S.F. sued over homeless camp sweeps: city charged with criminalizing unsheltered
sfchronicle.com
sfchronicle.com
Demand, it says.
Here's the problem with homeless advocates and their goals: they're idealistic and absolute. What percentage of homeless people are locals? Maybe 50 percent or less? We live in a country of over 320 million people and porous-by-law borders between 49 other states. What do you think would happen to a place that would create supportive housing structure, have the most liberal laws on public drug use and property crimes, with volunteers on stand-by to provide needles and medical attention as needed.
It's all a bit perplexing to me that people keep touting "housing shortages." I live surrounded by homeless people. They're not homeless because rents are high, they're homeless because of a slew of other psychological and addiction issues. And almost no one was born in the city that they're homeless in.
70% by recent counts. 22% from California (and 14% from other bay area counties). The remaining 8% are from out of state.
https://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/2019HIRDRep...
> And almost no one was born in the city that they're homeless in
Not clear on why that is particularly relevant. Almost no one I know lives in the town they were born in, myself included. Of the few homeless people I know personally here in Oakland, all of them were born and raised in Oakland.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/archive/item/A-decade-of-homeles...
There is a lot of land and resources in California to help these individuals focus on recovery and it should be possible to keep the cartel drug dealers away from them in a non urban area.
In conservative Utah, they know their housing-first approach works. It isn't 100% effective, but it is more effective than police-based approaches.
Also, commenting on downvoting is generally frowned upon here. Discuss the article and the comments themselves instead.
They tried this in Minneapolis during COVID to try and get a bunch of homeless people off the street in a nearby hotel that had been emptied due to COVID.
It didn't turn out very well:
A report of a drug overdose led to the eviction Tuesday of more than 200 homeless people from a hotel in south Minneapolis that had become a refuge during protests that erupted in the wake of George Floyd’s killing in police custody.
But some residents at the hotel said conditions had begun to spin out of control in recent days, with people injecting heroin and methamphetamine in the hallways, and fights breaking out at night. Volunteers became overwhelmed.
“It started out well, then descended into chaos,” said Jennie Taylor, who had a room on the second floor. “People got the message that this was a place where you could use drugs freely and that attracted the wrong crowd.”
https://www.startribune.com/homeless-evicted-from-former-mpl...
This has little to do with the availability of housing, or the cost of housing. Some people will simply refuse to live in the housing that is provided. Many are so mentally ill and addicted to drugs that no amount of money we give them, either directly or indirectly, will get them off the streets.
Proposed solutions that don't involve incarceration should be ignored as unserious and unrealistic.
Is that harsh? Is it "not progressive?" Yep. Progressive attempts to solve this problem have all failed. Progressives have allowed San Francisco to turn into an open-air drug den, attracting homeless people from all over the country, and nobody should listen to their ideas anymore.
Genuinely curious, what is the estimated income of your two homeless friends? And do they have any limitations on their salary potential?
> This has little to do with the availability of housing, or the cost of housing. Some people will simply refuse to live in the housing that is provided. Many are so mentally ill and addicted to drugs that no amount of money we give them, either directly or indirectly, will get them off the streets.
Everyone cohabitates with family and friends at some point in life. It's very different than sleeping on the street.
The drugs, and the camps, kill people. If they don't have the wherewithal to move then we need to do it for them. They can't get better while living in filth and honestly can't choose to do better. Once they're imprisoned, in a drug program - not a jail, for the 3-5 years it takes to actually detox they'll be ready to start to get clean and on their feet.
Once they get detoxed though they're going to be looking for a room to rent and a friend and now your offer of help is both wanted and sustainable.
IMO the homeless issue is San Francisco is because they've practically incentivized being homeless by subsidizing the homeless and also making any defense against the crimes of homeless toothless (misdemeanor theft is barely enforced, it is illegal to use violent self defense to defend property, and weapons laws are among the most restrictive in the nation.)
You don't even have to incarcerate them. Just make city policies such that there's no advantage to being homeless in SF, other than maybe the weather.
I don't see any advantage to being homeless. Literally every human being without mental issues would prefer having a roof over their head. This is a market failure.
