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Comment by traderjane | Hacker News Reader

Why is it that despite high housing prices everywhere in the tech region, homelessness appears acutely concentrated in SF?

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Because solutions that work (Free mental health care, free housing, more social workers) are not palatable to the people who live there, despite the city having more than enough money to actually pay for those solutions.

So an endless parade of soup kitchens it is.

It's hard to imagine surrounding cities are different because of free mental health care, free housing, and more social service support for homelessness.

Homelessness is not a problem that affects all cities alike.

It's not the case that Daly City, Mountain View, Pleasanton etc, have all solved the problem without telling SF how to do it. In reality, the surrounding cities simply don't have the problem for various reasons and environmental factors, so they don't need to solve the problem in the first place.

My experience in very poor metropolises across the plamet is that it's an entirely simple problem to solve. My experience in some of the most expensive cities on Earth is that providing housing for the poor devalues the only nestegg most people have and is widely railed against by the masses.

Its a Ponzi scheme first and foremost, housing simply cannot outpace wages, it's impossible. When it all comes crashing down is someone elses problem though hey :)

There are plenty of soup kitchens here in London and reliance on them is rising.

Versus the outlying suburbia? Because it's harder to get around in suburbia. Cities are easier to walk / ride your bike around and you're just a face in the crowd. People notice you if you're camped out in a suburban shopping mall.

Or versus another city, it's the weather. Never hot enough to turn you into jerky, never cold enough to turn you into a popsicle.

Since piles of people dead from exposure isn't a risk, the city doesn't have the same motivation to build shelters like a New York does, so they kick it to the side.

The citizenry gets concerned with poop on the street, but once it's bodies, they really expect the government to do something.

So, now that the government can safely do nothing, why won't the private sector fill in?

3 part answer:

1) my understanding of the political lean of the city is that the government is the great social savior.

2) most private groups who take care of the homeless and otherwise destitute havehistorically had a religious affiliation.

3) private groups have to deal with the same real estate prices as everyone else, and because of 1 and 2 and the general skepticism of religion by the citizenry, they won't be given any tax breaks or land price cuts, meaning they simply cannot afford to setup service.

It really is a self feeding system of misery-but-not-enough-to-kill-you all the way around.

There is literally no money in it, so obviously the private sector isn't going to do anything. You might get a bit of "third sector" charity, but it's always inadequate wherever you go.

> The citizenry gets concerned with poop on the street

This does not appear to be true for San Francisco.

Concerned, but not enough to really do anything about it.

I'd imagine:

Hot weather and good infrastructures so you can live in the street.

Liberal so you are not bashed out by the cops.

Rich so you can beg for money.

Many water points.

Strength in number.

There are also plenty of homeless makeshift camps in San Jose. In parks, alongs highways, underpasses, near creeks...

I'm wondering what the city's waste looks like. I bet there's a lot of nice stuff and food being thrown away.

What's it like to dumpster dive in the city with the most billionaires per capita?

Because SF treats homeless better and has much more services for them, and (being homeless) they are very mobile.

In my city if I were homeless I'd want to be central not in the suburbs. There are better services for homeless, more other homeless people to blend in with, opportunities to beg, places to find shelter etc.

Services for homeless people (housing, drug treatment, mental health, employment, etc etc) tend to be concentrated in cities.

As of July 2019, there is no know way that cures drug addition with even moderate degrees of success. Indeed, even the very definition of addiction is still controversial. From [1]: "[D]efining addiction is not an easy task and still represents a considerable source of scholarly dispute. The term addiction has been and it is still used in at least three different ways. [(i) I]t is used as a lay term, which entered the English language in the late sixteenth century (maybe owing to Shakespeare) to indicate inclination or proclivity for certain habits or activities, in both its positive and negative connotations, including excessive drinking and smoking. [(ii)]Since the late nineteenth century, addiction is also used as a medical term to indicate pathological, compulsive drug use [...] [(iii) A]ddiction is used as a psychological construct to indicate a compulsive motivational drive [...] Instances of all three meanings abound in the scholarly literature, sometimes within the same paper."

OTOH, drug dealers, too, obtain economies of scale by concentrating drug users in close physical proximity (and vice versa). It seems to be plausible to assume that the easy availability of drugs is itself causally contributing to drug use and drug addiction.

[1] A. Badiani, Is a 'general' theory of addiction possible? A commentary on: a multistep general theory of transition to addiction. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24888430

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