SF tourist industry struggles to explain street misery to horrified visitors
sfchronicle.com
sfchronicle.com
Homeless people are attracted to places with nice year round weather. SF provides that.
They are also attracted to places where they are tolerated or accepted. The people of SF are very tolerant of the homeless. As one of the commenters here says: "I bring cash, you run out after just a block or two." Sounds like a great place to be homeless.
As for root causes, homelessness is mostly caused by drug addiction and mental illness. According the the National Coalition for the Homeless:
"A 2008 survey by the United States Conference of Mayors asked 25 cities for their top three causes of homelessness. Substance abuse was the single largest cause of homelessness for single adults (reported by 68% of cities).
Substance abuse was also mentioned by 12% of cities as one of the top three causes of homelessness for families. According to Didenko and Pankratz (2007), two-thirds of homeless people report that drugs and/or alcohol were a major reason for their becoming homeless."
As for mental illness, according to a research summary compiled by the Treatment Advocacy Center:
"Approximately one-third of the total homeless population includes individuals with serious, untreated mental illnesses"
More affordable housing will not offer relief to the homeless because their state is largely caused by addiction and mental illness, not by high housing prices.
Many people have psychological problems, and/or dependence on various psychoactive drugs. And perhaps they do correlate with homelessness. But correlation does not prove causation. Maybe it's just that homelessness makes it all worse.
http://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/2017SanFranc...
This is an important distinction because people that emphasize homeless as "not being from here" often use it to justify inhumane policies.
What end game are you trying to get at?
Rich European countries which have solved this problem don't do it by putting all the homeless in Paris or Berlin. They're distributed throughout urban, suburban, and rural areas of the country, which is what we need to do.
It's cities that have the jobs and make policies that drive up the cost of housing. There's much that can be done at the city level.
Still, deportation doesn't seem like a viable option.
So 31% had were homele
0) http://sfist.com/2016/02/11/71_of_sf_homeless_once_had_homes...
Shipping homeless and/or mentally ill to other locations is a thing that's been done by a number of jurisdictions, more than once over an extended period of time with San Francisco as the destination.
So which jurisdictions do that? Do they give them bus fare?
But hey, SF does it too. And many other cities: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/dec/...
70%+ of homeless people in SF were previously housed in SF. Yes they are attracted to SF but it's in the same way that you and I may be attracted to the city. They came for the weather, the jobs, the culture, and they got left behind.
You're right about drug abuse and mental illness, but neither of those should leave someone to a life on the streets. Treatment is the answer for people with mental health issues or addictions.
Here's the relevant study http://sfgov.org/lhcb/sites/default/files/2015%20San%20Franc...
Most addicts don't want to go to treatment because treatment doesn't work - mostly it gets people to focus on their failures and feel bad about themselves. Someone responded to my previous quip about AA's miserable success rate with...
I'd say 12-step is closer to "takes credit for the
~10-15% of people who'd beat their addictions anyways".
My girlfriend was doing fine with her addictions. The main factor was that I did not approve, and she liked me more than the drugs. She's spent the last two years getting 'treated' by the mental health professionals, who have reversed cause (self-medicating) and effect ('mental illness').
Some months ago her treatment provider did a genetic test, and decided she'd benefit from Vitamin B-9 - grains fortified with folic acid doesn't work for poor methylators. It's too bad the treatment providers don't start with healthy diets and supplements for all their patients.
“Homlessness” is a much broader concept than the yelling szizophric on the street with that weird “missing hair syndrome” on his head that a lot of them have.
It covers things like eviction, family unit disruption, etc.
Yeah sure 70% of homeless fall into “previously housed here and fell on hard times.”
While sad and should be addressed it is not the homelessness that is greatly affecting quality of life. It is the small fraction of chronically sick, chronically insane and chronically addicted that are literally dying on the streets in front of people.
Your data isn't really at odds with what I said.
If you know anything about how evictions work in this city, like the fact that Ellis Act evictions require a _ridiculous_ amount of compensation (think at least $20-$30k), it's obvious the real problem with homelessness in the city is drugs and mental health and the fact that, for whatever reasons, homeless from around the Bay Area, California, and Western U.S. inflate our numbers.
My mother is part of a jobs program that pays her to tend to some disabled people in public housing[2]. That is, she's intimately familiar with many assistance programs from the perspective of both beneficiary and provider. In San Francisco, if you live on the streets but are willing to enter treatment (for mental health or drugs), it's _very_ easy to be housed. It's actually a source of resentment because plenty of people who could really use public housing, but who otherwise work their butts off to stay off the streets, can't get it in favor of people who can get housing (plus cash benefits) merely by stopping drugs.
