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Comment by joshribakoff | Hacker News Reader

> opponents argue is cruel

I have lived in SF for several years and done a complete 180. The status quo is not “compassionate”, there are people who turn down help. These same individuals quite literally destroy the city. For instance, we have people sleeping and overdosing (dying) in our buildings entryway. The other week, one person defecated and smeared it on our door, lit our awning on fire, and uprooted all the landscaping and burned it. At the same time, people are selling drugs nearby and individuals are literally lined up with backpacks. There is constantly broken glass, feces, and trash spewed everywhere. Something has to change, and again lots of these people are turning down help. Right now the police state they send out the HOT (homeless outreach team) which is basically older individuals who volunteer to distribute pamphlets. If there is a crime, usually no arrest is made if the police are even able to respond. The penalties are often a misdemeanor and a fine, and not showing up to court often only results in more (effectively unenforceable) fines

It’s a fine line between “compassion” and “enabling”.

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Mental health courts may be a small step in the right direction, but California will try absolutely anything to solve homelessness apart from building more housing: https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/i-will-do-anything-to-en...

We see the results: https://seliger.com/2022/06/29/homelessness-is-a-housing-pro...

Anyone who spends a few afternoons in the shady parts of San Francisco can tell you that the issue is not a lack of housing. There are some people who cannot live unsupervised in any kind of housing because they are a danger to themselves, others, and property.

Newsom is one of my least favorite politicians, but credit where credit is due this is one of the best things that has been accomplished under his administration.

California has been losing a ground war to hordes of homeless drug addicts for a long time. If Newsom can win a battle it'll be turning the tide even slightly...

About 1 in 5 homeless in San Francisco have a traumatic brain injury.

To deal with that, you need medical facilities. Mere housing is insufficient.

Somehow, they just all happened to start having brain injuries as housing got expensive.

rather then, expensive housing made it impossible to keep house for more and more people with issues.

not all homeless are the same.

No amount of housing will help those doing drugs and defecating on the streets. They need mandatory treatment if they are public nuisance (which they absolutely are).

For people "out of luck" but willing to get on their feet there should be socialized housing, not necessarily in SF (since that area is super expensive).

I think the key question here is: what kind of help is available? Is the "help" financial literacy classes, religious drug rehab, and overcrowded shelters with draconian policies?

How many of these people would still be out on the street if housing was abundant and affordable? Some, maybe, but surely not most.

> How many of these people would still be out on the street if housing was abundant and affordable?

What if the housing was abundant and affordable but came with strings attached, like not being able to do drugs or engage in other antisocial behavior in them? Would that be a draconian policy?

Literature from people who have spoken with many of the homeless of SF suggest that "some, maybe, but surely not most" ratio is actually the other way around. People who are temporarily homeless due solely to financial factors are often able to find a home, and comprise a minority of the people you actually see on the street; and many of the latter actually turn down help if it means they cannot do as they please.

This exactly.

There is more than enough housing in LA and SF to house the temporarily homeless.

There is also enough housing to house the mentally ill homeless.

But there is essentially no housing to house the drug-addicted homeless.

Thousands of shelter beds go unused in LA every night because most homeless shelters are sober facilities, meaning no drugs or alcohol, and the drug addicts would rather keep their booze and their high then have a bed and a bath. And those are the majority of the homeless you encounter in LA and SF.

(Note: mind altering substances can trigger mental illness; marijuana is known to trigger latent schizoid-series mental illnesses and this is one of the reasons it remained a controlled drug at the federal level for so long. Most illegal psychotropic drugs damage the brain, ultimately leading to the development of mental illness after sustained or heavy use; I don't classify such individuals as mentally ill because their drug addiction dominates.)

Source: I was a public defender representing the criminally mentally ill at the start of my career and essentially acting in the same role as proposed by the mental health court plan (albeit without the criminal law element).

> the drug addicts would rather keep their booze and their high then have a bed and a bath.

Or, rather, their addiction - which is an illness - prevents them from making that decision. Right?

There is that, but also when one's life is that shitty the comfort of "something to numb that pain" would be welcome to most, especially those with little to no hope of things getting better

No, that's wrong. Addiction makes it painful or unpleasant not to continue drug use, but it doesn't compel continued use of drugs; the choice is made to continue using instead of temporarily dealing with the pain of withdrawal.