You missed the "in SF" part of the sentence. In a sense you're correct, it is in part a market failure in SF for subsidizing homelessness.
>Literally every human being without mental issues would prefer having a roof over their head
I have a few times, on purpose. Not being responsible for a house can be liberating, depending on your life circumstances -- if you're not addicted, you're healthy and able bodied, and not mentally ill. It can be like an adventure where you see where you like to go, can get all the money you need for a week in only a day of day labor (which is trivial to get if you're able bodied and have an ID). Homelessness with serious personal problems is awful, but otherwise it can be an enjoyable lifestyle.
I would probably choose periodic homelessness still today were it not I have a child, whom CPS would probably take away if I enjoyed some of the liberties of my youth.
So I bought a shitty car and slept in the forest. The car finally broke down. I wound up homeless. I found out I really loved the forest and spending my time outdoors. I loved to spend months at a time in tents, coming into town to do day labor. Really it's a life I dream of nearly daily now that I have responsibilities to my family that keep me chained to a desk 5 days a week, and to a child during the weekends.
Only once you've been homeless you realize the problems of the homeless are typically the reason why they became homeless - drugs/addiction, mental illness, criminal record, lack of skills for employment. I had none of those problems really, so to me it was just a new adventure, except I could go practically anywhere I wanted and just enjoy travelling. I knew how to live outdoors and can easily adapt a tarp for inclement weather so for me it was just fun, for real! But I know it isn't that way for someone who doesn't want that life. I could always just pick up a day of day labor, and after a couple weeks of that afford to rent another room -- many people have personal problems that keep them from doing that.
That's the problem right there.
Are you aware that mentally ill and drug-addicted people are often able to hold down jobs and afford rent? But that only works when rent is reasonable.
Do you have proof that they would, in fact, be successful? Have you tried running an RCT? Maybe they would't be able to find jobs, or have childcare available from family nearby.
But I doubt it would get past an ethics committee, and if it did there would be a huge scandal. We're pretty deeply committed that the huddled masses of the world must be housed within SF. Even as we're equally deeply committed that they not exist at any particular site within SF, and won't contemplate anywhere near the unit counts (from a budget perspective or a permitting perspective) that would be required.
If you do day labor all week you just made $500 and you only need $100 to survive the week. Pretty easy to sock money away that way... if you decide to rent a room a couple weeks of that gets you your first week in a weekly rental and from there you can clean up and get a regular factory job. I had a well oiled process that I ran that cycle quite a few times. AFter 1-3 months at a factory I would generally get a fork-lift job or something that paid even more and from there you're basically as rich as the average American.
Bonus: If you have HN skills your average wage from the fork-lift job will give you enough to buy a nice laptop, hi-speed internet and then a high-paying programming job -- although it's obviously not generally applicable (although I've done it).
He is one of the people I am very keen to help because he is literally sleeping in the park with screaming, violent drug addicts. He's told me he can't get section 8 housing or any other help as he has money. He has told me if he was an addict he knows he would be getting state payouts and 'help'.
He has lived in rented rooms in the past and I think a boarding house model for clean, sober low income workers is essential.
I was the first post on this thread. I feel we have to be extremely aggressive with the Honduran cartels who run the drugs into SF and sell them, and to triage people on the streets into appropriate facilities, including rural substance abuse recovery incarceration centers with appropriate services.
Once drugs have rewired your brain you are turned into a zombie that has been reprogrammed to do whatever it takes to keep the flow of your addiction coming. We have to break this cycle.
I have lived in circumstances that I did not prefer but made decisions for safer/stable alternatives only because my survival instinct was stronger than my need to establish my need for freedom. I try to be empathetic but I can’t wrap my head around this kind of logic.
We have a system where every individual has the freedom to live within the law of the land and using their own resources.
When living in San Francisco becomes untenable and yet the choice is made, the individual should accept responsibility for their decision.
One might argue if someone just shows up from afar in SF, you get them housed and their life back together, there's comparably (to the 10 year person) little reason to believe they're gonna stick around to pay back into the system and produce the kind of ROI on the localities investment that whole foods guy may give
I'm not saying this is a "good" argument per se, but it would one that would make sense to me. If someone put a gun to my head and said "figure out how to use taxes, and only taxes, to help the homeless" I would probably rank cities by unskilled income : cost of living, then build rehabilitation facilities in those areas and use a nationwide distributed tax model to offer people voluntary relocation and rehabilitation in partnership with local businesses which is jointly funded nationwide to avoid the situation seen such as in SF where the minute you give the homeless more benefits you get them coming from all around to benefit.
