What San Francisco Says About America | Hacker News Reader

What San Francisco Says About America

nytimes.com

291 pointsimartin2k294 comments

If you live in SF (like me) and want to do something to help, consider donating time or money to a local charity focused on homelessness. My personal recommendation is Larkin Street Youth Services [0].

There are ~2000 homeless youth (age < 25) in San Francisco on any given night. These young people were often the victims of terrible family situations and have no support network. Larkin Street helps to provide shelter, counseling, education, and anything else they may need to get off the streets for good. More than 70% of the people who "graduate" from Larkin Street leave street life forever.

I know on Hacker News we like to talk about the political causes and solutions to a problem like this. But tomorrow's laws won't change the fact that there are homeless people sleeping on the street every night who need help. Charitable organizations are there to help meet these immediate needs.

[0] - http://larkinstreetyouth.org/

In my experience donating time or money does not change the systemic causes of the issues. You will forever be donating. For real,sustainable change a different society must be built, whatever that might look like.

"if I can't fix everything, let's just do nothing at all!"

Not exactly. How about, there are a million other options than straight up donation. Not at all a false choice.

Such as? I bet LSYS is much more knowledgeable and skilled than I am at providing services to the homeless.

The OP you replied to said this, and we're all aware. To solve the problem for good, systemic change is needed, but that doesn't mean we should let children freeze on the streets today while we wait for change tomorrow. You can do both.

> You can do both.

OP isn't doing both though, and I think that's what JustUhThought is speaking to. OP just said (paraphrasing): "I know people like to talk politics on this subject, but I'm not going to do that, I'm just going to promote private charity."

It is reasonable to argue that we can do both, but just as we expect those talking primarily about political solutions to also highlight how private charity can help in the mean time, we should also expect those talking primarily about private charity to also highlight what political solutions we should also be exploring.

Also I think it's important to remember that some people believe government has no place in solving this problem, so they will promote private charity as an alternative to political solutions.

Likewise there are those who believe that private charity has no place in solving this problem, and the need for private charity represents a failure of public policy, so they will promote political solutions as a replacement for private charity.

So in some senses, we can't do both. The most extreme positions in this debate are mutually exclusive.

Ironically, Larkin Street Youth Services satisfies both extremes. If you educate yourself, you'll find that LSYS is not a "private charity," it receives 2/3 of its budget from government agencies, and was founded by people in the neighborhood to fill a void not being handled by SF government.

So, in LSYS you have a charity that was begun in the neighborhood outside of government programs, which one extreme says shouldn't handle it anyway, which is in turn majority funded by government agencies, which helps the charity to do its work effectively. I'm not sure how this could be a problem for anybody outside of Kristol-Norquistian ghouls.

You aren't wrong. Many of the shelters in Los Angeles turn volunteers away.

There isn't a shortage of people that want to help, there is a shortage of ways for people to get mental health treatment and leave poverty.

What's wrong with forever donating? If the government is going to cut funding for services then there's really no other choice. To be sure, tax-funded services are forever-donating, too (unless we get another Ronald Reagan ghoul).

Are you talking about eradicating homelessness completely? I'm not sure that will ever happen, which is why public services are so important.

"A society that aims for equality before freedom, will end up with neither equality nor freedom."

Laws are not meant to lift people from poverty. PEOPLE must lift themselves so far as to lift each other out of poverty. One of the basic functions of government is to protect people from other people (both land and rights). Now, "rights" is where things tend to become grey.

Who should determine what those rights are? The government? People? A majority? San Francisco is an excellent study in what can happen when government plays a role it is not fit to oversee.

Now, Larkin Street is an excellent case study on how the private sector fills in that space governments leaves open when they play around with policy. The aim here is to continue to build these networks around support.

Wait, did you just quote alanaut's dead comment verbatim?

That is my other account. It was dead and now it isn't. I thought I was hell-banned. 10min ago, I couldn't see any alanaut posts logged in and logged out.

I would like to post and have meaningful conversations with the community and as it stands, I am unable to do so with alanaut.

> Laws are not meant to lift people from poverty. PEOPLE must lift themselves so far as to lift each other out of poverty.

There are numerous examples of people who have done everything society has expected of them but are still unable to find a job. The "all poor people are personally irresponsible" argument is basically a stereotype. Even if it does hold true for >50% of those experiencing poverty, it's pretty cold to tell the minority that actually is sympathetic, "Sorry, you did everything right, but your poverty is still your responsibility and you deserve no assistance from the community which set you up to fail."

> One of the basic functions of government is to protect people from other people

Protecting people from other people sounds like a great way to describe a government-guaranteed lifestyle floor, such as a universal basic income, or some other combination of safety net programs that are aimed at unconditionally ending poverty with no means testing. It would protect you from being coerced by others into the labor market against your will due to the implicit threat of death by the effects of homelessness and/or food insecurity. That protects poor people from other (richer) people pretty effectively.

> Who should determine what those rights are? The government? People? A majority?

I think this is pretty well settled. Public policy is what it is because policymakers we elected set it up that way. So, yeah, basically majority rules.

> San Francisco is an excellent study in what can happen when government plays a role it is not fit to oversee.

I would argue that San Francisco is an excellent study in what can happen when a majority of the electorate is insensitive to poverty and is uninterested in electing representatives who are serious about ending it by passing legislation like UBI or other more comprehensive, non-means tested safety net programs. As a nation, we simply don't prioritize solving this problem with government. We could. We choose not to. Majority rules.

