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Comment by kelnos | Hacker News Reader

Well the alternative, not enforcing laws, is clearly not working.

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.

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The alternative is building houses. When you put people in houses they cease to be homeless. They did it in Helsinki, and it worked: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/jun/03/its-a-miracle...

Very simple deductive reasoning actually, I wonder how people did not come up with it yet.

>>>No other American city has built as much affordable housing per capita, according to the Bay Area Council Economic Institute. From 2004 to 2014, the city spent $2 billion on nearly 3,000 new units of permanent supportive housing.

You’re conflating addressing “housing transience” with addressing “addiction, mental illness, and criminal antisocial behavior”. Additional housing units don’t resolve this problem.

I'm curious, what do you suggest should be done? Build more mental health wards? Put everyone behind bars? For how long? What do you do once they're released from prison? Or maybe there should be some sort of camps where they could be rounded up and concentratred away from the city? You obviously have something on your mind, say it.

Ever been to a developmental center ? Full of addiction, mental illness and criminal anti-social behavior, at a level completely beyond anything seen in any homeless group, not even close. You know what the answer the local government in the area has done to improve the lives of the people they have had locked away from society since the area has existed? Provided them housing.

Here's a different take:

https://www.politico.eu/article/to-help-the-homeless-helsink...

> Called Housing First, the Finnish model aggressively closed homeless shelters, calling them traps

Not really a different take at all. It also notes that the policy is very effective. Close the homeless shelters and hostels, give them housing.

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."

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