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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 the

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?
  - tptacek 2y ago
    I'm in Oak Park, for what it's worth. I went to high school next to the ABLA homes. I don't think redeveloping the projects is why we have homeless people; those buildings weren't full of mentally ill people, they were full of families. We replaced the CHA homes with Section 8 vouchers, and that has, I think, improved things.
    - jordanb 2y ago
      Well I don't think you're a renter then. I am so glad I bought a house in 2016 because everyone I know who rents has been on a wild ride. Section 8 has long wait lists. It seems kinda unbelievable to argue that destruction of thousands of units of low income housing didn't cause people to not have housing. I don't doubt that many people are mentally ill. Before Rahm's cuts, we had a taxpayer-ran system of caring for the mentally ill.
      - tptacek 2y ago
        I'm just saying: the ABLA homes weren't a relief valve for people who could not safely take care of themselves. It wasn't where all the people in tents on the streets came from. The CHA projects were overrun with gangs, for sure, but the median CHA tenant was a taxpaying full-time employee. I guess what I'm snagging on here is the assumption that there's an equivalence to draw between an ABLA tenant and a fentanyl addict. (I've been a renter and a homeowner in Chicago; I grew up here).
- SOLAR_FIELDS 2y ago
  My spouse works in homeless outreach in Texas. Essentially doing the exact thing mentioned in the article that the park rangers are doing - Helping people jump the bureaucratic hurdles of no ID, no birth certificate, etc that preclude the client from obtaining housing or employment. 80% of the clients are grateful and work towards housing. The other 20% refuse any help whatsoever.
  - devilsdata 2y ago
    This is the nuanced perspective that’s sorely needed in our society. Some people refuse help, and it becomes a talking point and a reason to never offer help— but that simply shouldn’t be the case.
- kjkjadksj 2y ago
  Isn’t it so stupid how cities don’t just install port a potties everywhere? Same issues here where they aren’t installed because people will make them gross. Well the alternative to a gross port a pottie is to have people poop and pee in the road which I’d say is a lot worse. Like none of our train stations in LA have bathrooms because they would get “gross” so instead people piss in the elevator on the floor because that is better apparently than having a dirty bathroom. Not building bathrooms doesn’t stop biology from happening.
  - zozbot234 2y ago
    Port-a-potties require frequent emptying and other kinds of maintenance. Other kinds of dry toilets are under development which would address this issue in a variety of ways (e.g. composting toilets) and be applicable to all sorts of interesting scenarios (e.g. remote places in the developing world, where proper disposal of human excreta is a severe public health concern) but overall they're not yet ready for prime time.
    - kjkjadksj 2y ago
      The elevator at the train station also requires frequent power washing because people pee in it. The maintenance of the porta pottie is already being paid by society especially by our metro in added custodial needs. Why not just implement it then? Contain the piss and poop?
      - zozbot234 2y ago
        Shouldn't a train station have restrooms somewhere already?
  - tptacek 2y ago
    It took my muni months of meetings to come to the conclusion we could not safely set up public toilets. No, cities can't simply install port a potties everywhere.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  Sounds like a parallel issue. Homes won't help with addiction. If Nixon didn't utterly ruin the term, a "war on drugs" would be applicable here. Or rather a "war on addiction". Hard to make compulsory though. Nixon didn't do it, but that era also gave asylums a horrible reputation.
seanmcdirmid 2y ago
I support initiatives to get really aggressive with drug dealers/users. I wish we could better help the unhoused in humane ways, but when 99% of our social resources we allocate to that effort are forced to go to fent zombies to no appreciable effect, I am very pessimistic we will make any progress no matter how many billions we throw at it.
- marcus_holmes 2y ago
  We lost the War on Drugs. Every attempt to treat drug users as criminals has failed to achieve anything useful. Portugal (as an example) treats drug use as a health problem and has much better results. Addiction is a disease, a health problem, not something you can beat out of people by imprisoning them or being "really aggressive". That just makes the problem worse.
  - seanmcdirmid 2y ago
    Portuguese complain about the drug zombies a lot more than I do. We lost the war, so let’s just admit it and move on. Like you say, there is nothing we can do, so we should redirect our resources to unhoused cases that we have a much better chance of solving. We can liberalize drugs if you want, let them do all the fent they want; society just shouldn’t be on the hook for fixing them, which doesn’t seem to work very well anyways, even if we spend all of our money on it.
    - marcus_holmes 2y ago
      > Portuguese complain about the drug zombies a lot more than I do. [0] USA has the highest drug use per head of population in the entire world. Portugal is way down the list. I don't think there's "nothing we can do". I think it's more of a question of how we approach the problem. We have always approached it as a failure of the individual in question, requiring correction by punishment. This has clearly not worked (ever) but everyone seems reluctant to abandon it. If we approach addiction as a disease, like cancer, that affects some people against their will, rather than something they chose because they're junkie scum, we might help them more [1] > society just shouldn’t be on the hook for fixing them In the USA society is never on the hook for fixing people. All that rugged individualism. Other societies work differently, and that seems to get better results. [0] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/drug-use-by-country https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/drug-use-... the USA has the highest world [1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6633066/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6633066/
idlewords 2y ago
San Francisco's homelessness budget in 2021 was $1.1 billion, for a homeless population of maybe 10,000. That works out to $110K per person before you add in state and Federal money. Say this budget was doubled. What should that money be spent on, that isn't being funded now?
- tptacek 2y ago
  We had this mathematical problem during the Venezuelan migrant crisis. A group of well-intentioned activists bussed about 100 migrants from the CPD station on Grand to Village Hall in Oak Park. By the time the dust had settled, we'd allocated enough money to each family --- through in-kind services, temporary housing, bridge services, etc --- that most of them could have bought a small house (outright!) in the south suburbs. Most of those families would have been way better off with the money than with the program design we came up instead.
  - idlewords 2y ago
    Where are those families now?
    - tptacek 2y ago
      Really hard to say. Many of them ended up in specially-arranged multi-month lease situations; I don't know where they would have gone when the leases ended.
  - ty6853 2y ago
    For the price of a home here they could live in a shack in the jungle of Venezuela off the mere interest and never work again.
    - tptacek 2y ago
      I'm making a point about program design, not about the advisability of allowing economic refugees into the country.

