Despite money and effort, homelessness in SF as bad as ever
sfchronicle.com
sfchronicle.com
It is a market inefficiency caused by zoning density restrictions and overuse of historic landmark status which creates a politically induced artificial scarcity in housing (scarcity = rising prices). These "rent-seeking" restrictions are a regressive tax transferring income from renters to wealthy landlords including Donald Trump. It is wrong, and Japan has fixed the problem removing zoning density restrictions at the local level. The result, in 2014 there were 140,000 homes built in Tokyo compared with about 90,000 for all of California and 20,000 in NYC.
Economist David Ricardo wrote about this phenomenon of "rent-seeking" about 200 years ago related to the Corn Laws. Corn Laws taxed the import of all grains which benefited not farmers but landowners. Ricardo joined Parliament and managed to overturn the "rent-seeking" law.
The solution is a federal law in the US following the example of Japan.
These restrictions (nearly all carried out as zoning) could easily be removed and allow a wave of development to occur, lowering housing costs and keeping many people from ending up homeless in the first place.
Another example is limits on taxicab medallions (which we have in NYC) so that medallions in NYC were valued at $1.2 million each and higher fares for passengers but that scarcity was fixed by competition from Uber/Lyft so that now medallions are only worth $700,000 or less and fares are less expensive than they were.
Another example is labor unions. Various forms of tariffs also create scarcity benefiting the special interests over the needs of the general population. Many jobs have extraordinary educational or licensing requirements to create scarcity and limit competition.
When it comes to housing wealthy landlords want their land to appreciate so they lobby politicians to pass these regressive laws. Without spending a cent, simply reversing the artificial scarcity in housing means that renters pay less for rent and more for goods and services, the construction trades have jobs, etc.
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/40509-yimbys-the-alt-righ...
Can you quantify?
One issue is that in the US, we treat housing as the primary source of wealth for middle class people. So everyone is expected to be a homeowner. A world where the price of your primary wealth asset is rising is good! And a world in which its value is flat or falling is disastrous. And so local laws get shaped so as to keep housing prices high; in practice that means choking the supply of new more dense housing. After all, any change might harm the value of your home!
Then it is a government inefficiency, not a market inefficiency
Pick up a microeconomics book and it will explain. In microeconomics market inefficiencies or market failures have 3 causes: 1) rent-seeking, 2) negative externalities, 3) information asymmetry.
As I explained somewhere else in this post, Economist David Ricardo first discussed this problem of rent-seeking about 200 years ago. In this case, the wealthy landlords work to pass laws that give them wealth paid for by society or in this case renters.
David Ricardo first discussed rent-seeking with the Corn Laws of Britain which had a tariff on all grains which increased the wealth of landowners at the cost of other members of society.
There are import tariffs on sugar that benefits sugar producers while "harming" society (and other countries that want to import sugar).
As with any political matter, binary assertions like this oversimplify issues. A counter argument in this case is that strict zoning laws serve to control an influx of citizens to a location. Those influxes can fundamentally change the culture for the present residents.
Is that a bad thing? I think it's worthy of debate. But blanket statements risk dismissing reasonable arguments before they are even presented.
San Francisco has not managed the ironclad rent control part, and as you'd expect, landlords found various ways to get rid of low-rent tenants in favor of high-rent tenants. When you have the ability to drag your feet on repairs, the mechanism is obvious. When your tenants are poor and you're constantly forgiving them for being late/short with the rent, all you have to do is stop doing that.
Zoning by itself is just destructive. Zoning and rent control could theoretically work, though I'm not sure it ever has, because landlords are so much more clever about getting rid of tenants than cities are about designing rent control laws.
Your blanket statement seems to shut down debate far more than OP's original comment.
These four items are deemed by society as wrong or bad and therefore it "wrong" as you say.
It feels weird to invoke patriotism here, but if there's an influx of citizens to a location, the individuals within it are doing the most American thing you possibly can: chasing opportunity.
To lock the doors, to hoard the opportunity for yourself because you were born in the right place or got there first, is the most deeply un-American thing you can possibly do.
We should be celebrating, encouraging, and facilitating the largest possible influxes we can get to our ascendant cities.
The resulting higher density of land-use would likely result in each landowners property becoming even more valuable. Imagine owning a single-family-housing-sized lot in the middle of New York City, for example.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo
I've read stories on HN of start-ups living or operating out of literal closets because they can't find or afford an alternative. Surely there's some size which is safe and liveable, but smaller than what is available now? And can be designed in a way that isn't a charmless, stifling box?
It doesn't. There are far more people who want to live in the Valley than there are homes and building homes won't solve that problem. If anything, they need to stop building so people are forced to relocate to other parts of the world. The insane concentration of technologists in one area is not good for the world.
And yes 300sqft is small.
Bringing some Tokyo public transport wouldn't hurt, right? That would help with the commutes and make living further out viable.
I just don't like the knee-jerk reaction from others (not you necessarily) who just call everything NIMBYism as if people who own property have 0 rights or concerns. I own and live in a small condo. Like under 100k in value. I have a cool little view of the city, nothing special. I bought it because of that and other factor. You're damn right I would be upset if somebody wanted to build a skyscraper blocking my view, it literally affects the quality of my life. Now, that certainly isn't justification in itself to block construction, but on the other end it very much seems as though, from the other end of the discussion, that my concerns would be deemed irrelevant.
How would you (not you specifically) if people started tearing down trees in your neighborhood to turn it into a strip mall so cars could get through? How bullshit is that?
Overall I just want to see a more balanced discussion, so I call out what I see.
Is there even ONE city in the US that does it this way?
Can't we talk San Francisco into trying this approach? What are the objections?
Who cares how much relative space the roads take up?
I agree, you personally will experience better air in the suburbs. Everyone in aggregate will experience worse air due to your drive between the city and suburbs.
That's a variable that affects travel time (because even moreso less stuff within a given radius).
The most bizarre thing about the Narrow Streets proposal is, how they hell are bikes or buses supposed to work at reasonable speed if the streets are choked with them (and pedestrians, who would apparently have right of way on the same paths as bikes and buses, rather than parallel sidewalks).
The general response is "it creates problems" -- traffic, congestion, auto-centric neighbourhoods (which are poor places for children, the elderly, the disabled), and pollution.
I find more compelling the case laid out in the StrongTowns blog, by Charles Marohn, over several articles, that sprawl 1) costs more in the long term and 2) ultimately creates an unsustainable expenses-to-revenues balance.
Suburbs developed with cars, when cheap gasoline and asphalt made distance, rather than height (as in New York City) cheap. Homes were dropped on quarter-acre lots, retail centralised, and (in the US model) land use generally restricted to single-use: a lot is either commercial or residential, and industrial uses are kept widely separated.
Before that, cities were dense, because virtually all movement was on foot, by hand-cart, or, if you were wealthy, by a horse-drawn cart or carriage. Cities were also limited in size, because everything that went in had to come out, and that also generally happened by one or more of the above means -- no electrical sewerage pumping substations. Cholera and typhoid were killing tens of thousands of people per year in mid-19th century New York and London.
Space means you need more of everything: power lines, water mains, sewer lines, gas, cable, internet, streets, ... And maintenance for all of the above. At the same time, densities are too low to support intensive use -- think factory or even office jobs, or dense retail. Reliance instead is on moving people to retail centres -- built at a remove from either housing or city centres.
If you've got the resources (and cheap fuel), the spread-out life is ... relatively pleasant. If you cannot afford a car, or have had your licence revoked (drink driving, tickets, in some cases a penalty for failure to pay child support, or miscellaneous infractions), or can no longer drive (blind, disabled, epilepsy, ...), not so much. Transit options are almost always poor, and options such as walking or cycling not well supported.
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/9/the-real-reason...
Fully pricing in deferred future costs might help.
The Asian cultures have centuries more experience dealing with high density people situations. Violence is not as legitimized as a method of boundary enforcement for example because people have learned to deal with each other without killing each other. Sure it creates super thick-skinned rudeness (China/NYC/India) or super thin-skinned rule following (Japan) but boundary enforcement based on things like status markers(Like LV bags and iPhones) or rules or much better than those based on violence.
The U.S. is unique in its sheer mix of cultures but also because of the presence of its youngest culture (African American culture) that is today still reeling from the shock of being torn from its mother culture in Africa. Racism and the lack of a reliable justice system for them has forced their culture to rebuild from 0, going through stages where each person had to have the ability to dole out personal-justice/violence.
What's normal in China becomes rude in the U.S. What's justice in one culture is violence in another.
The locals who call a place home see this and want to preserve their own culture. Despite economic incentive allowing them to move anywhere else, their dollar is limited by their software in what it can do. It's like a project that has github dependencies forced to only use dependencies on some other place like gitlab. The project might as well die and start over. And though projects and start over, people can only die, and they will go down swinging.
Younger and newer cultures learn to be more flexible and adaptable. The software/culture limitation that prevented their parents from living like kings in Thailand is removed because their dependencies aren't as rooted. Some are even completely standalone and super flexible at the cost of having no way of influencing things. (eternal vagabonds w/ no long relationships)
Meanwhile new dense hardware developments can only be populated by software that can deal with the density and find it worthwhile. Thus you get H1B 'slave houses' filled with Indians/Chinese.
