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Comment by marcus_holmes | Hacker News Reader

You should tell your elected officials that you support more initiatives to help the unhoused then.

I've ben homeless. It's not fun. Nobody does it because they want to. Ending up on the street trying to make the most basic of normality work is really hard work. I didn't end up on meth or anything (I stuck to alcohol), but I understand why some people facing this do. When your life is utter shite, drugs help.

Without any kind of social safety net the people who fall out of the bottom of society have nowhere to go except this. Build a decent safety net and they won't be living in the park and the park becomes the better place you'd like it to be.

So, on behalf of the unhoused: sorry your kids can't play in the park but we're facing bigger problems. Helping us with our problems will help you with yours.

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I left San Francisco 20 years ago, but, speaking to the situation in Chicagoland: our municipality funds long-term housing, support, and bridge services for local unhoused, and my understand is that the biggest problem we have with problematic unhoused people --- the people shooting up out in the open, or using vestibules as toilets, or accosting passers-by --- is getting them to take up those services.

It is the case that we have difficulty placing public toilets because of the risks their abuse will pose to unsuspecting users. I don't think it does anybody any good to pretend that these aren't real problems, or that we can moralize past them.

I think, at least in most major metros, we're past the point of it being a live issue whether to fund services to transition homeless people off the streets. Residents will fund those services simply because the alternatives are so disruptive. With that in mind, I feel like any response to this problem that centers on "well we should fund more services" is basically stalling.

Totally agree, and I'm not trying to minimise the harm that this does to our spaces.

Decades ago there were institutions that these people were placed in. We decided not to do that any more, for good reasons and bad, and I think maybe we should revisit that decision.

I've lived in Chicago since 2001 and when I got here it was pretty rare to see homeless people (and I lived in Uptown for a while back when Broadway was still borderline skid row).

First big wave of it (when you started to see tents appear under the highways and such) was 2008. Second big wave where that seemed to metastasize were Rahm Emmanuel's budget cuts. In particular, he shut down all the mental health clinics, and you ended up with a lot of people getting forced off their meds.

EDIT: Another thing, when I moved here there were still quite a few housing projects. I am not going to pretend they weren't rough. I walked through the ABLA homes most days and watched them get torn down. I had a kid hit me with a rock while biking through Cabrini. But there was a place where people could be off the streets back then. Now where do you go? What's waitlist for section 8 up to?

I'm in Oak Park, for what it's worth. I went to high school next to the ABLA homes. I don't think redeveloping the projects is why we have homeless people; those buildings weren't full of mentally ill people, they were full of families. We replaced the CHA homes with Section 8 vouchers, and that has, I think, improved things.

Well I don't think you're a renter then. I am so glad I bought a house in 2016 because everyone I know who rents has been on a wild ride.

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.

I'm just saying: the ABLA homes weren't a relief valve for people who could not safely take care of themselves. It wasn't where all the people in tents on the streets came from. The CHA projects were overrun with gangs, for sure, but the median CHA tenant was a taxpaying full-time employee. I guess what I'm snagging on here is the assumption that there's an equivalence to draw between an ABLA tenant and a fentanyl addict.

(I've been a renter and a homeowner in Chicago; I grew up here).

Your premise seems to be that homelessness is caused by mental illness. I think homelessness is very often caused by not being able to afford homes. Chicago has a lot less low-income housing now than it did when I got here. There's some basic arithmetic you can do.

To the extent that your premise is true (and I believe that, for many individuals, it is) that also speaks to our city pulling up the ladder on people. I was living in Logan Square when Rahm shut the mental health clinics down. There was one on Milwaukee. People protested for months. People on the streets obviously being in a very bad place and not getting help became a lot more noticeable after.

I'm a zoning reform person. I believe that increasing the supply of housing will reduce homelessness. But I have evidence to support my belief that it won't resolve the problem of people shooting up in the CTA vestibules, because I know many of those people have been offered secure housing and refused it.

I’m just not convinced homeless drug addicts are on the street because they’re shy of a house payment. The ones I’ve know have wound up there because they became drug addicts, and that addiction drove them into the abyss, exploiting family and friends and every relationship until they’re under a bridge.

We’ve spent billions and billions on the “homes are the solution to homelessness” crowd. And the problem has only grown worse.

> We’ve spent billions and billions on the “homes are the solution to homelessness” crowd. And the problem has only grown worse.