Drug and mental health issues are legitimate problems that people need and deserve help overcoming (often in perpetuity), and I don't have a problem funding programs to help those people. But IMO using the housing crisis to explain street homelessness is self-serving and counter-productive rhetoric by people effected by high rents, who have every incentive to link the two problems considering that the city actually puts resources into addressing homelessness. The cost of housing no doubt plays a part at the margins (e.g. by taking extremely low-end housing off the market that once upon a time might have been more tolerant of drug addicted and mentally ill tenants causing trouble and missing rent), but based on the facts on the ground I can't see how it's even close to being the primary cause of the magnitude of the problem today.
[1] It doesn't help that during the 1990s many states, including California, tried to make many of those myths the law, but SCOTUS shot them down (I think because of the Privileges & Immunities Clause). Still, Republican pundits today still push for hard requirements like 1 year of residency, having had a job, etc. This lends the myths credibility and keeps them circulating.
[2] Disabled in a very technical, legal sense. Every one of her "clients" is at least as physically capable as others of similar age. Most disabled in these programs are people who, because of psychiatric or cognitive issues, simply have trouble taking care of themselves or mastering life skills more generally, even if in conversation they seem perfectly normal and intelligent. The public housing they live in would deteriorate into garbage dumps and drug dens if people didn't come in and clean up after them and tamp down on bad behavior Involving police or social workers would be far too expensive, and such blatant exercise of authority would drive these people back out onto the streets. IOW, you literally need to _pay_ these people to stay off the street. Humans are... complex....
I've known long term renters who've lived in the same apartment for years and been forced out by landlords trying to capitalize on rising rents. If you are getting by on low income, or have a moderate or severe but treated mental illness (even like ptsd for vets), and lose your home, that can be the start of a slippery slope that can lead to homelessness. Affordable housing would provide a safety net to catch people falling down this slope
Substance abuse was also mentioned by 12% of cities as one of the top three causes of homelessness
Richest city in the richest state in the richest country in the world and we can't even provide a place for people to live. It's a failure at every level, there are too many culprits to list.
Aside: I thought it was a great touch that in this article each homeless person pictured was mentioned by name. Humanizing these people is something we can all do without spending a penny. If someone stops you on the street asking for a dollar, at least have the courtesy to look them in the eye and politely decline. I've had a number of people thank me more forcefully for that small gesture than actually giving them money (of course, give if you can!).
“Sorry I cant help you today”
I live in the Mission. When I have a friend come over from out of town, their first shock comes from the large number of homeless tents literally on my doorstep, a few blocks away from a major street (Valencia).
I then take them for a walk. As I pass the empty block at 22nd and Mission, I tell them how it used to be a tall apartment building where poorer people lived under rent control for a long time, and the landlord burned it down because he couldn’t evict them and wasn’t happy with the money he was making. Second shock. https://missionlocal.org/tag/22nd-street-fire/
Finally, we take a stroll to Dolores Park, and I point to them the house that Zuckerberg bought. There’s usually a homeless person hanging around, so one can provide a little verbal comment: “this person survives on a few dollars day, and a few floors above you have someone worth $80B“
There are no words to describe how screwed up things are.
In my experience the vast majority of SF homeless have substance abuse issues overlaid over mental health problems. The streets are dirty and dangerous, but the dumpster diving behind restaurants and food stores are rich pickings compared to other west coast cities, according to street people I befriended.
I decided to fact-check this claim. It is not true. The fire started in a poorly maintained electrical box.
the landlord burned it down
To think this through: very few homeless people were born in San Francisco. Everyone has freedom of movement in this country. If San Francisco commits to house everyone within its municipal boundaries, we'll need to be prepared to house all the homeless from the rest of the state and the country as well.
In other words, the problem has to be solved at a national level.
That's a common myth. 7/10 homeless people in SF were previously people with homes in SF.
That's not saying we shouldn't help them, but just that this is a national problem, not one that San Francisco can solve unilaterally.
I agree that the federal government needs to do a lot more, but cities can solve their own problems too. These people are our neighbors. We can do better for them.
The city of San Francisco is in a unique position of having resources and political will to try new policies. I'll cast my vote accordingly.
You're way to focused on the concept of elasticity. There's a lot more to figure out before that's the immediate problem.
