San Francisco homelessness: Park ranger helps one person at a time

b.) Another way to look at it is, "do you think it would be the top comment if the author didn't solicit feedback and thoughtfully edit their comment?" To which I would say, "who cares? Editing is fair play. Let's talk about our actual points of disagreement."

c.) To be frank I think this response from you is very telling. I haven't seen you engage at all with the substance of the comment. But you press very hard on this "AI" angle. The commenter has now shown us their pre-AI draft, and it's much the same - I think if you had a good-faith concern that it was "manipulated," that would satisfy you. Since it hasn't, I infer that your concern is either puritanical ("no AI must ever be used in any way") or that you are attacking the style of the comment when your real issue is it's substance.

We can go back through the threads if you like, but it certainly wasn't everyone. My bet was on it being related to the yet unresolved theft of a ~billion dollars from FTX using phenomenal amounts of mobilcoin.

Instead it was a less interesting story: A drug user under the influence killed another drug user they knew well over an interpersonal dispute.

People doing dumb shit attacking other people they know who are also engaged in dumb shit is enormously different from being attacked by a stranger out of nowhere while minding your own business. People rightfully feel less safe regarding risk that they don't have much control over vs risk they have more control over.

And we should treat it differently. No amount of policing can ever make you safe-- ultimately we all have to keep ourselves safe. FAFO is a law of the universe that we can't legislate out of existence, but we can adopt policies that increase or decrease the risk of random violence.

> Ronnie was always very clear about his needs. He knows he’s a volatile person. He doesn’t want to be in a shared room, especially with a stranger

So perhaps listening to what the people need instead of forcing them into unwinnable situations is the right answer. If your question is how you scale personalized care in a way that’s financially sustainable I don’t know. But pretending like the orphan crushing machine was turned off, to use your words, isn’t capturing the picture as I’m seeing it. Seems pretty crush happy.

It's this trifecta that people complain about - unsheltered, mentally ill and addicted. If we can solve any one, that feeling of abject squalor goes away.

[1] - https://open.substack.com/pub/dynomight/p/homeless

> Throughout his campaign, Trump focused on deregulation, tax cuts and reducing mortgage rates. In speeches, including one at the Economic Club of New York in September and a press conference in August, Trump reiterated his promise to reduce regulatory barriers and vowed to make federal land available for extensive housing projects.

https://www.housingwire.com/articles/trump-housing-build-fed...

I’m too lazy to find stats and stats may not exist anyway. You don’t need science to prove to you the ground exists when you get up in the morning. You use your common sense for that.

It does: https://www.sf.gov/information--overdose-prevention-resource...

This is not correct. SF gets a superset.

Car break-ins in SF were commonplace 25 years ago. They never became bad in the South Bay. SF just has legitimately bad policies that directly cause a lot of their issues.

The housing crisis is about the only thing it has in common with the South Bay and that’s because it is a state issue.

Most other cities that have large homeless populations aren’t on a peninsula so they can eventually shuffle them to places that are “out of sight, out of mind.”

It’s empathy for people with problems you don’t fully understand the cause of that turns into ham fisted destructive regulation.

More carrot and less stick, more compassion and less puritanism might have a chance of working.

The California high desert is full of variations of this in shacks and trailers across the nearly uninhabited expanse.

The biggest problem is support, but if they can navigate enough to get government assistance they can survive for quite a long time.

From what I hear, it is quite successful, giving their residents the dignity and autonomy they need to stand on their own.

Favoring narratives of individual heroes over narratives of systemic changes is a cultural problem. Whether it's Atlas Shrugged, the Odyssey or Harry Potter. It instills a learned helplessness and an artificial desire for a "strong man fix things" that can be very difficult to overcome. But it also atomizes and fractures society and benefits those with the most individual wealth and power.

The ranger is a hero. What she is doing is good. But she shouldn't have to do it. And nobody should have to do so much. The article intentionally buries its lede: if this is what it takes to save one person, how can we save thousands? The implied answer is again helplessness: of course this isn't scalable so we can't. What she is doing is too much for one person, so we can't expect it of others. But the real answer is that literally none of this would be necessary if the system were actually built to help these people.

Her work does not require a herculean effort because it is difficult. It requires so much effort because it is being made difficult. The right question isn't how can we scale this, the right question is how can we make it easy enough that we don't need her to be a hero. The question of scalability answers itself once you've removed the obstacles.

Of course you can probably find some government subsidy somewhere and trace it to grocery stores but nobody realistically claims grocery stores are taxpayer funded.

