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Anti Homeless Spikes

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99 Percent Invisible did an episode on such Hostile Architecture, architecture designed specifically to be hostile toward the homeless.

Some related sites:

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/unpleasant-design-hos...

https://99percentinvisible.org/article/design-crimes-artist-...

Sounds like a plot from 'The Wire'.

Honestly, it's getting so bad in the Bay Area, I'm having trouble seeing how this will end. Everywhere I walk in the East Bay (mostly Oakland), there are tents.

There needs to be some kind of basic housing guarantee. A society cannot survive like this for long.

I am in favor of the notion but it seems like revoking Prop 13 and rezoning the area over the objections of NIMBYists is just as likely to occur and probably prudent whatever else happens.

Nimby should be fixed in the law. Value of your own property should be just your own concern. If whatever happens around it doesn't emit toxic substances or horrible smells or noises and doesn't lower insolation of your property below some minimum levels then you should have no saying in what happens not on your land.

Isn't that basically how it works in Houston?

We stopped sending people to the RSA conference a couple of years ago because no one wanted to go to San Francisco anymore.

It's truly amazing that an incredibly rich city full of companies trying to "change the world" chooses over and over again to not solve its homelessness problem. It requires no new technological developments, no moonshots, just an ounce of empathy and maybe some raised taxes. But that seems to be too hard.

The amount of resources going towards the homeless are ridiculously large. The net result is that favorable weather and resource availability draws more people in from other places, and the problem is too large for any individual locality to solve.

e.g. The City of San Francisco is spending over $300M/year directly on services towards easing homelessness. This does not count state expenditures focused in the area, private expenditures, expenditures by surrounding areas, and the wealth of indirect expenses. Versus a homeless population of 10,000, this is $30,000 per year per homeless person in the City of SF-- just direct expenses by City of SF.

Clearly an overall change in approach is needed-- not just additional resources spent the same way.

The key would be that all US cities/towns/villages take care of their homeless instead of busing them to California. I can see the financial incentive - a bus ticket is like, what, couple hundred tops across the country? while the police, healthcare and other resources in a single year can easily reach five to six figures - but morally it is absolutely disgusting behavior.

Ideally federal agencies should take care of this and make sure that every US citizen in need is taken care of where he lives.

At the very least we need to strictly regulate programs that bus homeless other places.

Yes, there are circumstances where throwing someone on a bus to a locality where he has some family or other connections is the best move for all involved. But we need to make sure that is actually the case, not based on some tenuous connection and a desire to displace the costly individual somewhere else.

This isn't enough, though. Even without explicit governmental support to move, homeless people know that there are localities where it's "better" to be homeless and will move themselves.

> At the very least we need to strictly regulate programs that bus homeless other places.

That is close to impossible, I'm afraid. And even if federal regulation prohibits the executive branch from such programs, I guarantee that it will be replaced by some "church", neighborhood watch, political action group or whatever...

Wikipedia tells me there are some 500,000 homeless in all of the United States. At $30,000 per year per homeless person, that would amount to $15 billion for all homeless in the US. Certainly a lot of money, but doable for an individual locality like California if people really wanted to do it. (So much that they'd accept a 10% increase of all taxes to make it happen.)

Of course spending the money more efficiently would be preferable, but additional resources spent the same way would also work.

> that would amount to $15 billion for all homeless in the US

We are already spending, as a nation, much more than this. We spend roughly $3B federally directly on homelessness (not including other programs aimed at poverty that provide assistance). California spends $1B. California localities spend $3B. New York City spends $3B alone.

These are just governmental expenditures, aimed directly at homelessness, and ignore charitable efforts.

Then I wonder how direct that spending really is. It doesn't seem to involve handing out money to homeless directly... Does it just end up in a general budget that's labeled "homeless", but actually gets used for all kinds of projects?

A lot of it used to be direct cash assistance to the homeless. This did not work well. The trend has been towards providing services.

