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.