Comment by standardUser | Hacker News Reader

Comment by standardUser | Hacker News Reader

As a many-decades resident of Santa Cruz and San Francisco, and a as someone who has in the past been deeply involved in the street/drug scene and been associated with and friends with many dozens of people who have lived on the streets, I think this bizarre attempt at categorization missed the most visible and important group of people on the streets...

People who choose to live on the streets. Go talk to people. Ask where they're from. The people you're most likely to encounter (the ones being visible, doing drugs visibly, camping visibly) are travelers of sorts. Adventurers even. Sure, many are drug addicts or have mental health issues. But so do millions of people with jobs and homes. Unlike those people, these people choose to eschew social norms wholesale and live a nomadic lifestyle.

You see much less of this outside of the temperate climate of the West Coast. But here, it's a growing problem. They have plenty of food and can earn above minimum wage by spare-changing and are given adequate healthcare. And they shit and piss on our streets, block sidewalks, litter profusely and otherwise do whatever they feel like.

Sounds like you’re talking about the tweakers in RVs and the street kids/crust punks in the Haight who have pit bulls and are just living a “lifestyle” or homeless by choice. I think most of them qualify as “ruiners” according to the article, but maybe you disagree. These are the group of homeless I think that are causing 90% of the issues in the city and they know cops won’t really do much so they are constantly pushing what they can get away with like petty theft, stealing bikes, operating open bike chop shops, openly selling and using drugs, camping wherever they feel like... This is the group who are basically ruining quality of life for everyone else and a drain to homeless resources.

I think there needs to be some kind of program and either homeless are enrolled and attending and getting help, or they aren’t allowed to stay within city limits. It’s just really frustrating how the city has done nothing to sort the homeless into people who want help and the people who don’t. I think between the lazy DAs, cops who don’t care, juries who won’t convict, and judges who won’t sentence—we’ve created a situation where no one is actually improving the homeless crisis, just ignoring it. BART has become a de facto homeless shelter. Antioch trains regularly have 5-7 homeless people sleeping in each car during rush hour. I read in SFGate that they arrested 66 fugitives in the Tenderloin in one sweep this week... it just doesn't seem safe to have this level of lawlessness in a major city.

I feel bad for these people because most of them are mentally ill or struggling with some other issue, but this is not the way to run a world class city. There is clearly money to fix the problem, but no political will to actually put the structures in place.

Well then, sounds like a problem that can easily be solved with the meager expense of public facilities, trashcans, and open spaces that aren't sidewalks for the unhoused to hang out in.

I think you’re missing the point. The people that OP is referring to refuse to use all the public facilities offered, they don’t want to sleep indoors, they don’t want to use trash cans, they don’t want to piss in mobile bathrooms or take showers, they don’t want to be corralled into designated hang out spots.

They want to go wherever they want to, camp out wherever they want to, they want to collect whatever garbage they want to and they don’t want to clean up after themselves, they want to do as much drugs and alcohol abuse in public as they want to, they want to piss wherever they may happen to be at the moment because they don’t want to be burdened with the responsibility of thinking out their actions.

This doesn’t describe every one exactly but it generally describes most that fall into this category.

Ultimately these are people who refuse to play by the rules of society. No amount of public support is going to change them because they simply do not want to change. They are perfectly happy where they are right now, doing whatever it is they want to do. Nobody can solve their ‘problem’ because as far as they are concerned there is no problem.

So understanding that fact, society needs to decide just how much of that behavior it is willing to tolerate.

Interesting. How do those people think of jail time? Will arresting scare them away or change their behavior?

Oh no your treating mental illness with jail time, thats bad.

Probably not. They just go to wherever they are least bothered. Hence the Bay Area and its laxness.

people who are extreme along these lines can fall into the ruiners category (eg taking drugs in a childrens play area and pissing on the slide).

people who are not so extreme perhaps fall into the first category. I mean, I know people who live free because they want to. They don't cause any issues to the public around them except that they don't pay local taxes and are therefore a burden on the state in some minimal way (simplistically, they do use the roads and other services provided by the government). If housing were cheap enough they might take advantage of that.

So, libertarians, but without the money?

(How do these people get into this state? Is this just a concentration phenomenon, where people who think that all move to the same place?)

Many were bussed in by other cities to California

As a “recovering libertarian”, this is accusation is so apt. The ideology fits the behavior being described very closely.

Which is why it is so perplexing that Bay Area progressives strive so hard to protext libertarians.

Completely agree. Walking around San Fran the lack of public restrooms and reticence of shopowners to let you use their private restroom made me want to poop on the street.

Santa Monica had a bunch of public restrooms and you NEVER see poop on the street like on San Fran.

Yep. Some people just get sick of banging their heads against the wall, trying to make it in normal society. Life on the streets can be tough, but like anything, there are people with the skills to survive and prosper. If you're someone who gets little pleasure from responsibilities and owning things, and especially if you like to escape with drugs, being homeless in a temperate climate can look enticing.

I think it's hard to talk about it, because people hear it and think you're saying all homeless people choose to live that way. It's not like that, but some people definitely do choose that life.

Do these people not fall under "the ruiners"?

No, the "ruiners" are the ones who impose large costs on the system. Some people are just trying to live peacefully on the streets. In large enough numbers, yeah you'll get people treating public spaces poorly and it'll cause public health problems.

The key difference is that people like this who are living on the streets intentionally, if they get kicked out of the area they're living in or if the friend group gets broken up, they'll just go back to living in regular housing. Things like housing centers aren't useful to this group, but if you have cops go through arresting people they will go away.

(For what it's worth, my source knowledge here is totally personal and anecdotal. When I was a new grad student at Berkeley I was surprised when a roommate of a friend told me he had recently spent a few days on the streets. He explained to me that he did this often, panhandling to make some extra money, thought it was generally fun, and met a number of people doing it for similar reasons.)

Personally I'd call anyone who is homeless "for fun" a ruiner. In addition to overstressing the systems in place to support "legitimately homeless" people, they provide a convenient strawman for those who wish to argue that homeless people aren't deserving of help. The same goes for our welfare system.

> For what it's worth, my source knowledge here is totally personal and anecdotal.

Mine too. Same goes for the author of the article, I suspect. Everyone should take it with a grain of salt.

I think it depends on how they go about their lifestyle. Shouldn't we be free to choose whether we want to settle down in one location or wander around, as long as we're not hurting anybody? It seems unlawfully (un-American at least) restrictive to dictate how a person must live when it comes to their choice of residence

That's what it sounds like from the last paragraph.

> And they shit and piss on our streets, block sidewalks, litter profusely and otherwise do whatever they feel like.

Why is the amount of these growing?

I can't speak for every location but if you're traveling through the SF bay area, it's certainly a lot more expensive to get a hotel or other lodging than it used to be. Basically the relevant alternative might not be permanent housing, it might just be a cheap hotel room.

Because home and hotel rates keep rising relative to minimum wage.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com