Comment by damnesian | Hacker News Reader

Comment by damnesian | Hacker News Reader

>Neighbors of the library collaborated with the city to urge the library to turn off its Wi-Fi at night in hopes the Castro neighborhood’s unhoused population would move on.

Theoretically, wifi access could help people move on by giving them the network access even old tech could use to look for jobs, living situations, long-lost relatives, access e-counseling and telehealth visits, etc.

It's not the only thing the haves have taken from the have-nots to get them to move on. Bottle and can deposits used to be a much bigger deal in the US. It served its purpose of retrieving bottling materials for reuse to save costs and removing them from the landscape. But some noticed it gave the homeless a little spending cash too. The people in my otherwise fairly liberal city voted in the 90s to remove the local deposits from cans and bottles in order to force the homeless to move on.

Fast forward to 2023. The homeless did not move on. They stayed and are begging more intensely. Many "prominent" homeless (a guy I know just as the Cowboy for his begging flair, for instance) are still here 30 years later.

> wifi access could help people

This type of thinking is tone deaf and its the reason we're here. If all the homeless needed was wifi, this would have been solved long ago.

It's unquestionably clear the city gov is forcing a wedge between it's residents and the crime, homelessness and business closures by failing to respond.

Did you know the prostitution on Capp St is alive as ever? It's just less visible now that's it's walled off using concrete barriers.

SF already tolerate too much. If residents don't act, nobody will.

I remember seeing prostitutes on Capp street (and Polk St) 15-20 years ago in the aughts. Not anymore. I routinely ride my bike with preschooler in tow on Capp at 8AM and 5PM and haven’t seen any in the past two years.

I work from a co-working space on Mission & 20th and see them all the time.

No one said wifi is the only thing they need, of course that is absurd

I completely agree with this.

in hopes the Castro neighborhood’s unhoused population would move on.

We really need to implement solutions better than "go be homeless somewhere else."

In NYC the DHS intakes and beds 60,000 homeless people _every single night_.

To say that there aren't solutions in place is incorrect. At least in NYC, the folks you see sleeping on sidewalks have broadly chosen that position over a bed in a shelter. It's a point of pride for many New Yorkers that if you're homeless and willing to get clean, the city will provide a bed for you every night.

https://www.nyc.gov/assets/dhs/downloads/pdf/dashboard/FYTD2...

Are there similar services for people who won't or can't get clean?

There are very few shelters that take people who are actively using drugs. That's partially because drug use among the homeless is a proxy for antisocial behavior. It's definitely not a perfect metric, but it's the best that people providing care have to keep their operations running.

Are there similar services for people who won't or can't get clean?

I have a vague memory that there was a court decision stating that someone cannot be forcibly made un-homeless unless they're a danger to themselves or others.

I'm sure there are some IANALs here who can clarify my murky memory.

Bureau of Prisons

There are programs that will get you an apartment and a job if you’re homeless. When I lived in Santa Monica, the workers who cleaned the streets were formerly homeless living on the same streets.

This is the program in Santa Monica. https://www.changelives.org/

How does that compare to say, Boise, where the city was recently sued because they enacted criminal ordinances that said it was an offense to sleep on the street if a shelter bed was available?

Sounds reasonable. Then you hear the nuance. A shelter bed was always "available" because one religious shelter would say that one was always "available" even if it didn't in fact exist, and in order to stay there, even if it was, you were required to participate in compulsory religious events multiple times per day.

The gist of the argument was that, among other concerns, Boise was effectively giving the homeless a choice between jail or forced religious indoctrination.

I'm no expert at all on the subject, but my reading is that it's a system which can pretty easily be implemented poorly, and needs some considerable oversight from the state to work correctly. If it were up to me, religion would have no place at all in the administration of homeless shelters, but this is a big country and different regions face different challenges.

I think the Boise example is probably a good case of generally well-meaning but ideologically driven folks using their city's homeless as a means to promote their views. I imagine if you surveyed most Americans, they'd agree that forcing someone to go to religious events in exchange for a bed is completely inhumane and idiotic.

There was a constant homeless encampment here in Boise under the I-184 overpass over 16th street a while back. The city of Boise (to their credit) let those people be there for maybe two years or so as they didn't really cause any issue. Then a murder happened there. And now it's a skate park.

https://www.ktvb.com/article/news/local/homeless-camp-under-...

The right answer is to house the homeless.

The wrong answer is for Boise to be the homeless Mecca from Portland, Spokane, SF, and Seattle -- who seem to be actively working to get their homeless to move to other cities.

who seem to be actively working to get their homeless to move to other cities.

It's probably not "seem." A number of cities have been caught, sometimes repeatedly, buying one-way bus tickets to other cities for homeless people.

It's immoral, but not illegal. When they get caught, there's a brouhaha in the local newspapers for a bit, and then everyone forgets and it starts up again.

> In NYC the DHS intakes and beds 60,000 homeless people _every single night_.

I interpreted parent's use of the term "solution" quite differently.

What was your interpretation?

> It's a point of pride for many New Yorkers that if you're homeless and willing to get clean, the city will provide a bed for you every night.

And if you don't want to get clean, just go to San Francisco? At least you can sleep outside in any season without dying.

I think the question of "What should we do with people who don't want to get clean?" is a really difficult one which I've yet to hear a good answer to.

Fentanyl, meth, and alcohol are some of the most brutal drugs to detox from, and tragically, they're also some of the cheapest and most available for homeless people. I hope my previous comment didn't make it seem like I view getting clean as a simple task, it's actually one of the hardest things to ask a person to do, but after years of spending time with addicts both at all stages of recovery, I think it's the only path back to regular life.

The problem is that we don't police the shelters too. What ends up happening in some cities especially the West Coast people steal from each other even being as poor.

> We really need to implement solutions better than "go be homeless somewhere else."

Until you get the significant cohort of homeless who have serious medical conditions proper treatment, everything is simply rearranging the same deck chairs.

The "homeless" are not a uniform block. The woman fleeing her vengeful, abusive husband, the LGBTQ teenager thrown out of the house, the veteran with a traumatic brain injury, and the woman having succumbed to heroin addiction are all "homeless" but all have VERY different needs for making them "not homeless".

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