One caveat with the analysis is that your census of homeless people does not count the people housed as a result of these programs. It also doesn't count the number of people that would have to be served that are not presently considered homeless.

What choice are they ignoring? These cities actually spend a lot on the homeless. The problem is that the better you make things for the homeless, the more you'll be an attractive place for homeless to come to.

This seems demonstrably untrue. If it were that easy it wouldn't be such a pervasive issue across every society. It is crazy to me to see SF of all places accused of being unwilling to raise taxes

What if you supplied homes directly to homeless?

SF and state agencies directly house the homeless. http://hsh.sfgov.org/services/housing/

But not everyone is willing or able to conform to the rules required for such housing. Further, people migrate to SF and join the homeless population faster than people are housed.

What if you just...gave homes to the homeless, and stopped gatekeeping and moralizing?

> > SF and state agencies directly house the homeless. http://hsh.sfgov.org/services/housing/

There's conditions required for any housing, including housing one owns.

I do not think the requirements that SF allows its housing partners to impose are excessive (don't destroy the housing; don't deal drugs from the housing; don't continually create noise/waste/smells that adversely impact your neighbors).

SF also requires that nuisance evictions be conducted with plenty of warning and efforts by landlords and caseworkers to cure.. e.g.

> Nuisance evictions should include numerous incident reports, tenant complaints, prompt writeups and a “last ditch” tenant conference meeting with notes or a signed agreement.

And said tenants are entitled to due process after these numerous writeups and conference meetings, and legal assistance.

Raising taxes is not going to increase the supply of housing.

The supply of housing is an important problem (for cost of living, equitable conditions for the poor, etc), but it's not clear how directly related it is to homelessness.

That is, if you lowered rents 50% through increased housing supply, it's not clear how many formerly homeless people will now be housed.

Repealing prop 13 would actually totally do that

how do you figure that?

one of the many reasons local governments don't approve housing is that tax revenues from housing rapidly decay to 0 while services for the additional residents cost significantly more than 0

do you have any references for this? how does the tax revenue 'decay' to 0. Prop 13 doesn't reduce the tax over time but fixes it at a certain amount upon purchase (if the property is new) or transfer if it's sold.

All new houses and transferred properties are taxed at the value they were purchased.

No, I have no citations for the claim that inflation is sometimes above 2% or for the claim that the inflation rate for government services (which includes the cost of buying local housing for government employees) is sometimes above 2%. If either of these were true, the tax collected on a given property would increase in nominal terms but decay toward 0 in real terms.

Unrelatedly, Brisbane found that they could raise 9 times as much revenue and provide 0 times as much additional services to residents by approving hotels instead of housing. https://brianlui.dog/2018/08/01/housing-shortages/#_edn4

Most of the homeless people in the Bay Area are folks who had housing there a few years before and then fell on hard times (e.g. had a medical emergency, lost a job, ...) and couldn’t afford to continue paying for housing.

Fixing this requires bringing housing prices way down, which requires a ton of new housing built throughout the Bay Area. This is politically difficult because a substantial proportion of the people who live in suburbs full of single-family houses don’t want to have apartment buildings on the same street, and cities would rather have office buildings (which bring tax revenue but require few services) than housing (which brings less tax revenue and requires many services).

It would also help to fix the US health insurance system.

> Most of the homeless people in the Bay Area are folks who had housing there a few years before and then fell on hard times (e.g. had a medical emergency, lost a job, ...) and couldn’t afford to continue paying for housing.

These demographic numbers are often misleading. E.g. ~70% of people in San Francisco had some sort of housing in SF at some point before becoming homeless; but that number includes people who were housed through governmental programs or spent a short time on someone's couch, and a majority of this 70% had not been in San Francisco long term.

> This is politically difficult because a substantial proportion of the people who live in suburbs full of single-family houses don’t want to have apartment buildings on the same street, and cities would rather have office buildings (which bring tax revenue but require few services) than housing

It's especially difficult because when you look at true bedroom communities, they have very low sales tax revenues already, and property tax revenues are low in California, and the share given thereof to cities is small. Expecting these communities to absorb further high-service, low-tax burden is unrealistic.

