It's interesting to me how so many people confuse the absence of poverty/crime/homelessness with a system that has solved it. NYC has less of these things because it has undergone extreme gentrification and has politics and police which treat the homeless much worse. This is the opposite of what most people consider to be a real solution, yet NYC is praised for it. It is praised for the ends, not the means.
SF actually employs more of the policies people claim that they want to see, and as a result, it welcomes more homeless, and as a result, has more homeless, and as a result, it is demonized.
It's so backwards.
San Francisco can't manage to handle 3,000 to 4,000 people without permanent shelter (~6,600 total homeless), despite its immense affluence as a city. It's a failure of priorities.
I'd argue that it's easier for a smaller affluent city of 860k to solve a problem of roughly 3,000 +/- homeless people (their problem isn't the 6k overall figure, it's a smaller subset of that), than it is to deal with 10x that homeless figure at 10x the city size. Human problems like that get more difficult with scale rather than easier.
I'm not sure how SF weather plays in to providing shelter space for the homeless as a problem. It should be easier and cheaper for SF to do it, as SF requires both less air conditioning in the warm months and less heating in the cold months. Of course, this is also where SF's terrible zoning laws show up as usual.
Homelessness exists in a complex relationship with many other personal and social problems. The provision of shelters is only one element of the solution. If you aim for a complete and rapid elimination of visible rough sleeping, you'll inevitably end up persecuting rough sleepers or bussing them off to somewhere else. There is a great deal that can be done to reduce rough sleeping and much of it isn't being done, but there's no magic wand.
When you make housing for the homeless dependent on being sober and clean, just what, exactly, do you expect as an outcome if not that?
THIS moralizing "Oh, but you've got to DESERVE the help!" is partly why homelessness (and poverty) are still major problems in the US.
(Oh, and the truly pathetic NIMBYism in San Fran doesn't help anything... It makes solving the housing problem in general intractible. Seriously, shut up about the "character of the city" when you're really just using that as an excuse to increase your home value and when that "character" leads to a whole bunch of homelessness and rent that is impossible for people seeking jobs to afford.)
Note my use of the word "unmanaged". It's possible to house people with active substance abuse problems, but it's considerably more challenging, particularly heavy drinkers and crack users. There is a significant impact in terms of care because you're dealing with people who have a limited capacity to look after themselves, but the primary impediment is aggression and violence. It only takes one difficult resident to turn the whole facility into bedlam, at which point you're faced with few options other than evicting them for the sake of the other residents.
Wet houses do exist, but they're a lot more expensive to run and they face far more local opposition. They're a fundamentally good idea, but housing alcoholics and other difficult-to-house groups is a lot more complex than just "open more shelters". You need a highly skilled multidisciplinary team to make it work, and you're still going to have some amount of unavoidable rough sleeping.
If you still don't see where I'm coming from, imagine a crack addict with diagnosed antisocial personality disorder. Imagine someone who has been arrested multiple times for assaulting medical staff and police officers. Imagine someone whose life revolves around multi-day crack binges, which usually end in an episode of drug-induced psychosis and either an ER visit or an arrest. These people are not exceptional in the population of chronic rough sleepers, but they're exceptionally difficult to house.
Good luck.
Sometimes the best answer is to just give them their own space instead of a shared facility.
I've had plenty of contact with the homeless, have housed them in my own home for a night or three. They all have at least some kind of substance abuse problem (every one smoked, for instance). But if you push them out on the street, they'll end up eventually in the ER or in contact with police. This is way more expensive.
Housing is a crucial part of the response to homelessness, but it's only a part. Some people can walk straight into a home and get back on their feet, but some people will need intensive support and others just aren't ready to be housed.
Compassion is reducing the friction to life, somehow creating $500/month apartments with no credit checks and month to month.
Compassion isn't letting the homeless do anything, camp and violate other's rights, disrupt and distress the working lower to middle class, and reducing the penalties for petty crime while increasing the fines for minor infractions by taxpayers.
If you don't have good shelter for these conditions death is pretty much a guarantee. I sure as hell would never want to be homeless in NYC during a winter like this one. You cannot discount the effect of weather on homeless populations, and even the homeless can typically scrounge together enough money for a one-way bus ticket to somewhere warmer, once.