If you give homeless benefits just for showing up it's gonna end up as a race to the bottom, IMO, where whoever is the most 'helpful' sees a landslide of immigration of people needing help, which isn't practical when the load isn't shared. SF locals are probably not going to want to be the ones known as the person that foots the rehab bill for anyone who hitchhikes to town and then merrily walks away never to pay it back as soon as they get their heads on straight.
Some suggestions:
1. Move to north bay or another area where it is more affordable. Whole Foods probably will allow transfers. 2. Can he upskill? Certificate courses or some such? 3. Can he get or can someone pitch in to get him a gym membership? 4. Will he be able to rent a room? 5. Room mate situation with someone? 6. Can he take driving lessons and obtain a license?
Perhaps you can help him get a license or a gym membership? If he has the money, it’s a small amount. Stability and community is very crucial for housing vulnerable folks.
There can be other jobs like house sitting or caretaking or pet sitting. There are many jobs online that also pay these days.
Best of luck to your friend.
This is a startlingly ignorant take. Shelter is among the basic human needs. If people were starving to death, would you blame mental illness or food prices?
> Progressive attempts to solve this problem have all failed
Yes. Because they don't focus on creating more housing. Not "affordable" housing, just housing.
They're called "progressive" attempts because the city's politics is dominated by progressives. But every property owner and voter, regardless of political stripe, is responsible for this state of affairs.
There is exactly 1 solution to California's "housing crisis". More housing. Not "affordable" housing. Not mass transit alone. More. Housing. Moar. Build baby build. If that doesn't work, you know what you do? Build more housing. Beat those prices into the ground with construction cranes and hammers.
Here's a study someone else posted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33010913
"The data shows that over 70% of all of SF's unhoused people became homeless while living in San Francisco"
According to a 2019 survey [0], only 70% of people were living in SF prior to being homeless, and of those 70%, approximately half had lived in SF for less than ten years.
To me, that's staggering if 30% of the homeless population was already homeless before they moved to SF, and if another 30% became homeless within 10 years of moving to SF.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_San_Franci...
Then there are the chronically homeless. Those with no desire to become productive. These are the people that imo would be helped by forced rehab programs. But make no mistake, many, many homeless are the first type, not the second.
Should this be allowed? It's morally complex. For instance, if those people were in Nevada or Arizona, they'd likely die of exposure. San Francisco is a uniquely good place to survive being homeless, at least climate-wise.
Do more people come to these cities that have such policies? Probably... but that's not an indictment of the policy. We have a national crisis. We have some cities/states who literally pay for 1-way bus tickets out (as an alternative to jail).
This solves nothing. Having more people in jail solves nothing.
Yes it does. It gets them off the streets. It is the only thing that will do it.
The problem in the past is that we only incarcerated homeless people overnight. Jail was a revolving door, and people went right back onto the streets after being released, over and over again.
The problem is that we released them before they had recovered from the problems that made them homeless! We put them right back on the streets! It was a stupid policy that achieved nothing.
We need to be willing, as a society, to incarcerate people, and keep them incarcerated, until we have a good reason to believe they will not be homeless when released. This will require massive commitment and expenditure.
The problem has become so great that nothing else will work. There are no other possible solutions. Plus, if you see the way these people currently live, you'd realize that being institutionalized is better than the hell that is currently their daily lives.
So does it follow that the reason the previous houseed persons who are now homeless were previously in jail? If not, then there are other root causes at work, such as disappearance of inexpensive housing.
The argument you are making sounds like a dialog out of Charles Dickens, just without the irony.
Really? What about the "people are shitting on the street" issue? You don't think arresting people who do that will stop it? It'll create other problems, and obviously we shouldn't just go around and permanently lock up everyone who is living on the street, but doing that would obviously solve some things.
