28 ms·

San Francisco homelessness: Park ranger helps one person at a time

381 points by NaOH 2y ago

searealist 2y ago
Quoting a reddit comment: > Wow, this is almost a parody. An able-bodied meth addict and convicted felon was illegally living in a public park for 20 years, littering the land around him and forcing rangers to spend countless time and resources cleaning up the mess he left behind, making regular emergency room visits due to his unhealthy lifestyle costing the city hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, constantly doing illegal drugs while not holding down a job and suspiciously acquiring new supplies for his encampment after every sweep (how much do you want to be he engages in illegal activity), and giving an extremely hard time to caseworkers and HHS staff who already have a busy workload (including leaving/getting kicked out of housing multiple times). That one Golden Gate Park Dweller has probably cost the city millions of dollars over the last few years while consuming valuable time from caseworkers and park rangers who could be helping someone else (they're already overloaded). Not to mention the potential damage to the park's environment caused by his littering. What this guy needs is outpatient mental health treatment, and it's honestly criminal that our country has basically no resources for people with mental illness and shoves them into jail or shelters without treating their underlying problems.
- iancmceachern 2y ago
  This is true, I've heard the SF DA and police departments say so as well. They no longer prosecute or convict people of things here also, because there is no purpose, no where for them to be sent for rehabilitation. As a result we have created an open air mental institution combined with an open air drug market. It's getting pretty wild to live here.
  - chrisdhoover 2y ago
    Getting? It has been for years. Frank Jordan was the last mayor that tried a real plan.
  - titzer 2y ago
    It's absolutely nuts to me that the government finds ways to spend money on literally anything but providing shelter, clothing, food, and support to people. UBI would be cheaper and far more humane than practically any policy--or lack thereof--they can think of.
    - sarchertech 2y ago
      There are people UBI would help. But not the people in this article. The 2nd person in the article had free housing twice, but lost it both times because he kept fighting with people.
    - idlewords 2y ago
      This is an article about a man who was given all those things, repeatedly, and went back to sleeping rough in the park. How would giving him money make any difference?
      - BryantD 2y ago
        The hope is that UBI would prevent him and people like him from falling into homelessness in the first place.
        aprilthird2021 2y ago
        He would have still become homeless with UBI. The home he lived in was owned by his grandfather and was sold when he passed away, leaving him with no home at 18 when he could not possibly earn enough to rent or prove to anyone renting that he had enough stability and income to be given a place
        gs17 2y ago
        >when he could not possibly earn enough to rent or prove to anyone renting that he had enough stability and income to be given a place Why do you think that's a fault of UBI, rather than the fault of your hypothetical UBI being insufficient? AFAIK any actual implementation of UBI would be intended to be feasible to have housing on, even if it's not very good housing. With UBI, there's a level of income that people are guaranteed to have without needing any proof, that's the whole concept!
  - teaearlgraycold 2y ago
    Things are still bad in the city, but the state of homelessness has improved. The article states that the number of tents in Golden Gate Park has gone down by 10x in the last 8 years. I would say there's been a similar decrease on the sidewalks of the city in just the last 4. I walked much of the length of Mission Street yesterday, and there are still a lot of sad scenes to bear witness to. But it's clearly improving.
    - iancmceachern 2y ago
      In my daily walk to work it's gotten far worse. Often the "problem" just moves from neighborhood to neighborhood in my experience.
      - teaearlgraycold 2y ago
        Yeah I’ve seen things shift around as well. But I walk a lot in the city - all over the city. It’s better overall now than it was a few years ago.
- deleted 2y ago
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- galimalint 2y ago
  In australia, they put the people with mental illness or addiction in their own apartment and give them pills, and check in with them regularly. Definitely costs less than 50k/year. Most of them do end up getting better after several years. It seems US has a system that extracts maximumly from their tax payers and just keeps things in (bad) status quo as long as they can. A babying system if you well.
  - teaearlgraycold 2y ago
    I believe the homeless are kept around as a threat to the poor housed Americans. On top of that, those poor people are struggling so greatly that they too don't want to see the homeless helped too much. They don't want to see someone without any job live an easier life than they do with 3.
    - ltbarcly3 2y ago
      Do you honestly believe this or are you just being snarky?
      - teaearlgraycold 2y ago
        I don't think it's the whole picture. But I do believe those are two components of the situation. I'm happy to hear your insights.
        ltbarcly3 2y ago
        It's not even remotely true, to any degree. It's very conspiratorial thinking. If "they" were competent, unified, and powerful enough to create a situation like you describe "they" wouldn't need to. Which gets to the heart of why conspiracy thinking doesn't hold water, who in your theory are "they"?
        teaearlgraycold 2y ago
        “They” in my above comment is only used to refer to common people voting myopically. Usually conservatives who vote against social services. As for my claim of homelessness being a threat - I’m not saying that there’s any grand conspiracy. But in the scheme of capitalism it helps to have an underclass that receive undue blame and keep people from sliding down the ladder further out of fear. No one needs to intentionally keep anyone homeless for this to be a functioning part of the system. It’s like evolution but on a societal scale. Whatever we have now has persisted for a while. The threat of homelessness is part of why it’s persisted. Imagine if there was no uncomfortable bottom to society. All wage slaves that sell their body and time would simply choose to not work because not working would be a better life. It’s memetics. And of course we need people to do work. But we could be optimizing for happiness instead of GDP growth. Think of religion. When a religion mandates evangelism it’s not necessarily out of a nefarious central planner trying to gain control over more people. But for religions that do mandate evangelism there is a greater chance the religion thrives. Because obviously recruiting people means you have a bigger religion. But the believers might simply each want to share their religion out of genuine belief in an afterlife. I was raised in a specifically anti-evangelical religion. It’s pretty small as a result. There were the Shakers, a now extinct sect of Christianity. They considered sex ungodly and thus had no children. That killed the religion. Other sects promote having many children and survive.
- chrsig 2y ago
  well, one major problem is that you can't force people to get mental health treatment. the courts can, but that means things need to be brought before a judge.
  - silverquiet 2y ago
    Given how hard it's gotten to force people to take vaccines, I would think that psychotropic drugs are probably off the table completely.
    - chrsig 2y ago
      no, it just tends to need to be a violent offense
    - goatlover 2y ago
      They can be forcibly given if committed with a judge's order.
  - StefanBatory 2y ago
    And now with RFK wanting to put people with ADHD into labor camps, any chances of a program to help mentally ill homeless people is close to zero. I am sure that they would accept that "help" :>
- TechnicolorByte 2y ago
  Reopen mental institutions and enable forced is institutionalization. Engage this at the federal level. So sick of this crap. These “homeless” are not the kind who need clean clothes and shelter and some help getting a job. They want to live like this at the expense of the public’s money and enjoyment of public amenities.
  - teaearlgraycold 2y ago
    I'm pretty far left but I have to agree that some people are not mentally capable of independence, cause public harm, and need to be forcibly committed. I want that to be done carefully and humanely. I don't want someone who sleeps on the street and causes no trouble to get institutionalized. But the worst of them should get jailed, tried, and then sent away. We also need to support people at risk when they're young. If their parents had mental health support, if they didn't experience a loss of housing as children, if losing their job didn't make opioids looks so attractive, we wouldn't have that many people unable to care for themselves.
  - bloomingkales 2y ago
    Hey, that actually works really well in India: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpIJJPvn_ZI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpIJJPvn_ZI Edit: This got downvoted because it's a direct retort to what the GP is suggesting.
- deleted 2y ago
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- 29athrowaway 2y ago
  On one side, having compassion for vulnerable people is fine, but resources are finite. The government can help people, but who would they rather help? - a kid full of potential needing shelter, food, clothing - a brilliant student needing a scholarship - a scientist that needs funding for important research - a family affected by natural disasters - a veteran with PTSD - the guy in this article Should a kid go to bed hungry, or a student be denied access to education so that the government can subsidize the self destructive lifestyle of a person that doesn't even care about the people paying for it? If you pay taxes on your income, plus taxes on everything you buy, etc... you worked at least 5 out of 12 months of the year for the government. So the government not only can waste it but also end up in debt that will be repaid by your children?
  - johnnyanmac 2y ago
    The US is a first world country. Resources are not so finite that we cannot help that entire list and then some. It should not be worrying about funding any of this.
