14 ms·

> San Francisco, which is struggling with a troubling homelessness and public-defecation crisis, needs more public toilets. The irony in this statement, given

• vxNsr 4y ago
  Attacking the root causes would mean admitting that they have no idea what they’re doing, that they’ve been running full speed backwards and that their political opponents were 100% correct. Or they can spend more public money and keep running backwards while claiming victory.
• aliqot 4y ago
  Red tape and nimbyism is hard to imagine from what I see of SFO in books, it seems like the most anti-diversity thing you can do. Can anybody from SFO relate their experience? Hard to tell these days what is editorial bias or sensationalism and what is true.
  • msoad 4y ago
    SFO is the airport. I'm very confused by this comment. We're not all working at Google right now. MTV, SFO, MPK and all of this lingo is not familiar to all
    • lotsofpulp 4y ago
      People sometimes use major airport codes as shorthand for a city or the metropolitan region the airport serves.
      • simonw 4y ago
        People who live in San Francisco don't use SFO to refer to the city. The airport is actually a couple of cities away (there are a lot of cities in the Bay Area).
        • soperj 4y ago
          People who use airport codes to refer to cities don't care.
      • hotpotamus 4y ago
        And anyplace without a major airport is "flyover country" often to the chagrin of people who live there.
      • yardie 4y ago
        I would hope not, considering many major cities are serviced by multiple major airports. NYC - JFK LGA EGW PARIS - CDG ORY London - LGW LHR Tokyo - NRT HND SF - SFO SJC If someone starts refering to a city by the airport code I'd be completely lost because most airports and their codes don't reflect the name of the city they service.
        • hot_gril 4y ago
          SJC doesn't really serve SF. You can say OAK sorta does, but not really. It's pretty clearly SFO. Also, the BART line to SF is called SFO (used to be called whatever terminating city until they realized that's stupid).
      • nsxwolf 4y ago
        We have the best pizza in ORD
        • warkdarrior 4y ago
          Indeed ORD-style pizza is the best.
        • 4y ago
    • astockwell 4y ago
      SFO is commonly a shorthand for San Francisco, LA for Los Angeles, SD for San Diego.
      • thatswrong0 4y ago
        SF, not SFO
        • mikeryan 4y ago
          Username checks out.
      • fooblaster 4y ago
        no, SFO is an airport
      • hot_gril 4y ago
        SFO, LA, SD. One of those is not like the rest.
      • bombcar 4y ago
        Nobody refers to San Diego as SAN, even though LAX is used for LA, the airport, and the train station? Just be glad you don't live in Cumaná I guess.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  • dmead 4y ago
    I lived in the bay for a year. the city is for the winners of the startup and stock lottery and those who want to rent to be near them. 100% believe this.
    • _jal 4y ago
      I've lived here off and on since 1993. I work for startups but haven't hit the lottery. There's a lot of San Francisco (and Bay Area) out there that has nothing to do with the startup scene, and many, many people who have no connection to and couldn't care less about it. You should have gotten out more.
      • strikelaserclaw 4y ago
        its hard to appreciate anything else when you are bleeding through the ears due to expenses.
        • _jal 4y ago
          I don't know about you, but people don't charge me money to talk to them. All I have to do to meet people outside of my work peer group is go somewhere different.
        • deleted 4y ago
          [deleted]
      • hot_gril 4y ago
        I agree, SF area has a lot of non-tech-related people and activities that should be enough to at least enjoy your non-work hours, but same with other areas. Moved to San Diego, and now I'm happier all around. Running joke between me and the rest of the startup team in SF was that every time we go to an event, people lead conversations by asking what stack I use, which version of Python, and why the heck I'm messing with XMPP. I understood the importance of seeking out non-techies.
  • dekhn 4y ago
    SFO is the airport, not the city. We call it SF, or San Francisco.
    • hot_gril 4y ago
      People in tech companies with many offices tend to call cities by the nearest airport, cause that's what the local office (or datacenter) is called.