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?
- tptacek 2y ago
  I'm in Oak Park, for what it's worth. I went to high school next to the ABLA homes. I don't think redeveloping the projects is why we have homeless people; those buildings weren't full of mentally ill people, they were full of families. We replaced the CHA homes with Section 8 vouchers, and that has, I think, improved things.
  - jordanb 2y ago
    Well I don't think you're a renter then. I am so glad I bought a house in 2016 because everyone I know who rents has been on a wild ride. Section 8 has long wait lists. It seems kinda unbelievable to argue that destruction of thousands of units of low income housing didn't cause people to not have housing. I don't doubt that many people are mentally ill. Before Rahm's cuts, we had a taxpayer-ran system of caring for the mentally ill.
    - tptacek 2y ago
      I'm just saying: the ABLA homes weren't a relief valve for people who could not safely take care of themselves. It wasn't where all the people in tents on the streets came from. The CHA projects were overrun with gangs, for sure, but the median CHA tenant was a taxpaying full-time employee. I guess what I'm snagging on here is the assumption that there's an equivalence to draw between an ABLA tenant and a fentanyl addict. (I've been a renter and a homeowner in Chicago; I grew up here).
SOLAR_FIELDS 2y ago
My spouse works in homeless outreach in Texas. Essentially doing the exact thing mentioned in the article that the park rangers are doing - Helping people jump the bureaucratic hurdles of no ID, no birth certificate, etc that preclude the client from obtaining housing or employment. 80% of the clients are grateful and work towards housing. The other 20% refuse any help whatsoever.
- devilsdata 2y ago
  This is the nuanced perspective that’s sorely needed in our society. Some people refuse help, and it becomes a talking point and a reason to never offer help— but that simply shouldn’t be the case.
kjkjadksj 2y ago
Isn’t it so stupid how cities don’t just install port a potties everywhere? Same issues here where they aren’t installed because people will make them gross. Well the alternative to a gross port a pottie is to have people poop and pee in the road which I’d say is a lot worse. Like none of our train stations in LA have bathrooms because they would get “gross” so instead people piss in the elevator on the floor because that is better apparently than having a dirty bathroom. Not building bathrooms doesn’t stop biology from happening.
- zozbot234 2y ago
  Port-a-potties require frequent emptying and other kinds of maintenance. Other kinds of dry toilets are under development which would address this issue in a variety of ways (e.g. composting toilets) and be applicable to all sorts of interesting scenarios (e.g. remote places in the developing world, where proper disposal of human excreta is a severe public health concern) but overall they're not yet ready for prime time.
  - kjkjadksj 2y ago
    The elevator at the train station also requires frequent power washing because people pee in it. The maintenance of the porta pottie is already being paid by society especially by our metro in added custodial needs. Why not just implement it then? Contain the piss and poop?
    - zozbot234 2y ago
      Shouldn't a train station have restrooms somewhere already?
- tptacek 2y ago
  It took my muni months of meetings to come to the conclusion we could not safely set up public toilets. No, cities can't simply install port a potties everywhere.
johnnyanmac 2y ago
Sounds like a parallel issue. Homes won't help with addiction. If Nixon didn't utterly ruin the term, a "war on drugs" would be applicable here. Or rather a "war on addiction". Hard to make compulsory though. Nixon didn't do it, but that era also gave asylums a horrible reputation.