    - 29athrowaway 2y ago
      You are thinking US prior to 1971. You need to update your views a little bit. The perspective where the US has infinite money is wrong. The US is accumulating debt.
- raincole 2y ago
  I've heard that SF spent a lot of money on homelessness issues. But each time I visited SF, the situation seemed to get worse. I never understood why. My reaction to the OP article is: Oh... so that is why... A rare aha moment of mine on HN.
ggm 2y ago
Viewed from 10,000ft it could even be cheaper in the long term, as an overall outcome. Personal attention, guidance through the system, vs constant background EMT interventions, more costly health outcomes, Policing and ultimately incarceration risks. I don't like reductive economics logic over what is a humane response, but I do like that it may not only be nicer, but actually financially sensible.
- snarf21 2y ago
  Reminds me of an article from a while ago about a homeless alcoholic that ran up over $1M in hospital and ambulance costs over the years. https://centerforhealthjournalism.org/our-work/insights/million-dollar-homeless-patient https://centerforhealthjournalism.org/our-work/insights/mill...
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  - mikepurvis 2y ago
    Nitpick, but $1M in unpaid bills is nowhere near $1M in costs. Obviously this is still a troubling result but in all likelihood it was less than 10% of that in actual costs and the costs weren’t in fact borne by “the taxpayer” but rather by slightly inflated fees for everyone else, since US hospitals must bill according to an assumption that some percentage of bills will go unpaid, due to the relationship between themselves, the insurers, and uninsured patients.
    - davidgay 2y ago
      And for useful reference: I was in hospital last year for ~2 weeks, and my insurance was sent a bill for ~$580k. The insurance actually paid $32k. Hospital bills are clearly works of fiction.
      - mikepurvis 2y ago
        Indeed. Those clearly-bonkers initial bills are clearly meant to a) intimidate and terrify the uninsured, and b) present a sympathetic facade to politicians and possibly the IRS about how much cost the hospital absorbs from non-paying patients.
idlewords 2y ago
The title let me down; I was hoping this would be an article about a trebuchet. [edit: I see the post title has changed, the original one was something like "park ranger uses extraordinary methods to remove homeless from SF parks"] I lived next to the park for several years and grew to loathe the dynamic where the lives of people sleeping rough in Golden Gate Park or Civic Center merit months of one-on-on outreach, while the lives of all of those who can't walk through the park in safety, can't send their kids there to play, and can't sit on the grass for fear of stepping on a used needle or a pile of human excrement, don't seem to matter. I would like to see the city adopt a compassionate approach that doesn't at the same time enable years of lawbreaking by people who make nominally public spaces off-limits to the law-abiding. I'd like to see a San Francisco where there can be at least one clean, safe, working public toilet.
- deleted 2y ago
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- smohare 2y ago
  Just an anecdote but I was with my young child in GG park not too long ago and perhaps 50 meters from the artierial road encountered a homeless guy brandishing an axe. This in in a spot that routinely fields families.
- marcus_holmes 2y ago
  You should tell your elected officials that you support more initiatives to help the unhoused then. I've ben homeless. It's not fun. Nobody does it because they want to. Ending up on the street trying to make the most basic of normality work is really hard work. I didn't end up on meth or anything (I stuck to alcohol), but I understand why some people facing this do. When your life is utter shite, drugs help. Without any kind of social safety net the people who fall out of the bottom of society have nowhere to go except this. Build a decent safety net and they won't be living in the park and the park becomes the better place you'd like it to be. So, on behalf of the unhoused: sorry your kids can't play in the park but we're facing bigger problems. Helping us with our problems will help you with yours.
  - 2y ago
ltbarcly3 2y ago
Then why are the parks still full of homeless? Maybe they need to re-evaluate such extraordinary methods.
- codezero 2y ago
  according to the article there were 9 tents in the park, this person's efforts reduced the tents by 10%, also worth noting that 9 tents in the park is insignificant compared to the 8000 homeless in the area.
pessimizer 2y ago
Why does it take seven months and a team in order to fill out the paperwork to make one eligible for a room at a state SRO?
- idlewords 2y ago
  Because this is a person wants to sleep rough in a park and has to be pushed through every step of the process to leave it. I would imagine things go much faster if you hate sleeping in a park and want a roof over your head.
  - bombcar 2y ago
    The problem is CA weather is too nice. If the park was -40° for a few months a year things would be drastically different.
  - johnnyanmac 2y ago
    Well he stayed there for over a decade. Yoj have to pay thst cost if you took that long to resolve things. Or fail to resolve the root issues.
umvi 2y ago
I have a pet theory that love is a basic human need (and a requirement for good mental health), and governments are notoriously bad at providing love no matter how much money you throw at mental health therapy, treatment programs, UBI, etc. Barrows is setting a good example here, but how to get more citizens involved so the burden isn't all on a few rangers?
- II2II 2y ago
  I suspect that few people want to be involved. It is difficult and dangerous work. It requires a personality that both cares for others, while being resilient enough to face the challenges of those in their care. By in large, it is also a thankless job. Just look at many of the responses here. The public don't care about the time and effort involved. Many think that it is best to just lock them up. Quite often the recipients don't care. They are too busy battling their own demons. It's probably best to have safety nets in place so that people don't reach these depths in the first place.
  - aprilthird2021 2y ago
    We have social safety nets in the US. We just don't have one robust enough that you can live in housing and have enough income without working in San Francisco permanently.
  - bloomingkales 2y ago
    The safety net for everyone is your friends and family. Drug addiction destroys that, so you are left alone. They kind of don't have anyone else. People see homelessness, but all I see is a slow trek to a suicide for many. They are dying slowly - and do not make any mistake about that. It's fatal. Overall, there are many drugs addicts and homeless people in the world. It only bothers us when it obstructs our vision, very disgusting sentences like I cant even visit the beach anymore. I think that's fine, there are many beaches and many other places. You can visit the beach somewhere else, these people are dying. Millionaire Rogan found the sight of homeless people unbearable so he had to leave the state (could be the taxes, but he's also filthy rich. I don't want to say he's just rotten, that's mean. I'll say a few other things instead). Your society creates an inordinate amount of homeless people, that's first. Worry about the view later. You are lucky that you even get to see poverty up close, most just move the living fuck away from it. Wait. Edit: I bring Rogan up because if you go through his entire catalog, you will see he has hours and hours of content that just bullies homeless people. He has done that to a few other groups, literal hours if you stack them side by side in a compilation. So there was already a lot of damage done in terms of mindshare by this media-arm.
xyst 2y ago
The rising homeless crisis is a symptom of a much larger issue: poor economic policy propagated by decades of awful neoclassical economic theory and neoliberalism (ie, “trickle down economics” or Reagon-omics)
mrlambchop 2y ago
I was really swept up in this article and the portrait of Amanda Barrows - what a unique and strong person and this city is incredibly lucky to have her. Unlike some here, I came away with a deep sense of empathy, and today’s HN snark and frustration bounced off me pretty hard. The public order issues - homelessness in parks, the challenges of shared spaces—have certainly impacted me. But more than that, I struggle with how to translate the state of the world to my boys. I always remind them: every unhoused person was once a little boy or girl. We might be older now, but we’re still kids inside, and nobody dreams of growing up in these circumstances. What struck me most was the balance of compassion and pragmatism that Amanda brings to her work. It’s easy to be frustrated with the policies and bureaucratic inefficiencies that slow down real solutions - but they are, in some ways, understandable. The biggest frustration for me is the gap between the mental state of many unhoused individuals and the requirements needed to secure housing. The city surely understands the long-term costs of its policies, and it’s run by highly pragmatic people with limited budgets. But rules are rules, and at some point, top-down accommodations (including medical interventions...) are necessary to bridge this gap.
- searealist 2y ago
  This was written by AI.
  - II2II 2y ago
    If it takes an AI to display empathy, perhaps we should surrender to the AI overlords.
    - deleted 2y ago
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    - throw16180339 2y ago
      AI overlords worked pretty well for the Culture (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_series).
  - llamaimperative 2y ago
wnc3141 2y ago
I search through the internet looking for these type of stories that renew my faith in humanity. Thank you for sharing.
radu_floricica 2y ago