There's a point at which freedom and independence aren't working for someone. Maybe with more resources it could work. But sometimes you need to be in the care of an institution from which you cannot just wander away. This seems obvious... I genuinely do not understand. Do you think there is no such threshold? Or do you think the people hanging out in Civic Center right now aren't over it?
[0] https://gothamist.com/news/rikers-images-shower-cages-poor-c...
Do you honestly believe that after all that, people are still rational and blindly accept help from the state? No, they’ve failed so for, you might as well just accept that things are as good as they’ll get.
When tackling this problem, we don’t only have to deal with the current situations, we also have to consider past failure, because people remember them, and they do affect current behavior.
Incarceration has been our primary approach for dealing with drug addiction and mental illness over the last 42 years. It is extremely expensive, with cost-per-inmate figures ranging from $15K-64K depending on the state, with California being the most expensive. I don't know of any public policy experts, regardless of their political leanings who consider this an effective approach.
I think people fail to recognize that part of the push to "decriminalize" drugs and homelessness isn't necessarily bleeding-heart progressivism but calculated austerity: Prisons are full. We want murders, rapists and violent criminals locked up in them. We cannot do that if they are clogged up with people whose primary offenses were being mentally ill and/or drugs.
I understand that California in particular has been more lax the rest of the country, but coming from the midwest our hard-ass drug laws didn't prevent meth and then heroin from ravaging both urban and rural communities.
So if you do want to simply lock these people away, I think you also need the political will to do two very important things:
1) Provide evidence that spending $15,000-$65,000 to incarcerate a homeless drug addict will produce a better outcome than spending those same public tax dollars on something else that could also benefit society and/or the individuals in question.
2) Raise and invest tax money into prison infrastructure to house these people. This will likely mean hiking taxes and/or cutting them from things like education.
I mean, you can stop right there. Our cities should not be like that. We need to have higher standards than that.
You know there have been studies where giving people homes, or building subsidized housing, absolutely does improve peoples lives, cut addiction and crime rates, and generally do the things most progressives say they will.
Your proposal also puts them in expensive government housing but it does so in a way which significantly harms the individual. Incarceration might “solve” the problem for you but it does so at an extreme cost to others. And the financial burden to the state is still high. Meanwhile social housing solutions like those in Vienna actually make positive changes to peoples lives while still getting them off the streets:
https://www.huduser.gov/portal/pdredge/pdr_edge_featd_articl...
Honestly it’s like you people think the police and prisons are free.
No, I think those things cost money and are worth paying for.
What did I write that made you think I thought they were free?
We could build all the social housing we want, but it will only house people who willingly move into it. Many homeless people are insane drug addicts, and they are the ones who disrupt society, and they will not willingly change. What would you do about that?
“Many people are insane drug addicts”
Lots of people in society are drug addicts. Probably the rate is slightly higher amongst the homeless because homelessness can be hard.
Lots of people don’t want to go to existing shelters because of the draconian rules at those shelters. Probably you wouldn’t want to live in a place either if you had to be home every night at 8pm and you couldn’t have friends over and you weren’t allowed to have some beer. Does that mean we should throw you in prison?
What I would do is provide the services these people need. Housing, mental health services, counseling, job training, and job placement programs. All told this would cost less than prison because these programs have been shown to actually help people, so the burden to the state will go down over a few years as these programs do what they are supposed to. But prison won’t help them, so the costs will continue for as long as they are in prison, and once they are released you’re back where you started.
Don’t pretend you want to help people if you don’t actually care what is most effective at helping them.
I want to help people. I just recognize reality. All of what you have suggested has been tried, and has failed, and now the streets of San Francisco are unrecognizably bad. Dystopian sci-fi movies from the 1980s are actually better than the reality on the streets today.
Also, who are we trying to help? Personally I care more about the person living in an apartment who has to deal with crazy people stabbing each other outside of their window in the morning than I do about the crazy people stabbing each other. Not enough attention has been paid to the people who are trying to live upright lives while being surrounded by this violence -- going to work, raising children, etc. They matter too.
People love to say this while ignoring the fact that universal health care and social housing absolutely work in other parts of the world. Whatever parts of this strategy you think have been tried, it’s clear there are ways to make it work. You’d rather abandon those people you consider lesser because of mental illness or addiction, but we can in fact support those people for the same price as a prison cell.