      • dekhn 4y ago
        Yes, I worked in Moutain View, AKA MTV. And the SF office of Google is SFO. But nobody calls the city SFO.
        • hot_gril 4y ago
          Maybe you call it that if the entire point of the city to you is just the office, haha. I do hesitate to call my home city "LAX."
          • dekhn 4y ago
            I call it BUR.
          • avisser 4y ago
            At least LAX is in Los Angeles. Not true of SFO.
            • dekhn 4y ago
              While SFO isn't in the city limits, it is owned by the City and is in an unincorporated section of San Mateo; the SF police have a significant presence (probably the largest force) on site.
        • tanseydavid 4y ago
          >> But nobody calls the city SFO. Yes they do. And some also call it Frisco and San Fran. After 35 years in the Bay Area I have settled on calling it "The City" but will bust out with "San Fran Frisco" on special occasions to just to be irritating to those who desperately want to "fit in."
  • glacials 4y ago
    Born and raised in SF. NIMBYism is indeed a huge problem. It’s the hidden underbelly of a city with otherwise modern and diverse thinking. I’ve since moved to Seattle and it’s crazy to see shit can actually get done here.
    • aliqot 4y ago
      Thanks for the explanation. I'm a simple kind of person in a small town, so to us here this is all kind of crazy. Is a city as big as SFO still governed by politicians who live in it, or at that size does local government take people from other areas? I always read a lot about SFO as being on the cutting edge of progressive initiatives usually toward humane goals. Is this common? This gives everything I've been told or heard about SFO somewhat of a 'superficial' veneer (forgive me for lack of better words, I do not mean offense) based on the assumption that a city governed by its constituents ought to resemble them, but I'm seeing stuff like this where the words and intentions are right, but the actions and results are incongruent. Is this a mismatch between the politicians and residents or is this a "yes, but do it over there" thing? p.s. congrats on the move! in your opinion, what makes Seattle different? I've been there before, it was a beautiful and welcoming experience. People are friendly like here in the sticks, but there's just a lot more folks.
      • Kalium 4y ago
        SF is governed mostly by the people who live there. The core of the problem is that SF has spent decades investing in giving every person, block, and neighborhood ways to participate in planning and changes. Generally this means giving out some kind of veto. So when the time comes to do something "Yes, but do it somewhere else" is the predominant response. To put it another way - everybody wants more shelters for the indigent, nobody wants one near where they live. The planning system is structured around enabling this.
        • aliqot 4y ago
          Thank you for your perspective on this. In my locale, this type of thing is hard to imagine, we'll feed anybody who can hold a fork here. We have almost zero resources for indigents here, so homeless and others without are a bit rare. What are the resources (aside from this restroom) afforded to those without, near SFO? I'm tempted to think about this time when a local made a habit of feeding the deer, eventually they went from not being seen to no longer fearing people and would walk right up to the porch expecting sandwiches and RC Cola. Is it possible the abundance of resources exacerbates the situation where those seeking them arrive?
  • chimeracoder 4y ago
    > Red tape and nimbyism is hard to imagine from what I see of SFO in books, it seems like the most anti-diversity thing you can do. It sounds like your books are giving you an inaccurate view of San Francisco, because almost nothing is more on-brand for the city than red tape and NIMBYism.
  • epistasis 4y ago
    Here's a quote of the city planners' process to remove parking from in front of bus stops, a sevev year effort worn bearing doe every single stop: > We can't just paint 1,200 curbs, it's going to be a longer process. https://twitter.com/aarieff/status/1582408966163660802?s=46&t=yvz_4bsi0LrVzYqOJzKUXA https://twitter.com/aarieff/status/1582408966163660802?s=46&... This is the method for any change. SF thinks it peaked in the 80s or 90s and any change requires community consensus lest the 50 people that use a bus stop a day are inconveniencing the single car owner that parks in front of the bus stop.