> shepherding him through what one Recreation and Parks Department official described as the “arduous and achingly bureaucratic tasks” necessary just to be eligible for housing. I'm going to risk a political statement and say that this is why I'm mostly hopeful about DOGE, even if parts of it are a shit show. Building civilization comes with a hefty dose of institutional entropy, which keeps accumulating, despite (or often because) good intentions and competence. Everybody is improving their piece of the map, but this means you get stuck in a lot of spots of local maxima. Some can be fixed from a level above, but some need a round of creative destruction every 10 years or so. I've read this yesterday: https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/why-japan-succeeds-despite-stagnation https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/why-japan-succ... It's a good read and a good blog for many reasons, but the relevant part to this conversation: Japan managed to keep a very high level of living even through decades of economic stagnation and aging population in large part by having a sane zoning system. Yes, that simple. They have 12, nation-wide, mostly inclusive zoning types. This means the permitted building types carry over as you move up the categories, allowing mixed-use development by default. And indeed, you can actually go to Japan and buy a house for about the price of a decent car - which coincidently used to be the case in most of the world, before the double pressure of zoning/coding on one hand, and migration towards urban centers on the other squeezed the housing pricing way above what actual costs would have it be.
- croes 2y ago
  The problem is if you want lower bureaucracy you have to change laws and not fire people. Most of the time you still need them, they just have no time to do what they are supposed to do. For instance, would you fire doctors to reduce bureaucracy in medical services?
  - anon7000 2y ago
    Great point. And if you fire all the insurance middlemen, but don’t get rid of the legal requirements which spawned those middlemen in the first place, you end up with medical professionals swamped with paperwork they shouldn’t have to deal with it.
pfannkuchen 2y ago
Paul Graham approves.
alluro2 2y ago
The frustration of some of the people in the comments is clear - "the city is spending a lot of our tax money on these criminals, savages and addicts and they don't even want help". It's incredibly privileged and reductive to think of it that way - that, after surviving in a park for 10 YEARS, struggling for food and shelter, surviving the seasons, rest of society and getting beat down to square 1 so many times -and basically being in constant fight or flight mode as the article states - you think you wouldn't resort to escaping through alcohol or drugs, and could simply "decide to get your act together" and adapt to anything the govt agencies expect from you on daily basis in some of those housing solutions. Those people did not cheerfully decide one day to dedicate their life to shitting all over a park and be addicted to meth. A lot of homeless people got there either by being let down by the society very early on, or by 1-2 bad events in life making it impossible to pay rent and getting dragged into a downward spiral from there. Solutions should be focused on the root causes, and not the symptoms. If the country is such a late-stage capitalism shithole that so many people are 1 medical emergency away from not being able to pay rent, and there's no safety net or effective government support to prevent them from going homeless, the cost of trying to rehabilitate someone after years on the streets / in the parks is going to be multiplied. I'd like to see how those large budgets are being targetted first at number of new people coming into this situation being reduced, and then additionally decreasing the existing homeless population. As usually, there are methods being successfully (at least to a larger extent) used in other societies - but USA is very often dismissive of them, because it's special and different.
- hcurtiss 2y ago
  Nah — usually they decided to do meth and the rest followed. I used to be pretty libertarian about drugs. Victimless crime and all. But in the last ten years, it’s become clear to me that they exploit fundamental human weaknesses. TBH - I’ve become a much bigger fan of the war on drugs, and very heavy penalties for dealers.
  - Double_a_92 2y ago
    Why did they decide to do meth?
ErigmolCt 2y ago
This story shows a rare instance where the system actually helped someone... But unfortunately I think without a truly personal approach, most initiatives (in this field) end up as half-measures at best
lisper 2y ago
Almost 20 years ago I spent two years trying to get a homeless person off the street and made a movie about it: https://graceofgodmovie.com/ https://graceofgodmovie.com/ It's an incredibly complicated problem, but if there is one message I can share it is this: homeless people are, first and foremost, people. They span the full range of human experience (the main subject of my movie had a masters degree in psychology) and there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Homelessness is not one problem, it is a symptom of at least half a dozen different problems, all of which need different solutions. (And, BTW, some homeless people voluntarily choose the lifestyle. It's definitely a minority, but it's not zero.)
- harlanji 2y ago
  Yea, I'm a regular HN reader and I've been stuck on the street for going on 7 years. Used to be commended for persevering against the odds and the like, as a child and young programmer at 15 onward, home owner at 22. I've left SF and landed in a college town in Sac Valley last year. Rent is $750/mo here. Been working in a kitchen for a year. Am I housed yet? Nope. Just gotta save a few thousand dollars. I have about the same amount of bills as a housed person, between gym + storage + take out food + car insurance. But then the social aspect, my old relatives and network need to distance themselves from me. Any kind of old reference or something, non starter. I will beat this. I only keep posting here on these threads because as you say, we span the full range of human existence. I like to think I'll use my approach as a template to help others. Get out of the big metro and into a peaceful place with cheap rent and lots of opportunity, yadda yadda. Cheers.
  - carlosjobim 2y ago
    Have you looked into joining the merchant fleet? They need people working in their galleys as well, and you'll have no bills to pay.
    - deleted 2y ago
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  - thierrydamiba 2y ago
tlogan 2y ago
For those who live in San Francisco and witness homelessness and drug addiction across the city, this article feels deeply out of touch and even insulting. We need to acknowledge that San Francisco has spent billions over decades on homelessness programs, yet the crisis persists, leaving us to ask: Is this truly the best we can do? Are we investing efficiently, or are we simply maintaining a broken system?
- mordae 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - jraby3 2y ago
    You are online way too much. Come see the world say hi to some people. The US isn't a death cult it's just more heavily influenced by propaganda than most smaller countries.
- presentation 2y ago
  The latter
- martinald 2y ago
  The core problem imo is there is simply not good enough treatments for addiction (yet?). For opioid addiction there is methadone and buprenorphine etc. But I suspect these have became even less effective with so much fentanyl around now, requiring much higher doses. But these all really work (simplifying massively) by replacing the addiction with something that is easier to eventually titrate down. For meth, crack, etc there are effectively no pharmacological interventions available. And many (most?) of the street homeless have dual addictions to a stimulant and an opioid, so even if they did manage to switch from fentanyl to buprenorphine they would almost certainly be extremely unstable with their stimulant addiction. Obviously there are psychological interventions and peer support groups, but these require quite a lot of stability to stick to and get to, which I think is extremely difficult for someone in a very chaotic addiction cycle. To me, it seems some of the billions that cities spent on social services for homeless should be diverted (or in addition to) to pharmacological research. There is so little funding available for this - I read Prof David Nutt was doing an interesting PET study for kappa opioid response in addiction but ran out of funding. The funding requirements were low-medium hundreds of thousands of dollars and couldn't find it to continue the research. The current status quo seems a bit like trying to treat TB without antibiotics. The treatment back then was basically similar to current 'rehab' programs - send them to a quiet place and give them care and help. Obviously not a bad thing to do; but once you had antibiotics the prognosis improved by many orders of magnitude almost overnight (and a lot less costly to provide).
lukerramsden 2y ago
California is simply amazing. In so many areas they have problems simply nobody else has (wildfires due to bad fire control policy, homelessness and public drug usage as discussed here) or is at magnitudes worse scale than elsewhere, and then policymakers handwring about how “nothing can be done”. Nowhere else I have ever been even comes close to what I see in California.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  Yeah, meanwhile California alone is a top 10 economy and houses more billionaires than any other place. I wonder if it's a coincidence that increased greed fuels (or buys) less empathy?
IceHegel 2y ago
I’m 24 (which I think is younger than most people in here) and I live in San Francisco. I’m pretty ashamed to live here and hope to move soon. The “on the ground” feeling is bad. Every issue we had 5 years ago is worse (except the drought). Daily life involves walking calculated circles around drug addicts to avoid agroing them (like Dead Island). I’m seeing more trash on the streets, more graffiti covering highway signs. People have given up trying to change anything and just tolerate it now. I thought I’d meet high agency tech people when I moved here. The tech scene is way better than Boston but the sprit of SF is really dead. All the money in the world and they can’t run a city half a well as was done before cars…
- presentation 2y ago
  lol San Franciscans never tried to change anything for the last 50 years, they never gave up since they never tried to begin with - they actually prefer it this way.
- kelnos 2y ago
  Where in SF do you live? I'm guessing Soma, or near downtown? Get out of your neighborhood now and then. Most of the city does not have a drug addict or three on every block, and trash everywhere.
- infecto 2y ago
