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Comment by mrits | Hacker News Reader

You can purchase a 5K sqft lot outside of Austin for $2,200 and we still have a growing homeless problem. I'd look more into providing mental health, relocation, and incentives to stay off heavy drugs.

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SF has a $360 million dollar a year budget for addressing the homeless situation. I'm not sure what funding they may also get in addition from the County and State Level.

It was upped to about $600m. Good luck getting an audit.

Okay, that is something on the order of $10,000 per person if there's a homeless population of 60,000 people. I doubt if SF has such a large homeless population.

Does this $600 million cover things like Churches sheltering the homeless, pantries, and such? Or is it in addition to the the $600 million? Something is very rotten here.

Looks like 8k or 10k as of January [1], depending on which standard you consider, though obviously that may have gone up with recent events.

[1] https://sfgov.org/scorecards/safety-net/homeless-population

You're off by almost an order of magnitude [1]. Even if we say the official estimates are off by a huge margin and there are actually 20,000 homeless in SF, that's $30K per person, on top of however many millions are given out via begging and other programs. It's insanity.

[1] https://sfgov.org/scorecards/safety-net/homeless-population

Oh my. I feel like I will never understand California politics. Such blatant corruption and such a large vulnerable population, but also such a huge 'woke' electorate. It would take some crazy mental gymnastics to reconcile these things.

Said electorate is gradually moving elsewhere due to the issues and voting for the same policies that cause the same problems.

Yes. I have lived in the Bay Area for a long time now, but never really liked the general holier-than-thou attitude (interestingly, I keep meeting older people who have never turned conservative, but have instead turned even more rabidly leftist.) It's dispiriting to realise that moving elsewhere, to Texas, say, is no guarantee of being rid of this. The same cycle will likely be repeated, perhaps in the next decade or so!

Being woke doesn’t translate to voting for good policies. You’re even more susceptible to voting for heartstrings boondoggles when you’re extra woke.

Completely agree with everything you said. But how does woke and liberal politics square with almost complete apathy to the the plight of the homeless (or of those verging on homelessness)? Almost nothing has been done to make housing affordable (even very modest, incremental bills in this regard have been shot down). If you consider the plight of agricultural workers and housing for them, you would be even more befuddled. 9.2% sales tax? Regressive tax on the poor. Gasoline tax? Again, hurts the poor the most. What am I missing here?

What you're missing is the "left" has long since transferred its affections away from poor people who are not wards of the state.

"Woke" politics magically appeared in 2008 when leftists were manning occupy wall street, which pretty much immediately degenerated into escalating virtue signalling instead of, you know, making some reforms to wall street. I'm sure that was a total coincidence.

Well, it did appear to result in the CFPB (the thing that Elizabeth Warren was heading?) and Dodd-Frank, perhaps (one can never attribute these things to some particular movement or event, I feel). I don't know if they have been defanged already.

Anyhoo, so what is the pet constituency of the left? They do appear to be falling over themselves to regularise illegal immigrants (perhaps the Latinos in Texas handing Trump a win will give them pause?), while doing nothing for legal immigrants (who power the only growth sector America has going for it, technology.) They certainly don't care much for the working poor, as you have rightly pointed out.

Related: a "stirring" defense of child labor from a Gates foundation apparatchik that got published in the left-leaning guardian:

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/nov/06/c...

Pretty sure Gates is a Democrat! Yeah, man, Child Labor laws are so 19th century.

It's because CA voters are bombarded with propositions every election. At least a half dozen. People barely have time to study the issues, so they go off what makes sense from the headline or the title of the measure on the ballot. Hence being fleeced by Prop 22 and the new privacy laws, which sure looked pretty when they were sitting there in the ballot.

Prop 22 passing is what I simply can't square with the woke/liberal politics of CA. Workers' rights, whether they are cabbies, schoolteachers, government workers, construction crews, or really any other large workforce that can be unionized should be sacred to people of this persuasion. Yet, dispiritingly, it passed.

I don't blame them. I got texts from supposed "uber drivers" who really were paid actors (didn't even change their actual name for the advertisements, you can search for these actors websites yourself as I did) encouraging me to vote yes on 22. For people not keen on reading between the lines, this could have passed the sniff test.

Not only that, all these props are just propaganda to me. I see a bunch of youtube videos constantly telling me that people are gonna die if I don't vote for prop something. No information, just appeals to emotions.

SF does have a huge homeless population. Yes it go's to homeless shelters and other charities/programs. We sometimes forget that not all homeless are chronic homeless which is what most people associate as homeless.

Someone may be having hard times making rent and go to a church or other organization for financial help and other services. Battered women, at risk children also exist and may require a shelter with more security or women only shelters - which are funded too. There are many other services that exist that use that funding.

I didn't see waste. Actually, I would go so far as say most charities that receive federal and state funding rely on reporting to receive those grants and funding and things are very transparent. HMIS is the tech side of things that build the systems to track and report on everything.

SF has 10k homeless people. You can give everyone $60k a year outright right now and they would live a very comfortable life on that in the midwest.

