Hacker News Reader

There are a lot of public employees and contractors who would have no way to live in the bay area if it wasn't for the $300 million a year homeless budget for a few thousand homeless. They need those homeless to provide justification for their good government jobs, which is why they cater to them so heavily by allowing them to sleep anywhere, ignoring most crimes they commit and providing them with a safe place to buy and take drugs.

All that has to happen is tax revenue has to fall and the spending will decrease and the homeless will go to some other place where they can live a better drugs and camping lifestyle. Having lived for some time a few years ago in the Tenderloin, the idea that the homeless in S.F are normal people who have fallen on hard times is a complete simulated reality that has almost nothing to do with the actual situation.

SF is the solve everything with more money city because more money is always to the benefit of people working government jobs. For another example, look at the 1 billion dollar per mile recent subway extension, for example. That 1 billion went to somebody and employed a lot of people.

Even Scott Weiner mentioned in the interview with Ezra Klein in April that he would have not been able to live in SF if he hadn't gotten lucky and found a 500sqft place 15 years ago. You know something is off when your state senator can't even afford to live in his own district.

This is the case across most of the US. It’s also why our senators are wealthy people taking “bribes” and kickbacks, friendly business deals or benefiting from insider trading. Feinstein, Pelosi are good local examples.

They should pay top government officials multi-million dollar salaries like they do in Singapore. Then they could attract top talent to those jobs and they wouldn't have to engage in all these questionable side hustles.

You would have to find someone who has so much money that anything extra wouldn't matter. Those people do not exist and the richer high paying job it is the more it will attract the wrong type. Put Musk in one of those jobs and he will use influence to increase his wealth.

The same Scott Weiner who has an estimated net worth of $5M on a state senator’s salary?

Also, why would someone run for a district they didn’t live in?

Estimated by allfamousbirthday.com? Pardon me if I am a little skeptical.

And nobody said he doesn’t live in the district. He moved to SF as a lawyer, then became Deputy City Attorney, then was elected to Board of Supervisors, then elected to state senate. His quote about not being able to afford to live in SF is most likely to point out that rent control in SF keeps qualifying rents affordable while market-rate rents are extremely unaffordable.

> the homeless will go to some other place where they can live a better drugs and camping lifestyle

They should just drive in their cars to those cheaper places, true

Or their (meth) RVs or vans. Those are surprisingly common, but they tend to go to cities that don’t enforce parking limits for unhoused (LA, SF, Seattle)…

It’s not, 70% of unhoused people in SF started out housed in SF (source: every homeless count for the last decade, and my tenure as editor-in-chief of SF’s Street Sheet). People are unhoused here because housing is unaffordable. This is not complicated.

We already have a (very successful, uncontroversial) program that provides free bus tickets to unhoused people who came from elsewhere and have a support system wherever they came from. That leaves the other 70%.

Leading question: suppose someone moved to SF, started out homeless, moved to supportive housing for a few months, and got kicked out and became homeless again. Are they counted in that oft-cited "70% of homeless people are SF natives!" figure?

ETA some additional numbers[0]:

Of that [71]%, the top six places they were housed before their most recent loss of housing:

With Friends/Relative (31%)

Home Owned or Rented by Self or Partner (21%)

Subsidized Housing or Permanent Supportive Housing (11%)

Hotel/motel (9%)

Jail or Prison (8%)

Hospital or Treatment Facility (4%)

So only 21% of that 71% actually rented their own place. Granted, the "with friends/relatives" can cover some situations where I'd agree they count as originating from SF, but also covers things like people moving here and crashing with a friend for a week before being kicked out.

Note also that any homeless who has become housed at any point of their homelessness (including jail, hospitalization, supportive housing) would then persist in the "has been housed in SF before" stat.

[0] https://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/2022-PIT-Co... , see page 31

Love to get downvoted for stating extraordinarily well documented facts with which I have firsthand experience. Nice place you all have here!

FWIW, I upvoted; but I agree this is an ongoing problem on HN and really any place that allows people to downvote based on how they feel.

You can state all the facts you want and some people downvote because they simply didn't like it; others downvote because your replied topic was about a downvote (against policy) and those same problematic people who downvoted may also have multiple accounts and/or be doing this to promote a certain propagandist narrative. There's really no way to combat it or tell given the site design.