    • jayzalowitz 4y ago
      This one is stupid, you can walk in between cars.
      • orhmeh09 4y ago
        Try taking a wheelchair between cars.
        • aliqot 4y ago
          If I were in a wheelchair, I'd be terrified of cities like SF who only grow vertically and are opposed to any types of accommodations requiring construction.
          • hot_gril 4y ago
            I wouldn't feel safe around there either. Also, SF is naturally very hilly.
  • cjtrowbridge 4y ago
    [flagged]
    • aliqot 4y ago
      In what ways is SFO right wing? I don't see much representation of that type as far as elected officials. Is this a term used in spirit or something I'm overlooking?
      • theGnuMe 4y ago
        SFO is an airport, so two wings generally..
      • TeeMassive 4y ago
        Replace "right" with "those who doesn't want to do the right thing" and most political speech kinda makes more sense. The Left/Right split of viewing politics is a false dichotomy that made sense only about a century after the French Revolution, in France.
        • aliqot 4y ago
          >Replace "right" with "those who doesn't want to do the right thing" and most political speech kinda makes more sense. >The Left/Right split of viewing politics is a false dichotomy that made sense only about a century after the French Revolution, in France. I don't think that's a fair characterization. I don't think people affiliate with a certain party seeking to "not do the right thing". Saying it is a false dichotomy while still saying one side doesn't do the right thing is a bit two sided. I am, however, getting the idea that there is some subtle derision being conveyed when the term 'right wing' is used, which is unfortunate because at least to me I'm being pre-loaded with bias about people I don't really know yet.
          • savingsPossible 4y ago
            It is not meant (I'd guess) as a characterization for people, but as a way to explain/read the words left and right, especially when one is criticizing the right (i.e.: right is used mostly as a synonym for bad, for some people)
  • giantg2 4y ago
    CA in general is like the leader of red tape, with SF as it's poster child.
  • hot_gril 4y ago
    You're right. I used to work there. Hated the experience, but I can see why it's like that. SF was always dense. At some point, all these tech companies moved in, and it became what I call a "commuter city" where a huge proportion of people there during the day don't actually live there or necessarily want to be there. It also shifted the culture, probably for the worse. Of course many living there beforehand might not like that. Yeah some people own property, but generally big business stands to gain the most from the influx, not the residents. I wouldn't be happy in their shoes either, and the only reason I wouldn't be NIMBY about it is I'd just leave. The NIMBYs basically lost; the city grew anyway. And it comes from every side, not just a "left or right" thing. People with nice houses don't want their neighborhoods to deteriorate. Renters don't want rent to go up. Even the stereotypical SJW people against gentrification... that's NIMBY. Also, being a dense, very wealthy area with relatively fair weather, SF is naturally a place for homeless people to congregate. Besides the obvious squalor that brings, businesses don't trust just anyone off the street. No public restrooms, no chairs in Starbucks, covers on everything in Walgreens, ID requirements to enter stuff, you get the idea. There's no obvious solution to that.
    • aliqot 4y ago
      Thank you for this frank breakdown of what's going on. This seems like a good possible explanation for the testimonials I'm reading in this thread. I'm still struggling with what is espoused by those from SFO area and tech culture compared to the reality of what's going on. If anybody is dedicated to 'social justice', to remove/resist facilities to relieve oneself just seems so far off the mark. I'm sure a lot of this is due to me not being in a city as dense as SFO, that undoubtedly has to change the dynamic. How much is this a "this is just a great place to live" issue, and how much is this a "this is a great place for easy resources if you're disadvantaged" issue? Maybe I'm looking at this the wrong way, but in a chicken and egg way, I'm curious if a city with this much "not-here" going on, do people give money to initiatives and charities and people who ask for money/food on the street, or is it typically a city where people avert their gaze? I ask this because if resources were hard to be secured without effort, and if the city is generally expensive to reside in, the amount of those without resources should decline, right? Where my hypothesis / thought-experiment falls apart is from what I can tell, most of California has amazing weather, so even sleeping on a sidewalk it's got to be quite hospitable and paradise-like (as odd as it feels to say)
  • MrFantastic 4y ago
    Most people that own a $2 million home don't want a toilet for homeless people in front of their house.
