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Comment by rlt | Hacker News Reader

> It all wreaks of hypocrisy and downright poor fiscal judgement to me.

I'm curious how much of it is hypocrisy and poor fiscal judgement vs. simple naïveté. Has anyone studied where San Francisco's homeless population comes from? Is it mostly long-time residents who are down on their luck (whether due to economic hardship, drug addiction, or mental illness), or does San Francisco's extreme liberalness (tolerance for tent encampments, open drug usage, petty theft) attract people from elsewhere?

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San Francisco has caught Nevada and New York sending people on buses to get rid of them. This is supposed to only be legal if the person has family in California they are meeting, but they just dump mentally ill people on Market Street and hope for the best. Nevada paid a large fine for this recently. Many of the people needed urgent help within hours of arriving. Truly horrific.

Do you have a source for that? Sounds pretty egregious.

https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/S-F-Nevada-reach-tent...

This is not unique to San Francisco. https://www.10news.com/news/team-10/team-10-man-with-extensi...

> Partin's bus ticket cost $261.50. The receipt, dated February 2, 2015, is stamped with the name of a Nashville agency called Homeward Bound. Investigators at Team 10's sister station in Nashville, WTVF, learned the agency that has oversight of the Homeward Bound program is the Nashville Downtown Partnership (NDP), a group dedicated to making the city a great place to do business.

I don't know what San Francisco caught Nevada doing, but lurid stories aside, organizations do actual surveys and censuses of the San Francisco homeless, and they're overwhelmingly locals.

irvine has also done this, dumping homeless on the next county

The perfect weather and the strong social services attract people from around the country.

To be fair, the also essentially non-existent enforcement of rules and laws and the fact that SF is a mecca for international tourist and panhandlers can make decent money (i.e. Union Square) plays a role. Let's not factor out the economics and lack of consequences for bad behavior.

Both of these are largely myths.

How cold are the winters? 50 degrees?

Winters? It's 56 in SF right now. As to the 'come from all over the country for the excellent social services', there are lots of studies and surveys on this a google away. Statistically, nobody does that.

However attractive the weather might be, we don't have to use the axiomatic method to figure out where the SF homeless come from; the population is regularly surveyed, and is overwhelmingly local.

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