That said, as good as your point is about African American culture, it's far from our youngest; there's also the Chinese and Italian migration waves, the Armenian refugee wave... On the west coast, you would definitely also have to consider the effects of Japanese internment during WWII. That might be the most recent, but I wouldn't be surprised if there was another wave between now and then.
This doesn't detract from your overall point, or the severity of the effect on specifically African American culture, but I don't think you can call that America's youngest culture.
Further, there's evidence being brought out that there actually were aboriginal Americans that we would call black.
A simple example is being good at multiplication in kindergarten. This small advantage can become a desire for continuous academic excellence via courage towards math. If a child's parents are stereotypically prudish, another "advantage" is the ability to sidestep distractions of athletics/sex.
If the natural momentum a culture can build isn't appreciated, people become shallow and hoarding. In my family for example, the idea that Asians are naturally smarter and Blacks dumber is common and was the impetus for my thoughts in this area. I see a greed and lack of empathy developing that is difficult to watch.
The most common actual real world usage I get out of explaining this model is more support for affirmative action. Perhaps other people can see it as having other value. No need to trash it. All models are simplifications of reality and thus "wrong".
The homeless people here expect and receive a steady income from people on the street as well city services. I remember the first time I was in San Francisco and someone came up to me and demanded money for food. He said "I don't eat meat!". I was stunned, both at a stranger coming up to me and asking for money and also about why they can be so picky about their diet. I gave him $1. He looked at me like I insulted him and said "Salads cost more than meat". The homeless in San Francisco are really quite aggressive in comparison to other cities, and just like the rest of my fellow San Franciscans, there is a strong feeling of entitlement. There is just no price at which the number of homeless will decrease -- only when we start paying the homeless to live in houses will that happen.
The only thing I can think of is fully funded group homes that are mandatory to live in -- basically prisons with nice amenities and educational programs that you can graduate out of based on demonstrating a track record of being able to provide for yourself. Because as long as we give people the option of living on the street, there is a certain small subset of the population that will prefer to do that over the other options available to them, and San Francisco will be home to an outsized share of that population.
In my hometown there are people that quite there jobs to panhandle, because they make more money doing it. It's not common, but it happens and it shows that it's not a simple issue.
FYI mental illness is also common in the homeless population and for them I'm very much in favor of looking at any solution that'll help them have the success they desire in their lives. *Just saying.
All of the nearby locations with panhandlers are setup this way, maybe a couple hundred spots in the city. Sometimes I wonder how many people there are running the system...
One of the observations is that homeless populations tend to self select into encampments. And part of the expense and challenge is that where they choose to camp does not facilitate maintenance (cleaning, services, etc). I have not found any papers or articles on municipalities that have built infrastructure that specifically designed for hosting a homeless encampment. Could you build a system that would support a locally hosted infrastructure? Passive sanitation systems, trash depositories and collection points, water supplies?
very high medical costs are substantially reduced by giving them stable housing
I also know that health crises for homeless people tend to hard to resolve and cost a lot more than for people who are housed. Medical advice like "stay off your foot and soak it twice a day" simply cannot be complied with if you are homeless. The health issues of the homeless tend to compound and get incredibly expensive, in most cases.
Source: I have had a class on homelessness and public policy, I am homeless, I run a few websites pertinent to this problem space. (In essence, I am kind of a SME here.)
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/01/24/the-hot-spotter...
For example the "it is known" premise that the ACA and Medicaid expansion would result in lower consumption of medical care overall. The opposite has happened.
One example, with data:
http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/06/21/emergency-room-visits-...
The relevant question is: is any resulting consumption of medical care dollars reduced by more than the cost of these frequent in-home care visits? Generally, personnel costs (especially in public agencies) far outweigh the cost of (mostly generic) meds.
I see no hard numbers for either statistic. What did I miss?
"After several months, he had recovered enough to be discharged. But, out in the world, his life was simply another hospitalization waiting to happen."
Hospitalizations can cost thousands of dollar per day. So this stay cost in the several hundred thousand dollar range.
[skipping some paragraphs]. He is given a stable housing environment:
"I spoke to Hendricks recently. He has gone without alcohol for a year, cocaine for two years, and smoking for three years. He lives with his girlfriend in a safer neighborhood, goes to church, and weathers family crises. He cooks his own meals now. His diabetes and congestive heart failure are under much better control. He’s lost two hundred and twenty pounds, which means, among other things, that if he falls he can pick himself up, rather than having to call for an ambulance."
The entire article is about this sort of thing and about many cases.
http://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-thursday-e...
Perhaps it depends on the neighborhood. In the Tenderloin and parts of SOMA, there is an abundance of drug addicts and people with mental health issues living on the streets. I'm randomly screamed at or verbally threatened, but they don't ask for money.
Then I realized that there are roughly four different people working BART station entrances along Market Street, who collectively account for 100% of the times I've been asked for money.
While housing prices are a little different, zoning is most certainly an issue as many would much prefer to stay in any type of housing. You suggest making it a requirement but I contest that as that wouldn't actually be constitutional and most of the homeless here would love a place to stay. In NYC there are TONS of places for the homeless to stay but in SF, many shelters will have lines out the door well into the night and into the morning. There just isn't much shelter for them here. Attempting to build new homeless housing is always faced with NIMBY opposition.
You're advocating for in-prisoning people who cannot afford or, for whatever reason, can't live in a home. That's really awful and lacking in empathy. That's almost like debtors prison.
The vast majority of these people will actually stay in a home if you provide one. The majority of them in SF, however, do not have access to any type of shelter because the existing shelters are far too overcrowded and any attempts at building new shelters get held up for years by people who don't want homeless people in their neighborhoods.
The solution to helping someone is providing them with healthcare (preventative is far cheaper than reactionary care for the tax payer) and providing them with a place to stay. Currently we don't really do either, especially in SF.
My startup adventures have prompted many visits to San Fran and in turn I witnessed the plight of the homeless there. It does not exist on any scale like it does there whether it's in Baltimore or New York City where I lived a year after college.
There's not much you can do re: the homeless in San Francisco, but it bothers me and makes me feel bad.
Overall not a fan of San Francisco for a variety of reasons.
I have had an actual college class on homelessness and public policy. There is no single cause of homelessness, but sky high housing costs definitely contribute to homelessness. There has been a serious and growing lack of affordable housing in the U.S. going back decades, about 80% of SROs were torn down in the 60s and 70s at a time when they weren't really needed for demographic reasons but they were never replaced, and average housing size has more than doubled while average number of occupants has dropped. Meanwhile, homelessness has been on the rise nationwide for years.
No, high housing costs do not single handedly and directly cause homelessness. But that's because there is no single cause of homelessness. But high housing costs are absolutely a contributing factor.
Your dystopian solution of basically imprisoning the poor is outlandish.
There's a Star Trek episode that explores this idea. http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Sanctuary_District
It's difficult to think of ways of combating homelessness. To get them on their feet, you might need to redefine what a job is. A normal job requires some common elements: a shower, the ability to be there on a regular schedule, some productive task to do. But homeless people don't really have the ability to do any of those, except perhaps show up during regular hours.
It's hard to shake the feeling that the only solution is to give them money, and that most of them will just spend it on drugs or alcohol. But that's too heartless of an outlook. Some people who fall into homelessness are just like you or me. When your family connections fail and you have a debilitating illness, homelessness tends to result. And those kinds of people could be pulled out, if only we could figure out how.
There are homeless people that are essentially unsalvageable, though, and it's hard to know what to do with them. No family, no home, but most critically no willingness to help themselves even when given a small opportunity. But they still have friends, and if we focus on helping their friends out of homelessness, they might want to follow.
I am homeless and have had a class on homelessness and these are two of my websites:
http://whathelpsthehomeless.blogspot.com/
http://sandiegohomelesssurvivalguide.blogspot.com/
I also started a Reddit recently called Housing Works and I have various related little blogs, like Project SRO. I am still kind of throwing things at a wall and seeing what sticks, but the San Diego Homeless Survival Guide is a thing I started for myself in order to keep track of useful info I needed while homeless in downtown San Diego and I abandoned it after I left downtown. It was not updated at all for six months and then I realized it had organic traffic. It has the most organic traffic of any site I run because there is need for the info.
A lot of people who have spent time homeless are ashamed of that fact and don't volunteer that information normally. Even those who are not ashamed and not actively hiding it, well, you don't know just from looking at someone that they used to be homeless. Lots of people do get off the street. It is not a permanent situation for everyone.
However, homelessness has been on the rise nationwide for some years now and it does concern me that there are larger forces at play here that are causing it to be more of an uphill battle than it used to be.
Your endeavors seem promising.
Best.
2/3 of the chronic homeless have mental or physical disabilities. 1/3 have drug problems. You are talking about 83,000 people in a population of 320 million, but these 83,000 people are creating huge quality of life problems in all of our major cities. In San Francisco, you have 300 million dollars spent fighting a problem created by 2,000 people. The non-profit and social services mafia employs more people to "care" for the homeless -- or more cynically exploit them -- than the actual number of chronically homeless.
