10 ms·

We don't have a strong enough social welfare net (or enough resources there-in) to care for folks that need care; but, we're not comfortable letting them starve

• wmf 13y ago
  How was property owner supposed to respond when told he must get rid of the illegal dwelling, but also told he can't evict the tenant? Clearly he should have moved out of the house and let her live there.
  • justizin 13y ago
    Someone told him this would happen before he bought the property.
• jack-r-abbit 13y ago
  My thoughts too. As soon as the DBI saw that the unit was illegal, I would have assumed the occupants would have been removed almost immediately. It should not have taken that long for the owner to be able to do what he was legally required to do. But instead he was legally prevented from doing what he was legally required to do. Makes no sense.
  • flomo 13y ago
    San Francisco almost always looks the other way regarding these 'illegal' units. Many of them are in plain sight and the rent/tenancy control laws still apply. I would guess the unit must have been a serious health/safety hazard for them to do anything.
    • jack-r-abbit 13y ago
      Yes, according to the article there is a long standing "don't ask, don't tell" policy. But it does say that when they are reported, the city takes serious action. And it sounds like it was a health hazard the way she was living. The owner seemed to be caught in the middle of two incompatible laws: 1) You can't have that person living there. 2) You can't make that person leave.
      • pyoung 13y ago
        My guess is that the owners were well aware of the situation when they purchased the property. The owners stated that they were warned by "pretty much everyone" not to purchase the property, and the fact that the property came with someone living in it should be a pretty big red flag. For those that have been around SF long enough, it's easy enough to recognize when someone is playing the 'sf housing regulatory lottery'. The basic gist of the game is as follows: Step 1 - Buy a property that is impacted by certain regulatory constraints (which depresses it's market value heavily). Step 2 - If you are cheap, sit, wait, and pray that natural forces relive you of the regulatory burden (or make life a living hell for your existing tenant in an attempt to get them to move out). If you have some money, actively spend it to rid your property of regulatory constraints. Step 3 - Once unburdened (or partially relived) of said constraints, sell the property and profit handsomely. This game is primarily played with rent controlled units and TICs. The owners in question bought property on the cheap, evicted an old disabled lady who is now homeless, and made bank. Sure, the lady was a piece of work herself, but let's not pretend these owners were saints, they knew what the endgame was all along.
        • jack-r-abbit 13y ago
          I don't think the owners are saints... but they get way more sympathy than that rotten tenant. We don't know what they thought the end game would be. It sounds like to me that they were willing to keep the tenant but then started to see she was a nightmare. I have no doubt they knew the unit was illegal. But once it got to the point that they were required to take action to do something to fix the situation... they were promptly met with incompatible laws that would not allow them to do what they were ordered to do. Also... $500 a month is not really "bank" in the context of this $1.4M house that was purchased by two families (that lived in it for 10 years). And they gave her over 2 years worth of rent back in a relocation settlement.
• selmnoo 13y ago
  It's too bad that we're focusing on this kind of event, because it gives people a false impression of the reality on the ground. The fact is that right now there are whole families that are being displaced out of their homes and communities with absolutely no fallback net. And as we all know, it's hardest to bounce back when you're down low. I lived through troubled times a few years back, but I always knew in the back of my mind that no matter what, I'll never be homeless -- a nice big paycheck from daddy was only an asking away - at the cost of only a little momentary humiliation that I was the only person not 'made' in my family. It's tough to even imagine what happens to families who're not well-networked or financially secure to begin with. There is a problem right now, as much as this particular story may hint otherwise.
  • dntrkv 13y ago
    It happened to my family. We're definitely not a wealthy or well-connected family. We lost our home in the recession, my dad's business went from doing great to completely closed. We moved to a tiny house in a cheap neighborhood. Started a new business and worked and saved and now we're almost back to where we were before the recession. I'm not saying we shouldn't help these people, but if you are complaining about not being able to get by in the most expensive city in the country, I really don't have any sympathy for you.
    • smtddr 13y ago
      >>I'm not saying we shouldn't help these people, but if you are complaining about not being able to get by in the most expensive city in the country, I really don't have any sympathy for you. I have sympathy for them, because the current tech-boom is displacing(or greatly accelerating a process that was already happening much faster than they can handle.) them and I think that's a shame. IMHO, what makes SF great is its diversity. For reasons I won't get into right now(could probably write a book on it), diversity & high-income don't overlap too much... so watching high-income people displace the diversity is sad to me. I believe it to be a worthy goal to preserve SF's diversity of culture & history like this lady carries; preventing events like this from happening. I don't know how though, but I definitely don't think it's okay to lose it.