Your error is that you're obsessed with trying to fix this within a market economy, by specifically housing them in areas of high economic activity where they can supposedly find "opportunity". That won't work and is counterproductive.
> Only housing near economic opportunity means anything.
> Why do you insist it be the city's services and not the federal govenment's services? Where in San Francisco do suggest we house the nation's 643,000 homeless if the problem isn't solved at a national level?
Is it really only 643000? San Francisco's a city of ~800000 and could probably handle a 75% increase with a bit of high density construction. Sounds like such an easy problem to solve financially speaking. Why hasn't it been done already?
I think the reason it hasn't been done is that it would change the character of the city in a way most people wouldn't consider positive.
I think it's natural for a subject of such a poll to respond how s/he thinks will produce a result favorable to her/him in the long run. People like a sense of belonging.
What? That's not true. People without income can get health insurance paid for by the state.
It's called Medicaid, look it up.
> which is perfect if you are an insurance company
Again, what? That doesn't help insurance companies. They don't care, they'll just raise their rates. It helps the average person I suppose, although they end up paying for it in taxes, so it doesn't make a net difference.
> As somebody who does not live in the US
What you really are is someone who gets all their info about the US from the news. Please remember: If it's in the news it's not typical. Your impression about a county should be the opposite of whatever you read in the news.
It's called Medicaid,
At the core, you need to spend more money by basically giving these people healthcare, mental health care, and a place to live.
"But that's not fair, what about all the good, honest citizens of the city who work their asses off to pay the exorbitant rents and exorbitant health insurances and still struggle to put food on the table bla bla bla"
No, it's not fair, but as long as that mentality rules, SF will have a homeless problem. The city sure as fuck doesn't lack the money to solve it, it lacks political will.
"But that's socialism!"
Yes. Now do you want to solve the problem, or keep sticking your head in the sand and hope it goes away through the magic of capitalism and the free market?
Seize it and build housing. The end.
EDIT: Of course this will never happen in the U.S. and we will always have homeless people and poor people like it's some axiom of civilization.
You prop up this solution of something vague but close to socialism as a silver bullet, but with no evidence. If $46K per person doesn't show that socialism is failing to work, then what will?
Almost none of it goes to the homeless people themselves.
The homeless person now has a house, and so they're not homeless. (duh!) It's shockingly simple, and ruthlessly effective at not only getting people off the street but solving health, addiction, and employment problems. Oh, and did I mention that it's way cheaper than the traditional patchwork model of mitigating homelessness?
Again, and again, simply giving away houses is a cheaper and more effective way at ending this problem. Cases in point:
Utah cut homelessness by over 90%. [0]
Finland has had similar results. [1]
Just today, NPR reported that Chicago hospitals cut ER costs and improved the health of frequent homeless patients by simply giving them an apartment.[2]
Housing First works. It's a waste of time and money to do anything else. Oh and it's gasp socialist!
[0] https://www.npr.org/2015/12/10/459100751/utah-reduced-chroni...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/housing-network/2017/mar/22/finl...
[2] https://www.npr.org/2018/01/30/581778796/er-use-goes-down-as...
Your references don't support this.
[0]
> The idea of Housing First is that housing comes first, services later. Clients do have to pay some rent — either 30 percent of income or up to $50 a month, whichever is greater.
They also review every case and only provide housing to those that aren't dealing drugs, and aren't violent.
[1]
> Tenants pay rent and are entitled to receive housing benefits. Depending on their income, they may contribute to the cost of the services. The rest is covered by the municipalities. They provide the support themselves or buy support from other service providers, mainly from the NGOs.
[2] is in reference to Chicago. I don't think that city is a success story.
It's effective.
It's cheaper.
It's giving housing first.
Finally, Numbers and Chicago don't care what you think.
> It's effective.
I never said there shouldn't be any social services. I don't think 100% socialism is the answer, though.
> It's cheaper.
You are comparing San Francisco to other areas which run these programs, and holding it up as if it is the only alternative to socialism. This is hardly true, isn't it?
> It's giving housing first.
Only to those that play by the rules. I think that is really the best solution out there. A compromise between self responsibility and care.
> Finally, Numbers and Chicago don't care what you think.
And? You thought I think they do?
SF is already spending $305 million a year... That's $46K per person!
It probably does count much of the state and federal spending
1) City spending isn't the full picture. How much money does the city lose because tourists/people/businesses choose other places because they perceive SF as a dump? That's the true cost of the problem, and the obvious answer is that as long as you spend below that amount to solve the problem, it's a win.
