Downtown San Francisco is at a tipping-point
economist.com
economist.com
The SF chronicle did a series on the efforts to house people in shelters and one major problems was that a person who wanted to get clean from opioids is just surrounded by temptation and is just one dose of Fentanyl away from death.
Thus these people are more dangerous to each other than they are to anyone else. Not only is there the paradox of warehousing the poor in the most expensive place in America but also that of warehousing them in the most dangerous place in America insofar as fentanyl is concerned.
Does it? As the article points out, the homeless population is actually down since 2019. Homelessness is bad, and a hard problem to solve[1], but it's not The Reason Everything Is Wrong, because if it was (1) everything would have been wrong before, when we agree everything was great and (2) other places would be worse, and we all agree they aren't.
Really this article is just like all the others on this subject. It's completely innumerate. It takes crisis and calamity as a prior and writes about it, while having to nod repeatedly that the actual measurements don't hold up the hypothesis.
It's just shocking to me the extent to which this meme has permeated the tech community. Urban homelessness is just not a new phenomenon, it's not a changed phenomenon, and it's not even a new phenomenon to San Francisco!
[1] Largely because it's unsolvable inherently. We've always had a homeless population in our cities going back to the invention of the city. Some people won't/can't/don't-wanna live within the rules of typical society and view street living as acceptable vs. the alternatives. So to that population, attempts to assist them just have the marginal effect of making homelessness more desirable. And... that's just not something that public policy[2] is going to fix.
[2] Well, tolerable public policy. Some of our ancestors deployed asylums and other kinds of para-prisons to control this. But even that works only poorly.
I just visited several cities in Europe. I did not see homeless people just strewn all over the place like one does in SF, in countries which are both equivalent and far poorer than the U.S., and in countries which statistically have significantly lower and higher homeless per capita than the U.S.
It’s almost like if the govt provides basic services that allow even the poorest then even the homeless will choose to live with some dignity.
I won't speak to what you saw in Europe except to say that Europe too has large homeless populations in most cities. This is a universal thing.
But really your point is the point in the linked article. We don't want a solution to the homeless problem. We just don't want to see the homeless. And our community has treated that disconnect by meme-ing the existence of a problem that isn't real.
What you're saying about "Urban homelessness is ... not even a new phenomenon to San Francisco!" is very much true, at least since the Gold Rush. I believe our Emperor Norton III was, technically, by modern standards, homeless, although the city was his palace.
What changed was the influx of more-or-less normal people. San Francisco has served as a kind of "drain" for the crazies of the rest of the nation since 1849 right up until the late 90's and the "Dot Com boom". Then e.g. Twitter was tricked into opening their office in the middle of skid row and techie culture and "the street" got to rub shoulders daily and it was not so great, eh?
I've come to believe that OP has got the right idea: Civic Center and the Tenderloin should be condemned and razed, just like Kowloon. The issue is what to do with the people living there now?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Walled_City
(BTW there have been cities w/o homelessness but they are rare. "We've always had a homeless population in our cities going back to the invention of the city." this is another meme that needs to die, eh?)
maybe the loin, but how does razing the Civic Center help? that area by itself is one of the nicest areas you can think of: a wide-open park-like place to walk around and enjoy the city. What would you even replace it with? and how would it help the problem of those people still around, who would shift to soma or elsewhere nearby.
The problem is, the very few regions where both conditions match end up overrun - even though no one can seriously expect these regions to solve the homeless problem of an entire continent-spanning country with 330-340M people.
People with severe mental illness are hard to live with. When I was growing up there was a homeless man who spent all day at the public library that people called "The Professor" who was said to be unable to live indoors because he'd wake up screaming every night. We took in a friend who I think had schizoaffective disorder in and she threatened my wife with a knife after she'd lived at our place for 18 months. Schizophrenics are more likely to be the victims of crime than the perpetrators but every so often they do something that is "batshit crazy"
https://www.mlive.com/news/muskegon/2017/11/look_back_thanks...