It’s remarkable that you think you recognize reality and believe these things can’t work, because $60k per year of spending on social services would absolutely work. I mean hell the average German only needs something like $8k in services for medical care per year. You don’t think that would help?? You can claim to “recognize reality” but you’re ignoring how effective public spending is the world over.
If you think Americans are unable to function as well as Germans then I hope you're speaking out loudly at PTA meetings because it must mean the American education system is utterly broken.
Like, you want to spend $60k/year or whatever throwing these people in prison for struggling to make it in the current system, and I’m here saying “spend that money on services, like Germany does”, and you say “no our people are way worse off than the German population” and you cannot seem to connect the dots that German social spending is exactly the reason Germany doesn’t have these problems… social spending works!
America (and Canada too!) had horrible issues with abuses in mental institutions that led to a short sighted knee-jerk reaction of shuttering all of them to prevent abuses rather than cleaning them up and addressing the actual concerns. As someone with a family member with developmental disabilities (comorbid with other issues) I've seen my family member thrive in institutional settings - not getting locked in a padded cell institutions but facilities with enough staff and patients to respond quickly and with specialized labour to sudden issues. I think it'd be wonderful if we could, as a society, get our minds away from Victoria Era sanitoriums where patients were exhibited as carnival shows and start seriously investing in larger facilities - home care options and group homes fall extremely short in providing ample care for folks while being extremely costly.
I don't think any of the people sleeping on the street are there by choice - it's just that their alternatives don't exist. A fair number of shelters are run by religious organizations that shame and preach to the homeless - offering a bed in exchange for prostelitization, other shelters are short on beds for the population they need to serve and prevent long term residency sometimes allowing a few consecutive nights - sometimes offering a single night, kicking everyone out in the morning and offering beds first come first served.
Depending on how you are defining incarceration I'm either in agreement with you or I guess - yea, it'd work, but it's a terrible solution to just force people with mental illnesses into the prison system where they will receive next to no mental healthcare and just rot as human beings. Mental disabilities don't make you subhuman.
Drug addiction is far worse in WV yet they don't have a major homeless problem.
Explain this discrepency please if it's all because of drugs
All the people in this thread are refusing to acknowledge that may play some causal factor because the solution might involve slightly lowering their property values.
Show your work here. It's actually not simple at all because per capita drug abuse is far worse in WV so if that's the causal mechanism then you should see tons of homeless in WV.
You're getting REALLY close to getting this.
The "housing first" approach does seem to have a number of successful examples. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_First#Evidence_and_out...
> we have a chronic opioid and meth crisis which tips many people over into serious mental illness.
But also the most visible homeless population is not the only homeless population, and people who became homeless through other paths can get stuck. Having a home is really helpful for e.g. getting and keeping a job, resolving or managing health issues, etc.
You can't give a junkie anything you don't want them to trade for drugs. If you give them an apartment they'll sell the plumbing fixtures and everything else. They'll also go back to sleeping outside, right next to where they procure their fentanyl, because nothing but acquiring and using matters.
Vancouver and SF also both insist you can't give someone a dingy basement suite (like many of their residents actually pay for and live in) but you have to give them a bright cheery condo in an expensive area. All done seemingly to avoid ever having enough money to house more than a few people. Housing first isn't actually being tried, in a way that taxpayers or foreign drug-policy experts would expect.
It's more about the careers of the literal thousands of people, poverty pimps, who "manage" the problem every day, and the power it gives them in city council to make sweeping decisions for the city. The number of lives lost positively correlates with dollars spent because the money goes to feel-good nonsense and bandaids, and actually counter-productive measures like fentanyl vending machines which have been proven to increase, not replace, street crime.
The data[1] shows that over 70% of all of SF's unhoused people became homeless while living in San Francisco. What we're dealing with is a housing crisis.
Every $100 increase in median rent is associated with a 9 percent increase in the estimated homelessness rate. [2]
[1] https://hsh.sfgov.org/get-involved/2022-pit-count/
[2] https://nlihc.org/resource/gao-report-congress-finds-increas...
Out of morbid curiosity.. is this not crack cocaine?