Ultimately its a bridge too far and violates free speech by de-amplifying what you said (because it goes invisible once it goes under a certain vote, greyed out at 0, hidden -1, delisted/invisible -2) but that's mainly just my opinion that the vast majority of people (or more accurately bots) here don't hold. Its why I think most current social media should be outlawed (as its currently designed).

It interferes with communications which are an important signal over public discourse for our representatives to take action. They stop being responsive and representing when they can't receive meaning from their constituency because its an intentionally jammed/noisy channel and they so far have failed to take any action to remedy that jamming, which can have grave historical consequences.

When there's no effective representation, the rule of law eventually breaks down.

It's down voted because it's a figure that people who follow the discussion closely know is misleading. The context it's usually used in (including here) suggests homelessness is because people were gainfully employed and renting in SF before being kicked because of greedy landlords, but that's a small minority of people actually included in the figure. It also includes anyone who's ever crashed on a friend's couch for a month, been jailed, hospitalized, or rented a motel room in SF.

Those people still deserve empathy, but they're a very different group than those who once were productive and housed in SF and then ended up on the streets because of a bout of bad luck.

> The context it's usually used in (including here) suggests homelessness is because people were gainfully employed and renting in SF before being kicked because of greedy landlords

No, that isn’t the context here. When I wrote this here, and when I put this figure on a Muni bus ad for Street Sheet’s ad campaign in 2015, I was responding to the often-repeated false assertion that SF is “a dumping ground” for unhoused people, that people “come here to be homeless”, that “other cities send their homeless here”, etc etc etc.

Claiming that “housed in San Francisco before becoming unhoused” should only include “productive” people who were paying their own rent with their name on the lease is moving the goal posts by an entire football field.

Cities are full of poor people. They ought to be — cities are great places to find opportunities to get out of poverty. And lots of people, self included, show up in cities with no money or plan, and crash on couches, in hotel rooms, in their cars, etc, until they land on their feet.

San Francisco has always been a place where people have done this. We didn’t have large-scale homelessness here until the second half of the 80s, after federal public housing was gutted and especially after the Loma Prieta quake wiped out a lot of affordable housing.

If cities don’t make room for poor people, those people will end up on the street. People try to make this more complicated than it is, but every serious study on this lands in the same place, every time — just provide housing.

> And lots of people, self included, show up in cities with no money or plan, and crash on couches, in hotel rooms, in their cars, etc, until they land on their feet.

Sure. But the approach to dealing with that subset of people should be different than the approach for the subset who were once employed and renting in San Francisco and then ended up homeless through a health emergency, job loss, or eviction. The latter group has shown the ability to sustain themselves in SF in the past, while the former hasn't. And, morally, the place of original residence is responsible for them, not the taxpayers of San Francisco.

If nothing else, people with longstanding ties to the community and economy should get preference for services compared those who didn't. And homelessness advocates get this: the entire point of conflating them is to increase sympathy for the people who just turn up.

> And, morally, the place of original residence is responsible for them, not the taxpayers of San Francisco. If nothing else, people with longstanding ties to the community and economy should get preference for services

I believe you would find that this is illegal. Shapiro (Shapiro v. Thompson, 394 U.S. 618 (1969)) and its progeny address this issue on point.

(I feel obliged to mention I believe your number because of your expertise, simply because of the number of people in this thread who failed to say that).

> But the approach to dealing with that subset of people should be different than the approach for the subset who were once employed and renting in San Francisco and then ended up homeless through a health emergency, job loss, or eviction.

How do you even begin to discriminate on that? The USA lacks a residency system like other countries.

I agree with your point, but it’s not possible to implement here, which is why the non profits continue the conflation.

For San Francisco in particular, if you work in San Francisco, you pay a local income tax of ~0.4%. Make having paid that (say, $50 paid by either you or the person you're married to) or having attended an SFUSD school as qualifiers for assistance.

That covers the large majority of homeless that SF should target for help and are all easily accessible to the city government, with no documentation required by the applicant. You can imagine corner cases (attended a private school, lived in SF but worked outside it) but it'd be an improvement over the status quo. Even many of the corner cases could be captured with additional documentation that would require a bit more effort on the applicant's side.