2) $46k is a crazy amount of money in my mind. What? How? How can you spend all that money and not get any results other than basic survival? Is it incompetence on a massive scale? Corruption? A failure of imagination?
3) Again, my main point is that this is a solved problem. It is not a unique problem. Contrary to what a bunch of other commenters in this thread have said, SF is not a unique snowflake of a city where this problem is magically unsolveable. It's the fucking not-invented-here syndrome from the software world, but applied to city politics. This is not rocket science. This is not uncharted territory. Learn from others, ffs.
That said I'm under the impression that a huge fraction of bay-area homeless are of the mentally-unsound variety not the out-of-work variety.
The second time you get beat up, recorded again and driven to city limits. The third time and afterwards, you get beat up, all your stuff gets destroyed/confiscated, and you're driven to city limits.
There is no homeless problem in Orange County/Irvine despite it having nicer weather than San Francisco.
Due to nice weather, California cities have to support many of the Midwest’s homeless population. To compensate, there should be a lot more federal funding for homelessness.
"The most recent homeless count, conducted in January 2015, found 6,686 homeless people in the city. Seventy-one percent of people reported living in San Francisco when they became homeless, up from 61 percent in 2013. Just 10 percent said they were living outside California when they became homeless, and the remaining 19 percent were living in the state but not in the city."
http://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/What-San-Francisc...
Sadly, each time I travel back, it seems worse and I’m jaded. I bring cash, you run out after just a block or two. I was staying in the Embarcadero and every restaurant and shop had a homeless person outside the door. Do even if you just gave a dollar or your change, I ran out.
This is a difficult problem and I don’t even know how to measure it, much less solve.
Do people really ask that? I'm sure they do, but the lack of respect for the "fly-over states" from America never fails to surprise me.
https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/13/security-robots-are-being-...
Opinions are opinions. That's fine. But what I find as a Missourian living in NYC is that people on the coasts (who didn't move there from somewhere else) are largely ignorant of important factual properties of the South and the Midwest. It's not uncommon to see someone off by an order of magnitude about, say, GDP or population or whatever (expressed with extreme confidence, of course).
Florida is significantly less developed than it has any right to be, on a range of measures.
The United States is ridiculously wealthy, even in places Americans love to denigrate. That's worth remembering whenever you feel like comparing Florida unfavorably to this or that other place.
Florida has one of the highest levels of inequality in the US and the US in general had more inequality than most European countries.
Are the working poor in the south really that much better off than most of Europe where healthcare and social housing are more readily available? GDP alone is a bad measure of success for individuals living somewhere if the benefits are not shared.
Unless a price of a home is ridiculously cheap (under $100 a month?), and even then, people without any income and/or mentally unwell people will not magically become non-homeless. Next time, read your post two times after writing and check for logical errors.
This sounds like a basic supply and demand question, no?
You have to treat mental health and drug addiction, because other homeless people don't want to live with them. Probably, you'll have to move people out of the city center, if you don't want substantial new taxes. However, if you don't bother to enforce anything you'll still end up with several thousand people living in the creeks under tarps, because they'd rather do that than go outside the city center.
Very glad the tech scene is spreading out around the world rather than further concentrating
Dallas considered building a concentration camp.[2]
[1] http://sfist.com/2016/04/12/no_san_francisco_does_not_spend_...
[2] http://www.dallasobserver.com/news/even-the-idea-of-homeless...
SF spends so much fucking money on the homeless, including 112 million on supportive housing for the formerly homeless and 27 million spent on eviction prevention.
The problem is that the issue of homelessness is a FEDERAL issue and that no one city, even SF has the resources to combat it.
As some have said SF and many other west coast cities are extremely attractive to the homeless because they have relatively lenient laws regarding them, ample social services (relative to any other city) and moderate temperatures.
SF is also a mecca for sending your queer/trans child that your religious beliefs can't bear to have around you.
There are many obvious solutions to mitigate homelessness. Provided government housing, decent physical and mental healthcare, job training.
San Francisco does all of those things. However, the fact is supply and demand is totally out of whack because SF is a sink for homelessness.
This needs to be addressed federally and until then all west coast cities will continue to be filled with homeless and have their social services over run.
[citation needed]
I'm skeptical of the weather argument. I would expect the homeless to move to Los Angeles or San Diego first.
Of course, that's assuming the homeless have the mental capacity to even make the conscious decision to move there. I don't think most addicts or mentally disabled people have the wherewithal to make a move from, say, Chicago to SF. (I.e. how do you make a planned move with (a) no money and (b) no Google to figure out the commercial train line routes you can hop a ride on for free? Hop a train in Chicago and maybe end up in Lansing, Michigan or Toronto instead!)