I think intuitively it seem likely to me that drugs might be the difference between chronically homeless people and merely temporary, it also seems like it might have a relationship with the people you encounter on the street and get mad about seeing, but the studies of the overall population seem to say homelessness is causing drug use not the other way around
I'd be careful with this. High housing costs are also likely highly correlated with areas that provide a lot of services to the homeless which might be the cause of homelessness.
Lost Job 26% Alcohol or Drug Use 18% Eviction 13% Argument with Family or Friend Who Asked You to Leave 12% Mental Health Issues 8% Divorce/Separation/Breakup 5%
https://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/2019HIRDRep...
They have shelter beds available. People need to stop repeating falsehoods from activists and well-meaning people who keep saying this.
Some homeless people prefer not to use them for a variety of reasons -- usually because shelters tend to be drug- and alcohol-free -- but also for reasons like not accepting pets or not housing couples of opposite gender together.
Handwaving this away and saying, well, maybe according to some estimate we may run out of beds in the future -- when we haven't run out of beds and never do, is not a serious argument.
Shelters are rife with abuse and have no place for you to store your belongings.
>for reasons like not accepting pets or not housing couples of opposite gender together.
You so casually dismiss the fundamental human desire to be close to the people and animals that you trust while being inside a facility that offers you the absolute barest of minimum and is sometimes outright designed to expose you to predation.
I hope you are able to cite some sources the next time you try to make this point.
Its going to have to be an involuntary solution (yes, incarceration), and its probably going to involve moving people to a ranch-like area away from the city with a much different housing setup than some cells or apartments, maybe something with individual shelters with outside spaces. I expect its going to be a commitment of years or forever for some of these people. Working on people's mental health and addiction is not some 30 day process. Just the dentist bill alone will be scary, but its not going to get better in a tent in SF.
Society cannot last with this level of filth and crime in major cities.
The homeless because of cost folks, well, move to somewhere else or we are going to need a wave of mini-apartments approved at some point, but SF doesn't like such things.
This difference, which gets lost in discussions such as the one here, leads to bad-faith statements by politicians and others regarding the true amount of housing available for homeless people. For example, the number of "available beds" touted by Newsom and others are almost entirely within short-term emergency shelters, which do not address the real problem (chronic homelessness) much at all. Instead, this "number-of-beds" statistic is used to gloss over the fact that a real solution has not been found, and then justify (probably illegal) police action against homeless people. The true intent of such actions is probably to cause regular disruption in the lives of homeless people to increase the difficulty of simply being homeless in San Francisco. Whether or not you agree with such police action is up to you, but it's important to acknowledge that the argument that "there is available housing" is a bad faith argument, and that this argument is simply used to redirect attention from both police action against homeless people as well as the fact that a real solution has not been found.
Here's a citation that describes the differences between short term emergency housing and long term housing, which illuminates why the current approach being taken by San Francisco is not genuine as well as approaches that might actually work:
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. (2018). Permanent supportive housing: Evaluating the evidence for improving health outcomes among people experiencing chronic homelessness.
I guess we'll find out in 2024 if that argument has legs.
Everyday, there is a missed opportunity to clean up the streets: https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/bayarea/heatherknight/article...
[..]In what has become a five-alarm fire for many women in the city — spread on social media — several alleged victims have posted photos of the distinctive-looking Hobbs, a 6-foot-4 white man with a buzz cut and a body covered in tattoos, including the E-V-I-L tag on his fingers.
The fact that a San Francisco Superior Court judge dismissed a case against Hobbs in which he was accused of following and grabbing a 15-year-old girl — first reported in this column — is well known by now. So is the fact that he’s back on the streets despite a long arrest record in four counties, despite admitting to me in a phone interview that he follows women he finds attractive, and despite the flood of new complaints.
But it turns out city officials had another chance to intervene on Aug. 11 — and again came up short.[..]
[..]A police report states that he entered a home on Avila Street in the Marina while the owner, who left the door unlocked, was out walking his dog. When the owner returned and found Hobbs standing in his hallway, he called police and told them the intruder kept saying, “I want a house like this.”
Hobbs, according to the report, initially told officers he was “Scott Peterson,” using the name of the California man who notoriously killed his pregnant wife.[..]
