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Comment by Shivetya | Hacker News Reader

Somehow completely ignoring the issue with how the homeless have made many areas of the city uninviting. The pandemic is being exploited by both business and politicians alike to mask underlying issues in hopes of getting a free pass. The old don't look behind the curtain. Protest violence isn't helping any city; and the lie about Federal agents causing it was silences with continued violence long after they left; and the long term change to where people want to live from the confluence of the pandemic, protest violence, and costs, is all coming to haunt our cities.

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> how the homeless have made many areas of the city uninviting

That's a very ugly sentence.

Its is not "the homeless" who made the city uninviting. That is like saying "the sick made this hospital uninviting".

Homeless people need help. They are people in distress.

Those who made the city uninviting are self-centered voters, who apparently can't give two shits about the situation, and keep voting people into power who don't do anything to help those who need help.

> That is like saying "the sick made this hospital uninviting".

But the sick do make a hospital uninviting! Think of all those heart attack patients who opted not to visit their local emergency department. Heart attacks are still happening regardless of how many additional patients are at the hospital due to infection.

This misses the point the parent was making.

But it does point out flaws in the analogy

Helping the homeless is a huge chunk of the city’s budget. I could see an argument that it’s not being spent on the right things, but the idea that city voters don’t care about the situation really doesn’t make sense to me.

Semantics, we all know what the poster meant. Whatever the cause, the homeless make large swaths of San Francisco unappealing, especially for people with young families. BTW, quite the irony that the most liberal city in the country has the biggest homeless problem. Whatever they're doing isn't working, maybe they should try something different?

San Francisco may be the most liberal city in the country (or at least one of them -- Washington, D.C. is pretty liberal, too), but it absolutely does not have the worst homeless problem: https://www.usnews.com/news/cities/slideshows/cities-with-th...

Only if you’re using the literal definition of “absolute.” I think most people would find per-capita a much better metric for the “worst homeless problem.”

All analogies break down fairly quickly, so I'll preface this with a clear vote of support for what you said. But in this case the purpose of a hospital is to provide for the sick. The purpose of a city is to do the opposite of homelessness - a city is a massive collection of homes.

The existence of a large homeless population is concerning for reasons you allude to, but because a more appropriate analogy might be "the piles of corpses made the hospital uninviting". The point of a city is to not have homeless people and so something fundamental went wrong if there is a big homeless population.

> the purpose of a hospital is to provide for the sick

And the purpose of society is to provide for its people. All of them.

Perhaps true for society depending on your views, but the point of a city is simply somewhere many people want to live together. A sign of a healthy city is steady growth, this could be from the opportunities available or the attractiveness of the quality of life of the city. For Sf, the opportunity aspect is strong enough so people are willing to overlook the widespread homelessness.

That depends on your society. America is made of people who have left their societies to start something on their own. At what point in history have those people turned into a society that cares for each other beyond personal relations?

You need to realize that saying "Homeless people make cities uninviting" does not mean people are against solving the problem of homelessness.

It is unquestionably, irrefutably, unarguably true that seeing homeless people everywhere in the city is indeed uninviting.

I agree, we should fix homelessness. But saying that "Homelessness should not be criticized" is unproductive. In fact, criticizing homelessness is how we can force the governments to improve the situation.

historically: no. Currently outside of progressive cities: no. Giant impoverished tent encampments in the middle of an extremely wealthy city is pretty unique to SF at this particular period of time. Also a society is an organization of people living under a set of agreed upon rules, we are currently dealing with how best to update these rules to deal with massive income inequality and poverty.

Yes the homeless need to be in long term health facilities. Many of these people were essentially kicked out of these facilities due to budget issues. The federal government turns a blind eye, while individual cities take turns buying bus or plane fares to make them another city’s problem. This issue has its origins from a combination of the Reagan Administration and heavy lobbying by the Kennedy family.

Ok, give the homeless homes and don't complain about homeless shelters in your upscale neighborhood. Reform police, there are major american cities with protests and minimal violence.

You complain about symptoms with no regard for the root cause.

I guess I’m not sure who you’re telling this to. Most people don’t have the time or energy to lead city reforms on their own. Their choices are to stay or leave, and it seems an increasing number of people are picking leave.

Well to do people who can afford to leave also complain about homeless shelters in their neighborhood. I wasn't suggesting leading a reform but attacking the root cause by changing your opinion and the opinions of others.

There’s a homeless shelter 2 blocks away from me, and I’m perfectly fine with it. The residents are great people as far as I can tell; I smile and wave when I see them, and I don’t begrudge the occasional panhandler or guy mumbling to himself.

I mention all that to be very clear about what I mean when I say, I wouldn’t agree to live near a San Francisco homeless shelter either. I just can’t tolerate people screaming at me all the time or scattering used needles on the sidewalk outside, and definitely couldn’t ask friends or family to tolerate it.

This needs to upvoted higher. My anecdotal experience living in SF near homeless shelters for years is that there is a stark contrast in the homeless population in SF compared to other major US cities. I don’t claim to know why, but my big take away is that there isn’t a one size fits all strategy to addressing homelessness as it varies from region to region.

I concur, for whatever reason, SF seems to have a larger density of people who are homeless who are also (sadly) suffering from mental illness or drug addiction, which has led to SF being the only city where I regularly expect (and do) see violent interactions between the homeless and others.

No one can fix the root causes.

But everyone can move to somewhere functional.

These are not impossible problems. They are fixable and we need to agree on the root cause before we can talk about solutions.

There are reforms that would fix the problems. But they are politically impossible to enact.

Moving to a city that already has a functioning society is something one person can do without permission. So people do.

What are examples of cities with functioning societies? My backup plan was NYC, but thanks to de Blasio that's now out.

