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Comment by kasey_junk | Hacker News Reader

Not sure where you are located but one thing I’ve found is that people from the Bay Area are much more concerned about drugs amongst the homeless than in other locations. And rightly! It’s shocking as a visitor to encounter San Francisco’s version of homelessness.

As a Chicagoan though I’m much more concerned about mental health and access to short term housing. We’ve eliminated almost all of the short term housing that helps people move off the streets with the obvious side effect of homeless encampments. But you very rarely hear any talk of easing the restrictions on short term housing.

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Any attempt to establish a short term housing prompts multiple questions. For example, do you allow drunk people in? If you don't, you leave a lot of people on the shore. If you do, you end up with drunk fights and vomit on the stairs.

Go figure.

There is an SRO less than a block from my house (one of very few left in the city). They have strict rules around intoxication outside of your room. It does have the impact of meaning people who can't control their abuse have to find other housing. We should have a place for those folks too, but I'd rather there be a place that doesn't solve all of the housing issues, but can get some people off the streets rather than wait for a solution that solves every issue.

As an aside, they are perfectly good neighbors. As is the studio apartment complex next to it, that is a single tier above the SRO. I have a lot more trouble from the fast food wing place on the other side of the block than I've ever had from my neighbors.

Maybe it should be on categories: you get drunk, you move where the vomit and drunk violence is. You want to commit to stop drinkig you get out of there. But it’s more wishful thinking as nobody sane wants to monitor these. All solutions that are given seem to be half assed and barely work.

The perfect is the enemy of the good in lots of these cases, the old flophouses would have drunk tanks where they knew to throw the appropriate people, and hoseable floors.

But you can't build things like that anymore; you get shut down if you're not meeting all the "minimum requirements" and so the people who at least used to have a heated room out of the weather are now living rough.

You should probably have both kind at the same time in different buildings.

> I’m much more concerned about mental health and access to short term housing

You should be more concerned about general restrictions on housing construction. Mental health is not magically better in Japan and yet we don't see this kind of vagrancy there. But they also don't have the kind of nimbyism that plagues American cities with "intractable" homelessness problems.

What does Japan do with its addicts and mentally unstable?

I grew up in the Bay Area. It's always been about mental health and housing from my perspective. Pushing symptoms like "drug use" out of public view has nothing to do with solving the causes like "economic precarity", "systematic discrimination", and "lack of affordable housing".

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