First, we can go after the low hanging fruit of helping people who are more easily helped. More availability of actual affordable housing would help with this issue. Some people who are homeless do have income, just not enough to pay for a middle class American lifestyle.
Second there are things that work to help rehabilitate people with serious, entrenched personal issues. I raised and homeschooled my two gifted learning disabled sons, one of whom has the same medical condition I have.
I know quite a lot about this problem space and I see it as solvable. It will take time, but it can be done. Writing people off as hopeless does not help the problem at all. It just compounds it.
I've read this many times, bigger houses have contributed a great deal to rising housing costs. But do we have any data on the cost of materials and labor now vs. then as well as the cost of land and regulations now vs. then?
I've always had an inkling that materials/labor costs haven't actually risen that much even as houses grew larger.
Yes, there is data on such things. There are a number of reasons that housing has gone up in cost, but size inflation is absolutely a contributing factor.
This could explain a jump from $200k to $250k. Not from $50k to $200k.
Here, I am talking about the chronic homeless, which are the root of the problem. Not families that may need to sleep in the car because they are in between housing or people crashing on couches while they straighten themselves out. I mean people with tents.
The one person I knew the longest was basically camping out around Palo Alto. The reason why you don't see so many homeless in the suburbs is because the Police are fairly effective at driving them out with beatdowns and destroying their property. This is the reality of not forcing them into group living situations -- let them live on the streets creating a lot of quality of life issues or have an unspoken policy of police brutality. So I would say that what we have now is dystopian.
The last homeless man I let live with me I ended up asking to leave, because he was unable to keep steady work. I just asked him to do something, anything -- it didn't have to be full time -- and he could keep the money himself. But he was able bodied and needed to work. I drove him to his job. At the end of the day, he was pretty blunt in telling me that at his age -- he was in his 50s -- he couldn't stand doing menial work and being ordered around by some kid. For him, it was either a high paying job or camping out. So I finally asked him to leave and he's been camping out (assuming he's still alive at this point -- it's been a while).
I think it's cute you took a college class and now understand the issue. But housing costs have nothing to do it. You can today find a place to live in the U.S. for a few hundred a month. No, not in San Francisco or Manhattan or Monaco, but most of the country is incredibly cheap.
Look at rent prices in the middle of the country. For example, in Phoenix, real rental costs have not increased for 30 years. They've been basically flat. But in Phoenix, the homeless don't have the same access to city services as in San Francisco, or NYC.
You might focus more on what you're sure you know, and not what you think someone else does, doesn't, or ought.
I could afford about $400 a month in the near future. I am trying to find a way to get off the street now that my student loan is paid off and that frees up enough money where I could afford that much for shelter in the near future.
But these homeless programs that just keep the homeless subsisting are better than nothing but sill aren't helping the ones who could escape.
The super short version is that I don't want to live in a van because I no longer drive due to my medical condition. There are other factors, but that's a big one.
We are getting healthier and I have been paying down debt. My student loan was paid off just days ago and things will start getting better for me in July because of that. In fact, they have been getting gradually, slowly better the entire time I have been on the street.
I am author of the San Diego Homeless Survival Guide. I have been interviewed by reporters on 3 different occasions because of it, though, so far, none of that has resulted in a published article promoting my work.
The class I took involved an internship in a homeless shelter in Vacaville and I continued to do volunteer work there after the class ended. I was instrumental in getting them a proper website set up.
http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2017/05/how-to-effec...
http://sandiegohomelesssurvivalguide.blogspot.com/
I am sorry you are bitter and were never able to figure out how to effectively help people solve the root causes of homelessness in their lives. That is not evidence that I am clueless.
There is a very small percentage -- basically 0.03% of the population are chronically homeless -- that are unable or unwilling to meet their obligations. There will always be some Bartlebys with us, who when presented with their obligations as members of a community respond with "I prefer not to". I prefer not to live in the shelter because it's unpleasant. I prefer not to move to where housing is cheaper because this is my home. I prefer not to live in a supervised environment because I like being in control of my life. I prefer not to take this medication that will stop me from screaming because I don't like how tired it makes me feel. And with these Bartlebys the choices are prison, banishment, and forced compliance -- institutionalization. Because a society is not a collection of isolated individuals, it's a web of obligations that are, at heart, mandatory. Some people view this as a dystopian nightmare. They are naive. It is living in a rooted world. From the beginning of civilization if you did not meet the obligations placed on you, the society expelled you, whether by death or banishment. What I don't understand is why people who have no problem enforcing laws banning camping in national parks or forcing people to pay taxes under threat of jail are unwilling to ban camping on the street in a high density city. If you want a nature preserve or other area outside of society in which all the individuals who are unable to comply with our rules can do whatever they want, that's fine. But you will find that with enough people filling up that area, a government will form, a society will form, and you will be back in trouble if you start violating the new expectations placed on you in that new society.
I don't disagree that we shouldn't allow people who are homeless to camp openly on city streets and generally be a public nuisance. I don't do either of those things, so I don't believe it is a given that being homeless must equate to such behavior.
Historically, the more desperately that governments try to control people, the more people find ways around it. This is the origin of Martial Arts. Governments denied the peasants access to weapons, so they learned to use their hands and feet and farming tools as lethal weapons. You couldn't reasonably deny them those things. They needed them in order to produce food for the nation.
I don't agree that imprisoning all homeless people merely for being poor is at all a humane solution. I also don't agree with general trends towards criminalizing behaviors in such a way as to be a kind of Jim Crow law for homeless people. You don't solve this problem by trying to get them to just leave your city and go elsewhere. All that does is shift it around. It doesn't get people off the street.
There is a tremendous housing crisis going on in the U.S. today. Evictions are at very high rates and young people are basically expected to live with roommates because there are almost no spaces suitable for a single, young person to live alone, like there once were. Returning to historical practices of making market rate housing available that single young people can afford on an entry level salary will not solve homelessness, but it will take some of the pressure off.
Homelessness occurs when someone has more problems than solutions. The more solutions we can make available, the more feasible it is for people to make their lives work, even if they have serious personal problems for which there are no ready solutions.
I was born with my medical condition. For many years, I was a full time wife and mom. This gave me a middle class role in society, even though I was actually too sick to hold down a paid position. At some point, I expect to return to a more conventional life. My condition is not curable, but that doesn't mean my life cannot be made to work. It did in the past. It will again in the future, at some point. As the number of problems I have shrinks and the number of solutions I have grows, at some point, it will cross some tipping point.
Let me stop here and thank you for being so generous for a decade of your life. I am sorry it has made you so very cynical. But I don't think your cynicism is actual evidence that more affordable housing cannot play a role in helping get this problem under control.
I actually think his solution makes sense.
For the really impoverished people who are willing and capable to work their way up, this would be exactly what they want; for those who really don't want a roof over their heads, they should really be put into some sort of institution with restricted freedom and mental illness help.
If we have $300mil budget to help 10 thousand homeless, that's $30k per person, enough to support a decent standards of living in a cheap part of the country.
http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/SF-s-new-count-shows-h...
Sounds like a great premise for a dystopian short story
For what it's worth, 70% of SF's homeless population lived in SF in homes before they were on the street. It's probably fair to assume that if rents were lower, more of those people would still be in homes.
And seriously, locking up people for not living in homes and working? We used to do that in my country back in the late 19th century, it was a very handy law for the government to dust off when you had to jail protesters or strikers in the street.
If schools were voluntary and private then it wouldn't matter which school district your house is in. The quality of local government schools (and therefore the good school's district) often is a large factor in house prices.
>Also how do you align the long term goals of educating those kids with often short term profit motivated KPIs.
I'm not sure that the government management of schools aligns the school's interests with long term goals.
anecdotally i went through almost all of my k-12 in public school and it seems like the opposite: that areas with more expensive houses pay more in local taxes which fund nicer schools and governments. meaning the "quality" of the local government is a function of the wealth held by its residents. this is all to say that be it the local government or a privatized system, the education system seems very much beholden to their patrons, the rich families. i don't see why privatization would be a better alternative.
> I'm not sure that the government management of schools aligns the school's interests with long term goals.
saying that the current system isn't good enough doesn't automatically mean that some other system is better. the question remains.
Decoupling property values from school quality has a lot of liberal appeal. SFUSD does it. Unfortunately, SFUSD's experiment has largely failed because parents who draw bad schools in the lottery system opt out and move to the East Bay, where they can reliably buy their way into good school districts.
(If they stayed, their children would likely turn those bad schools into good schools, or at least okay schools).
Privatizing education wouldn't remove school quality as a function of wealth, but it would let you pay directly for school quality, and disentangle it from the real estate market.
I think you are arguing that school quality is a function of the kinds of students that attend the school, rather than the value the school itself adds. In that case I agree with you.
>saying that the current system isn't good enough doesn't automatically mean that some other system is better. the question remains.
My hypothesis is that schools could be run much more cheaply and be as effective as they are today. Therefore the money not spent on public schools (or on expensive homes in good school districts) could be gainfully invested elsewhere in the economy which would make everyone more wealthy.
