San Francisco, Hostage to the Homeless | Hacker News Reader

San Francisco, Hostage to the Homeless

city-journal.org

49 pointsundefined138 comments

Repost of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21188178

> San Francisco’s progressive self-image soon trumped common sense, and in 1996, at the urging of the Coalition on Homelessness, voters turned Jordan out of city hall in favor of former state assembly speaker Willie Brown. Brown had run on a compassion platform, but he soon came to repudiate it, observing with amazement that many of the homeless didn’t actually want to come off the streets. ...

When people think of the Great Depression, they tend to imagine bread lines, lots of unemployment, and general poverty.

What if a modern depression in the US looks like San Francisco? A deep divide between haves and have-nots. The have-nots spiral ever further downward, propelled by abundant drugs, while the haves struggle to comprehend (or even notice) what's happening. Leaders have run out of ideas about how to solve the problem, contenting themselves with damage control.

All the while drip, drip drip... the problems continue to compound.

Something annoying about this kind of reporting is that the writer constantly refers to the homeless population as a monolithic group called "the homeless."

The writer ascribes all kinds of attitudes and beliefs onto them, ostensibly based on the writer's interactions with homeless people in investigating this story.

There's a weird self-fulfilling prophecy going on in which the writer only interacts with homeless people who are behaving in the way the writer would like them to. You aren't, for instance, going to get a homeless person who doesn't do drugs to test your fentanyl for you.

Feels like an inherently biased sort of investigation.

One particular inconsistency in the article is that it intersperses mentions of a sizeable mentally ill homeless population with an expectation and recommendation that they can be supported or housed in a manner that requires these people to accept responsibility for themselves and keep to a "single standard of behavior for all" - which is not really compatible with many of the involved mental illnesses.

The author does mention relevant aspects of multiple different subgroups, but still suggests various universal "solutions" that might work for one group but obviously can't work for another.

>>"You aren't, for instance, going to get a homeless person who doesn't do drugs"

what does that even mean (like they only abuse alcohol?)?

There are not thousands but 10s of thousands of discarded needles being cleaned up monthly and weekly (https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2019/09/04/the-city-picks-...)

>> Feels like an inherently biased sort of investigation.

this is a weird call out.

What is the proposed alternative here?

> what does that even mean (like they only abuse alcohol?)?

Only about 35% of the homeless population has an addiction. Less than half of the homeless population neither has an addiction nor a mental illness. [1] Just because there is lots of substance abuse (and yes, there certainly is), doesn't mean that the average homeless person does drugs. When you talk about the homeless population, you have to include people who are really quite like you but had a bad turn. Many of them have a story like "I got a mortgage with a large down payment just before 2008, when I lost my job and then shortly my house. I had to go to the streets because I had nowhere else to go."

[1]: https://sunrisehouse.com/addiction-demographics/homeless-pop...

There's ambiguity between the formal classification of homelessness as used by the city and organizations, and other connotations such as the street homeless. People across the spectrum seem to abuse this and similar terminological ambiguity to suit their particular argument or rhetorical point.

There's also the fact that self-reporting regarding things like previous residence, drug use, etc is unreliable. I've always found it odd that some people on HN are so credulous of these numbers even though in other contexts they'd be the first to point out that self-reported data makes bad science.

This doesn't mean the numbers are wrong, just that we should have very large error bars which grow as we make inferences. If we combine ambiguity regarding homelessness with an already substantial number like 35%, and tack on issues like mental illness, it's hardly a stretch to say that drug use and mental illness are the principle problems for the seeming intractability of street homeless reduction.

I am extremely skeptical of the 35% number.

>>Less than half of the homeless population neither has an addiction nor a mental illness.

Above quote implies close to half. I just find it hard to believe.

If a person is otherwise "functional" (or as you say "like you") I would really want to know more about their situation if their time on the street is longer than one month.

For contrast id like to point out that in the cases of migrant caravans comprised of THOUSANDS (https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2018/10/20/migrant...) of people and families. Caravan migrants are so poor they cant afford a bus/train ticket. As far as i know most of those people do not WALK to the US to sleep on the streets. As far as i know they are able to find housing.

Just to recap people with almost no education/English/money and minimal social network DO NOT endup on the streets of major cities in their thousands.

I make a point of this - because for this problem to get resolved we have to think critically about what the problem actually is.

And to be super clear - we absolutely need a better safety net for people who fell on hard times and could no longer keep their previously expensive home.

But also we need to be clear about the causes of homelessness we see in major US cities.

I was homeless for 9 month in Paris (until i got my first internship), i did not live on the street, i slept at my school or took friends beds when they were out of town, and i think most homeless do the same. And i was not alone, i think we were ~20 to do the out of 400 students. None of us had addiction (i can't tell about mental issue, after all we wanted to be devs).

I went to San Francisco 3 years ago with my familly and my sister made some homeless friends. They were not living in the street but in their cars, they had low-pay (or illegal) jobs and did not seems to have any addictions.