Anyone who is chronically homeless should be offered jobs and paid housing. If that doesn't work, then they become a ward of the state and treated as a child.
[1] https://www.chase.com/personal/banking/education/budgeting-s....
Have you considered that you only notice the addicts and mentally ill? Because they don't give a shit about being seen as homeless. Everyone else is probably trying to keep up appearances by hanging out in libraries or coffee shops during the day.
They're also very unlikely to remain homeless for long periods.
> If that doesn't work, then they become a ward of the state and treated as a child.
The original title was : “S.F. sued over homeless camp sweeps activists charge city with criminalizing unsheltered” that I edited due to limits on title length on HN submission.
First time I’m hearing of such a complex that sounds oxymoronic. How big is this complex? Who are the players? How do they make so much money to become a complex industry?
https://mynorthwest.com/2744155/seattles-two-new-hotel-homel...
The motels would be worth nowhere near that much if sold as a motel, and it is happening all up and down west coast cities. I know one property that sold for $150k per key, which would have sold for half that to a non government buyer, and the kicker is that it sits empty except for housing 2 guests that were already living there when the government bought it in summer 2021.
The point of the sweeps is to make the camps an undesirable option compared to shelters, or moving back home, by increasing the friction and hassle of camping vs the alternatives.
Most of CA's homeless aren't local to SF, LA, or SD, or even to California. For example, LAT reporting on the subject has confirmed that as much as 75% of Hollywood's homeless may be from the Midwest. Several Midwestern states (specifically, Texas and Oklahoma) openly brag about shipping their homeless to CA to avoid dealing with the costs of caring for their own residents. Moreover, the great majority of the drug-addicted homeless population is comprised of out-of-state residents, and drug addicts are more than half of California's homeless.
Camp sweeps are a good thing. They disincentivize drug hotspots, get the mentally ill into shelters where they can be treated, and improve safety for everyone else.
these camps are a serious problem for the rest of us in SF that are trying to lead quasi-normal lives. it just cant be acceptable to have dogs trained to harass and attack people running around free on the streets.
i'm hardly a law and order kind of person, but methheads arguing outside your window every night is real problem. it really hard to run a retail business when there are 5-6 seriously messed up people living right outside you door who have reluctantly agreed to keep a tiny path free.
it really sucks to have to pick up their biological waste because they cant be bothered.
as a society, not just the city of SF, we should really wonder what we're trying to accomplish here and how this situation came to exist instead of wondering if there is another rug we can push this all under.
I think if it disincentivizes drug hotspots, the effect is weak. I would say it temporarily moves the same people by a very short distance. You still see the same issues in the same neighborhoods, week after week. Similarly, if this is meant to be a mechanism for helping people with mental illness get to help, it's not effective. I see the same characters over and over again.
I would also argue it doesn't improve safety for everyone else. If anything, when a sweep happens, it creates a sudden stream of agitated, physically and emotionally unsettled people, moving through the street. Normally in my neighborhood walking _past_ an encampment isn't too bad. Walking home when a sweep has just happened nearby is much less comfortable.
I think what's really happening is theater. Local officials and institutions need to appear to be active more than they need to be actually effective. So while we're not actually solving problems, we're having the most visible homelessness shepherded from block to block.
When they say “units”, do they just mean housing, or does it also include mental health and rehab units?
I'm curious - what do you imagine that looks like?
Alternatively start up workhouses and sanitariums again. Government work in exchange for a safe, clean place to sleep and food for the day. Mental sanitariums for those people that are too far gone. That should provide enough of a disincentive over time to camp on the streets.
An observation: most of the "simple answer" approaches to this seem to have failed badly in practice when/where they are attempted. There has to be some complexity, no?
What is it about the shelters (other than lack of spaces) that is making people opt not to use them?
One part of the problem is that the sheer cost of housing in San Francisco (and the surrounding) area is out of control. Some homeless people are simply priced out of the market. That generally is caused by a general lack of new construction in San Francisco and the Bay Area. But, I doubt that magically increasing the housing stock overnight will "solve" homelessness. (Because there are many reasons for homelessness.)
