Why Silicon Valley hates the homeless | Hacker News Reader

Why Silicon Valley hates the homeless

thewhatnoise.com

31 pointsBenStroud39 comments

I don't think this is really accurate. There are many reasons that the people who live in SF might not love the number of homeless that are in the city, but I don't think most of them are thinking "That could be me any day now."

This is conflating two groups in SF: startup people and big company techies. The people who are driving up rents (and seem to be the focus of recent controversy) are the big company techies. I do not think that those people that work at Google are worried about being homeless any time soon. Similar for Facebook, Genentech, Apple, and other bus-providing companies. People working on startups full time may feel more at risk of being homeless, but I don't think that even they are actively worried about being homeless -- though everyone is different, so maybe some are.

I'm with you. This feels like a pretty big reach.

Homelessness is scary, especially in this society. But there is not some number of startup failures after which I'm at risk of spending every day yelling gibberish and spitting on passers-by. And that stuff doesn't seem to happen in the valley, possibly because they were all drawn to the city where not so many people drive everywhere.

I disagree with the conclusion of this article. I think the hate has little to do with the actual people, and more to do with how bad SF streets look and smell.

Yes, these issues are because of homeless people and homeless people deserve our sympathy and help. However, for better or for worse, I think most people complaining aren't complaining about their fellow humans. It's easy to try to turn this into an "us vs them" class war. Rather, I think most people are simply upset by the resulting aesthetics.

SF right now reminds me of Times Square before it was cleaned up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Times_Square#1980s.E2.80.93pres...

"homeless people deserve our sympathy and help"

San Francisco is the most sympathetic and helpful city on the planet for homeless people. Yet also seems to have more of them than any city I have ever been too. I wonder why?

Actually I don't. "Sympathy" and "help" exacerbate the problem instead of resolving it.

This may have some truth to it, but there are other factors. They are also bussed in, weather as well.

Is the problem that people are homeless? Or that they are in your back yard?

> San Francisco is the most sympathetic and helpful city on the planet for homeless people.

Bwahahaha, no, no it isn't. Not even close. There's a huge lack of shelters, housing, food, etc... The problem with SF is that the entire city is stupid expensive, and nobody wants to spend huge amounts of money to build and run the shelters necessary.

> San Francisco is the most sympathetic and helpful city on the planet for homeless people.

Unless San Francisco actually picks them up, gives them a clean, maintained, regularly inspected apartment with heat, hot water, electricity; pays for that; gives them every month enough cash to pay for necessities of life with enough being given that a reasonable interaction in society and culture is possible; puts them in a program designed to find them useful and respectful work, or with none available, provides them with training courses; and lastly, provides free full health and dental coverage ... unless all that is what SF does, there's 2000+ german cities and who knows how many more cities in other countries who'd like to have a word with you about that claim.

SF actually sort of attempts to do that, and spends more than enough money to do that, but is ineffective to the point where the homeless are either disincented to participate, or are stuck in a weird limbo where the city/state/fed/charity give them enough to survive indefinitely, but not to actually improve.

In fairness, well over half of the SF homeless population are mentally ill or drug addicted, which would probably be covered by other programs elsewhere; some of which (on the mental health front) is missing because the US had a lot of issues with horribly run institutions until the 1970s, so they shut most of them down, but didn't provide an alternative.

This article's thesis is way off. I'm pretty sure, when someone complains about "crazy, homeless, drug dealers, dropouts, and trash", their concern is not about the possibility of themselves becoming like that.

Ben Stroud, you live in London, why are you writing about San Francisco anyway?

It seems he perhaps has a grudge against the West Coast and/ or the US in general - http://www.thewhatnoise.com/2013/05/500-startups-and-not-goo...

On behalf of an embarrassed island on the other side of the Atlantic, I offer my sincerest apologies. We try to confine self-righteous bores to north London, but with the advent of the Internet, they've taken up jobs in social media, enabling them to amplify their boorish dinner party cockwafflery.

Upvoted for "cockwafflery".

You don't need to be an entitled techie to be disgusted by people openly defecating in the streets.

SV and SF techies hate the homeless b/c they think they are all self-made. They walk out of Philz with their $4 coffee, look down at a bum, and think to themselves "Why doesn't he learn Ruby on Rails and become YCombinator millionaires like us?" At least in "third world" countries cited by the author, the wealth disparity is much older and there is a social contract between the serfs and lords.

I'd rather live in a world where it's socially acceptable to look down on someone for a lack of abilities and work ethic than the 90% of the world where it's socially acceptable to look down on someone just because their ancestors came from the wrong region.