Well, there's also the fact that, unlike NYC and SF much of that city was destroyed during what Wikipedia calls "the single most destructive bombing raid in human history". So it's not like they had all that much historic architecture to protect, anyway.
Apples and oranges, in other words.
These "rent-seeking" restrictions are a regressive tax transferring income from renters to wealthy landlords including Donald Trump.
Oh please. The Trumps made their money through, first, being notorious slumlords; then through mob connections and tax loopholes; and finally, as money launderers for the post-Soviet elite.
Not through the "overuse of historic landmark status", by even the most fantastic stretch of the imagination. (As an illustration, look into the history of the building that preceded Trump Tower at the same location).
Much of the post-fire development used unreinforced masonry and was built on poor-quality fill. We saw the effects of this during the 1989 quake in areas like the Marina district.
The preponderance of fill (and depth to bedrock) in the densest areas of SF is well-illustrated by the Millennium Tower fiasco[0]. The MT's pilings do not even reach bedrock!
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Tower_(San_Francisc...
A comparatively tiny portion of the city actually. But anyway, this is far afield from the original topic of this thread.
Also, the issue of some buildings being built to (allegedly) inadequate standards is a red herring. If that were the case, the city would be more than happy to have them condemned, and all manner of more useful structures (for affordable housing or otherwise, put in their place).
Out of the millions of property owners in the US who benefit from artificially propped-up real estate prices, you chose to single out this individual why?
Yes there was drinking, drugs and mental health issues, but there was also this sort of resignation where once they'd got used to sleeping and defecating in the street and they knew where they could get food and maybe some cheap liquor they kind of stopped caring about improving their lives. They didn't want to move into a shelter with dangerous people who would steal their meager posessions or attack them. They had basically accepted they had failed at life and had come to terms with an existence of scraping along the bottom of city existence.
I think the main thing that attracts them to San Francisco is the nice climate, progressive politics that doesn't persecute them and that they can walk to services, walk to begging spots, walk to the liquor store, and walk to where they sleep. Notice how there are no homeless up at the top of hills in S.F?
At that point they have a job, it's working at being homeless full time.
I’ve been homeless for six years now. If there’s such a thing as an effective homeless man, then I suppose I’m effective. Being homeless is probably the only thing I’ve ever been good at. I know where to get the best free food. I’ve made friends with restaurant and convenience-store managers who let me use their bathrooms. And I don’t mean the public bathrooms, either. I mean the employees’ bathrooms, the clean ones hidden behind the kitchen or the pantry or the cooler. I know it sounds strange to be proud of this, but it means a lot to me, being trustworthy enough to piss in somebody else’s clean bathroom. Maybe you don’t understand the value of a clean bathroom, but I do.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/04/21/what-you-pawn-i...
https://www.trulia.com/home_prices/California/San_Francisco-...
The overall housing prices are probably lower in SOMA because there are more condos and smaller units.
https://www.zumper.com/blog/2016/03/mapping-san-franciscos-r...
The only 2 hilly neighborhoods that support your theory are Pac Heights and Russian Hill, but that has less to do with the hills and more to do with the historical housing in those areas.
If you look at Nob Hill, Potrero, Twin Peaks, Bernal Heights, and Telegraph Hill, they really aren't any more expensive than the surrounding areas. In a lot of cases (SoMa, Dog Patch) the flat parts of town are even more expensive.
Yes, it's bad that someone can only afford a 60 square foot room to live in. The solution isn't to make it illegal to let out a 60 square foot room to them, or to force market-rate housing to subsidize a few lucky winners.
Citation needed.
Homeless people with drug problems or mental illness are the most likely to be visibly homeless, acting out, and/or harassing people so perhaps confirmation bias makes you believe they represent the majority? In reality a minority of homeless people (~35%) have drug, alcohol, or metal problems.
The majority of homeless people are depressed and ashamed of being homeless and trying desperately to get off the streets. They lose their job or get evicted and don't have any family they can turn to, causing a downward spiral. Even if you have the money to rent an apartment you're fighting people who can pre-pay a year's worth of rent (thanks to large signing bonuses).
I don't know the breakdown but it is undeniable that some portion of the homeless in the Bay Area are homeless as a direct result of housing being so unaffordable.
>Much more likely is that SF has many factors that make it a nice place to be homeless so these people migrate to it.
That's wrong; 70%+ were residents of SF when they became homeless. Only 10% are from outside California and most of them said they came here on promise of a job, to find family, etc.
Citation needed.
In reality, when people are complaining about homelessness, it's the chronic homeless, not temporarily homeless. 1/3 have drug problems and 2/3 have mental or physical disabilities. Those 1/3 and 2/3 pools don't perfectly overlap, so the amount of people who have neither drug nor disabilities is very small.
A 10 story building blocking MY view? No way!
You want to add 1,500 more cars to the street in front of my house? But my children play in the front yard!
We can't tax or deny foreign ownership of property! That unfairly targets immigrant entrepreneurs!
(I'm not saying these arguments aren't valid in some peoples minds, but they are the root of the problem)
If what everyone actually fights for is a conservation approach to the legacy housing market, is it really any surprise that we get a conservation approach to it? The sad thing is that the city otherwise has good policies, but housing is a morass of entrenched self interest.
There are quite a few skyscrapers in SF, actually. A new huge one was built for Salesforce recently. Building affordable housing isn't a priority, though, apparently.
Note that a skyscraper is probably expensive enough to build that they would not put tiny apartments in it anyway, but the more moderate sized buildings downtown could be a mix of apartments and offices resulting in a usable city.
Seattle, NYC, LA, Portland?
It's what happens when the city government steps back and lets progress happens.
But why should it be? Why is creating low cost housing in the bay area better than spending that money in, say, Sacramento? What are the individual, societal and area benefits of doing it on the bay area vs anywhere else in the state of California?
I am being contrarian to be sure, Full disclosure: Australian with no dog in this fight.
So I ask because Tyler Cowan (https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/patrick-collison...) made the point that the Bay Area makes a lot of great global goods, and loosening housing regulation is effectively a tax on the current, extremely productive people that live in the Bay Area.
Given that these people pay taxes in California, why not find somewhere else to house less well to-do people? Somewhere less expensive, less productive and less likely to be problematic for the residents, would seem ideal.
$1,000,000 in SF buys sweet FA, but that would 3 median priced houses in Sacramento, and it is less than 100 miles away.
So I just wonder what the correct level is to do these things at: country, State, City, Suburb or street? I just think there are only so many dollars, why is the argument about where they are spent, rather than how effectively?
That's an utterly ridiculous claim.
So not ridiculous, not held by a random internet nobody, but thanks for your input ;)
No, it's a tax on the landlords. How many producers of value are homeowners and not renters? (At least one person on HN, but I mean proportionally.)
Man, this is infuriating. San Francisco isn't under a magic spell that makes affordable and market-rate housing distinct. They can be the same, like they are in the rest of the country, with enough housing.
But people spouting this line will never let that happen, because the proposed projects aren't immediately cheap.
From the transcript, and yes, this is a long quote, but I really love Tyler, and what he says always is considered and interesting, and the full quote is deserved:
COLLISON: Restrictive urban construction and land use regulations.
COWEN: They’re terrible. We should allow much more building. Much more of this country should be like Houston and parts of Texas. But that said, I’ve become a slight contrarian on this lately. I wonder if the Bay Area isn’t the one place in the world where building restrictions might make some sense because most of you want the restrictions. Even if not you in the room, you out there in this area. So removing the restrictions would be a tax. It would be great for the people who moved in.
But if you’re all producing these amazing global public goods, and the federal government is going to raise taxes on you anyway, I promise this. I don’t care who wins the next five elections, your taxes are going up. State, city, local, whatever. And then we put this new tax on you and you all are the Atlases out there. I don’t know if loosening building here would tax your productivity or increase it. But I’d at least consider the notion. This is the one place in the world where we shouldn’t loosen building restrictions.
COLLISON: Can you apply that argument in reverse? Do you think Silicon Valley would be better off if it had half the population?
COWEN: I don’t live here. I don’t know how bad the traffic is, and I suspect the people who are the most productive have workarounds. They can afford to live where they want, for instance.
COLLISON: I think a lot of us spend a lot of time in traffic.
COWEN: But it seems to me, it’s a pretty finely honed structure. It’s evolved the way it has and to cut it in half or shrink it, it’s probably a big mistake.
COLLISON: Just to make sure I understand, you’re saying the tax would be the other people around us? Our personal experiences of the area would somehow be diminished?
COWEN: The general culture would change; it would be less intense. It would be like taking Florentine Renaissance and injecting into it 50,000 people from Naples. Nothing against Naples. I love Naples, in fact, more than Florence. But I suspect that would have been a mistake back then. So I worry, if you have too many people move into this uniquely weird, diverse monoculture, you could wreck it. Just a cautionary note, I’m agnostic, but I’ve started having this worry lately.
This is NIMBYism, regardless of motivation.
I particularly can't get over his outright xenophobia at the end: "Keep the dirty foreigners out, but I still hate Trump!" He can't have it both ways; either live with immigration and learn how to make it work well (which is probably the better idea), or allow everyone else to be raging xenophobes just like he is.
