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Comment by bkudria | Hacker News Reader

Feral humans are people too.

Can you explain to me why only rich people ought to live in cities?

I asked a feral human (which really, takes some doing) and he explained that by corralling the rich people into the cities, and getting them to help push out the feral -- well, it made the rich people easier to harvest or, more commonly, cull for meat. I offered that, well, if that is the motivation, then you can hardly call yourselves feral any longer for, clearly, you've developed animal husbandry. He conceded that I was probably right and that, for pointing out his error, I deserved some reward. So he gave me an approved lease on this apartment in the city! And I'm not even rich!

I'm definitely not talking about poor people. I'm talking about people who are literally incapable of living in a civilized society. People such as:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/12/02/... (multiple random stabbings on Muni and the streets)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Ramos (Triple drive-by gang murder against people he erroneously thought were in a rival gang)

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/11/24/... (Murdered a pizzeria employee apparently because she didn't like his beard)

That guy I saw defecating on Haight Street (ok, maybe that one was my fault for going to the Haight).

BTW congrats on item 10^6 :-)

I could cherry pick some senseless violence stories from any large American city. They don't prove anything.

While I do think San Francisco is poorly managed, it's naive to think that its homeless problem is caused solely by bad governance. It's a combination of a lot of different things: the hippies that turned into deranged homeless people, the strong lure of California for those down on their luck, the strong drug culture, the very consistent temperatures, the size of Golden Gate Park, etc.

...Not to mention that Giulani bought bus and train tickets for huge numbers of homeless in NYC and sent them out West....

It's actually very difficult to forcibly put someone in a mental health facility in California since the 1970s, when a lawsuit by the ACLU succeeded in giving many mentally ill people the right to discharge themselves from care (this was a reaction against past abuses within the mental health system). Many facilities subsequently closed down for lack of sufficient patients, and in fact California lags in the provision on mental health services today.

Then, San Francisco is relatively tolerant of 'weirdos' and always has been...while many other cities, especially to the south, are not and give the homeless a fairly hard time. San Diego, for example, is reputed to keep itself free of homeless people by giving them a bus ticket out of town, and I've heard the same thing about other jurisdictions. And so they end up here.

This is only one reason among why the city has problems. Look back through the history of SF and you'll find it's always had a seamy underbelly, right back to the days of the gold rush.

San Diego, for example, is reputed to keep itself free of homeless people by giving them a bus ticket out of town, and I've heard the same thing about other jurisdictions. And so they end up here.

Ah, yes, the time-tested principle of solving problems by pushing them off onto someone else. Didn't work so well for me as a kid when I tried to clean my room by piling all the crap in a different room, but I guess it's okay for cities to do it.

Of course, the problem isn't having poor or mentally ill people living on the streets, the problem is that middle-class people might have to see the homeless which is obviously unacceptable.

2 minutes between bkudria's comment and pg's submission.

Been watching the odometer? ;)

On a side note: Congrats for taking HN in to the 10^6

Ding!

Grats!

what!?! this! ;)

It's a darwinist thing.

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