The agenda for during my adult life has been cutting services for needy (public housing, mental health, etc). Since we seem to agree that homelessness is getting worse isn't it also rational to agree that cutting these services is, at the very least, not helping.

I don't think it's true that funding for services for the homeless have been consistently cut in Chicagoland (or San Francisco) during your adult lifetime. In fact, I'm not even sure that would be true for public housing --- again, a different problem than the one we're talking about --- I think if you look you might find that we spend more on housing assistance now, in constant dollars, than we did in 1980.

My spouse works in homeless outreach in Texas. Essentially doing the exact thing mentioned in the article that the park rangers are doing - Helping people jump the bureaucratic hurdles of no ID, no birth certificate, etc that preclude the client from obtaining housing or employment. 80% of the clients are grateful and work towards housing. The other 20% refuse any help whatsoever.

This is the nuanced perspective that’s sorely needed in our society. Some people refuse help, and it becomes a talking point and a reason to never offer help— but that simply shouldn’t be the case.

Isn’t it so stupid how cities don’t just install port a potties everywhere? Same issues here where they aren’t installed because people will make them gross. Well the alternative to a gross port a pottie is to have people poop and pee in the road which I’d say is a lot worse. Like none of our train stations in LA have bathrooms because they would get “gross” so instead people piss in the elevator on the floor because that is better apparently than having a dirty bathroom. Not building bathrooms doesn’t stop biology from happening.

Port-a-potties require frequent emptying and other kinds of maintenance. Other kinds of dry toilets are under development which would address this issue in a variety of ways (e.g. composting toilets) and be applicable to all sorts of interesting scenarios (e.g. remote places in the developing world, where proper disposal of human excreta is a severe public health concern) but overall they're not yet ready for prime time.

The elevator at the train station also requires frequent power washing because people pee in it. The maintenance of the porta pottie is already being paid by society especially by our metro in added custodial needs. Why not just implement it then? Contain the piss and poop?

Shouldn't a train station have restrooms somewhere already?

It took my muni months of meetings to come to the conclusion we could not safely set up public toilets. No, cities can't simply install port a potties everywhere.

Sounds like a parallel issue. Homes won't help with addiction. If Nixon didn't utterly ruin the term, a "war on drugs" would be applicable here. Or rather a "war on addiction".

Hard to make compulsory though. Nixon didn't do it, but that era also gave asylums a horrible reputation.

San Francisco's homelessness budget in 2021 was $1.1 billion, for a homeless population of maybe 10,000. That works out to $110K per person before you add in state and Federal money.

Say this budget was doubled. What should that money be spent on, that isn't being funded now?

We had this mathematical problem during the Venezuelan migrant crisis. A group of well-intentioned activists bussed about 100 migrants from the CPD station on Grand to Village Hall in Oak Park. By the time the dust had settled, we'd allocated enough money to each family --- through in-kind services, temporary housing, bridge services, etc --- that most of them could have bought a small house (outright!) in the south suburbs. Most of those families would have been way better off with the money than with the program design we came up instead.

Where are those families now?

Really hard to say. Many of them ended up in specially-arranged multi-month lease situations; I don't know where they would have gone when the leases ended.

For the price of a home here they could live in a shack in the jungle of Venezuela off the mere interest and never work again.

I'm making a point about program design, not about the advisability of allowing economic refugees into the country.

Yes I am too. I have no problem with them entering at least facially. I'm saying if we're to provide for them I see even more cost effective options in areas Venezuelans can reside in.

I'll take the next $1.1 and provide them with new tents and sleeping bags and shoes.

More seriously, you get grafts like these. $800k for sheds in Los Angeles [1] or 300k for shipping containers in Oakland [2]. These are the type of stories that destroy hope that government us up to the task of handling the problem, no matter how much money they throw at it.

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-03-05/lopez-co...

https://oaklandside.org/2024/07/10/oakland-fbi-investigation...

If I may give you some optimism for LA:

https://abc7.com/post/federal-judge-frustrated-missing-data-...

"frustrated" is an understatement.

"You're not working on your time frame now. You're working on mine," Carter said.

And surprise. LA is getting small improvements on the homeless situation.

I'm not familiar with SF finances. I gather the problem with any kind of public works in the USA is that it immediately gets drowned in graft, pork and bureaucracy.

I suspect the bulk of the money in that budget is being spent on civil servants and very little of it actually reaches the people who need the help.