Glad I was lucky enough to be born here, too bad if you weren't. I do not want the population in this country to continue to rise. It certainly doesn't need any help. Move to Canada or Russia instead.
-Complaints about the removal of trees to accommodate bicycle lanes
-Complaints about restriping/widening of bicycle lanes
-Complaints about how the architecture of new apt buildings on El Camino Real is ruining the character of MV
-Complaints about how the removal of historic buildings in downtown MV (by their landlords, who can no longer afford to maintain them) is also ruining the character of MV
-Complaints about why are there so many RVs and campers parked on Shoreline
-Complaints about why so many restaurants in downtown MV have a hiring shortage and quick turnover
-Complaints about why the checkout lines in Safeway are so long and there aren't enough checkers
-Complaints about the traffic on Shoreline (i.e. near Google)
-Complaints about Google's attempt to add pre-fab housing
And of course, if you imply that they should sell their $$$ house and move elsewhere, it becomes a discussion of how "my family has lived in MV for 3 generations, etc, who gives you the right to tell me how/when to move"
I would absolutely complain about that. Remove road lanes instead. Why would you remove trees? Are they idiots?
The rest of the stuff (ruining the character, etc...) are fine. There's no reason people can't be upset that this area they moved in to is changing because everybody else wanted to follow suit. I wouldn't want to have moved to Mountain View then all of a sudden Google shows up and now I'm dealing with all this bullshit traffic. Send Google somewhere else. They don't need to be on the coast.
You guys act like people don't have any right to wish to have their way of life preserved. Ridiculous.
Do you currently have a commute that involves Mountain View? Ever driven on Shoreline when there's both a concert and an accident on the 101? Ever gotten stuck on Rengstorff or Castro when there's a Caltrain incident?
Sure, let's remove a road lane. Then all the traffic will back up and clog the residential streets.
Hint: traffic never gets better. It's called induced demand. I for one also don't want my world turned into a mega highway for the suburbs. Once traffic gets bad enough, people will have to find alternatives, like biking, taking the bus, or simply moving to other areas.
That's bizarre to me. The "architecture" on El Camino in MV is strictly of the suburban-strip-mall variety. Even identikit glitzy new apartment buildings are an improvement over that, even without taking into account how they can help alleviate the housing crisis.
An initiative vote overturned the Planning Commission's approval -- "Big Box" stores were unwelcome (Ironically, a Best Buy now sits on the adjacent parcel).
The site became a residential care facility. Sunnyvale and East Palo Alto get that tax revenue instead.
I'm not saying ship the poor away and make them someone else's problem. I mean caring for people in a more cost-effective manner, and in a way that isn't just treating the symptoms.
There are 6,686 homeless people in SF [1]. With a budget in the hundreds of millions, it is conceivable that all of these people can be housed and treated in an inland community in perpetuity. Many homeless suffer from mental disorders that require treatment, not just housing and food.
[1]http://sfgov.org/lhcb/sites/default/files/2015%20San%20Franc...
[1]http://sfist.com/2017/06/26/2017_san_francisco_homeless_cens...
Probably not.
> I'm not saying ship the poor away and make them someone else's problem.
But you are saying “ship the poor away”. Which is problematic, historically, to implement even locally, which is why much of that money is spent reaching then in the community.
> I mean caring for people in a more cost-effective manner, and in a way that isn't just treating the symptoms.
If you want to treat more than symptoms of poverty, you need to restructure the economy and society, not move the victims.
> There are 6,686 homeless people in SF [1]. With a budget in the hundreds of millions, it is conceivable that all of these people can be housed and treated in an inland community in perpetuity.
The number (and, even moreso, the identity of the individuals that are homeless) isn't static. Though forced relocation without any clear plan for improving the ability of people to escape homelessness will probably make the condition stickier.
I do want to treat more than just the symptoms, but I don't think handwaving for socioeconomic restructures is a realistic way get anything done. I'm advocating for a way to make the ~30K/person go farther by not being in one of the most expensive areas of the country.
Many of these people need long term mental healthcare, and is the main reason they are homeless. Our current system is not well suited at helping people with mental disorders.
Perhaps I'm ill-informed and I don't pretend to have the answer, but evidenced by the fact that homelessness is a growing problem despite throwing more and more money at it. I do think we need to try another approach.
No, even local relocation (like forcing people into shelters for services) has been problematic historically.
> Many of these people need long term mental healthcare, and is the main reason they are homeless.
Yes, a minority do, and institutionalization (which, generally, might as well be outside of SF) may help a fraction of that minority.
Forced dislocation would also probably aggravate mental health problems for some others in (and out) of that that minority.
> Our current system is not well suited at helping people with mental disorders.
Sure, but “ship people elsewhere”, even if the responsibility doesn't shift, isn't a solution to that.
These numbers do not paint a small minority that could benefit from institutionalization or other forms or long-term care, and our current system is poorly setup to handle these issues.
The number I'm familiar with is 35%, but either is a minority.
> These numbers do not paint a small minority
Which is probably why I never qualified “minority” with “small”.
https://www.nami.org/Learn-More/Mental-Health-By-the-Numbers
> ...may help a fraction of that minority. > Which is probably why I never qualified “minority” with “small”.
I believe we're now arguing about semantics, so lets agree to disagree.
Completely optional but hopefully a better life for those who tried and liked it. If their peers were there and the weather wasn't problematic, surely something could be superior to a life on the streets.
If other states were shipping people in to take advantage of it, pool resources.
It is worth noting that many homeless people in SF did not become homeless in SF.
They became homeless elsewhere, then moved to SF because circumstances there favor homeless living.
At first glance it appears very affordable. Rents in the city center appear to be about $5 per square foot per month judging from a quick perusal of craigslist listings. So to give all 7500 homeless in the city a 100 sq foot efficiency would have plausible annual expenses of about $45 million -- a small fraction of the $300M plus mentioned in the parent article. Obviously there are many problematic details, such as there are almost no appropriate apartments currently available, but ultra-small units do exist [2] and seem to be a favorable alternative to sleeping on the street.
[1] http://www.npr.org/2015/12/10/459100751/utah-reduced-chronic... [2] http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/truly-tiny-4-apartments-unde...
I'm all for just setting the more salvageable homeless up in a 900 sq ft condo, and subsidizing it for them (i.e. free), then let them sell it in 3+ years. They can pay back the subsidies, and take the equity and move elsewhere. There would be other requirements as well (attending substance abuse programs, staying out of jail, etc)
Every day I see some weird stuff going on (it's at a point where it's no longer weird to me).
Here's a description: http://www.cityofsydney.nsw.gov.au/community/health-and-safe...
And here's a map:
during my normal commute hours at Civic Center I've seen ...
- used needles strewn about in busy areas
- someone defecate on the station floor in broad daylight
- meth/heroin deals
- a dealer shaking down a high junkie for money owned on the platform
- entire hallways/stairways that were no-go because of strung out transients
- pretty much a third of BART cars have a homeless person sleeping off their high in them.
I feel stressed and not safe during my commute, can't believe I pay $9/day for the privilege of commuting via a cesspool of human misery. Not being on Civic Center or Powell station or being able to take Transit Bus will definitely be a consideration for my next job hunt.
Cleaning staff should remove the needles. Security or police arrest the dealers, and remove people loitering on stations or trains.
Is it a lack of funding, laws, sympathy for the homeless, or ... what?
I lived in London for ten years, and homeless people, or beggars, were extremely rare on public transport vehicles, and even rarer within stations. I don't know what combination of law and enforcement is used, and there are homeless people on the streets, but something prevents them from overtaking the transport system.
But what exactly is Skid Row? In reality it is not, other than incidentally, a spatial concept, but a functional one. . . Skid Row is the end of the line, and there must be an end of the line somewhere. ... The whole [reform] operation has proved to be, inevitably, an ideological illusion. Since Skid Row is not a static place, it cannot be abolished or rubbed out. The most noticeable consequence of this anti-Skid Row campaign has been merely to diffuse Skid Row, for a while, throughout the City.
I've elided a lot of supporting argument, the gist of which is that the denizens of Skid Row tend to form networks of support & attract institutions that maintain them. And while that level of maintenance looks (and is) rather squalid and miserable to outsiders, breaking it up is just replacing an organic support network with an artificial one which looks at the symptoms more than the roots.
I can't speak to London except that I guarantee London has a Skid Row, even if it's not physically located in London, if that makes sense.
Final disclaimer that I don't claim to have the answer, just pointing out one point of view that seems rather pertinent to 2017 SF despite being written 53 years prior, whatever moral valence you assign to the author & his politics.
What I am suggesting is removing the homeless people from the public transportation network, so it's kept cleaner and feels safer for the users.
This figure has risen every year for the past 6 years, and it's likely to keep rising. Removing the single room supplement / imposing the bedroom tax, freezing housing benefit, cuts to local authorities (and thus cuts to drug and alcohol services, and to some mental health provision, and to some housing provision) all mean that rough sleeping is going to increase.