> The "all poor people are personally irresponsible" argument

[1] I am almost certain I did not make that argument. Rather, people are responsible for their actions - no one else.

> It's pretty cold to tell the minority that actually is sympathetic

[1] Again, your logic seems flawed here. "You did everything right?" According to whom? The majority? That is a very my myopic viewpoint. Your entire argument proceeds to tell me what I said when in fact, that is clearly not the case.

> Protecting people from other people sounds like a great way to describe a government-guaranteed lifestyle floor, such as a universal basic income, or some other combination of safety net programs that are aimed at unconditionally ending poverty with no means testing...

[1] To be honest, you are making some broad assumptions here. You mention means testing, please explain.

[2] Personally, I feel like you are saying a lot of pretty, flowery things here, but what ("It") would protect you from what exactly?

[3] "Against your will?" Are workers not currently being forced against their will to work? Are Mexican immigrants who flee Mexico to work at the wineries in Southern California not being forced to work against their will?

> because policymakers we elected set it up that way. So, yeah, basically majority rules.

[1] And where do lobbyists fit into this equation? Is it really "public" policy if a majority is deciding what is best for the minority? Doesn't this contradict your argument above: "That protects poor people from other (richer) people pretty effectively." What about liberals from conservatives, right vs left, christians vs muslims, LGBT vs straight, white vs black, etc. You see my point here...it is not the governments responsibility to police people but rather the responsibility of people to police themselves. Yes, there will be outliers, however, we are seeing the ill effects of how public policy BY THE MAJORITY adversely affects all those in the minority.

> I would argue that San Francisco is an excellent study in what can happen when a majority...

[1] Insensitive to poverty? San Francisco is a sanctuary city and as such has laws in place to protect the rights of those who are homeless, illegal, etc.

[2] You can't have it both ways. When you do (as with the case of liberalism) you argue where it makes sense in one context and fail to see how those actions directly impact policy across the board.

[3] In my opinion, it is not a policy problem. It is a problem caused from the US being a welfare state. It pays more to be homeless.

> we are seeing the ill effects of how public policy BY THE MAJORITY adversely affects all those in the minority.

That is true. But not in the way I think you meant it. The majority has made a political choice to implement a much weaker safety net than is needed end poverty. Our safety net full of holes is far from the best we could do.

> It is a problem caused from the US being a welfare state. It pays more to be homeless.

On the contrary. It's a problem caused by not enough welfare state.

People are homeless because programs like Section 8 are underfunded and horribly means-tested. To get public housing you often have to sit on a waiting list. And many people who need public housing can get kicked off the waiting list for a whole range of stupid reasons. More funding and less means-testing would get more people off the streets. Section 8 would be a better program if it was made unconditional, funded at rates which tracked with demand (to prevent waiting lists), or if it were simply replaced by an unconditional basic income.

A similar issue exists for people experiencing food insecurity. SNAP too is means-tested. Many people who qualify don't sign up because they're worried they don't qualify. Others can't get past the paperwork. If the program were universal and unconditional - if everyone had a SNAP card regardless of income, people wouldn't starve.

Those are clear ways in which more welfare state would totally end poverty. But we've made a political choice not to care because the majority of us are insensitive to poverty.

San Francisco spends $241 million a year[1] on the homeless. Perhaps what it says about America is that you can't solve these kinds of problems by throwing more and more money at them, but that won't keep politicians from trying.

[1: http://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/S-F-spends-record...]

I think it's not necessarily that the money is being spent (in general) but rather the money is being spent in the wrong way. For example, we've spent untold billions of dollars on the "war on drugs" since it started with Nixon, but it's been mostly spent on incarceration rather than rehabilitation; if that money had been spent on safe needle spaces, mental health clinics, and easier access to alternatives for drugs such as heroin like methadone, the problem may not be solved but would be in a better place.

Homelessness would also be in a better place if the money was spent better. Better shelters, better services similar to those I mentioned above, and better information about each person like the article mentions would substantially make the issue better.

But those things aren't as easy to justify as the alternative. In the case of incarceration, because the effects are effectively immediate, it feels easier to put someone away for 10-20-life rather than giving them a better life.

> safe needle spaces, mental health clinics, and easier access to alternatives for drugs such as heroin like methadone

> Better shelters, better services similar to those I mentioned above

Every time I hear people say that I just can't understand how do they think that will fix the problem? Most homeless and drug addicts wont go to mental health clinic on their own, most of them enjoy the life they are having and are not willing to change, giving them better shelters, better services will only increase their number. Can you explain me why do you think that giving a drug addict a clean needle or alternative drug will make them want to stop using them?

Are you sure about that first part or if that just conjecture?

The main reason to give drug addicts clean needles is to stop the spread of blood borne diseases like HIV and hepatitis, which reduces stress on the healthcare system. Alternative drugs are useful for weaning people off of a drug that would otherwise give them potentially life threatening withdrawal.

I think the argument you're implicitly making is that homeless people won't change so why help them, which is fundamentally flawed because you're looking at those people like they're less than human. Sure, some (or in your argument, most) people won't seek help, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't offer it.

> the argument you're implicity making is that homeless people won't change so why help them...you are looking at those people like they are less than human.