    • tanseydavid 4y ago
      For 2MM you get 1.5 baths!!!
  • carapace 4y ago
    I wasn't born here but my parents came here just after I was born, and they had lived here before that, I did grow up here, I've lived in other (N. Am.) cities, and I've studied a bit about San Francisco's history (Viva Emperor Norton III!) and I've seen more-or-less first hand SF city politics. This city is nuts. It's always been nuts. (Since the arrival of the Europeans, I don't know what it was like with the Ohlone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohlone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohlone ) First it was sort of concentration camps for the Native Americans run by Spanish Catholics. Then "Commodore John D. Sloat of the United States Navy sailed into Monterey Bay in 1846 and began the U.S. military invasion of California," https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California#U.S._Conquest_and_the_California_Republic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California#U.S._Conquest_and_t... Minutes later gold was discovered at Sutter's Mill and the Gold Rush was on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Gold_Rush https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Gold_Rush That was a pretty nutty (to put it mildly, very very mildly) time... Eliding all the craziness between then and the "Bohemia by the Bay" period brings us to the 1950's (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Renaissance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Renaissance) which then leads directly to the Summer of Love a decade or so later (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer_of_Love https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer_of_Love) There has always been a dark side to the city, from the tortured and murdered Indians, to the Jonestown Massacre. Sick shit has gone down here. It's not all sunshine and roses. Last but not least, this city has been the catch-all for all the folks who are too weird or crazy to fir in in the rest of the country. There's even an old joke about it here. It's only in the last twenty years, since all the tech companies and hype have come, literally since the Dot Com Boom (and bust). Remember that? Before 2000 nobody but the crazies came here to live. I can't emphasize this enough. All this "What's up with San Francisco?" is a young person's perspective. It's only by totally ignoring the entire history of the city up to ~2000 A.D. that the current situation seems puzzling or strange. So anyway, to answer the immediate question: Yes, red tape and bureaucracy are wielded here with a perfection of hypocrisy. If you don't know a "fixer" you can waste hundred of thousands or even millions of dollars and years trying to get projects approved. We do build things: the new Bay Bridge, and a tunnel under Chinatown, but some of the things we build are crap: The Millennium Tower is sinking, the sidewalks are pulling away from the buildings in Mission Bay (Mission Rock?) The new transbay terminal cracked, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transbay_Transit_Center#Extended_closure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transbay_Transit_Center#Extend... Then there's the recent and ongoing FBI probe into corruption, with the arrest of the director of Public Works among other things ( E.g. https://sfist.com/2020/07/15/ongoing-fbi-corruption-probe-hits-three-more-sf-city-departments-with-subpoenas/ https://sfist.com/2020/07/15/ongoing-fbi-corruption-probe-hi... ) So yeah we have things like empty "luxury" condos next to folks living in tents in little shanty towns. (The condos aren't actually lux, they look nice but the construction is crap, the folks in the office are sales not managers or maintenance, to get maintenance you call a call center in another state or country, the owners are a faceless LLC or other corp, etc. These things are all over the place!) The city does house and feed some homeless people, credit where credit is due. Some folks have been put up in hotel since COVID and some other things have been done. But we spend $250,000,000 (a quarter of a billion dollars) on less than 10,000 homeless people. As you can imagine most of that money is not just given to the homeless people themselves. Most of it goes to people who are not themselves homeless. Those people don't actually take any homeless people into their own homes and care for them. I'm not sure exactly what they do with all that money, but I'm sure the folks who get paid to "deal with" homelessness in SF are able to pay their rent or mortgage regularly and on time. (I feel a rant coming on, so I'ma stop myself there.) So yeah, this is a case where the sensationalism is actually warranted in the sense that the situation here is "sensational" (but not in a good way, unless you have lots and lots of money, then you can avoid the worst of the bad stuff by isolating yourself in the nice neighborhoods and taking uber, etc.) The educational system here is also wildly mismanaged. I could go on but this is already a long post. We recently recalled three school board members for being too nuts and radical for SF! Also the DA got recalled! (A friend of my sister works for a school, the new principal of which turned out to be so fucking crazy the kids themselves went on strike! They literally walked out! I don't think this made the paper even locally, and I forget the name of the school, if anyone asks me I'll ask my sister about it, okay?) To sum up: it's nuts here, it's always been nuts, but at least it used to be mostly fun nuts, and now it's more like a 90's cyberpunk dystopia nuts.