The government directly putting homeless in hotels over and over again is very clearly taxpayer funded and everybody knows what is meant when someone says that.

I don't mind strangers benefitting from my tax dollars. No where do I even imply this, so this idea is completely coming from your own preconceived ideas about those who disagree with you. The problem with this case is that I'm not sure anyone is benefiting from these tax dollars. These men aren't asking for help. They're being pressured into accepting help. Someone resourceful enough to trap racoons isn't fundamentally so helpless that they require 7 months of handholding to apply for temporary housing. He required 7 months because that wasn't something he was interested in the first place but is willing to occasionally humor a pretty ranger. She would have much more success meeting them where they're at. For example, she can set up an arrangement where the rangers will stop harassing the campers and tearing down their encampments if they keep the surroundings clean.

> What you're describing is triage, not housing the homeless

Yes, I'm talking about triage because that's exactly what the ranger is doing.

Until sometime around the 1980s, even in the USA poverty and homelessness were scene as systemic failures - "our system should not lead to those results". Post-Reagan, the attitude has shifted dramatically and now poverty and homelessness are broadly seen as personal failures, a mixture of poor morals, bad character and weak decision making. We even used to be a little inclined towards a potential role for the state in helping individuals deal with bad luck, but now bad luck is seen as "gravitating" towards individuals whose fault is all theirs.

This has necessarily drastically altered government policies at the local, state and federal level. We are much, much worse for it, no matter which interpretation of poverty and homelessness is more factually correct.

HUD[1]:

"Housing First is an approach to quickly and successfully connect individuals and families experiencing homelessness to permanent housing without preconditions and barriers to entry, such as sobriety, treatment or service participation requirements."

California Department of Housing and Community Development[2]:

"Housing First is an approach to serving people experiencing homelessness that recognizes a homeless person must first be able to access a decent, safe place to live, that does not limit length of stay (permanent housing)...Under the Housing First approach, anyone experiencing homelessness should be connected to a permanent home as quickly as possible, and programs should remove barriers to accessing the housing, like requirements for sobriety or absence of criminal history."

[1] https://files.hudexchange.info/resources/documents/Housing-F... [2] https://www.hcd.ca.gov/grants-funding/active-funding/docs/ho...

The drugs are administered first to foster obedience, credulity, and fidelity. The patient learns to keep their appointments, lest the drugs be withdrawn. The patient becomes a regular customer at the pharmacy, which must also be done on precise schedules. The drugs must be taken as directed, and the patient learns how to read and understand and follow intricate rubrics for rituals at home, and what foods to avoid, how to coordinate meals with the drugs, etc.

The patient, having demonstrated obedience and fidelity is well-supervised now by the clinic and provider. The drugs are "virtual shackles" that stand in for actual restraints and confinement methods. Just as "chemical castration" substitutes for surgical mutilation, any patient who's on drugs and making regular appointments can be let loose, a feral in the human population, often undetected and blending in.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_psychiatry#/media/F...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippe_Pinel

It's important to consider that Mental/BH has never been a medical discipline, and while today's scrubs and white coats are the priestly raiment of BHT, NP-LPN-RPh-BH, and M.D.s alike, they take blood pressure and do labs, and they prescribe drugs and work in clinical systems, even Western-style BH is, fundamentally, a religious temple cult of profound spirituality. In order to fit the mold of modernist secularism, the BH temple must array itself in trappings of science and respectable, professional jargon. The BH orthodox profession is that mental illness begins and ends in the body, somewhere, hopefully the brain, or at least where the neurotransmitters flow, to be manipulated by sacramental means. Because if mental illness is not bound or subject to the body, or the secret HIPAA-protected rites and liturgies are not concrete and high-tech, then treatments become subjective, outcomes are unpredictable, and evidence cedes ground to superstition or faith in deities and the intangible world of spirit, which must be ignored in order to promote and foster D.E.I.