  You need to get out of SoMa. The rest of SF is pretty nice, there are definite hot zones like near Bayview but generally what you describe is just SF. I left to raise a family and one of the reasons was the homelessness BUT SF has always been like this and if it was not the homeless it was the gangs or other issues in different parts of the city. Try living in a different part of the city, it might change things up a bit.
  - cancan 2y ago
    My experience suggests the opposite; the city was an upwards trajectory until 2018 or so but it's taken a turn for the worse since. I lived in SF from 2009 to 2024. Every part of the city has gotten worse. When I moved, parts of Mission were definitely rough and they've cleaned up quite a bit. Even SoMa became somewhat interesting, as much as area like that could have before Covid.
yieldcrv 2y ago
The park rangers empathic personal approach is interesting, she is working within a system not worth navigating as even that best case outcome is still a poor case outcome > For him, “it was overwhelming,” I’ve dealt with people that take 15 years to do some basic action because of something considered overwhelming. The only thing I observe is that you could literally start from scratch, the age of zero, and be competent in any field by this time In this guys case, it took 7 months to get basic identifying paperwork regenerated, so that he can walk into one of those classic grifter housing projects So many issues with that, masqueraded as a solution
jonstewart 2y ago
The last time I was in San Francisco was 8.5 years ago. My family had a cabbie with a pile of new tube socks in front seat. When he’d have to stop at a light, he would look for any homeless near the intersection, get their attention, and hand them new socks. We gave the cabbie a good tip.
barrenko 2y ago
Root cause of this issue all wonderfully explained in the Tom Holland's Dominion (not to be confused with the Spiderman actor).
- namlem 2y ago
  Yep, thought the same thing when reading the article. Christian morality. I think it's a good thing for society to care for the poor and downtrodden, but when it reaches the point of self-flaggelation, it's gone too far. Imo, we need some form of institutionalization that's milder than what we have for the criminally insane, but still coercive.
tehjoker 2y ago
What a horrible problem with such a simple solution. Give people adequate and decent housing at reasonable prices or for free if necessary. Laughable this is still a question in the richest country in world history.
- teaearlgraycold 2y ago
  Did you read the article? Some of these people don’t want to live in housing. I think what they’d prefer (and it’s not realistic) is to live in the woods on a few acres of their own in a cabin with all of their needs met. But I agree if housing was more affordable the problem would not be as bad.
  - tehjoker 2y ago
    Do you really believe that if people had access to cheap / free housing there would an enormous homelessness problem? How many weirdos do you really think are out there??
1024core 2y ago
If this person wants to be left alone and live by himself, why doesn't he find some place in the wilderness, away from a city; maybe an area managed by BLM where he won't be bothered? Why does he have to fuck up one of the few parks in a city of 850,000 people?
- itishappy 2y ago
  The article speaks explicitly to this point: > Barrows slowly learned that he’d had a rough childhood and had grown up in a foster family. The park was his childhood refuge, a place where he’d spend afternoons wandering around and riding the carousel. She understood then why he had such a deep attachment to the place.
- nickvec 2y ago
  How do you expect them to get necessities to survive in the wilderness?
sidgarimella 2y ago
the hn cynicism is crazy but unsurprising. turns out can really easily spend your whole life obsessed with a pragmatism that betrays taking any action, however directionally correct
namlem 2y ago
Sorry but the idea that such a system of personal involvement is a practical solution is a pipe dream. We need some system of involuntary confinement that isn't prison or psych hospitals imo. A place where we can put these people in humane conditions that is meant to transition them into being able to take care of themselves. A place where they can have private rooms and be given useful work to do, as well as counseling for their mental health issues.
owenversteeg 2y ago
It's nice to read an article showing someone with serious empathy and understanding. We need more of that these days. But it's also immediately obvious that more of this cannot possibly be the solution. This article is basically the "California liberal" solution turned up to 11: maximum personalized attention, empathy, "softness" plus several opportunities for housing. And yet as the article shows, you put a homeless person with extreme mental illness and/or addiction into a shelter/apartment/SRO/wherever and they will usually end up homeless again. And this system has an extremely high cost. People harassed or attacked by the homeless. Volunteers and government employees with their own trauma from the things they deal with when working with the homeless. Sections of cities that are unlivable. Even when there's a "success story" it is usually "this person's life still sucks, they're still addicted and have the same other demons but now life sucks in a shitty apartment in a shitty neighborhood instead of in a park where it's other people's problem." The only real option is prevention. We need stronger communities, stronger families, mentorship for young people. The interventions from the article, across the small handful of homeless men described, cost at least several million dollars. Take a fraction of that money and invest it in new windows and fresh paint and flowerbeds in the neighborhoods they grew up in. Give them access to nutritious food and exercise. Provide for regular contact with community leaders and mentors and people who can make a difference in their lives. Allocate money to wholesome community activities (sports, robotics, arts, etc) such that they can vacuum up all the free time of a teenager with nothing better to do. Every dollar invested in each of these things will repay itself a hundredfold. Much of homelessness is a disease without a cure. What do you do with a disease without a cure? Prevent it.
ncr100 2y ago
Great article highlighting a complex problem, and the steps required to solve it. EDIT: May be a situation that would call for "Dog Fooding", to solve for the detailed use-cases? USA does not spend enough resources to get a highly effective suite of services together, nor appreciate enough the value of human life to consistently provide care to people, ironically. I'm currently dealing with the impact of a homeless, mutually abusive (shouting, fighting), drug-using couple camping either on the strip of grass directly in front of my home (most recently for weeks) or various sidewalks / bus stops in a 2 block radius, here in Seattle. Worse, they attract "pals" who are : heavier drug users, very very disruptive to the neighborhood by causing nuisances including walking into traffic and being struck / killed here, creating public health issues with drug paraphernalia and human waste, etc. This article reminds me of the complexity the couple faces, freeing themselves from the shackles of their abusive relationship, moving away from the homeo-statically well-know life on the streets. I want them gone. I see it's difficult. I wish more Civil Servants were available to guide them. There aren't that many. The Seattle Unified Care Team has been ineffective for this couple, they have been here for over four years, and it has not improved.
willywanker 2y ago
Gotta love the change in terminology. 'Unhoused' people instead of homeless, as though their being without a place to live is now someone else's (the American taxpayers') responsibility.
AStonesThrow 2y ago
So I've been looking through overhead map views, and identified possible swastikas near Mental Health Care facilities. For example, This "Specialized Pharmacy" dispenses BH drugs https://maps.app.goo.gl/ktnBzitvbKjPrFp78 https://maps.app.goo.gl/ktnBzitvbKjPrFp78 Is this clockwise or widdershins? I need to squint and ponder the shape before the swastika spins out. Like the arrow in the FedEx logo. Activate the Satellite Photo view to see the building design This area in Glendale, AZ is a large medical complex, and the two "spins counterclockwise swastika style" buildings are "Advanced Health" which is boutique cosmetics and upgrades for the wealthy, mostly, and there are dentists and imaging/radiology and vision care. You can Street View the shingles hung outside. No BH here that I found. https://maps.app.goo.gl/srBLyNUkMLNmD3gt6 https://maps.app.goo.gl/srBLyNUkMLNmD3gt6 Another interesting clockwise swastika, if I am not hallucinating it, is by road design in Tempe 85288: It's at Priest Drive, [psychiatrists and physicians are a priestly class who practice a religion of Aesclepius, wearing casual blue or dressy white vestments and stethoscope rosary, in temples that smell sanitized and sterile], and there is a little international food court with good falafel and Hindu fare, cybersecurity/IT firms kitty-corner to that, homes going up, a train station, and oh yeah, up the road to NW there's the central behavioral health authorities and crisis line operators, a large disability center, the D.E.S. services for SNAP, unemployment, not far actually from the Phoenix Zoo, etc, (is the Zoo hiring this month? any vacancies for carbon-based homeless?) and a housing agency for the Mentally Ill, Disabled and Chronically Homeless, commercial blood testing lab, etc. https://maps.app.goo.gl/PXz44uHWc4vTw8hR9 https://maps.app.goo.gl/PXz44uHWc4vTw8hR9 Now of course a Swastika is not automatically rabid Nazi supremacist style, but it helps to understand the positioning of Mental Health Care and ordinary normal physicians and hospitals, the legal authority they carry to route patients out of the community, and into court-ordered drugging, or the penal/corrections/prison system, and the pipeline to cemeteries such as White Tanks or crematoria. Of course many mentally ill people also die or become gravely disabled, or felons, without any treatment. But I just looked at the graceful curved arms of Priest & Washington as the wheel spins clockwise, I suppose. Don't forget that the WWII losers and refugees migrated to elsewhere and contributed all their research and intellect to receiving nations. Herr Mengele drowned off South American coast. So it goes.
- AStonesThrow 2y ago

