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Comment by azinman2 | Hacker News Reader

How about bussing back the homeless that cities across the US send to SF, or if Regan wasn't dead sending them to his place since his defunding of mental health flooded the streets with schizophrenics?

Edit: see my links below... Not sure why I'm getting down voted but these things happened and contributed to the situation at hand. Homelessness is a very complicated issue, I'm not suggesting this is the entirety of it.

http://thinkprogress.org/health/2013/09/11/2602391/san-franc...

http://www.povertyinsights.org/2013/10/14/did-reagans-crazy-...

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Everyone else who's downvoting you and responding to this is also correct, but we do purchase bus tickets for people who came from other places and ended up homeless in SF. The program is called "Homeward Bound" and it's pretty good at getting people who have a means of support somewhere else back home. The issue is there are not that many homeless people in SF who came from very far away. Of the minority that did, most of them came from an adjacent county.

If you actually did research, you'd know that cities sending their homeless to SF is a complete myth. Here are some numbers from SF itself discounting it. https://sfgov.org/lhcb/sites/sfgov.org.lhcb/files/2015%20San...

86 page document. Where in there does it say that? I did see that out of state homeless is down at 10% (still significant), but 30% were not in SF when they became homeless. That's high. I don't see anything discounting the bus tickets, however.

In fact, the city of SF sued Nevada for exactly this: http://thinkprogress.org/health/2013/09/11/2602391/san-franc...

Interesting report! Thanks for linking.

I suggest you do more research on how we ended up with this situation. Saying "Reagan defunded mental health" gives you about 1% of the picture.

Not really. Reagan did do that. He also made a lot of dick moves in the 1980s. That's why he was controversial.

He also cut school lunches shortly after taking office which spawned the famous meme "Ketchup is a vegetable."[1] Now I know some hagiographer of Saint Ronald of Hollywood (Peace Be Upon His Name), will say that he never said that. And they would be technically correct. The actual guidelines said that schools "could credit a condiment such as pickle relish as a vegetable."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketchup_as_a_vegetable

You're conveniently ignoring the fact that how mental health issues were treated were changing as well. Reagan was hardly at the forefront.

http://www.povertyinsights.org/2013/10/14/did-reagans-crazy-...

Wow, that's just terrible thing to say. Really terrible.

He may be factually incorrect, but what is "horrible" about it? If he were right, wouldn't it be wrong for cities to offload their homeless problem on SF? If that were going on, what would be so "horrible" about sending them back, and asking all cities to take their fair share of the burden?

San Francisco is not a sovereign state: It can't "send" US residents anywhere, they're free to go where they will.

Similarly, SF can offer whatever "fair share" it likes, but can't force other cities to do the same.

Couldn't SF enact a law to make it illegal to sleep on the streets? To not give an address to the police (could be a hotel room, etc), when asked?

Then make a deal with some other place that has lots of cheap land that they handle the people who gets arrested for this (for a fee), which is still cheaper than rent in SF.

Part a) is probably fine (though I am ignorant of the latest jurisprudence on what you can and cannot be required to tell police officers).

I am certain that part b) is illegal. SF is free to arrest people locally for local crimes, but they can't 'extradite' those arrested to other states: If you're charged with a crime, it's your constitutional right to be tried "by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed"[1].

[1] http://constitution.findlaw.com/amendment6.html

After conviction, they could ship them off to somewhere else for whatever punishment they were sentenced to; alternatively, they could just agree to drop the charges after arrest in return for them accepting one-way bus tickets.

Actually, something like the latter (with or without formal arrest) has happened a lot with the homeless and/or mentally ill (and, especially, the mentally ill homeless.) Though, IIRC, SF has more frequently been cited as a destination than a source of those types of maneuvers.

What's incorrect?

And why assume I'm a he?

> may be

I see others claiming you are incorrect, but haven't been arsed to actually read their sources to see who is actually right.

Regardless, I see nothing "horrible" with what you've said.

> And why assume I'm a he?

I'm curious. Why do you make this a talking point when you are, in fact, a he?

Do you know my gender identity? I don't believe we've ever met in real life.

There's a big gender bias in tech already, and even within anonymous HN I see this in comments all the time where everyone is assumed male and few ever point it out directly. If we want balance in tech these kinds of assumptions need to get chipped away to make others feel welcome. It's the same thing with race, sexuality, etc.

edit: ugh, nevermind. your ridiculousness has nothing to do with gender bias.

The form of a man?

My point is there's no sex field next to my handle... It was just assumed. I'm guessing that you googled me to even start this discussion, and even then you have no idea what my gender identity is. These biases are the types that keep tech a men's club and make it hard for women to want to be around 99% guys.

Why? It's not like the SF homeless population all grew up here.... although in the 80s it did significantly increase once the institutions were shut down by Regan and they forced those without families into the streets. To me THAT is the terrible thing.

> the institutions were shut down by Regan

ugh, this old distortion.

You're probably referring to the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act which, while signed into law by Reagan, was actually co-authored by two Democratic state senators and a Republican assemblyman, following the advice given at the time by the medical establishment - and under pressure from the public - that protections were needed to prevent the inappropriate over-commitment of people into asylums.

The result was an "overreaction," and more patients were released than should have been - again, under the advice of medical professionals. [1]

However, before this, people were sent to asylums - indefinitely - for reasons that today would seem barbaric. Alcoholics, the mentally retarded, people with anxiety disorders, or simply troublemakers whose families didn't want to deal with them anymore - locked up in asylums and the key thrown away before this legislation was passed.

We might be suffering for a lack of mental health services, but over-committing people into asylums seems like the greater evil.

The narrative that Reagan got into office and one day decided to boot everyone out onto the street for no good reason is just wrong.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/1984/10/30/science/how-release-of-men...

Why does it matter who wrote it?

And yes, it does make it much more difficult to put people in a mental institution against their will - but it also is the unforeseen cause for what the OP described.

> Why does it matter who wrote it?

Because it's often trotted out as an indictment against one man in particular, and his political party in general.

Many homeless people have a mental illnessed caused by being homeless, not the other way round.

They're human, not trash, you know?

So even worse that they get offloaded like trash by others. What did I say that was indicating otherwise?

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