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What's remarkable about this is how the poster finds these casual encounters with homelessness "unremarkable". No other western city that I have visited has the
by djmdjm 14y ago
What's remarkable about this is how the poster finds these casual encounters with homelessness "unremarkable". No other western city that I have visited has the massive, in-your-face homelessness as SF.
I don't know enough about the causes of this phenomenon in SF to suggest what can be done about it; I'm sure they are complex, multi-factorial and politically fraught, but the level of homelessness in SF and (almost) everyone's blase acceptance of it shocks me every time I visit.
- unkleruckus 14y agoI live in the Mission and work in Soma. I ride my bike under a stretch of 101 where there are usually several people sleeping. I am not sure if this is "accepted" or not but everyone seems to just ignore it completely.
- yannk 14y agoIt pretty much describes every single spot under 101 in the city... 17th has become worse in the recent months/year
- eob 14y agoI have this reaction every time I visit a west coast city. So far, that includes San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle. I've always assumed it has something to do with the climate being more amenable to homelessness. But thinking about it now there must be some other political or structural reasons at play.
- jiggy2011 14y agoFailed startup founders?
- sbov 14y agoSome cities in the US just make it illegal to be homeless. Problem solved.
- chao- 14y agoOr you can be a bit more subtle about it, Suburban Texas Style™, and simply design the homeless away: 1. No public transportation. 2. Unreasonable distances between gathering places (e.g. grocery stores) and often long stretches of no sidewalks. 3. Public park curfews with police sweeps of said parks at night. No way to get in, no way to get food, no way to stay. When I realized, as a teenager, that this was why I was not used to homeless people, I was a little perturbed.
- huggah 14y agoExcept for #3, I don't think these measures could be considered intentional. However, I imagine they have a large effect and go a long way to explain the difference between SF (or NY) and most of the midwest/mountain/central US.
- chao- 14y agoHonolulu comes close. As you say, it's complex in origin, but contributing factors are the constant influx of outside money (tourism), significant pedestrian traffic, and moderate climate (you can live outside year-round and the weather will never be completely unbearable, or kill you outright).
- dclowd9901 14y agoLocal law enforcement has told us that, off the books, many East coast cities have actually paid to fly their homeless out of their areas into other parts of the country, California (namely San Francisco) because of their homeless-friendliness. People wonder what happened to all the crime and homeless in NYC? They were flown out west.
- outside1234 14y agoi can't believe that. it fails the conspiracy secrecy test - there would have had to have been a bunch of people involved and eventually there would have been a scandal. my bet is that we have mild winters in California that are much less Darwinian.
- pkaler 14y agoAlberta offered bus tickets to welfare recipients to leave the province. A lot of them ended up in Vancouver and in the Downtown Eastside. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_Canada#Cuts_to_Social_Assistance_.28welfare.29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_Canada#Cuts_to_...
- kingnothing 14y ago"New York has found a novel, if expensive, way of dealing with its overcrowded shelters – buying one-way tickets for homeless families to leave the city." http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jul/29/new-york-homeless-ticket-leave http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jul/29/new-york-homeles...
- epc 14y agoFrom that article: “Families can qualify for the tickets if they have a relative in another part of the world, including the US, who says they are willing to house them.” NYC also gets its share of people from outside the NYC region who actually fall for the myth of NYC as ultra-socialist nirvana.
- charonn0 14y ago
- geebee 14y agoIn the mid-90s, when I lived in New York, panhandlers would follow me several blocks while negotiating for change (you got tokens? I take subway tokens!). In Paris in the mid 80s, the same thing happened constantly in the metro station. Panhandlers would also come up to you while you were stuck in traffic, ask you to roll down your window, and try to bum money off you. It was constant. I was punched by a bum in Dublin when I didn't give money. SF is bad, but I'm always a little surprised when people say it's somehow unique. There does seem to be a more seriously mentally disturbed element to SF, though, I will give you that. I've heard NY has cleaned up, and I didn't get spanged last time I was in Paris as far as I remember (though someone did try the old trick of pretending to "find" a ring, ask if it belonged to my wife, insist on handing it to her, and then asking for money).
- chao- 14y agothough someone did try the old trick of pretending to "find" a ring, ask if it belonged to my wife, insist on handing it to her, and then asking for money I don't understand this, and if someone did that to me, I would be utterly confused. What's the basis for giving someone a ring that they would know isn't theirs?
- geebee 14y agoTo induce a feeling of obligation. I accepted a gift, now I should give a gift in return. This way, they trade a ten cent ring and ask for a 10 euro note in return. She tossed the ring on the ground so it clattered and jumped up, "is this yours? Oh, well you keep it...", you know, that kind of crap.
- arcatek 14y ago"This ring did fall, take it, take it !" "Now can you give me money please ?" Sometimes they don't speak the country languages (or don't want to), so it's hard to say 'no'.
