SF’s appalling street life repels residents – now it’s driven away a convention
sfchronicle.com
sfchronicle.com
Some of my team went to a meeting in SF a few years back. They described "running the gauntlet" from the hotel to a Mexican restaurant in an area where the streets were full of homeless people. While none of them ran into direct trouble, they felt uncomfortable and unsafe, and were disgusted at the state of the place (human waste on the streets etc), "like a third-world country".
In subsequent years, when the company asked for volunteers to go, no one wanted to, and no one volunteered. A week long all-expenses-paid trip from the UK to SF is something which would previously have been considered a huge perk, but is now considered to be a dangerous punishment. I certainly had no desire to visit.
And addiction is a large component of homelessness, but if you're still addicted you're obviously not going to spend much time in a place where you have to go cold turkey to enter.
So, my ( probably naive ) suggestion would be to allow drugs and alcohol in the shelters, hopefully giving the residents long enough of a chance to receive some help. No it's just a revolving door that doesn't appear to be helping anyone.
Universal basic income too. :-)
No, I really just think that people should stop overthinking problems like this. You don't need to go around asking everybody's life story to work out that homelessness is tightly coupled with rent prices. Fix one, you fix the other. Or, if you think that's too expensive or onerous, own it. Accept that you're basically OK with other people being homeless. Everything else is just crocodile tears.
My second question is, how exactly do you propose rent be lowered? Do you just think that rent is made up on the spot by evil rich white people, and we should have the government force them to charge less? The reason rent is so high in the first place is largely to do with government restrictions on new developments...Rent is also high here because there is a large concentration of high paying work in the area. Are these high earning people going to be allowed to benefit from your proposed arbitrary lowering of rent, so that we only disproportionately punish the wealthy landlords but not the wealthy tech workers? If not, how many tech workers would you like to displace to make room for homeless residents, and how do you determine which?
I feel foolish for not realizing how simple of a solution it was that you were proposing, but not all of us operate in the intellectual 4th dimension.
It seems to me something else is going on that pulls homeless people into San Francisco. But I readily admit I don’t understand it all very well.
On the individual level, I expect the reason why people stay is that being homeless makes you very dependent on local knowledge and social network. Knowing what bins contain food, where is good shelter, which police officers are dangerous, and so on - is very important. If you move city, you're not suddenly going to have the kind of money to pay a deposit. You'll just be homeless in a place you don't know. That, and a lot of homeless people have jobs.
You can understand quite a lot about this place if you really internalize that realization.
I think the root problem is that SF is carrying too much of the load for other places who won't take up the problem themselves. Every place is going to have some level of drug use or social problems. But it's not productive or responsible for everyone else to just dump it all on the SF taxpayers.
A lesser problem is the populace's unwillingness to hold the homeless to any reasonable standard of behavior. I'm sorry, I know the homeless have it hard, but there are certain global norms of civilized behavior I consider inviolate, like, don't defecate in public, or don't drop used syringes on the ground, where people will step on them. These things happen here every day and the political climate is such that it's taboo to ask for law enforcement to get involved.
it used to be that if a pile of drunks had a loud party outside my house at 3am, I could call the cops and they would send someone to break it up. or if someone started living outside by business, screaming at passersby and making a huge biohazard mess I could call them and they would move them along.
now they want to know how big the encampment is, if it gets big enough they will break it up after a few weeks. otherwise I get the feeling they just put you on a list of whiners to ignore. anyways - you stop calling.
even if the rent weren't so insane I would want to leave just because of the sheer misery involved for everyone.
I'm really thinking about leaving. Not, as perhaps the other 95% of people do, for economic reasons, but just because I'm tired of how dysfunctional SF is. We pay through the nose in taxes and get what, a disgusting, dirty city, with barely-functional transit, do-nothing law enforcement, totally unaffordable housing, and insane traffic. It really does get under your skin after a while.