Where did I say that? Interpretations like this is exactly the reason why politicians just throw money at the problem without understanding it, they are just afraid of people making wrong assumptions just like you did. I never implied that they are less human, I just said that offering them better shelters and better services isn't helping them getting away from being homeless, in contrary it's doing the opposite.

* I just said that offering them better shelters and better services isn't helping them getting away from being homeless, in contrary it's doing the opposite.*

You're demonstrably wrong based on the vast majority of our research on homelessness in the developed world. Annonymous needle exchanges not only help reduce blood borne disease transmission rates (we're talking about a reduction of up to 70-90% of HIV infections in some cases like London). They are also most often in rehab buildings, clinics, and hospitals where they have professionals most able to help intervene or assist those who want to quit in an environment of understanding and respect. The idea that free needles increase drug use may sound logical but it's the exact opposite of reality. No one beats addiction just because they're scared of a friend's used needle.

Homeless shelters are even more critical because they allow people to get back on their feet, especially for those with families to support or those without a regional support network of friends. If you're homeless and have a job interview, for example, homeless shelters will often help you with grooming, professional clothing, and even transport. Without shelters or friends/family, bootstrapping from homelessness to financial security is almost impossible. Unless you've ever been homeless you can't begin to fathom the positive effect all of these services have on someone who has hit rock bottom.

Safe injection sites are also a way of saying that there is someone who gives a damn about your problem, instead of seeing you as a stupid junkie. It's one of the few interactions with the government people suffering from addiction have which is devoid of judgement - that they are worth helping.

For some people, this means a lot. Some of the worst parts of addiction is how completely it destroys any sense of self-worth.

Additionally, note that pretty much all help for homeless people is heavily tied to a requirement to keep off drugs in many places, with zero tolerance policies in place. I don't know if that's the case in San Francisco, but it's a large part of the reason many homeless people are unable to access support to get them into housing.

I'm an ex-heroin addict. No addict enjoys having a chemical noose tighten around their life, every single day. Go look at my country for proof that those programs help; Australia has some weird issues, but if it wasn't for Biala and buprenorphine, I'd be dead 10 times over.

It doesn't sound like you know many people facing these issues. I believe it's unreasonable for you to come to such a generalized position that they don't care to better their lives if offered a helping hand.

For example, look at the rise of heroin abuse in the US. A great number of addicts didn't start out going into opium dens and shooting up. Many were taking prescription painkillers under a doctor's care. However, they lost access to that medication at an affordable price for a number of reasons, whether it was a loss of Healthcare, change in their policy, or ham fisted bureaucratic decisions that limits doctors ability to prescribe. (like many top down, across the board solutions, this made matters worse).

Without their medication, these people are in a world of pain that I hope you never have to experience. So they turned to what was available and affordable... street opium. They're not running the streets and getting high because they are recalcitrant thugs. They cannot function without the drugs, and they hate that their life has come to that. No one sets out to become a slave of a chemical substance.

Effective outreach and ensuing treatment does wonders when it is properly administrated and funded. It also has the effect of signaling to people that individuals and society has empathy for and still values them. This is huge since many addicts have a deep hatred for themselves.

Not a cent of those $241 million is spent on incarceration, policing or the like. You can scroll down in the article I linked to see a breakdown. Your response essentially consists of ignoring the facts I have presented and talking about something else (Nixon! Drug war!). Of course, that is a very effective way of dealing with cognitive dissonance, which is why it is currently the highest-voted response to my comment.

I think you misunderstood what I was going for. My argument wasn't that $241MM is spent on incarceration, it's that it could go for much better services than currently being offered.

The state cannot compel you to seek shelter, nor accept medication or other mental health care, unless you are a danger to yourself or others.

Society moved away from institutionalizing people, so when a patient wants to get off their medication, drink, or get high they leave whatever community based program they are in and hit the streets.

I don't believe it was society moving away from keeping Pete institutionalized. It was a very deliberate action by the Reader administration to shut down scores of institutions, essentially shoving people out on to the street.

It was both. Advocates were screaming for community based care. Other advocates were demanding an end to compulsory commitment, vagrancy/drunkenness laws and other reforms.

The politicians said "Yes!", over promised, under-delivered and kept everyone happy except for the ones who have little or no voice -- the folks who need help.

1 in 5 homeless people were brought here by, or imediately entered the homeless support system. IIRC, the former outnumber the latter 4 to 1.

http://sfgov.org/lhcb/sites/default/files/2015%20San%20Franc...

Why do people exit the homeless services? They exit due to the support providers being unable to handle them, or to make room for more. In former case, they reduce costs and in the latter, they inflate support numbers. Both of these benefit the fiscal health of the service provider, and both dump people on the streets. And the rest of San Francisco get to handle most disturbed, and disturbing, of these poor people.

It's hard not to conclude that it's an industry with business model based trafficking in human suffering and abuse of the commons, to the tune of 20% year over year.

The average homeless person in the US cost tax payers around $40,000 [1]. In 2015 SF had a homeless population of 7539 [2]. Meaning they're spending on average of about $32000 per homeless person, $8000 less than the national average.

From 2013 to 2015 San Francisco experienced a 2% increase in the total number of homeless, while the nation as a whole saw a 5.2% decrease.

Sounds like it's a problem you can't underspend your way out of.

[1] http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/mar/... [2] https://sfgov.org/lhcb/sites/default/files/2015%20San%20Fran...

