It is no secret that San Francisco has a homelessness crisis and if they can't prosecute how are they expected to clean up their city of homeless people?
Edit: This is a legit question why all the down votes?
Prosecution only leads to more problems, as people cannot adequately gain the skills they need in US prison and are then shunned by US employers.
Prosecute what? Simply being homeless? I'd rather buy the homeless some apartments/shelters than put them in jail. Jail is more expensive. It's dangerous. It prevents them for working their way out of homelessness.
Jailing people for the crime of being too poor for your tastes is shitty policy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Court_of_Appeals...
Also, what is prosecuted is a crime. The homelessness crisis is not a crime per se (as established again by this very ruling), so it cannot be prosecuted--only actions that are actually crimes.
It's one of the most affluent cities in world history. That is exactly the obvious solution that SF has intentionally avoided implementing.
If it was a matter of 25,000 people, sure, I understand that would be a huge problem for a city of that size. It's a matter of closer to 5,000 people that need housing (out of SF's 8k to 10k homeless, some are long-term homeless, some are short-term homeless, so you end up with a lower tally of how much housing you need at a given time than the max figures). They have no excuse for the grotesque human rights abuses going on there.
I'm overwhelmingly in favor of the Federal Government stepping in and doing some very unpleasant things - as necessary - to the city in order to force their hands on fixing homelessness there. If they won't fix it, bring the full weight of the US Government down upon their collective heads until they squeal and capitulate (as they are guaranteed to do). The Feds have dozens of ways to beat on the city until it does by forced measures what it should have been more than happy to do on their own.
I get what you're saying here but you're expressing it poorly, and without regard to the fact that the overwhelming unpleasantness is likely to fall on the vulnerable rather than the excessively comfortable, as exemplified by the proliferation of bad policy choices currently taking place at the federal level.
pass a version of sb50, one that especially forces SF and LA to open up large tracts (but not all) of the city to immediate housing construction.
in LA, mayor garcetti tried pushing through the construction of shelters in each of the council districts and got so much push back that only like 2 have gotten anywhere. we need to put local political pressure on the mayor and the council. the federal government is not the right political body for this effort.
I don't know what the situation is like in SF or Boise, but in LA more than half of the homeless aren't even from California. They're just here because they were given a free bus ticket and told they would get free food and drugs and good weather if they rode all the way to the end.
Expect a lawsuit.
Both Newark and Elizabeth, New Jersey are suing New York City for busing its homeless over the Hudson River.
California has a long history of doing the same. It wasn't that many years ago that Los Angeles agreed to stop busing its homeless people to Nevada.
This is blatantly false. SF and LA were sending the homeless back to their cities of origin. Their is a great deal of reporting on this in the NYT and LAT. (See, e.g., https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/14/us/homeless-busing-seattl...)
Texas and the Midwest represent the biggest non-local sources of the homeless in Southern California. Combined, the Midwestern states generate more of LA's homeless than California itself. It was the openly stated policy of Texas for more than a decade to deal with the homeless by buying them tickets to Los Angeles, and it is still their official (but unstated) policy with respect to addressing homelessness. Their governor has admitted as much on television.
1) Zone 90% of the city for detached single-family homes? 2) Mandatory decade-long design review for every new home? 3) Lots of parking lots? 4) Designate every extant building a "historical resource"?
Some combination of those policies should eventually solve the housing crisis, I think.
But homelessness of the kind at issue in this case is a very different thing. The vast majority of these homeless are mentally ill, drug addicts, or both. Re-zoning single-family lots won't do anything to address this problem, because most of them have families with homes who've simply given up on trying to take care of them.
Citation? That's a much repeated trope, but I've yet to see actual numbers to support it.
Thousands of homeless live on or travel to Skid Row each day, but most people who attempt this challenge don't get to double digits.
But within 7 miles of me in any direction, more than 100,000 new units have come online in the past 2 years, and more than another 100,000 are expected to come online in the next 2. Across LA, there are a few hundred thousand more units in the pipeline, some of which would already be built and occupied if not for NIMBYs in single-family houses opposing the construction.
And quite frankly, even if we could build at the speed of historic norms, there simply isn't the available land. You'd end up with housing tracts hundreds of miles from their associated job centers.
So, my point stands. The only people who believe this is a boom haven't looked at this graph: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LOSA106BPPRIVSA
Down the street are two new apartment buildings which house another 1000-1500 people.
Two blocks away from that are a cluster of apartment buildings which collectively house more than 10,000 people.
And quite frankly, you are simply wrong about the statistics you are citing.
The pre-1990 figure is primarily residential single-family homes, so each structure was on average capable of housing just 4 people. Current residential construction is primarily multi-unit residences, so each structure represents residential capacity, on average, of several dozen people.
So my point stands, and I would strongly recommend you take a statistics course.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LOSA106BP1FH
The breakdown of permits issued in 2018 in Los Angeles was as follows:
1 Unit: 10042 2 Units: 1528 3-4 Units: 522 5+ Units: 17432 Total: 29524 Source: https://www.census.gov/construction/bps/txt/tb3u2018.txt
As you can see from the total, this is not anywhere near 50000 units per year, as you initially claimed. These 30000 units are also spread across an area with diameter far greater than the 14 miles you started with.
Also, in addition to being wrong about every other aspect of this debate, you are quite wrong about this one. By FAR the majority of PERMITS go to single-family homes.
When you are very ignorant about a topic, it would be helpful to type less and read more.