"Housing first" is an improvement over the status quo but people with severe problems are going to make that kind of environment hard to run. "Dispersal" may very well make it possible because that kind of behavior randomly scattered won't break people's ability to cope with it down, whereas concentrating it in one place certainly does. I can't see how anybody who has any moral sensibility at all could stand to go to SF, never mind live there. Just as the rationalists try to break down our moral sensitivities by spamming us with trolley problems, exposure to that filters for a population of people who just don't care.
BTW, the one way bus ticket was tried in SF long ago, just like they've tried the other obvious non-solutions, but they came to the conclusion that the offer of bus tickets away just made it more attractive to go there.
Looking at SF specifically, the causes seem to be "job loss (26%), alcohol/drug use (18%), eviction (13%), argument/asked to leave by friend/family (12%), mental health issues (8%), and divorce/separation (5%)".
One thing that seemed to have worked in London a few years ago is to give people a bank account with £3,000 with no strings or obligations attached.[1] While the pilot was small (13 people) and time period relatively short (1 year), the results were promising. I seem to recall it's been tried elsewhere too, but I can't find the report on that right now.
Turns out that just giving people a chance and autonomy goes a long way. Unfortunately "free money for homeless people" is politically difficult, even though the alternative is far more expensive.
[1]: https://www.jrf.org.uk/report/providing-personalised-support...
The internet is big and I just didn't look for it very long.
> I bet, showing great results on a group of 100 people, would get more investments into this experiment.
You'd think so, but policy is often penny wise and pound foolish. I think the biggest obstacle is that "free money" just doesn't fit in our culture very well (or maybe it just doesn't fit human nature).
You'd think so, but for the majority of homeless programs I was interested in, I couldn't find any data. For example, I was trying to find efficacy of tiny villages, what are their goals, how they track graduation rate. What's even their success criteria? Nothing, despite my decent google-fu.
> You'd think so, but policy is often penny wise and pound foolish. I think the biggest obstacle is that "free money" just doesn't fit in our culture very well (or maybe it just doesn't fit human nature).
For policies, sure. What about non-profits? Why wouldn't someone who believes in the efficacy of such methodology organize something like that? Changing someone's life for the better with only 3k sounds like a no-brainer to me. I would personally contribute financially and direct other people to contribute.
And for a lot of people, giving them a roof and a room of their own is enough to help them out of the worst. Yes, you'll still have a sizable population of hardened homeless, but hey - if you manage to get the 80% low hanging fruit off the street, it still reduces the amount of homeless by a significant degree. And don't forget an awful lot of homeless are people actually having fulltime jobs but unable to afford a place on their own!
I think this is inaccurate. We have many ideas, medications and therapies.
What most homeless populations lack is regular access. Free clinics barely scratch the surface. Bouncing people between the street, hostels, pop up kitchens and offering no stability just makes everything worse.
Dispersal only helps problem areas. Unless you're taking people off the street and homing them with support elsewhere, you're not helping them.
Seattle, Portland, Denver, San Francisco and many other "blue" cities all have "Homeward Bound" one-way bus ticket programs to incentivize homeless people to leave their city. In fact, the City of San Francisco invented the entire concept 15 years ago. This is a primarily liberal strategy to deal with the overwhelming collapse of their public welfare systems.
Private programs in conservative states do this as well. Prisons in Texas will give prisoners on release an open bus ticket if they have no one picking them up. That’s how many people without options wind up in fairer west coast cities in the first place. If you look at “popular greyhound bus destinations”, west coast cities are at the top of that for reasons. Homeless don’t even need a ticket given to them, they can also scrounge the cash they need for one in a pinch.
Make public transport convenient. You solved another 30%.
People needs to be able to stay frugal in rough times and socialize. It feels to me that many US cities make this impossible.
If you had Spain levels of unemployment I have no idea how would you do.
The vast majority of homeless people do not look like what's on display near Civic Center in SF. That's just the tip of the iceberg.
