reason the previous houseed persons who are now homeless were previously in jail? If not, then there are other root causes at work, such as disappearance of inexpensive housing. The argument you are making sounds like a dialog out of Charles Dickens, just without the irony.
runarberg 4y ago
Just imagine living on the streets for an extended period, while also dealing with substance abuse and/or other mental illnesses. The state has failed you, there is no denying that. Indeed the state has repeatedly failed you. Every time you’ve tried to improve your living conditions has failed. Everytime you’ve tried to fix your substance abuse problem has failed, and every time you’ve found shelter, you’ve lost it for some reason. This has happened multiple times over. Do you honestly believe that after all that, people are still rational and blindly accept help from the state? No, they’ve failed so for, you might as well just accept that things are as good as they’ll get. When tackling this problem, we don’t only have to deal with the current situations, we also have to consider past failure, because people remember them, and they do affect current behavior.
spamizbad 4y ago
> Proposed solutions that don't involve incarceration should be ignored as unserious and unrealistic. Incarceration has been our primary approach for dealing with drug addiction and mental illness over the last 42 years. It is extremely expensive, with cost-per-inmate figures ranging from $15K-64K depending on the state, with California being the most expensive. I don't know of any public policy experts, regardless of their political leanings who consider this an effective approach. I think people fail to recognize that part of the push to "decriminalize" drugs and homelessness isn't necessarily bleeding-heart progressivism but calculated austerity: Prisons are full. We want murders, rapists and violent criminals locked up in them. We cannot do that if they are clogged up with people whose primary offenses were being mentally ill and/or drugs. I understand that California in particular has been more lax the rest of the country, but coming from the midwest our hard-ass drug laws didn't prevent meth and then heroin from ravaging both urban and rural communities. So if you do want to simply lock these people away, I think you also need the political will to do two very important things: 1) Provide evidence that spending $15,000-$65,000 to incarcerate a homeless drug addict will produce a better outcome than spending those same public tax dollars on something else that could also benefit society and/or the individuals in question. 2) Raise and invest tax money into prison infrastructure to house these people. This will likely mean hiking taxes and/or cutting them from things like education.
- notch656a 4y ago
  No worries! We'll just build more prisons! Perhaps a second "inflation reduction act" could be passed to print some more money to pay for it and also to make sure there are more dollars out there to help pay for these rising prices.
hotpotamus 4y ago
I agree that incarceration isn't progressive, but is it conservative? I mean I'm sure conservatives will appreciate brutalizing (those they perceive as) criminals for little more than the sake of it, but prisons in California aren't cheap, and is there much appetite for even more taxation?
- positus 4y ago
  This is a grotesque mischaracterization of conservatives. Just because a group of people do not agree with you does not make them violence-obsessed brutes.
  - hotpotamus 4y ago
    And yet the conservatives' elected leader, Donald Trump, is banned from Twitter because he's unable to stop publicly obsessing over violence.
    - jaywalk 4y ago
      Trump was banned from Twitter because the people running it absolutely hated him and everything he stood for, and being on his way out of office they figured it was time to make the move that they had been wanting to make for years.
      - andirk 4y ago
        I am not sure if I consider Trump's behavior breaking the Terms of Services that we _all_ need to follow, but he walked up to that line closer and closer, and got bit. However, 2 others, Senator Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley said way more damning things than Trump, on paper, the same days, on the same topic, and they got no penalty.