And that number doesn't include people who are in temporary accommodation or vulnerably housed or sofa surfing.
There are cleaning staff going through the area cleaning stuff up. But people still are doing their crap and the laws are unenforced because of those political reasons.
I also think SF police & the city decided the tenderloin was the homeless containment zone long time ago with SROs being there. That is also where the civic center station is.
That's just where they've decided to gather. I'm not entirely sure what attracts them there, other than the burger king with the huge "EBT Cards Accepted" poster.
http://www.mercurynews.com/2016/11/01/bart-janitor-grossed-2...
Homelessness is a massive problem in SF, but the attitude that they behave this way "because of the situation they're in" is untrue and counterproductive.
https://www.city-journal.org/html/how-new-york-became-safe-f...
NYC used to be worse than SF is now.
"Bryant Park, in the heart of midtown and adjacent to the New York Public Library, was an open-air drug market; Grand Central Terminal, a gigantic flophouse; the Port Authority Bus Terminal, “a grim gauntlet for bus passengers dodging beggars, drunks, thieves, and destitute drug addicts,” as the New York Times put it in 1992."
NYC's "solution":
"In sum, a diverse set of organizations in the city—pursuing their own interests and using various tactics and programs—all began trying to restore order to their domains. Further, in contrast with early sporadic efforts like Operation Crossroads, these attempts were implemented aggressively and persistently. Biederman, for example, worked on Bryant Park for 12 years. When Kiley was struggling to restore order in the subway, he had to withstand pressure from powerful opponents: the New York Civil Liberties Union, the mayor’s office (which had suggested bringing portable kitchens and showers into the subway for the homeless), the police commissioner, and the transit police. In fact, it was after the transit cops resisted Operation Enforcement, Kiley’s first effort to restore order, that he hired Bratton.
By the early 1990s, these highly visible successes, especially in the subway, had begun to express themselves politically. Better than any other politician, Rudy Giuliani understood the pent-up demand for public order and built his successful 1993 run for mayor on quality-of-life themes. Once in office, he appointed Bratton, who had orchestrated the subway success and understood the importance of order maintenance, as New York’s police commissioner.
Under Bratton, the NYPD brought enormous capacities to bear on the city’s crime problem—particularly Compstat, its tactical planning and accountability system, which identified where crimes were occurring and held local commanders responsible for their areas. Giuliani and Bratton also gave the force’s members a clear vision of the “business” of the NYPD and how their activities contributed to it. In short, a theory previously advocated largely by elites filtered down to—and inspired—line police officers, who had constituted a largely ignored and underused capacity."
From what I've seen, there are a lot of confounding factors in the studies that both back up and refute broken-windows policing. It can be hard to tell what actually works.
Between extrapolations from https://www.panynj.gov/corporate-information/pdf/10-board-me... and this New York Times article http://www.nytimes.com/1984/06/11/nyregion/as-port-authority... it seems that crime at the Port Authority Bus Terminal has decreased by a factor of ten from 1983 to 2013/2014. This seems to be consistent with everything else I have found on the subject, eg statistics in http://www.nytimes.com/1988/04/06/nyregion/bus-terminal-addi... which suggest an even greater reduction in robberies specifically.
I would appreciate it if anyone can find better data or spot-check these numbers against other reports, because of course an order of magnitude is very large.
My immediate reaction was to jump out of my chair and aggressively move towards her - I'm actually not sure what I would've done next because it all happened so quickly. Probably shoved her? That seems like a legitimate response to someone walking up and spitting on you. Thankfully I was with a few friends and they restrained me before I could do anything and the woman ran away unscathed.
The entire experience left me so confused. I am legitimately concerned that if I had shoved her I would've been considered the 'bad guy' here be the absurd SF hyper liberals and could've ended up in jail been fired if my employer found out.
What are you supposed to do in this situation? There needs to be some sort of disincentive to this behavior but it seems like the way things are in SF it's actually socially acceptable behavior.
We have our own spitting lady: http://nypost.com/2017/04/24/notorious-spitting-lady-loses-i...
- a mild climate (attractive if you don't have shelter)
- our society has no place for mentally ill. They may not ever be able to live life by themselves.
- a $250 million of subsidies for being homeless, apparently
- a culture of spending money on the symptoms rather than solving the problem. For instance, a number of comments here suggest paying for them to live in a house/apartment somewhere. Now you're stuck paying their rent forever, because the underlying problem of they aren't making enough money to live is still there. Plus, if I'm homeless, now SF looks like a good place to move, because they'll pay for my apartment!
- a culture of permissiveness. Why do homeless people get to act with different standards? If a "homed" person defecated on their neighbor's sidewalk they would call the police, but it's okay for the homeless to do it? If a "homed" person throws liquids at you, it's probably grounds for charging them with assault. But it's okay for homeless people?
- persistent lack of housing, which means that some people who might not be homeless can't afford housing. Combined with the above, there isn't much incentive to move to a place they could afford.
I think the attitude of entitlement by some of the homeless (see rsj_hn's comment, for instance) suggests that SF's structure is enabling homelessness, rather than caring for the homeless.
Dezoning California so appropriate development can take place would allow for much of that homeless population that your police dept. chases into SF to actually be housed and perhaps take an active role in society. Housing First should be our priority, not chasing the poorest members of our society out of the ghettos that surround the average city in the US.
My own running list of root problems that underly the homeless epidemic in California:
- zoning. we have technology to build inexpensive micro-apartments, theres just no cost-effective way to gain approval for tens thousands of them convenient to health care facilities and economic opportunities.
- building codes. to build cheap micro-apartments, they need to be prefabricated. building codes enforce customized busy work for individual plumbers, electricians, inspectors and other contractors on each installation. The systems resists pre-fabrication which would be safer and much cheaper overall.
- local attitudes about state power. police use of force. crimes of poverty aren't often prosecuted. City attorneys/prosecutors are highly disincentivized to tackle quality of life crimes. cost of jury trials.
- high cost and poor state of prisons
- lack of police headcount, expense of police salaries/benefits.
- high cost of health care & related labor. regulatory capture by licensed professionals, hospital companies, drug/equipment companies. cost of healthcare liability insurance.
- lack of regional coordination between low-cost and high-cost areas within the state
- lack of state-wide mental health and drug abuse treatment policy
- lack of money for preventative care and early intervention for new homeless - don't tackle problems till its far too late and more costly / impossible to fix
There is a disproportionate amount of companies starting or moving into SF over even just the past 5 years. Before, if you're starting a tech company, it could be equally common to start it in the peninsula (maybe even more so), say Palo Alto or Mountain View and the like. Nowadays, the default choice is SF and that's majority of the cases by far.
I think collectively, the whole environment is pushing towards building SF into the New York of the west, except instead of banks and the financial industry filling up the town, it's tech companies. I'm not saying it's the agenda of anyone in specific (in government or otherwise) to build out SF that way, I'm saying it's what we're all collectively doing, whether intentional for some of us or simply riding the waves for others.
SF is a city that used to support many industries. Tech is obviously the one industry that is almost the top earner overall (or might even be the absolute top earner by industry). It seems like an obvious factor (and a big one) that's driving anyone not in tech away. In some cases, at the lowest end of the income spectrum, they might not have anywhere to be driven away to other than to the streets. Another anecdotal point is that recent popular article about how <$105k is considered low income in SF.
If this is indeed a factor, one of the things we collectively as part of the tech industry can do, is to intentionally spread ourselves away from SF, into other areas of the bay area. I get it that people want to live in the bay area for its climate and all the conveniences. There's no reason why there can't be tech companies HQ'ing in East Bay, for example. (and I'm not talking about just Oakland, but everywhere from San Leandro down to Fremont, or further east like Pleaston, Livermore, Walnut Creek, etc.)
Really nothing to do with YC.
Trouble is, the hot young talent often want to live right in SF and walk/bike to work. So it becomes hard to recruit successfully if your company does not have an office in SF, and you are not Apple, Facebook or Google. My company is in Redwood City (about 30 minutes south of SF) and we experience this problem.
They have done the math and realized that %99 of the time even with an exit, they will make more at google.
There are apartments in Redwood City. Get one, and the walk/bike experience should at least beat SF. I may be wrong, but the place seems flatter at least.
I'm out in Indialantic, FL. It's hot but flat, and houses near work are affordable. I walk 0.9 miles to work, and that's only because I wanted a 4-bedroom on almost half an acre.
Maybe the problem is the desire you have for "young". That ought not be a job requirement. If all the young want to live in SF, you can still hire old people.
While a lot of these startups might be useless Tinder clones or Uber for X, there are also startups that quite literally change the world ~for the better~ in objective ways. Don't we have a moral imperative to cater to these companies at the expense of all else? Isn't it better for the long term to ensure they have all the resources available?
Yes, some of the startups are scum money grabs, but for every cancer researching, ag developing, energy innovation startup shouldn't we extend them every benefit possible?
It's also hard to tell what startups are world changing. Theranos probably seemed like a real life saver to 100s of millions globally. An Uber for home nurses might save that many lives, or it might be yet another scummy Hospice company that does everything it can to steal money from Medicare. Other businesses could have amazing effects that are hard to quantify: Google has certainly saved thousands of lives indirectly by providing easy access to information (due to the speed increases in research this allows as well as allowing people to treat/identify acute symptoms more easily), but how do you measure and predict this?