[1] https://americanaddictioncenters.org/rehab-guide/homeless
This video is from two weeks ago (you can find many more like it): https://youtu.be/ipivYAHEoIM . It doesn't come close to capturing the scale of the neighborhood's blight but gives you an idea. The transient addicted population and people with extreme mental illnesses in Philly have been increasing in number and spread throughout the city though.
People needs treatment and a path to become useful members of society again.
Affordable housing makes a lot of poor people able to save money and help their peers.
Transitory economic homeless, these homeless can be assisted by affordable housing, housing first, and other programs. Often these homeless of covered pretty well by current homeless programs, as they are the type of homeless people most easily identify with, and engineer programs to solve.
Then there are chronic non-economic homeless. For this group it is not economic issues they face no amount of affordable, or even free housing will make them not homeless, even if you give them a home chances are they will not stay in it. CA has an outsized portion of the latter type of homeless population, and only have programs designed for the former, that is why the problem does not get better. Infact many of CA programs actively harm the latter population
We do have people with mental problems here in Spain, but most don't roam the streets and end up living under a bridge.
And I can assure you the Spanish institutions are not precisely brilliant dealing with problems.
Let me ask, does Spain have and enforce loitering laws that prevent homeless of camping in front of businesses? Is this a factor in driving them to under the bridges instead of roaming the streets?
Because CA prohibits the police from enforcing any of these laws, and many prosecutors refuse to charge anyone with "low level" crime.
SF and LA (and CA in general) has the nicest weather, unlike other parts of the US where you have Extreme cold, extreme heat, or both in many area's LA and SF have mild temperate weather with limited rain fall, this promotes a "roaming the street" style of living.
Most of Spain has a weather similar to CA.
The big issue is that the USA doesn’t have a national strategy for dealing with homelessness. So any city offering programs that provide housing will become popular very quickly, with predictable results.
This is likely saying "the EU does not have strategy for dealing" remember the USA stands for "United STATES" States here is the key... We are 50 independent states, and most of our problems are because we look to the incompetent and corrupt federal government to solve problems they are not constitutional empowered to solve. There is a reason we are not "America" but instead our United States we seem to be losing that foundation, to our own demise. Not every problem is a national one, and homelessness certainly is not
>>We could always do what Finland does: admit that these people will never be productive members of society again and get them into housing with social workers on staff.
Well we used to do that, after many many many human rights abuses the US stopped doing that, and if you look at the graphs of institutionalization, and homelessness there is a striking correlation as the rate of institutionalization drops the rate of homelessness increases.
I am not sure bringing back institutionalization is going to be a popular solution
Homelessness is definitely a national problem. The fact that someone without housing from Great Falls Montana first winds up in Spokane and then Seattle should give you a clue. Yes, you can’t be homeless in great falls because you’ll die, so you move to a place where you’d at least survive with services and maybe better weather. Expecting the west coast cities to shoulder the nation’s homelessness burden is not just ludicrous, it is ultimately futile.
The premise is important in how the problem can be solved or not. If it’s a national problem and we treat it like a local problem, no solution can possibly work. If it is a local problem and we treat it like a national problem, likewise. Non-profits that count these things don’t do it very well, eg when they did the count in Seattle they found out 70% of its homeless population was from pioneer square (probably where they were counted), which is crazy if you know Seattle. We have a huge data problem which leads to bad solutions given wrong assumptions.
you have completely missed the Point, Finland is comparable to the single state of California, in fact Finland by most measurements is smaller both in economics and population than California.
California has a State wide (in this analogy would be a "national" Strategy)
The US is comparable to the entire EU, so it would be a "union wide" strategy not a "national" strategy.
Each State in the US, in this analogy would be a "nation" in the EU.
Critically here as well, most states do not have any kind of time limit on welfare, and I am not sure if it would be legal to do so in the US.
>>Homelessness is definitely a national problem.
Homelessness is a State Problem.