In that sense, it's no different than giving up sweets, or pushing through physical discomfort during hard exercise.

While drugs can cause mental illness due to brain damage, the amount of drug use required to get to that point is always a deliberate choice by the addict.

And the "tough life" "self medicating" BS is just that. Billions of people have harder lives and don't do drugs to self medicate.

This weird characterization of addiction is just wishful thinking on your part. Even your examples are absolutely blind to casual scrutiny. Plenty of people find it incredible difficult to alter all sorts patterns of behavior.

I'm very sympathetic to the whole: "If you can't fix you I can't fix you" resignation of the situation. And I totally get people being over "solving the disease not the problem" rhetoric.

That's all normal.

But you're just flat out pulling justification out of your butt to feel better. Your compassion is limited and it's acceptable that it is. That's all.

No, my justification comes from actually working as the appointed legal guardian for a number of drug addicts and knowing how it actually works instead of having a purely academic understanding of addiction like so many homeless "advocates" do.

Compassion for drug addicts does not mean letting them stay addicted. That is the cruelest thing you can do to them. Compassion for a homeless drug addict means forcing them into treatment so they can be human again.

I'm fine with everything you're saying here. I only take issue with trivializing addiction as simply "deliberate choices" that are "uncompelled".

> What if the housing was abundant and affordable but came with strings attached, like not being able to do drugs or engage in other antisocial behavior in them? Would that be a draconian policy?

Yes - in two ways. First, "antisocial behavior" is a very loose phrase. Do you mean "crimes," or do you mean something broader? If the latter, then you're applying a higher standard to the most vulnerable than to everyone else in society, and that's definitely draconain. Second, expecting people to quit addictive drugs cold turkey in order to obtain housing is absolutely doomed to fail. Why not have harm reduction clinics and secular drug rehabs as an option? That would almost certainly lead to better outcomes.

Technically drug use (at least of the kind commonly done by this demographic) is a crime ;-) but of course I agree that criminal laws aren't always logical or moral.

I'm given to understand that harm reduction clinics and secular drug rehabs already exist in San Francisco? That might be wrong. But either way, since the taxpayers of SF are already funding a variety of homelessness-related programs run by the city to the tune of $60k per year per homeless person, those programs absolutely need to come with strings attached, if nothing else to be able to prove to the taxpayers that the programs are successful.

But the policy in the city (and I'm not saying that you are in support of this) has evolved to the point that the very desired outcome of harm-reduction or drug rehab -- that is, reducing drug abuse and dependency -- is infringing on the right of the homeless to behave as they wish, often with the justification that nobody complains about wealthy people doing drugs. At that point, taxpayers are just paying homeless people to do drugs with the side benefit of paying city workers who administer the programs.

Yeah, I largely agree. This is one reason I'm inclined to support direct-cash-transfer programs like the New Leaf Project in Vancouver, Canada; it dramatically reduces overhead and, according to the study related to that project, actually does a much better job in getting people off the street than managed programs with complex policy and behavior requirements. If the objective is to get people into houses, that's the way to go.

Why is it good policy to push drug addicted people and those with issues into homelessness?

> I have lived in SF for several years and done a complete 180.

Doesn't really matter because CA is uniparty system. Few people doing 180 isn't going stop us from providing compassionate care instead of vindictive suggestions like imprisonment.

Where is the compassion for contributing members of society who have to deal with this on a daily basis?

I consider myself a progressive individual, but I won’t allow someone to damage my home or other property simply because they are mentally unwell. I won’t allow my child or wife to be harassed or watch them tip toe around feces and broken class because people can’t get their act together.

> Where is the compassion for contributing members of society

Pretty sure compassion for top 1% of society isn't really top priority for the society.

you can move easily if you want with all the resources you have at your disposal.

People want to live their lives without being harassed and without having their property damaged or their loved ones harmed.

If you had to choose between property or people, which would it be?

I would choose my family’s safety and well being over the life of a stranger every time.

You can just say property. No judgement here. Property rights form the basis of society.

sure thats totally fair but There are literally thousands of places you can move to if thats really your priority. You are clearly prioritizing something else over safety to continue to live there.

