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Comment by iambateman | Hacker News Reader

Can you source that fact? I'm seeing both violent and property crime as statistically way down over the few decades.

My anecdotal experience visiting LA and SF in 2022 was wild - homeless and mentally ill people yelling, being a public nuissance, defecating on the streets, multi-story tents on the same block as the Hollywood stars. It bewildered me that the same state that houses Apple and Google can’t afford to help these people. Whilst I am empathetic and understand that these people need help, I wouldn’t let an 8 year old roam these streets, whereas I was allowed to roam my town when I was 8. Maybe it has been even worse before, and I don’t agree that making the cities walkable before these people are no longer on the streets is somehow usess, I do think that it is a more pressing issue.

I think this is a dominating perspective for a lot of people. A few neighborhoods in LA and SF get infinitely more news coverage than the thousands of quiet urban places where nothing spectacular is going wrong, which creates an illusion of widespread despair.

I’m not saying crime or homelessness don’t exist, but urban LA is just not representative.

It is shocking that the richest state in the history of the world can’t figure out how to help the people with nowhere to go.

Skid Row has been in LA since the 30s. The problem is largely that there's a lot of vested interest in painting Californian Urban Areas as bad and so negative coverage focuses on the Tenderloin, Union Square, and Skid Row.

Those people are there because of the help. Every time a municipality expands support for the homeless and addicted they get more homeless addicts. Surrounding areas will in fact put people on buses and ship them out to towns where there is more support.

This is why Housing First is such a brilliant idea. Give them help, but require them to be stably housed (i.e. on a viable path out of long-term homelessness) before they can access the help.

The results have been that much of that housing ends up with the same problems homeless shelters do.

My town set up an apartment building specifically to house the "chronically" homeless. It cost a fortune to build (something like twice the cost per square foot as normal, or maybe more). The rationale was exactly that, give them stable housing so they can work on their addictions and life skills.

Fast forward five years, the place is a shithole. Roach-infested, apartments severely damaged and filthy, needles and garbage everywhere. Police, fire, and EMS spending a disproportonate amount of resources there.

People who are chronically homeless and addicted do not know how to live in houses. If you give them housing they will destroy it or they people they associate with will destroy it.

Sobriety has to come first. Some people won't accept that. At some point you have to stop accomodating their behavior and just say "no, that is not an acceptable way to live, and you can't do that here."

I'm not sure what's the problem is. They're getting individual apartments, right? If someone makes their assigned apartment a shithole, they should get kicked out of the program. Offer them rehab and therapy in a supervised community setting, like you say.

So you visited once? My anecdotal experience is I grew up in LA in the 80s and 90s. My middle school was shot at on three occasions I can remember. We weren't allowed to wear red, blue, or Raider's jerseys because the school district was so scared of kids getting shot for being suspected gang members. Six different intersections directly in front of elementary and middle schools near my neighborhood had no stop lights, until so many kids got hit by cars and killed that the parents finally demanded it enough that the council did something about it. My sister's best friend was murdered, smothered in her sleep by her mom's boyfriend. My second sister's best friend's mom had a fake identity because she survived getting attacked by the Night Stalker, Richard Ramirez. There was a black girl found tied to a fence and burned alive near my house whose name I never learned. My dad was punched by some guy at his birthday party where he met my mom and his friends took that guy into the concrete river ditch and shot him. As far as they tell me, no one ever got in trouble and I don't even think the authorities gave a shit. My dad was also shot in the chest with a shotgun, had his thumb cut off in shop class, broke his collarbone in football practice and didn't even get medical care for it. My uncle drowned in a river. My best friend from preschool died from touching a stray cat. My buddy in drafting class freshman year shot himself because he got a bad report card and was tired of how many times his dad beat him for something like that. I was kind of a goth and a bunch of my friends all gave themselves HIV because they were dumbasses who thought they were real vampires and drank each other's blood in the middle of a damn AIDS epidemic. In elementary school, we were often not allowed to have recess because air pollution was so bad that it wasn't safe to play outside. The nightly local news was so damn repetitive, because it was every single week an 8 year-old trying to buy ice cream from the ice cream truck getting caught in gang crossfire and shot in the head. Always the same little girl, always buying ice cream. Felt like it happened a thousand times. I was a pretty lucky kid that never got picked on, but you know why? My school had no idea what to do with someone who learned math as easily as I did, so they let me teach a remedial class when I was 12. The other kids I was helping were mostly gang bangers who came to really like me and beat the ever living shit out of any other kid that looked at me funny.