  • jquery 4y ago
    This is largely editorial bias and sensationalism. The original article was clickbait, $1.7m is merely the going rate for a public restroom (think of the big installations with women, men, and family rooms plus a janitor room). It is not what SF spent on a single commode. Keep a skeptical eye whenever you see an article trashing SF. We are the boogeyman city for right wing demagogues in the USA. Edit: Responding to a sibling comment: > No public restrooms, no chairs in Starbucks, covers on everything in Walgreens, ID requirements to enter stuff, you get the idea. There's no obvious solution to that. Lest people think the whole city is like this, this kind of thing is limited to a few square blocks inside the downtown area. As a gone-native SFer, I would have no problem finding public restrooms anywhere in the city, or a coffee shop with comfy couches soft enough to nap in.
  • bena 4y ago
    It's what I call the difference between "northern racism" and "southern racism". The American South is probably more ethnically diverse than the North. If you're in the South, you are going to encounter black people. They're 13% of the nation but they're up to 30% of the population in some states. Whereas, there are some states further north where the population is mostly white. Like the joke that when Prince died, Minnesota's black population died. So the areas developed different styles of racism. The South has more of a "know your place" kind of racism. You can live here, you can shop here, you can blah blah blah. But "know your place". Defer to your "betters". Etc. The North has developed NIMBY. "Yes, you are equal to me, but just not here." A "roll up the windows and lock the doors" kind of vibe if you will. Redlining was as much, if not more, a Northern thing. And while San Francisco is geographically South, it's got a lot of the North mentality about race relations. They want to deal with it by not dealing with it. They should be able to buy houses and shit with dignity, just not here. And it's a kind of attitude that can pervade while claiming to be fighting for racial equality. And those people may truly believe they are fighting for racial equality. Which is why we should always be a bit introspective and concerned whether our own actions are prejudiced in some manner. Because it can develop despite our best intentions.
    • hot_gril 4y ago
      This reminds me of one party in UC Berkeley hosted by my extremely Democrat-voting, racism-fighting friends. All their friends and acquaintances were there. 20 minutes in, I noticed something was different... every single person out of ~100 attending was white. This is statistically unlikely, given that >50% of the students are (or were?) Asian. And I'd been to plenty of other parties not like that. Then I realized, that entire friend group is distinct from my other groups, with almost no overlap.
  • Redoubts 4y ago
    > it seems like the most anti-diversity thing you can do. Can anybody from SFO relate their experience? Black people have been leaving SF steadily for 50 years. That's the experience.
• bongobingo1 4y ago
  I think it's not unreasonable to attack effects of homelessness as well as the cause. Some problems are really hard and some are just hard. In other places where it wont cost 1.7M to build one public toilet, this wouldn't be seen as such a failure or mis-step, just extending public services to people in crisis - as long as it's not seen as "fixed" by doing so.
  • lr4444lr 4y ago
    I think the OP wanted you to consider the benefit that 1.7 million could have had in providing direct aid to preventing homelessness, e.g. rental assistance or job training.
    • jonhohle 4y ago
      Certainly even an existing residence or office with multiple toilets could be purchased for ≤$1.7M within city limits.
