Why is San Francisco covered in human feces?
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
I once walked down Mission St and for blocks the whole thing was like some kind of homeless bazaar. Two women were fighting at one point, and I passed a gentleman in a doorway who I’m pretty sure was dead (he eventually moved, but he was skin and bones..)
Something is terribly, terribly wrong in the Bay Area, and I’m unfortunately not surprised that it continues to get worse. I refuse to ever go back.
For example all the farm owners' houses are on hills or birds and the workers' housing is in the flood planes. Think I'm exaggerating? Just drive through the Altamont pass and head down 205 towards Tracy. Get off the highway and the divide becomes even more extreme.
They have their houses on birds? That’s ... amazing!
Let some of the money go elsewhere and boost some other city's economy rather than having it all focused in one place to the point of it causing major problems.
At least the democrats here aren't monolithic, there are frequent initiatives at the local or state level to increase the supply but they've (sometimes narrowly) lost.
Also some of California's unusual policies (like the special property tax system and very high income tax) are actually due to a political system where ballot initiatives have more influence and weren't top-down planned by the legislature to begin with.
Anyway, yeah it does seem self evident. I think San Francisco is somewhat extreme relative to the national level though.
Taxes would help slow their expansion and in turn the increasing rent. Unfortunately the city has been toothless in this regard for fear of loosing some of the businesses that are causing many of the problems. IMO the threat of of them actually leaving is low given the whole echosytem set up here to support them but they would likely grow a little slower which would actually be for the good of the city.
1. People believe that there should be support systems in place so that homeless people don’t just die all the time. 2. (Kind of General American thing): the government must never give money, healthcare, welfare sufficient to have a place to live, etc to anyone. Because handouts result in “dependence”, “welfare cheats”, etc
Anyway, part 1 means that if you are homeless, for whatever reason, you’re better off being homeless in a place like SF (esp given its relatively mild climate). But once you are homeless it’s incredibly hard to stop being homeless.
That’s ignoring other issues :
* the group that wants to ensure homes for the homeless intersects heavily with the group that fights against new housing/“gentrification” * many of the well off mostly want to force the homeless to go somewhere else, and don’t want any of “their” money being spent on providing homes
Etc, etc
Yeah that's not at all a "general American thing" - that's a one particular political party thing.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1976/02/15/archives/welfare-queen-be...
[2] https://slate.com/human-interest/2018/06/trumps-work-require...
I don't think that disputing the OPs assertion constituted a rant or was off-topic. I had no interest in taking sides either.
Democratic Mayor Art Agnos developed a comprehensive program to deal with the homeless problem back in 1989/90 called "Project Shelter"[1] so yes he very much believed in helping the homeless. Unfortunately the Loma Prieta earthquake strikes. He's defeated in the following Mayoral election by another Democrat, Frank Jordan, who shelved the Agnos plan and created his own task force to try to address the homeless problem. So clearly he believed in helping the homeless as well.
However at that same time you had NIMBYs who were upset about the encampment across from City Hall and it was cleared. And you also have have a Republican Governor, Pete Wilson cutting welfare grants.
And it goes way beyond this - the rapid decline in federal public housing development began under Nixon in the early 1970s[2]. The underfunding of the Napa State Mental Hospital was a state issue.
So yes there have been no great successes racked up by Democratic mayors but the problem far more complex and nuanced to lay at the feet of one particular political party and at only the city level.
And again my original comment was not about left vs right, it was about the OPs assertion that a lack of interest in social welfare programs was a "general American thing."
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1990/07/19/us/san-francisco-treating...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_housing_in_the_United_S...
SF has many incredibly good systems for helping the homeless - medical care, varying amounts of temporary shelter (SROs are kind of required in SF, but it's terribly implemented, and doesn't actually give people a place to live, just sleep). But the help for the homeless does not involve giving money, but you need money to pay rent, so your only real option is to remain homeless.
Honestly though, I feel there's so much accumulated cruft it would take decades to deal with homelessness in America. For instance, if you turn around and give money to the homeless tomorrow the first problem you'll hit is there are now a few thousand additional people competing for the already limited housing in SF. The decades of mismanagement of mental health in CA mean that you have a huge population of mentally ill who are homeless and may not have cognitive resources to make use of (or even get) the money. You also have to deal with decades of drug [ab?]use in the long term homeless - simply having access to a home isn't going to resolve that.