>NYC has less of these things because it has undergone extreme gentrification and has politics and police which treat the homeless much worse.
This is part of the puzzle. However, I think there are other contributing factors too, like the weather. If I was homeless I sure wouldn't want to be in NY in winter.
Now I'm in a city with a lot of visible homeless and the government tolerating it is the real problem. They allow homeless to build massive camps filled with drugs, garbage, and human waste.
And they don't hang out in these gross camps for company. It's mostly for easy access to drugs. The city should tear these camps down the day they form.
Homeless population is one of the toughest issues a city can have. Homeless people aren't stupid, and the more welcoming you make your city the more homeless you will end up with. Considering the size of the US, there's a practically unlimited number of homeless that can come to your city if it's welcoming enough, and that's exactly what has happened to SF. There's plenty of other places with decent weather, but the homeless problem in CA is mostly a product of the politics there.
We pour endless billions toward 'solving' homelessness when it's been a problem since ancient times. Some people are just too crazy or addicted to live a normal life. The answer is to bring back asylums to hold these people against their will, but that's too politically radioactive to do.
I have a family member of the crazy variety and I would love if they were in an asylum. I wouldn't have to worry about them dying on the streets. This family member is so crazy that if you gave them a house they would likely burn it down or otherwise ruin it anyways. Far too crazy to live with the family, basically a danger to themselves and society. I would guess the majority of homeless are the same.
All these initiatives to provide housing and training are misguided, a normal person will rarely be homeless for more than a few months. The majority of the homeless population is chronic, and these people would already have shelter if they were sane or sober enough to maintain one.
That in turn has a demand side cause -- the continued influx of highly paid tech workers -- and a supply side cause -- the economically illiterate politics which paints housing development as some sort of handout to developers. The supply side of this problem could be fixed through political means, at no real cost to anyone. New York has 6x the population density of San Francisco yet lower housing prices, because it has the capacity to meet the demand.
(Yes, recently the population of Manhattan has gone up, although it hasn't fully recovered from the downs of 1980's and is still much lower than 100 years ago).
This is basically slowly happening in SF as well. As much as SF-natives didn't want the "Manhattanization" of SF, it is happening just with a lot fewer people able to afford it.
Dnainfo had a map of nyc gangs and it was funny because they all looked like xbox live usernames, and then the awkward reality set in that the gangs are all 14* year olds
*hyperbole
Sites that pride themselves on accurate information should consider a different model
I walk around all parts of the city considered “dangerous” (Bayview, Mission, Ocean View/Ingleside) and nothing has happened to me. Really the only “bad” area SF has is the Tenderloin and it’s common sense not to be out there wandering around even during the day.
By and large NYC and San Francisco are both very safe cites in the grand scheme of things. (Unless you are a car window in San Francisco. Then you are screwed).
https://www.eastbaytimes.com/2017/11/25/group-of-teens-strik...
[1] http://www.newsweek.com/new-yorkers-are-getting-sucker-punch...
In 2014 (NYC has only gotten better), SF is substantially worse by virtually every measure - some metrics over 3x worse per capita.
Trying to equate them - or even consider them similar - is generally dishonest.
You can't use a personal anecdote to suggest SF is at least as safe as NYC or other major urban centers. "Anecdotally" I saw way more broken glass on sidewalks from car break-ins, saw several phone jackings in broad daylight, and, at the same day, remember wondering to myself on many days why I hadn't seen a single police officer/car on my regular commute...
Though I may have a different perspective on “crime” since I’m not as easily scared and use my senses to keep me out of trouble. It’s a city, shit happens just make sure it doesn’t happen to you.
I just moved from Manhattan to Brooklyn - it's not the same as Manhattan, but I still feel safer in Brooklyn than in SF.
And you say "avoiding the tenderloin even during the day is common sense" - it's not the Bronx, it's in the middle of town. Make a left from a $400/night hotel room and you're standing next to human feces and needles.
That would be like if I told NYC visitors to "avoid midtown west in Manhattan, it's just common sense."
But you know what is interesting - you would've gotten that advice in NYC in 1985. Times Square wasn't safe. Now it's a shithole of a different variety - but a safe one.
SF doesn't need to be the way it is.
