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Comment by wwwwwwwww | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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.

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?

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.”

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.

> 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.

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