>Expecting the west coast cities to shoulder the nation’s homelessness burden is not just ludicrous, it is ultimately futile.
yet we expect Boarder stated to shoulder the nations burden for unregulated boarder? Any attempts by those states to move that population is viewed negatively, and any attempt to stop that migration is likewise negative.
>>We have a huge data problem which leads to bad solutions given wrong assumptions.
And you believe the federal government will solve this? Really? What examples do you have of them solving any social problem ever.?
What evidence do you have to support that claim...
Think about it: lots of people from LA aren’t from LA or even California, why would its unhoused population be any different? The same is true with Seattle, Portland and San Francisco. We have freedom of movement in the USA, anyone can just show up and live in a city without permission, it isn’t like the “EU” as you claimed. Free migration of people means that if any city or state decides to just give housing to all its unhoused population, unhoused in the rest of the country would quickly congregate on that place. No, we don’t have that in Seattle or LA yet, but the sucky social services in those places is way better than Great Falls MT or Houston TX. So people come.
Who was the last group that argued "states first!" over people's rights and lives? How did that go again?
And social care is not institutionalization. In Finland specifically homeless people are given independent housing. It's a completely different thing. Look it up before you start comparing it with failed Titicut Follies-esque institutions in the US.
But this is an important point: there is a real homelessness problem in the USA, but there is also a mental illness/drug addiction problem that often co-exists with homelessness (some say that being homeless causes one to become an addict eventually, but that is controversial).
Rates of drug use or mental illness among the homeless can be as high as 30-50% depending on where and how you measure it, and anyone who has ever met people in that state knows they need to be in professional treatment, by force if necessary.
There've been a few efforts over the years to remedy the problem, but in general institutionalizing people and forcing them onto any sort of medication is very difficult to do in California.
Fascism visibly pulsates under the skin of these dehumanising HN discussions.
And if they're far enough away, no fences are needed.
Yup, and the technology that permeates everything now is designed and implemented with the same mentality, which I think is even more alarming. We've forced everyone into software Skinner boxes.
The only way to keep housing affordable without building more, and have some semblance of fairness, would be to stop new building, impose a price/rent cap, then have a lottery to determine who gets the limited supply of houses.
That is a one-time eternal solution that satisfies degrowth ideology, so long as you're willing to ignore the unlucky folks in the lottery.
Supply solutions provide enough time window to think on demand solutions.
It is possible, don't get paralized because you'll have a different set of problems in the future.
Trying so hard to preserve rundown two-story crap boxes built in the postwar era just because some folks think that’s what SF should look like isn’t a solution.
I'm quite interested in this because I anticipate we'll all need this when climate becomes too dire.
This isn't the case anymore (price wisw, still dense) and it's having effects on the social fabric.
In my city it's 20 min walking max. In Madrid it's not that easy, but still. And it's walking.
Improvising plans with people is also easy because you don't have to plan ahead too much.
Because no one uses the streets in Atlanta outside a car.
Atlanta has 930 violent crimes per 100k vs SF’s 715 or so.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities...
Atlanta is the ultimate out of sight out of mind city.
I would imagine that this has something to do with atlanta being in an open carry state with no restrictions on gun ownership, and thus more crimes committed involve a gun and would explain why violent crime is statistically higher even though san francisco has 19% more crime overall.
you know, out of chart, out of mind.
But if remote work has permanently emptied SF’s downtown office buildings, pushing commercial demand to near zero, but demand for housing in the Bay Area is still red-hot, perhaps large-scale conversions will become cost-effective as commercial leases begin to expire, since the alternative for building owners is to just let them rot empty.
The cost of rent feeds into everything, its such a clear drain on everyone's resources (apart from landlords). If you have time to give, please think about how to change things. Though I'm an internet rando so ymmv
It is arguable that inheritance taxes should prevent accumulation of wealth, but point is, real estate survives you.
real estate survives you
Still makes no sense to me
So if you are going to have private ownership of housing, the question is more about how policies should be structured. Should policy favor home ownership, should policy focus on housing affordability, etc.
