8 ms·

Every day I start to believe more and more that people won't stop with homelessness until every homeless person is dead. "Emergency housing is a drain on taxpa

Every day I start to believe more and more that people won't stop with homelessness until every homeless person is dead. "Emergency housing is a drain on taxpayer dollars." "Job placement is taking jobs away from locals." "Soup kitchens are another drain on taxpayer money." "Homeless services are a waste of money." It makes me sick how people can act when it comes to the homeless population when so many of us are just 1 bad month away from being homeless ourselves.

derefr 3y ago
The problem is that unlike people with homes (who are generally stuck in one place — wherever their home is), homeless people have nothing holding them to places inhospitable to their presence. So the homeless diffuse around countries, drifting from place to place, until they settle in an "attractor" city — a local optimum for homeless hospitable-ness (with more social-welfare programs for them; less police suppression of homelessness; milder climate; more walkability; etc.) These attractor cities then experience undue burden of having to fight basically an entire country's homeless problem using only municipal (rather than state or federal) tax dollars; where every social welfare program they add, creates "induced demand" by making them into more of an attractor city for surrounding homeless populations. The homed people living in these attractor cities, experience a reality where they can choose to vote in progressive parties that throw however-much money at the problem of homelessness — adding public housing, shelters, food programs, jobs programs, etc. — with the only result being ever more homeless people showing up in the city. Which causes these homed people in these attractor cities to get burned out on the idea of solving homelessness. (An aphorism: "the river sees more water than the lakebed.") AFAICT, the only way out of the problem, is to 1. set aside federal funding for solving homelessness (which could be done easily enough in the US if anyone without a permanent residence in a particular state, were interpreted by federal law as not being "of" any state, but still a US national, and therefore a person the federal government has a duty to take care of directly — basically the same as how the federal government does insurance, postal delivery, etc. for actively-serving members of the military); and then 2. use that funding to start offering social-welfare programs for homeless people in places that don't already have large homeless populations, with the aim of creating more, smaller attractors, dispersing the homeless population, so that it's not all having to be dealt with by just the one or two natural attractor cities per country. Yes, both of these things are big political lifts. I see it as something like the federal highway system, or for that matter, like military bases: cases where it's in all our best interests to relinquish local NIMBYesque control, in favor of top-down eminent-domain use of land for serving the needs of the country as a whole.
- generalizations 3y ago
  All you do then is turn the entire country into an "attractor country" - faced with the 'homeless problem' of the rest of the world. Which is, ironically, one of the issues raised against open borders.
  - gtbcb 3y ago
    Agreed about the "attractor country" comment; however, at least we have some restrictions on borders. I agree with the parent comment that this issue needs to be addressed by the federal gov't. I wonder if some states could even be incentivized to support such systems by creating rehabilitation communities which would bring jobs (and yes homeless) but still more $ in general. FL and AZ sort of does this with old people and some states seem to do it for addiction treatment centers. X% of the population will always need some gov't help and Y% will need gov't help at some point. I think we need to stop negatively viewing these groups as sponges on society. Ability is a spectrum, and we don't criticize someone w Down's Syndrome, and so I don't think we should be so harsh on people who are homeless / have trouble holding down a job / low-ish IQ / and even those who fried their brain w drugs / etc. Yes, we want to avoid perverse incentives and incentivize people to be productive members of society, but we also need to recognize that some people will always need some help, and as a society, I think we should help them, striving for a future with little to no involuntary poverty.
  - derefr 3y ago
