Pay rent or get a permit? SF bureaucracy scuffs dream of homeless shoe shiner | Hacker News Reader

Pay rent or get a permit? SF bureaucracy scuffs dream of homeless shoe shiner

sfgate.com

51 pointsjbarciauskas41 comments

This is the purpose of a great deal of regulation, simply raising the cost of some transaction to benefit those who have already cleared the bar. In this case, it is particularly clear to see because the person being held down has virtually no resources at all, but it is merely a difference of scale, not kind, to many other such endless regulations.

All regulations have social costs. It should be a routine question "What will the costs be?", "Who will bear them?", and "Is it worth it?", but the questions are so rarely asked. No matter how small the cost, it can be the difference between success and failure for somebody. A full economic accounting often shows the costs aren't worth it because of second order effects (which would be beyond the scope of a HN post, but for example, once the gate has been set up, those on the right side of the gate can artificially charge more, often negating the value to society of the regulation).

If you don't like this result, think twice next time you feel tempted to suggest that the answer to some problem is regulation. Maybe it is. But if you don't know what the costs are, and you haven't thought about how people will change their behavior after you've put your regulation in place, you haven't got it all worked out yet.

This is a significant problem with legislation in general. We can hardly expect our supposed representatives to have given much thought to the unintended consequences of their actions when they surely haven't read all of the bills on which they vote.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unintended_consequence

This seems like a caricature of what street vendor permits are trying to do. These aren't cartel permits.

This is the purpose of a great deal of regulation, simply raising the cost of some transaction to benefit those who have already cleared the bar.

This is a serious charge you are making. Is it really the purpose or rather, an unintended consequence?

This unintended or not consequence is so often the case, that it might as well be intended. But in general, yes it's true incompetence is much more common then malice.

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/04/silly-consensus.html

my favorite is that when you go to a subway in San Fran, if you ask to have your sub toasted for 30 seconds, you then have to pay 10% sales tax on it.

cold food is free but "hot food" is taxed. i can understand the purpose--restaurants are more luxuries than needs--, it just seems absurd in that context.

The other day I saw two SF cruisers pulled over busting a guy selling strawberries on the corner. I constantly walk past human shit, used needles and the broken glass of car windows and they're arresting a guy who's doing something useful?

Get organized, make a difference.

I don't know why you were down voted. I fully agree, get angry, get organized, participate in local politics.

Local politics is not as hopeless as national/federal. You do have a realistic chance of making a difference there.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/06/05/...

By the sound of it, they already have...

Or, at least the people have begun voting with their feet (no pun intended).

A comment I noticed from the follow-up article:

Nice story Chron. Do a story like this every day and you'll have peple [sic] lining up to buy your newspaper too.

Newspapers have the power to serve the local interest, if they would just accept the responsibility and effort necessary to do so.

Where in SF was this (feces, needles, etc)? SF is the cleanest city I've spent time in.

You're kidding right? I guess you haven't been to the Tenderloin, Western Addition, Mission, 6th & Market, Upper Haight, Chinatown, etc...?

I apologize... Spent most of my time just east of Golden Gate Park

So what you're saying is you're too high to notice.

I live in SF and constantly joke about how gross and dirty it is. However, I recently went to NYC and I'll have to say that relatively, SF actually is much cleaner than I gave it credit for. It's just that the gross areas in SF are REALLY gross. The trash and poo in SF are largely concentrated in the areas you mention. As an example, even in the Upper Haight, it's only bad on Haight street itself. The streets just parallel, Page and Waller, are quite clean. In Manhattan, there's a thin layer of grime and garbage spread out everywhere. I will have to say that I didn't see any human poo in NYC. That seems to be a unique feature of San Francisco.

Same thing with Boston. The Cambridge side of town is nicer, but generally dirty all around.

Come visit New Orleans.

I was there recently actually - problem is it doesn't fall under the rubric of "city" as described in the GP...more of a war zone :-)

It looks good on their annual performance evaluation.

I see this guy every morning on my way in to work. Had no idea he was homeless. Pretty impressive and inspiring story.

An enterprising individual, requiring the consent of the shoe shiner in order to collaborate, might offer an investment.

