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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 "pa

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
[deleted]
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.
- tptacek 2y ago
  I left San Francisco 20 years ago, but, speaking to the situation in Chicagoland: our municipality funds long-term housing, support, and bridge services for local unhoused, and my understand is that the biggest problem we have with problematic unhoused people --- the people shooting up out in the open, or using vestibules as toilets, or accosting passers-by --- is getting them to take up those services. It is the case that we have difficulty placing public toilets because of the risks their abuse will pose to unsuspecting users. I don't think it does anybody any good to pretend that these aren't real problems, or that we can moralize past them. I think, at least in most major metros, we're past the point of it being a live issue whether to fund services to transition homeless people off the streets. Residents will fund those services simply because the alternatives are so disruptive. With that in mind, I feel like any response to this problem that centers on "well we should fund more services" is basically stalling.
  - marcus_holmes 2y ago
    Totally agree, and I'm not trying to minimise the harm that this does to our spaces. Decades ago there were institutions that these people were placed in. We decided not to do that any more, for good reasons and bad, and I think maybe we should revisit that decision.
  - jordanb 2y ago
    I've lived in Chicago since 2001 and when I got here it was pretty rare to see homeless people (and I lived in Uptown for a while back when Broadway was still borderline skid row). First big wave of it (when you started to see tents appear under the highways and such) was 2008. Second big wave where that seemed to metastasize were Rahm Emmanuel's budget cuts. In particular, he shut down all the mental health clinics, and you ended up with a lot of people getting forced off their meds. EDIT: Another thing, when I moved here there were still quite a few housing projects. I am not going to pretend they weren't rough. I walked through the ABLA homes most days and watched them get torn down. I had a kid hit me with a rock while biking through Cabrini. But there was a place where people could be off the streets back then. Now where do you go? What's waitlist for section 8 up to?
idiotsecant 2y ago
[flagged]
MichaelZuo 2y ago
Clearly the local electorate has decided such desires and aspirations are not worthwhile enough to change their voting behaviour… So the question is how do you plan to change that? Trying to convince random HN readers seems pointless if that’s your goal.
- aprilthird2021 2y ago
  This isn't true btw. In San Francisco the constant homeless and drug and crime issues have led to voting changes.
  - MichaelZuo 2y ago
    Since when did changes in one electoral cycle automatically equate to changes in long term voting behaviour? e.g. Swing states are a well known concept, so it’s unclear how you could confuse that. It has to be credibly sustained and durable for a few cycles, at the very least.
    - aprilthird2021 2y ago
      It has been durable for a few cycles. There was the Boudin recall and now the recent election
      - MichaelZuo 2y ago
        Can you provide sources for the relevant electoral districts…? At the very least, whatever has been imagined hasn’t translated into a ground reality expected by the parent. So I doubt it’s true.
xyst 2y ago
Blame the rapacious capitalists that have essentially ripped away the safety nets that Americans used to enjoy. Cost of living has skyrocketed while labor wages have stagnated. Blame awful economic theory such as neoliberalism, “trickle down economics” that has allowed a few people and corporations to acquire a significant amounts of wealth while not paying back into the system that helped them get there. Decades of tax cuts to the wealthy while cutting funding for federal/state programs. Corporations are buying up all of the property and jacking up the rates. Minimum wage hasn’t been increased since 2009. What we need is a political party that _fights_ for the middle class. We need power to shift back to labor instead of the rapacious capitalists that instead of investing the profits into the company (ie, increase wages for labor) it’s reinvested into stock manipulation tactics such as stock buybacks. The shareholders, often foreigners as well, get paid while labor holds the bag. Fuck the culture war. The next war is a class war and it won’t end well if this country continues at its current trajectory.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  I don't like saying this much as an ex-redditors. But it's a shame seeing this downvoted as if a huge cause of a lot of things isn't our gridlocked politics bribed/powered by donors and billionaires robbing the country blind.
archagon 2y ago
[flagged]
- idlewords 2y ago
  I lived near this particular park, so the article struck a chord with me. For things to be better, we need to start doing things differently, and one starting point is to have compassion for the people who are denied the use of public spaces by the hardcore homeless who refuse outreach and aid.
  - archagon 2y ago
    Let’s not exaggerate here. I’ve been to Golden Gate Park many times in recent months and it is bustling with activity. It’s also a massive area. People are not scrambling over encampments or wading through needles to access most public spaces in the city (though there are certainly some hot spots).
  - marcus_holmes 2y ago
    You ask for compassion, yet give none. Have some compassion, then you might qualify for some.
  - redmajor12 2y ago
    The problem with trebuchets though is that the trebuchet makers are less well connected politically, so there's less opportunities for graft along the way.
WeylandYutani 2y ago
America has no social safety net and a drug epidemic. What did you seriously think was going to happen? I even find a weird sense of respect for the folks who want to build concentration camps because at least they are honest.
ambarp2 2y ago
My solution to this was to sell my home and leave San Francisco after living there 19 years. The moment I had a baby on the way, it no longer became tenable for me to deal with the lack of cleanliness or safety on the streets. The irony is that I moved to Mexico City. It’s a far safer place than San Francisco.
- blovescoffee 2y ago
  That’s pretty debatable and entirely depends on how you define safety. I live in cdmx btw.
- rafram 2y ago
  Just for the record, CDMX has a crime rate of over 50,000 per 100,000 residents, meaning that there’s one crime for every two residents each year. SF’s crime rate is about 6,000 per 100,000 - so about eight times safer. CDMX might feel safer than SF to you, but it is unequivocally much, much more dangerous. When the housing crisis there reaches its breaking point (driven by gentrifying transplants), we’ll see if even the feeling lasts.
  - hcurtiss 2y ago
    Mexico City is absolutely enormous. I don’t know for sure, but I’m betting crime rates city-wide don’t tell the whole story.
    - seanmcdirmid 2y ago
      The same is true with San Francisco, even if it isn’t as big. We could cherry pick compare the best neighborhood of Mexico City against the worst neighborhood of SF to falsify a claim that Mexico City is safer than San Francisco.
    - rafram 2y ago
      Sure, and all cities of all sizes have crime hotspots, but even the rich transplant epicenter, Roma, has a crime rate of about 8 per 100 [1]. That’s well above the SF average, which itself is skewed by a few high-crime outliers like the Tenderloin. [1]: https://hoyodecrimen.com/en/sectores-map/ https://hoyodecrimen.com/en/sectores-map/
gadders 2y ago
As Rob Henderson said "San Francisco is the only city where dogs tread in human shit."
habosa 2y ago
As someone who has enjoyed your writing, I find your trebuchet comment to be so distasteful I’ll have a hard time not hearing it if I read your posts again in the future. These are human beings you’re talking about. And before you say I don’t get to have a say, I’d like to point out I live only 3 blocks from Golden Gate Park and I’m raising my child here. I’ve lived all over the city including in some of the worst areas (6th Street). I do understand the problems we have here, but I don’t think it’s appropriate to suggest we trebuchet people.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