    Homeless people are generally not allowed to cross borders pretty much anywhere in the world, except under special conditions (e.g. being considered a refugee fleeing a warzone or failed state.) This is why most countries' border services will ask short-term visitors the address of the place they'll be staying while they're there: no country, no matter how open its borders, wants you to visit with the goal of becoming a beggar on their streets. (And this is also a large part of why particular passports only let you visit particular places without a visa. The EU has internally-open borders for EU citizens, because they have mostly equalized levels of social-welfare "pressure" between countries. But no EU country will let you in from a non-EU developing country that has high levels of homelessness, if you can't prove income; and that's something the EU enforces on its member states, so that no country becomes the de-facto homeless ingress point for the whole of the EU.) Because of these measures, each country (or open-bordered region of equal-welfare countries) is mostly just dealing with its own homeless problem, not with other countries'/regions' homeless problems.
gumby 3y ago
As is clear from may comments to this post, the american dream is apparently to pull up the ladder behind you.
AnotherGoodName 3y ago
They'll complain about lack of workers while doing this too. Put people into a hopeless unemployable situation and don't allow them a way out and meanwhile complain that no one wants to work. We could fix the one of the biggest economic issues right now by enacting a program to get people back on their feet but apparently the real solution is for them to die.
- ng12 3y ago
  A very large chunk of homeless people are either: 1. Employed but unable to afford the COL of the area. 2. Too mentally unwell to hold down a job, possibly due to a history of hard drug addiction. I agree that some homeless people can be meaningfully helped through drug addiction treatment and/or employment programs, but it won't solve the whole problem.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
throwaway894345 3y ago
I don’t think many people just want to fuck over homeless people, I think they don’t perceive these programs are effective—they don’t perceive the desired inverse correlation between increase in social spending and reduction in homelessness/poverty (possibly because they’re told by parties with malicious interests that these programs aren’t effective).
- notaustinpowers 3y ago
  It's easy to notice a homeless person. It's a helluva lot harder to notice a person who used to be homeless.
  - throwaway894345 3y ago
    True, but I think most peoples’ intuition is based on (perceived) changes in the number of homeless people they see over time rather than transitions to/from homelessness in any given individual.
droopyEyelids 3y ago
Part of the problem is the overloaded definition of the term 'homeless' Look at all the different things it covers: 1. Chronic homelessness: This refers to individuals who have experienced homelessness for long periods or repeatedly over time. They often struggle with complex issues such as mental health problems, substance abuse, or disabilities, which make it difficult for them to maintain stable housing. 2. Episodic homelessness: Individuals experiencing episodic homelessness go through multiple episodes of homelessness throughout their lives. They may face challenges like unstable employment, lack of affordable housing, or inadequate social support systems. 3. Transitional homelessness: This type of homelessness is temporary and occurs when an individual or family faces a crisis or life transition, such as job loss, eviction, or escaping domestic violence. With proper support, people in this category can usually regain stable housing. 4. Hidden homelessness: Hidden homelessness refers to individuals who do not have a permanent residence but are not visibly homeless. They may be temporarily staying with friends or family, living in overcrowded conditions, or residing in places not meant for habitation, such as cars or abandoned buildings. 5. Youth homelessness: Young people who have left or been forced out of their homes, often due to family conflict, abuse, or neglect, experience youth homelessness. They may face unique challenges such as lack of life skills, education, or employment opportunities. I think the fact that there are habitually antisocial people in the first category (chronic homeless) sours the voting populace against the whole idea of 'homelessness' because there isn't enough distinction in the term. And that is a shame because while the chronic homeless may be the most visible and difficult to address, the majority of homeless people fall into the other categories, and they (and we!) reap huge benefits from social programs.
Hermitian909 3y ago
As someone who volunteers with the homeless a lot I mostly agree, but I will take the other side for a moment: It's very hard to a voter base who feel financially squeezed that their taxes should be going to people who, usually, are not holding down a job. They're "doing everything right" and feel the government is robbing Peter to pay Paul as it were. There are a lot of sophisticated answers we can give as to why the above line of reasoning is wrong (multiple analyses show that, basically, if you're unwilling to literally murder people for being homeless it's cheaper to help them) but it's a hard sell.
- notaustinpowers 3y ago
