I live in SF. I am very, very tired of the homeless tents everywhere, dirty needles everywhere, and suspicious feces everywhere. The amount of bums living outside is unacceptable - this is perhaps the dirtiest city I have ever been to.
We could have a state initiative to build Club Med for homeless people in the Central Valley, far away from anyone who could complain, and the same people who would complain if we put that facility in Hunters Point due to their NIMBYism would complain if we put it outside of SF because that would be "mean" due to displacing the homeless people (many of whom used to have residences in SF).
build Club Med for homeless people in the Central Valley
>Yet the shelter is in such high demand that it has a waiting list 150 people long, all of whom were skipped over to relocate those who were moved to make way for Super Bowl visitors.
which sounds like they would use it
I think the term “homeless” does a grave disservice to that population, the term itself implies that it’s the home that’s a problem and not the zillions of underlying causes.
All they need to do is build some state institutions to provide care
Let's be careful about confusing our frustrations with something that is wrong or illegal. Frustrating me isn't wrong and it isn't illegal; my frustrations aren't evidence of either - they are, in fact, irrelevant to those questions.
More importantly, many people and groups frustrate me, sometimes to a great extent. Political leaders stand out, as do many in tech; comments on HN sometimes frustrate me. Bigots frustrate me and cause great harm, IMO. I sometimes frustrate others. Why doesn't the state act against those people? Why doesn't it act against me? The state shouldn't act because we all have rights; it doesn't act because the people in this paragraph have political power. As a result, we all have to accommodate each other
Homeless people do not have power. They don't have political representatives who can insist on their priorities - who in fact must insist to keep their jobs - even when others don't like them, which is perhaps the only important meaning of power. If law enforcement acts illegally or excessively toward them, they can't protect themselves. And in the courts, they have no lawyers, and judges and juries give them no credibility and don't take their pleas seriously.
The great sin of government is the powerful abusing the powerless, the strong abusing the weak. It's long been a problem in the U.S. too; minorities, for example, could be publicly murdered or lynched and nobody would act; laws clearly abusing the minority, such as voting rights laws, can be implemented and they are powerless to stop it. I think we should be very careful to not let our frustrations drive us and repeat that grave error.
But my frustration, as you can see by my comments elsewhere in this thread, are grounded in that a city of such wealth and technological progress cannot take care of it's lowest citizens.
Aside from the odd choice of perspective - have you considered that the homeless may be infringing on others rights as well? The right to an unobstructed sidewalk? The right to feel safe in my neighborhood? The right to not have to watch out for needles when I visit my nearest Muni station (Van Ness)?
Legality, while an important factor, is not the end of the discussion. Helping freed slaves was once illegal, using an extreme example. Legality depends on who is powerful, referring back to the GP.
> odd choice of perspective
Who says it's odd? Why would that be relevant? Is it odd to you because it isn't your perspective? It isn't the perspective you expect to see in this community? Is it good or bad to have 'odd' perspectives?
> the homeless may be infringing on others rights as well? The right to an unobstructed sidewalk? The right to feel safe in my neighborhood? The right to not have to watch out for needles when I visit my nearest Muni station (Van Ness)?
None of those things are really rights. Mostly, they are frustrations, and that's my point: I'm not saying people shouldn't come to accommodations with each other. I'm saying that frustrations of the powerful are not a basis of rights or of imposing on the powerless.
Imagine your homeless neighbors had a representative negotiating with you and your housed neighbors on an equal basis. How would you work it out? Has anyone asked your homeless neighbors what they need or want?
> purpose of your comment ...
That purpose is a creation of the parent, not me (the author of the GP). I'm going to stick with the words on the page.
Relevant snippets:
googlemike: "I am very, very tired of the homeless tents everywhere"
forapurpose: "Let's be careful about confusing our frustrations with something that is wrong or illegal."
googlemike: "The tents are illegal"
forapurpose: "Legality, while an important factor, is not the end of the discussion."
Would it be better if I anticipated every possible response and addressed it in my GGGP comment? Uhhh ... probably not; that would be a very long comment and I don't have time for it. Sorry if that makes the thread confusing, but while suboptimal, I don't think it's hard to follow.
I consider the right to live in and be treated with dignity the utmost important one.
I'm more surprised by the fact that the tech industry chose SF of all the places in California.
The move to SF has been much more recent and mainly fueled by the desire of younger workers to live/work in more densely populated areas. And then most startups started basing out of SF proper to be closer to these workers (and appear “cool”) so now you have all the big startup successes based in the city proper.
Shockley was working at Bell Labs over in New Jersey on solid state electronics, and was jointly awarded the Noble Prize for the discovery of the transistor effect. When he moved back home, angry at how the invention of the transistor had been handled at Bell Labs, he took a number of researchers with him. Together they were one of the first startups in Stanford's new "Stanford Industrial Park", and the first to use silicon. Some of those researchers later started Fairchild Semiconductor, from which came many companies like Intel and AMD.
