Unfortunately, the health care problem goes back to CA or even on a national level. Often times, mentally ill or people that lost their jobs for another reason become homeless, and from there the downward spiral begins. So, a better security net for those who suffer from mental and physical problems would be a good start.
[1] http://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/2017SanFranc...
Yes of course people who own a house do drugs. Some of them destroy their mind to the point they can no longer keep their house.
[1] http://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/2017SanFranc...
But the SFO phenomenon of open drug use, screaming disruptive people, and street level encampments isn't something you see really anywhere in the five boroughs, excepting maybe a few errant overpasses or very industrial areas of Hunts Point or similar.
Notice the comment on this thread about how in the poor areas it was unpleasant to get lunch? That attitude carries over. Starting with the fucking super bowl there was a very dramatic effort to shoo away the homeless people from where 'super bowl city' was. The net effect was a dispersal of homeless encampments the likes of which I've never seen. Combine that with stagnating wages at the low end and rising cost of living and you have a lot more people on the streets. Make no mistake, the homeless population in the whole of the Bay Area is growing dramatically.
Meanwhile in some "street photography" (but really mostly creep shots) group a couple people have been posting pictures of indigent folks from the 90s. The difference is pretty dramatic. From a friend who works for the city -- both meth and heroin have hit San Francisco very hard. The type of people that you see on the streets these days has changed.
San Francisco is also paralyzed by extremely aggressive NIMBYs. Shelters are at capacity, but the city's efforts to build more shelters (e.g. Embarcadero) are being battled by carpetbaggers. A while back the idea of "wet houses" was floated to get addicts off the streets (where folks will call 911 and tie up a large chunk of SFFD/paramedic resources). Of course that didn't go over well with the punishment first crowd.
New York is also facing record homelessness and is actually buying property to house homeless folks — San Francisco is…
This was a sharp contrast to the mid 1990s, when I lived in New York. I found aggressive panhandling to be more prevalent in NY than SF then, with panhandlers following me for blocks, approaching me at the counter of coffee shops (once crowding me as I attempted to get my change from the cashier, quickly picking up it up when I dropped it, and then asking me for it while holding it away from me).
I'm always a little skeptical about anecdotes, though, as the "homeless" population, ranging from non-addicted or mentally ill people who are temporarily without housing to severely addicted and mentally ill people engaging in criminal level harassment of people, often clusters in a few neighborhoods in a city, sometimes at the outskirts.
I met a man from Paris who refused to agree that San Francisco has a worse problem than Paris. He said that he believes that in Paris, the severe poverty is pushed out to the edges of the city. I don't know if this is true, or if he didn't want to criticize too much, but it is an interesting observation, at any rate.
71% in SF homeless already lived in SF, 90% already lived in California: https://socketsite.com/archives/2016/02/san-franciscos-homel...
the cite link in that article is dead but refers to http://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/2015-San-Fra...
75% of LA homeless already lived in LA: https://www.lahsa.org/documents?id=2059-2018-greater-los-ang...
1) It was self-reported
2) "Lived in SF" in report meant they were SF residents and this is requires just any bill with city address within 30 days (consider cases like: moved to SF with hopes of better opportunities, out on the streets in couple of months - but sf resident for a short term prior).
(B) Our cops are super aggressive with the homeless. I mean, technically that can be described as "policy", but probably not the way you meant it
I used to volunteer for an annual winter round-up, where a bunch of volunteers would get vans and go looking for homeless and try to get them into shelters. We did this on one of the coldest nights of the year, trying to prevent people from dying in the chill. We had no problem finding shit-tons of homeless folk, with the caveat that unlike in other cities I've been, they put a little effort into hiding from the public eye.
This was in the outer boroughs.
Combine that with your B and you can start to see the outlines of an actual policy decision.
There are caveats to be added to the above, but, I've never gotten the impression that our implementation of shelters has resulted in something people utilize in anything less than a crisis situation, for a population that doesn't consider "chronically homeless in the winter in a northern latitude" a crisis.
I later marvelled to an NY-based coworker about how this could happen, since I've never seen it happen in SF (just random harassment of people who aren't even screaming/needling/etc.). His response: "oh, were you in Chelsea?" (Answer: yes.)
