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Comment by pclmulqdq | Hacker News Reader

NYC kicked the bums out of Manhattan in the 80s and kept them out through the early 00s. It worked really well. Wealthy people used public transit to get to their wall street jobs, and many people walked home alone at night. Fast forward to today, and it's not progressive to go after the bums any more. Now the subway is extremely dangerous and smelly, and nobody but the desperate takes it. The streets are a lot less safe than they used to be.

You can take the bums off the street (and put them in shelters) and your city will get a lot better. It's just very unpopular with progressives, who happen to be the voting base in big cities.

Eventually, things will get bad enough that the progressives leave, and then the streets can get cleaned up again.

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Extremely dangerous might be a bit much. I ride the subway a fair amount. And there's been an uptick in crime (all over the US), but I wouldn't really call the subway dangerous.

NYC houses something like 95% of its homeless as well, which is why we have a lot less people on the streets than in places like LA or SF.

But shelter conditions are pretty miserable as I understand it so you can sort of understand the hold outs.

And we may just not have enough space. But yea, NYC's a big city, there's definitely some homeless, but I'm not sure my lived experience here is as dire as you make it sound.

That being said, some areas are certainly worse than others, and there's definitely some aggressive mentally ill people you'll see here and there.

NYC houses something like 95% of its homeless as well, which is why we have a lot less people on the streets than in places like LA or SF.

This is true, and is the most clear example of how immoral the "housing first" policies in California are. It is a pipe dream that creates a horror show of homeless misery on the streets in LA and SF.

The vast majority of the city’s approximately 50,000 homeless people live in shelters — about 30,000 in family shelters, and about 18,000 in shelters for single adults.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/30/nyregion/nyc-homeless-eri...

I agree with you, but I only have one lifetime, and by the time it plays out in its entirety, I’ll be long retired. Point is, government needs to first clean things up, and then the civil society will move back in, not the other way around.

Use the subway every time I’m in Manhattan and I barely even see any crazies. It’s about on par with Boston. It’s got some notable events that make it in the news but I think that’s more a function of the population size rather than a noticeable increase in the crazy percentage

Have you been since the pandemic?

Not the parent, but I've visited Manhattan and Brooklyn a couple times in the past year, and I didn't find the subway scary at all, even when taking trains fairly late at night. Maybe I was just in the safer areas, though.

Yes, I was there 2 weeks ago. Mind you I didnt go to every single line and section of the city, only in Manhattan, but literally no issues.

Also spent about 3 hours outside smoking until 4 am and only had a single person approach me to bum some change and left with no issue when I told him I didn't carry cash. I have no doubt there are rough parts of the city, but its not all lawlessness and mentally unwell in the streets everywhere.

I used to use it until the pandemic. It's a horror show in comparison now. Some lines used to be horror shows before, too, but it was mostly only bad outside of Manhattan.

> You can take the bums off the street (and put them in shelters)

There's your problem, I think. In the US, at least, the elements of our polity that favor "taking the bums off the street" are mostly unwilling to pay for things like shelters and mental hospitals.

I'm a moderate liberal and I would love for my tax dollars to go to pay for shelters and mental hospitals.

The dearth of mental health institutions is not (directly) because “elements of our polity” don’t want to pay for them. It’s a legacy of actively closing them in the 70’s-80’s due to inhumane conditions and civil libertarian concerns around institutionalizing people against their will.

Now - we certainly aren’t having a very productive public conversations about the obvious negative outcomes of that policy shift.

"With President Reagan and the Republicans taking over, the Mental Health Systems Act was discarded before the ink had dried and the CMHC funds were simply block granted to the states." https://www.salon.com/2013/09/29/ronald_reagans_shameful_leg...

I don't see how anyone can claim that austerity and a deep cynicism toward the very idea of mental treatment didn't play major roles.

No, of course that is a large part of the story, but things like the Willowbrook expose also caused left-wing politicians (in that case Robert Kennedy) to also attack institutions.

Maybe that’s true, but it’s not like Salon would ever pass up an opportunity to blame Republicans for something.

It's a result of not funding appropriate community-based supports after deinstitutionalization. Deinstiutionalization could have worked out very, very differently, if we'd been willing to pay for the alternatives.

You're so obsessed with turning "progressive" into a derisive term that you're not being consistent with it.

> You can take the bums off the street (and put them in shelters) and your city will get a lot better. It's just very unpopular with progressives,

Progressives are absolutely for building more low income housing, and making it available to street bums.

It's conservatives who fight 1/ building low income/subsidized housing, 2/ putting that housing in any neighbourhood where they might be in.

I don't know what happened in the 80s, or where the bums went. Maybe they all were shipped off to California, where it's warm, and now HN posters complain about IT'S progressive policies.

Maybe they all died and nobody in the 80s cared but now they do.

Either way, the economic forces that led to them being created in the first place never were fixed, so there is a steady supply of new bums throughout America. Why? What is Europe able to do to keep those people at bay that America isn't?

> It's conservatives who fight 1/ building low income/subsidized housing, 2/ putting that housing in any neighbourhood where they might be in.

That’s why, I presume, cities that are thoroughly controlled by Democrats, like San Francisco or Seattle, have no trouble building low income housing and putting it all around the city, right? I mean, conservatives have no government representation in those cities whatsoever, so the Democrat politicians are simply listening to the wishes of their constituents, and as a result, low income housing projects sail through, and housing prices are low, correct?