There are 53 US metropolitan areas with > 1M people.

They all have something wrong with them, but only SF has it's unique set of problems.

So everyone has to figure out what tradeoff works for them.

To me the biggest flaw in SF is the institutionalized Nimby-ocracy and the resulting housing and homelessness crisis, which I think poisons most areas of society.

Texas seems like it has that side of society figured out. It has other serious problems, I know.

Specific to the Nimby-ocracy issues of Texas though, many homes have HOAs, so I'm not convinced that Nimby-ism isn't worse in Texas, there's just more land to spread out over.

Unfortunately, giving the homeless homes doesn't work. For the economically disadvantaged, of course providing free or low cost housing is helpful and welcome.

But for the majority, who have mental illness and/or substance abuse issues, a shelter or home often makes little difference.

Witness for example the experiment in Manhattan to provide some homeless men with hotel rooms. They literally go downstairs to poop in the street, harass or attack passersby, and trash the hotel. There's not a one-size-fits-all solution to homelessness.

What we really need is restoration of residential mental care facilities that were largely torn down in the 1970s in favor of mainstreaming the mentally ill.

We also need some kind of analog to the old rooming house districts where men down on their luck could get a bed and a hot meal for a dollar or so.

What we don't need is the status quo which is ripping apart the social fabric of our society.

You're absolutley wrong, various studies have been done that prove not only does no strings attached housing reduce homelesness, it is cheaper than having shelters and other economic costs. Finland is already doing this: https://english.best/toeic/exercise/finlands-radical-solutio...

That study shows providing housing for free results only in a 35% reduction. Like the GP said, some people can be helped, others not so much.

And it's cheaper! 35% is a lot. That figure will likely be a lot higher given the lack of safetynets in the US already that result in homelessness.

Well, I wasn't trying to argue against "no strings attached housing". Actually, there used to be a lot of low-cost/no-cost options including the aforementioned dirt-cheap rooming houses, mental care residential facilities (including voluntary and involuntary incarceration), and shelters run by nuns and the like. Note that some of this still exists today but not the same scale as before.

I'm afraid also that Finland's socio-economic situation is rather different from that of the U.S. Up until quite recently, they have had a homogeneous culture, a much smaller population, and more social stability, versus the U.S. with its vast and highly diverse population and relative instability. I don't see how a Finnish solution would quite fit our situation, though we should of course study their methodology since they tend to have good ideas :)

Unfortunately, giving the homeless homes doesn't work.

It does though. Cities like Philadelphia and states like Utah solve it this way and both the homeless per capita + the return-to-homeless rate are nationally very low:

Together with our many nonprofit partners, the City provides 11,503 emergency, temporary and permanent “beds.” Last year we helped 970 families and individuals from-homeless-to-housed. Our permanent housing programs have an average 90% success rate in preventing a return to homelessness.

http://philadelphiaofficeofhomelessservices.org/know-homeles...

From my experience in Europe, providing housing only works together with very low tolerance to substance abuse and disorderly behavior. I can image conservative Utah having very similar attitude.

IMO, the SF public sees the right to disturb others as an extension of personal liberties, and hence this solution won't work very well.

No strings attached includes substance abuse and criminal activity. No strings. They get a roof over their head anyways.

I mean you'd think people would be excited about homeless people pooping in their free housing instead of on the sidewalk.

It really depends on the underlying cause of the homelessness. I live in SF, and have spent a considerable amount of time getting a homeless friend lined up with two different housing options - the 16th Street Hotel (SRO), and the Washburn House. Both were fully paid for by SSDI, and in both cases he left voluntarily to live outside, due to mental health reasons.

> Unfortunately, giving the homeless homes doesn't work. For the economically disadvantaged, of course providing free or low cost housing is helpful and welcome.

> But for the majority, who have mental illness and/or substance abuse issues, a shelter or home often makes little difference.

I'd question your stats about mental illness and substance misuse disorder, but even if we accept that most homeless people are either mentally ill, or addicted, or both: how do you expect them to engage with treatment when they're living on the street?

"Homes first" is a key part of many homeless health programmes. See this example, called "housing first": https://hfe.homeless.org.uk/about-housing-first

> is restoration of residential mental care facilities that were largely torn down in the 1970s in favor of mainstreaming the mentally ill.

We really really don't need to go back to the days of asylums that held people for many years for relatively mild mental ill health.

We don't want to go back to that, but the replacement of that system with a choice between homelessness or incarceration hasn't exactly been a success. There has to be a better way.

The link in the post you are replying to claims to be a better way. (I agree but I'm not an expert.)

%90 of homeless are not the chronic homeless, it's the ~%10 chronic that really need mental health care that are ruining it for everyone.

The numbers are also very low, around 10k 'chronics' for the entire bay area as far as I remember.

You need different solutions for different types. The poor / down on their luck types are definitely helped by free housing.

The root cause for a large part of homelessness is mental illness in combination with personal freedom. There is no solution. You can not force people into treatment.

San Francisco just happens to attract more homeless for various reasons.

See,people say that and I am sure some if it is mental illness but in my experience most are stuck. Too many catch 22's. You need a phone, a car, clean clothes, a shower,etc... Mental illness itself is exasperated by not having a home. No silver bullets, give them all a safe shelter while you work out other issues

> Somehow completely ignoring the issue with how the homeless have made many areas of the city uninviting.

Perhaps a more solution oriented statement:

Somehow completely ignoring the issue with how tech has made the homeless in many areas of the city uninvited.

These people would easily prefer to be in DevOps, can learn to run other people's software and call it a job, as we all do, except maybe for issues encountered along the way (housing, direct or indirect mental health crises, food insecurity). Our indifference to, or what we considered not to be priority is coming to the surface.

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