Comment by rg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rg | Hacker News Reader

Alex Payne doesn't appear to see the connection between one of his good points:

"San Francisco boasts superb weather. ... There may be some fog, or a bit of rain from time to time, but most of the time it’s sunny and hovering around the high 60s to lower 70s."

and a closely-related bad point:

"the sight of homeless persons in varying states of dishevelment".

If you're homeless, being so in a spot where it's nearly always comfortable to be outside is perfectly sensible. It's not surprising that there are fewer homeless people in areas where it snows and freezes.

His link to http://emptyage.honan.net/mth/2009/07/are-you-going-to-san-f... is well worth following, particularly for the good advice:

"If you're moving 3,000 (or even 300) miles to live in San Francisco; live in San Francisco. And by I don't simply mean that you should not live in the East Bay or the Peninsula or Marin. I mean live in a part of the city that your great-grandparents would recognize as being San Francisco. Somewhere that was entirely residential, and all of the homes in your neighborhood existed, prior to 1915."

The old neighborhoods of San Francisco are wonderful, with considerable village character, nothing like living in SOMA or the Tenderloin.

Perhaps, also the connection between: " It’s entirely possible to have a bad meal in San Francisco, but to do so is entirely your fault: Yelp and other social recommendation services are better represented here than anywhere else in the world, and a suggestion for a good restaurant is always just a couple clicks (or taps) away."

and: "Enormous competition for limited resources. You will wait for everything. The better a thing is (food, coffee, a nice place to sit), the longer you’ll wait for it. When you finally get what you want, you’ll be crammed in with others trying to enjoy the same place/thing, diminishing everyone’s enjoyment."

Agreed. I find that I have a much better time hitting the coffee shops that don't get the yelpers in a twitch than I do hitting the hotspots. I'm not waiting an hour for coffee at ritual. It's good, but it's not an hour wait good.

I've always wondered about that.

I've lived in both Miami and Chicago for extended periods of time and there sure seems to be a lot more homelessness in Chicago, which is quite counter-intuitive for the very reasons you mention.

It probably depends on where you live. I see very few homeless near where I live in Chicago (Austin), but I'm sure you'll see many more in Printers Row or Bucktown. Likewise, maybe you just got lucky with where you lived in Miami.

I don't blame SF for the size of the homeless population; SF can't help it, it's a small city, which exaggerates the problem. But SF's response to the problem hasn't been a winning one:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/05/13/...

Remember the credit card machines?

My experience is that the homeless in Chicago are astoundingly robust. I've seen homeless people on Michigan Avenue when it's in the low teens, cup in hand.

Robust implies a positive connotation, I always saw it as desperation.

It's one thing to see someone begging on the street-corner. It's a whole other thing to see them out there wrapped in an old wool blanket when it's below zero. One is fairly innocuous for anyone acclimated to big cities, the other one gets you thinking "holy shit, that person is in mortal danger".

The sad part is that these people are offered help that is much more substantial than a quarter in a cup, but they don't want to give up their "freedom" to get that help.

I've lived in Miami and New York. My old apartment was across the street from the downtown/overtown shelter. I would say the amount of homeless out and about is dependent on location and possibly weather. New York can get brutally cold and Miami can get insanely hot. During the winter and the summer most of the homeless have settled into a shelter.

Miami is only bearable because of air conditioning in offices, cars, and homes. If you've ever had the A/C break in any one of those you'd be miserable in minutes.

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