  I think the issue isn't how much citizens are paying in taxes. I think it's how the government is allocating those funds. For example, my town I live in has average rent prices for 1 bedroom apartments ABOVE the medium HOUSEHOLD income. Our homeless population is starting to get out of control. Every day there are 3 to 4 homeless families with their children at the local mall intersection asking for assistance, because the city only has 13 units set aside for homeless housing. But we spend 100s of millions a year on one public high schools sports budget. The government is the party that should be responsible, and I'm tired of the onus of the responsibility being put on the citizens. Why else do we PAY taxes for if not for these social services?
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    > we spend 100s of millions a year on one public high schools sports budget Where is this?
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  “A Republic, if you can keep it.” The quote came to mind while I listened to a Radiolab episode on police surveillance [1]. We usually take it to mean opposing tyranny, even when convenient. But that might be too simple. For every Patrick Henry there are dozens who prefer not to die. If we let the security situation devolve out of sympathy, or inequality increase in pursuit of efficiency, those people will snap and prompt a brutal backlash. I’m not suggesting we re-criminalise homelessness. But the status quo, with the permanent homeless population, isn’t working. I don’t know how much one quashes one’s sympathy for the less fortunate and sense for technological progress to achieve these ends, but it’s becoming clear we have to explore toward that boundary. Open-air hard drug use, theft of non-essential goods, aggression and refusal to receive psychiatric screening (note: not treatment); these seem like low-hanging fruit to target zero of. Hell, make it part of a grand bargain to improve the transient homeless population’s wellbeing. [1] https://radiolab.org/podcast/eye-sky https://radiolab.org/podcast/eye-sky
piloto_ciego 3y ago
Homelessness is a threat to keep workers in line.
rationalfaith 3y ago
[dead]
0xB31B1B 3y ago
Library wifi is not a homeless service. An 24 hour open seat on a subway is not a homeless service. Parks where children play is not a homeless service. Public goods being overtaken by an antisocial drug users in the name of homeless support is not progressive.
- dijit 3y ago
  The cost to run the service though is as close to zero as you can possibly get. It just feels somewhat inhumane to take something away which is a marginal cost and at best and doesn't cause harm. I mean, Libraries themselves do not need to exist, they are a service, they don't earn money, under pure capitalism they can't exist. But we know as a society that it improves social mobility and education. and I mean, you can't do a lot these days without access to internet.
  - throwawaymaths 3y ago
    Why not provide wifi for the homeless as a service, with its own line item, instead of doing it via the Library?
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - sangnoir 3y ago
      Why segregate an existing service that's already meant for everyone? Would we need another wifi network for Veterans and yet another for retirees?
      - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
        > Why segregate a service that's already meant for everyone? Because one group denies it to others. In New York, the potent image is that of a homeless person obviously going through a mental health issue, who hasn’t bathed in what smells like weeks, sitting in a subway car on their own. (When I was younger and naïve, I went into one such car and tried to talk to them. I had a handful of what I’ll pretend was a smelly sauce tossed my way.)
stickfigure 3y ago
What's your address and WiFi password? Maybe we can turn your neighborhood into the homeless camp known for free wifi. Homelessness is a complex subject but the impact of homeless people is not spread evenly. The people that live in that neighborhood (I used to be one) don't want it concentrated there. A few homeless people might be tolerable; a major camp is not, and free wifi at night acts as a magnet. I don't blame them at all for shutting it off.
- notaustinpowers 3y ago
  Kick 'em while they're down right? How dare you, a public citizen, use public services!
  - stickfigure 3y ago
    Nobody is being denied public services; the WiFi works for everyone during daylight hours. It's just turned off at night to discourage people from sleeping there. They close and lock the library doors too.
    - notaustinpowers 3y ago
      We have loitering laws that would then go to prevent homeless people from using those services during daylight hours. My library requires you to have a drivers license and prove you have an address within that city/town to be able to use it. So a homeless person without a DL, or who never had an address in that city would not be allowed access. And could be arrested for loitering for just existing near a library during daylight hours.
      - stickfigure 3y ago
        The article is about turning off WiFi at night. Is your library the Eureka Valley library, or even in San Francisco? If not, speculation about what they do/don't/could permit is not constructive to the conversation.
somerandomqaguy 3y ago
