Comment by condiment | Hacker News Reader

Comment by condiment | Hacker News Reader

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The fact that many of San Francisco's homeless are suffering from mental illness in some way doesn't ameliorate the damage caused by the growing divide between the haves and the have-nots in the region. While it's fine to address the causes of persistent homelessness, and to look for solutions to it, it's a completely different phenomenon compared to intermittent or temporary homeless the average middle-class family works to avoid.

The video mentioned that many middle-class families are one paycheck away from financial ruin. That is, rent and expenses in the city are so high in relation to wages, that missing a single paycheck or being out of work for just one week will result in a family losing their apartment and possibly being homeless.

As an outcome of the disparity between incomes and housing costs, low-income families are living 2- and 4- families to an apartment. 40x rent for a 3-bedroom (family) apartment in SF is $120,000 a year - a wage that is more than double the median household income in the US.

This is the more pressing of the problems the video addressed, and I think we would benefit more from discussing solutions for this than we would from wringing our hands about the myriad causes of persistent homelessness.

If you can't afford to live in San Francisco, generally the advice I would offer would be: Move away from San Francisco.

Is it harsh? Not really. People move all the time for economic reasons, there is no basic human right to live in a neighborhood you can't afford, even if you are used to living there.

San Francisco is going to be expensive when the economy is up. It's very geographically constrained, and earthquakes drastically limit the kinds and density of housing you can build. We can pretend that there is some silver bullet, but any program that artificially subsidizes or restricts the cost of housing just displaces someone else who would live there and be able to afford it better. It produces a drastically inefficient and expensive mess.

I guess what I'm saying is, it's far better to help people adapt by finding a place they can afford and where their family can thrive without assistance.

How are you supposed to afford a move when you can barely pay your bills?

I think you can look at any immigrant community and see the answer to this question, almost all first generation immigrants managed to move when they had almost no money, so you have tens of millions of people you can ask right now.

I think your opinion here is too paternalistic and fatalistic. People can and do adapt when the incentives become strong enough.

Those communities also had beachheads to move to: neighbors and family to support them while they moved. It's not really comparable. Also, during that time, we _really_ needed manual laborors here, so you had a known target (the States) with a support network in-place and an clear path to a job.

None of these things are true for low-income people today.

>>Those communities also had beachheads to move to: neighbors and family to support them while they moved.

It also helps that they are willing to take almost any job and work their asses off. It will keep you from being homeless.

They also didn't have crippling mental illness to deal with.

> It will keep you from being homeless.

It does help, but it will not always keep you from homelessness. There simply aren't enough jobs.

Are you saying mental illness makes someone broken, like a cripple? Foucault! Come quick!

Seriously though, 'there aren't enough jobs' is just a weird thing to say. Aren't enough jobs for what? For everyone to not be homeless?

Let me paint you a picture. You are homeless. At night, when it rains, you get wet. After a day of panhandling, you have $30.

Do you:

1. Buy a meal (loaf of bread and coffee, $4) and save as much as possible for bus fare.

2. Buy a tent, so at least you can stay dry and avoid illness.

3. Buy 2 fifths of rotgut vodka and drink it on the sidewalk.

The problem has absolutely nothing to do with jobs. If you had 5 open jobs for every person in the country, the same people would still be homeless.

> Are you saying mental illness makes someone broken, like a cripple? Foucault! Come quick!

Yes, I am saying that the way that we treat people who have mental health issues discourages them even further.

> Aren't enough jobs for what?

I have friends from college who had to move back in with their parents because they literally could not find a job. They applied everywhere, even McDonalds. No work.

> If you had 5 open jobs for every person in the country, the same people would still be homeless.

No, they wouldn't. _Some_ people would be, there's always the travel punk kids. But even your hypothetical is giving me a decision between rational choices. You left off the 'the voices from your paranoid schizophrenia are so loud that all you can do is lie there in a ball' option.

>>I have friends from college who had to move back in with their parents because they literally could not find a job. They applied everywhere, even McDonalds. No work.

I have another anecdote to counter your anecdote. I have a friend just arrived a couple of weeks ago. In the first week she was able to find two jobs. One in a hotel in the buffet area and another in a clothing factory.

> People can and do adapt when the incentives become strong enough.

Is the argument that SF's homeless have it too good, and if we made their condition worse (i.e., increased the "incentives"), that would solve the problem? Which incentives exactly do you have in mind? They are already subject to shockingly high levels of violence, which the police appear incapable of protecting them from. Do the levels of violence need to be even higher?

I'm an immigrant and moved to the Bay Area in the 90s with no network, and no desire to plug into my ethnic (Irish) network for political reasons (when I moved here first the Irish community was tilted heavily towards support of of the IRA and its associated political arm). My in-laws moved here from North Vietnam via Hong Kong in the 70s, and were also somewhat socially isolated by choice (most Vietnamese people in the Bay Area are from South Vietnam and as you can imagine this would make for some political friction).

