Hacker News Reader

Comment by kneel | Hacker News Reader

http://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/nevius/article/Sidewalk-t...

>“I could have a job, be living in an apartment and all that crap,” he said cheerfully, “but I’m not ready. Right now I just like getting high.”

>Fikes, who says he moved here last month because he heard San Francisco had excellent homeless services, said a church group comes by from time to time with free tents

There is no solution here. City leaders are pressing for solutions while many homeless are just waiting for another handout.

View on HN

How much time have you spent actually talking to homeless people, learning about their lives, their histories, or their motives for doing what they do? Are you just basing your opinion on the quotes from one widely disputed article? Maybe you should start with the most recent official data on the subject[1].

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

Homelessness should be a federal issue. Services should be rendered at the jurisdiction they've spent the most time in the last X-years (decade?) so you don't get clumping and for it to remain dispersed, rather than concentrated. Trying to address this locally has an inherent conflict of interest. If you give great service, you attract others from distant places seeking these services but still funded by the same base population and you become both a magnet and you exhaust your resources.

Great job reducing a whole population to two people in order to perpetuate your biases. I bet people love living on the streets and begging for handouts. I don't understand why they can't get jobs like normal people?

My point was that there is currently no viable solutions to homelessness in SF. The city and the homeless are trapped in a cycle of enabling and being enabled, it's been this way for decades.

I say this in a general sense. The majority of homeless are on the streets due to mental illness and/or addiction.

Okay that's a much more reasonable thread of thought and I actually do agree that there isn't a viable solution present, especially because current solutions aren't effective at solving the issue. You choice of quotes just made it sound like you were putting all the blame on homeless people who want "handouts" and portraying it as some sort of glamorous lifestyle where they are tended to.

"I can quit anytime I want to, I just don't want to."

Sounds like addiction to me.

But the popular image is that of a hardworking man who got evicted by some Google-bus-taking tech bro and lost his job!

Ask any longtime resident, and they'll tell you that most homeless, basically, can't be helped. They have severe substance abuse problems and no desire to settle down.

Actually most homeless people can be helped. The chronically homeless only make up about 15% of the homeless population.

The vast majority of homeless people are homeless for months not years, and the many programs to aid them in finding housing and preventing homelessness in the first place have a significant measurable effect on the average number of homeless shelter entries and length of stay.

This may be true nationally, but it is not true in SF.

Nope, it's still true. From: http://sfgov.org/lhcb/sites/sfgov.org.lhcb/files/2015%20San%...

The number of chronically homeless individuals and families in San Francisco continues to decline. In 2015, 25% of survey respondents were chronically homeless, compared to 31% in 2013. Based on Point-in-Time Count data, it was estimated there were 1,745 chronically homeless individuals and 18 chronically homeless families living in San Francisco on January 29, 2015.

Don't bring facts into this!

I went through that survey too. But self-reported surveys run a huge risk of bias. The respondents sometimes say what they think you want them to say.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com