San Francisco's homeless problem: A civic disgrace
projects.sfchronicle.com
projects.sfchronicle.com
- if you are in the city and need to find a bathroom, good luck -- hearts and minds of the people are closed to you and there is nowhere a restroom accessible as service jobs are constantly under assault from the mentally ill. It's extremely dehumanizing -- I would invite anyone who wants to feel the homeless experience to put on some decent but non fashionable clothes, wait until they urgently need to pee while in an unfamiliar area of the city, and then see how the city feels to you. - the battery in my phone died and I asked a random passerby if he had the time -- he said "no".
Just an isolated sketch -- but the people in that city generally struck me as terrible and generally very close to depressed -- and I attribute at least some of that to the fact that they are constantly barraged by the souls of the crushed masses dwelling all around them.
Cities have psyches, and sf strikes me as very sick right now.
The restaurant was full of people. Many of them seemed to have a good living standard. But nobody got involved in helping an honest senior person in distress.
I got involved. I paid the bill and the cops set the woman free. Even if it was intentional (unlikely), if you are stealing food then you probably need help anyways, especially if you are old.
I was horrified to see how a society so prosper can be so dehumanized. Shame on you people.
In fairness, where should their morals come from? I'm not religious myself, but it seems that for all their faults religions provide a shared morality. Why should a society without a fixed set of morals be humane? There's no source of truth as to what humane even means. Why is helping an old woman humane? Why should I believe you, or feel shame when something like this happens?
I believe it is part of our human nature to care for other humans. Why else do people give money away without getting anything in return (even if you count it as an altruistic act)?
That only works for some people. Where do sociopaths fit into your worldview?
s/some/the vast majority of/
Sociopathy is incredibly rare. The existence of it doesn't affect the substance of the parent's (or my) comment, which is about society as a whole, not a tiny fraction of outliers.
For that reason, I'm always somewhat annoyed when other atheists (I'm an atheist myself) rely on some shared sense of human empathy and argue from it - it's only convincing in a society where empathetic people wield power. We don't live in such a world. To convince people to act humanely even if they don't feel empathy, we need to appeal to a higher objective source of truth as the religious do, or find an argument for humane acts that doesn't rely on appealing to people's consciences.
And if you appreciate that, you will at some moment give back. Not necessarily in the form of money.
Altruism does not need a religion. It also exists in the animal world.
Sure, based on defining in-groups and out-groups so we can decide who is and isn't worth mercy and salvation.
Works great when you're in the in-group. If you're, say, gay, it might not seems so great...
Personally, given that empathy is wired into our cerebrum, I'd think the golden rule would be enough to decide that helping a senior in distress might be the right thing to do.
How awful.
People are very much in their own world here compared to other places I have lives/traveled. I offer my seat to pregnant, older, disabled, injured, etc. people and notice that most people are too absorbed in their phones or conversations to even notice there is someone that needs a seat.
1) Too many of the programs enable, rather than help the root cause, of homeless folks.
2) These enabling programs are very efficiently communicated among the homeless population, drawing them from all over the state and the country.
I'm not some asshole who hates homeless people. I was raised by a single father because my mother was a mentally-ill and drug addicted person who was homeless or in and out of shelters for the majority of the last 25 years before she died in 2014.
I watched as numerous programs did nothing but enable her addiction and undermine me and my siblings efforts to eliminate her addiction and get her to work.
ANY PROGRAM that doesn't provide this very much needed element of the human condition is going to fail.
My ideal drug rehabilitation program for homeless addicts is this: give them drugs, and make them work at some kind of job to continue to receive them, as well as a basic income. This is based on a more recent theory of addiction (that I wholeheartedly embrace) following the "rat park" model of psychological isolation and emotional injury being a bigger contributor to compulsive drug use than the chemical dependencies.
Edit: Forgot to say that the above would likely result in the majority of folks in the program to quit drugs in a few years on their own as they became happier and more socially connected individuals.
All the programs my mom ever had available basically treated her like a helpless victim: stay away from drugs, take your lithium, and "of course we don't expect you to work. Just sit around and do nothing all day and here's your disability check".