andirk 4y ago
Trivia: what country incarcerates the most people per capita? Oddly, that country is the topic of discussion here. And I live and work in/near San Francisco and it's plenty a shit show depending on neighborhood, but a very far cry from an "open-air drug den". Let's dig in deeper for solutions.
- twblalock 4y ago
  > And I live and work in/near San Francisco and it's plenty a shit show depending on neighborhood I mean, you can stop right there. Our cities should not be like that. We need to have higher standards than that.
- km3r 4y ago
  SF incarcerates significantly less per capita than the rest of the country.
TaylorAlexander 4y ago
So what you’re saying is we should pay $60,000 per year for government housing for these people? You know there have been studies where giving people homes, or building subsidized housing, absolutely does improve peoples lives, cut addiction and crime rates, and generally do the things most progressives say they will. Your proposal also puts them in expensive government housing but it does so in a way which significantly harms the individual. Incarceration might “solve” the problem for you but it does so at an extreme cost to others. And the financial burden to the state is still high. Meanwhile social housing solutions like those in Vienna actually make positive changes to peoples lives while still getting them off the streets: https://www.huduser.gov/portal/pdredge/pdr_edge_featd_article_011314.html https://www.huduser.gov/portal/pdredge/pdr_edge_featd_articl... Honestly it’s like you people think the police and prisons are free.
- twblalock 4y ago
  > Honestly it’s like you people think the police and prisons are free. No, I think those things cost money and are worth paying for. What did I write that made you think I thought they were free?
  - TaylorAlexander 4y ago
    Because you outright dismiss building social housing as expensive and ineffective but you want to put them in to an equally expensive situation that is clearly less effective. I cannot imagine why you would think prison is better than social housing unless you ignore the very real cost of prison.
    - twblalock 4y ago
      Prison is social housing, but it’s mandatory rather than optional. We could build all the social housing we want, but it will only house people who willingly move into it. Many homeless people are insane drug addicts, and they are the ones who disrupt society, and they will not willingly change. What would you do about that?
munk-a 4y ago
When you say incarceration do you mean prison and jails or recovery clinics? America (and Canada too!) had horrible issues with abuses in mental institutions that led to a short sighted knee-jerk reaction of shuttering all of them to prevent abuses rather than cleaning them up and addressing the actual concerns. As someone with a family member with developmental disabilities (comorbid with other issues) I've seen my family member thrive in institutional settings - not getting locked in a padded cell institutions but facilities with enough staff and patients to respond quickly and with specialized labour to sudden issues. I think it'd be wonderful if we could, as a society, get our minds away from Victoria Era sanitoriums where patients were exhibited as carnival shows and start seriously investing in larger facilities - home care options and group homes fall extremely short in providing ample care for folks while being extremely costly. I don't think any of the people sleeping on the street are there by choice - it's just that their alternatives don't exist. A fair number of shelters are run by religious organizations that shame and preach to the homeless - offering a bed in exchange for prostelitization, other shelters are short on beds for the population they need to serve and prevent long term residency sometimes allowing a few consecutive nights - sometimes offering a single night, kicking everyone out in the morning and offering beds first come first served. Depending on how you are defining incarceration I'm either in agreement with you or I guess - yea, it'd work, but it's a terrible solution to just force people with mental illnesses into the prison system where they will receive next to no mental healthcare and just rot as human beings. Mental disabilities don't make you subhuman.