Maybe SF spends its money more smartly. People complain about the homeless problem in SF but never seem to stop to think that perhaps we have more homeless because there is less incentive to not be homeless in SF. NYC has lower homelessness because the winters are shit and the police are hostile. In SF, the weather is great and police let you shit in the street without much of a confrontation. Is there seriously any question why the rate is higher here? The homeless are treated pretty decently. SF has more homeless because it generally treats them better than the rest of the US, not worse.

>SF has more homeless because it generally treats them better than the rest of the US, not worse.

Thinking of the way Giuliani criminalized homelessness in NYC, you may be right. http://mobile.nytimes.com/1999/11/20/nyregion/in-wake-of-att...

NYC has lower homelessness because it spends a ridiculous amount of money on the problem and has more public housing units than anywhere. People who claim to be homeless get priority for placement.

Right now, so much focus is on this problem that backlogs for section 8 and other housing are dropping in the broader region because clients are moving to NYC.

Nyc doesnt have less homelessness than sf. Numerically, statistically, per capita, any way you want to slice it. Hit me up about a recent source.

Sf has visible encampments in prime living areas which greatly skews perceptions.

I fell for it to.

Why not just post a source here?

On mobile, on vacation, don't have link

> Numerically, statistically, per capita, any way you want to slice it.

Per capita SF might beat NYC (couldn't find good sources and honestly I'm a little tired at the moment) but "Numerically" and "any way you want to slice it" NYC wins hands down. In 2015 it was estimated that San Francisco had 7,539 [1]. NYC, on the other hand, had 60,456 in 2016 [2].

I couldn't find many sources that differed much than these figures I found even though they're about a year separated.

[1] https://sfgov.org/lhcb/sites/default/files/2015%20San%20Fran...

[2] http://www.coalitionforthehomeless.org/basic-facts-about-hom...

These statistics are a snake pit.

New York City is unique in that they have a court mandated obligation to provide accommodation. The advocacy people use a factor of the shelter population to calculate the total population, which may or may not be accurate.

I'm not trying to minimize the problem. The fact is those encampments are all over and people is indicative that functioning people can't get placement in SFO. You can't just say "NYPD are jerks" and call it a day like the previous commenter.

I guess I'll chime in here. I normally don't talk about homelessness as I had a distant cousin (grandpa's sister's son) that loved to be homeless. So my opinion will be quite negative/biased.

But yes you are right about SF. This cousin of mine would regularly leave his family and travel around the US hitchhiking for one or two years at a time. He spent most of his time in Cali, not sure which city. He said it was great to go there for the winter as at that time senior citizens (he was not a senior but he would pass based on looks) could get free public transit tickets. So after a long day of panhandling or drinking, he'd get on a nice warm bus for a night and sleep.

He seemed to be part of some kind of "homeless elite". There was nothing wrong with him physically or mentally (other than severe stubbornness) and it was the same with this group of friends he would regularly meet up with. They would all be in Cali for the winter. They'd bum money on the street pulling in $100+ a day and spend it on alcohol where him and his buddies would sit around in an alley socializing over how everyone is stupid. After winter they'd all disperse to Chicago or the east cost (not sure about NY). He'd randomly run into his buddies throughout out the Spring and Summer months in other cities as well.

He talked favorably of Cali and the east cost. There were some overpasses in Texas on I10 and I35 that he mentioned were also where the cool guys hung out at, can't remember were exactly. But he didn't really like Texas much. In Austin he would be quickly arrested for "vagrancy". This would happen in San Antonio too, but before the cops would haul him off he would call my grandparents about 20 miles away to come pick him up.

I stayed off and on at my grandparent's house while going to college for 4 years. I had the pleasure of rooming with him many times. When he would show up, my grandma would wash his bag of cloths, but it would stain the inside of the washer black, so she'd have to wash 'em a few more times and then eventually wash the washer by hand. His first shower hot off the streets was also a doozy too. The walls would be caked with globs of this white jelly type stuff. I can only assume it was from massive amounts of built up dead skin that washed off. But it would glob up in the drain, and along with his long uncut hair, clog everything up. It was totally gag-tastic cleaning it out. The last few times he came around, I was too annoyed to deal with him again so I convinced the pastor at a local small church to let me sleep in their gym at night for a week(even though there was a mouse and scorpion problem there, I didn't care).

He was a cool guy, had some hilarious stories and you could hold a conversation with him for hours. He once told me he didn't learn how to read until he was 28. Said he taught himself. I asked what motivated him to do that and he said he wanted to be able to read the captions next to women in porno mags. Both my grandparents and his mother dumped a lot of cash into him but nothing helped. He would always get mad at something a leave again. One of the more memorable times, he was living with his mother for a bit (I think the cops grabbed him in Dallas and his mother was close to there) but he got mad at her for some reason and started to leave again. She gave him her car, some cash, stuffed the car with clothes, food and a TV. He drove off in it but it broke down about 10 miles down the road. He just left it there and hitchhiked to Dallas where he stayed for a month or so before getting picked up again.

He died about a year ago actually. Probably 55. He spend his last few years living in some low incoming housing (for free) near Dallas. His last year was spent with him having various hoses hanging out from his abdomen. He would have to go to the hospital for the doctors to drain fluids out of him from failing organs. He didn't seem to mind though, he thought the hoses were stupid and kept drinking until the end.

Hard to say how much he cost society (from a government perspective). He seemed to pay his way most of his life. Only the last few years did he get any kind of government assistance.

Heck of a guy, but dang.