      • jandrese 4y ago
        No way in hell you could buy even a small building in the city for the stated purpose of homeless services for anywhere near that amount of money. Anything homeless “attracting” will have you swarmed with NIMBYs and red tape for years. It will be called a crime magnet. People will say that it will reduce property values. They will sue you to stop the project. The one thing everybody agrees on in the public review meeting is that the place to put the homeless is “not near me”. You will spend way more than $1.7m on lawyers alone for a project like this.
    • itake 4y ago
      I'd think increasing demand would hurt everyone's bottom line, since non-assisted renters have competition with assisted renters for the same set of properties. Is there any data on how rental assistance impacts market rental prices?
      • cornel_io 4y ago
• hedora 4y ago
  We have an access road that was sized for utility trucks. We had to widen it slightly because of obscure California regulations. Widening it didn’t cost $1.7M. However, the cost per linear foot was within a factor of two of buying a line of Tesla Model 3s. This is in an unincorporated (rural) area, on a farm. The work lasted one rainstorm before needing extensive repairs. I’m completely unsurprised that building a hut around existing plumbing and adding a toilet costs so much in the city. I wonder if the price includes a sink.
  • jollyllama 4y ago
    Too many bureaucrats and construction profiteers, not enough good laborers.
    • hotpotamus 4y ago
      • melony 4y ago
        > The public toilet will be built by union workers who will “earn a living wage and benefits,” San Francisco doesn't owe anything to the tradespeople. When you share a border with Mexico, there is absolutely no reason not to outsource. Almost every city that can rapidly scale up infrastructure have access to some type of cheap labour. The rapid construction in the middle east and asia didn't happen by using union labor for everything. Nobody likes talking about the elephant in the room but that doesn't make it any less true. Most of the red tape and bureaucracy come from having too much local rights and democracy. If you can't build housing cheaply, then no amount of union rights and progressive policies would reduce the amount of homeless people.
        • hotpotamus 4y ago
          Does San Fransisco owe anything to anyone?
          • 4y ago
• xivzgrev 4y ago
  Wow I agree. When I read I thought it was an Onion article.
• giantg2 4y ago
  This is the even more wild statement to me. Just for the "look"? Last year, the city spent nearly a half-million dollars to develop new trash can prototypes because city leaders “weren’t happy with the look” of off-the-shelf cans. At least the public defacation issue is a true public health concern.
• sbmthakur 4y ago
  Is there any state that has laws to prevent NIMBYism?
• agumonkey 4y ago
  Society is strange. Last year a Canadian woodworker made cabins for the homeless which was destroyed (probably because of some regulation) by the city.
  • Kalium 4y ago
    SF and Oakland have both had problems with fires in encampments. I'm betting the... let's call them guerilla housing efforts generally don't measure up on fire safety.
    • hcurtiss 4y ago
      It seems that should be weighed against no home at all.
      • Kalium 4y ago
        How do you weigh incipient death-by-fire-with-major-public-hazards against other options? I have no idea how you'd do it or how you'd weight other options. Basically, how many avoidable deaths by fire are you willing to sign off on with this justification?
        • Ancapistani 4y ago
          > how many avoidable deaths by fire are you willing to sign off on with this justification? Up to, but not including, the number of avoidable deaths by exposure that are already occurring.
          • Kalium 4y ago
            Given the permanently mild weather in the SF Bay, this number is probably smaller than you think. Whereas fires in homeless encampments are a relatively frequent occurrence.
            • notch656a 4y ago
• spaceman_2020 4y ago
  Is this the real SF experience? Or is it media hype? I’m completely unfamiliar with the city. My only experience of America is staying in Atlanta for 6 months during an exchange program, but that was years back. Some of the stories of bureaucratic meddling and political corruption sound like something I’d see back home in India. Always had this impression that America was above that.
  • josh2600 4y ago
    America is really big. You’ll find a high level of variance across the country just like you will in most g20 countries. Big cities have lots of problems and lots of desirable features. It’s a toss up. Having recently returned from Japan to San Francisco, I find myself longing for a city which has less crime and more functioning infrastructure, but having grown up here it’s hard to leave my friends.