hezralig 4y ago

I know plenty of homeless people in San Francisco without drug issues. The reason they are on the street or living in their cars or crashing on a friends couch in between either other spot? They cannot afford rent. Both friends I am currently in contact with are also CURRENTLY employed.

chimineycricket 4y ago
come on this is anecdotal
- clint 4y ago
  Everything in this thread is anecdotal
closeparen 4y ago
I know lots of normally functioning adults who cannot afford rent in San Francisco. Many of them have bigger, nicer houses than my apartment - elsewhere than San Francisco.
- hezralig 4y ago
  That's dope. Are any of them employed in SF, grew up in SF, and have no social supports outside of SF?
  - closeparen 4y ago
    I can think of more people who switched languages and continents than who still live in the city where they grew up. Establishing yourself in a new place where you don't know anyone isn't easy or painless, but compared to literally sleeping under a bridge? Come on.
  - caminante 4y ago
    > Both friends I am currently in contact with are also CURRENTLY employed. Genuinely curious, what is the estimated income of your two homeless friends? And do they have any limitations on their salary potential?
yucky 4y ago
You know people who can't afford rent in one of the most expensive cities in the world to rent in? Shocked - shocked I tell you! If only there were a solution...
- munk-a 4y ago
  As a Vancouverite I'd appreciate it if you didn't compare your extremely affordable city to my own. /s
nostromo 4y ago
If you're crashing on a friend's couch, you're not homeless. Everyone cohabitates with family and friends at some point in life. It's very different than sleeping on the street.
- hezralig 4y ago
  When you live on the street and sometimes can crash on a friend's couch, you are homeless.
conductr 4y ago
yet this part of their statement is still true, let's focus on solving 70% of the problem and then we can debate the rest > This has little to do with the availability of housing, or the cost of housing. Some people will simply refuse to live in the housing that is provided. Many are so mentally ill and addicted to drugs that no amount of money we give them, either directly or indirectly, will get them off the streets.
- hezralig 4y ago
  I agree. Most people who are homeless at any given time are not homeless due to chronic drug abuse.
  - conductr 4y ago
    People that choose to make a lifestyle of it should be dealt with forcefully. And no I'm not saying to beat them up although I'm not against rounding them up and dropping them in the wilderness just like a racoon. It's not a permanent solution but deters the lifestyle and is much cheaper than rehabilitating people that don't want it.

alsetmusic 4y ago

This is the most cynical and heartless response I’ve seen in perhaps ever.

LawTalkingGuy 4y ago
You want to leave drugs users, on the most potent substances ever created, in open-air drug camps full of violence, rape, filth, more drugs, etc? Do you expect them to one day pull the fentanyl out of their arm and walk over to the Apple store to get a job? The drugs, and the camps, kill people. If they don't have the wherewithal to move then we need to do it for them. They can't get better while living in filth and honestly can't choose to do better. Once they're imprisoned, in a drug program - not a jail, for the 3-5 years it takes to actually detox they'll be ready to start to get clean and on their feet.
- triceratops 4y ago
  I don't think GP was only talking about imprisoning lawbreakers (not including laws for sleeping rough, or vagrancy).
- masterof0 4y ago
  Yup, I would love to see all this people contributing to solve the problem, or actually taking a homeless person to live with them, etc...
  - LawTalkingGuy 4y ago
    Taking a druggie to live with you will destroy your home and your life. It's not voluntary. Once they get detoxed though they're going to be looking for a room to rent and a friend and now your offer of help is both wanted and sustainable.
twblalock 4y ago
Responding with feelings, rather than objective logical solutions, is why the homelessness problem got so bad in the first place.

notch656a 4y ago

I've been homeless without using drugs and without being mentally ill. Honestly I don't see the big deal if you sleep in a tent and use appropriate sanitation. I was always careful to pack in pack out, to respect the community, to not become intoxicated, and to dispose of waste appropriately. IMO the homeless issue is San Francisco is because they've practically incentivized being homeless by subsidizing the homeless and also making any defense against the crimes of homeless toothless (misdemeanor theft is barely enforced, it is illegal to use violent self defense to defend property, and weapons laws are among the most restrictive in the nation.) You don't even have to incarcerate them. Just make city policies such that there's no advantage to being homeless in SF, other than maybe the weather.

triceratops 4y ago
> Just make city policies such that there's no advantage to being homeless in SF I don't see any advantage to being homeless. Literally every human being without mental issues would prefer having a roof over their head. This is a market failure.
- notch656a 4y ago
  >I don't see any advantage to being homeless You missed the "in SF" part of the sentence. In a sense you're correct, it is in part a market failure in SF for subsidizing homelessness. >Literally every human being without mental issues would prefer having a roof over their head I have a few times, on purpose. Not being responsible for a house can be liberating, depending on your life circumstances -- if you're not addicted, you're healthy and able bodied, and not mentally ill. It can be like an adventure where you see where you like to go, can get all the money you need for a week in only a day of day labor (which is trivial to get if you're able bodied and have an ID). Homelessness with serious personal problems is awful, but otherwise it can be an enjoyable lifestyle. I would probably choose periodic homelessness still today were it not I have a child, whom CPS would probably take away if I enjoyed some of the liberties of my youth.
  - triceratops 4y ago