> Hard to say how much he cost society. He seemed to pay his way most of his life.

Are you excluding the charity?

Likely, and why not? The man sells a story, someone buys it voluntarily. It's a profession.

Yea, I didn't think of that. The topic seemed to be pointing at how much the government gives.

Quite an interesting story. I've favorited it.

> I had a distant cousin (grandpa's sister's son)

By my understanding that would make him your first cousin once removed [1]. He's either your dad or your mum's cousin, you're one generation away from them so he's a first cousin once removed.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cousin#First_cousins_once_remo...

Hell of a story.

But that's the big problem about the American approach to this problem (IMHO).

The problem is not homlessness, some people can choose to live out of our society rules and I don't see any problem about it. We also built a society that has failed to many people, I can see how someone could prefer to roam freely rather than having to work 80 a week to be able to afford a shitty life anyway (ask people who serve food).

So what need to be addressed is not homelessness itself, but the causes that bring people to homelessness against their will:

- Mental illness (including depression)? Subsidised healthcare for those who cannot afford it. - Addictions? Subsidised treatment and a reinsertion program. - Done something wrong in the past? Forgiveness. - Young person without studies? Subsidised education.

Being European, I see in the American mentality this kind of way of thinking like "if he is poor is because he is lazy and didn't work hard enough, so he deserves to be poor and suffer".

I think that in the first world countries we are rich enough to ensure that the human rights of all our fellow citizens are protected.

>"Being European, I see in the American mentality this kind of way of thinking like "if he is poor is because he is lazy and didn't work hard enough, so he deserves to be poor and suffer"

Where do you "see" that?

I am curious have you visited America? Have you spoken to Americans that live in cities that have acute problems with homelessness? Have you visited those cities yourself?

I can assure you that what you "see" in the American mentality is not the predominant or prevailing view. Its actually quite a complicated problem that involves mental health, bad circumstances, social programs, drug addiction, child abuse and a host of other nuances. Its very easy to over simplify from an ocean away though.

I have visited California several times for work (and tourism) and I tend to hang out on forums where most of the users are from the US. And now I live in Japan, which helps me to have an "external view" on my own European culture.

One of the things that surprised me the most the first time I visited the US was one particular conversation with a sensible, well educated person. She literally told me:

"I don't care if someone is not able to pay to a medical treatment. If that person didn't plan well their life, is their mistake. I am not going to pay the medical costs for them."

Of course, this is just one person, but my feeling is that this a predominant way of thinking in the US.

> Being European, I see in the American mentality this kind of way of thinking like "if he is poor is because he is lazy and didn't work hard enough, so he deserves to be poor and suffer".

This is absolutely not how most people think.

I'm Australian and I've picked up on a similar American Stereotype.

I think the "people are poor because they are lazy" stereotype comes from American television. Any show from the US featuring ostensibly 'working class' Americans will at some point in its life bring up the 'American dream'. This idea that if an American works hard enough they can become rich. From there the negative corollary is obvious - "if you are poor you just aren't working hard enough".

The American approach to things like education and health care seems to exemplify this stereotype. American society in general does not seem very egalitarian. It's easy to form the opinion that American's don't care about poor people.

Thanks for sharing.

Panhandling is a tough way to make a buck.

But please don't equate panhandling with homelessness. Just four examples: vets who haven't reintegrated into society (PTSD, disability, etc), teens kicked out or escaping bad situations, women with children escaping bad situation, people with mental illnesses.

"Both my grandparents and his mother dumped a lot of cash into him but nothing helped."

I believe about 2% of people are like this.

They want to 'live free' kind of thing. Some of them are lucky and inherit money. Some live smartly-cheaply. Others are like bums.

I have a cousin who is 35 and still lives at home, way out in the country, he doesn't have his drivers license. He does nothing. Always has. His father is 'cheap wealthy' (he has money but you'd never know it). He does nothing, and won't do anything.

He cannot be motivated to do anything, ever.

Some people are just like this.

Winters do not keep homeless people away from big cities. They just hide in warmer places like metro or underpasses.

I live in Montreal, Canada, which is even more up north than NYC. That's what our homeless guys are doing when it's freezing outside.

I see 1.8/100k in Montreal [1] vs 8.0/100k in SF [2].

[1] http://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/results-of-montre...

[2] http://sfmayor.org/sites/default/files/FileCenter/Documents/...

I am not sure I understand where you took your numbers from.

Regardless, you compare apples to oranges. I believe it is HIGHLY incorrect to compare the number of homeless people from cities located in DIFFERENT countries.

Comparing to the US, Canada has much stronger social policies including financial aid and free health care that lead to a smaller number of people sleeping on the streets who ended up there because of financial troubles and losing their home/livelihood.

Quebec province is even better in this sense. In Montreal specifically, our hobos are mostly drunks and young people who had troubles at home.

Here are the numbers of people experiencing homeless state on a given night:

Canada: 35,000 / 35,749,600 = 9.8/10k [0]

USA: 56,4708 / 320,090,857 = 17.64/10k [1]

[0] - http://www.homelesshub.ca/blog/infographic-homelessness-cana...

[1] - http://www.endhomelessness.org/library/entry/SOH2016

(edited new line breaks)

    I am not sure I understand where you took
    your numbers from.

The links I listed give 3,016 homeless people for Montreal and 6,686 for SF. Dividing by their populations, you get the per-capita rates I gave.