I never understand these kinds of sentiments on the Internet. Was nobody actually alive in the 90s? Have no memories? All rich white kids who grew up sheltered in the suburbs? Is Hacker News just super European and it was way better there? I get that California closed all of the state mental hospitals 35 years ago and now you have to actually see crazy people shitting on the street near your office building, but the overall reality is so immeasurably better than it was then that you guys make me feel like I'm being Mandela Effected. I somehow slipped into the timeline where Los Angeles and San Francisco weren't gang-infested murdervilles suffering from drug and disease epidemics with barely breathable air 40 years ago but were actually paradises.

Like you're talking about the Walk of Fame? Hollywood Blvd has been public drug use, street walkers, sex shops, theaters where Pee Wee Herman might cum on you, for as long as it's existed. Pretty Woman wasn't making it up except they weren't actually as attractive as Julia Roberts.

Thank you for your perspective, it does adjust mine heavily. Yes, I am a European, and your depiction of LA makes the post soviet 90s of Eastern Europe look somewhat tame in comparison. We had shootings and violence, but not nearly to the same extent.

Yet my point still stands, how can the worlds richest state not fix this?

I would love to live wherever you live so that I could even imagine that this was not obvious to anyone who goes out into public spaces.

To be clear, your response to the extremely reasonable request for a source of the wild claim that you made is "it's obvious"? Am I reading you correctly?

No, you are not reading me correctly.

Come on down! Columbia SC is experiencing a bit of a renaissance…there’s growth all over the city and a lot of optimism.

Life isn’t perfect, and we have serious problems like any other city, but I took my kids bike riding through downtown yesterday evening and felt safe.

I am glad you are enjoying it, but Columbia, SC has an extremely high murder rate, even for the US which in general has terribly high murder rates.

Unfortunately, we do. For various historical and demographic reasons, my exposure to this risk is extremely low. But yes, it is a massive problem.

Is it doing better than 5-6 years ago?

I lived there for a few years, and while the river walks were very pleasant, I don’t have much to say about it particularly otherwise.

The job market was pretty bad, basically limiting you to State gov or one of the handful of insurance companies around and state government work is rough (easily the most fulfilling job I’ve had, but the salary was just way too low.

Seems hard to justify with GA and NC markets nearby unless you’re staying solely for CoL or existing ties.

Better, yes. The market has grown a ton, and was ranked #1 in the country recently. Our tax base is weak, which makes it hard to compete with GVL and CHS, plus we have worse weather.

But the Bull Street district is in a totally different place from when you were here, which creates a feeling of “coming liveliness.”

Also Scout Motors is dropping a multi billion dollar plant in Columbia which will help job market

Definitely not Greenville, but we are getting there.

Seattle! Violent crime is way down from the 90s. People don’t think this is obvious because violent crime rate is not actually an immediately visible problem, since the majority of violent crime takes place in or around homes (followed by hidden places like alleyways and parking garages, chosen for not being seen).

The actual visible stuff (homeless people, trash, smell of public urination, people on drugs in public, people being mentally ill in public, shoplifting) is up. And both violent crime and rich people are more evenly distributed around the city so the “violent crime near a rich person” is up. And so people react to those.

The late 80s early 90s was the all time crime peak for a lot of places.

That's like saying the economy is up from the 1930s.

Personally I think two things are true, crime ain't that bad and you're basically framing the problem to let you lie through your teeth a politican.

What insulting shit.

Isn't it wonderful that we have people doing actual research on the topic, so we we can know what is actually going on instead of relying on random people's subjective impressions of what seems "obvious" from their necessarily limited viewpoints?

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