People complaining about treating housing as an investment vehicle are often referring to policy choices in the US that treat home ownership as a good result in itself, regardless of the impact on affordability. So we have things like long term mortgages backed by quasi-government entities or local policy choices that focus on maintaining real estate prices (vs things like quality, availability and affordability).
> Start by doing real politics not a junta
Because doing that has worked great so far right? You keep ignoring the problem and pretending that billionaires will allow any change to happen and people just need to go and get into politics.
Need to be more efficient
[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/CEO-of-S-F-nonprofit-...
[2] https://sfist.com/2023/02/11/saturday-links-lawsuit-alleges-...
As of 2019, the stats show Oakland around the middle at 1,300 violent crimes per 100,000 people and San Francisco towards the bottom at around 700 per 100,000. The worst were around 2,100 violent crimes per 100,000.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_homicide_rat...
Puts Oakland towards the middle internationally (and domestically).
The second major federal bailout in eight years.
But MA also elects Republican governors on the regular. Mitt Romney was Governor from 2002-2006. Republican Charlie Baker ran the state so well that by the end of his second term the state's "rainy day" fund hit the legal max of 15% of the state's annual budget, so last fall every taxpayer in MA got a check for 13% of their previous years state taxes! And state income taxes are not high, basically a 5% flat tax. I would argue this frequent election of people who have run businesses is what also keeps the state at the top of the list of states in per capita GDP.
Healthcare outcomes, standard of living, GDP per Capita, poverty, educational attainment, obesity, etc.
All deep dark red.
Drugs are taken and sold openly in San Francisco and LA.
And I wonder - what would Republicans offer a city? My assumption is that they'd just blow a hole in any city budget with tax cuts for the wealthy, thereby achieving defunding of city services, but that's my bias. Still it doesn't seem like anyone in a big metro is buying what they're selling to the point where the Republicans don't even seem to try selling it anymore.
There are a lot of local policies that are in the vein of the traditional GOP politics (small govt, personal freedom, less regulation, etc.) that are very applicable to urban living but do cut against national GOP politics. If they could separate the local from the national they'd do great.
Some examples:
* Cutting land use regulations to encourage more housing development. Urban areas suffer from ridiculously high housing prices due to overburdensome regulation
* Give parents more input into how their children's education via school choice.
* Reduce red tape/bureaucracy for accomplishing things in cities like slow permitting processes and starting businesses
https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio...
Investing in one of the most important cities in one of the most important states in the USA is in everyone's interest.
SF contributes 6.5% of California's GDP, a state that alone would rank as the world's 5th largest economy. SF's economy is higher than several other states put together [1]. Additionally, Californians pay significantly more federal taxes than they receive in return, so they are the ones subsidizing other states' budgets.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...
Again, I agree that there's plenty of corruption to stamp out, but letting one of the most important cities in the USA decay over a relatively meager amount of money is not the way to go.
I live in the SFBA and I continue to go there weekly and bring my family and children there, etc.
I would recommend Jackson square (Cotogna, Blue Bottle, Maison Nico) as a hangout spot, perhaps venturing uphill from there to the Grace Cathedral on the peak of Nob Hill[1] (remember: crime doesn't climb).
I would also highly recommend walking the top of the new transit center which is basically a High Line of the west[2] and is well worth your time and trouble.
If you want to glimpse, but not immerse yourself, in the angst and tension of post-pandemic SF, you can walk to Union Square.
Finally, get yourself to Hayes Valley without crossing through the Tenderloin as that is, without question, ground zero for all of the disturbing headlines.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Cathedral,_San_Francisco
https://www.ft.com/content/71d8013d-9d94-441e-b2d1-3039c0439...
What do folks on here think - if the City could cut the homeless population in half for $100 Million per year, would it be worth it? How about $50 Million per year to cut it by 25%, would that be worth it? [3]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_of_San_Francisco [3] 7800 homeless [4]. $2k rent per month. [4] https://archive.is/IkYHB
https://paragonpublic.blob.core.windows.net/dash-v2-blog-ima...
