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Comment by heurist | Hacker News Reader

I haven't been to San Francisco in 10ish years or NYC in 5 so I can't compare directly, but Austin, Dallas, San Antonio and Houston all have tons of homeless people as well and they seem to get very little attention.

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> Austin, Dallas, San Antonio and Houston all have tons of homeless people as well

I'm sure, but the situation in California is objectively worse. 34 in 10,000 Californias are homeless, compared to 8 in 10,000 Texans. The California homeless population increased by 13.7% last year alone (+16,136 people), compared to a 1.8% increase in Texas (+426 people).

San Francisco does a particularly bad job at sheltering its homeless population though. Maybe its mild climate allows this, compared to cities like NYC or Boston or DC with harsher winters.

https://www.hudexchange.info/resources/documents/2017-AHAR-P...

The point is that supposedly San Francisco's ideology would be extremely favorable to taking superior care of the homeless vs more conservative cities. The actual results, are that SF does an extraordinarily mediocre job at it.

SF is an affluent city, with a homeless problem consisting of 5,000 people, and they're unwilling to fix it financially. They can afford to, and they refuse to. It's disgusting.

That's what gets me. In SF you have a huge liberal majority and is a wealthy city. This is in a state with a liberal majority.

Yet the social problems in SF are probably some of the worst in the US.

It's pretty shocking.

Your observation is consistent with the belief that progressive policies are not the answer.

If politicians only pay lip service to the ideology when their major supporters are NIMBY property owners, is it really an application of progressive policies?

Homelessness isn't just a city-wide problem, but a national one. National policies regarding drugs, housing, economics, play a huge role in how homelessness in a city turns out. There are also homeless populations that move around to different cities. A city can do a lot to change their own situation, but it feels like there's only so much that can be done on a local level when there are huge higher-level pressures.

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