Ramp up drug regimes trying to blunt aggression, anxiety, restlessness, independent thought and reason, resistance to authority, and other compulsions to harm others, or sometimes the drugs magnify those compulsions and homicidal ideations, and the patient just goes totally apeshit, until the hospital can get to billing their insurance in earnest. But since President Reagan "closed the asylums" the paradigm shifted to keeping people out and free and at-liberty. Because institutionalization is an excessive burden on taxpayers, families, and insurance carriers, and it's labor-intensive: this is recapitulated in the past 5 years because the "Flatten the Curve" mantra was promulgated because there are widespread staff shortages and a lack of skilled, certified HCPs, especially for Defence Against the Dark Arts. I recommend viewing the critically acclaimed, award-winning film "Ladybird" starring Saorsie Ronan; her mother is a psychiatric nurse played by Laurie Metcalf, and see how Ladybird herself turned out

Even for the HCPs on staff, BH facilities are closer to meat-grinders than revolving-doors, as they burn out, train up, move up, drink their own Flavor-Aid, circulate within the system. So those homeless psychos meet a new team of strangers every month or so. Over 25 years, I personally witnessed one clinic that changed its name/brand/ownership 5-6 times, expanded/moved at least 3 times, and there are literally dozens of BH systems that didn't exist 10 years ago, including 8-story hospitals with no 6th floor.

https://www.azahcccs.gov/Fraud/Downloads/ProviderSuspensions...

Would you believe dozens of New Religious Movements operating under auspices of BH services? You may find yourself in a shotgun shack, worshipping Shiva or Kali, or I don't know, in a UFO cult, or practicing tantric yoga with authentic Punjabi Guru, because Medicaid funding. BH Funding for Treatment is Public Safety and a National Security concern: every time a mass shooting is reported on the news, Congress acts to bolster BH funding and services, and so "every time a shell casing pings, someone's clinic builds a wing!"

Ask anyone working in hospice/palliative care and they may confide that drugs are administered when family or staff are irritated or vexed by the patient, rather than basing it on the needs of patient herself. An incoherent or insane patient may be unable to articulate their needs, but when they act out, or become criminally dangerous, they must needs smacked down. "The Squeaky Wheel Gets the Grease" indeed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosemary_Kennedy#Lobotomy

The patient works with the provider to identify and treat more and more conditions. The drugs layer-up, and sometimes extra drugs are shoveled on top, to complement really debilitating effects. But in general, the drugs are exacerbating and magnifying the patient's sins and proclivities. The drugs are interacting and the patient is increasingly entangled in the intricate ritual of provider->pharmacy->daily pill rituals->pharmacy->provider->pills.

It's impossible to know whether recovery is attributable to a true underlying change or whether the drugs have papered over the worst symptoms. Therefore, it's never advisable to stop those drugs or titrate off them, because they don't get labeled with maximums or limits like the OTC stuff can be (this guy once OD'd on fiber supplements).

In the case of "lunatics" and other folks who just had a temporary nervous breakdown or trauma-based freakout, they certainly can recover and exit the system--anyone can exit the system until they're court-ordered or incarcerated, anyway.

There's plenty of other non-drug treatment for outpatients on the streets; counseling/therapy can be done 1:1 or in groups and other supports in the clinic for building life skills, etc. The homeless nutjob population can typically get benefits from us taxpayers to keep them in the clinic 3-5 days a week, just doin' stuff, because the clinic is pretty much a church, and the mentally ill need a religion with structure, rituals, priests, and sacraments like Prozac.

Every state does have some form of civil / involuntary commitment, though nothing like before the 80's.

Many drugs also come with unpleasant side effects, especially if someone steals them from you and you're stuck with withdrawals. I'm reminded of one person my friend was helping who hated taking his medicine, but if he didn't, he would inevitably become increasingly paranoid that vampires were out to get him. Helping the poor guy live anything close to a "normal" life was a constant challenge.

I think yimbys are framing that situation as THE problem.

I think you’re coming at this from the wrong angle. A lot of people just really like drugs (and alcohol) and it has nothing to do with society getting them down. Surely there are plenty of people abusing substances as a coping mechanism but I think there are likely a lot more who just want to have a good time.

Well that's your first problem. We're hiding the underemplyment crisis with "but unemployment is so low!". Quality of life for underemplyment is a lot closer to homelessness than middle class.

The deeper problem that America is more and more trying to focus on the elite over the working class.

Imagine singlehandedly earning 150% of what the average family earns, in one of the richest countries in the world and living in a one-bedroom apartment - and such a low standard of living isn't even cheap.

The landlords must be laughing all the way to the bank!

Even then, the problem could be Elon buying so much steel, or it could be steel manufacturers deliberately limiting steel production and only selling it to Elon to keep prices high. The latter is what is happening with landlords and building restrictions.