You're essentially saying "if you don't like it, leave."

I hope you understand that it's attitudes like yours that are driving otherwise moderate people to join the GOP and become conservative voters.

And you're placing the onus on the contributing members of society who just wish to be left alone. Rather than having the criminals correct or stop their behavior.

> You're essentially saying "if you don't like it, leave."

Yes if you have options then why not. People make these decisions everyday. You are saying X is your top priority then I don't understand what stoping you from achieving that X when you have all the resources in the world to make it possible. Why do you need compassion from others if you already have the resources to achieve your own goals. What i am missing here.

> Why do you need compassion from others if you already have the resources to achieve your own goals. What i am missing here.

Communities are more than a package of policies. Californians are unsatisfied with the status quo. They could decamp. Or they could work to change the system. They're doing the latter.

Nah. It is time to stop blaming democrats for republican policies. People go to GOP, because they like GOP as it is.

I never seen progressives being blamed on GOP with equivalent "they made them do it".

I’m not blaming democrats for GOP policy.

Voters who are on the fence are only one incident like this away from becoming GOP voters.

And when you have people like the person I replied to saying “oh well, just move if you don’t want people shitting in your yard”, that’s going to drive those people to the GOP.

Those people are not on the fence. They are pro GOP, maybe needing excuse.

The people actually on the fence would be equally likely to flip to democrats after hearing equivalent slightly non accommodating phrase. But they are nowhere near of that. GOP does not have to top toe around them, they can go fully openly insulting and it is fine.

It is not being on the fence. It is being pro GOP, seeing its excesses and feeling slightly ashamed for them, so wanting to blame democrats for them.

People are moving. They’re leaving these places and going to areas they and their families can live with a presumption of safety, without also being accused of “lacking compassion.”

I won't allow it either, but the question does become "what are you going to do about it?" I don't want to assume anything about your experiences, but you might be surprised, in a place like San Francisco, how few options you have.

You have the ability (and perhaps the duty, at some point) to move.

Maybe these people don't feel the need uphold their part of the unwritten contract with society, because society hasn't uphold their side during their life. Generally such problems are much rarer in societies where the divide between rich and poor is smaller, where you have free access to healthcare and psychological treatment and where you have some form of social security that keeps you off the street.

What you phrase here are the consequences of the form of society you are living in. The question now is, do you want to solve the root causes of these issues or do you want to paint over them following the motto "out of sight, out of mind".

I mean maybe it is my European arrogance, but to me it is pretty damn obvious that a lot of the things that make parts of the US this dystopic place are a direct result of the lack of social cohesion. Helping total strangers out with my tax money is not something I just do because it is the right thing to do, I also do it because living in a nicer society feels better than living in one where one quarter is desperately fighting for survival while another quarter has basically already given up.

> maybe it is my European arrogance

It could be. Social cohesion is a lot easier in monoethnic countries, for better or for worse; and in countries where the monoethnicity is changing like Sweden (where a full quarter of the population is not ethnically Swedish), voters are putting political parties in power that promise to restore it by some combination of reducing immigration or enforcing integration.

In the meantime, the dystopia of the United States is such that the state of Mississippi, often panned both within the US and without as a "literal third-world country", has a higher per capita disposable income than Germany. The image that you have of half the population either struggling to stay alive or basically dead is not true to reality.

I feel you're just repeating randomly cherry-picked stats.

The data is fairly consistent that the USA as a whole has slowly lost it's advantages over Europe that it had after WWII and the New Deal:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_of_living_in_the_Unit...

> In the United Nations Human Development Index, which measures health, education, and per capita income levels, the United States is relatively high, currently ranking 8th. However, the Human Development Index is not considered a measure of living standards, but a measure of potential living standards were there no inequality: rather, the inequality-adjusted Human Development Index is considered the actual level of human development, taking inequality into account. On the inequality-adjusted HDI, the United States ranked 27th in 2014, tied with Poland

Wikipedia has newer stats too, but the USA is still basically tied with Poland in the mid 20s:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_inequalit...

So, if the USA as a whole is Poland then presumably Mississipi, despite all the money they get from other states, is likely not doing that great compared with Germany.