The government, able to force its demands, seizes a tax.

What's the argument that resolves the common-sense problem this guy has while maintaining the city's reasonable interest in making sure that con artists, unsafe food vendors, and public nuisances can be kept off the streets? Because I don't think this is a uniquely SF problem.

> What's the argument that resolves the common-sense problem this guy has while maintaining the city's reasonable interest in making sure that con artists, unsafe food vendors, and public nuisances can be kept off the streets?

I hate to say it, but selective application of the law looks like the only way. (See also, teenage girls getting prosecuted under child pornography law for sending naked pictures of themselves to their boyfriends.) Bureaucrats, police officers and state's attorneys all have to make judgment calls in situations like this. There's no legislative solution that perfectly corresponds to our intuitions of right and wrong.

They could make the permits free to people that do less than $N in revenue, which would still leave them with the ability to revoke permits from people who abuse them.

There are always two ways in such situations - make perfect law or apply imperfect law selectively. If you ask me, I prefer perfect law (but I am biased because I'm in Russia and I often see how selective application may be terribly abused). On the other side, it is not always feasible or possible to design perfect law. But in this particular situation IMHO it is definitely the better option.

Like the client quoted in the article said, "Nothing like kicking someone when they are down."

Page A-1! I hope that means something good will come of this.

There used to be one of the only two political parties in this country that at least nominally claimed to care about stuff like this.

Unfortunately, now they are singularly obsessed with defending the right of the government to arbitrarily detain and torture anyone it pleases.

I am hoping that we can get back to having two somewhat viable political parties some day, so there can be an actual debate about issues like the proper role and limitations of government regulations.

Wow that's complete fucking bullshit. I thought this city was trying to clean up its homeless problem.

Spirit of the law vs letter of the law.

And this is why it should be legal to shot bureaucrats on sight. How petty do you have to be to prevent a homeless man from bettering himself?

You're advocating murder?

Anyway, yes, the system tends to fail when people work outside of the system. I'm not sure why this guy can't live in the subsidized housing until he has enough money to legally run a business and pay his own rent, though.

It says in the article that he refuses to live in subsidized housing.

Moore doesn't want to get into city housing, preferring to make it on his own.

This man wants to make an honest living, and you're criticizing him for not taking welfare instead? Believe me, this man is not the reason for the failure of the system.

False dichotomy. And how it dishonest to avail of a welfare system one has contributed to in the past and/or will contribute to in the future?

To be clear, perhaps I should have said "make a living for himself" instead of "make an honest living".

> I'm not sure why this guy can't live in the subsidized housing until he has enough money to legally run a business and pay his own rent, though.

It's unclear how living in subsidized housing would help him with his permit problem....

He seems to think that he's better off living on the street than being in the subsidized housing that is available to him. Maybe he's wrong, but shouldn't you at least offer some specific supporting evidence? (No, "housing is good" isn't enough. Public and subsidized housing can be quite bad.)

You do have specific knowledge of subsidized housing in SF, right?

Pride, dignity, and self-respect be damned, he should get on the public dole, right? Oh wait, he's from Kansas, so he probably has some mid-western values in his DNA.

Gunfire may be a little extreme, but we should consider carefully allowing a person like this to continue to work for the city. There's a certain attitude that pervades the lower echelons of public service that entices people to beat up the helpless with the letter of the law. They pretend that they're doing good by "enforcing city ordinances" and then smugly refuse even to tell the poor guy which building to go to because its "not their job".

This is evil (little e). We'd be better off with the position they fill being vacant. Should they ignore the law altogether? Certainly not, but we employ humans so that it can be enforced with intelligence and compassion. I have a suspicion that those who would engage in this kind of cruel enforcement on the low end are the first to give favors to the wealthy on the flip side. That's just what corruption looks like from the bottom.

It seems to me that many bureaucrats are just blindly following a set of rules laid out for them and they are afraid of bending the rules for fear of getting reprimanded.

This reminds me of two things I saw on Hacker News. One was some TED talk which mentioned a hospital janitor who knew when to bend the rules when cleaning around grieving relatives. The other item was some study that demonstrated that if experts were to follow a set of instructions for a task that they themselves wrote, then they would fail at that task.

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