If you haven't heard of it yet, Stephen Fry has an excellent (if too brief!) podcast that goes through this and the history of other big advances in technology in great detail, called Stephen Fry's Great Leap Years.
Baltimore is cheap, but I want to live somewhere that I can ride my bike without the fear of getting killed for it.
Buying a house in PA on almost Silicon Valley (working remotely) salary you can buy two and other investments.
You can seriously go on a little mini vacation every weekend for almost no money. I suppose if money were no object - why would you choose to live elsewhere?
Cool you like the west .. it's just too expensive and socialistic for me. Independent voter here.
Those are two facets of the same issue which is a demand much higher than the supply. SF has one of the best tech scenes in the world (to the point where it becomes stomach-churningly nauseating), and it's also just a hip metropolitan city with other thriving non-tech scenes.
If you don't like it, show up and say something.
Rent Board contact info: https://sfrb.org/commission-meetings
SF Tenant's Union contact info: https://www.sftu.org/contact/
The last day to register to vote is THIS TUESDAY.
Those people dumping needles on SF sidewalks won’t get magically well by handing them the key to an apartment. We need to treat the whole problem.
Are there any mental health startups out there?
The New York, Canadian, Australian, and English housing markets are showing signs that Q/E asset price inflation is over. But with Prop 13, outside of a HUGE global depression, it's hard to imagine prices dropping to reality.
I recently finished Thomas Picketty's Capital in the 21st Century. Basically he says that the typical capital/income split is 700%, meaning assets are worth 7 times global output, meaning houses are usually worth 7 times median household income.
That's about the ratio you see everywhere in the world outside of the United States. Even in the priciest markets in the US like SF and LA, that rate hardly exceeds 300%. If anything, that book convinced me that unless we change our tax policies substantially, house prices are going to get MUCH MUCH worse.
I hope I'm wrong. But the book had 300 years of economic history to make me think the US post WW2 was under strange economic conditions that never existed anywhere else on the planet at any other time. Things aren't necessarily getting worse. They're just returning to normal ]=
Upon saying that, things are pretty bad if all we can say is "at least it's cleaner than Phnom Penh".
The street denizens in SF building encampments, shitting on the sidewalk, breaking into cars to get their fix and blatantly operating chop shops aren't hard up people who are just down on their luck and between jobs... these types move here to specifically live on the streets and get high all the time.
I guess if you’re going to side with the rich in this ongoing class war, this is the kind of stuff you have to tell yourself to sleep at night.
Source: hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/2007-SF-PIT-Report.pdf.
I have a tent I could call a home but am not entirely comfortable crashing wherever I can, although generally I like being outside as much as possible. Tent dwelling is also historically well-respected, hard housing being the niche of farmers and royalty. I'd go as far to say that if people in tents aren't safe it's not a good neighborhood, because tents are fragile. They're also not garbage: some of them are fireproof and UV resistant with two or three shells. And, if you've never built housing, I can tell you: it is a huge chore for hundreds of people, including chemical workers, lumberjacks, metalworkers, and coal miners.
Why not build a Black Rock City where the Burn never stops? If cities sponsored that niche, the gig economy would ramp up to "unstoppable machine" instantly. Sociologically, there's not much difference between a tent city at a festival and an apartment building with a range of incomes, in terms of deviancy and community struggles. From a housing and urban development perspective, some of the new textiles are better and more sustainable than industrial construction.
You know, that would actually be a fascinating thing to see. I doubt it will ever happen given how litigious our society is, but that seems preferable to what we're doing now. San Francisco spends about $250 million on homeless services[1], but you'd never know from walking around. You could probably fund a non-stop Burn with that; the budget for a 65,000 person burn for a week is 37 million[2]. You'd have fewer people and less overhead so I think it would work.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_San_Franci...
http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-silicon-valley...
Something of a commune, heavily staffed with mental health professionals and with very attentive services (medical, cleaning, garbage). Encourage the more willing to undertake/share those roles. Make it feel somewhat self-organised and free.
Run a very loose "street school" - open-air where possible, 1-2 hours a day, variety of interesting topics. (I'm surprised they don't try doing that in SF.)
Why not build a Black Rock City
Source: hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/2007-SF-PIT-Report.pdf.
Homeless people aren't just a danger to themselves. They are disproportionately a danger to everyone around them.
In the current situation, everyone on every side of the issue loses - there are no winners. Something needs to change.
Is there any evidence of public health consequences, much less a crisis. This argument looks suspiciously like the rationalizations long made for people to discriminate against those they feel uncomfortable around.
Like code defects, it is magnitudes cheaper to fix earlier in the development pipeline.
It does seem like the ideal talking point - it's disgusting, a bit frightening, and thus shifts readers from reason to a strong emotional reaction. Let's try to shift back. If there's evidence of a problem, it absolutely should be addressed.
It seems to me that porta-potties, and some needle-safe trash cans, would be cost-effective, temporary solutions.