381 points by NaOH 2y ago

Quoting a reddit comment: > Wow, this is almost a parody. An able-bodied meth addict and convicted felon was illegally living in a public park for 20 years, littering the land around him and forcing rangers to spend countless time and resources cleaning up the mess he left behind, making regular emergency room visits due to his unhealthy lifestyle costing the city hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, constantly doing illegal drugs while not holding down a job and suspiciously acquiring new supplies for his encampment after every sweep (how much do you want to be he engages in illegal activity), and giving an extremely hard time to caseworkers and HHS staff who already have a busy workload (including leaving/getting kicked out of housing multiple times). That one Golden Gate Park Dweller has probably cost the city millions of dollars over the last few years while consuming valuable time from caseworkers and park rangers who could be helping someone else (they're already overloaded). Not to mention the potential damage to the park's environment caused by his littering. What this guy needs is outpatient mental health treatment, and it's honestly criminal that our country has basically no resources for people with mental illness and shoves them into jail or shelters without treating their underlying problems.

iancmceachern 2y ago
This is true, I've heard the SF DA and police departments say so as well. They no longer prosecute or convict people of things here also, because there is no purpose, no where for them to be sent for rehabilitation. As a result we have created an open air mental institution combined with an open air drug market. It's getting pretty wild to live here.
- chrisdhoover 2y ago
  Getting? It has been for years. Frank Jordan was the last mayor that tried a real plan.
- titzer 2y ago
  It's absolutely nuts to me that the government finds ways to spend money on literally anything but providing shelter, clothing, food, and support to people. UBI would be cheaper and far more humane than practically any policy--or lack thereof--they can think of.
  - sarchertech 2y ago
    There are people UBI would help. But not the people in this article. The 2nd person in the article had free housing twice, but lost it both times because he kept fighting with people.
  - idlewords 2y ago
    This is an article about a man who was given all those things, repeatedly, and went back to sleeping rough in the park. How would giving him money make any difference?
    - BryantD 2y ago
      The hope is that UBI would prevent him and people like him from falling into homelessness in the first place.
      - aprilthird2021 2y ago
        He would have still become homeless with UBI. The home he lived in was owned by his grandfather and was sold when he passed away, leaving him with no home at 18 when he could not possibly earn enough to rent or prove to anyone renting that he had enough stability and income to be given a place
        gs17 2y ago
        >when he could not possibly earn enough to rent or prove to anyone renting that he had enough stability and income to be given a place Why do you think that's a fault of UBI, rather than the fault of your hypothetical UBI being insufficient? AFAIK any actual implementation of UBI would be intended to be feasible to have housing on, even if it's not very good housing. With UBI, there's a level of income that people are guaranteed to have without needing any proof, that's the whole concept!
- teaearlgraycold 2y ago
  Things are still bad in the city, but the state of homelessness has improved. The article states that the number of tents in Golden Gate Park has gone down by 10x in the last 8 years. I would say there's been a similar decrease on the sidewalks of the city in just the last 4. I walked much of the length of Mission Street yesterday, and there are still a lot of sad scenes to bear witness to. But it's clearly improving.
  - iancmceachern 2y ago
    In my daily walk to work it's gotten far worse. Often the "problem" just moves from neighborhood to neighborhood in my experience.
    - teaearlgraycold 2y ago
      Yeah I’ve seen things shift around as well. But I walk a lot in the city - all over the city. It’s better overall now than it was a few years ago.
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galimalint 2y ago
In australia, they put the people with mental illness or addiction in their own apartment and give them pills, and check in with them regularly. Definitely costs less than 50k/year. Most of them do end up getting better after several years. It seems US has a system that extracts maximumly from their tax payers and just keeps things in (bad) status quo as long as they can. A babying system if you well.
- teaearlgraycold 2y ago
  I believe the homeless are kept around as a threat to the poor housed Americans. On top of that, those poor people are struggling so greatly that they too don't want to see the homeless helped too much. They don't want to see someone without any job live an easier life than they do with 3.
  - ltbarcly3 2y ago
    Do you honestly believe this or are you just being snarky?
    - teaearlgraycold 2y ago
      I don't think it's the whole picture. But I do believe those are two components of the situation. I'm happy to hear your insights.
      - ltbarcly3 2y ago
        It's not even remotely true, to any degree. It's very conspiratorial thinking. If "they" were competent, unified, and powerful enough to create a situation like you describe "they" wouldn't need to. Which gets to the heart of why conspiracy thinking doesn't hold water, who in your theory are "they"?
        teaearlgraycold 2y ago
        “They” in my above comment is only used to refer to common people voting myopically. Usually conservatives who vote against social services. As for my claim of homelessness being a threat - I’m not saying that there’s any grand conspiracy. But in the scheme of capitalism it helps to have an underclass that receive undue blame and keep people from sliding down the ladder further out of fear. No one needs to intentionally keep anyone homeless for this to be a functioning part of the system. It’s like evolution but on a societal scale. Whatever we have now has persisted for a while. The threat of homelessness is part of why it’s persisted. Imagine if there was no uncomfortable bottom to society. All wage slaves that sell their body and time would simply choose to not work because not working would be a better life. It’s memetics. And of course we need people to do work. But we could be optimizing for happiness instead of GDP growth. Think of religion. When a religion mandates evangelism it’s not necessarily out of a nefarious central planner trying to gain control over more people. But for religions that do mandate evangelism there is a greater chance the religion thrives. Because obviously recruiting people means you have a bigger religion. But the believers might simply each want to share their religion out of genuine belief in an afterlife. I was raised in a specifically anti-evangelical religion. It’s pretty small as a result. There were the Shakers, a now extinct sect of Christianity. They considered sex ungodly and thus had no children. That killed the religion. Other sects promote having many children and survive.
chrsig 2y ago
well, one major problem is that you can't force people to get mental health treatment. the courts can, but that means things need to be brought before a judge.
- silverquiet 2y ago
  Given how hard it's gotten to force people to take vaccines, I would think that psychotropic drugs are probably off the table completely.
  - chrsig 2y ago
    no, it just tends to need to be a violent offense
  - goatlover 2y ago
    They can be forcibly given if committed with a judge's order.
- StefanBatory 2y ago
  And now with RFK wanting to put people with ADHD into labor camps, any chances of a program to help mentally ill homeless people is close to zero. I am sure that they would accept that "help" :>
TechnicolorByte 2y ago
Reopen mental institutions and enable forced is institutionalization. Engage this at the federal level. So sick of this crap. These “homeless” are not the kind who need clean clothes and shelter and some help getting a job. They want to live like this at the expense of the public’s money and enjoyment of public amenities.
- teaearlgraycold 2y ago
  I'm pretty far left but I have to agree that some people are not mentally capable of independence, cause public harm, and need to be forcibly committed. I want that to be done carefully and humanely. I don't want someone who sleeps on the street and causes no trouble to get institutionalized. But the worst of them should get jailed, tried, and then sent away. We also need to support people at risk when they're young. If their parents had mental health support, if they didn't experience a loss of housing as children, if losing their job didn't make opioids looks so attractive, we wouldn't have that many people unable to care for themselves.
- bloomingkales 2y ago
  Hey, that actually works really well in India: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpIJJPvn_ZI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpIJJPvn_ZI Edit: This got downvoted because it's a direct retort to what the GP is suggesting.
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29athrowaway 2y ago
On one side, having compassion for vulnerable people is fine, but resources are finite. The government can help people, but who would they rather help? - a kid full of potential needing shelter, food, clothing - a brilliant student needing a scholarship - a scientist that needs funding for important research - a family affected by natural disasters - a veteran with PTSD - the guy in this article Should a kid go to bed hungry, or a student be denied access to education so that the government can subsidize the self destructive lifestyle of a person that doesn't even care about the people paying for it? If you pay taxes on your income, plus taxes on everything you buy, etc... you worked at least 5 out of 12 months of the year for the government. So the government not only can waste it but also end up in debt that will be repaid by your children?
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  The US is a first world country. Resources are not so finite that we cannot help that entire list and then some. It should not be worrying about funding any of this.
  - 29athrowaway 2y ago
    You are thinking US prior to 1971. You need to update your views a little bit. The perspective where the US has infinite money is wrong. The US is accumulating debt.
raincole 2y ago
I've heard that SF spent a lot of money on homelessness issues. But each time I visited SF, the situation seemed to get worse. I never understood why. My reaction to the OP article is: Oh... so that is why... A rare aha moment of mine on HN.