Bud 4y ago

twblalock 4y ago
> Long-term public support for the entire population, even the inconveniently vulnerable and expensive part of the population, is the only solution. Ok, what will you do about the people who actively refuse to accept that support? We are talking about non-rational, mentally ill, addicted people. You can't just offer support. If that worked, this problem would not exist.
- munk-a 4y ago
  When shelter is offered without any strings attached it is almost never refused by homeless persons. Some people have developed serious trust issues with government authorities after decades of abuses but if the housing is presented as a thing they control it is almost universally accepted. The problem is that shelter is always offered with strings attached - you need to be actively seeking employment, you need to listen to our sermons, you can't use if you accept the housing, you can only sleep here for three nights then we need the bed for someone else. If SF built some new high-rises and offered every homeless person a condo free of charge that they will personally own after some amount of occupancy you'd pretty much solve homelessness and put a significant dent in mental health issues overnight.
  - pandaman 4y ago
    >If SF built some new high-rises and offered every homeless person a condo free of charge that they will personally own after some amount of occupancy you'd pretty much solve homelessness and put a significant dent in mental health issues overnight. And if that does not happen you can always say that some strings were attached after all: the requirement to pay utility bills, the requirement to dispose of trash, the requirement not to have open fire and/or chemical labs inside, the requirement not to assault neighbors and passersby etc. etc. After all there are always some "strings" required to live in the society and even more of those when you require that the society provides you with everything you need for nothing in return.

zarmin 4y ago

masterof0 4y ago
Worse than the people outside your windows screaming, having fights, r*ping each other, being abused, assaulting others? Is very easy to judge when you don't live the consequences.
- caminante 4y ago
  Anecdotally, I have SF colleagues who surprisingly often have to interrupt phone calls to check on disturbances outside. Filing a police report does nothing even for battery. I'm still amazed by this Greater LA story where a vagrant has holed up on a woman's front porch, and the police won't do anything. [0] https://abc7.com/van-nuys-los-angeles-homeless-man-porch-takeover/12258443/ https://abc7.com/van-nuys-los-angeles-homeless-man-porch-tak...
  - masterof0 4y ago
    Yup, and the police let them out again[1] 1- https://www.amren.com/news/2022/02/seattle-homeless-man-cracks-female-amazon-engineers-skull-with-a-baseball-bat/ https://www.amren.com/news/2022/02/seattle-homeless-man-crac...

erellsworth 4y ago

Yes, because we certainly don't do enough of that in this country.

triceratops 4y ago

> This has little to do with the availability of housing, or the cost of housing. This is a startlingly ignorant take. Shelter is among the basic human needs. If people were starving to death, would you blame mental illness or food prices? > Progressive attempts to solve this problem have all failed Yes. Because they don't focus on creating more housing. Not "affordable" housing, just housing. They're called "progressive" attempts because the city's politics is dominated by progressives. But every property owner and voter, regardless of political stripe, is responsible for this state of affairs. There is exactly 1 solution to California's "housing crisis". More housing. Not "affordable" housing. Not mass transit alone. More. Housing. Moar. Build baby build. If that doesn't work, you know what you do? Build more housing. Beat those prices into the ground with construction cranes and hammers.

twblalock 4y ago
If there were a million empty houses in San Francisco that were available free of charge, there would still be a massive homelessness problem because the real issue is not lack of housing, it's drug addiction and mental illness.
- triceratops 4y ago
  Why do you think so? What makes SF have so many more drug addicted or mentally ill people, compared to cities with sane housing prices?
  - twblalock 4y ago
    Because everyone knows that SF will tolerate behavior that other cities will not, and that attracts the most problematic homeless people from all over the country. It's practically a network effect for homeless encampments.
    - triceratops 4y ago
      > attracts the most problematic homeless people from all over the country Here's a study someone else posted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33010913 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33010913 "The data shows that over 70% of all of SF's unhoused people became homeless while living in San Francisco"

ineptech 4y ago

"The only solution to my problem is more candles", says the man with more candles than anyone else on Earth.

