San Francisco Whole Foods made 560 emergency calls before closing
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What I find even more perplexing than the city doing nothing is how the large tech companies and their brood that work right next door tolerate it.
For those that work in those offices, do you just get bused in everyday, eat all your meals at the cafeteria, and get bused back out, observing the outside world like a snow globe?
How do you reconcile the money you make with the destitution at your literal doorstep.
The answer is obviously yes.
Responsibility assumes that conditions can be changed by those responsible, otherwise the concept of responsibility is void.
I can direct this reflection at myself in various domains and come to the conclusion that I am falling short of my responsibilities in many ways, but it’s also true that people who walk by the worst of SF’s blocks everyday to pick up there 200k+ salaries are telling themselves everyday “not my problem”.
None of that is beyond reach but the voters of SF don't want those things.
The largely-untried approach is to assess why people are being afflicted with mental health issues and why people are turning to drugs, and to actually address those underlying factors. Drug abuse and mental illness are symptoms of a larger problem, not the cause. That larger problem is likely the one producing other symptoms, like the majority of adults under 30 living with their parents, or 11% of all Americans being at risk of eviction.
The issue is that the US half-asses its drug enforcement policies. Everything is a leaky sieve full of inefficiency. They have a mostly unprotected border with Mexico, that they're too scared to lock down for political reasons. They have drug dealers that they won't arrest, or put in a revolving door policy, because they're afraid of being called evil by the privileged members of NGOs and academia. Investigating, arresting and putting on trial criminals is extremely expensive and inefficient because there's 50 million legal checks to deal with.
Look at Singapore for an example of how an all-out war against drugs can be effective, and produce a safe society. 98% of the citizens of Singapore support those policies because they have some of the safest streets in the world. Their children can safely be out at any time. Why should they let the criminal 0.5% of the population keep them terrified like in America? It should be the other way around. They get criticized by westerners for their use of the death penalty for drug dealers, such as in this short clip with visionary Singaporean PM Lee Kwan Yew https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PXAOZwvv04, who handles it admirably.
The US is violent and dangerous because it tries to give as much freedom as possible to its citizens, and protect their constitutional rights to a high degree, even when this comes at a high expense for the rest of society. I am not saying I want this to change, I like diversity of thought and government, and there's something endearing about how different the average American is compared to other nations. This diversity of thought allows us to learn lessons about the effect of policies and culture. For example this is why I like the USA's 2nd amendment and wish to see it protected, even though I wouldn't want everyone to be armed in my country.
Please don’t turn more countries into police states, it’s really not required to fight drug abuse.
There are many nice places that have liberal drug laws(Netherlands, Switzerland), clearly authoritarian state control is not required.
The US is not violent because it grants a lot of freedoms(which tbh, it really doesn’t). It’s violent because the ruling class don’t give a shit about poor people
People stay on drugs because those drugs are addictive. That says nothing about why they felt inclined to start using drugs in the first place - that underlying cause being "I'm broke and starving and freezing and can't afford actual treatment for the illnesses/injuries I'm racking up and I need something to take the edge off".
> Look at Singapore for an example of how an all-out war against drugs can be effective, and produce a safe society.
There are all sorts of confounding variables in that equation, chief among them being private land ownership being basically nonexistent; 80% of Singaporeans live in government-subsidized flats. Even this hasn't solved homelessness in Singapore, either.
> The US is violent and dangerous because it tries to give as much freedom as possible to its citizens
The US is violent and dangerous becuase its socioeconomic safety nets and mental healthcare systems are absolute dumpster fires compared to pretty much every other "developed" country.
With the job rate as it is, I have a hard time believing anyone not disabled or with other health challenges would have any trouble finding a job.
Writing destitution as the problem leads to useless fixes.
And it doesn’t matter what the causes are. I’m simply pointing out the most disgusting element of San Francisco’s destitution, namely that it is in cohabitation with some of the greatest wealth ever produced in human history, including the lowest salaried employees of the tech companies who operate downtown.
Your post is like saying "look at all those pedestrians using the wrong door", when the actual issue is that the correct entrance is only accessible by train.
You are basically going on an irrelevant tangent.
> namely that it is in cohabitation with some of the greatest wealth ever produced in human history, including the lowest salaried employees
i.e. you have an axe to grind and you are trying to fit your post to make it work?
The Board of Supervisors will continue to pretend everything is okay until they are voted out.
Connie Chan, Dean Preston, and Aaron Peskin should go.
You talk about a misguided sense of compassion. But what have we really tried except liberalism? Except allowing whatever happens to happen to people? What have we tried to help, to build possible lives? Even for those not living in homed, what have we tried to keep them from sliding off the edge?
It's May Day. This cry for dispassion & accusation & intolerance, for jailing each other, should not be the go to plan for when situations get bad. Maybe doing nothing hasn't worked, but rather than resort to striking out against those we are afraid of, we should be trying to make possible paths forwards.
You can offer people help but, you can't force them to accept it.
They have the resources to get all the drugs they want, iPhones and better camping equipment than I have.
A lot of the crime in the area seems to be driven by organized crime groups. Helping homeless people won't stop that.
The city of San Francisco spends $70,000 annually per homeless person! <https://abc7news.com/sf-homeless-plan-housing-all-san-franci...> The homeless there are homeless because severe mental and addiction issues cause them to reject help, not because resources aren't available.
One hurts the full population. Is the liberal solution honestly any better for the addicts?
SF ain't the only one, either; this is a statewide, regionwide, and nationwide issue. Only reason it's more pronounced on the West Coast is because of the more temperate weather; rough sleepers end up surviving for another year instead of freezing to death in winter.