ggm 2y ago

Viewed from 10,000ft it could even be cheaper in the long term, as an overall outcome. Personal attention, guidance through the system, vs constant background EMT interventions, more costly health outcomes, Policing and ultimately incarceration risks. I don't like reductive economics logic over what is a humane response, but I do like that it may not only be nicer, but actually financially sensible.

snarf21 2y ago
Reminds me of an article from a while ago about a homeless alcoholic that ran up over $1M in hospital and ambulance costs over the years. https://centerforhealthjournalism.org/our-work/insights/million-dollar-homeless-patient https://centerforhealthjournalism.org/our-work/insights/mill...
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- mikepurvis 2y ago
  Nitpick, but $1M in unpaid bills is nowhere near $1M in costs. Obviously this is still a troubling result but in all likelihood it was less than 10% of that in actual costs and the costs weren’t in fact borne by “the taxpayer” but rather by slightly inflated fees for everyone else, since US hospitals must bill according to an assumption that some percentage of bills will go unpaid, due to the relationship between themselves, the insurers, and uninsured patients.
  - davidgay 2y ago
    And for useful reference: I was in hospital last year for ~2 weeks, and my insurance was sent a bill for ~$580k. The insurance actually paid $32k. Hospital bills are clearly works of fiction.
    - mikepurvis 2y ago
      Indeed. Those clearly-bonkers initial bills are clearly meant to a) intimidate and terrify the uninsured, and b) present a sympathetic facade to politicians and possibly the IRS about how much cost the hospital absorbs from non-paying patients.

idlewords 2y ago

The title let me down; I was hoping this would be an article about a trebuchet. [edit: I see the post title has changed, the original one was something like "park ranger uses extraordinary methods to remove homeless from SF parks"] I lived next to the park for several years and grew to loathe the dynamic where the lives of people sleeping rough in Golden Gate Park or Civic Center merit months of one-on-on outreach, while the lives of all of those who can't walk through the park in safety, can't send their kids there to play, and can't sit on the grass for fear of stepping on a used needle or a pile of human excrement, don't seem to matter. I would like to see the city adopt a compassionate approach that doesn't at the same time enable years of lawbreaking by people who make nominally public spaces off-limits to the law-abiding. I'd like to see a San Francisco where there can be at least one clean, safe, working public toilet.

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smohare 2y ago
Just an anecdote but I was with my young child in GG park not too long ago and perhaps 50 meters from the artierial road encountered a homeless guy brandishing an axe. This in in a spot that routinely fields families.
marcus_holmes 2y ago
You should tell your elected officials that you support more initiatives to help the unhoused then. I've ben homeless. It's not fun. Nobody does it because they want to. Ending up on the street trying to make the most basic of normality work is really hard work. I didn't end up on meth or anything (I stuck to alcohol), but I understand why some people facing this do. When your life is utter shite, drugs help. Without any kind of social safety net the people who fall out of the bottom of society have nowhere to go except this. Build a decent safety net and they won't be living in the park and the park becomes the better place you'd like it to be. So, on behalf of the unhoused: sorry your kids can't play in the park but we're facing bigger problems. Helping us with our problems will help you with yours.
- 2y ago

ltbarcly3 2y ago

Then why are the parks still full of homeless? Maybe they need to re-evaluate such extraordinary methods.

codezero 2y ago
according to the article there were 9 tents in the park, this person's efforts reduced the tents by 10%, also worth noting that 9 tents in the park is insignificant compared to the 8000 homeless in the area.

pessimizer 2y ago

Why does it take seven months and a team in order to fill out the paperwork to make one eligible for a room at a state SRO?

idlewords 2y ago
Because this is a person wants to sleep rough in a park and has to be pushed through every step of the process to leave it. I would imagine things go much faster if you hate sleeping in a park and want a roof over your head.
- bombcar 2y ago
  The problem is CA weather is too nice. If the park was -40° for a few months a year things would be drastically different.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  Well he stayed there for over a decade. Yoj have to pay thst cost if you took that long to resolve things. Or fail to resolve the root issues.

umvi 2y ago

I have a pet theory that love is a basic human need (and a requirement for good mental health), and governments are notoriously bad at providing love no matter how much money you throw at mental health therapy, treatment programs, UBI, etc. Barrows is setting a good example here, but how to get more citizens involved so the burden isn't all on a few rangers?

II2II 2y ago
I suspect that few people want to be involved. It is difficult and dangerous work. It requires a personality that both cares for others, while being resilient enough to face the challenges of those in their care. By in large, it is also a thankless job. Just look at many of the responses here. The public don't care about the time and effort involved. Many think that it is best to just lock them up. Quite often the recipients don't care. They are too busy battling their own demons. It's probably best to have safety nets in place so that people don't reach these depths in the first place.
- aprilthird2021 2y ago
  We have social safety nets in the US. We just don't have one robust enough that you can live in housing and have enough income without working in San Francisco permanently.
- bloomingkales 2y ago
  The safety net for everyone is your friends and family. Drug addiction destroys that, so you are left alone. They kind of don't have anyone else. People see homelessness, but all I see is a slow trek to a suicide for many. They are dying slowly - and do not make any mistake about that. It's fatal. Overall, there are many drugs addicts and homeless people in the world. It only bothers us when it obstructs our vision, very disgusting sentences like I cant even visit the beach anymore. I think that's fine, there are many beaches and many other places. You can visit the beach somewhere else, these people are dying. Millionaire Rogan found the sight of homeless people unbearable so he had to leave the state (could be the taxes, but he's also filthy rich. I don't want to say he's just rotten, that's mean. I'll say a few other things instead). Your society creates an inordinate amount of homeless people, that's first. Worry about the view later. You are lucky that you even get to see poverty up close, most just move the living fuck away from it. Wait. Edit: I bring Rogan up because if you go through his entire catalog, you will see he has hours and hours of content that just bullies homeless people. He has done that to a few other groups, literal hours if you stack them side by side in a compilation. So there was already a lot of damage done in terms of mindshare by this media-arm.

xyst 2y ago

The rising homeless crisis is a symptom of a much larger issue: poor economic policy propagated by decades of awful neoclassical economic theory and neoliberalism (ie, “trickle down economics” or Reagon-omics)

mrlambchop 2y ago

I was really swept up in this article and the portrait of Amanda Barrows - what a unique and strong person and this city is incredibly lucky to have her. Unlike some here, I came away with a deep sense of empathy, and today’s HN snark and frustration bounced off me pretty hard. The public order issues - homelessness in parks, the challenges of shared spaces—have certainly impacted me. But more than that, I struggle with how to translate the state of the world to my boys. I always remind them: every unhoused person was once a little boy or girl. We might be older now, but we’re still kids inside, and nobody dreams of growing up in these circumstances. What struck me most was the balance of compassion and pragmatism that Amanda brings to her work. It’s easy to be frustrated with the policies and bureaucratic inefficiencies that slow down real solutions - but they are, in some ways, understandable. The biggest frustration for me is the gap between the mental state of many unhoused individuals and the requirements needed to secure housing. The city surely understands the long-term costs of its policies, and it’s run by highly pragmatic people with limited budgets. But rules are rules, and at some point, top-down accommodations (including medical interventions...) are necessary to bridge this gap.

searealist 2y ago
This was written by AI.
- II2II 2y ago
  If it takes an AI to display empathy, perhaps we should surrender to the AI overlords.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - throw16180339 2y ago
    AI overlords worked pretty well for the Culture (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_series).
- llamaimperative 2y ago

wnc3141 2y ago

I search through the internet looking for these type of stories that renew my faith in humanity. Thank you for sharing.