I doubt they want them dead. If I had to guess, I'd say they just want them gone. How many people would look the other way if we were talking putting homeless into death camps and mass murdering them, that I have no idea about.
- silverquiet 3y ago
  One of the more absurd details of the holocaust was that it started as a plan to move all the Jews to Madagascar. (I like to imagine a bunch of Nazis in a room in the early 30's with a world map and they just sort of agreed that it looked like a big enough island). They just wanted the Jews gone too, but economic realities caught up with them I suppose.
- Tozen 3y ago
  That's part of the problem. The get out of my sight, go somewhere else mentality, can lead down a very dark and even more evil path.
km3r 3y ago
Or we are demanding real solutions. A library is not a homeless shelter. If the homeless population nearby is getting in the way of provide safe and clean access, the library should seek remedies to that. The progressive attitude of "any opposition to a left wing idea is a right wing talking point" is so problematic towards finding *effective* progressive solutions. We NEED to critique our ideas and programs. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. And SF is on that road if we don't figure out something more effective. SF spends more per homeless individual than most other US cities. It's not a matter of "we could solve this if there wasn't as much opposition to spending taxpayer money". Whatever we are doing now isn't working, and it's not some right wing talking point to acknowledge that. SF has wasted billions on bandaids to our housing crisis, it's time we find solutions that actually work on getting homeless people housed with access to the care they need.
scarmig 3y ago
It's reasonable for people have access to public services. If you turn every public service--sidewalks, parks, libraries, public transit--into something unusable because it's really an ersatz homeless shelter, there's an entirely expected response: people cease to use those services, because they're not really public anymore. And then people either vote to cut funding for those services, or they defund with their feet. Governments have functions and services beyond homeless services they are obligated to provide. Saying that no public services will be provided until homelessness is solved is not a sustainable approach.
- notaustinpowers 3y ago
  Call me a radical but I think human beings without homes are a higher priority than paying 10s or 100s of millions of dollars a year to build a new park or pave a road.
  - scarmig 3y ago
    You can certainly take that perspective. It's unclear, however, how you'll find the funds to turn a city into a giant homeless shelter when no one else wants to live there because you don't offer access to safe and clean parks, sidewalks, and roads.
berkle4455 3y ago
I just don't care anymore after being verbally assaulted on walks or at parks by random people clearly out of their mind and an endless supply of used needles in public places and playgrounds.
- notaustinpowers 3y ago
  Have some compassion maybe?
  - bsder 3y ago
    Thoughts and prayers are always the least that can be done in any situation. Yes, you can read that quip both ways.
throwaway22032 3y ago
It would probably illuminate the situation to realise that no-one I know personally is "1 bad month away from being homeless". I don't think that this is unusual. Staving off the obvious retort - I don't have some sort of silver spoon upbringing, my parents and childhood peers are supermarket workers, bus drivers etc. People I know and socialise with just spend within their means, live in places that aren't hilariously expensive, have an emergency fund etc. They plan their lives around being able to provide for themselves and not burdening others. Very few people I know could afford to live a normal life somewhere like SF. I don't think that homeless people are subhuman as some people here mention, that's clearly a strawman. But I don't consider them to be my peers either. Their life choices, both past and present, are completely baffling to me.
panda888888 3y ago
Compassion fatigue is real. Have you lived near a large homeless encampment? Not one guy with a sleeping bag, but the type of big encampment with 20+ people? We're talking multiple stabbings/shootings per month, people shitting on the sidewalk, a significant risk that you'll be be harassed in an unpredictable way (e.g. a homeless person swinging a hammer and screaming in a way that's impossible to deescalate), high risk of fires or exploding RVs, and even mundane/"harmless" things like methheads uprooting literally every flower from your garden (this happened to me). We're talking about a situation where these people are literally terrorizing neighborhoods. There will be maybe 50 homeless people and ~5000+ neighbors, and that small group can ruin the place to the extent that kids can no longer walk to school. After these experiences, I'm a lot more skeptical about homeless services. I don't want them to die, but at some point forced drug treatment or forced incarceration would be more humane than providing "services" and letting them all OD and die on the streets.