I know what you mean by police state, but i wonder why america doesn’t consider themselves a police state, with such a large prison population and all the innocuous behaviors that can land you in legal trouble. i guess americans get indoctrinated in a certain way of thinking, where their subset of freedoms which they can mostly practice, makes them think they are free but ignore all the numerous other penalized behaviors. for example: i cant possess cocaine regardless if it wont be consumed as a drug, cant drink in public, cant lay down in public, cant sleep in public(ny), etc etc. a lot of intermediary stuff gets penalized because its the only way to control some tangentially related detrimental behavior, or its penalized for making people feel odd (nudity).

but more on point: america polices property taxes. Any property owned gets taxed automatically. this creates a forced work state to accumulate money to pay Uncle Sam. Failure to comply with this system and you get policed or pushed around as a homeless. David Graeber talks about Madagascar colonies set up with a similar system (underline) intentionally(/u) to produce a productive populace. similarly he mentions ways monarchies created rules and systems to force markets and force productivity elsewhere. I think homelessness circumstances is by design, and this free nonpolice state we call america is actually an artificial created police state. we can choose different governing setups that have different features emergent and by design. Its what Mao attempted to do, its what the French and British monarch did. But i see the coercive force in all the government setups even the ones that claim to be free.

Reference: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

So the way I figure, you spend money on imprisoning (though private prisons make more money and can sell non-violent labor).

Or spend money on housing and social workers and maybe a good chunk of this individuals rejoin the workforce and pay taxes.

Or you spend money on cleaning up after, paying for medical emergencies, and increased private security costs.

The option selected is either the one that the invisible hand found to be the most efficient or a better option was not sold well enough.

This clearly isn’t true, as the US has a per capita prison population four to five times that of China & Singapore! We jail far, far more people than they do.

If you have the money to imprison the homeless you could use that very same money to just build more affordable housing and that would give you more in terms of results per dollar spent.

But that doesn't jive well with the American idea of having to morally punish unwanted behavior, instead of just helping people.

Jailing homeless people is like jailing people who break a leg: Nobody plans to break a leg, so jailing people who do won't reduce the number of people who do. The only thing criminalization of such involuntary traits achieves is to reduce visibility and pushing people to hide it.

Humans naturally evolved in a hunter gathering setting, yet certain governing “civilizing” forces had the audacity to eliminate that as possible lifestyle, and then label people who defy that restriction on lifestyle choice as problemmatic.

The incarceration rate of the USA is 541/100k:

https://www.prisonstudies.org/country/united-states-america

The incarceration rate of Singapore is 164/100k:

https://www.prisonstudies.org/country/singapore

The homelessness rate in the USA is 19.5/10k. The homelessness rate in Singapore is 1.9/10k.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_ho...

Singapore doesn’t have a homelessness problem because they build as much public housing as possible, sell it to citizens at a massively subsidised rate, and follow up with schemes to rent to people who fall through the system for practically nothing.

If you want to reduce homelessness, you need to build a large volume of housing. San Francisco is doing the exact opposite and getting the exact opposite results.

This is marked contrast to, for example, most European countries (particularly the two you've mentioned) where the number of people who simply do not see a role for non-carceral government action (i.e. the first solution you've described) is quite small.

Combine that with a referendum process, and you've got a situation in which there are lots of things that could theoretically be tried but will not be, even in California.

2. Almost. They don't use for profit prisons who are incentivized to punish. Other countries actually focus on minimizing recidivism. But America keeps falling for "Hard on Crime". Again, that selfishness: "I would never do that, that person deserves to suffer".

>If there was a silver bullet which was politically acceptable to "solve" America's homeless problem I ensure you, folks in California would have tried it.

I agree. But politically people treat reformation as "free handouts". With that attitude nothing will change.

Finland, the poster child for housing first, does this as well.

A free society will by definition be unequal; people have different priorities and abilities, and wealth acquisition isn't a zero sum game. If anything, instead of vilifying billionaires, take a look at the unelected but taxpayer funded and vastly bloated bureaucracies in every country around the world. The shocking revelations of USAID spending billions upon billions to interfere in other countries is example enough.

Prisons are the most equal places in the world in terms of living standards and options available to prisoners; nobody sees them as ideal.

Now lack of upward class mobility - that's a separate problem area to focus on.

Almost no one "prefers homelessness" to anything else per se, but they may decline the terms on which housing is offered. For example "break all your social ties and move away from the only city you know" is extremely hard for anyone to accept.

Look at some other conversations in this comment section! A lot of people want to "solve homelessness" but a lot of them also don't care what happens to the homeless people on the way. "Come with us, to a place you've never heard of and know nothing about, where all your needs are met"? No thanks my man I have read Maus.

1. The ER is free to you, because they legally cannot refuse to treat you based on your ability to pay.

2. A regular doctor's visit costs $250 and your medicine costs $5-$500/month depending on what you need, because those businesses won't give you things they don't think you'll pay for.