- arcatek 14y agoAs a parisian currently living at Montreal, there is a huge difference between the two mentalities. There is homeless people at Montreal too, but .. well .. most of them are civil : they don't try to annoy you to get money (some of them even say "Have a nice day" when I decline). One of the thing which surprised me when I first used the montreal subway was that the 'musicians' were actually real musicians, played only at some places, and did not try to get money by playing so bad that you only wanted them to stop. When I came back to Paris during holidays, it was horrible to see again these guys with their horrible speakers, horrible musics and horrible voices. tl;dr Montreal is a very nice city. Why can't we find such nice behavior in other cities ?
- deathchill 14y agoI didn't notice the homelessness to be nearly as bad as Vancouver when I visited SF in 2011. Maybe we missed it, but we stayed in a hostel on Mason Street and walked around a fair bit. Here's a picture from East Hastings Street in Vancouver: http://jamesdanderfer.com/news/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/East-Hastings.jpg http://jamesdanderfer.com/news/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/Ea... This is what that spot looks like every day, except the lines of homeless stretch much further then the picture shows. After that section of the street you get corners filled with hookers and junkies.
- entelarust 14y agoI remember visiting vancouver and found myself walking down that street. I was like WTF is going on
- nahname 14y agoWestwood in LA was pretty similar. I would guess the climate and the excess change is the primary draw. As a visitor to the US, I find the homeless there very emotionally saddening. I had a morning routine in LA where the same guy would greet me and everyone around. I just started buying him breakfast each day and he was always very appreciative. Saw a lot of people grabbing food out of garbage cans. Another guy with no legs crossing 10 lanes of traffic. Just a painful reminder of how much harder life could be. I wasn't as regular with my routine in SFO and admittedly moved apartments further from the tenderloin. I ended up scaring more homeless whenever I walked through the tenderloin than scared me. But I still found it depressing to have to face that each day when I knew I could make a meaningful difference to many of the people I saw.
- neoveller 14y agoHas Westwood gotten worse since I graduated UCLA in 2010? By my memory, there were only several decipherably-homeless individuals wandering about. In most cases, they would talk at me, mumbling, and didn't actually talk TO me in a real attempt to get anything. I would even say downtown Palo Alto is worse than Westwood. The rest of LA is pretty bad, but Westwood was a far cry away from any of it.
- nahname 14y agoDidn't spend much time in the rest of LA, but I was in westwood for 8 months in 2011. There was less than the tenderloin, but most of the streets with shops had a homeless on every corner. I would walk by 5-10 on my way to grab lunch or dinner.
- neoveller 14y agoBut did they harass you at all? Downtown Palo Alto has one on every street corner too, and they don't bother anyone. But Tenderloin... after walking through Westwood and PA for several years now, I still just plain don't feel safe in the Tenderloin at all.
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- bmmayer1 14y agoWelcome to California.
- doktrin 14y ago> No other western city that I have visited has the massive, in-your-face homelessness as SF. SF is unique not in the size of the homeless population, but in its distribution. The linked study refers to metropolitan areas (thus including Oakland as part of the SF Bay), but SF ranks 12th in the nation behind Tampa, Seattle & San Jose among others [1] In both DC [21] and to a lesser extent Seattle [8], for instance, you could quite conceivably live, work and play in areas without visible signs of homelessness (including the commute in between). In SF, of course, this is impossible. Certain parts of Market street (bordering on the Tenderloin) are about as run down as a major downtown area gets in the developed world. [1] http://b.3cdn.net/naeh/a18b62e5f015e9a9b8_pdm6iy33d.pdf http://b.3cdn.net/naeh/a18b62e5f015e9a9b8_pdm6iy33d.pdf
- jdavis703 14y agoI can't speak for most other cities on the list. But in DC you can from far out wealthy suburbs (e.g. Loudoun County to the White Houss and see homeless. It certaintly is not as prevelant as I've seen in Tenderloin/SF but its not hidden either.
- cafard 14y agoThere are plenty of homeless in Washington, and downtown some are fairly aggressive in their panhandling. I'm not aware of them in the suburbs, as mentioned by jeffd703, but then I don't get out Loudoun County much.
- doktrin 14y agoThere are plenty of homeless in DC, but the vast majority are well out of sight in major business and residential districts. It's in part a "virtue" of the intense economic (and racial) segregation in the district. I was born and raised in DC and have lived there for the last 6 years, working and living downtown. Of course there are homeless people (as opposed to the bizarrely antiseptic Palo Alto, for instance), but the level of visible homelessness is not in the same zip code (let alone ballpark) as SF. Honestly, it's not even close.
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- bcantrill 14y agoIf you want a glimpse into San Francisco's hardcore homeless, read this excellent Chronicle series from 2003: http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/SHAME-OF-THE-CITY-HOMELESS-ISLAND-They-live-2510831.php http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/SHAME-OF-THE-CITY-HOMELES... This problem is in no way unique to San Francisco; our engineering team has offices in San Francisco, Seattle (Pioneer Square) and Vancouver (Gastown) -- and we can collectively report that there are large, hardcore homeless populations in all three cities.
- frozenport 14y agoIs it a West Coast thing?