Also intersesting, and new to me, they do one that takes into account how wasteful the country is with resources to achieve that standard of living, on that the USA slips way down, below Ukraine:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_planetary...

> The data is fairly consistent that the USA as a whole has slowly lost it's advantages over Europe

It is September now, let's talk about USA standards of living vs European in say 6 months. This will give some time to account for the winter with natural gas shortages.

I think they made a compatible point that you are glossing over.

The US can have all of the following: less social cohesion, more money, more inequality, and less human development.

I agree that social cohesion is at the crux of most of it. Many Americans hate most other Americans at any given time. Most are concerned in exerting political control over each other to force them to behave how they want.

I don't know about "hate", but one of the foundational ideas of the US, at least from what I can make of it, is that more control should be relegated to the lower levels of government (to the states or the people), and the highest levels (the federal government) should necessarily be sort of the least common denominator of what everyone agrees on -- which, of course, is going to be few things.

So you have a situation where one side wants to "help people" by throwing money at them and yelling at the other side for being heartless greedy bastards, and the other side wants to "help people" by imposing state-sanctioned morality on them and yelling at the other side for being immoral hedonists, and the federal government being simultaneous trying to be used by everyone for their own purposes and yelled at by everyone for being "obstructionist" (hint: that's it working as intended).

I think it goes a bit further than you described. both sides aren't just judging calling the other side heartless or hedonists. They are actively using the state and police to force them to comply with their own morality via mandatory taxation and laws. (e.g. mandatory taxation for social welfare, or prohibition of private behavior such as buying alcohol on Sunday)

Social diversity = differences in morality

differences in morality + State enforced morality = low social cohesion/animosity.

I promise I'm not downvoting you despite our disagreements -- I'm not sure why you are being downvoted.

I'm not disputing that other countries are more egalitarian than the US, and it's more comfortable to be poor in countries like Norway or New Zealand (ranked higher on the IHDI) than the US. But I'm willing to bet that almost all, if not all, of the countries higher than the US on IHDI are net immigrants to the US. This data is surprisingly hard to find, but the couple that I did manage find (Ireland, France) supported my viewpoint. If anyone has a table of net migration by country pair, it would be marvellous.

So clearly something is still drawing people to the US, even from countries that are more egalitarian than the US.

This "planetary pressure-adjusted HDI" thing sounds completely made up ;-) but by your same logic, if the US is doing poorly by virtue of it being ranked around Ukraine, then apparently Luxembourg is truly awful, ranked 153rd around the likes of Afghanistan and DR Congo. And I'm sure only very few people would choose to live in Ukraine, Azerbaijan, or Saudi Arabia over the US, given the same relative impact on the planet; in fact, when it comes to people's own lives, practically everyone chooses (metaphorically) "drill, baby, drill!".

Well, they could choose to live in a country that score high on all of the indices, like Germany.

The northern EU immigrants to the USA are generally a small amount of highly educated workers. And it's unlikely they're moving to Missisippi:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...

To Germany's credit, they are the second biggest receiver of international immigrants, only behind the US which take in almost a full fifth of all. But between Germans and Americans, the net gainer was the US for the past 30 years[0], though with the gap narrowing in recent years.

Granted, those are small absolute numbers and may not indicate much, but still, if Germany is that much better than the US, why are consistently more Germans choosing to live in the US than the other way around?

[0]: https://www.destatis.de/EN/Press/2020/10/PE20_N068_12411.htm...

If I had to chose one factor I'd say lack of language skills.

It doesn't really change the fact that America is squandering its many advantages and seems unaware of how poorly it's doing compared with what it could be doing.

You could make a reasonable case today for wanting to be born in China rather than the US. That should embarrass the US but instead they've recently latched on to a very convenient belief that China will implode in the next five years. And they've been saying that for decades because it's been obvious for that long how embarrassing it is to be caught up so fast and need an excuse that isn't just them at fault for their own problems.

"Oh China only did so well because we gave them all this stuff and they cheated and copied us, not at all like how we ripped of IP from Europe in our own history".

No instead were celebrating well known, tragic failure Mississippi because it has a number higher than another number if you carefully avoid all context.

