Really does feel like a “doom loop” for San Francisco. Who will write the definitive book on how everything went downhill over the past 10 or so years? Michael Lewis would entertaining. Or maybe it’s a job for Matt Levine? Who else?
People in need tend to congregate around help services provided by the city, and Sanya has a lot of those services. It is unclear if homeless are "moved" to Sanya or if it is just a natural place for them to end up, because of the mentioned services. Housing, food and vending machines are also extra cheap in Sanya.
The situation for homeless Americans is a lot more dire than living in Sanya, from an outsiders perspective. I don't envy having to sleep in SF streets.
Launch a "Gentrification Relocation Program" for the ultra-rich, where they're given an all-expenses-paid trip to Mars, solving Earth's issues one rocket at a time.
Create a "Homeless-themed Escape Room" to help tech bros gain empathy and understanding of the struggles faced by the less fortunate, all while working on their team-building skills.
Establish "Adopt-a-Billionaire" initiatives where the homeless can select a wealthy patron to support their journey towards self-sufficiency, with the added bonus of receiving personalized financial advice.
Develop a "Homeless Monopoly" board game that highlights the systemic barriers faced by those in poverty, with bonus spaces for empathy-challenged players to experience unexpected setbacks and financial ruin.
Initiate a "Hunger Games: Empathy Edition" competition where participants are placed in a simulated environment of scarcity and adversity, forcing them to confront their lack of understanding and support for the less fortunate.
Unfortunately George Carlin's idea on the matter seems to be hard to implement. But is still the best proposed solution
I definitely would be interested in seeing all of the missed opportunities and failures in prioritization; that would require a reflective insider, which seems unlikely in the near term future.
Shellenberger's central thesis is that addiction, mental illness, and "disaffiliation" are the primary causes of homelessness. However, this oversimplified view ignores the complex interplay of factors such as affordable housing shortages, job loss, and systemic inequalities that contribute to the problem. By focusing solely on progressive policies, Shellenberger turns a blind eye to the broader socio-economic context that has given rise to homelessness in the Bay Area.
The book's methodology is highly suspect. Shellenberger relies heavily on secondhand accounts and outdated ethnographic studies while failing to engage with the current experiences of homeless individuals. This glaring omission undermines the credibility of his analysis and reveals a lack of empathy for those affected by the issue.
Shellenberger's penchant for exaggeration and misrepresentation further erodes his argument. He is quick to criticize progressive approaches such as harm reduction and housing first policies but offers little in the way of evidence-based alternatives. Instead, he proposes vaguely authoritarian solutions that betray a deep-seated ideological bias.
Ultimately, the book's distorted portrayal of homelessness serves only to fan the flames of the culture wars.
I don't necessarily agree with the book, but I feel I need to respond.
- Criticizing something doesn't imply offering a solution. This has been a bedrock of philosophy and discussion from Socrates. So let's dispense with that first.
- Two, I'm not part of any political religion and I don't consider single-handed critiques of any group to be a problem. Considering that so much slant is added to my information from progressive sources, reading an alternative perspective is helpful.
- A lack of empathy is thrown around loosely, especially in certain circles, but frankly I don't think that's fair. How much empathy do you think is required for a situation where people are engaged in activities that are harmful to themselves and others?
- All government-imposed solutions are "vaguely authoritarian". I'm not an anarchist, I don't see why this should bother me. To take a separate example that you would agree with, repealing zoning laws at the state / provincial level and forcibly changing the characteristic of a neighborhood is fairly authoritarian measure (as it strips local autonomy) but we accept its necessity.
- What does exaggeration and misrepresentation (the start of your paragraph) have to do with criticizing "progressive" policies?
- Can you clarify what you mean by an "ethnographic study"?
- Many of your criticisms seem to be based on vague allusions to things in the book, can you offer concrete examples?
I'm willing to be convinced that the book is complete nonsense but not by the arguments you are presenting.
EDIT: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
"Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken."
My initial response was clear and specific. Rather than addressing my main argument, you assigned me a task/homework. I take your assumption of me being a bot as a compliment, as I've been striving to enhance the professionalism of my HN comments, particularly in discussions with strong opinions where emotions run high.
Even this response reads like a response from such a model.
> Because unlike poverty and mental illness and drug abuse and weather and welfare benefits and other factors, the places that have the highest housing costs, and the least housing supply, have the largest homeless populations:
> [graphs]
> In literally any other realm, this would come as no surprise. You can’t have what you can’t afford. If someone says, “I want a $2000 laptop, but can’t afford it,” nobody would find that hard to believe. But if someone says, “I really want the single largest and most crippling expense known to man, housing, but can’t afford it,” for some bizarre reason people would say, “that’s not true!,” or “correlation isn’t causation,” or “homelessness isn’t a housing problem,” or something patently insane. As I said before, the topic of homelessness breaks people’s brains.