To be fair, there are human feces all over downtown.
What are broke people supposed to do, hold it until they get a job?
That said, I certainly don’t blame them for being transgressive.
I don't go to SF unless I have to now. I have no idea why rich people are still flocking to SF. It is only a matter of time before the homeless set up at Broadway and Broderick.
Last time I was there I saw a nice woman driving in a top-line Range Rover with her cute blonde kids in the back. They stopped at an intersection near the Bay Bridge. The underpass was jammed with tents and all manner of desperate people. Some young guy from the camp made eye contact with them and stared them down from a distance...they were oblivious. These people think the invisible wall will hold. I don't want to be in SF the day it breaks down, and I am convinced it will.
The city government isn't liberal enough to raise a local tax to build a solution, but also not conservative enough to take a hard line. They're just letting it fester and it will become worse and worse until someone decides to break through the invisible line separating the tent cities from the Pac Heights mansions.
I find it extremely difficult to have meaningful conversations when we obscure our values and are not transparent about our ethical reasoning. The commenter said the driver was nice but clearly didn't interact with her. "Nice" is a signifier of value and I was hoping to tease out a conversation about that.
It seems pretty bad that a major western city has a completely no-go area right in the middle. Dismissing it as not a problem because it’s common sense to avoid a large area of the centre of the city doesn’t help the argument!
Are you joking? Or just insane?
I'm a 160 lbs male and would not walk through the tenderloin at night. It's really fucking scary. Almost everyone there is homeless and on drugs. The bad kind of drugs.
I would go so far as to say that someone carrying an infant through that area might be endangering the child.
There are lots of people with kids who live in the Tenderloin and presumably pass through their own neighborhood at all hours.
Walking around near poor homeless people now counts as 'child endangerment' I guess...
The fact that SF tolerates shit like this under the banner of "acceptance", "it is mental health" or whatever the hell it may be is mind blowing.
This is nonsense. You must be extremely easily scared. For normal people, it's perfectly fine.
I mean I've lived in Bolivia and never seen _anything_ as bad as this at it's worst, in Bolivia's worst areas.
http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Human-waste-shuts-down...
The Tenderloin is a shithole. Don't go there. And don't park your car on the street down there unless you like replacing window glass. Loads of shady looking people standing around, selling and buying crack, screaming at the top of their lungs at ghosts as they zigzag down the street dodging cars, and homeless people shitting and pissing on the sidewalks. Also lots of petty theft and assault, and the SFPD doesn't do much about it.
I've never witnessed a single act of crime like that in any other city I've been to on earth (I lived in Europe, now in Asia), so it was quite shocking.
I know the parent comment only said this in passing, but let's be careful about assuming poor communities are gang-infested or dangerous. AFAIK, gangs are not a problem in most American cities.
In Manhattan, I think the last pockets of seediness were in Alphabet City but that has quickly gentrified as well. As far as I know gang-related activity near NYC is now concentrated in parts of Brooklyn and Long Island (I.e MS-13)
Broadly, I agree. To refine my point: Most street gangs are in poor areas but most poor areas don't have street gangs.
> gang-related activity near NYC is now concentrated in parts of Brooklyn and Long Island (I.e MS-13)
Does anyone know any hard data on MS-13 activity? Government has made it a talking point recently but I haven't seen data on how common it really is.
> I’m also not necessarily suggesting gentrification is a net positive, just a big factor in declining crime rates in NYC.
That seems true to me and I didn't mean to suggest otherwise.
I guess my general point, which was not a criticism of yours (yours just made me think about it), was: Let's be careful about broad stereotypes which can and do result in criminalizing poor people. I will add an observation by the esteemed Woodrow Wilson Guthrie: "Some will rob you with a six-gun, / And some with a fountain pen." I would guess that the latter cause far more harm each year than the former, and in NYC especially.
> MS-13 is in every major city in the US, the scale obviously varies.
Is that also from the data?
> They get so much attention due to the extreme violence they tend to utilize, rather than the sheer number of members.
This is the kind of thing I try to avoid: Do we know that the violence is more extreme than other gangs? And I suspect they get attention because it fits the White House's / GOP's immigration narrative. But who can say why something gets attention?
https://projects.newsday.com/long-island/ms-13-long-island-k...