I guess that's one way to "solve" homelessness -- harass them until they move elsewhere.
If I was resigned to being homeless, I would definitely do whatever I could to be homeless in a city that hardly rains, never snows, and never gets freezing.
The interviewer challenged him on the homeless problem in SF. His answer was basically, "Yes, there are homeless people in SF now. The challenge is that during my tenure as mayor, we got people off the streets, but X x 2 homeless people came to SF from other places."
Newsom was far from blameless, but his point that homelessness in SF can't be solved on a SF level, or a bay-area level or possibly even a state-wide level, but needs a more global solution rings true to me.
I heard an interesting theory during a discussion of how off the rails weird some cities' denizens were X decades ago, and how you no longer really see that any longer. The hypothesis put forward was that back then rents were very cheap relative to minimum wage, and minimum wage jobs didn't take much more than a grade school education to hold down. A lot of borderline or minimally-mentally-ill people could fit in between these cracks and live out their lives relatively peacefully coexisting with the broader mainstream, though to be sure adding "color" to the surroundings.
I think this hypothesis has legs. I've read that there were successful experiments at simply outright giving homeless a place to live of their own reduced the incidence of homeless-related crimes to a statistically significant degree. If that is true, then it is worth questioning our economic incentives making housing ever-more expensive.
From my perspective as someone outside the real estate industry, I'm perfectly fine with reducing values by 10X or 100X in more HCOL areas through removal of all state support for the industry. As far as I'm concerned, that's simply stranded capital idling uselessly instead of working for everyone. I wish Bezos would apply his "your margin is my opportunity" aphorism to real estate and healthcare.
I used to do a lot of work with homeless charities, and I often wonder if I would be a better person if I worked from home. Maybe I would have retained some of my sensitivity to these issues, or maybe that concern for the human condition fades with age, and I'd just be the same asshole but working in my pajamas.
Here in Austin, the City announced plans to build a new community center to help the homeless. Nearby residents are losing their fucking minds over it.
So long as they don't want help, and so long as it is their right to refuse and continue as they are, nothing will change. The alternatives are many, but they all start with some type of enforcement agency willingly stripping these peoples rights, and forcibly and potentially violently taking them into government custody, which the citizens of San Francisco find far more appalling than solving the problem.
Note: What I said above doesn't generalize to 'the homeless,' and people out of a job and down on their luck, It specifically is targeted to the worst offenders who scatter the city with waste and needles.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/heatherknight/article/Bu...
SF's recent bill to involuntarily commit chronically mentally ill individuals is a step in the right direction, but it's so toothless that it won't matter much. An individual has to be brought to inpatient mental services 8 times in a year to trigger the rule. Why bother?
This was a year ago. It was not as bad as SF by a long shot, but absolutely present.
The homeless problem is a sea level problem.
2.5 billion dollars spent on a broken bus station, and they are going to fix long-term homelessness with 800 million, and a poop patrol that earns 100k+ a year per employee?
These things don't cost as much as Californians think they do.
Apparently, it's a really difficult problem that nobody has really solved.
Yes, San Francisco is wealthy. And Monte Carlo is wealthy too with Lamborghinis and Ferraris. Why does MC not have a rampant "homeless problem"? Well, if a homeless person tried to lay down a blanket to sleep on the sidewalk across from the iconic casino, he's going to be rounded up by MC police. As far as I can tell, MC doesn't have a homeless shelter so I'm not sure where the MC police takes the vagrants. San Francisco police obviously do not remove all homeless people from the sidewalk. And nobody is suggesting SF emulate what MC does.
Can SF spend money on housing for homeless? Multiple cities have tried this with mixed results[1] ... poop in the stairways, drugs, etc.
Which city in the world has the best homeless program (especially dealing with mentally ill homeless) and what do they do differently?
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=washington+dc+homeless+apart...