San Francisco is a beautiful city. But if there's a place that could do with a bit more shit on the streets it's SF. Homeless people are terrible. They remind us that we, as a society, fail to provide for the weak among us. On the other hand, they're great. They remind us that the world, is a cruel, messy, hard place, and that we're all, quite literally, full of shit.

Unfortunately, I wasn't yet born when San Francisco was a Mecca for those who wanted to live a different kind of life. But I was fortunate to live in the Castro for a few months during YC, and the sight of those naked guys – or those in tight leather skirts – always made me smile. I thought, hmmm, that's what disruption looks like; that's true hacking – really going against the grain rather than pretending you do because you're like, totally ignoring regulation, while, in fact, you're just screwing cab drivers over and serving nothing other than the same old boring consumerist culture, being manipulated to serve the man with true passion, rather than trudge along with quiet desperation but true rebellion in your heart.

Many of the homeless are mentally ill; most of them live a nightmare. But if we can't help them, let them at least help us remember how crazy this world is. So go ahead you wonderful, destitute, unwashed people: save this beautiful city's soul by shitting all over it. Make the streets of San Francisco your toilet! And when you're done, see if there's a way some of you could get back into New York again. God knows that city needs your help, too.

> Many of the homeless are mentally ill; most of them live a nightmare.

The best solution in such cases might be to put them in institutions (where they could also get help), rather than let them free on the street.

The best solution is to take care of them in one way or another. You can't "put" them in institutions because they don't pose a danger to themselves or to others. You could offer them some arrangement, though.

If they're mentally ill, can they really choose by themselves? There's not much point in making offers to someone who can't distinguish or understand their options. People with limited ability to make decisions or take care of themselves shouldn't be out on the streets.

Now, you can either give them a home and a caretaker individually (let's say, each of them gets a full-time social worker), or put all of them in the same place where they're taken care of as a group (aka an institution).

> considering that he got a certain distance in life actually thinking in this way

Apparently we are not allowed to have differing opinions to the author.

His main point is a bit silly as well. The majority of the people we are talking about are mentally-ill and/or addicts, not laid off project managers.

Actually, they do need shelter, treatment, and a chance at work. That the second post was pandering and poorly written doesn't change that fact. It doesn't help anyone to have people shitting in the street.

Of course you are allowed a different opinion to mine. It doesn't mean that I won't think it's stupid though.

He merely asks why the city has to be filthier than it should be. Why do you defend filth and danger? There could be any number of solutions to the problem, but your primary concern is to attack the messenger for noticing.

Unless there is further info I'm not aware of, your character judgement here is unwarranted. That he got "a certain distance..." is the part that bugs me.

Disrupt all the nimby's who lobby against building additional housing. Landowners hate new housing because it drives down the value of their assets. If anyone's truly despicable in this culture it's the landowners who refuse to let more housing come into the market.

This armchair psychology fails any basic sanity check. If the SV rich worry they'll become poor, why wouldn't they support more public safety nets? And why anyone fear a day when they are "not white"? A startup failure does not change skin color.

I just got back from SE Asia, and SF actually is the only place I've visited where humans shit on the main commercial streets.

I have some compassion for mentally ill/drug addicted/etc. homeless, but zero compassion for the $100-300k/yr SF city employees who are at best worthless wastes of oxygen and are given a by-world-standards huge budget, in a city with massive inherent advantages, to try to make the city a decent place to live. And fail spectacularly to do so.

I rode the light rail in Houston once and a homeless man got aboard. His stench was so strong that my only conclusion was that he had been defecating in his pants for at least a few weeks without ever changing clothes or cleaning up at all. Everybody on the metro got up and moved as far away from him as they could until he was the sole occupant of his end of the train.

I felt extremely sorry for the man. I also couldn't blame the people moving away as the smell was so bad.

I think non-homeless people in general just don't know how to respond to homeless people. I'm no exception. But I really don't think "hatred" for the homeless is any more prevalent in Silicon Valley than elsewhere; San Francisco simply has an unusually prominent homeless population.

If you would like to help some of the low-income youth of San Francisco, consider donating to the education of one through Wishbone:

https://www.wishbone.org/campaigns?location=san-francisco

What community, anywhere in the world, doesn't hate the homeless? Certainly not Dhaka, where I spent a portion of my childhood, or for that matter anywhere I've. Even in Asia. Not New York or Chicago or DC. The town I grew up in Virginia even extends the hate to lower middle class people, objecting to better public transit on the grounds that less wealthy people will be able to shop at their upscale malls.