On the other hand, you have "vertical agriculture" companies that talk all about saving the world through a second agricultural revolution. But they're really only economical viable for growing marijuana.
I specifically mentioned crap startups because I'm sure its the first rebuttal to my suggestion (tax breaks for uber for party cups?!?!)
I have a bunch of blogs because of the free service BlogSpot. I have an earned income because of an online writing service. I have social contact and an intellectual outlet because of free forums, like Hacker News. I do most of my banking online. I am paying down debt and my earned income is gradually going up.
I could really use more traffic for my websites, more customers for my resume editing service and access to decent basic housing that doesn't cost an insane amount. If I could find a simple 2 bedroom place for about $400/month, I could get off the street in the very near future. I can't seem to find that. I am in the Central Valley, not SF and I am willing to potentially move to another state, though not just ANY state. I am still finding it incredibly hard to locate a potential viable housing solution for me.
While I agree that some things add more value to the world than others, there aren't really any clear cut boundaries. Some of the people on the street are, for example, cancer survivors who are broke in part because they got treatment that saved their life (so far) but it cost a helluva lot. We really need a few more basic things solved, like universal access to basic healthcare. More cancer solutions can potentially just put more people on the street. It doesn't necessarily fix this problem.
Homelessness isn't a simple problem space to solve. There is no one thing that causes it. Some things that would help enormously:
More affordable housing, which has been in short supply for decades and getting worse.
More middle class employment options. These seem to be going the way of the dinosaur.
Single payer health care system to provide universal coverage.
I am looking basically at West Coast states and other Western states. Nevada and Idaho are two I am looking at very closely at the moment. I am inclined to simply leave California for various reasons, but I also am looking at the possibility of finding something here.
But thank you for your concern.
The best thing tech could do is get involved in local politics, show up reliably to local meetings, and advocate for zoning and taxation policies that would support building enough housing so anyone who wants to live in these places can live there. Not just in SF either: it's even more important that Palo Alto, Mountain View and Cupertino start being willing to build housing for the people employed there. The suburbs could be significantly more dense than they are, which could support better public transit options.
The solution isn't to try to convince people not to live where they want to live; it's to stop letting Boomers decide where housing should get built, which requires Millennials to start showing up for ourselves.
"Ten percent (10%) of respondents reported they were living out of state at the time they lost their housing. Nineteen percent (19%) reported they were living in another county in California. Six percent (6%) reported they were living in Alameda County at the time, 3% San Mateo, 2% Marin, 2% Contra Costa and 1% Santa Clara County."
https://sfgov.org/lhcb/sites/default/files/2015%20San%20Fran...
I guess experience of Belarus in eliminating bums should serve as example. There are no bums in Belarus. Why? You aren't supposed to ask, they won't tell you. People are happy, and the government is doing its job. Everyone knows that wandering in the street dressed and smelling like a bum is a bad idea and won't last for long.
It sounds like you're advocating for killing homeless people.
When society on all levels is really not-welcoming to homeless that may force some people to try much harder not to end-up as bum on the streets.
That's not a whole lot better.
Thing is, bumming is a crime. As far as i know, it is a felony in just about every country. It is just that cops are closing their eyes on this crime so frequently that most people even forgot that it was against the law.
We're talking about Belarus here. Its not a happy-clappy place even if it does its best to look like that on the surface.
The homeless in SF are disgusting. Why does the city dump so much money into them? Is it really worth the amount spent per person? Why not spend that money on improving public schools, the efficiency of public transit, and things that useful members of the society would actually benefit from?
Why don't you tell us how you really feel?
Instead, we get numbers about how expensive programs are, how many needles have been cleaned up, and how many complaints made about the homeless on a neighborhood by neighborhood basis with a map, with a special highlight of human excrement complaints.
If I were cynical, I'd say that this is an anti-homeless piece with the summary: "Our spending is going up 10% a year, and homelessness is barely going down (take our word for it.)"
My cynical take on why the number of homeless was omitted: it's 7,499. $275MM/7,499 = $36,700 for each homeless person. This is obviously more than enough to house every homeless person directly, but the money is being drained away by subcontractors and salaries. Instead, the paper is implying that more money isn't the answer, policing is (notably not implying that spending be reduced, either.) Shifting emphasis to more policing of the poor will create a material benefit for the people who've decided to live in a gated community but forgot to put up a gate, while maintaining spending will keep up the flow of money that is going to a network of graft that results in little material gain for the supposed object of that spending.
... at which point you will have a lot more than 7,499 of them.
So the city got rid of the "subcontractors" and started handing out cash. The homeless people (as a group - I'm sure there were exceptions) pretty much treated the assistance as extra money for booze and drugs. Also, you can imagine what happened when homeless people living in other cities learned about cash benefits.
Gavin Newsom rose to prominence by changing the system back to what it had been before cash assistance. So we're back to having bureaucrats administering services, because it turns out a whole lot of homeless people are homeless for reasons that go beyond bad luck.
$275 million is a lot of money. Instead of trying to help the homeless survive in SF, why not help them relocate somewhere more affordable. There's lots of space in the country and almost all of them are cheaper than SF. 275 million goes a very long way to help people resettle and their quality of life would surely go up.
Disclosure: To be clear, I did just what I'm suggesting: I relocated due to the high cost to somewhere more affordable for me. I've met many others over the years that have as well.
Housing is certainly the problem. If there was a glut of housing, the city could just hand out 30k per person, save a lot of money, and the homeless could just rent a place. With the remainder of the money, people could get back on their feet. Give people back hope.
Have you ever tried heroin?
Fund an infinite supply of government make-work jobs with included housing, legal drugs, and okay pay.
Model the make-work towns off of coal towns of old. On cheap land so housing is cheap.
Have a minimum age of 30 to prevent kids/teens/young adults from moving to these towns and being employed at these subsidized (read: un-profitable for the government) jobs.
Also, if you want make work jobs modeled on coal towns on cheap land, maybe we could have them in coal country, digging not-coal out of ground. Then we could deal with the death of coal mining as well as 90% of homelessness, using that infinite supply of not-jobs.
It isn't just people who fall through the cracks when they lose their jobs, its also those who never could get a start to begin with.
The promise of these towns for the homeless should be legal drugs, guaranteed income, and something to do.
But, as it is now you don't even get a square inch. Everything is owned by government, landlords, businesses etc.. The result is that once a man starts to earn a little money, it all flows back to the owners. Earning enough to buy and really own a property yourself is only for the lucky few. Even after 20 or 30 years of hard work you can end up in the streets if you lose your job. And if you are unlucky enough having a (mental) illness, your chance to succeed is near zero.
Homeless are a product of the system we live in. And the best way to describe this system is a pyramid game. In the end there will be a few owning (and controlling) almost everything. It is sad to see that democracy totally fails to address this problem.. Maybe even more sad is that most children are not properly educated, especially when it comes to the system we live in and homelessness. I learned in primary school that homeless people are just lazy, and being on the streets was their own punishment.
It would be a miracle if a new generation really understands the problem and can solve it politically by changing the system we live in.
Do you release your property and get given property in a new city when you move?
As the situation with property and ownership is now, it is random chaos. Even a rudimentary design has never been made. A financially successful billionaire (who says not by criminal act) can buy and own thousands of houses forever, and the income from that will grow tremendously, which allows him/her/progeny to buy even more property. This is just insane, how can this ever scale for the benefit of all people considering the greed we all have built in?
The cost of housing and living in the west coast states has increased astronomically over the years and continues to do so, is it that simple?
Combine that with the moderate climates (read: you aren't sleeping in 4 foot of snow) and we just end up with an uneven distribution.
It was pretty eye opening to see people shooting up on the street at 10am in front of cops in SF.
Also super homeless friendly rules and laws. For example, in the city of Berkeley, you are required to have the front door of your commercial establishment set back from the street and covered, and the police won't remove homeless people while your business is closed. In other words, you must provide covered shelter each night to the homeless if you own a business there.
Port cities were all about radical acceptance once upon a time, because they needed laborers. It didn't matter who you were or what you did: if you could carry goods off a ship, you had a place as a dock worker. And if you couldn't, you could still cook or launder for dock workers. So radical accpetance predates the 60's, though it became more of a thing afterwards.
Well, it's nice to know you have a city to go to if your home town cannot accept you. If you're gay, or bookish, or artsy, et cetera.
But if what the people around you are not accepting is the erratic behavior that your incipient schizophrenia is getting you to engage in (or the lack of acceptance is actually a delusion induced by it, and your family does still accept you), and you've heard of San Francisco, well, you go there. You cut off ties to your home. And then the schizophrenia kicks in full blast.
A nice thing about social media is that people having mental breakdowns tend to make it obvious on Facebook and invite intervention. And, it makes it harder to cut your old ties, when once upon a time it was harder to maintain them.
But when you see 50 year olds in the streets around the Mission, holding debates with the voices in their heads, well, this is how they got there.