The solution always is to just build more houses. That’s fine, but with that comes sewer treatment plants, power plants, water treatment (not that CA has water anyway) and digging up the existing infrastructure to expand it, etc. All that has to be funded with bonds that will have shitty ratings since there is no tax base to pay them off.

You can house all the homeless, and more will take their place on the streets.

Individual cities in California aren't legally allowed to significantly raise taxes. Any major changes would have to be legislated at the state level.

The more money a city spends on homelessness, the more homeless people there are. If you were a homeless person, wouldn't you go to a city where there are more services for homeless? Panhandling for a bus ticket is no big thing for them.

I’ve volunteered at the encampments in West Oakland and it’s painfully sad to see. A lot of the homeless I met were 50+ years old and had lived in Oakland all their life. It was a stark contrast to the homeless in SF.

So solution is basically simple. Provide state sponsored flat monthly amount retirement money to all people over 50 and build a bunch of homes owned by the state and rent them exclusively to 50+ at the cost that can be comfortable covered out of retirement amount. It just needs money and that should be easy in richest large country on Earth.

Change your perspective if you want to help. Those aren't tents. Those are sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, mothers, and fathers with nowhere else to go, with drug and /or emotional problems. Those are soldiers who fought our oil wars and came home broken and abandoned.

Those aren't "tents", they're you if you made the wrong choice or had the wrong thing happen to you.

Brothers? Sisters? Mothers? Sons? Do their siblings, children not want to help them out so much that they end up homeless?

I bet most of the homeless have their normal social ties severed, and shame, guilt, hate and other such things keep them away from their former friends and relatives.

Also, I bet the great majority of them don't have a job, or another occupation, and lives on handouts and petty crime.

Overcoming this first is required to make these people feel like fathers, sisters, sons, etc again, and agree to come back into the society.

> Brothers? Sisters? Mothers? Sons? Do their siblings, children not want to help them out so much that they end up homeless?

Americans have this "rugged individualism" to our culture. I left my own home when I was still 15, most people at 17 or 18.

I live in Istanbul, and the first thing I noticed was the lack of homeless people in this city of 15-20million (depending on with whom you are talking). This is because Turks have a much stronger family structure, and most people live with their parents until they're married at the very least.

I'm from San Francisco and have known many of my friends to become homeless over the past 20 years through combinations of, as I stated before, substance abuse, trauma, and a lack of a strong family / social support structure.

My closest friend is a homeless violinist hippy in San Francisco (who just returned after 4 years in Istanbul). He keeps tents in 6 or 7 spots around the bay, most of them with breathtaking views. He just likes being homeless. (Brilliant guy. Oliver. He plays mostly in Bart, the Mission, and North Beach. Say hi in any language, he knows it)

I also know a lot of kids from my various music scenes who are homeless on purpose. The street punks, for example, find a stronger family structure drinking 40s on telegraph or the haight all day than they ever did in their own middle-class homes. (PS: Fuck the kids on haight. They're basically an aging street gang, I used to be in a band with one of them.)

> I live in Istanbul, and the first thing I noticed was the lack of homeless people in this city of 15-20million (depending on with whom you are talking). This is because Turks have a much stronger family structure, and most people live with their parents until they're married at the very least.

There's about 15,000 living in the streets of Istanbul, and about 150,000 living in the streets of Turkey according to NGOs.

150k per 80M compares to about 200k living unsheltered in the US (per 320M) or 550k homeless overall.

You're not wrong, and maybe "hostile architecture" like this is cruel, but damn if I owned a business and I had homeless people setting up tents or loitering outside my door every night I'd probably find a way to stop it too. Spikes are a cheap and easy-to-deploy deterrent.