(actually what spurred me to write was the surprise that the Guardian, a UK newspaper/web site used the American spelling for faeces).
[0]: https://www.npr.org/2018/08/14/638512558/nope-those-arent-ma...
Sidewalk-Roomba is what I was picturing in my head, and their design has been a walk-ing exercise I do when walking around the city... basically I just observe the city as I walk through it and think about what it would take to make these feasible.
I was picturing stations where they would go to dock and dump and reload. You would have them assigned to a particular block radius and would monitor the conditions of each given area.
Perform cleanup and what not.
I was picturing something with a bunch of sensors on it, a clean/dirty water tank, tankless water heaters and a preassure washer with a battery pack.
The sensors could track the amount of foot traffic they see pass by them at all times - and you would know the ebb and flow of foot traffic throughout the city as well as the available walking space, timings of lights and buildup of foot traffic for a given intersection for each hour... lots of data.
Los Angeles has a lot of homeless people as well but there's tons of public restrooms and also businesses are a lot more generous with the restrooms.
The reason it feels hard is that it gets politicized and PC'd super fast, which quickly penalizes any form of brainstorming.
Here's some off-the-top-of-my-head brainstorming, that promises nothing, but is infinitely closer to fixing the problem than all the other comments I've heard on this topic in my life put together:
1. Move homeless shelters out of the city proper. This will improve the disease/sanitation problem of homeless living in the subway, for example.
2. Collect accurate data. Do this by finger-printing at food banks and other measures. Accurate data on the role of drugs+schizophrenia is important.
3. Solicit experimental ideas. Could these homeless people be farm hands? Would they want to? Could you create a digital trash-can that pays rewards to homeless who actively clean?
I'm really mystified as to why tech entrepreneurs seem so enamored of SF. Does being close to good restaurants compensate for all the negatives?
Technically, the issue is easily solved. The only thing difficult is winning the political fight.
1. The only city with so many shelters for homeless. Other cities would just let people die of cold, heat or hunger or send them to SF.
2. Besides homeless shelters, there are absolutely zero places for homeless to go to. At least in third world countries, poverty is acknowledged and there are charitable organizations which help keep people fed and pooped (example Churches, temples, charitable individuals). But in America, churches only get tax breaks and serve the middle class. They don't really do as much social service as their tax breaks should enable them to do.
3. SF is crazy expensive. There is no f-ing way an average homeless person can find a job, make $500 this month and can actually find a home. Why don't they go to a cheaper city/town? Most cities/towns won't allow them to sleep on the street until they find a job. The flight/bus to cheap town is expensive. Cheap town usually looks down on them even more. No shelters in cheap town.
4. American background check system is brutal. One felony record and you are instantly eliminated from many jobs. So, many of these folks with a small time felony charge are can't just walk into a safeway to find a job.
5. There are too many ways to fail in a society with no safety net. A lot of SF homeless were once good citizens. They either got divorced or had a healthcare trauma or lost a job or a combo of things and their nice $50k savings account dropped down to zero in an instant. This is how quick poverty in America is.
6. Poor person penalties are too large. $600 penalty for car getting towed in SF? Are you f-ing kidding me? This will literally cause a poor family to be thrown on the streets.
There could be more reasons but these are ones I'm familiar with. Most homeless weren't homeless from childhood. They were forced into homelessness by some circumstance. At the end, we (including me) are all responsible for this. SF needs to acknowledge their strategies are not long term sustainable. Rest of America needs to stop exporting their homeless and needs to set up retraining and rehabilitation centers. We are all to blame.
[1]https://m.ranker.com/list/top-10-u-s-cities-with-a-high-home...
There's a youtube channel called "Invisible People" that interviews homeless people. https://www.youtube.com/user/invisiblepeopletv Many of them are sane and not addicts, who simply became poor for one reason or another.
These interviews are really heartbreaking. Especially how so many feel the need to emphasize that they are actually human beings, just like the rest of us.
https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2018/05/california-...
https://www.pacificresearch.org/is-states-plastic-bag-ban-ca...