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Comment by 121789 | Hacker News Reader

Yeah everyone loves those things too, they just don't want to deal with the cost and quality of life from the homeless/drug problem. I walked up to beautiful Corona Heights today and saw all of the amazing views, but then I walked home past the ever-increasing numbers of tents popping up on the street to my overpriced apartment in the mission where I currently have to listen to one mentally disabled homeless person scream profanities at everyone around her. Sure you could move to a different neighborhood, but those problems are difficult to ignore.

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Dude you live in the mission, probably the most disgusting part of the entire bay area, other than maybe the bay itself. I didn't last a single week there

Move to Noe Valley or Bernal heights

There are parts of the Mission that are extremely nice. The Tenderloin is far worse than the Mission and parts of SoMa rival the Mission for grossness.

On my morning walks in the TL, I had brieflly kepts stat on the poops per mile I counted. I decided it was too much work after I saw 3 poops on a single block.

Yes, can confirm the Tenderloin is worse than the Mission. Take a walk down to Eddy & Leavenworth, especially right after all the homeless and drug abusers have cashed their disability cheques (or on the weekends) and try to walk down the sidewalk without being harassed or your nostrils assaulted by the acrid tang of human piss and fecal matter: https://youtu.be/KUtVz2fIhHM

Hell even park Merced area by SFSU is nice. I have a few friends who love out there.

Aside from the limited parking it is a decent area that does not smell like “San Francisco”

Tents? I didn't realize it has gotten that bad. Do they try to remove them?

The city has a limited ability to remove them. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Martin v Boise, which held that it was illegal for the city (of Boise, Idaho) to remove homeless people from public spaces if the city has insufficient homeless shelters. This is a binding precedent in San Francisco, which is also in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. The city of Boise, Idaho appealed to the Supreme Court, prodded by several cities including Los Angeles, but the Supreme Court declined to see the case.

San Francisco is still held to Martin vs. Boise. They need to either build sufficient homeless shelters for all of the homeless in SF, (lol) or allow them to sleep where they please in public places.

I am not a lawyer, but I got an A in Political Science 101 and I read the news. This is not legal advice, but my personal advice is that cities in California oughta build more homeless shelters.

cities in California oughta build more homeless shelters.

Oh, please, god, no.

California desperately needs more actual housing. That's a huge issue in California.

More homeless shelters just drags out the problem. It doesn't solve it.

The people who scream at me in a schizophrenic drug addled haze aren’t going to go away because cheap 1br housing pops up in an affordable neighborhood. They do need help though. They need homeless institutions.

I spent nearly six years homeless and I have had a college class from SFSU on Homelessness and Public Policy.

There are mentally ill people in housing. They don't generally follow you down the street and scream at you when they have housing.

Being homeless is enormously stressful. It is itself crazy-making.

Lack of sufficient housing supply is a root cause of high housing prices and of homelessness. California has been under building for decades.

Counterpoint: SROs are the most common location of overdoses in the city of San Francisco. Mentally ill people in housing probably don’t bother you, but that doesn’t mean they are safe and healthy.

When you find the planet that has solved all personal problems, let me know.

In the meantime, I will keep harping on best practices for this planet as I best understand them.

Residential housing costs $750k to build per unit in California, and most of those costs are unique to the process of developing infill in NIMBY cities with high costs of labor. We are two orders of magnitudes away from enough funding to solve homelessness with residential housing in San Francisco for the existing population, notwithstanding induced demand. Treatment outside of city centers for people dealing with mental health and substance abuse issues could be built far more affordably elsewhere by saving on the land and labor costs. They’d also be cheaper to operate.

More generally, your comments come across and smug and sanctimonious — everyone has an interest in solving the problem, and falling back to “homelessness is a housing problem” amounts to tautology which is not particularly insightful.

Plus if you throw all the poor people in 1 building you're not solving anything.

It's a great way to help them share their diseases and fun stuff like that. I went to soup kitchens about six weeks and then began doing everything I could to stay away from that crap.

I'm sad that this is the first thing we're thinking about, removing them. What does it mean, displacing them so that it's somebody else's problem? Putting them in jail? Killing them?

Killing them?

Given how much lower the average lifespan is for homeless individuals, we are more or less killing them.

I came from tribal origin with nomadic goat and sheep herders recent ancestors. Life is not easy there but sense of community is strong and lifespans are at par with cities with best healthcare despite not having good healthcare facilities there. Not sure how it compares to people who are homless in cities.

Being from the tribal origin I've been conned by city dwellers a lot before I wised up. In tribe we trust everyone, there is no need to be shrewed and sense of community and living together in harmony is valued above everything else.