Some time ago I saw someone post this on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6816649

It left me questioning the authors motives. On one hand, if the author intended the event to be about business networking (as he, being a ceo of a startup, are wont to do) then the choice of having it done on thanksgiving to be an odd one, but ultimately harmless.

If the offer was more of making meaningful social connections then I would have found that to be troubling. I was particularly convinced of this when I saw in a bold faced declaration, the author stated that "No one should be alone for thanksgiving". No one should be alone for thanksgiving but it seemed targeted at the members of the tech community and not the community at large. You know, the people without a home, people with fractured families.

I could be wrong. Perhaps he advertised on the street. But if he pointed people to upvote it on HN, then it just reinforces my opinion.

In college there were groups that would throw a thanksgiving dinner for students that couldn't make it home to be with family. Were they wrong or elitist or uncaring? It is a common group tradition in the US to throw thanksgiving for some group you belong to. Besides the fact even a CEO of a startup cannot afford meals for every homeless person or just everyone off the street, it makes it no less nice if it happens to be for a social group and maybe some business is done. If the Churches[1] in SF weren't serving a thanksgiving dinner for the homeless then I am surprised.

1) Churches generally do this regardless of belief of the homeless. It is about the beliefs of the church not the served.

The thesis seems way off. I fit the bill of the typical tech industry asshole (though I'm quite aware of my instinctive attitudes and have qualms about them) and I've never even considered the possibility of becoming homeless. If anything I feel that no matter what happens in my life I'll be able to get some job somewhere.

My pet argument is that "we" [1] don't understand the poor, the homeless, and the uneducated. I grew up in a leafy SV neighborhood, went to good schools, and literally never interacted with anyone from the lower half of the economic spectrum through HS. Even in college, my friends were middle class and above. We've largely grown up in stable homes with supportive parent(s) and think this is normal.

Even when we read about the poor, we tend to try to forget it. It's like pushing stuff under the carpet or putting a lid on the unpleasant stuff.

Earlier this year I volunteered at Junior Achievement and taught a few classes at a low income neighborhood in LA. This was literally my first in person encounter with a group of people from this socioeconomic segment. Having this exposure and interaction with them gave me a better sense of the good nature of the kids, the disadvantages they face, and how ridiculously lucky and privileged I have been throughout my life.

With this understanding, I have a bit more empathy for the less fortunate. I understand that a lot of what they face is a matter of circumstance than laziness or delinquency.

If our gentrification and socioeconomic satisfaction were not so pronounced, I suspect that we'd understand the less fortunate better and would no longer "hate the poor" as much as we do now.

----

It's hard though. Gentrification and being around like minded people is comfortable. It's pleasant.

[1] I'm going to generalize by using "we" but obviously there will be exceptions among us. But I imagine at least 80% of us -- or at least the ones guilty of "hating the poor" mostly fit this description.

While I would agree this attitude stems from fear, I'm not so sure it's rooted in fatalism; or the idea that homelessness represents some "bad roll of the dice" that could happen to anyone. It more likely stems from not understanding the circumstances that led people to being on the street.

One of the first things learned when volunteering with a social services non-profit organization is that many homeless are there by choice; the result of their own actions and decisions. Drug and alcohol abuse are almost always at the root cause.

Fortunately, the culture in SF tends to approach this problem as an illness, and doesn't assume every homeless person is a criminal.

In the USA i can think about a lot of very expensive cities (eg nyc, sf, etc).

But i don't know even one i would consider "wealthy".

In europe a few would come to mind instantly. Eg. Zurich, Frankfurt, Vienna, Munich, etc

it's mostly a consequence of arrogance and too much money. after all, this is the same geographic region where you have anarchocapitalists microchipping the homeless and less well-to-do under the guise of "we're perfect; everyone else is flawed."

> By all means come on in, serve us our coffee, drive our busses and clean our toilets – but wipe your feet before you come in, and close the door on your way out.

Wait, what? COFFEE?! No, I'm allergic to coffee. If they're going to make it in the Valley, they should only be serving Vyvanse.

Um, 'cause they're dicks?

Would've been the shortest article EVER. ;)

The bile, it burns, it burns!

Off the mark. They don't have enough insight to think, "Hey, that could be me". No, they hate the poor because anything else would force them to give up their treasured (although, entirely misguided) belief in the justice of the status quo.

They hate the homeless and poor because their narrow worldview requires it. Nothing more to read into it.

Fuck, these VC darling assholes are uncouth. When people posted that elitism shit on Xoxohth in 2005 it was a fucking joke. These wankers are serious when they gripe about "the poors".

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