I'm optimistic with London Breed that we'll finally get some tech/lawyer/finance/other working professional-driven emphasis on accountability and RESULTS from the city government. Less grandstanding and speeches, more numbers, data, better schools, functioning transit, and cleanliness.
Per the same link, SF spends very little money on homelessness. A lot of the so called homelessness money is actually subsidized housing money.
Most issues with the homeless represent a public health issue much more than a law enforcement issue.
Given they lack access to toilet facilities, are you imagining the homeless not pooping through sheer willpower?
Addiction is a form of mental illness, and that's not the only mental illness common among the homeless. Many suffer from other illnesses. Nobody wakes up wanting to be addicted, or schizophrenic, or whatever, whether they are homeless or otherwise.
What this city really needs is restrooms. Agree with you on that. Yes, people would do drugs in them, but it would certainly help with some of the smells.
When you make bad options illegal, you aren't magically giving anyone any better options.
There'd probably have to be shelters specific to users of a given substance who want to continue using.
At least then non-using homeless would be less likely to suffer from proximity to agitated drunk/high individuals.
And homeless recovering addicts wouldn't be living with actively using addicts.
The city built a transportation center, surely they can dedicate a government building to being a combination shelter and benefits center. Or place it near a place that handles the homeless better like people's park does in Berkeley where, yes there are campers, but they keep it pretty clean and respectful.
Given the high gdp and high tax rate, why isn't SF better than it is?
I'm would really like to understand this. Is it politics, economics, cost of living?
It will improve the quality of life for the addicts as well as the city climate, as to whether this is worth the extra costs compared to a state-supplied drug stash is up to society to decide.
Some people are incapable of looking after themselves, or fall into addiction after horrible experiences, and leaving these people to stew in their own juices rather than intervene is inhumane. We do after all section people that are a risk to themselves or others, so this is not without precedent.
A slim majority has recognized that consent and autonomy are important rights and chooses to deal with the consequences of maximizing them.
To give one example, Amsterdam used to have a huge heroin addiction problem, with associated crime and high death rates amongst addicts.
It is now treated as a health rather than a policing problem. Safe injecting rooms, methadone replacement programs, etc. As a result, the average age of heroin addicts in NL is now over 40, because young people aren't being addicted, and 'established' addicts are able to manage their condition for years, rather than die early from overdoses.
For more info on the Dutch approach to drugs of all kinds, this 21-page PDF has good background plus statistical comparisons both over the last 15 years and with other European countries:
http://www.emcdda.europa.eu/system/files/publications/4512/T...
Just like our current national hysteria around crime or immigration, the notion that homelessness is somehow getting worse, or that San Francisco is doing a bad job handling it, are flatly contradicted by the data. San Francisco is in fact doing a better job handling homelessness than most of its peer cities in the United States.
Readers of Hacker News should go to the data first. Matier & Ross have a long history of this kind of ugly sensationalism and it has no place here.
Market St. is a war zone.
The city spends $300 - $400 million a year on the homeless industry, but virtually none trickles down to the actual homeless.
There is currently a well-funded political campaign, backed by VC money, to change conservatorship laws in California to snatch homeless people off the street and involuntarily institutionalize them. You are doing serious harm by allowing people to spread misinformation here without challenging them, and punishing people doing the thankless work of correcting them.
I would agree that two slums sandwich this narrow band.
Trickle down doesn't work for people who do not contribute to the society in any way. Why do many homeless don't? I don't know, but that's what any government effort should focus on. Spending money and hoping it will trickle down without addressing the root cause is stupid.
In 2004 the homeless made up 1.15% of the population. In 2017 it was 0.08%. A 30.5% reduction. Definitely significant.
I see two issues that are driving the false perception regarding homelessness.:
As you reduce the overall homeless population the significantly mentally ill and drug addicted make up a higher percentage of the homeless that remain.
The policies enacted have concentrated the homeless into fewer areas which makes it seem that their numbers are higher rather than lower.
> It didn’t help that one board member had been assaulted near Moscone Center last year.
It's not just a stigma. It's not safe.