  • screye 4y ago
    > sound like something I’d see back home in India I have started appreciating bribery and corruption as a necessary lubrication for any excessively bureaucratic system to work. Trying to go through all of the legal rigamarole of the Indian regulatory process would mean nothing ever gets done.
    • jquery 4y ago
      Allowing bribery and corruption only ensures that whatever system you end up with requires bribery and corruption to work. Better to let the system freeze up entirely and remove the unnecessary bureaucracy than monkey-patch the bad system with bribery.
    • rootusrootus 4y ago
      > I have started appreciating bribery and corruption as a necessary lubrication for any excessively bureaucratic system to work. I feel similarly, when it comes to pork. We tried to eliminate that from congress, calling it wasteful and corrupting. And perhaps at some level that is accurate. But when we took it away, now all we have is naked ideology. It's not clear to me that this is an improvement, in fact I think it is the opposite. Bring back the pork.
• whimsicalism 4y ago
  > a far better option than actually trying to provide housing or attack more of the root causes. I see a lot of discussion among urbanists of "induced demand" when adding extra lanes to highways. Are we sure there wouldn't be induced demand from providing free housing to the homeless? Already, the Bay Area & LA are major draws to homeless populations throughout the country. [0] [0]: Yes, there are some studies that show "70% of homeless people in the Bay Area list most recently becoming homeless in the Bay Area" but many of those people came to the Bay in the first place to access homeless services and that study also relies on a very expansive definition of homeless). These studies are also incentivized to show this as a local issue from an ideological perspective. If you actually ask visible homeless people on the street where they are born, most will not say the Bay Area.
  • rootusrootus 4y ago
    > I see a lot of discussion among urbanists of "induced demand" when adding extra lanes to highways. Are we sure there wouldn't be induced demand from providing free housing to the homeless? This is an interesting point, but would it not apply more generally to creating more housing for everyone, rather than just when creating housing for homeless? The population of homeless people is just a tiny fraction of the total number of people in the housing market.
    • whimsicalism 4y ago
      The difference is that with normal supply and demand for housing, shifting the supply curve right will both lower the price and increase the quantity. Not the same for artificial supply of zero cost housing.
  • bnralt 4y ago
    Another problem with "just providing housing" is that there are a good number of these people who need a lot of support and have a hard time functioning in society. Here, they tried giving homeless residents housing vouchers to apartments, and it lead in a significant drop in quality of life for the people who lived there, with a rise in violence and crime in the buildings (this is based both on newspaper articles about the program and talking with residents). I've known people in buildings like that who are looking to move after living there for decades.
• nathanaldensr 4y ago
  Housing is provided. They don't want it. The ones that do move in to government housing often overdose.
• purpleblue 4y ago
  This is what decades of single-party dominance turns a city into. It has reached a fevered pitch in the last few years. I'm voting Republican across the board, no matter what, until the Democrats regain some semblance of sanity. The Democrats have taken our vote for granted and are not only sucking the state dry with their corruption (a la Nancy Pelosi) but layering on ridiculous social justice programs that are destroying this state. ALL of my friends are doing the same, and many people I've met are also doing the exact same thing.
• jquery 4y ago
  Replying to the top comment for visibility… the entire article is clickbait Buried in the article is this: > In an email to National Review Wednesday, the Recreation and Parks Department said it will consider various options for constructing the toilet, including installing a pre-fabricated restroom. The department said it budgets for the worst-case scenario, so it estimates high. “In the end, the project may well be delivered for far less [than $1.7 million], with leftover funding put toward further improvements or maintenance,” the email stated. $1.7m is the going rate for an entire public restroom. $1.7m is not what was spent on a single commode. It is merely what is set-aside for the project while in the planning stages.
• Justin_K 4y ago
  NIMBY? More like the government wants to control and tax everything.