derefr 3y ago

The problem is that unlike people with homes (who are generally stuck in one place — wherever their home is), homeless people have nothing holding them to places inhospitable to their presence. So the homeless diffuse around countries, drifting from place to place, until they settle in an "attractor" city — a local optimum for homeless hospitable-ness (with more social-welfare programs for them; less police suppression of homelessness; milder climate; more walkability; etc.) These attractor cities then experience undue burden of having to fight basically an entire country's homeless problem using only municipal (rather than state or federal) tax dollars; where every social welfare program they add, creates "induced demand" by making them into more of an attractor city for surrounding homeless populations. The homed people living in these attractor cities, experience a reality where they can choose to vote in progressive parties that throw however-much money at the problem of homelessness — adding public housing, shelters, food programs, jobs programs, etc. — with the only result being ever more homeless people showing up in the city. Which causes these homed people in these attractor cities to get burned out on the idea of solving homelessness. (An aphorism: "the river sees more water than the lakebed.") AFAICT, the only way out of the problem, is to 1. set aside federal funding for solving homelessness (which could be done easily enough in the US if anyone without a permanent residence in a particular state, were interpreted by federal law as not being "of" any state, but still a US national, and therefore a person the federal government has a duty to take care of directly — basically the same as how the federal government does insurance, postal delivery, etc. for actively-serving members of the military); and then 2. use that funding to start offering social-welfare programs for homeless people in places that don't already have large homeless populations, with the aim of creating more, smaller attractors, dispersing the homeless population, so that it's not all having to be dealt with by just the one or two natural attractor cities per country. Yes, both of these things are big political lifts. I see it as something like the federal highway system, or for that matter, like military bases: cases where it's in all our best interests to relinquish local NIMBYesque control, in favor of top-down eminent-domain use of land for serving the needs of the country as a whole.

generalizations 3y ago
All you do then is turn the entire country into an "attractor country" - faced with the 'homeless problem' of the rest of the world. Which is, ironically, one of the issues raised against open borders.
- gtbcb 3y ago
  Agreed about the "attractor country" comment; however, at least we have some restrictions on borders. I agree with the parent comment that this issue needs to be addressed by the federal gov't. I wonder if some states could even be incentivized to support such systems by creating rehabilitation communities which would bring jobs (and yes homeless) but still more $ in general. FL and AZ sort of does this with old people and some states seem to do it for addiction treatment centers. X% of the population will always need some gov't help and Y% will need gov't help at some point. I think we need to stop negatively viewing these groups as sponges on society. Ability is a spectrum, and we don't criticize someone w Down's Syndrome, and so I don't think we should be so harsh on people who are homeless / have trouble holding down a job / low-ish IQ / and even those who fried their brain w drugs / etc. Yes, we want to avoid perverse incentives and incentivize people to be productive members of society, but we also need to recognize that some people will always need some help, and as a society, I think we should help them, striving for a future with little to no involuntary poverty.
- derefr 3y ago
  Homeless people are generally not allowed to cross borders pretty much anywhere in the world, except under special conditions (e.g. being considered a refugee fleeing a warzone or failed state.) This is why most countries' border services will ask short-term visitors the address of the place they'll be staying while they're there: no country, no matter how open its borders, wants you to visit with the goal of becoming a beggar on their streets. (And this is also a large part of why particular passports only let you visit particular places without a visa. The EU has internally-open borders for EU citizens, because they have mostly equalized levels of social-welfare "pressure" between countries. But no EU country will let you in from a non-EU developing country that has high levels of homelessness, if you can't prove income; and that's something the EU enforces on its member states, so that no country becomes the de-facto homeless ingress point for the whole of the EU.) Because of these measures, each country (or open-bordered region of equal-welfare countries) is mostly just dealing with its own homeless problem, not with other countries'/regions' homeless problems.

gumby 3y ago

As is clear from may comments to this post, the american dream is apparently to pull up the ladder behind you.