seanmcdirmid 2y ago

I support initiatives to get really aggressive with drug dealers/users. I wish we could better help the unhoused in humane ways, but when 99% of our social resources we allocate to that effort are forced to go to fent zombies to no appreciable effect, I am very pessimistic we will make any progress no matter how many billions we throw at it.

marcus_holmes 2y ago
We lost the War on Drugs. Every attempt to treat drug users as criminals has failed to achieve anything useful. Portugal (as an example) treats drug use as a health problem and has much better results. Addiction is a disease, a health problem, not something you can beat out of people by imprisoning them or being "really aggressive". That just makes the problem worse.
- seanmcdirmid 2y ago
  Portuguese complain about the drug zombies a lot more than I do. We lost the war, so let’s just admit it and move on. Like you say, there is nothing we can do, so we should redirect our resources to unhoused cases that we have a much better chance of solving. We can liberalize drugs if you want, let them do all the fent they want; society just shouldn’t be on the hook for fixing them, which doesn’t seem to work very well anyways, even if we spend all of our money on it.
  - marcus_holmes 2y ago
    > Portuguese complain about the drug zombies a lot more than I do. [0] USA has the highest drug use per head of population in the entire world. Portugal is way down the list. I don't think there's "nothing we can do". I think it's more of a question of how we approach the problem. We have always approached it as a failure of the individual in question, requiring correction by punishment. This has clearly not worked (ever) but everyone seems reluctant to abandon it. If we approach addiction as a disease, like cancer, that affects some people against their will, rather than something they chose because they're junkie scum, we might help them more [1] > society just shouldn’t be on the hook for fixing them In the USA society is never on the hook for fixing people. All that rugged individualism. Other societies work differently, and that seems to get better results. [0] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/drug-use-by-country https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/drug-use-... the USA has the highest world [1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6633066/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6633066/

idlewords 2y ago

San Francisco's homelessness budget in 2021 was $1.1 billion, for a homeless population of maybe 10,000. That works out to $110K per person before you add in state and Federal money. Say this budget was doubled. What should that money be spent on, that isn't being funded now?

tptacek 2y ago
We had this mathematical problem during the Venezuelan migrant crisis. A group of well-intentioned activists bussed about 100 migrants from the CPD station on Grand to Village Hall in Oak Park. By the time the dust had settled, we'd allocated enough money to each family --- through in-kind services, temporary housing, bridge services, etc --- that most of them could have bought a small house (outright!) in the south suburbs. Most of those families would have been way better off with the money than with the program design we came up instead.
- idlewords 2y ago
  Where are those families now?
  - tptacek 2y ago
    Really hard to say. Many of them ended up in specially-arranged multi-month lease situations; I don't know where they would have gone when the leases ended.
- ty6853 2y ago
  For the price of a home here they could live in a shack in the jungle of Venezuela off the mere interest and never work again.
  - tptacek 2y ago
    I'm making a point about program design, not about the advisability of allowing economic refugees into the country.