Not sure how it compares to people who are homless in cities.

UK data from 2011:

Homeless die 30 years younger than average

The new research found that the average homeless person has a life expectancy of 47, compared to 77 for the rest of the population: a startling difference of 30 years. The life expectancy for women was even lower, at just 43 years.

https://www.nhs.uk/news/lifestyle-and-exercise/homeless-die-...

I think this is US data from 2017:

The average life span of a homeless person was shorter by about 17.5 years than that recorded for the general population.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5739436/

In tribe we trust everyone

Yeah, my dad was part Cherokee. I can be sort of stupid at times about thinking the best of people and I've been burned by that.

But I also think my native heritage helped me survive living in a tent for nearly 6 years and helped me profoundly in other ways.

That sense of community is very life giving and it tends to be lacking in most modern American places.

These people ostensibly have no other place to live. Why should the state or anyone else destroy what little housing they have?

Well if we built housing for those people they wouldn’t have to live in tents. And if we provided mental health services to all people there would be fewer people who slip to homelessness in the first place.

Yes but do we have to build houses for them in one of the most physically constrained places (partly geographic, partly zoning) on Earth?

There seems to be this strange idea that people put forth that your options are simply between living in the most expensive city in the country or being homeless in the most expensive city in the country.

How about Modesto? I think you would find plenty of support from people who genuinely would like for those people to have somewhere to live. The problem is that the opposition wouldn't accept it. It would come off as some perverse form of gentrification, under the implication that anybody "deserves" to live anywhere. I personally have always found the argument that "I should be able to continue living here, because I lived here previously" to be incredibly uncompelling. What about people who weren't born in fantastic cities?

The fact that the Tenderloin is where it is, in what would probably be some of the best real estate in the city, is absolutely insane. I think you would find that there is all the good will in the world from people, if the proposed solutions make sense. They just don't.

Modesto is not San Francisco. I believe it is reasonable for someone to want to live in San Francisco even if they do not earn many tens of thousands of dollars a year minimum. While there are many units grandfathered in or rent controlled in SF, it seems all new tenants are selected based on wealth. Why should SF be a city exclusive to the wealthy?

The city of Vienna Austria has a fantastic social housing program. The city owns and manages 220,000 units of housing and indirectly controls another 200,000 units of private properties developed under a city-regulated process [1].

This could be done in SF. And then even people who are not very wealthy could potentially move to and live in the city. I reject the notion that individual wealth should be the sole or primary way that we allot housing to people.

Instead of complaining about tents, we could (through our taxes) build these people homes. Instead of stepping over people sleeping on the ground we could make sure every person has a roof over their head. San Francisco is a very wealthy city. We could certainly afford to build this kind of housing.

[1] https://www.huduser.gov/portal/pdredge/pdr_edge_featd_articl...

The important thing to remember is that the same forces that made those people homeless are what made you pay for your overpriced apartment.

All the “unlanded” are sharecroppers, some better paid than others. Time for some solidarity among the renter class.

Homelesnes can be cured only by treating housing as a basic human right. There are plenty of examples of this globally so it's a fact, not a theory or a political fad.

If you prefer more equal ownership of capital there is nothing wrong with that.

But that is completely orthogonal to solving 'the problem' of homelessness. Please don't confuse the two issues.

This comment seems unrelated to mine.

People are made homeless because housing costs rise arbitrarily high along with productivity. To the market, the definition of “the correct price” for housing is when there is “a little bit” of poverty.

If you happen to earn enough to land above that price then you are paying for your overpriced apartment. If you happen to fall below that line, you are homeless.

The “force” at play is a broken pricing scheme which allows/encourages landlords to continue raising prices as high as they can possibly go, which in a super high productivity area like SFBA or NYC is extremely high.

Housing market and homelesness are two different things.

Places with less inflated housing prices had a 'homeless problem' as well until they made home a basic human right.

Hence empirically I doubt you can 'fix homelesness' by fixing the housing market. You can fix the housing market but will still have homeless problem - until you make home a human right.

What constraints do you think there should be on that basic human right, if any?

None? That's what a basic human right means. This is how lots of countries have fixed homelessness.

Can you give an example? Are you sure it's unconstrained? For example, is there any constraint on the location and/or properties of the housing?

And what forces are those? Demand for housing?

Housing prices are set as high as they need to be in order to guarantee at least “a little bit” of poverty.

Everyone being housed is effectively a signal to landlords that rent is too cheap.

We obviously produce enough capital to ensure everyone is housed and fed, yet housing costs simply keep rising with productivity because, well, why wouldn’t they?

Zoning/NIMBYism doesn’t help either, but even with perfect zoning, prices would still rise with productivity.

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