As a result whatever background your dock workers are, they have to get along with the crews of all those ships coming in.
First, housing in SF is insane. I have seen lots of articles about how bad it is and that $50k or even $100k is considered "low income" in these parts.
Second, the weather in the Bay Area is very homeless-friendly. If you need to sleep outside year-round, it is best to be someplace where you will neither die from the heat in summer nor from the freezing cold in winter.
Third, homelessness is on the rise nationwide. Homeless people can relocate relatively easily due to not having to give notice at their apartment and having lost most or all of their material possessions. So, the odds are good that some people are simply coming out here for the weather.
Fourth, big cities like SF tend to have more services for the homeless. There are meal kitchens and the like. If you are completely destitute, you go to where you can get free meals and other services. I know because that is exactly why I went to downtown San Diego for six months as a homeless person. I left and went elsewhere when I was no longer outright destitute and did not need access to things like soup kitchens to have any hope of surviving.
So, I think if you want to solve homelessness in SF, you need to work on homelessness across the nation.
That's incorrect according to "The 2016 Annual Homeless Assessment Report (AHAR) to Congress" at https://www.hudexchange.info/resources/documents/2016-AHAR-P... . Page 8 has a graph of all homeless people, which has been on a downward trend from 2007 to 2016.
I have been seeing a lot of articles about the rise in evictions, among other things, and I left downtown San Diego when I did in part because homeless services were suffering distress and were less and less useful to me because they were overwhelmed. But I will dig into this and see if I can come up with a more nuanced and accurate means to convey my point.
We have a very serious housing crisis on our hands. People who are homeless per se are merely the tip of the iceberg.
Utah took a decade but slashed their numbers by making sure the homeless had an apartment and phone. For the amount of money SF is spending they could buy them homes. The real crime here is the wasteful spending. They are burning close to 40k per person. People harp about wasteful spending on incarceration need to start looking here.
So how is that for even a third of this they cannot house the thousand that still need a bed each night? That number should have been taken care of in the first few months. Sorry for the hyperbole but if we want an example of a government needing a expose on waste and bureaucracy this is an ideal candidate.
Hard numbers as provided by the city.[1].
7,499: 2017 total homeless population 7,539: 2015 total homeless population (The number was 6,436 in 2013, and 6,455 in 2011.)
5,518: 2017 single homeless adults 5,342: 2015 single homeless adults
1,363: 2017 unaccompanied homeless youth 1,567: 2015 unaccompanied homeless youth
1,100: 2017 approximate waiting list for shelter bed 900: 2016 approximate waiting list for shelter bed
[1]http://sfist.com/2017/06/26/2017_san_francisco_homeless_cens...
https://jobs.utah.gov/housing/scso/documents/homelessness201...
The 2016 Utah report doesn't have the same graph showing the homeless population in state over the decade (it did not show a slashing of the homeless population in 2015 just a slight downward trend) but it does show the cost for housing a homeless person across the country - it's roughly 40,000-50,000 per year almost everywhere they surveyed.
https://jobs.utah.gov/housing/scso/documents/homelessness201...
1,333 sqft - $69/mo
https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/88335003_zpid/1000-180...
870 sq.ft., $49/mo
https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/88467667_zpid/1000-180...
966 sqft, $25/mo
https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/88361634_zpid/1000-180...
992 sqft, $40/mo
https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/88206127_zpid/1000-180...
I work in the tenderloin and it seems that quality of life would increase dramatically if they would get mental health and medication, seems pretty obvious to me. How about spending all of those millions on free healthcare for the bottom 5% ?
Exactly what job are you going to get if you smell, are missing teeth, have an alcohol problem, don't own clean clothes, and potentially have mental health issues?
I think we need to think outside the box on this one.
Aside from the hard-core mentally ill, a lot of people might be relatively easily intercepted before they wind up looking/acting like the person you describe.
I ask not why they are homeless, but why are they there rather than in a cheaper area?
As the article mentioned, homeless like SF because of how much the city spends on them:
> The city spent $275 million on homelessness and supportive housing in the fiscal year that ends Friday, up from $241 million the year before. Starting Saturday, that annual spending is projected to hit an eye-popping $305 million.
Also the moderate climate, and there's so much wealth it's excellent for panhandling.
Compare it with a more rural area where you could survive on it for a week. In terrible conditions but not starving.
0) Free muni passes,
1) great social & free housing programs - some even have stipends & phone service
2) a few decent shelters,
3) close by methadone clinics,
4) friendly 420 doctors (police don't arrest for 420),
5) tons of crack/meth on eddy street,
6) great places to pan (market),
7) weather is amazing (no hot days, no snow),
8) huge! public parks.
9) super friendly locals
10) a pretty liberal police department
SF hilariously always takes the wrong approach to things. If you want a city full of homeless, make it awesome. This would definitely be my plan G.
Compassion isn't hilariously wrong
I'll post my source (a SF gov census) later today, when I'm not on my phone.
It's more than 1 in 5, in fact it's almost 1/3rd of the homeless that have 'moved' to SF.
1 in 5 is the number of homeless (from the same survey) whose first place of residence in San Francisco was a homeless shelter. It's buried under figure 16 in this survey:
http://sfgov.org/lhcb/sites/default/files/2015%20San%20Franc...
So 1 in 4 ( or 1 in 3) people are coming here directly to use the services. The 1 in 5 figure is significant because it strongly suggests that homeless nonprofits are actively seeking referrals from other parts of the state and country. We know that in some cases people are literally being sent here:
http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2015/10/nevada-settles-busin...
Yes, that was found to be illegal and some wrists were slapped. I find it hard to conceive that this is the only homeless bussing program - there's no other conceivable way that so many of them are arriving, and immediately finding places in homeless shelters that typically have waiting lists, and definitely have plenty of underserved former tenants.
Ultimately, the organizations involved have no incentive to stop referrals from other parts of the country. The more people they serve, the more money they can ask for from the city, and the more 'successful' they are as a non-profit business.
And just as serving more people is in their interests, so is dumping the most troubled, and consequently, most costly onto the streets in order to serving another round of newcomers. Once they've outstayed their welcome, or become too costly, they are shunted onto the streets. And the worse the crisis gets, the more money they can ask for from the city.
I'm not suggesting that this is some kind of intentional human trafficking. I am sure that (almost) everyone involved is doing so because, in a small minded way, they think that they are improving the world. However, the end result is a travesty.
My thesis is that our current environment is is the result non-profits being run in a capitalist business environment, with a capitalist, MBA-style mindset. Eventually, the business model achieves stasis with it's environment, which, in this case, involves letting the city be a dumping ground for human tragedy, and letting the city's tax payers pay $250 million dollars a year for the privilege. The crisis is the side effect of this expanding bureaucracy achieving homeostasis and justifying its existence.
Getting only down to 50F max and having a 60F avg temp is easily solved by a sweater. 80F+ is solved by an AC, which is a lot more work.
All the things you described (besides crack and meth) are a good start. We're missing key pieces, but your apparent solution (make their lives harder until they are driven to a slightly less bad place) is just pushing the problem onto someone else.
That's fine if you only care about your neighborhood, but it's obviously not a solution if your goal is to stabilize society.
What's the long term plan for people in that situation?
If society weren't so hostile to some people, maybe they wouldn't shut off to participating in it. And even for those that don't - it makes financial sense to macroeconomically attempt to minimize the frequency of economic drop-outs but microeconomically it is much better to not just ignore the ones you have and force them on the street, because they cause a lot of property damage, which lands them in jail, where they got over a hundred thousand a year to keep imprisoned.
So economically, there has to be a recognition that some people are going to give up on the system and decide to stop trying to please a brutal economic machine, and that some of them may even become bad actors, in order to develop a realistic plan.
I agree. IMO, we should have doubled down on the war on drugs approach. The free access to drugs and lax enforcement is the undeniable sole reason for SF's homelessness problem. I don't why SF has taken an opposite approach, as the war on drugs has been an unquestionable thriving success in the rest of the country.
Please don't post trollishly about divisive topics. That produces flamewars, which destroy the site.
But wait, since being homeless is one the worst experiences a human being can have this can only be the flippant perspective of someone who has no clue about homelessness and no interest to learn.
Please be civil. We are not here to attack others. We are here to discuss the topic.
Most of the jobs being done by the people reading this weren't even invented when they were born...
One of the changes at that time was having to pay a homeless person to 'watch our car for us' when we went to get a bite or see a band south of market.
Awfully sad scenario and well-documented in this article.
The root cause was losing a lot of funding for mental health services during the Gov. Reagan years.
But go ahead with your strawman.
The first type can be helped by better job opportunities and cheaper housing. All the cheap housing in the world cannot help the latter group because they can't function in society even if you make it that much easier.
We do need a federal (or at least statewide) solution for the latter group, though, because with local control it's too easy to for the "solution" to be giving the homeless person a free bus ticket out of town.
This sort of uncivil internet trope breaks the HN guidelines and is the sort of thing commenters here are expected to avoid.
It looks like your account has a long history of posting this kind of thing. Would you please only post civilly and substantively from now on?
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14649227 and marked it off-topic.