    I believe it is HIGHLY incorrect to compare the
    number of homeless people from cities located in
    DIFFERENT countries.

Yes, I'm sure country has an effect, and we can't count the entire SF vs Montreal difference as being due to weather. Similarly, different cities have different institutions and are otherwise, so figuring out the effect of weather is pretty hard.

"Is there seriously any question why the rate is higher here? The homeless are treated pretty decently. SF has more homeless because it generally treats them better than the rest of the US, not worse."

No, there is not a seriously any question.

It's (relatively) warm in San Francisco, year round, and social mores are (relatively) welcoming to aberrant behavior. These people exist and they're not going to disappear, therefore they have to go somewhere.

There is actually a quite nice A/B test already in place in the United States. Minneapolis/St. Paul is culturally almost as liberal and progressive as northern california and have an extensive social services and support network for all manner of social circumstances. Also it's literally deadly to be homeless for 2-4 months of the year. In all of my years living in downtown Minneapolis (and other years living in suburban twin cities) I witnessed a very, very low level of homelessness.

It's worth noting that homelessness =/= rough sleeping. For every person you see sleeping on the streets, there are several who are squatting, living in vans, crashing on couches etc. Hidden homelessness is much more difficult to identify, so the headline statistics on homelessness rates can be misleading.

>police let you shit in the street without much of a confrontation.

Is that really a positive?

Depends on the perspective. I've had family who rolled their eyes when I'd tell them about seeing homeless people just walk up to trees and start pissing or drop their trousers and shit in trash cans, by bushes, on the sidewalk, etc. Invariably the ones who visit marvel at my relatively tame descriptions afterward. I'm sure the homeless find it quite a positive that they can relieve themselves without much interference, while I find it a net negative.

That awkward moment when you find out NYC has greater homelessness

Read your own sources more carefully. The $40k figure was for homeless people with mental illnesses in NYC (a more expensive subset of homeless, and a more expensive city than most). The figures given by Mangano later in the article have no citation.

More importantly, you are comparing all the services consumed by mentally ill homeless people in NYC with the homeless budget of the city of SF alone. Look at table 17 in the study [1]. Here is where those $40k came from:

   $12,520  NY State Office of Mental Health
   $11,596  Medicaid (inpatient)
    $2,613  Medicaid (outpatient)
    $6,229  NYC Health and Hospitals Corporation
    $4,658  NYC Department of Homeless Services
    $1,822  US Department of Veteran Affairs
      $645  Department of corrections (city)  
      $368  Department of corrections (state)

Of these, only $11,532 came from the city.

[1] http://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1067...

Funding source isn't really relevant. NYC has a guaranteed right to shelter [1], they'd be providing the same services regardless of state funding.

[1] https://www.marketplace.org/2015/09/30/wealth-poverty/behind...

Perhaps, but the focus on a specific, more expensive set of homeless people sure is.

Yes, but it's misleading to compare city+state spending in NYC to solely city spending in SF, and conclude that SF is underspending on the homeless.

To be a fair comparison, we'd also have to include what the state of California spends on the homeless.

True, but as far as I know California has never funded homeless programs at the state level. The only thing listed in the 2015 budget is:

"Housing Support Program — The Budget contains $35 million General Fund for CalWORKs Housing Support Program services, an increase of $15 million, which provides additional support to CalWORKs families for whom homelessness is a barrier to self‐sufficiency."

Which leaves medicaid spending, which according to my previous source only 20% of the homeless population in SF receive. Assuming medicaid pays the same amount poer person as in NYC that would bring the per capita homeless expenditure to about $35000.

This is no longer the case. The state recently approved $2B in funding to build and maintain housing for the mentally ill homeless [1]. That's close to $70k per homeless person with mental illness, or an additional $17,500 per homeless person if we don't group by mental illness.

[1] http://fox40.com/2016/06/27/california-lawmakers-approve-2-b...

Why does Thailand have so fewer mentally ill and drug addicted homeless, despite its government spending so much less on social programs for the homeless?

Perhaps for the same reason that head injury rates were lower in WWI before steel helmets were introduced: the mortality rate was higher.

That's a particularly negative take, but would be interesting if true. Do you have any reason to believe it is? I'm not even sure how you would measure this. Suicide rate against attempted suicide rate? Other mental health stats?

No clue. Idle speculation on my part.

I live in Thailand (but not in a big city). Out here it's because if you find yourself without a home, you can go build one out of bamboo. If you have some friends to help you, it can be done in a week.

The key being that the municipality won't give you crap for an "illegal settlement" until the land you're occupying suddenly becomes worth something.

It doesn't have to be worth squat. Your "settlement" just has to rub someone with too much time on their hands the wrong way.

Repealing zoning and building restrictions would go a long way to making the West the same. Land titles enforcement would still put up impediments to construction of makeshift housing, but making it so anyone with land can build a structure without needing a building permit or being limited by zoning would make the creation of housing supply significantly easier. Land is not all that expensive, after all.

"From 2013 to 2015 San Francisco experienced a 2% increase in the total number of homeless, while the nation as a whole saw a 5.2% decrease."

When I see a change in some hot button statistic, I always ask why.

Why are these homeless numbers decreasing? Are the homeless people finding homes or are they dying? Or maybe they're moving or being moved somewhere else.

I heard there was once a plan to round up all the homeless people in San Francisco and ship them off to Treasure Island. Would that have solved the "problem" or would it just be a case of "out of sight, out of mind"?