I don't have the bandwidth right now to consider the actual numbers, but one thing worth noting - as it's often overlooked in these discussions - is that much of the money spent on homelessness is spent keeping people in housing such that they're not homeless. Dividing by the number that still remain homeless isn't the right choice of denominator for anything meaningful.

As someone who once earned money from a CA public project the wastes are gross negligence. All that money which is paid is almost certainly misappropriated.

Maybe if other states could be blocked from buying one way bus tickets for their homeless citizens and instead be responsible that would help.

This is an urban legend and gets claimed in every major city.

San Francisco has great weather, lots of well off people to panhandle from, and treats the homeless relatively better than its neighbors. It really is that simple.

Absolutely not an urban legend.

https://www.sacbee.com/news/investigations/nevada-patient-bu...

> This is an urban legend and gets claimed in every major city.

It's not an urban legend, it's well documented and there have been lawsuits based on it.

It’s real. There are plenty of articles about it. The cities are playing hot potato with the homeless because there’s no federal program to deal with it. 80% of the homeless get back on their feet in months. It’s only 20% who are chronically homeless. It’s a mental health and drug abuse issue.

It’s not an urban legend. Mayor Bloomberg had a well funded, well documented program in NYC. Quick duck duck go.

Many others have piled on, so the burden has shifted to you. What support do you have for this being an urban legend?

Literally one search shows sources from across the ideological spectrum covering this:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/14/us/homeless-busing-seattl...

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/10/27/nyc-exports-ho...

And other cities are bussing their homeless to NYC as well. How can NYC fund the entire countries homeless population?

California buses the homeless out as much as they're bused in. It's complicated[1].

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/dec/...

My take is that homelessness is a nationwide issue in the US more than anywhere else in the world, and its more visible in states that have more funding to address the issue. Knowing that, 360M$ is nowhere near enough to alleviate the symptoms, and nothing compared to what needs to be invested to cure the actual root cause.

360 Million is cute, NYC spends over 3 Billion and still hasn't cracked it.

> You can purchase a 5K sqft lot outside of Austin for $2,200 and we still have a growing homeless problem.

But not actually near Austin enough for it to be a sane place to live and commute to Austin from (especially if you depend on public transit).

30 mins east of downtown is farmland

Not with traffic. Takes 30 mins just to get to the airport from downtown around rush hour.

If you depend on public transit in Austin, you're not going to be able to commute reliably no matter where you live.

When I lived in Austin I took the bus almost every day without issue. Austin has the best public transit in all of Texas (though that’s admittedly a low bar).

Fort Worth is in the same state, almost the same population, growing just as fast, and has similar taxes. Yet Fort Worth doesn’t have the visible homeless problem that Austin and San Francisco do.

This is partly because the private security force employed by the wealthy Bass brothers forcefully (and sometimes violently) discourage the homeless from existing in downtown Fort Worth, especially the Sundance Square area.

I used to work downtown (Oil & Gas Commerce building) and became friends with the night-shift security guard, who told some really shocking stories about how the Bass goons would drag the homeless into alleys and beat them, simply for existing in downtown Ft. Worth.

That might be 0.1% of the city’s land area. Not really a significant cause. If you applied that exact same factor to Austin there would still be a ton of homeless people everywhere.

The homeless tend to congregate where they're treated better.

The cities that treat the homeless better, when confronted with a new influx of homeless, work to confront the problem with more spending and social programs, and the cycle continues.

If your security guard at the O&G/C Building said that, then you were being told a wild story.

There is NO WAY Sundance Security would do that. I personally know the security team members and how professionally they are trained, and I know the Basses and how they operate.

That's a horrible thing to say. And it is sad that you or anyone would actually believe it.

It's a tall tale that a late shift guard might enjoy telling, but it isn't the truth.

Surely that number is not right - probably lacking two digits?

You can get out of Austin pretty quick. 30 mins in some directions can get you out of the metro area. Also, 5k sqft is 1/10 of an acre.

That said, I don’t know anything about land prices in Texas right now.

>You can get out of Austin pretty quick. 30 mins in some directions can get you out of the metro area. Also, 5k sqft is 1/10 of an acre.

During the normal busy hours in which people commute, no way. I can only hope all the construction going on along 183 will speed things up on the East side. The 290/71 junction is another nightmare during rush hour.

30 minutes won't take you from the river to North Loop. And even Redbud is slow in the opposite direction.

north-south commute? You must be new here.

Nah. I arrived when it was too easy to speed on Mopac. I left town before a north-south was totally inconceivable. Dunno if the behind-Pease-on-Parkway trick still helps. I had an east-west when I bailed.

I always hear bay area friends tell me how it's not that bad there if you have room mates. Mean while the engineers here in their 30s are collecting income from their 3rd rental property already.

I know lots of people under 30 in the Bay Area who could have much more than 3 rental properties if they wanted to. Especially outside of the bay area.

It's just that living with roommates is pretty frugal, and before the pandemic, it was a good way to save an extra $10k a year living in a more central location. Every single person I know who is a bay area SWE makes enough to afford renting a 1bed apartment in a good area, they just don't think it's worth it.