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.

tptacek 2y ago
I left San Francisco 20 years ago, but, speaking to the situation in Chicagoland: our municipality funds long-term housing, support, and bridge services for local unhoused, and my understand is that the biggest problem we have with problematic unhoused people --- the people shooting up out in the open, or using vestibules as toilets, or accosting passers-by --- is getting them to take up those services. It is the case that we have difficulty placing public toilets because of the risks their abuse will pose to unsuspecting users. I don't think it does anybody any good to pretend that these aren't real problems, or that we can moralize past them. I think, at least in most major metros, we're past the point of it being a live issue whether to fund services to transition homeless people off the streets. Residents will fund those services simply because the alternatives are so disruptive. With that in mind, I feel like any response to this problem that centers on "well we should fund more services" is basically stalling.
- marcus_holmes 2y ago
  Totally agree, and I'm not trying to minimise the harm that this does to our spaces. Decades ago there were institutions that these people were placed in. We decided not to do that any more, for good reasons and bad, and I think maybe we should revisit that decision.
- jordanb 2y ago
  I've lived in Chicago since 2001 and when I got here it was pretty rare to see homeless people (and I lived in Uptown for a while back when Broadway was still borderline skid row). First big wave of it (when you started to see tents appear under the highways and such) was 2008. Second big wave where that seemed to metastasize were Rahm Emmanuel's budget cuts. In particular, he shut down all the mental health clinics, and you ended up with a lot of people getting forced off their meds. EDIT: Another thing, when I moved here there were still quite a few housing projects. I am not going to pretend they weren't rough. I walked through the ABLA homes most days and watched them get torn down. I had a kid hit me with a rock while biking through Cabrini. But there was a place where people could be off the streets back then. Now where do you go? What's waitlist for section 8 up to?

idiotsecant 2y ago

[flagged]

MichaelZuo 2y ago

Clearly the local electorate has decided such desires and aspirations are not worthwhile enough to change their voting behaviour… So the question is how do you plan to change that? Trying to convince random HN readers seems pointless if that’s your goal.