radu_floricica 2y ago

> shepherding him through what one Recreation and Parks Department official described as the “arduous and achingly bureaucratic tasks” necessary just to be eligible for housing. I'm going to risk a political statement and say that this is why I'm mostly hopeful about DOGE, even if parts of it are a shit show. Building civilization comes with a hefty dose of institutional entropy, which keeps accumulating, despite (or often because) good intentions and competence. Everybody is improving their piece of the map, but this means you get stuck in a lot of spots of local maxima. Some can be fixed from a level above, but some need a round of creative destruction every 10 years or so. I've read this yesterday: https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/why-japan-succeeds-despite-stagnation https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/why-japan-succ... It's a good read and a good blog for many reasons, but the relevant part to this conversation: Japan managed to keep a very high level of living even through decades of economic stagnation and aging population in large part by having a sane zoning system. Yes, that simple. They have 12, nation-wide, mostly inclusive zoning types. This means the permitted building types carry over as you move up the categories, allowing mixed-use development by default. And indeed, you can actually go to Japan and buy a house for about the price of a decent car - which coincidently used to be the case in most of the world, before the double pressure of zoning/coding on one hand, and migration towards urban centers on the other squeezed the housing pricing way above what actual costs would have it be.

croes 2y ago
The problem is if you want lower bureaucracy you have to change laws and not fire people. Most of the time you still need them, they just have no time to do what they are supposed to do. For instance, would you fire doctors to reduce bureaucracy in medical services?
- anon7000 2y ago
  Great point. And if you fire all the insurance middlemen, but don’t get rid of the legal requirements which spawned those middlemen in the first place, you end up with medical professionals swamped with paperwork they shouldn’t have to deal with it.

pfannkuchen 2y ago

Paul Graham approves.

alluro2 2y ago

The frustration of some of the people in the comments is clear - "the city is spending a lot of our tax money on these criminals, savages and addicts and they don't even want help". It's incredibly privileged and reductive to think of it that way - that, after surviving in a park for 10 YEARS, struggling for food and shelter, surviving the seasons, rest of society and getting beat down to square 1 so many times -and basically being in constant fight or flight mode as the article states - you think you wouldn't resort to escaping through alcohol or drugs, and could simply "decide to get your act together" and adapt to anything the govt agencies expect from you on daily basis in some of those housing solutions. Those people did not cheerfully decide one day to dedicate their life to shitting all over a park and be addicted to meth. A lot of homeless people got there either by being let down by the society very early on, or by 1-2 bad events in life making it impossible to pay rent and getting dragged into a downward spiral from there. Solutions should be focused on the root causes, and not the symptoms. If the country is such a late-stage capitalism shithole that so many people are 1 medical emergency away from not being able to pay rent, and there's no safety net or effective government support to prevent them from going homeless, the cost of trying to rehabilitate someone after years on the streets / in the parks is going to be multiplied. I'd like to see how those large budgets are being targetted first at number of new people coming into this situation being reduced, and then additionally decreasing the existing homeless population. As usually, there are methods being successfully (at least to a larger extent) used in other societies - but USA is very often dismissive of them, because it's special and different.

hcurtiss 2y ago
Nah — usually they decided to do meth and the rest followed. I used to be pretty libertarian about drugs. Victimless crime and all. But in the last ten years, it’s become clear to me that they exploit fundamental human weaknesses. TBH - I’ve become a much bigger fan of the war on drugs, and very heavy penalties for dealers.
- Double_a_92 2y ago
  Why did they decide to do meth?

ErigmolCt 2y ago

This story shows a rare instance where the system actually helped someone... But unfortunately I think without a truly personal approach, most initiatives (in this field) end up as half-measures at best

lisper 2y ago

Almost 20 years ago I spent two years trying to get a homeless person off the street and made a movie about it: https://graceofgodmovie.com/ https://graceofgodmovie.com/ It's an incredibly complicated problem, but if there is one message I can share it is this: homeless people are, first and foremost, people. They span the full range of human experience (the main subject of my movie had a masters degree in psychology) and there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Homelessness is not one problem, it is a symptom of at least half a dozen different problems, all of which need different solutions. (And, BTW, some homeless people voluntarily choose the lifestyle. It's definitely a minority, but it's not zero.)

harlanji 2y ago
Yea, I'm a regular HN reader and I've been stuck on the street for going on 7 years. Used to be commended for persevering against the odds and the like, as a child and young programmer at 15 onward, home owner at 22. I've left SF and landed in a college town in Sac Valley last year. Rent is $750/mo here. Been working in a kitchen for a year. Am I housed yet? Nope. Just gotta save a few thousand dollars. I have about the same amount of bills as a housed person, between gym + storage + take out food + car insurance. But then the social aspect, my old relatives and network need to distance themselves from me. Any kind of old reference or something, non starter. I will beat this. I only keep posting here on these threads because as you say, we span the full range of human existence. I like to think I'll use my approach as a template to help others. Get out of the big metro and into a peaceful place with cheap rent and lots of opportunity, yadda yadda. Cheers.
- carlosjobim 2y ago
  Have you looked into joining the merchant fleet? They need people working in their galleys as well, and you'll have no bills to pay.
  - deleted 2y ago
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- thierrydamiba 2y ago

tlogan 2y ago

For those who live in San Francisco and witness homelessness and drug addiction across the city, this article feels deeply out of touch and even insulting. We need to acknowledge that San Francisco has spent billions over decades on homelessness programs, yet the crisis persists, leaving us to ask: Is this truly the best we can do? Are we investing efficiently, or are we simply maintaining a broken system?

mordae 2y ago
[flagged]
- jraby3 2y ago
  You are online way too much. Come see the world say hi to some people. The US isn't a death cult it's just more heavily influenced by propaganda than most smaller countries.
presentation 2y ago
The latter
martinald 2y ago
The core problem imo is there is simply not good enough treatments for addiction (yet?). For opioid addiction there is methadone and buprenorphine etc. But I suspect these have became even less effective with so much fentanyl around now, requiring much higher doses. But these all really work (simplifying massively) by replacing the addiction with something that is easier to eventually titrate down. For meth, crack, etc there are effectively no pharmacological interventions available. And many (most?) of the street homeless have dual addictions to a stimulant and an opioid, so even if they did manage to switch from fentanyl to buprenorphine they would almost certainly be extremely unstable with their stimulant addiction. Obviously there are psychological interventions and peer support groups, but these require quite a lot of stability to stick to and get to, which I think is extremely difficult for someone in a very chaotic addiction cycle. To me, it seems some of the billions that cities spent on social services for homeless should be diverted (or in addition to) to pharmacological research. There is so little funding available for this - I read Prof David Nutt was doing an interesting PET study for kappa opioid response in addiction but ran out of funding. The funding requirements were low-medium hundreds of thousands of dollars and couldn't find it to continue the research. The current status quo seems a bit like trying to treat TB without antibiotics. The treatment back then was basically similar to current 'rehab' programs - send them to a quiet place and give them care and help. Obviously not a bad thing to do; but once you had antibiotics the prognosis improved by many orders of magnitude almost overnight (and a lot less costly to provide).

lukerramsden 2y ago

California is simply amazing. In so many areas they have problems simply nobody else has (wildfires due to bad fire control policy, homelessness and public drug usage as discussed here) or is at magnitudes worse scale than elsewhere, and then policymakers handwring about how “nothing can be done”. Nowhere else I have ever been even comes close to what I see in California.

johnnyanmac 2y ago
Yeah, meanwhile California alone is a top 10 economy and houses more billionaires than any other place. I wonder if it's a coincidence that increased greed fuels (or buys) less empathy?

IceHegel 2y ago

I’m 24 (which I think is younger than most people in here) and I live in San Francisco. I’m pretty ashamed to live here and hope to move soon. The “on the ground” feeling is bad. Every issue we had 5 years ago is worse (except the drought). Daily life involves walking calculated circles around drug addicts to avoid agroing them (like Dead Island). I’m seeing more trash on the streets, more graffiti covering highway signs. People have given up trying to change anything and just tolerate it now. I thought I’d meet high agency tech people when I moved here. The tech scene is way better than Boston but the sprit of SF is really dead. All the money in the world and they can’t run a city half a well as was done before cars…

presentation 2y ago
lol San Franciscans never tried to change anything for the last 50 years, they never gave up since they never tried to begin with - they actually prefer it this way.
kelnos 2y ago
Where in SF do you live? I'm guessing Soma, or near downtown? Get out of your neighborhood now and then. Most of the city does not have a drug addict or three on every block, and trash everywhere.
infecto 2y ago
You need to get out of SoMa. The rest of SF is pretty nice, there are definite hot zones like near Bayview but generally what you describe is just SF. I left to raise a family and one of the reasons was the homelessness BUT SF has always been like this and if it was not the homeless it was the gangs or other issues in different parts of the city. Try living in a different part of the city, it might change things up a bit.
- cancan 2y ago
  My experience suggests the opposite; the city was an upwards trajectory until 2018 or so but it's taken a turn for the worse since. I lived in SF from 2009 to 2024. Every part of the city has gotten worse. When I moved, parts of Mission were definitely rough and they've cleaned up quite a bit. Even SoMa became somewhat interesting, as much as area like that could have before Covid.

