San Francisco used to enforce these quality of life laws, and things were different. The thing is that San Franciscans didn’t like that world. Sure, people got in trouble for crapping on the sidewalk, but they didn’t have better places to crap.
Instead of creating better places to crap, San Francisco decided not to hassle people for crapping on the sidewalk. I agree that’s a little more compassionate, but it’s not paradise.
As recently as the mid 1970s simply being black or in a homosexual relationship could get you beaten up and thrown in jail. People rejected this arrangement because it was unfair, unreasonable, and extremely expensive. Then the drug war turned the whole nation into a kind of gulag. Go ahead and object to Chinese treatment of minorities, but we have more in jail here.
Neoliberal economists said that if we just lowered taxes enough there would be plenty of opportunity, but modern capitalism runs lean and fires fast. Even basically competent middle aged men can have trouble, so the larger population which includes people of various genders, ages, and capacities is not doing well. Labor markets are as brutal in America now as during the depression. You can't shred labor markets and leave them in tatters and then whine about how society isn't fixing itself like before.
The appeal to dominance and laws and enforcement is a silly delusion that we will have to get over if we ever want to make progress with this problem for real.
Incidentally, the city believes there are roughly the same number of homeless people today as there were back when they enforced quality of life laws: “The sense that homelessness itself is exploding in San Francisco is not reflected in the city’s numbers. According to the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, the city’s homeless population has remained essentially flat in recent years. The agency counted 7,499 people experiencing homelessness in 2017, about 2 percent higher than 2013 levels, and slightly lower than in 2015” ( https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/08/san-franciscos-sidewa... ). They claim that back then, there wasn’t crap on the street because people were crapping in vacant buildings. Now, because of the building boom, there aren’t many vacant buildings.
I’m not saying that hassling people for crapping on the street is the right approach. I understand why San Franciscans by and large rejected it. But it absolutely can be done, because that is what they used to do.
Law enforcement everywhere is about moving crime out to the margins. It will never stamp out all crime, but it does tend to reduce the quantity of it.
And I'm not even convinced that "moving it elsewhere" is necessarily a bad thing. I'd rather have most crime concentrated in a small area than distributing it over a large area. Regardless, people should be allowed to feel safe in their communities, and that just isn't the case for embarrassingly large amounts of SF.
Very simple deductive reasoning actually, I wonder how people did not come up with it yet.
You’re conflating addressing “housing transience” with addressing “addiction, mental illness, and criminal antisocial behavior”. Additional housing units don’t resolve this problem.
https://www.politico.eu/article/to-help-the-homeless-helsink...
> Called Housing First, the Finnish model aggressively closed homeless shelters, calling them traps
The rest of the part you quote is revealing:
"Finland’s experiment in ending rough sleeping has caught the attention of policymakers for one reason: It’s working.
Called Housing First, the Finnish model aggressively closed homeless shelters, calling them traps, and did not require participants battling addictions to recover before receiving keys to a home."
For people choosing to live outside, well it's ok for society to demand they follow the rules like everyone else.
For people who can't afford a place to live, displacing them to somewhere else is the best thing you could do, living in SF requires an absurdly high income, if they move to Montana (or Idaho or honestly throw a dart at a map, the US is cheap if you don't try to live in the top 20 most expensive zipcodes) they could rent an apartment for $500/month, which is $250 if you have a roomate. That's less than one week of work at minimum wage. Lots of my friends are software engineers, and are moving to Oakland because SF is too expensive. So my friends with high paying jobs are expected to move, but someone can set up a tent and they have a human right to stay right where they are? It's ludicrous.
For the people with mental illness or an addiction, which is more than 95% of the people living on the street, what fixes the problem? They can't function in their current state, and it's illegal to force them to take medication, and impossible to make them stop doing drugs. Fine, lets provide them with shelter at least. Lets build the shelter somewhere really cheap, and provide them with free transportation to get there. Maybe the same places I mentioned above, where it would be very inexpensive to provide them with food and shelter, which is basically everywhere besides SF. Of course this is again a non-starter, since no matter what you do, literally anything you do at all to help them, unless they are homeless and living on the sidewalk in San Francisco, people are going to claim it's a violation of their human rights.