Doubling the budget will just attract more graft and not double the amount of help getting through. But I'm not an expert, so I may well be wrong.

I support initiatives to get really aggressive with drug dealers/users. I wish we could better help the unhoused in humane ways, but when 99% of our social resources we allocate to that effort are forced to go to fent zombies to no appreciable effect, I am very pessimistic we will make any progress no matter how many billions we throw at it.

We lost the War on Drugs. Every attempt to treat drug users as criminals has failed to achieve anything useful.

Portugal (as an example) treats drug use as a health problem and has much better results.

Addiction is a disease, a health problem, not something you can beat out of people by imprisoning them or being "really aggressive". That just makes the problem worse.

Portuguese complain about the drug zombies a lot more than I do.

We lost the war, so let’s just admit it and move on. Like you say, there is nothing we can do, so we should redirect our resources to unhoused cases that we have a much better chance of solving. We can liberalize drugs if you want, let them do all the fent they want; society just shouldn’t be on the hook for fixing them, which doesn’t seem to work very well anyways, even if we spend all of our money on it.

> Portuguese complain about the drug zombies a lot more than I do.

[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/

> In the USA society is never on the hook for fixing people

Can you cite this? How much does the US spend on entitlements vs other countries?

Let me Google that for you:

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

It's kinda interesting. In terms of % of GDP on social welfare spending it's halfway down the list (but still just above Australia and Canada which surprises me).

In terms of government taxation and spending it's very close to the top on taxation and #10 on spending, which is definitely not what the USA tells itself.

This implies that the USA taxes folks heavily and then doesn't spend it on social welfare (which seems consistent with the vast military spending).

Would you say military jumps out?[0] Medicare + Social Security + Health + Income Security add up to 44% already; much larger than the 15.5% military budget. Or am I misreading it?

[0] https://www.usaspending.gov/explorer/budget_function

Something like loading up Swains Island chalk full of every potent drug imaginable by the barge full and then offering free one way tickets to whoever wants them might have an effect.

>That just makes the problem worse.

The core problem is that there are a large contingent of homeless drug users who just want to be left alone so that they can continue to be homeless drug users. Any services given to them will just be redirected by them towards enabling continued drug use. It's like an inbuilt self-sabotage that is totally alien to regular folks, but the choice way of living for those with it.

This isn't talk about much at all, because the story book tale is that homeless people are just regular people who are down on the luck, and if we could just show them some respect, compassion, and spare a few resources, they'd be right back on their feet again. But that story is just a fairy tale used to sell a feel good idea, reality is way more fucked up than that.

Regular people who are down on their luck are at severe risk of becoming the drug-addict permanent homeless. Living on the street is real hard in an environment like SF, and subjects you to all sorts of wildly stressful circumstances that must be coped with somehow. Taking drugs then becomes a vicious cycle.

The vast majority of people who are simply down on their luck have friends and family that will help them. It’s not like you lose your job and go straight to living under a bridge. Not everyone, but most.

The people who end up in truly dire circumstances have backstabbed everyone who ever trusted or helped them. They have burned every bridge, and nobody they know wants anything to do with them. All to feed a ravenous addiction.

Well yes, but keep in mind the homeless population is still a minority. Apparently SF has a homeless population of 10k out of 900k people. This is your minority.

>The people who end up in truly dire circumstances have backstabbed everyone who ever trusted or helped them.

Or their family backstabbed them, if they ever had one (this article has a case study on someone raised out of an orphanage). Or this continually individualistic society has loosened support networks so you never truly got "friends". Or you simply got priced out because rent became 3k and you're not a silicon valley engineer.

Not all homeless people are drug users. Just the ones you remember most.

I'm sorry, but there is no-one who wants to be a homeless drug user.

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.

I think war on drugs only works on the user side anyhow. The edge in game theory is always to the smuggler not the inspector after all.

Anecdotally during covid la metro cut a ton of staff, including security, and people started smoking meth and crack and fent in the station platforms openly. It was disturbing and made the few of us still riding the system then feel very unsafe and complain to metro leadership and the press. As a result they hired more staff to arrest and kick these people out and ridership constantly improves. I haven’t seen someone smoke from a glass pipe on metro station property in probably years now, going from seeing it at one point or another basically every workday.

I'm reminded of being a tourist in Moscow a few years ago and being pleasantly surprised by the lack of unhoused folks on the streets.

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.

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