San Francisco is extremely progressive in some ways, and extremely conservative in others. There seems to be a general assumption that because SF is very visibly progressive on some high-profile social topics that it must be progressive on all topics, but it's not.

More generally, the idea that Democrats cannot be conservative is incorrect, and not just in the leftist "Democrats are right wing" sort of sense. In an effective one-party state you see a lot of people who are ideologically much more aligned with the Republican party running as Democrats, and vice-versa in Republican-dominated states.

Respectfully, this seems like it’s veering toward a “no true Scotsman” argument.

I don't think that's the case. The parent's opinion lines up pretty well with what I observe in San Francisco. Our mayor calls herself a Democrat, but most of the policies she pushes feel pretty conservative to me. The Board of Supervisors (our "city council", which has quite a lot of power) is all over the place, but definitely has what I'd consider a conservative element... but of course they still call themselves "Democrats", "progressive", "liberal", whatever.

I can't speak to the opposite phenomenon, where places controlled by Republicans tend to have quite a few "liberal" Republicans, but it seems plausible that would be the case as well.

It’s possible that you just have an extremely left-wing view of what it means to be progressive, such that people who identify a s progressive to you and who would be called progressive by most Americans appear conservative to you. This is definitely the case with Republicans who call an insufficiently conservative Republican a “RINO” or “Republican In Name Only” (although the Trump wing which isn’t conservative has colored it to refer to Republicans which aren’t sufficiently extremist).

It’s also possible that SF tried more progressive policies, but found they didn’t work in certain cases (for example, the recent DA recall). Note that I’m not trying to litigate whether conservative policies would work better than progressive policies or any such thing.

I’m not even sure it’s a majority of constituents so much as a review process that takes the smallest objection very seriously and makes overcoming them very difficult.

If the politicians don’t like the process, why don’t they change it? It’s not like San Francisco Board of Supervisors is deadlocked 50-50 and requires filibuster-proof majority. If the construction can be blocked by a single complaint from the last remaining conservative in SF, it is only because SF government allows it to be the case.

Frankly, I find blaming “conservatives” for inability of coastal liberal cities to build anything to be rather ludicrous. It can only be true if you define “conservative” as someone who blocks construction in order to conserve status quo, but that only makes it a vacuous tautology. Truth is, there are plenty people in SF who are as progressive as it gets when it comes to both social and economical concerns, but are also not blind or stupid, and know that low income housing project in their neighborhood means dirt, decay, and constant petty crime. Instead of blaming people for trying to live in clean and peaceful places, try to figure out why low income housing projects in Vienna or Amsterdam don’t decay into dens of crime and despair in a way those same places in US do.

Instead of blaming people for trying to live in clean and peaceful places, try to figure out why low income housing projects in Vienna or Amsterdam don’t decay into dens of crime and despair in a way those same places in US do.

This right here. How have we constructed a system in which we can pour thousands of man-hours and millions of dollars into a neighborhood and make it a worse place? That's the big question, and until it's answered I can't blame people for voting in their own best interests.

Most cities are run by people who would call themselves very progressive, and have been for a long time. New York, SF, Chicago, LA, and other big cities have all had 100% progressive leadership for a very long time. These same cities, which purport to have "fair" "progressive" policies have huge problems building affordable housing (mostly because they want to regulate its construction to hell). It is not due to conservative opposition, it is generally due to opposition from the left, often on grounds of "avoiding gentrification" and "keeping the character of the city."

Look at Calle 24 in SF for a good example - in order to preserve diversity, a progressive organization has blocked a lot of projects that would add low-income housing to their neighborhoods. In addition, progressive mayors and city governments make it comparatively pleasant to be a bum in these areas - you can do whatever you want, including committing petty crimes, and you will get generous amounts of money for it. Economics 101 tells you that when you subsidize something, you get more of it. It's true for solar panels, and it's true for homelessness.

By the way, what happened in the 80's in NYC is that the professional class had enough and started electing conservatives. Those are the people who actually cleaned up the city by forcing homeless people to take shelter beds (they often don't want to end up in shelters because shelters have strict rules), and making it unpleasant to be homeless. At the same time, they invested in things like brighter lights, subway cleanups, and other nonsense that improves quality of life (but is not "fair" according to progressives). They also empowered police to enforce criminal laws on petty criminals.

So yes, this is a problem with politicians who claim to be progressive. I used to call myself "progressive" until I learned that this is where "progressive" politicians lead things. As a progressive yourself, it's up to you to call this behavior out if you want people to think that your ideology actually helps people.

NYC has low street homeless because they build enough shelters and are next to New Jersey, which is good at providing affordable housing (Mt. Laurel doctrine).

California has high street homeless because housing is expensive not only in cities but everywhere in their exurbs as well. Most homeless people in California are locals who just can't afford their rent; they're not "bussed in" and didn't move for the weather.

Being mean to homeless people has very little effect compared to giving them homes. California governments are good at being mean to them; the police constantly raid them and steal all their possessions. It of course doesn't do anything.

Note, it's not related to drugs because the parts of the country with the worst drug problems (like West Virginia) don't really have big homeless populations, since they can still afford somewhere to live.

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