>I don't think most addicts or mentally disabled people have the wherewithal to make a move from, say, Chicago to SF.
There is a distinction between people with mental health problems and mental disability. Things like addiction and mental health exist on a pretty vast spectrum and have massive variations day to day.
As to how homeless people get around - well I see you haven't been on the greyhound much but that's a major way to travel for homeless both with their own money or with tickets paid for by various cities.
I imagine a meat grinder something like this. First you get evicted because you earn too little to pay the rent. Then you lose your job because you can't stay presentable. After a while, it's pretty much irreversible.
So yeah. We need affordable housing. And we need fair wages.
> Then you lose your job because you can't stay presentable.
Then you lose your health because you aren't insured.
Then you lose your sanity because you take drugs to cope.
WHAT keeps you from giving now? Isn't the poor person there? Aren't your own warehouses full? Isn't the reward promised? The command is clear: the hungry person is dying now, the naked person is freezing now, the person in debt is beaten now-and you want to wait until tomorrow? "I'm not doing any harm," you say. "I just want to keep what I own, that's all." You own! You are like someone who sits down in a theater and keeps everyone else away, saying that what is there for everyone's use is your own. . . . If everyone took only what they needed and gave the rest to those in need, there would be no such thing as rich and poor. After all, didn't you come into life naked, and won't you return naked to the earth?
The bread in your cupboard belongs to the hungry person; the coat hanging unused in your closet belongs to the person who needs it; the shoes rotting in your closet belong to the person with no shoes; the money which you put in the bank belongs to the poor. You do wrong to everyone you could help, but fail to help. --Basil, 4th century
THE large rooms of which you are so proud are in fact your shame. They are big enough to hold crowds-and also big enough to shut out the voice of the poor. . . . There is your sister or brother, naked, crying! And you stand confused over the choice of an attractive floor covering. --Ambrose, 4th century
I can't even believe the author had that thought. Amazing.
I don't know. I remember 20 years ago, around the first internet bubble, seeing literally hundreds of homeless people along Market St. It was like an army of homeless people.
There are far fewer these days, at least in the fancy shopping districts and along Market. There are more tents around other parts of the city, though. Maybe it's more of a case of gentrification pushing the homeless to other parts of the city so they're "out of sight, out of mind".
It reminds me of a plan I once heard about, of rounding up all the homeless and shipping them off to Treasure Island. That plan was never put in to practice, but I was shocked it was ever seriously considered. Still, in many ways what's been achieved is something similar, with the effective eviction of many homeless from the shopping areas and in to tents outside of it.
The whole subtext of this article is kind of troubling. It's like the only reason that homelessness is a problem is that the tourists are seeing it, and that it's hurting the tourist industry's bottom line.
I'm glad people are seeing it. If they weren't much less would be done to help.
"Political will" is just code for financial incentive.
The fact that this problem isn't being solved, tells us very clearly that this isn't actually a problem for the majority of the city's income.
The tech industry is strong enough that people will still show up to collect their $120k salaries, even if they have to step over people and feces to do that.
Obviously tourism must not be a big income for the city. Which is why no one cares what "Mr. Hotel owner" has to say.
SF will continue to become a tech dystopia, because no one comes to San Francisco to stay or to make a home or a community. Everyone is passing through, there to make their fortune in tech, and then leave. No one has kids there. That's why this isn't solved. San Francisco is not a community. Until it is, this problem will never go away.
The recent shady "election" of the new mayor - a white male tech VC, would seem to support this. Apparently a black woman who was willing to go along with the rich white men wasn't enough.
California's Proposition 13 and massive constraints on housing don't much help either.
Drugs, stress, climate, mental illness, and various social safety net breakdowns are, of course, other (and significant) factors.
https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/eDscpi6K...
Is this an Area where YC can help ? I challenge YC to consider Request for Startups that will consider ideas to fix this problem. I envision someone as powerful as YC and its network partnering with the city of SF,SJC,Oakland to allow for experimentation in finding long term fixes to this social issue.
here is a NPR report that shows the impact of fixing the homeless problem.
https://www.npr.org/2018/01/30/581778796/er-use-goes-down-as...
SF literally gets punished, the better job they do.
As they provide services, the city only attracts and retains a bigger and bigger population who become accustomed to relying on just enough services to continue living on the streets.
San Francisco is creating its own problem here due to its own altruism.