And let me add this: most addicts are actually pretty functional and capable of work if provided some amount of drugs. The cases where an addict won't be able to work are going to involve folks who are in withdrawal and need their fix. They aren't going to be doing clerical work or anything, but day labor and other basic work like that is 100% doable. This is the kind of work that cities like SF have available in large quantities for their public infrastructure.
http://sfgov.org/lhcb/sites/default/files/2015%20San%20Franc...
Living on the streets is very dangerous and stressful. Somewhere around 25% of homeless people have traumatic brain injuries. Not the sort of people you can put in a cubical to do data entry.
Further, no mental illness has ever been alleviated through boredom, malnutrition, lack of sleep, social exile, and maltreatment.
Also, not every job involves sitting at a computer ;)
In particular, I have no problem criminalizing the latter if we can address the former. Criminal laws are supposed to prevent mass unpleasant behavior in public. Pooping in the street is not a lifestyle choice we should encourage or support. (though "having public toilets" might be a better solution)
Why would they do this?
If that isn't a fantastic argument for Basic Income I don't know what could be more persuasive.
Edit: Commenter below summarized my (admittedly poorly phrased) point better than I can:
> The current programs are focussed around spending the minimum amount of money possible on as few people as possible, which is an expensive and inefficient proposal. The parent's suggestion is to give people the power in their own lives, which studies have shown can result in huge turnarounds for people in unpleasant situations.
> So OP is suggesting that overly complicated, byzantine, and underfunded welfare programs aren't working, so maybe we should give up and do what experts have been suggesting, and studies have shown results from, instead.
And no, this does not address the problem of mental illness but if we're going to continue to ignore this problem until we can find a solution that works for all homeless, just shoot them now and limit their suffering because it will never happen.
Also, from an european's point of view, calling SF policies "left-leaning" is quite amusing.
In Vancouver, as an example, people on welfare don't get enough money to rent a bedroom from someone, let alone pay for food, clothes, transportation, taking care of children if they have any, etc. Even if someone on welfare does get a job, there's a decent chance it won't pay them enough to afford child care so it'll be a net loss in the end. You also have to prove that you're out there looking for a job every day, but there's such a stigma against people on welfare that it can be difficult to be hired, so the government is requiring people to go out every day and be told no over and over again.
These people are often unskilled and have no money to learn new skills, so they're stuck getting low-paying jobs which also don't provide enough money to learn new skills, and so on and so on.
A basic income system would save a significant amount of money on bureaucracy, making sure people are looking for work or jumping through hoops to pay someone not enough to live on and then take it away as soon as possible. It would also give people a lot more opportunities for entrepreneurialism, education, child care, and so on.
The current programs are focussed around spending the minimum amount of money possible on as few people as possible, which is an expensive and inefficient proposal. The parent's suggestion is to give people the power in their own lives, which studies have shown can result in huge turnarounds for people in unpleasant situations.
So OP is suggesting that overly complicated, byzantine, and underfunded welfare programs aren't working, so maybe we should give up and do what experts have been suggesting, and studies have shown results from, instead.
It was tried giving people housing. The problem is not doing that once - the problem is the ongoing process. Even in Africa the helpers switched to letting people pay for basic services instead of giving it to them for free, not because "capitalism", but because it turned out they didn't value free stuff and ruined or ignored it.
Similar with the homeless, and in addition a large part of them has mental issues! If you want to have ruined housing, sure, just give them free housing now. But a solution that involves an entire well-organized system that takes care of them and the housing is needed - and likely a very flexible individualized one. Some may need almost constant help, for others checking on them occasionally and giving nudges and support is enough. "Basic income" is not a solution for this problem. Most of those people on the street are very likely to gain next to zero benefit from (just) getting money.
Where can I read about these mixed results?
This seems like a bad idea. Any culture that contains something of value needs to absorb new members a little at a time. A culture or scene that tries to absorb many new members all at once is going to be damaged or at least significantly changed in the process.
So it would seem that scattered site housing is the new norm. Now, the problem is that it's harder for such residents to become part of the local community networks. (Often suburbia is distinctly isolating.)