Years of policies that hurt honest people, entrenched landlords and those already here, and made it difficult for new families and groups to come to the city are why the good times are ending. People like Peskin burst the bubble.
That is actually going to drive home construction rates though the roof. Part of the labor shortage in construction is a result of reduced illegal immigration. Who could ever tell by the day laborers standing in front of Home Depot that illegal immigration was so entangled with construction?
> end the green energy initiatives that are costing the state billions,
So cede the entire green energy to China? Smart, it would also solve our illegal immigration problem as the USA would be less desirable economically.
Green energy has nothing to do with the homelessness crisis. Yes, it might someday take away those well paying oil extraction jobs and replace them with wind turbine and solar panel installation jobs, but economically is positive or a no-op for everyone else.
Green energy provides negative return on investment, does not create jobs, and those funds could be better allocated solving homelessness.
Instead, they are shoving mountains of cash to turn the United States into some perverted libertarian fantasy, where the government is weak, paralyzed, ineffectual, and out of their way OH WAIT.
When you have money for security and the ability to travel in what are effectively armored cars, the rest of the city can go to hell.
Many progressives already fight against policies that would increase housing (like adding overly burdensome restrictions to the development process)
Policy clearness is a legislative choice. If someone tries to mail a bomb to the White House the policies are very unambiguous about what happens next.
> Many progressives already fight against policies that would increase housing (like adding overly burdensome restrictions to the development process)
Liberals maybe, not progressives.
1. How does one “buy” a government? With bond purchases? With campaign contributions? With voter fraud? And in the chosen case, what powers would they gain to “fix their habitat”?
2. Which valley “gazillionaire” is actively spending money in any way that doesn’t align with progressive politics and larger stronger less-accountable government? For the purposes of this question, anybody invested in Palantir is ineligible.
3. What “their way” would a strong government be “in”? What specific harm to whom are you suggesting?
4. If they have infinite power over government, why do you think they would be happy to have it “out of their way” versus active assistance?
5. If we observe that “the government” is quite powerful at the present moment, then how do you resolve the contradiction. Are they wasting their money?
The habitat of the gazillionaires is not the same as the habitat of the people experiencing the issues facing the city. In order to become a gazillionaire, you need to be at least a bit selfish, so if you're selfish, why would you spend your money fixing other peoples habitat?
Because all I saw so far, including far away from CA, is what you are describing as a valley phénomène.
1. They don't want to know or admit the articles that are "worth paying for"
2. They know that hardly anyone would pay
3. Advertisers only care about subscription numbers
Every day I literally step over bodies to get to work. Drugs are openly dealt and consumed. Mentally ill people roam the streets, screaming. People openly use the sidewalks as a toilet. Crime is rampant. And if anyone doubts it's that bad, I invite you to come and look for yourself.
Almost all of these people come from elsewhere in the country. They aren't "priced out" local citizens, they're junkies and mentally unwell who come here because they know they will get services and be tolerated.
By its own accounting, the city spends over $1b per year on homeless services, for supposedly < 10k "homeless". You do the per capita math. Notice anything strange there? $100k per homeless. Something is off - way off.
Meanwhile these people suffer. Even if they have city housing, they are on the streets anyway, because they need drugs, plus they are driven by their mental issues. It's horrific and uncivilized, and it's a creation of a culture that says "all they need is housing", and then enables them in their drug addiction and psychosis. That's go on for years and years, steadily getting worse. Every year more of them come to SF. And every year more of them die, and the city declines further.
The solution is obvious: mandatory treatment for drug addiction and mental illness. No more tolerance for crime and drugs. Enforce basic city codes.
But somehow, this is "inhumane" to the extreme left that runs SF. They'd rather keep the status quo, and let people suffer and die, while the city falls further into ruin.
I hope these homeless people have better health insurance than I do.
But somehow, this is "inhumane" to the extreme left that runs SF.