One need not be morally bankrupt to make choice #1. We all choose things that are more expensive for society because they are more convenient or less expensive for us - lots of regular activities of what patio11 calls the professional/managerial class have negative externalities that the rest of society pays for: air travel, personal automobiles, and lawns all come immediately to mind.

If you want people to get their medical care from a PCP and their medicine from the pharmacy, then make it cheaper for them. Health insurance companies know this; that's why many plans lets you see your PCP for a small fixed price even before your deductible is met - because they want to incentivise you to get your care in the way that's cheapest for them.

Spending $700M/year on homelessness crisis is straight up insane. There has to be a better way that doesnt cost as much. SF is kinda fucked.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/homeless-questions-an...

https://opengovpay.com/employer/ca/san-francisco

Now, I think there are otherajor issues with this idea (mostly that having a 0.1% population of assisted people is much more workable than a 10% population, as would happen if SF moved every homeless person to a smaller city).

But reducing those homeless to 0% would likely not move the needle at all on the “problematic homeless” - the type everyone complains about.

Nobody cares about Steve Wallis sleeping in a bush.

On both occasions I used this equation homeless -> day labor for Airbnb to clean up for warehouse/factory interview -> work in factory until deposit on apartment earned to get out.

Most the people actually on the street are nuts or drugged out. People like me would clean construction site, then take a bus to edge of town and climb a flat roof and sleep where no one sees us.

What you're witnessing isn't so much poverty but insanity.

And in many parts of the world you have to be lucky not to see/experience poverty from up close.

But for the most part, the things I expect the SF city government to do, get done. The roads are paved, the schools function, crime is kept in check, elections are held, permits are issued, inspections get done, etc. All to varying degrees of course. And the people get to change leadership if they feel things aren't going well (as they did in the last election).

The trend of stealing money from New York, shutting down the Department of Education, and FEMA would make me think otherwise.

I would expect this to be a particularly low point. Can you link some data?

Section 8 has long wait lists. It seems kinda unbelievable to argue that destruction of thousands of units of low income housing didn't cause people to not have housing.

I don't doubt that many people are mentally ill. Before Rahm's cuts, we had a taxpayer-ran system of caring for the mentally ill.

[0] USA has the highest drug use per head of population in the entire world. Portugal is way down the list.

I don't think there's "nothing we can do". I think it's more of a question of how we approach the problem. We have always approached it as a failure of the individual in question, requiring correction by punishment. This has clearly not worked (ever) but everyone seems reluctant to abandon it.

If we approach addiction as a disease, like cancer, that affects some people against their will, rather than something they chose because they're junkie scum, we might help them more [1]

> society just shouldn’t be on the hook for fixing them

In the USA society is never on the hook for fixing people. All that rugged individualism. Other societies work differently, and that seems to get better results.

[0] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/drug-use-... the USA has the highest world

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6633066/

They're refusing treatment because they're addicted. They're refusing shelter because the shelters have policies (like not using drugs, or from the article; no pets) that they can't meet.

A lot of them have been abused by the institutions that were supposed to help them in the past, so understandably don't trust that they will be helped by similar institutions now.

Any of us, put in the same situation, would find it impossibly hard to deal with. I was lucky; I had friends who could help and I got lucky with some work that allowed me to get out of that situation. If I'd not had that luck, I could easily have gone down the same road.

A friend of mine who lived there for a while commented that that's because the police round them up and ship them out to the suburbs where they're not being seen by the tourists. They then migrate back to the centre over time because that's where they can beg, and the cycle repeats. Nothing is solved, no-one wins, and people die because of this policy, but at least the tourists are impressed by the lack of street people.

Moving drug addicts off the subway does literally nothing to solve the problem, except it keeps the subways nice and clean and allows everyone to think the problem doesn't exist any more.

At the very least, whatever has been imagined hasn’t translated into a ground reality expected by the parent. So I doubt it’s true.

What's going to happen, if we're foolish enough to try UBI, is we're going to bleed a bunch more money that immediately gets vaporized (or at least put in the pockets of pushers and alcohol distributors), and then we still will have the same problems for at least 50% of the people that needed the focused benefits like SNAP or Medicaid anyways. We'd be much better served getting very medieval on anyone and everyone selling drugs, and then going from there.

Which gets to the heart of why conspiracy thinking doesn't hold water, who in your theory are "they"?

I don't think government thinks far enough ahead to use this as a fear tactic. Most homeless are not some drug users hopelessly addicted.