It's certainly possible, but it also helps to be young and healthy; not to have any particular life obligations; to be a bit alienated from your native environment in the first place; and to have a somewhat unrealistic view of your own capabilities :) It also helps if you're moving from lesser to greater opportunities. If you're moving from SF (for example) to somewhere much cheaper, you're likely also facing a narrowing of your available economic, academic and other options.

So although I share your views to a certain extent, I think you're also taking a rather rosy view of things. It is certainly possible to move and adapt, but there are significant costs involved and it's not equally easy to move in any direction.

This is a common refrain but rings a bit hollow without particular advice. Where specifically should people go?

As a couple talking points, in western North Dakota there are jobs but there is no place to live. Oil field workers live in their cars in the Walmart parking lot in the dead of winter. In Atlanta, there are inexpensive houses but there are no jobs. Most of America is somewhere in between - not a lot of work to be had and not inexpensive, either.

You're not wrong, but you're overlooking a bunch of things. Suppose you grew up in San Francisco - does that count for anything at all, or should you be subject to the same economic headwinds as people who just arrived? What about the costs of relocation and re-establishment elsewhere? As someone who has moved several times in search of opportunity (which is how I came to SF, in fact), you need a minimum of about $2,000 to move and get through the first month or two, and that's assuming you have no dependents and are reasonably street-savvy. Indeed, I'm underestimating that slightly because I've always moved to places with fairly high levels of density and moderately good public transport. If you move to somewhere that you need a car just to get around, then those costs are a lot higher, not to mention the opportunity costs of the time you now have to spend driving. If you move somewhere where you have no connections you're at an economic disadvantage fora while until you can build your personal network, especially if you don't have an obvious marketable skill.

At bottom, the problem is that the people who are in the most tenuous economic position are the least likely to have the skills and resources needed to just up and move somewhere else. It's true that subsidies do display other people who would like to move to SF and could afford it better, but they don't have any right to move there either. In general I'm strongly in favor of efficiency, but I think you're over-discounting the economic value of cohesive communities and internal economic diversity. Also, you're overlooking another alternative, which is to loosen constraints on development and allow the city to build upward more. Earthquakes are not that big of a limiting factor, considering that large parts of SF consist of two-story housing...a great deal of which is seismically unsafe compared to more modern apartment buildings of 3-6 floors.

This is a nice hypothesis but fails to account for the reality on the ground - foremost being transportation.

So you are displaced out of SF - great, where to? You still need to be able to get to work in the city - after all, it'd be pointless to move somewhere cheaper just to end up out of work.

So, let's head south. Oops, due to the overflow of demand in SF, as well as the sheer number of tech workers looking to straddle the peninsula and the city, prices down there are only slightly less insane than in the city proper.

Okay, let's head north - well, nope, Marin is not exactly poor man's territory.

West is water. Humans float, but not that well.

Let's head east - Oakland is rapidly being gentrified and colonized by tech workers also. On a relatively low income you can probably still scrape by - but not for long, in a year or two you'll be priced out yet again.

Further out? How do you get to work? The toll on the Bay Bridge is ridiculous, and it's not like you can afford parking in the city so you can work anyways. Your only options are along the BART, but park and rides are few and far between, and properties within non-driving distance of BART are all rising rapidly in price. Not to mention, BART fares are distance-based (rather than flat on, say, MUNI) so the further away you move the more expensive your commute gets! For a tech person making six figures a year the price difference isn't even noticeable - but for someone scraping by?

This whole problem has played out this way because San Francisco (or really, the Bay Area in general) is the most frustratingly myopic place I've ever lived when it comes to transportation. Unlike cities like Chicago or New York (or even Seattle, which is primarily bus-based), the transportation network is in such poor shape that it actively penalizes the poor. The well-heeled, like ourselves, can afford cabs and Ubers to bridge the gaps where the transportation grid fails. The poor cannot.

> 40x rent for a 3-bedroom (family) apartment in SF is $120,000 a year

I know plenty of families (with kids) who live in 1-bedroom apartments (in Poland). 3-bedroom apartment are considered lavish.

I don't know about SF, but many localities limit the ratio of occupants/bedrooms. A family of four might not (legally) be able to rent a 1-bedroom apartment even if they were willing to live in one.

You skipped a level. 2 people per room is standard housing limits in most places. A poor family should only need 2 bedrooms and a vasectomy.

There's the really problem: 2 underemployed adults producing 3 or 5 underemployed-to-be children, while resourcr-ful adults shower their resources on 1 or 2 children.

$10,000/m for a 3 bedroom? You can get a 3 bedroom in the city for much less than that. It might not be the most desirable neighborhood or the biggest apt but let's be realistic. If you don't have a lot of money you're not going to spend $10k on an apt.

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