AnotherGoodName 3y ago

They'll complain about lack of workers while doing this too. Put people into a hopeless unemployable situation and don't allow them a way out and meanwhile complain that no one wants to work. We could fix the one of the biggest economic issues right now by enacting a program to get people back on their feet but apparently the real solution is for them to die.

ng12 3y ago
A very large chunk of homeless people are either: 1. Employed but unable to afford the COL of the area. 2. Too mentally unwell to hold down a job, possibly due to a history of hard drug addiction. I agree that some homeless people can be meaningfully helped through drug addiction treatment and/or employment programs, but it won't solve the whole problem.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

throwaway894345 3y ago

I don’t think many people just want to fuck over homeless people, I think they don’t perceive these programs are effective—they don’t perceive the desired inverse correlation between increase in social spending and reduction in homelessness/poverty (possibly because they’re told by parties with malicious interests that these programs aren’t effective).

notaustinpowers 3y ago
It's easy to notice a homeless person. It's a helluva lot harder to notice a person who used to be homeless.
- throwaway894345 3y ago
  True, but I think most peoples’ intuition is based on (perceived) changes in the number of homeless people they see over time rather than transitions to/from homelessness in any given individual.

droopyEyelids 3y ago

Part of the problem is the overloaded definition of the term 'homeless' Look at all the different things it covers: 1. Chronic homelessness: This refers to individuals who have experienced homelessness for long periods or repeatedly over time. They often struggle with complex issues such as mental health problems, substance abuse, or disabilities, which make it difficult for them to maintain stable housing. 2. Episodic homelessness: Individuals experiencing episodic homelessness go through multiple episodes of homelessness throughout their lives. They may face challenges like unstable employment, lack of affordable housing, or inadequate social support systems. 3. Transitional homelessness: This type of homelessness is temporary and occurs when an individual or family faces a crisis or life transition, such as job loss, eviction, or escaping domestic violence. With proper support, people in this category can usually regain stable housing. 4. Hidden homelessness: Hidden homelessness refers to individuals who do not have a permanent residence but are not visibly homeless. They may be temporarily staying with friends or family, living in overcrowded conditions, or residing in places not meant for habitation, such as cars or abandoned buildings. 5. Youth homelessness: Young people who have left or been forced out of their homes, often due to family conflict, abuse, or neglect, experience youth homelessness. They may face unique challenges such as lack of life skills, education, or employment opportunities. I think the fact that there are habitually antisocial people in the first category (chronic homeless) sours the voting populace against the whole idea of 'homelessness' because there isn't enough distinction in the term. And that is a shame because while the chronic homeless may be the most visible and difficult to address, the majority of homeless people fall into the other categories, and they (and we!) reap huge benefits from social programs.

Hermitian909 3y ago

As someone who volunteers with the homeless a lot I mostly agree, but I will take the other side for a moment: It's very hard to a voter base who feel financially squeezed that their taxes should be going to people who, usually, are not holding down a job. They're "doing everything right" and feel the government is robbing Peter to pay Paul as it were. There are a lot of sophisticated answers we can give as to why the above line of reasoning is wrong (multiple analyses show that, basically, if you're unwilling to literally murder people for being homeless it's cheaper to help them) but it's a hard sell.