I've also been told that a lot of homeless people in NYC, for instance, just die in the brutal winters -- especially if they're forced outdoors by police, everpresent locked and unwelcoming doors, and horrific shelters.

Similar questions should be asked about why homeless numbers are rising in SF.

Those changes look small enough that they could be natural variance.

In the US - unemployment is down, incomes are up, it's easier at the margin to afford a place to live.

In SF - great economy doesn't help people on the margin when there is not enough housing.

$32k per homeless person is underspending?!

Consider this. We spend roughly 2x that figure on incarcerating individuals.

I'm not going to even touch why a great number of those people are in jail for nothing more than selling dime bags of pot or being unable to pay for tickets. However, don't you find it somewhat interesting that we're spending more per capita and in total on criminals than we are on more or less law abiding citizens?

I agree with you but would add one thing. The money isn't spent on prisoners, it's spent on private corporations. The actual cost of having a prisoner is likely much less, or the corporations wouldn't exist.

First, I agree with part of your sentiment. Not only is it financially and socially against the interest of citizens to allow private corporations to be jailors, it is also morally and ethically repugnant t choose organizations which maximize profits instead of those that maximize rehabilitation and minimizes recidivism.

I've had personal experience in this area. Although I've never been to prison, I spent a week in a county jail for a charge that I was innocent of and ultimately acquitted. In that short span, I witnessed just how broken the system is. Using the word justice to describe this system a tragic joke. The "justice" you receive is in direct relation to how much you spend on your legal defense. To me, it's a joke and a modern form of double speak. It's more accurate to call this system the societal stablizization system It blows my mind that people have faith in this system when people who have to rely on woefully under-resourced public defenders go to jail. The prosecution coerces you to take a "deal", which is usually sanctioned by the defender. If you elect to seek a fair trial in court, they take this deal off the table and retaliate by seeking the maximum possible sentence. It should not surprise you that when many prosecutors run for office, one of the things they tout is the number of years they have gotten people sentenced to. How can people accept widespread disparity in sentences for the same crime when the system has the word justice in it?

As a prisoner, many know that you are a source of virtually free labor. This is troublesome on its own, but when you are a source of free labor for private capital...we have a very precise term for that arrangement. This is also counterproductive because it takes away from prisoners a nest egg that they can use while to house, feed, eat, and clothe themselves while they go and look for one of those mythical jobs out there for ex-cons. If one doesn't have a place to sleep, food to eat, etc.. you literally have to make a decision to either go hungry and sleep on the street or you focus on base survival and take what you need.

It doesn't stop there because not only are you a prisoner, you are also a captive consumer to outside contractors/monopolists. The most notorious parasitic vulture out there is none other than Bob Barker. If you guessed that he sells travel sizes of the most basic toothpaste for $6, then the price is right! I'm not even going to go into the antiquated, exploitative system for making phone calls.

However, private prisons only house like 8% of the incarcerated. I'm not sure if you're trying to distinguish between private prisons or not, but any organization usually needs a vendor. And, boy, prison vendors sure have the taxpayer's best interest at heart. The fingerprint scanning machines are about 2x the size of those massive 4 foot tall copier/fax/scanners you would see from the 90's. I understand that it has to have a high degree of precision, but it baffles all reason when they spend at the minimum $6000 for a behemoth machine (that needs regular maintenence over time, which costs) while I own a phone that I paid $300 for that can scan all 10 fingers and it fits in my pocket.

I've already written too much, but the most despicable part was the prison's enforced racial segregation. I had heard a little bit about it before, but I wasn't prepared to travel back in time to the Jim Crow era where you are really only allowed to interact with people of your own race. That means, you have to take a shower with your race, watch tv with your race, eat with them, etc. So, instead of teaching or encouraging prisoners to get along with people different from them (the type of thing you need to do in the real world in the US), you are inculcated and degraded into an ignorant and antiquated relic from a mostly bygone era. I just wasn't ready to hear someeone say literally "Alright, you blacks over her. Mexicans, Hispanics, latinos or whatever over here. White people, you stay here

As a victim of crime, I understand the desire to see the assailant punished severely. But at the end of the day, you have to ask yourself would you rather that person experience at least just as much pain and loss as you did or would you rather have a system that focuses on prevention and rehabilitation so that society overall is safer and no one else has to go through your experience as a victim.

EDIT: This is anecdotal, so it may not apply to your area, but prison guards are some of the dimmest employees I've ever come across. 16 yr old drug dealing high school dropouts were categorically more articulate and could calculate basic math like 10x better. They make $43,000 on average and face the same amount of danger as a teenager working the overnight shift at a gas station.

It's sad that most of the public's interaction with officers, etc happens with patrol level police officers instead of people like detectives, administrators, and the like.

Most prisoners in the US are not in private prisons.

I think what he means is even public prisons are serviced and overcharged by private companies. Inmates still get charged ridiculous rates to make phone calls, packs of Maruchan Ramen cost upwards of $3, finger print scanning machines are like $8000, the size of the most extravagant copying machine and require a maintenance contract in the age of mobile size biometric scanners, etc.

I spend 33% more than that on just my rent (small, attached townhouse) and my commute to the city is an hour all together. So, yeah, $32k per homeless person seems stingy.

> From 2013 to 2015 San Francisco experienced a 2% increase in the total number of homeless, while the nation as a whole saw a 5.2% decrease.