yieldcrv 2y ago

The park rangers empathic personal approach is interesting, she is working within a system not worth navigating as even that best case outcome is still a poor case outcome > For him, “it was overwhelming,” I’ve dealt with people that take 15 years to do some basic action because of something considered overwhelming. The only thing I observe is that you could literally start from scratch, the age of zero, and be competent in any field by this time In this guys case, it took 7 months to get basic identifying paperwork regenerated, so that he can walk into one of those classic grifter housing projects So many issues with that, masqueraded as a solution

jonstewart 2y ago

The last time I was in San Francisco was 8.5 years ago. My family had a cabbie with a pile of new tube socks in front seat. When he’d have to stop at a light, he would look for any homeless near the intersection, get their attention, and hand them new socks. We gave the cabbie a good tip.

barrenko 2y ago

Root cause of this issue all wonderfully explained in the Tom Holland's Dominion (not to be confused with the Spiderman actor).

namlem 2y ago
Yep, thought the same thing when reading the article. Christian morality. I think it's a good thing for society to care for the poor and downtrodden, but when it reaches the point of self-flaggelation, it's gone too far. Imo, we need some form of institutionalization that's milder than what we have for the criminally insane, but still coercive.

tehjoker 2y ago

What a horrible problem with such a simple solution. Give people adequate and decent housing at reasonable prices or for free if necessary. Laughable this is still a question in the richest country in world history.

teaearlgraycold 2y ago
Did you read the article? Some of these people don’t want to live in housing. I think what they’d prefer (and it’s not realistic) is to live in the woods on a few acres of their own in a cabin with all of their needs met. But I agree if housing was more affordable the problem would not be as bad.
- tehjoker 2y ago
  Do you really believe that if people had access to cheap / free housing there would an enormous homelessness problem? How many weirdos do you really think are out there??

1024core 2y ago

If this person wants to be left alone and live by himself, why doesn't he find some place in the wilderness, away from a city; maybe an area managed by BLM where he won't be bothered? Why does he have to fuck up one of the few parks in a city of 850,000 people?

itishappy 2y ago
The article speaks explicitly to this point: > Barrows slowly learned that he’d had a rough childhood and had grown up in a foster family. The park was his childhood refuge, a place where he’d spend afternoons wandering around and riding the carousel. She understood then why he had such a deep attachment to the place.
nickvec 2y ago
How do you expect them to get necessities to survive in the wilderness?

sidgarimella 2y ago

the hn cynicism is crazy but unsurprising. turns out can really easily spend your whole life obsessed with a pragmatism that betrays taking any action, however directionally correct

namlem 2y ago

Sorry but the idea that such a system of personal involvement is a practical solution is a pipe dream. We need some system of involuntary confinement that isn't prison or psych hospitals imo. A place where we can put these people in humane conditions that is meant to transition them into being able to take care of themselves. A place where they can have private rooms and be given useful work to do, as well as counseling for their mental health issues.

owenversteeg 2y ago

It's nice to read an article showing someone with serious empathy and understanding. We need more of that these days. But it's also immediately obvious that more of this cannot possibly be the solution. This article is basically the "California liberal" solution turned up to 11: maximum personalized attention, empathy, "softness" plus several opportunities for housing. And yet as the article shows, you put a homeless person with extreme mental illness and/or addiction into a shelter/apartment/SRO/wherever and they will usually end up homeless again. And this system has an extremely high cost. People harassed or attacked by the homeless. Volunteers and government employees with their own trauma from the things they deal with when working with the homeless. Sections of cities that are unlivable. Even when there's a "success story" it is usually "this person's life still sucks, they're still addicted and have the same other demons but now life sucks in a shitty apartment in a shitty neighborhood instead of in a park where it's other people's problem." The only real option is prevention. We need stronger communities, stronger families, mentorship for young people. The interventions from the article, across the small handful of homeless men described, cost at least several million dollars. Take a fraction of that money and invest it in new windows and fresh paint and flowerbeds in the neighborhoods they grew up in. Give them access to nutritious food and exercise. Provide for regular contact with community leaders and mentors and people who can make a difference in their lives. Allocate money to wholesome community activities (sports, robotics, arts, etc) such that they can vacuum up all the free time of a teenager with nothing better to do. Every dollar invested in each of these things will repay itself a hundredfold. Much of homelessness is a disease without a cure. What do you do with a disease without a cure? Prevent it.

ncr100 2y ago

Great article highlighting a complex problem, and the steps required to solve it. EDIT: May be a situation that would call for "Dog Fooding", to solve for the detailed use-cases? USA does not spend enough resources to get a highly effective suite of services together, nor appreciate enough the value of human life to consistently provide care to people, ironically. I'm currently dealing with the impact of a homeless, mutually abusive (shouting, fighting), drug-using couple camping either on the strip of grass directly in front of my home (most recently for weeks) or various sidewalks / bus stops in a 2 block radius, here in Seattle. Worse, they attract "pals" who are : heavier drug users, very very disruptive to the neighborhood by causing nuisances including walking into traffic and being struck / killed here, creating public health issues with drug paraphernalia and human waste, etc. This article reminds me of the complexity the couple faces, freeing themselves from the shackles of their abusive relationship, moving away from the homeo-statically well-know life on the streets. I want them gone. I see it's difficult. I wish more Civil Servants were available to guide them. There aren't that many. The Seattle Unified Care Team has been ineffective for this couple, they have been here for over four years, and it has not improved.

willywanker 2y ago

Gotta love the change in terminology. 'Unhoused' people instead of homeless, as though their being without a place to live is now someone else's (the American taxpayers') responsibility.

AStonesThrow 2y ago

So I've been looking through overhead map views, and identified possible swastikas near Mental Health Care facilities. For example, This "Specialized Pharmacy" dispenses BH drugs https://maps.app.goo.gl/ktnBzitvbKjPrFp78 https://maps.app.goo.gl/ktnBzitvbKjPrFp78 Is this clockwise or widdershins? I need to squint and ponder the shape before the swastika spins out. Like the arrow in the FedEx logo. Activate the Satellite Photo view to see the building design This area in Glendale, AZ is a large medical complex, and the two "spins counterclockwise swastika style" buildings are "Advanced Health" which is boutique cosmetics and upgrades for the wealthy, mostly, and there are dentists and imaging/radiology and vision care. You can Street View the shingles hung outside. No BH here that I found. https://maps.app.goo.gl/srBLyNUkMLNmD3gt6 https://maps.app.goo.gl/srBLyNUkMLNmD3gt6 Another interesting clockwise swastika, if I am not hallucinating it, is by road design in Tempe 85288: It's at Priest Drive, [psychiatrists and physicians are a priestly class who practice a religion of Aesclepius, wearing casual blue or dressy white vestments and stethoscope rosary, in temples that smell sanitized and sterile], and there is a little international food court with good falafel and Hindu fare, cybersecurity/IT firms kitty-corner to that, homes going up, a train station, and oh yeah, up the road to NW there's the central behavioral health authorities and crisis line operators, a large disability center, the D.E.S. services for SNAP, unemployment, not far actually from the Phoenix Zoo, etc, (is the Zoo hiring this month? any vacancies for carbon-based homeless?) and a housing agency for the Mentally Ill, Disabled and Chronically Homeless, commercial blood testing lab, etc. https://maps.app.goo.gl/PXz44uHWc4vTw8hR9 https://maps.app.goo.gl/PXz44uHWc4vTw8hR9 Now of course a Swastika is not automatically rabid Nazi supremacist style, but it helps to understand the positioning of Mental Health Care and ordinary normal physicians and hospitals, the legal authority they carry to route patients out of the community, and into court-ordered drugging, or the penal/corrections/prison system, and the pipeline to cemeteries such as White Tanks or crematoria. Of course many mentally ill people also die or become gravely disabled, or felons, without any treatment. But I just looked at the graceful curved arms of Priest & Washington as the wheel spins clockwise, I suppose. Don't forget that the WWII losers and refugees migrated to elsewhere and contributed all their research and intellect to receiving nations. Herr Mengele drowned off South American coast. So it goes.

AStonesThrow 2y ago