aprilthird2021 2y ago
This isn't true btw. In San Francisco the constant homeless and drug and crime issues have led to voting changes.
- MichaelZuo 2y ago
  Since when did changes in one electoral cycle automatically equate to changes in long term voting behaviour? e.g. Swing states are a well known concept, so it’s unclear how you could confuse that. It has to be credibly sustained and durable for a few cycles, at the very least.
  - aprilthird2021 2y ago
    It has been durable for a few cycles. There was the Boudin recall and now the recent election
    - MichaelZuo 2y ago
      Can you provide sources for the relevant electoral districts…? At the very least, whatever has been imagined hasn’t translated into a ground reality expected by the parent. So I doubt it’s true.

xyst 2y ago

Blame the rapacious capitalists that have essentially ripped away the safety nets that Americans used to enjoy. Cost of living has skyrocketed while labor wages have stagnated. Blame awful economic theory such as neoliberalism, “trickle down economics” that has allowed a few people and corporations to acquire a significant amounts of wealth while not paying back into the system that helped them get there. Decades of tax cuts to the wealthy while cutting funding for federal/state programs. Corporations are buying up all of the property and jacking up the rates. Minimum wage hasn’t been increased since 2009. What we need is a political party that _fights_ for the middle class. We need power to shift back to labor instead of the rapacious capitalists that instead of investing the profits into the company (ie, increase wages for labor) it’s reinvested into stock manipulation tactics such as stock buybacks. The shareholders, often foreigners as well, get paid while labor holds the bag. Fuck the culture war. The next war is a class war and it won’t end well if this country continues at its current trajectory.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
johnnyanmac 2y ago
I don't like saying this much as an ex-redditors. But it's a shame seeing this downvoted as if a huge cause of a lot of things isn't our gridlocked politics bribed/powered by donors and billionaires robbing the country blind.

archagon 2y ago

[flagged]

idlewords 2y ago
I lived near this particular park, so the article struck a chord with me. For things to be better, we need to start doing things differently, and one starting point is to have compassion for the people who are denied the use of public spaces by the hardcore homeless who refuse outreach and aid.
- archagon 2y ago
  Let’s not exaggerate here. I’ve been to Golden Gate Park many times in recent months and it is bustling with activity. It’s also a massive area. People are not scrambling over encampments or wading through needles to access most public spaces in the city (though there are certainly some hot spots).
- marcus_holmes 2y ago
  You ask for compassion, yet give none. Have some compassion, then you might qualify for some.
- redmajor12 2y ago
  The problem with trebuchets though is that the trebuchet makers are less well connected politically, so there's less opportunities for graft along the way.

WeylandYutani 2y ago

America has no social safety net and a drug epidemic. What did you seriously think was going to happen? I even find a weird sense of respect for the folks who want to build concentration camps because at least they are honest.

ambarp2 2y ago

My solution to this was to sell my home and leave San Francisco after living there 19 years. The moment I had a baby on the way, it no longer became tenable for me to deal with the lack of cleanliness or safety on the streets. The irony is that I moved to Mexico City. It’s a far safer place than San Francisco.

blovescoffee 2y ago
That’s pretty debatable and entirely depends on how you define safety. I live in cdmx btw.
rafram 2y ago
Just for the record, CDMX has a crime rate of over 50,000 per 100,000 residents, meaning that there’s one crime for every two residents each year. SF’s crime rate is about 6,000 per 100,000 - so about eight times safer. CDMX might feel safer than SF to you, but it is unequivocally much, much more dangerous. When the housing crisis there reaches its breaking point (driven by gentrifying transplants), we’ll see if even the feeling lasts.
- hcurtiss 2y ago
  Mexico City is absolutely enormous. I don’t know for sure, but I’m betting crime rates city-wide don’t tell the whole story.
  - seanmcdirmid 2y ago
    The same is true with San Francisco, even if it isn’t as big. We could cherry pick compare the best neighborhood of Mexico City against the worst neighborhood of SF to falsify a claim that Mexico City is safer than San Francisco.
  - rafram 2y ago
    Sure, and all cities of all sizes have crime hotspots, but even the rich transplant epicenter, Roma, has a crime rate of about 8 per 100 [1]. That’s well above the SF average, which itself is skewed by a few high-crime outliers like the Tenderloin. [1]: https://hoyodecrimen.com/en/sectores-map/ https://hoyodecrimen.com/en/sectores-map/

gadders 2y ago

As Rob Henderson said "San Francisco is the only city where dogs tread in human shit."

habosa 2y ago

As someone who has enjoyed your writing, I find your trebuchet comment to be so distasteful I’ll have a hard time not hearing it if I read your posts again in the future. These are human beings you’re talking about. And before you say I don’t get to have a say, I’d like to point out I live only 3 blocks from Golden Gate Park and I’m raising my child here. I’ve lived all over the city including in some of the worst areas (6th Street). I do understand the problems we have here, but I don’t think it’s appropriate to suggest we trebuchet people.