notaustinpowers 3y ago
I think the issue isn't how much citizens are paying in taxes. I think it's how the government is allocating those funds. For example, my town I live in has average rent prices for 1 bedroom apartments ABOVE the medium HOUSEHOLD income. Our homeless population is starting to get out of control. Every day there are 3 to 4 homeless families with their children at the local mall intersection asking for assistance, because the city only has 13 units set aside for homeless housing. But we spend 100s of millions a year on one public high schools sports budget. The government is the party that should be responsible, and I'm tired of the onus of the responsibility being put on the citizens. Why else do we PAY taxes for if not for these social services?
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > we spend 100s of millions a year on one public high schools sports budget Where is this?
JumpCrisscross 3y ago
“A Republic, if you can keep it.” The quote came to mind while I listened to a Radiolab episode on police surveillance [1]. We usually take it to mean opposing tyranny, even when convenient. But that might be too simple. For every Patrick Henry there are dozens who prefer not to die. If we let the security situation devolve out of sympathy, or inequality increase in pursuit of efficiency, those people will snap and prompt a brutal backlash. I’m not suggesting we re-criminalise homelessness. But the status quo, with the permanent homeless population, isn’t working. I don’t know how much one quashes one’s sympathy for the less fortunate and sense for technological progress to achieve these ends, but it’s becoming clear we have to explore toward that boundary. Open-air hard drug use, theft of non-essential goods, aggression and refusal to receive psychiatric screening (note: not treatment); these seem like low-hanging fruit to target zero of. Hell, make it part of a grand bargain to improve the transient homeless population’s wellbeing. [1] https://radiolab.org/podcast/eye-sky https://radiolab.org/podcast/eye-sky

piloto_ciego 3y ago

Homelessness is a threat to keep workers in line.

rationalfaith 3y ago

[dead]

0xB31B1B 3y ago

Library wifi is not a homeless service. An 24 hour open seat on a subway is not a homeless service. Parks where children play is not a homeless service. Public goods being overtaken by an antisocial drug users in the name of homeless support is not progressive.

dijit 3y ago
The cost to run the service though is as close to zero as you can possibly get. It just feels somewhat inhumane to take something away which is a marginal cost and at best and doesn't cause harm. I mean, Libraries themselves do not need to exist, they are a service, they don't earn money, under pure capitalism they can't exist. But we know as a society that it improves social mobility and education. and I mean, you can't do a lot these days without access to internet.
- throwawaymaths 3y ago
  Why not provide wifi for the homeless as a service, with its own line item, instead of doing it via the Library?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - sangnoir 3y ago
    Why segregate an existing service that's already meant for everyone? Would we need another wifi network for Veterans and yet another for retirees?
    - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
      > Why segregate a service that's already meant for everyone? Because one group denies it to others. In New York, the potent image is that of a homeless person obviously going through a mental health issue, who hasn’t bathed in what smells like weeks, sitting in a subway car on their own. (When I was younger and naïve, I went into one such car and tried to talk to them. I had a handful of what I’ll pretend was a smelly sauce tossed my way.)

stickfigure 3y ago

What's your address and WiFi password? Maybe we can turn your neighborhood into the homeless camp known for free wifi. Homelessness is a complex subject but the impact of homeless people is not spread evenly. The people that live in that neighborhood (I used to be one) don't want it concentrated there. A few homeless people might be tolerable; a major camp is not, and free wifi at night acts as a magnet. I don't blame them at all for shutting it off.

notaustinpowers 3y ago
Kick 'em while they're down right? How dare you, a public citizen, use public services!
- stickfigure 3y ago
  Nobody is being denied public services; the WiFi works for everyone during daylight hours. It's just turned off at night to discourage people from sleeping there. They close and lock the library doors too.
  - notaustinpowers 3y ago
    We have loitering laws that would then go to prevent homeless people from using those services during daylight hours. My library requires you to have a drivers license and prove you have an address within that city/town to be able to use it. So a homeless person without a DL, or who never had an address in that city would not be allowed access. And could be arrested for loitering for just existing near a library during daylight hours.
    - stickfigure 3y ago
      The article is about turning off WiFi at night. Is your library the Eureka Valley library, or even in San Francisco? If not, speculation about what they do/don't/could permit is not constructive to the conversation.

somerandomqaguy 3y ago

I doubt they want them dead. If I had to guess, I'd say they just want them gone. How many people would look the other way if we were talking putting homeless into death camps and mass murdering them, that I have no idea about.