cpuguy83 4y ago

This is absolutely appalling. Considering we've historically incarcerated these people and it didn't fix anything, I don't see how you can blame "progressive" attempts to solve the crisis. Do more people come to these cities that have such policies? Probably... but that's not an indictment of the policy. We have a national crisis. We have some cities/states who literally pay for 1-way bus tickets out (as an alternative to jail). This solves nothing. Having more people in jail solves nothing.

lotsofpulp 4y ago
It solves something for people at the destination of those bus tickets.
twblalock 4y ago
> This solves nothing. Having more people in jail solves nothing. Yes it does. It gets them off the streets. It is the only thing that will do it. The problem in the past is that we only incarcerated homeless people overnight. Jail was a revolving door, and people went right back onto the streets after being released, over and over again. The problem is that we released them before they had recovered from the problems that made them homeless! We put them right back on the streets! It was a stupid policy that achieved nothing. We need to be willing, as a society, to incarcerate people, and keep them incarcerated, until we have a good reason to believe they will not be homeless when released. This will require massive commitment and expenditure. The problem has become so great that nothing else will work. There are no other possible solutions. Plus, if you see the way these people currently live, you'd realize that being institutionalized is better than the hell that is currently their daily lives.
- jonwithoutanh 4y ago
- hodgesrm 4y ago
  > Yes it does. It gets them off the streets. It is the only thing that will do it. So does it follow that the reason the previous houseed persons who are now homeless were previously in jail? If not, then there are other root causes at work, such as disappearance of inexpensive housing. The argument you are making sounds like a dialog out of Charles Dickens, just without the irony.

runarberg 4y ago

Just imagine living on the streets for an extended period, while also dealing with substance abuse and/or other mental illnesses. The state has failed you, there is no denying that. Indeed the state has repeatedly failed you. Every time you’ve tried to improve your living conditions has failed. Everytime you’ve tried to fix your substance abuse problem has failed, and every time you’ve found shelter, you’ve lost it for some reason. This has happened multiple times over. Do you honestly believe that after all that, people are still rational and blindly accept help from the state? No, they’ve failed so for, you might as well just accept that things are as good as they’ll get. When tackling this problem, we don’t only have to deal with the current situations, we also have to consider past failure, because people remember them, and they do affect current behavior.

spamizbad 4y ago

> Proposed solutions that don't involve incarceration should be ignored as unserious and unrealistic. Incarceration has been our primary approach for dealing with drug addiction and mental illness over the last 42 years. It is extremely expensive, with cost-per-inmate figures ranging from $15K-64K depending on the state, with California being the most expensive. I don't know of any public policy experts, regardless of their political leanings who consider this an effective approach. I think people fail to recognize that part of the push to "decriminalize" drugs and homelessness isn't necessarily bleeding-heart progressivism but calculated austerity: Prisons are full. We want murders, rapists and violent criminals locked up in them. We cannot do that if they are clogged up with people whose primary offenses were being mentally ill and/or drugs. I understand that California in particular has been more lax the rest of the country, but coming from the midwest our hard-ass drug laws didn't prevent meth and then heroin from ravaging both urban and rural communities. So if you do want to simply lock these people away, I think you also need the political will to do two very important things: 1) Provide evidence that spending $15,000-$65,000 to incarcerate a homeless drug addict will produce a better outcome than spending those same public tax dollars on something else that could also benefit society and/or the individuals in question. 2) Raise and invest tax money into prison infrastructure to house these people. This will likely mean hiking taxes and/or cutting them from things like education.

notch656a 4y ago
No worries! We'll just build more prisons! Perhaps a second "inflation reduction act" could be passed to print some more money to pay for it and also to make sure there are more dollars out there to help pay for these rising prices.

hotpotamus 4y ago

I agree that incarceration isn't progressive, but is it conservative? I mean I'm sure conservatives will appreciate brutalizing (those they perceive as) criminals for little more than the sake of it, but prisons in California aren't cheap, and is there much appetite for even more taxation?