The fractions mentioned were of course hyperbole. My point was that giving away more of your income to your peers will create a more livable environment. For example as we talk about Mississipi and Germany:

- Infant mortality — Germany: 2.67 deaths per 1000 live births, Mississippi: 8.8 infant deaths per 1000 live births

- Life expectancy — Germany: 80.1 years, Mississippi: 71.9 years

- Homicides per 100.000 population — Germany: 0.933, Mississippi: 20.5

So the superiour disposable income in Mississippi surely does not help to keep their infants (or rather themselves) from dying more often.

But okay: you pay less taxes and therefore have more disposable income as people living in Germany. But it comes at a cost. And while well educated upper class people might not be as much affected by this (if they are lucky and don't fall victim to the resulting violence), this will shape the whole environment you are living in. Nothing else was my point. If I had to choose between more money and a less livable environment, or less money and a more livable environment I'd choose the later one. Money can buy you a lot of nice things, but unless you never leave your home living in a nice environment is worth more for a live well spent. And if you never leave your home, you should maybe wonder why.

By the way I live in Hamburg, Germany, where 34% of the population has a migration background, many turkish, arabian and african minorities. I never heard a single gunshot in a decade of living here. I have never seen a single person publicly using hard drugs (excluding Marihuana, Alcohol and similar things). I have once seen a used syringe and I live in one of the dirtier parts of the city.

Just like living in a noisy flat will wear you down in ways you don't even notice until you finally spend a few calm nights in another place, the environment you live in affects you as well.

There is a huge diversity between US states in our federal structure, just like there is a huge diversity between EU member countries. For better or worse, US states are sovereign entities with the right to govern their own internal affairs. It would be more sensible to compare Mississippi to Romania. (Although Mississippi does still come out worse on certain metrics.)

You're absolutely right about everything you said, but for me the crux of it comes down to:

> If I had to choose between more money and a less livable environment, or less money and a more livable environment I'd choose the later one.

Some people might choose differently, and moreover, the less taxation there is, the more people are able to choose between the two at all. After all, you can freely give to charity what isn't taxed from you, should you choose to trade your money to better outcomes of those around you.

I have never been to your fair city (though I always have wanted to!), but a 34% foreign-born rate is comparable to many large cities in the US, some in states with more egalitarian policies (California, New Jersey) and some in states with less egalitarian policies (Florida, Texas); so clearly that is not a big driver, at least in the US, of where immigrants choose to go.

San Francisco, famously egalitarian in its local politics, is right in line with Hamburg at 34.1% foreign-born; yet it is full of people using hard drugs in public, leaving syringes and human waste behind.

> Helping total strangers out with my tax money is not something I just do because it is the right thing to do, I also do it because living in a nicer society feels better than living in one where one quarter is desperately fighting for survival while another quarter has basically already given up.

This is basically my thought process, and I also feel it would be a stronger argument in a lot of cases. Some amount of me, in some cases, views the taxes through the lens of helping people and making a collective better future. Another part of me is much more selfish about it. Don't like seeing homeless, drug addicts, dirty streets, street tents, beggers, etc? Pay your share to not see them.

I'm not opposed to paying taxes to help out people in need. But in California, much of that tax revenue ends up in the "homeless industrial complex" filled with bureaucrats, consultants, vendors, and non-profit employees who have a direct financial incentive to perpetuate the problem rather than solving it. Some are also pushing leftist political ideologies which directly cause more homelessness when put into practice.

I don't mean to paint with too broad a brush here. Most people working to aid the homeless are sincere and trying to make a positive influence. But there is a huge amount of waste, and taxpayers are right to be skeptical about where their money is going.

This is the main concern - millions or billions can be spent on a system that is obviously failing and the solution is always spend even more.

I agree. I was talking more in general toward the idea of not wanting to pay more in taxes to "pay for the lifestyle of those who don't work", that is a common sentiment in general for social safety nets. Instead of focusing on how someone's money will help someone else, you can show how it will help those who would be paying more in taxes.

The concept of personal behavior being contingent on society providing free access to healthcare seems so bizarre. Up until a few generations ago there was hardly any healthcare, and what healthcare did exist often did more harm than good.

I do support expanding access to basic healthcare (including mental health services) but I think that would have only a minor impact on the problem. There's something else going wrong.

That’s not how it works. The obligation is to society, not the other way around

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