> The story of homelessness in America is perfectly captured by the following quote in the Economist:
>> Few Americans lived on the streets in the early post-war period because housing was cheaper. Back then only one in four tenants spent more than 30% of their income on rent, compared with one in two today. The best evidence suggests that a 10% rise in housing costs in a pricey city prompts an 8% jump in homelessness.
> And that’s just it: before modern-day homelessness, there was poverty, there was mental illness, there was nice weather, there was welfare, there were liberal places, and there were drugs. So, something must have changed. And what changed were the rents:
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/everything-you-think-you-k...
A related critical article I found on the Wikipedia page for his book seems to be exactly along these lines: https://homelessness.ucsf.edu/blog/san-fransicko-incorrect-a...
Nevertheless, it's entirely possible that San Francisco's other policies have exacerbated the issues caused by homelessness and housing unaffordability. I don't think it's too much to ask that the city should allow more housing to be built and that organised retail theft gangs be punished.
He has posted multiple videos of himself interviewing homeless people on his Twitter page, so this is a very strange criticism of him.
I feel like most of that would just be 200 pages of saying "And then, San Francisco didn't allow enough housing to be built." over and over.
I very much doubt the visible homeless problem is a result of housing - the iceberg is a result of housing. The visible homeliness wouldn’t be solved if rent were half - that doesn’t treat schizophrenia
How do we solve the mentally I’ll problem? Is it that involuntary commitment with excessive oversight is incomparable with American values of freedom ?
The problem we are having today is we’ve excused criminal behavior due to mental illness. I agree prison probably is inappropriate in most cases, but so is just letting them back on the street.
A lot of seriously mentally ill folks burn their family care due to the extreme burden it places on them, and the fact a lot of mania and schizophrenia accompanies a willful belief in their own sanity and autonomy, and a lack of personal knowledge of their state. This makes keeping them under care and medications extraordinarily difficult.
Prison isn’t the answer. Mental health facilities is. That’s the real alternative to letting them back into the streets. Prisons aren’t equipped to treat anyone.
The problem is that the latter is far too attractive and convenient for a large percentage of this country. Then simply move out of a city center, get some guns, put up some fences, and it’s no longer a problem that you’re directly personally affected by.
If you dig into news about current inpatient care for the mentally ill, I think you’ll see something white washed but not too dissimilar to the past sanitariums. Heavily medicated patients confined to close quarters without much supervision and that that exists is unskilled providers, with 30 minutes or less of professional care a week. Patients frequently assault each other and because they’re often placed their by the police for criminally insane behavior there’s no recourse or different place to move them to just an upgrade to their charges. Sexual assaults are rampant by staff and patients. It’s barbaric, but even then, there aren’t enough beds so people in crisis have to wait months getting limited care through outpatient if they have find a psychiatrist with an opening- most don’t take insurance, and even then it can be a six month wait.
By itself? No.
But literally every viable path to addressing serious mental illness requires stable housing as a prerequisite. Without it, there's literally no way to manage the problem - just different ways of shifting it around over and over again.
https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2019/0...
Reagan hasn't been Governor of California for nearly 50 years.
He certainly did try to crush it on state level, too, as a governor.
I'm still not seeing why the present-day problems can reasonably be blamed on "Reagan".
Why don't Bush I, Clinton, Bush II, Obama, Trump, and Biden bear any responsibility? Or, in California, Brown, Deukmejian, Wilson, Davis, Schwarzenegger, Brown (again), or Newsom?
Why haven't any of those people undone what "Reagan" supposedly did?
That’s why it’s Reagan’s fault. He set up the stage so effectively it’s taken this long to turn around the basic issue of payment, and now we have no providers or services or infrastructure left to pay for.
If things are still messed up 40-50 years later, it's not due to "Reagan". That's just an excuse.
As for the idea that the mental health infrastructure was some kind of wondrous utopia before "Reagan", I draw your attention to this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titicut_Follies
Many other citations are available.
I don’t hold it was a utopia. But if you want to see something worse than Bridgewater, look at the streets and see humans rotting in front of your eyes in the depths of untreated, yet easily treated, mental illness. It’s certainly morally convenient to do nothing, and morally wrong to try and get it wrong - but I think trying and failing in some cases and succeeding in others is better than failing in all cases by default. My father and great uncle were both clinical psychologists in the public mental health system, and there were many institutions that were high quality and served a population we let simply decompose on our streets now. If we traded a non utopia, we traded it for a total dystopia.
California and other warm states, on a long timeframe, absorb a lot of homeless people -- only places you can sleep outside all year and, like, not die. Not an option for NYC or Minneapolis. So inevitably they have all of these people, and no place to put them. Nor the political will to crack down, since California Capitalists want things to be nice while still flogging the NIMBY-isms.
Then again, it’s not like the high rises ever end up including a significant amount of affordable housing anyway, so that doesn’t even make a dent in the issue.
I recall headlines of restaurants struggling to find cooks due to the cost of rent + commuting being too prohibitive for service workers of the city.
Who knows, maybe this "death-loop" is actually healthy for the longterm well-being of the city.