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Comment by StavrosK | Hacker News Reader

I visited SF a few times, and I was always horrified to see how such a wealthy city leaves its homeless people to wander around, sleep in the cold and generally live in inhuman conditions. I won't claim I know enough about the city from two visits to propose any solutions, but I know that the fact that there are hundreds or thousands of people living like that is inexcusable. I've never seen this before to such extent.

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The city spends $167 million [1] for a homeless population no larger than 15,000 (and probably closer to 7,000) [2]. The wealthy city isn't leaving anyone to his or her fate. To the contrary, it's expending vast amounts of wealth with precious little to show for it.

[1] http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/matier-ross/article/S-F-spendi...

[2] https://sfgov.org/lhcb/sites/sfgov.org.lhcb/files/2015%20San...

And that $167 million is just services specifically for the homeless. It does not included other city services which are heavily used by the homeless such as medical, housing, police, sanitation, etc - probably well over another $100 million - or the extensive private, non-profit and church spending.

To boot, that would be 6-7% of the city's 2.5B in receipts from 2012-2013:

http://sftreasurer.org/sites/sftreasurer.org/files/TTX_Annua...

That there's not a significant dent in the continuing issue raises some questions.

Expatistan's crowd-sourced info finds SF housing to be the most expensive in the world, and cost of living in general nearly there:

https://www.expatistan.com/cost-of-living/san-francisco

That's between 12k and 20k per person. Way less than you'd need to provide accommodation and treatment for a person with mental illness. It's not surprising it doesn't work.

The people blasting the city claim the city isn't doing enough, and when shown that they are actually are providing a remarkable amount of support, it still isn't enough. 12-20k annually is more than a significant chunk of the population earns in wages.

I don't really know what your point is. The amount may be a large dollar figure, but it is clearly not enough to solve the problem, therefore the problem still exists.

I'm curious how many people live in SF on 12-20k, but that's irrelevant. If someone has accommodation and is able to earn wages as a steady state, it is obvious that their costs will be less than a homeless person who needs mental health treatment, rehabilitation and maybe even education before they are employable.

The figure that employed people can survive on is well below the lower bound for what is needed to rehabilitate a homeless person.

The point is that no amount of money will solve the problem with San Francisco's current approach (whatever that is). If they spend $50 million with zero effect, and they spend $100 million with zero effect, and they spend $150 million with zero effect, where do you guess the problem stands at the $200, $250, $500 marks?

What are you talking about? How do you know the approach has zero effect?

Check out the chart on page 18. $1.5 billion spent over 10 years, and the homeless population... increased! What a humiliating statistic for anyone who thinks this can be solved with mental-health treatment, rehab, empathy, or [homily of choice].

Throwing money at a problem is one thing. Intelligent allocation of that money is another.

I'm not saying it isn't allocated effectively, just that the numbers themselves do not tell the whole tale.

Sure, I agree, but that's a bit different from whether they're supposedly ignoring the problem and/or not doing "enough".

That's just the city's spending though. There (edit: is) other money: state and federal, private donations, churches, the VA system, and so on.

> sleep in the cold

Are we talking about the same city here? I'd call SF "occasionally chilly" at best. That's part of why so many homeless people gravitate to CA; if you're sleeping outdoors there are many, many worse climates for it.

> The coldest day of the year is December 26, with an average low of 44°F and high of 55°F.

https://weatherspark.com/averages/31587/San-Francisco-Califo...

Related: did you know that windows can crack from thermal stress like cookware that you cool too rapidly? I learned that last weekend! Windchill -30F, fun times here in New England.

...and why we have few/no homeless in my town: it stays around 16F for weeks at a time. And goes negative overnight.

Also, the Emergency Housing Project, an Ecumenical service my UU Church started 20 years ago.

A solution to the OP's problem presents itself: Make SF colder!

another reason to fight global warming !

The fewer homeless sleep in public buildings like train/bus stations.

>did you know that windows can crack from thermal stress like cookware that you cool too rapidly?

This is called thermal shock [1]. Basically thermal expansion mismatches cause internal stress beyond the material's Ultimate Tensile Stress and causes a fracture. It's the underpinning to how tattoo removal works too.

Please can you elaborate a bit on the tattoo link? Sounds interesting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0B7F5UbTOQ

2000 chronic homeless from what I have read. However, the city spends about $40000 per person that is not on the streets. A good article on the last 10 years or so: http://www.sfchronicle.com/archive/item/A-decade-of-homeless... 1 reason there are so many is probably because the city does try to help them and not abuse them like many cities. That and the mild weather...

SF cares for a substantial fraction of the entire nation's homeless population, who migrate to SF for weather and public services. SF gets blamed because SF helps homeless folks the most, not the least.

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