My petite SO made the mistake of parking in the wrong parking spot outside a verizon store next to Tenderloin and a homeless person chased her around our car trying to stab her with a screwdriver. In the middle of the afternoon on a weekday. And because it's sf, a couple guys saw what was happening and crossed the street to avoid getting involved, and the useless sf police took 8+ minutes to show up.
SF tolerates street trash acting up and acting out in ways real cities -- eg nyc -- simply don't.
I get off at the civic center bart station and coworkers are regularly worried about their safety.
I don't know what the solution is, but I don't care about them. It's fundamentally unreasonable to expect people to be unsafe walking around sf in the middle of the afternoon.
"street trash" is a particularly nasty way to refer to people. They might be mentally ill, drug-addicted, and perhaps criminal, but they're still human beings. Maybe, just maybe, if society treated people who find themselves at rock bottom with a bit of respect and compassion then they wouldn't end up in a situation where they chase women around cars with screwdrivers.
There's an interesting theory that suggests there's two different sorts of wealth - private wealth and public wealth. Private wealth is living in a nice house and driving a fancy car. Public wealth is living in a clean, beautiful community where it's safe to walk around without fear. If you want to be happy then both sorts of wealth are equally important.
Here's a tip; if someone is engaging in crime, they're a criminal. In this case it sounds like at least assault. This isn't a downtrodden Okie with his family in a hooptie trying to make ends meet until the Depression is over, it's a nutjob trying to attack someone with a lethal weapon.
There are reasons why people turn to crime. If we deal with those reasons before the crime happens then, in general, everyone is better off.
it's a nutjob trying to attack someone with a lethal weapon.
Someone who is dangerously insane probably shouldn't be living on the streets. They represent a danger to the public. It's clearly preferable that those people are given aid in whatever ways necessary so no one gets stabbed. That's the problem with looking down on these people and referring to them as trash - you put yourself in the position of thinking they shouldn't be helped at all, so you end up having to live with the threat they pose.
I would prefer to give aid to the poor women accosted and assaulted by this criminal, than give aid to the criminal. Life is full of choices.
Now therr might be people who had a good upbringing and education, no psychological issues and all opportunities in life but they still become criminals. These are generally corrupt politicians and bankers and asshole CEO's and such, NOT the kind of people who would be hurt by harsh anti-crime policy.
Just how anti-encryption laws don't hinder cruminals, only good-meaning activists and journalists, neither do harsh laws against crime help against actual crime. See how Denmark and other nordic countries treat criminals - they have extremely low crime rates as result.
Then he spit on me.
I can't describe in words the pure unadulterated rage and anger I felt in that moment. I wanted to pulverize every single bone in his body, over and over again, until he was a bloody pulp. Until there was nothing left, except a blood stain on the ground. But I didn't. I turned the other cheek, but not for a pretty reason. I simply didn't want to get his blood on me.
It's hard to love someone that hates you and possibly wants to harm you, but I think that's the first step to solving the homeless problem in SF. Compassion is a difficult trait to master.
I wouldn't tolerate unleashed dogs begging for food, shitting in the streets and otherwise accosting strangers for no reason.
I refuse to tolerate this behavior from Human Beings.
Act like a human or cease to expect to be treated as one. (Mental illness aside, of course.)
Between me + SO, 9 years in nyc, 10 years in sf.
Source: http://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Myths-like-homele...
Cheap homes are $20k a pop. $10k for materials, and $10k for contracted labor. If you allocate another $20k for the land itself, and completing utility connections to it whenever they do not already exist, that's $40k total.
If you had $240M to spend each year, you could build 5000 houses every year, and have $40M left over for rudimentary commercial strips, administrative buildings, libraries, schools, firehouses, and cop shops.
You could stamp out a new municipality every year in 10 undeveloped adjacent square-mile survey sections. 6400 acres would be 5000 for the houses, and 1400 for the commons and businesses. You don't even need to go as far as Mississippi from SF. There are huge tracts of undeveloped land on the Great Plains between I-25 and I-35. They're actually cheaper than Mississippi, mostly because they have a less reliable fresh water supply.
Congratulations! You've reinvented the reservation system!
If you allocate another $20k for the land itself
I used to know an older fellow who lived out of a van half-full of tools, and did odd jobs where he could. I saw him around my favorite coffee shop; I think he got free coffee in exchange for fixing stuff sometimes. There was an article on HN not too long ago about a guy who went from an nice house and a swanky tech job to homeless and living out of his car in less than a year; he managed to crawl back out by doing freelance work on his laptop, but things were pretty awful for him for a while.
It's way too easy to say that homeless people are all beyond help, and therefore we can ignore them and leave them to rot with a clear conscience. But it's not true. And even for the people you mentioned--die-hard "lifestyle" homeless may be out of reach, but public assistance programs can sometimes give the addicts and the crazies a hand up, or (better) prevent them from ever becoming homeless in the first place.
San Francisco has a number of problems with "homelessness". Our most visible problem is a very serious one - there are a lot of alcoholic, drug addicted, and mentally ill people living on the street, some of whom are prone to erratic, aggressive, and violent behavior. There is also a large and less visible problem with people who are not addicted or mentally ill, but who are in difficult economic circumstances and who are having great difficulty finding a safe place to sleep. These two things are related some of the time, but I don't believe that they are simply two sides of the same coin, they also exist as acute if not orthogonal problems.
I appreciate that "homeless" was, at least in part, intended as a more humane term than various derisive terms like bum, vagrant, and so forth. This I am in favor of - regardless of how you feel, I see no benefit in derisive terms, I don't think it requires a derisive term to express an opinion, even if it's an unsympathetic one. But while it's a mouthful, I do think it's probably more descriptive to say that SF (and other cities as well) have a serious problem with "mentally ill and/or addicted people who live on the streets" when discussing that specific issue, rather than using the blanket term "homeless" which encompasses much more than this.
The story about the couple having sex in a tent on a busy street with the flaps open while a pit bull stands sentry, or a person getting chased around by a crazed man with a sharpened screwdriver - well, I hope we all know that there exists a large population of of people who desperately try to maintain appearances (and sanity) but are actually in pretty dire economic circumstances. You don't necessarily notice them. The two situations call for very different solutions.
That would make an interesting basic income experiment.
If instead the $240M helped every single homeless person become un-homeless except for 1, it's not the case that SF is spending $240M on the one homeless guy.