Hacker News Reader

Comment by conanbatt | Hacker News Reader

Its a rant but I'm also surprised at how she writes "people's perfect life". Whats perfect about San Francisco, that has such a low demographic representation of family, the city is super dirty, people live with 6 figure salaries live in terrible housing conditions.

Maybe google gets to shelter their employees from a lot of the cruft of SF, but walk 2 blocks away from the google offices in SF and you'll get yelled at by homeless people.

Also sad that the writer does not see a correlation between homelessness and public policy, but blames it to income inequality due to the tech companies. Without tech companies SF as a dump would not be masked by 6 dollar coffee.

View on HN

I also look at this as - individuals have so much wealth, along with these companies, yet no one is doing a single fucking thing to help the homeless.

Facebook and Google could reverse their negative PR so quickly if they actually put some money meaningfully toward the problem, not into fake tax shelters for their founders.

define "meaningfully", keeping in mind the city spends hundreds of millions on homelessness already (kind of insulting and ignorant to say "no one is doing a single fucking thing")

Does SFO homelessness really have a shortage of money being thrown at the problem?

How would you solve it? I think it's a really tough problem and a significant fraction of the homeless population has serious mental health problems. I live in a city (Salt Lake City) that did a great job fixing its homelessness problem... for a couple of years. Now it's worse than it has ever been. Partly this is because more homeless people are coming to the area because they've heard about how great the resources here are. The problem with trying to solve homelessness is that most things that work to solve it incentivize more homeless people to move to the area that is solving the problem. At least that's what it seems like to me.

It's simple.

We need more fucking housing. Period. End of story. We need condo towers. We need townhomes. We need mid-rises.

And secondly, we need free and low cost mental health services.

That's it. Problem solved. The problem is we're 20 years behind.

Nope, your just indentfied the problem that needs to be solved. You haven't "solved" the problem, which is massively more complex.

More affordable housing only solves a problem for those with moderate incomes. Evidence: every other city in the US that has cheaper housing but also still plenty of homeless. Free and low-cost mental health services are closer to the mark, but still far from a simple problem. Many homeless people have complex, multi-faceted problems. Many resist initial contact. Many have trouble with maintaining any kind of regular schedule for either medication or counseling. Funding that many therapists (not just head-counters) and ensuring their security is a challenge unto itself. Not a simple problem at all.

If there's one thing that makes Silicon Valley unpleasant to me, it's the "simple, just do X" hand-wave that so many there indulge in regarding every damn topic. I'm sure your job isn't so simple a child could do it. Why act like everybody else's is?

Really I think that hints that homelessness should be addressed federally just to stop the buck passing. Not helping matters is the electoral college biasing against urban areas where homelessness is more of a problem.

The buck-passing however is from San Francisco to other cities. Guardian published a piece estimating San Francisco would double its homeless population if it hadnt exported it.

The point is that it is multi-lateral circular shipping as a result of incentives - following them doesn't speak well to their character but it is a systemic problem.

How many homeless people could one even very wealthy person help in San Fransisco or Silicon Valley? Even just building a homeless shelter, which I think are still uniformly pretty terrible places, is probably near-impossible; and not just because of the opposition from residents to them being built in their areas or neighborhoods, but also the regular, general opposition to any new development.

And just giving homeless people a better place to live is only one, tho extremely important, dimension along which homeless people can be helped.

And then of course one should expect side-effects to any help one would give, e.g. increasing 'demand' for help for homeless people. I'd imagine one reason why there's so many homeless people in San Fransisco is that it's already one of the best places to be homeless.

Its true private could solve it, but there is a crowding out effect as well as a double-charging effect. The city announces it spends 400 million on homelessness and fails, while it spends 2600U$S a month per household.

If you are a private worker you pay a monopoly surplus to the landlord and then get taxed to hell, and then you would give charity to help the homelessness the previous two mostly provoke?

Hell no.

It would probably be illegal for facebook and google to run a homeless shelter in san francisco. The city would never allow such a thing to happen, because they want first-right to spend.

You have to yell back at homeless people, keeps you energized. Someone I know working a very good (esp. by Russian standards) tech job in Russia told me that he wouldn't want to live in the US or especially Europe, because the everyday struggle in Russia is what makes one feel alive. Only half-joking ;)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com