> But the approach to dealing with that subset of people should be different than the approach for the subset who were once employed and renting in San Francisco and then ended up homeless through a health emergency, job loss, or eviction. The latter group has shown the ability to sustain themselves in SF in the past, while the former hasn't. And, morally, the place of original residence is responsible for them, not the taxpayers of San Francisco.

This is how the system already works. The Homeward Bound program provides free bus tickets to people who have a support system elsewhere. That still leaves a substantial population of people who do not have any other support system, or whose support system is in San Francisco.

> If nothing else, people with longstanding ties to the community and economy should get preference for services compared those who didn't.

This is how the provision of services currently works. The problem is not prioritization, the problem is a lack of available housing for even your narrowly-defined “deserving” unhoused people. And arguing about a few percent being moved into a different category of eligibility does nothing to fix the underlying problem.

> That still leaves a substantial population of people who do not have any other support system, or whose support system is in San Francisco.

It's not San Francisco's responsibility to pick up the slack for places that don't take care of their homeless. Declaring that it is doesn't make it so, and both creates perverse incentives (for other places to shirk on their responsibilities) and makes it impossible for San Francisco to fulfill its own responsibilities.

Also, I don't think I used the word "deserving," despite your quotes. They deserve help, but San Francisco is not obligated to be the provider of services for the entire country. Once we do manage to build successful programs for the homeless who originate here, then we can talk about whether it makes sense to build aid systems and SF housing for people from other communities.

As it stands, we fail all the homeless in San Francisco. It's silly to think we can tackle homelessness nationwide before we even can get a handle on those who come from here.

mbgerring, I agree with you in almost the entirety of what you've said both here and in some of your responses.

There are a lot of false assertions made, often with no consequence for doing so, which is an ongoing problem; and worse a lot of these people actually believe what they say is true despite well researched facts showing to the contrary. Its disheartening that so many people are completely irrational when it comes to discourse on these things.

As for the lack of housing, to me its clearly not a money problem. Also, in other areas they do hotel vouchers instead of actually creating affordable housing; and while programs may limit it to no more than 30 days, there are loopholes which allow a revolving door between multiple hotels accepting vouchers. I would guess this is where most of the money is going, and this doesn't do the same thing as providing permanent housing first.

Additionally, the vouchers themselves are often traded, for drugs and other things and the areas where these are accepted, quickly become crime-ridden because the dealers follow the vulnerable populations; its one of the reasons some areas refuse to add additional local transit resources. They simply don't want to deal with it; or they deal with it in a way that makes it someone elses problem (like what happened in Santa Ana).

Everyone seems to have an opinion on what needs to be done, but none that I've seen have actually followed through on what the rigorous studies have shown. There always seems to be some loophole, corruption, backroom deal, etc for business to capitalize on homeless services without actually improving the situation in any way while draining resources meant to help people get back on their feet.

You did not provide any documentation. Whenever documentation is provided that supposedly proves this, is highly misleading. Like this one in which they've somehow managed to define everyone as an SF resident (see footnote) https://i.redd.it/omvx0d36ng1b1.jpg.

I am not serious, completely. But you called it a dumpster for the underclass (not judging either way).

But it points to an irony when you’re there, going to a meeting at the Transamerica pyramid or walking past the headquarters of Salesforce, or having a michelin starred meal, then walking down the street and a guy in an alley has a knife.

(Yeah, personal experience. I wasn’t very scared. Probably because I just had michelin starred wine pairings…)

When demand on resources exceeds available resources and/or current plans are not moving the ball, management must act. Moving homeless to lesser cost places is in scope. The poster above is right. While getting stable is a huge win, it's silly to think they can then continue to live in sf

They are not entitled nor are tax payers obligated to insure they have parity with people who can afford to live and work in SF.

And I buy the argument providing homes is humane and cost efficient compared to options. Any treatment medical or mental in the US is stupid expensive. But I think/hope DBT which is effective mental side is not the most expensive

The "toilet" controversy was the set-aside maximum cost for a sheltered, multi-year maintenance project that involved road construction. It wasn't just a toilet seat like people keep repeating.