Yes if your main goal in life is to live in a large house on a large lot in a nice area without spending much, you will not find it there, but your characterization makes it seem like bay area engineers are poor which is... not true

>> makes enough to afford renting a 1bed apartment in a good area

In most cities in the US this is not the definition of wealthy or even well off. living with roommates to save 10K a year does sound like one step above poverty.

When I lived in the bay area, lots of my friends lived in shared accommodation because they actually liked living with other people. Saving money was a side effect. They usually bought a place when they got married or not long after. That's not poverty.

This is common when you're a kid out of college, but a few years go by and living with other people sucks.

Maybe I am just a frugal person, but to me, if you told me I could get a post-tax extra 10k a year switching from a 1bed apartment to a roommate situation I would always take it as long as I could find reasonable people to live with. I was pretty far from poverty when I made that decision in the SF bay area. And again, I just said they could afford a 1bed apartment, not that this was the max they could afford. You're not being charitable with interpreting my reply.

> living with roommates to save 10K a year does sound like one step above poverty.

Sounds like every college student and recent grad I've ever known.

One of the problems is that every person wants to live in some trendy neighborhood in "The City". Naturally, that means landlords can get away with charging exorbitant rents (the bulk of the inventory is under rent control, which reduces incentives for folks to move out). Because of this, you end up with ridiculous startups that rent beds out to people, folks paying $2000+ for a small room in a small house, and so on.

Meanwhile, in the majority of places that aren't the Bay Area (or urban CA), folks in professions like engineering are set up with nice suburban homes and additional properties by their mid-thirties.

I have seen many east-coast transplants move back after realizing that the madness is not going to end in the past ten years. Giving up access to the Bay Area job market, or existing social or family circles are perhaps the only thing holding folks back from getting the hell out of this area, I feel.

Not everyone wants "nice suburban homes" or being a landlord. Many people like city life. It's really that simple.

I agree. A lot of this stuff is a function of age and marital status. Older people tend to get married and have kids, and once that happens they clearly prefer the suburbs.

There are many folks who prefer city life, but I bet they would be found in much greater numbers in the 'real' cities: New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Dallas, Houston, Washington D.C... San Francisco just feels like a slightly overgrown town with hardly any cultural amenities one would expect from a world-class city. It does have almost unparalleled access to very pretty coast, woodland, and desert all in three hours' range, though.

I don't know what exactly you consider "city life," but Los Angeles does not come anywhere close to San Francisco by my definition.

The second-class treatment of public transit over car-driving alone is awful. I don't have to worry about being stranded ANYWHERE in the bay because I didn't finish what I was doing by 5pm, unlike my last trip to Santa Monica.

40% of SF residents are married. That is just slightly lower than nearby mostly suburban Sonoma County at 47%. And the median age of an SF resident is actually higher than the state median.

How many with young (K-12) children?

How many billion dollar start ups came out of the Austin ecosystem? SF is expensive because it is productive. It’s producing wealth so prices go up. If you want to raise money, recruit talent SF adds value which is paid for with hire expenses. I would rather own equity in a high growth start up than 3 rental houses; at least from a growth perspective.

> I would rather own equity in a high growth start up than 3 rental houses; at least from a growth perspective.

But that isn't the choice, the choice is between three rental houses and a maybe 1 in 20 chance of owning equity in a high growth startup that may or may not IPO in the next 15 years.

The third option in west coast cities is probably more common than your startup option : working for an established company, possibly a FAANG, and accumulating enough wealth to retire early.

That's a false dichotomy. A startup engineer could easily afford three rental properties in most flyover states after 8 years of working from their salary alone.

It is the choice because the ecosystem is in SF. And because of the demand of people wanting to participate in the SF ecosystem, prices are higher. It’s a gold rush dynamic. YCs are the new 49ers.

It's more important and more achievable to become financially independent rather than to become outrageously wealthy. Someone with a tech job and 3 rental properties has a lot more flexibility in life than someone with a tech job and some stock/options in the same tech company they work for.

Live in Austin. Yes that's BS, unless you're talking about a 5.5k sf lot out carved out of a rural farmland (which are plentiful right outside of Austin).

Odd thing to argue about that is easily provable with a Zillow search. Plenty of half acre lots that sold int he last year for ~$5K east of downtown but certainly before farm country. And capital metro goes past it all the way to the toll road.

Montopolis and McKinney are basically right before farm country (I ride my bike there all of the time). Where on earth are you seeing 5k sf lots being sold for $2k?!?!

Or that figure is the monthly mortgage payment heh

No... In most parts of the country, a tenth of an acre of dirt past the edge of town does not run $200k.

Social problems exist in degrees. San Francisco, with the most stringent land-use restrictions in the US, and largely as a consequence of that, the highest rental rates in the world, experiences the problem of homelessness to a much higher degree.

> You can purchase a 5K sqft lot outside of Austin for $2,200

How many miles away from the city though?

Quite a few, and not somewhere most would probably choose to live

Can you build on that? Is there water, electricity, gas and cable?

Yes. If you want to drive 50 miles outside the city you can get 10 acres for $50k.

50 miles is really far. You can get the exact same prices in California if you're willing to drive 50 miles outside SF / Bay Area proper.

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