When I lived in the S.F. Bay area for almost a decade, I was shocked that the homeless problem was so bad. Where I'm from, the weather does put a sense of urgency on homelessness, because it's much more difficult to camp unsheltered in the winter. The Bay Area doesn't have the late October-November urgency to get people into shelters; nor do the homeless have the urgency to follow someone else's rules for a bit or risk freezing to death.
What I would suggest is to try to avoid seeing homeless as "others." Many people are homeless for different reasons; and it's important to empathize with the person who doesn't want the tent on their front door as much as it's important to empathize with the person in the tent.
so let's continue to spend more on incarcerating them as a bandage rather than fixing the issues :)
> incidents of... pooping...
i'm sure they just do this outside for preference rather than utter lack of access to public facilities. why couldn't they be like me during my trip to SF where i could just patronize a business to use their bathroom when i needed to go?
> menace to public health and safety
love to see the intentional split between "public" and whatever group you'd put houseless people in (those "menaces"!)
One of the points of the justice system is to ensure that people are sufficiently disincentivized from doing things that society has decided shouldnt be done. We shouldnt consider it a good investment to enable bad behavior.
No false notions required -- all living people have a risk of loss of freedoms, which is why prison works.
> why can't there be more public garbage cans
I suppose this mostly makes sense until we start to have local businesses using them for free trash disposal. Why would I be more in favor of public trash cans you ask? (so you dont have to continue presuming...) Because it's enabling and encouraging an ideal behavior -- people dispose of their trash in an orderly manner.
If you really cared about this, then you would simply impose a simple tax on local businesses and give them garbage service in return. Or you’d enforce proper garbage disposal on the businesses not the unhoused. It is a lot easier to monitor and enforce the garbage disposal of businesses then that of the unhoused.
you realize that the justice system doesn't equally impact everyone, right? people with more wealth, more access are demonstrably treated better and have better outcomes with regard to the justice system, so no, all living people do not have the same risk of losing freedoms.
> ... which is why prison works
ah, there it is
i'm glad you agree with more access to public trash cans; however, i think it should be called out
> local businesses using them for free trash disposal
is already done in homeless encampments. i can find some, but there are many reports of businesses dumping in encampments because there's little risk of getting caught and no one bats an eye at trash-ridden encampments.
I agree with you that this is an injustice and should be fixed, that doesnt mean we shouldnt work towards using the tool (it's not a either/or scenario, we can do both) .
> is already done in homeless encampments. ...
Only furthers my point as to why we should not be enabling bad behaviors
idk. the amount the police harasses the unhoused, I think we all would be living in a police state if the same brutality was employed equally across citizens.
It has been shown multiple time over in experimental settings that punishment is a pretty poor means of modifying behavior. The deterrence of punishment is marginal at best. For punishment to work consistently you need to apply it consistently and immediately, law enforcement does neither.
There are other means of modifying behavior that are both scientifically proven and have shown results in the real world. This includes accommodating the desired behavior while disincentivizing the undesired ones.
If you want the unhoused to leave their surroundings cleaner, give them trash cans, public kitchens, safe use shelters, regular street cleaners, etc. If you don’t want them to pitch a tent on 17th and Mission, designate an area where they can.
No the point of the justice system is to give victims of crimes some solace that justice has been served. It has nothing to with the behavior of criminals.
That's much more reasonable of a point than other peer comments. To which I mostly would suggest that rehabilitation is definitely an important part (and I'd agree with you if you claimed the USA is bad at rehabilitation... but lets improve that than bandaid something else)
I'll wait.
My belief is that homelessness / 'unsheltered' is a catchall result of all the gaps in society's integration of individuals; and it's also a national level problem since the individuals can also be shipped around like those migrants that made the news recently. At least in America, but I've also heard that one of the emotionally motivating factors of Brexit were migrants from outside of the EU, we refuse to even provide a path and set of requirements for those who do want to participate in the system that's setup (instead in the US it's "build the wall" or "war at the border" extremes). Closing gaps in social safety nets and providing pathways for those who are troubled to integrate into society in mutually useful ways, or perhaps even caring for those who are incapable of such self care when provided help getting out of that hole, logically seems like a far harder challenge than any single city can face in a vacuum when we can't even handle easier issues on a national level.