Comment by pastor_bob | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pastor_bob | Hacker News Reader

> Mayor London Breed threw her hands up in response. “We can’t force people to accept or stay in shelters and we’re unable to prevent people from setting up an encampment in an area that was just cleaned. This is the situation we are in,” she tweeted Wednesday.

> She’s right. San Francisco is under a federal injunction that bars officials from enforcing laws against camping or sleeping in public spaces as long as its homeless population exceeds available shelter beds. As we recently explained, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment creates a right to vagrancy.

NYC has a ban against encampments because they provide shelter to homeless. Even after southern states have sent 100,000 penniless migrants to NYC, they still are able to find beds for people.

If San Francisco politicians can't create enough shelters, it's on them. There are hotels, parking lots, rec centers, etc if you have to deal with the numbers in the interim before you get housing up.

Well, maybe they need to deal with the problems of (1) why people are afraid of shelters, and/or, even more importantly, (2) people not having homes, rather than whining that they can’t force people into terrible shelters or force them into jails for trying to survive outside of terrible shelters.

But, even so:

> Even after southern states have sent 100,000 penniless migrants to NYC, they still are able to find beds for people.

NYC is ~10 times the size of SF.

>100,000 penniless migrants to NYC, they still are able to find beds for people.

These are, by and large, economic migrants who really just want to work and are therefore a very different profile from the unsheltered on typical city streets - for whom mental illness and drug dependency are almost ubiquitous.

>As San Francisco progressives are learning, government can build more shelter, but that doesn’t mean the homeless will use them.

This is literally the opener to the article. The whole argument it is making is a complete mess.

> a federal injunction that bars officials from enforcing laws against camping or sleeping in public spaces as long as its homeless population exceeds available shelter beds.

If a place to sleep exists, you can demolish the encampments and force them the clear out. As the old saying goes, "You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here."

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