The main reasons there's such a visible homeless problem are:
1.) Housing crisis in general. A lot of that $241M goes to lower-income residents who are at risk of homelessness, not ones actually on the street, to keep them in their homes. From there, it largely goes to the landlords, if the apartment isn't rent-controlled, since it's more money chasing the same amount of housing. If the apartment is rent-controlled, it goes to the tenant + other landlords, since rent-controlled apartments drive up the rent for everybody else.
2.) A general laissez-faire attitude toward the homeless. SF has a strong culture of live-and-let-live; if you don't bother the homeless, they won't bother you. (This attitude may or may not reflect reality, but it's the culture.) There's widespread opposition to criminalizing homelessness and say arresting or tazing homeless people.
3.) Poor mental health & substance abuse services. This is a legacy of history: JFK moved responsibility for mental health services from the state to federal government, Reagan consequently cut the budget for the state of CA's mental health services, and then when Reagan was president, he moved responsibility back to the states, without any corresponding increase in funding. As a result, the mentally ill are nobody's problem, so they just sorta hang out on street corners or wander across major boulevards.
4.) Mild climate. SF is an attractive place to be homeless. I grew up in Boston; we didn't have much of a visible homeless problem. Why? Because come wintertime, they would all either freeze to death or huddle together in the subway stations, keeping them out of public view unless you took the T. In SF, they sprawl all over the Tenderloin, the Mission, the Civic Center, SOMA, etc, all of which are prominent neighborhoods that get a lot of gentrified and/or tourist traffic.
I want to point out that it is a departure from laissez-faire to criminalise, arrest, and taze the homeless, but another conceivable departure from laissez-faire is to house them.
EDIT to clarify.
The homeless people that you see crowding Civic Center BART or the Tenderloin or the Mission are generally not people that want housing - they're addicts, or mentally ill, or veterans suffering from PTSD, or just rebel against the strictures of modern society. You can't force them into housing without involuntarily committing them, which is what cities generally did in the 50s and 60s. That's definitely not laissez-faire, and has its own moral issues.
SF is also incredibly bad at making use of a vast pool of resources. The amount of money spent to help the indigent is substantial, but no amount of ineffective spending can address real problems. Other changes that might help, such as constructing homes for the homeless, run into stiff political resistance in a permitting system designed to make it easy to block anything.
That residents and voters seem to care more about what makes them feel compassionate than what demonstrably helps also helps little.
The result is a mess.
I'm not sure "dead language" is the term you are looking for.
> every time I go grab a coffee or lunch in a cheaper area,
A "cheaper area" area where they can access what they need to get through the day (cheap food, etc) is also what those homeless people are after, so it's no surprise you might end up in the same space.
Leaving Twitter headquarters gets me in an uncomfortable place, even without the need to find cheap food.
Speaking Latin or Aramaic while never having studied it is like #1 sign of demonic possession. I'd definitely avoid those guys.
Working there is a different story, but generally you don't want to work there since the reason they're cheap is that the people are poor. The local jobs are low paid. The trick is to be able to work remotely or more rarely as a well paid employee of a foreign company.
Food has labels in English, restaurants and everything else, because of tourism, are very English oriented. It's a great place for foreigners.
To be clear, you'll have a harder time if you don't speak (or willing to learn) Turkish in Bodrum, whereas more people speak English in Istanbul.
Companies here do not mind paying to your business for services because it is cheaper for them too, and as a tech worker, all the benefits of an employer are not that important.
It's not that bad. Yes, you give up the Croatian pension, but it would be miserably small after inflation. You still keep the healthcare.
[0]: https://weatherspark.com/compare/y/80692~557~1098/Comparison...
Families that want to save more go live in Solin, Stobreč or similar costal outskirts, and these are 15-20 minutes by car from city center. Roads get congested around historic core, unlike Zagreb where congestion issues are ridiculous (can take you an hour to get to where you want).
According to Numbeo, I'd have to have impossible income to keep the buying power at the same level if I moved to Vienna, Berlin, or other more attractive European towns.
A quality engineer earning 2-2.5k euro in Croatia has no reason to move to Berlin or Vienna if paycheck does not double. An experienced engineer earning more really needs to get insane offers to move.
My SF salary was no where near the current living standards.
/sarsasm in case it was not evident. some days I just don't know whether it would be evident here.