- ekimia87 14y agoIm from NYC, and it does seem like there is a bigger problem here. (or at least more apparent)
- gtani 14y agoI remember the Cleveland Plain Dealer had an article a few years back that said the October count of homeless they (some city or Ohio government entity) did every year, the numbers had dwindled to essentially zero, because there were so many unoccupied houses to take shelter in.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- stephengillie 14y agoSeattle has about 8 "tent cities", plus the massive Pioneer Square and Belltown homeless mobs.
- philwelch 14y agoBelltown isn't even remotely as bad as Pioneer Square.
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- hristov 14y agoThe main cause is pretty simple. The police in San Francisco just do not bother them in certain neighborhoods. In most other cities police routinely pick up the homeless and dump them some place far. So the absence of homeless is usually not a sign of better humanity, it is usually a sign of cruelty. This is especially the case in the US. There are other countries where they have better treatment for poverty and mental illness (most homeless are mentally ill to some extent) where the absence of homeless on the city streets may mean actual absence of homeless. But this is not the case in the US. Thus, even if the sight of homeless in San Francisco is so terrible, one should keep in mind that San Francisco provides the best treatment for them in America.
- gcb0 14y ago> homeless > police you are doing it wrong. very wrong, if you think that's a police problem. recently the former, most retarded, mayor of Sao Paulo used police on the city's 'tenderloin' (called cracoloandia ...literal translation to crack-land... you get the idea) it resulted in a city wide chaos as those figures, usually restricted geographically and living with their own morals and codes, scattered all over the place and freaked out when found in a situation worse than they were already at, resulted in far worse crimes than the littering they were committing before.
- dotBen 14y agore-read the parent comment, I think you're both actually in agreement.
- sebastianmarr 14y agomost homeless are mentally ill to some extent I'd love to see some numbers on that.
- corwinstephen 14y agoI used to believe this based purely on having heard it all my life. But a friend of mine recently made an interesting point: he asked me what race homeless people are. My answer (at least here in LA) was that they're almost unanimously black or white. Never Asian. Never indian. Rarely Mexican. I countered that it could be due to Asian and Mexican cultures being more culturally inclined to take care of their own, but I haven't fully convinced myself that that's the case. My friend who made this point happens to be black, and his explanation was that having grown up in a black neighborhood, he noticed that black and white people have a sense of entitlement that other races don't often have, both for reasons that don't need explaining, and that that type of attitude begets unfortunate circumstances. I don't know whether I entirely agree with this point either, but it certainly makes you think.
- cpeterso 14y agoI think SF is stuck with a perfect storm of "landed gentry" conservatives that don't want to pay for homeless services, sympathetic liberals whose spare change enables drug addicts, civil rights activists that fight city hall to protect people's "right to be homeless", and the so-called "homeless industrial complex." A few years ago, the local PBS station had a TV show about SF's homeless problem. People migrated to SF because the city (until "Care Not Cash"?) handed out monthly cash stipends. Emergency rooms would be crowded with drug ODs on the first day of each month. PBS also spent a few days with one panhandler in particular. He received handouts that would have added up to $70K/year, if he didn't spend it all on heroin.
- frozenport 14y agoSounds interesting, would you happen to have a link?
- cpeterso 14y agoI scoured the KQED archives, but I can't find a definite match. This show from 2005 might be it, but I'm not sure: "Hope on the Street" http://www.kqed.org/w/hope/ http://www.kqed.org/w/hope/ btw, I must note that was impressed at how much old web content KQED has archived!
- mehulkar 14y agoI find it remarkable that we're still talking about "western" cities.
- Sundog 14y agoYou should check out Portland or LA. Or DC. It's a thing.
- msutherl 14y agoIt seems nobody has mentioned the climate. San Francisco is temperate and mostly warm – you can be outside all year. I spent a lot of time in Montreal. There are homeless people, but they tend to be more organized. You don't want to weather a Montreal winter unprepared. I've always wondered how many of them die in the cold every year.
- vellum 14y agoMore like mostly chilly. SF doesn't have the temperature extremes of the Montreal, but you still have to wear a sweater most of the year. You can always spot the tourists by their shorts and newly bought "San Francisco" emblazoned sweatshirts.
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- uriloran 14y agoI find it interesting that we have some homeless people even in Germany, where social payments exist by law and (evidently almost) everyone in need would get some money for living and even payed the rent of a home. --edited syntax
- rexreed 14y agoI know your comment is regards to West Coast cities, but if you've been to the East it's quite noticeable in many cities (Baltimore, Philadelphia, Detroit, among many) - definitely not a uniquely SF phenomena. Did you know that in 2011, there were 46.2 million US residents at or below the poverty line [1]? That's 15% of the US population. And as much as 10% of the poor, or 1% of the US population is homeless [2]. [1] https://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/about/overview/ https://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/about/overview/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_United_Sta...
- rlmw 14y agoLondon has a pretty bad homelessness issue. There are lots of charities and voluntary contributions that attempt to address the issue but its a hard problem to solve. London also has quite fragmented social ghettos. In most cities you have richer areas and poorer areas, London broadly has this, but has pockets of wealth in the poorer areas and pockets of poverty in the rich areas. To a much greater extent than I've seen in any city I've been to.