I think this is a definition issue. Homeless just mean you don't have a home.

Unfortunately, the situation is so bad in San Francisco that even a very conservative, moralist, and generalizing article such as this happens to make quite valid observations and arguments.

At this point I don't think there's any serious public disagreement that the city's policies of radical tolerance of drug use and refusal to pursue forced treatment of the mentally ill has become too extreme and counter-productive. There are plenty of politicians, perhaps most of them, that would swing the pendulum back. But generations of rhetoric regarding the history of forced institutionalization, War on Drugs, and minority discrimination, has been internalized. Not just the sad truth of it, but the rhetoric, divorced from the reality of that history and thus impenetrable to reassurances of a changed context. So whenever the city tries to change course it's far too easy for political opportunists to inflame passions and stoke cynicism, making the political risk of change intolerable.

For example, Mayor London breed opposed a bond measure to raise more money for homeless housing, drug treatment, etc. She opposed it because as a newly incoming mayor she wanted to the ability to use the prospect of more money as leverage for reform. That is, she supported a bond measure in principle, but not until some policy reforms were in place to insure the money would be more effective. But opportunists and activists outside the political process pushed ahead, which meant all the various departments and political interests knew they had money coming without having to seriously reckon with their manifest ineffectiveness. And the public were willing to just throw more money at the situation--anything to just make it go away--because they've internalized the rhetoric that the homeless and drug use problems are purely structural; they were overly credulous of promises that things would change with just another round of new money.

It's a very unfortunate state of affairs, and in many ways I see similarities to how, on a national scale, generations of conservative rhetoric has been internalized to some non-negligible degree by the entire country, which has in turn resulted in an extreme rightist element effectively being able to drive the national narrative.

EDIT: Removed the "[now ancient]" qualifier on the history of forced institutionalization, in case people thought I meant it to apply to minority discrimination.

Why was this flagged?

And homeowners.

Arguably a more important problem as it impacts the vast majority of the population.

"A 33-year-old woman from Alabama, who now lives in a tent in an industrial area outside downtown"

migration issue, rule of law failure and a healthcare problem.

since there is no expansion of the middle class layer to pay more taxes for the extra cost of new social housing IMHO this is going to progress.

At an even 90% income tax rate there's not enough money in the city to build new housing for the homeless and financially insecure. It's insane to think this is even possible. (Not that I assume you do.) It's like saying we should buy new cars for the carless, rural population rather than subsidize used car purchases.

But there would be no cheap, used cars to buy if we severely limited the manufacture of new cars. Yet somehow people still believe that building new, market rate[1] housing is not a prerequisite to improving the housing situation in the city. To be sure, it's not sufficient; but it's absolutely necessary.

[1] Thus leveraging the hundreds of trillions of global capital.

San Francisco in 2019 arguably has more wealth concentrated within it than any place at any other time in history.

Making poor and mentally ill people sleep on the street is a choice you have made as a society. Places with far, far fewer resources have somehow managed to sort this problem out.

What's the solution?

Any variation on "add new housing units," which is something San Francisco seems to be allergic to.

Spend some of the money on social good.

Free housing, food, and healthcare for every human being. Figure out how they can contribute back to society once they are no longer sleeping at a bus stop.

Build houses for them, for one. Make housing cheaper in the first place, so they don't go on the streets. At a bare minimum, at least have sufficient shelters for them so they don't have to sleep on the streets. (Almost) no one wants to sleep on the street, and San Francisco has more than enough money to make it so they don't have to. Heck, some individual Bay Area companies have enough money for it, not that they would ever spend it on the homeless.

Have you actually been to SF? Nobody makes these people do anything. In any sane polis, you'd institutionalize the ones that require it, and run the rest off. SF's leaders pride themselves on adopting the opposite approach.

A better option instead of "run the rest off" is to actually give them houses.[1][2][3]

[1]: https://aeon.co/essays/best-way-to-solve-homelessness-give-p...

[2]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-36092852 (includes specifics on San Francisco)

[3]: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/22/home-free

> run the rest off

Yes, its sure to solve their homeless problem by putting them on a bus and dropping them in a desert.

I mean, it will solve their homelessness problem. When they are dead.

That is such a gross and inhumane way to approach it. If people are homeless you figure out why that is and fix it so they can be housed, not kick the can over the fence into the next precinct over.

The mindset that it sure it inconsiderate of people to exist and be inconvenient in their existence is why the problem happens in the first place. Have some damn humility and empathy, there is no gene to be homeless, its a product of circumstance and bad luck. For every lucky bastard who grows up with the right people to make the right connections to get the right break to make it rich there is someone who grows up with the wrong people who abandon them to drug addiction and the streets.

99% of the time the only thing separating you from anyone else you walk past on the street are the collective circumstances that led you to where you are now. Nothing innate preordained your successes or failures.

Did you read the article? Until it gets all 'get rid of the homeless' in the second half, it breaks down this argument in a lot of detail.

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