In a similar vein, I volunteer with a pigeon and dove rescue organization, and it's no secret that businesses install spikes on eaves and ledges to deter birds too. Although it always makes me sad to see them, I can understand and appreciate why they do it.

Posted like 3 tweets down from this guy: https://mobile.twitter.com/Inartica/status/12109709851149598...

Aaaaaaa!

I believe anti-homeless architecture is appalling and Western culture of "the strong (rich) deserve more than others" is the root cause but good lord please go to China and talk to some people before you go repeating propaganda like that...

This guy has some weird cognitive dissonance. They seem to be supportive of socialist countries, but also of tulsi gabbard?

why is that surprising? have you read her policy positions?

She is very far from socialist. She isn't in line with democrat ideologies either. Her policies don't matter, what matters is her history. She is a conservative masquerading as a democrat.

For example: https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/13/politics/kfile-tulsi-gabbard-...

its amazing how we can all see things so differently. her policies seem ver socialist to me

socialist is about economic policies. your link is about something else

also to clarify im not saying youre wrong that she may be conservative on social issues.

It's just an example of how she doesn't fall in line with the left at all. Look at her voting record.

>Western culture of "the strong (rich) deserve more than others" is the root cause

[citation needed]

two, actually.

one regarding the Western origins of 'the strong (rich)', and one regarding poverty being caused by 'the strong (rich)'

I think both claims are overly ambitious. These problems largely pre-date mass civilization, not to mention 'the east and west'.

I don't have a magic solution but I would like to add few thoughts:

1. Homeless people destroy environment and don't practice sanitation on the same level (non homeless folks) That imo is true and we shouldn't ignore it. But why? I have a few explanation depending on the place so it's not an apply all hammer, alcohol & drug abuse/mental illness are one of the reasons why there are homeless in big rich cities (combined with other) but wouldn't that cause itself will lead to people caring less about environment and things that don't directly affect them? When was the last time you were depressed and wanted to hole up in your bed doing nothing? Consider that and with not a good overall health condition, lacking empathy (of course why would they for the society that failed them), poverty mindset and resource constraints with no hope for a brighter future. It's a self destructive mindset.

Oh to make it more suitable for HN in analogy, think of those anti homeless spikes as walled garden of the big companies. Imessage? Yeah, you can't connect with your friends anymore after you can't afford an iPhone. Maybe you contributed to society in tax and other spheres and now you can't anymore, you don't deserve whatever crumbles are left there.

Of course I am exaggerating.

2. Throw money at them and it will go away. I hope that worked, I really do but that doesn't solve any of the problems. US puts a lot of money more than countries with free healthcare (controlled for population but not size) yet people aren't getting it. The system is dysfunctional or benefits some people more than others due to lack of awareness, discrimination (advertising towards one gender or race is an example), collective empathy, and tendency to put pressure on your career/home/bank as an identity.

Maybe those homeless shelters are far away. I don't know but why blame anyone without any evidence or data on those things.

I think we can employee homeless people with the money spent on 'solving' the problem for cleaning and maintaining our environment. They get a job and maybe they can afford some housing now or make free housing structures for those employees.

CEOs who afaik are 100% not homeless destroy the environment to such an extent as to make what all the homeless in the US destroy seem insignificant and inconsequential. They too lack empathy and have a destructive mindset. I say we address this much more massive problem first and the homeless problem will likely be solved by our actions.

Yeah, carbon emission tax or other similar taxation can be used more effectively, I guess. Raising taxes for luxury that are not providing anything but a way to brag should be heavily taxed into oblivion.

I wish we could have something like pollution emission credit, the higher your credit. The more percentage of income/wealth you have to pay but that is unenforceable, actionable and will go against human rights to track.

Can't believe it's gotten this far, that cities need to implement deterences like these.

This is nothing new - I have seen similar things since I was about 8.

Huh. And what is their defense if the homeless is a fakir?

https://sciencedemonstrations.fas.harvard.edu/presentations/...

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