• roc 13y ago
  I don't even think a stronger safety net would have helped in this case. It sounds like she simply wasn't interested in changing anything and that just doesn't work when you have to move and have to change your lifestyle (e.g. stop hoarding). This is all-too-familiar to me, after having helped a couple older relatives through serious late-life changes like this. Further, the general lack of safety net doesn't really apply when you're talking about a person with $1300/mo in disability/SSI, 'free' medical and some savings (/settlement payments). She could live, certainly not lavishly, but at least as well as she did before, just not where she did before or how she did before. Which is the crux of this entire story.
  • trhway 13y ago
    >she simply wasn't interested in changing anything and that just doesn't work when you have to move and have to change your lifestyle not interested? or not being able to? it starts to look like a diagnosis (as an extreme illustration Rain Man comes to mind). It is not a big stretch of imagination to allow that after 20 years of being in the same situation an elderly person may lose ability for "changes", just like many lose ability to bend and reach the floor or make a split. Brain is just a biological organ and there is a lot of information around about it losing its "flexibility" with time. Basically the society is very cruel to its members who lose the ability to function above specific level, be it physical or mental abilities.
    • hack_edu 13y ago
      But is that reason to be mean and obstruct anyone who challenges your comfort zone?
      • trhway 13y ago
        that is the point - it is basically a definition of diagnostable situation when reasoning machinery doesn't function well (i'm not a doctor of course). I mean, was she mean and obstructing by explicit willful choice or was it a panic reaction and collapse of reasoning machinery in response to what she perceived as destruction of her world? Former is ill will, while later would seem to be a diagnostable episode.
• radley 13y ago
  I have no sympathy for the owner. He knew he had a tenant when he bought the property. The fact the unit was illegal was caveat emptor, yet she's the one who had to pay the price.
  • CocaKoala 13y ago
    Ah, yes; how dare she be evicted for threatening to burn the building down, refusing to pay rent, refusing to attend court summons, complaining about her neighbors for having the temerity to turn on a sprinkler, and turning her home into a disgusting pit? Clearly those are all natural rights of tenants, and the landlord should have just accepted her with all her quirks when he bought the property. Come on. It's sad that she got evicted, but to imply in any way that the tenant is blameless seems ridiculous. You don't get a free pass to be an asshole just because you're old; you're still obligated to try and work with the system.
    • zyxley 13y ago
      Agreed Given the "[a]t first, Withrington accepted Inge’s presence", I would think that if she'd been a clean and polite tenant it's entirely possible the new landlord would have had no motivation to evict her. There may not even have been the complaint, given the article's not-so-subtle way of saying "maybe the landlord submitted it!!".
• forrestthewoods 13y ago
  It's almost as if excessive regulation and NIMBY-ism in San Francisco has created an artifical bubble of hyper inflated housing prices that causes the most harm to the people who are in most need of help. Damn.
  • kyleblarson 13y ago
    almost? this is precisely the case.
    • iron_ball 13y ago
      Even the most obvious of sarcasm is poorly adapted to the comments section of Hacker News.
  • geebee 13y ago
    This comes up every now and then. I'm really not sure there is as much NIMBYism in SF relative to other cities as many people believe. By the way, by "not really sure", I mean not really sure. I just view it as more of an open question than many people here on HN do. Here's where I'm coming from - SF is small, old, and largely built. It's in the middle of a very large metropolitan area, but it includes many of the old parts that have had high population densities for a long time. Contrast that with the population densities of most American cities, and the general land area. With the exception of New York, SF much smaller and more densely populated than almost all of the regions used in these comparisons. Now, when someone builds a large housing development far from the urban center of, say, Houston, that counts as development for Houston. When this happens in Walnut Creek, it goes down as not developing in SF. So the way I'd answer this question - and I haven't yet - is to look at subregions in major met regions in the US that have had a population density of above 17,000/sq mi for more than 50 years, and try to measure how much development has occurred within those areas in the last 20 years, or what kind of opposition to new development happens in those regions now. My refutable hypothesis is that SF will no longer show a dramatically different pattern of NIMBYism from those sub-regions outside San Francisco. That doesn't mean it won't show NIMBYism, or that it won't show more NIMBYism than other old, relatively dense regions - I just think that it may reveal that "population density over 17000/sq mi for more than several decades" correlates with general opposition to new construction regardless of whether it happens in SF. Like I said, I haven't checked, it's just an idea. This would actually take some work to investigate.