Some social organization similar to a church would seem to be the idea method of providing the residents a social network.
Homeless are expensive as hell to have. They visit ERs instead of getting preventive care, not that they can afford either, they devalue property where they squat, they occupy emergency services like police when property owners complain, they spread disease, etc. etc. etc.
You can joke about giving people a home like it's just going to ruin the country, but we're already subsidizing these people with emergency services, jails, and police. Just giving them a home with some basic amenities both gives them the chance to actually contribute and at the same time, and basic income allows them to manage their own money, even if they aren't earning it, to give them some semblance of dignity.
And in almost every case studied, it's cheaper.
Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of homeless people who are like that and who really do just need a helping hand and some support for 6mo or a year and they're back to being productive members of society. I won't argue with this because it's absolutely true!
But there are also people who are homeless because of untreated mental illness, who "choose" to be homeless because they're too far out there to participate in traditional society. These folks (probably) need help, but just giving them a house and money for food isn't necessarily the answer.
And there are also folks who choose to be homeless. People who think society is really effed up and that they don't want to be a part of it. I've met folks like this and talked with them at length and they know full well what they're doing, why, and whatnot. They're not down on their luck and they don't have any kind of debilitating mental illness; they have very well founded reasons for rejecting society and you won't convince them otherwise. They obviously have different values than most, but that doesn't mean they're crazy or wrong. If you give them a house they'll probably just laugh at the "idiots" trash it, spend the money profligately and continue doing whatever makes them happy.
Pretending that you've got a one-size-fits-all solution to a problem is either incredibly naive or just downright intellectually dishonest. I'm not terribly interested in people peddling snake oil.
And as I said above, this doesn't solve the issue of mental illness but none of the current ones do either. I would argue the majority of homeless people are really just regular folks who have had a serious financial issue (the fastest route to the streets is the medical system) and giving them a leg up will not only get them off the street, but would likely get them productive again.
I'm not arguing that basic income is the silver bullet solution to our cities' problems. I'm arguing for what we spend on the patchwork crap system we have now, we could use much more effectively via basic income WHILE giving these people at least a passing sense of ownership of their own lives.
Without that I could simply assert that only 10% of homeless want to rejoin traditional society and you'd be powerless to refute me.
Please stick with the tired-but-true way of making headlines or pulling text to the side to break-up text.
Don't dynamically resize text while you're scrolling. This has to be the dumbest web design I've seen in a while.
Does anyone have a good idea of why SF/LA (the US in general?) exhibited this characteristic of homelessness more markedly than in London (where I almost never see the sort of extremely obvious health issues that I saw in SF/LA every time I've been there)? Is it because of the US healthcare system, perhaps?
Incidentally, there is a good episode of the BBC's "The Inquiry" which asks about one route of dealing with this:
Homelessness is a crisis that is growing all over the US.
Homeless crisis in Hawaii sparks state of emergency http://www.cbsnews.com/videos/homeless-crisis-in-hawaii-spar...
L.A. County supervisors call for a state emergency declaration on homelessness http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-homeless-emergen...
Mayor, county exec declare ‘state of emergency’ over homelessness http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/mayor-coun...
2. The weather in the Bay Area makes us a target for homeless people everywhere.
3. Related to #1, but different: not being "anti homeless people" is a reason people come to SF and Berkeley. I don't this is the same as encouraging homeless people to come to SF and Berkeley.
Part of the problem is that SF has become known as a sanctuary city for the homeless. People come from all over the US. That is good, from the perspective that we have some positive karma for treating people better than other cities. It is bad, from the perspective that we bear more of the burden.
> San Francisco, which gets an influx of about 450 chronically homeless people a year, needs to shed any perception that it is a sanctuary for people who are unwilling to participate in programs designed to get them off,
> It is neither inhumane nor “criminalizing poverty” to enforce laws against aggressive panhandling, tent encampments or defecation and urination in public places....are no longer afforded the option to flout the law with impunity.
So plan is to build a few houses and put everyone who is left into jail.