silverquiet 3y ago
One of the more absurd details of the holocaust was that it started as a plan to move all the Jews to Madagascar. (I like to imagine a bunch of Nazis in a room in the early 30's with a world map and they just sort of agreed that it looked like a big enough island). They just wanted the Jews gone too, but economic realities caught up with them I suppose.
Tozen 3y ago
That's part of the problem. The get out of my sight, go somewhere else mentality, can lead down a very dark and even more evil path.

km3r 3y ago

Or we are demanding real solutions. A library is not a homeless shelter. If the homeless population nearby is getting in the way of provide safe and clean access, the library should seek remedies to that. The progressive attitude of "any opposition to a left wing idea is a right wing talking point" is so problematic towards finding *effective* progressive solutions. We NEED to critique our ideas and programs. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. And SF is on that road if we don't figure out something more effective. SF spends more per homeless individual than most other US cities. It's not a matter of "we could solve this if there wasn't as much opposition to spending taxpayer money". Whatever we are doing now isn't working, and it's not some right wing talking point to acknowledge that. SF has wasted billions on bandaids to our housing crisis, it's time we find solutions that actually work on getting homeless people housed with access to the care they need.

scarmig 3y ago

It's reasonable for people have access to public services. If you turn every public service--sidewalks, parks, libraries, public transit--into something unusable because it's really an ersatz homeless shelter, there's an entirely expected response: people cease to use those services, because they're not really public anymore. And then people either vote to cut funding for those services, or they defund with their feet. Governments have functions and services beyond homeless services they are obligated to provide. Saying that no public services will be provided until homelessness is solved is not a sustainable approach.

notaustinpowers 3y ago
Call me a radical but I think human beings without homes are a higher priority than paying 10s or 100s of millions of dollars a year to build a new park or pave a road.
- scarmig 3y ago
  You can certainly take that perspective. It's unclear, however, how you'll find the funds to turn a city into a giant homeless shelter when no one else wants to live there because you don't offer access to safe and clean parks, sidewalks, and roads.

berkle4455 3y ago

I just don't care anymore after being verbally assaulted on walks or at parks by random people clearly out of their mind and an endless supply of used needles in public places and playgrounds.

notaustinpowers 3y ago
Have some compassion maybe?
- bsder 3y ago
  Thoughts and prayers are always the least that can be done in any situation. Yes, you can read that quip both ways.

throwaway22032 3y ago

It would probably illuminate the situation to realise that no-one I know personally is "1 bad month away from being homeless". I don't think that this is unusual. Staving off the obvious retort - I don't have some sort of silver spoon upbringing, my parents and childhood peers are supermarket workers, bus drivers etc. People I know and socialise with just spend within their means, live in places that aren't hilariously expensive, have an emergency fund etc. They plan their lives around being able to provide for themselves and not burdening others. Very few people I know could afford to live a normal life somewhere like SF. I don't think that homeless people are subhuman as some people here mention, that's clearly a strawman. But I don't consider them to be my peers either. Their life choices, both past and present, are completely baffling to me.

panda888888 3y ago

Compassion fatigue is real. Have you lived near a large homeless encampment? Not one guy with a sleeping bag, but the type of big encampment with 20+ people? We're talking multiple stabbings/shootings per month, people shitting on the sidewalk, a significant risk that you'll be be harassed in an unpredictable way (e.g. a homeless person swinging a hammer and screaming in a way that's impossible to deescalate), high risk of fires or exploding RVs, and even mundane/"harmless" things like methheads uprooting literally every flower from your garden (this happened to me). We're talking about a situation where these people are literally terrorizing neighborhoods. There will be maybe 50 homeless people and ~5000+ neighbors, and that small group can ruin the place to the extent that kids can no longer walk to school. After these experiences, I'm a lot more skeptical about homeless services. I don't want them to die, but at some point forced drug treatment or forced incarceration would be more humane than providing "services" and letting them all OD and die on the streets.