• apr 13y ago
  Especially given that she was speeding the day of reckoning with "Fuck you" notes. I am 100% with the property owner here.
  • astrodust 13y ago
    Nothing to lose, right?
• prawn 13y ago
  I wonder if her sexuality was a factor in her leaving her family support behind decades ago?
• skyegrey 13y ago
  In this case, what we lack is more a mental health support net than a social welfare safety net.
• chaostheory 13y ago
  The Bay Area still has plenty of single rooms for rent around the same price as her illegal in-law. She just has to be open to change.
• nirnira 13y ago
  Disagree. I think the existing social welfare system in your country is hugely destructive, and you need to weaken and dismantle it as much as possible. Social welfare weakens incentives for individuals to plan and live for the future. People should pay for their own lives with their own dollars, and if they are too foolish and imprudent to account for their old age, they should suffer the consequences of their own actions. They have no one to blame but themselves for not analysing the dangers. Once people become aware that there are no second chances, behaviour will improve. It's a short-term pain for a major long-term benefit.
  • zevyoura 13y ago
    I think you'll have a hard time convincing the majority of Americans (or even just humans in general) that we should literally let people die on the street.
    • nirnira 13y ago
      But that's exactly what we should do. Or, more accurately, we should leave it to private citizens to decide, of their own free will, to render assistance (and prevent anybody from using the state's threat of violence to force an entire society to render assistance.) Until the full dangers of death and failure operate as incentives, moderated only by the free choice of individuals to cooperate and render assistance, our economies will never grow to their full extent, and our prosperity will always remain limited. In the long term, any society that clings to these dysfunctional social policies will be outcompeted by societies that discard them. In the much longer term, if the planet as a whole is held back by these policies, we may expect to be outcompeted by other, more progressive alien civilisations.
      • deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]
      • russgray 13y ago
        I think that your worst-case doomsday prophecies for what our current system will lead to are hugely, overwhelmingly preferable to your alternative.
• kenrikm 13y ago
  How can you say that we don't have a strong enough welfare net with the amount of funding California dumps into it? "34% Of the nation’s welfare recipients live in California but only 12% of the U.S. population resides here". http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2012/Jul/28/welfare-capital-of-the-us/ http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2012/Jul/28/welfare-capital-o... Honestly if there were not so many social programs in SF the homeless population would be much lower as they would relocate to other less expensive areas and maybe actually be able to afford a place to live. The current social system in SF mixed with the crazy rent prices actually encourages homelessness. Even I can't afford to live in SF on "developer" pay, so guess what? I don't I live in SF, I moved south where I could find an apartment at a semi-sane price (still extreme, I could make payments on two Teslas for what I pay in rent).
• keypusher 13y ago
  If you read the end of the article, it turns out she is actually a German citizen, which has "a free program for nationals wishing to relocate. She’d be able to get off the plane, connect with social services, and get subsidized housing and medical coverage." In fact Germany has a very strong social welfare net, she just chooses not to take advantage of that.
• zaroth 13y ago
  I don't think this story has anything to do with social welfare or a safety net. Free health insurance, $1,300/mo stipend from Uncle Sam, pays no utilities, and stopped paying rent entirely. Is there something in the constitution that I missed about a right to live for free in someone else's garage in San Francisco Mission District? There are actually plenty of places in this great country where you can rent a 1-bedroom apartment for $500/mo and not exactly have to duck bullets. This read to me more like story about a squatter in an illegal dwelling, trying to cause as much pain to the owners as she could on her way out. A property owner wants to, god forbid, sell their property, and they have to suffer through this: http://pix-media.s3.amazonaws.com/blog/632/ScreenShot2014-03-11at11.45.15AM.png http://pix-media.s3.amazonaws.com/blog/632/ScreenShot2014-03... I'd feel bad for the soon-to-be-prior owners, but the $40k in costs barely dented their 120% return ($723k) over 12 years. It's not like they didn't know she lived there when they bought the place. But it still doesn't mean they are/should be legally obligated to rent to her for the rest of her life.
  • arjie 13y ago
    It says she paid for the health insurance back when she was younger. It isn't free. She paid for it already.