positus 4y ago
This is a grotesque mischaracterization of conservatives. Just because a group of people do not agree with you does not make them violence-obsessed brutes.
- hotpotamus 4y ago
  And yet the conservatives' elected leader, Donald Trump, is banned from Twitter because he's unable to stop publicly obsessing over violence.
  - jaywalk 4y ago
    Trump was banned from Twitter because the people running it absolutely hated him and everything he stood for, and being on his way out of office they figured it was time to make the move that they had been wanting to make for years.
    - andirk 4y ago
      I am not sure if I consider Trump's behavior breaking the Terms of Services that we _all_ need to follow, but he walked up to that line closer and closer, and got bit. However, 2 others, Senator Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley said way more damning things than Trump, on paper, the same days, on the same topic, and they got no penalty.

andirk 4y ago

Trivia: what country incarcerates the most people per capita? Oddly, that country is the topic of discussion here. And I live and work in/near San Francisco and it's plenty a shit show depending on neighborhood, but a very far cry from an "open-air drug den". Let's dig in deeper for solutions.

twblalock 4y ago
> And I live and work in/near San Francisco and it's plenty a shit show depending on neighborhood I mean, you can stop right there. Our cities should not be like that. We need to have higher standards than that.
km3r 4y ago
SF incarcerates significantly less per capita than the rest of the country.

TaylorAlexander 4y ago

So what you’re saying is we should pay $60,000 per year for government housing for these people? You know there have been studies where giving people homes, or building subsidized housing, absolutely does improve peoples lives, cut addiction and crime rates, and generally do the things most progressives say they will. Your proposal also puts them in expensive government housing but it does so in a way which significantly harms the individual. Incarceration might “solve” the problem for you but it does so at an extreme cost to others. And the financial burden to the state is still high. Meanwhile social housing solutions like those in Vienna actually make positive changes to peoples lives while still getting them off the streets: https://www.huduser.gov/portal/pdredge/pdr_edge_featd_article_011314.html https://www.huduser.gov/portal/pdredge/pdr_edge_featd_articl... Honestly it’s like you people think the police and prisons are free.

twblalock 4y ago
> Honestly it’s like you people think the police and prisons are free. No, I think those things cost money and are worth paying for. What did I write that made you think I thought they were free?
- TaylorAlexander 4y ago
  Because you outright dismiss building social housing as expensive and ineffective but you want to put them in to an equally expensive situation that is clearly less effective. I cannot imagine why you would think prison is better than social housing unless you ignore the very real cost of prison.
  - twblalock 4y ago
    Prison is social housing, but it’s mandatory rather than optional. We could build all the social housing we want, but it will only house people who willingly move into it. Many homeless people are insane drug addicts, and they are the ones who disrupt society, and they will not willingly change. What would you do about that?

munk-a 4y ago

When you say incarceration do you mean prison and jails or recovery clinics? America (and Canada too!) had horrible issues with abuses in mental institutions that led to a short sighted knee-jerk reaction of shuttering all of them to prevent abuses rather than cleaning them up and addressing the actual concerns. As someone with a family member with developmental disabilities (comorbid with other issues) I've seen my family member thrive in institutional settings - not getting locked in a padded cell institutions but facilities with enough staff and patients to respond quickly and with specialized labour to sudden issues. I think it'd be wonderful if we could, as a society, get our minds away from Victoria Era sanitoriums where patients were exhibited as carnival shows and start seriously investing in larger facilities - home care options and group homes fall extremely short in providing ample care for folks while being extremely costly. I don't think any of the people sleeping on the street are there by choice - it's just that their alternatives don't exist. A fair number of shelters are run by religious organizations that shame and preach to the homeless - offering a bed in exchange for prostelitization, other shelters are short on beds for the population they need to serve and prevent long term residency sometimes allowing a few consecutive nights - sometimes offering a single night, kicking everyone out in the morning and offering beds first come first served. Depending on how you are defining incarceration I'm either in agreement with you or I guess - yea, it'd work, but it's a terrible solution to just force people with mental illnesses into the prison system where they will receive next to no mental healthcare and just rot as human beings. Mental disabilities don't make you subhuman.