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Comment by MAGZine | Hacker News Reader

Because it implies a cut and dried solution, which does not exist. It's implies sf wants to care, but is too busy virtue signaling to do anything about it. Like as if the city doesn't want to put it's money where it's mouth is.

Instead, sf has one of the most well funded social networks in the country. And they tried to take an innovative approach on policing, one that would not disportionately target poor people or people of a certain race.

The remaining solutions are essentially to forcibly remove people from the streets, and revert to the standard American policing playbook. At least, those are the tools traditionally used to clean up these problems in other parts of the country.

So, it's a comment that sounds nice but isn't actually true. Sf was taking actions. And now, as of last night, the citizenry are also taking action (by recalling the DA)

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> solutions are essentially to forcibly remove people from the streets

Solution is to build more housing. This, however, cuts against two powerful San Francisco voting blocs, and the source of its problems: homeowners and entrenched subsidized renters.

This is probably a correct take but not really immediately actionable. It's up the the residents of the city to decide they want to change their neighborhoods. And most new construction ends up market rate which takes a while to free up housing supply for the affected group (which is at the bottom of the market.)

I'm a yimby fwiw, but as new york has shown you can have both density and an affordability issue—density isn't a a cure-all.

And what's perhaps most annoying is that certain minority activist groups also actively block new development. The mission hasn't been developed much, but it's not for lack of trying.

> Solution is to build more housing

Yeah, we have been there, tried that and it was a disaster.

More housing might be the answer, but more public housing projects is definitely not the answer.

We have literally not been there, and done that.

> but more public housing projects

Who brought this up, other than you?

So we should just pretend that first attempts for government to provide housing were not an unmitigated disaster that created nearly endless cycles of poverty and crime?

Sorry, but it’s my hope we actually learn from our mistakes.

It speaks to the hierarchy of concern. It is similar to the school debate where many millions of dollars would be spent renaming schools like Lincoln and Jefferson to PC names. Meanwhile, teachers are paying out of pocket to provide student menstrual products.

You can make quick wins on small problems while working on big problems. However, if you are spending most of your time and money on small or trivial problems while your house burns down, you have a priority issue.

I understand abstractly what you're saying, but I don't understand concretely.

Do you have a way of fix the homelessness issues in San Francisco that the city has overlooked because it was too hard? I've thought about the problem a lot, I never came up with obvious solutions that didn't obviously end up with removing liberties from minorities or homeless (might fly in other parts of the country/state but not sf, until recently).

I think there are a number of partial solutions that would help, at least in the long run.

A couple realistic policies are:

First and foremost is addressing the affordability crisis. Roll back zoning regulations. Allow smaller housing spaces, reduce building costs, and streamline the building approval process.

Crack down on drug dealing and theft. These issues perpetuate and feed into the homelessness problem.

A less realistic possibility that would be dead on arrival is converting some of the copious green spaces in SF into low income housing units. Converting half of the presidio of GG park to SROs and RV camping would drastically improve the stable housing options for homeless.

A lot of people would disagree with those proposals, though. They're not new ideas. The most recent DA did exactly what he said he was going to do, which was (essentially) work at fixing the underlying problems, and not promote a system of spiraling inequality by ruining people's lives (and preventing them from ever getting ahead) by criminalizing them for pretty crime.

Some people see that as humane. I think SF has rebuked the idea. Still, I don't know that fixing theft and drug dealing is enough to fix tent cities.

And the affordability crisis is also equally unclear. It's easy as an outsider to say "make things more affordable, build more!" but it also requires ignoring a set of stakeholders' wishes and desires in favour of someone who might have less basis in the city.

Who is more entitled to a discussion about what gets built: someone who has lived in the city for 40 years, or someone who just arrived to work, or someone who lives in the city but without a home? What about the peole who own property and pay taxes, but can't legally vote? a

There's lots to consider here.

>A lot of people would disagree with those proposals, though.

Disagree that the proposals would work, or disagree that they want execute them?

I agree that there are complex stakeholders for issues like building more homes, but I think that underscores my point.

It is not that this solution to homelessness is unknown or impossible, it is that people generally don't like it and don't want to do it!

> Converting half of the presidio of GG park

There is no “presidio of GG park”; Golden Gate Park (a city park, and the third most visited urban park in the US) and the Presidio of San Francisco (a national park on the grounds of a former Spanish, then Mexican, then US military base) are different things.

Converting the Presidio is outside of San Francisco’s scope of legal options, converting half of GG park to low-cost housing is legally possible for the city, but fiscally dubious.

> Converting half of the presidio of GG park to SROs and RV camping would drastically improve the stable housing options for homeless.

uhh how about we start with ugly things like parking lots and urban freeways rather than destroying the priceless parks that make san Francisco beautiful and materially wealthy?

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