Greyhound.

No, really.

San Francisco's homeless problem is the nation's problem.

I've always heard about this, but have never actually seen any prove. Any sources for this? Genuinely curious.

$40k a year is a living wage. Even $32k is a decent living wage (yes, even in the bay area). To me, these figures sound like we're too unimaginative as a society in figuring out better systems of distributing this money. I know people in the bay area living on a lot less and getting by ok. If we actually gave the homeless money instead of making them jump through hoops like zoo animals for the smallest of concessions, a bed here, some food stamps there, we could potentially start making a dent in this problem and giving people real chances. It's been demonstrated over and over again that this is something that can work. Why not give it a shot and start helping people find affordable government housing instead of perpetually squandering the money in the inefficient ways we have been doing?

There are two kinds of homeless people. Most people who are ever homeless get back on their feet relatively quickly, and are not homeless again. They are cheap for the system to handle, and cash payments would do the trick. But most homeless people are the chronic homeless. They're likely outside the range on the bell curve of people who can take care of themselves. Cash payments won't help them--the government has to take over in a more interventionist role.

So you're saying that there are no homeless people that can take care of themselves but can't get back on their feet quickly. Seems unlikely.

> But most homeless people are the chronic homeless.

That's wildly inaccurate. Chronic homeless account for less than a fifth of the homeless population.

* https://www.usich.gov/goals/chronic

* Look at "Key findings": https://www.hudexchange.info/resources/documents/2015-AHAR-P...

Interesting, but are the rest 80% homeless for long, or is it just that they are homeless for a bit, but as soon as they get back on their feet, someone else is already homeless?

From the Definition of Terms section in the second link:

> Chronically Homeless Individuals are homeless individuals with disabilities who have either been continuously homeless for a year or more or have experienced at least four episodes of homelessness in the last three years.

So they made a "profitable business" out of homeless people.

Get real, people want convenience and that convenience means paying someone else to address the issue.

By dividing that way, the more people are helped the worse the number looks. I.e., if the $241M helped 99.99% of people become un-homeless, then it the math would work out to $241M per homeless person since there is only 1 homeless person left.

$241 million would educate a lot of people :(

SF has a $9B budget, we can do both.

Solving the homeless "problem" with money to allow the homeless to live more comfortably is the wrong approach in my opinion regardless of city. The mentally ill need psych support and help. They are they group most in need (and deserving IMHO) of aid, along with displaced youth (whether due to security, sexuality, or other factors).

But they get lumped into the greater group of homeless, that also includes a sizeable number of "unwilling" (in that they simply don't want to work, and expect to be cared for), as well as the "supported", which includes people with marketable skills and/or family or friends that are willing to help that are abusing the system. This also includes the "capable abusers" that choose drugs or drink outside of the mental health caveat listed above.

Only exacerbating the problem are local activists that provide the homeless with tents, 3x meals daily, and free med/dent/etc services that further incentive the homeless, to be homeless.

The two or three groups should be prioritized differently, and treated uniquely, with the goal to be reintegrated successfully. Not "well we owe it to all of the homeless to house, bathe, feed, care for, and fund their experience".

I'd love to hear opinions on either side.

See Utah's Housing First program. Dallas is starting to implement similar things.

It turns out that if you give people a place to live first without making them jump through a bunch of degrading hoops a much larger percentage of them will become functioning members of society again. Yes some people will end up back on the streets. Yes some people have mental illnesses. Doesn't change the statistics that giving homeless people free housing leads to many more of them getting off the streets permanently, getting jobs, and becoming self-sufficient.

The idea that you can punish people to successfulness is the Victorian-age meme that just won't die.

Remember that $241 million figure is not spend entirely on homeless. $122 million of it is spent on supportive housing which is not for the homeless. Granted those people, without supportive housing, may become homeless but that's simply not how they're counted.

Also remember the rest of that money is split among a ton of groups and organizations within San Francisco all of which have an inability to track their own results or even collaborate effectively. If that money was spent more effectively and could prove what it tried that worked and what didn't work I bet it would make a huge impact.

If only there was a way to effectively measure the impact a charitable program has on it's service audience/region.

FWIW, $241M is about 2.7% of the $9 billion budget.

The city of Vienna / Europe spends 632 Mio € alone on social housing. Another 3366 Mio € goes to other social and health services. [1]

Vienna has no relevant homeless problem.

https://wien1x1.at/site/wp-content/blogs.dir/9/files/2014/06...

But also Austria spends a lot of efforts and. Oney to better distribute wealth. This has a positive impact overall because it reduces the extreme cases that can cost a lot of money and impact society.

Social housing in Vienna is completely different than social housing in the US as an example. I just bought a flat in a building where the first three floors are social housing. That is not something you do in the us.

"The city of Vienna / Europe spends 632 Mio € alone on social housing."

You've never been to Vienna or Austria if you are comparing San Francisco to Austria.

Austria has a relatively homogenous culture, very conservative society (culturally, not politically).

Relatively low rates of labour mobility meaning that you 'know your neighbours' - generally a communitarian attitude, (as opposed to fairly libertarian attitude in SF and US in general) and they don't have industries that generate tons more $ than others, which means no housing bubbles. You can rent flats not too far outside of Vienna very inexpensively.

Just some things come to mind.

Money matters, but it matters less than social conventions and culture.

My hometown (in Canada) spends $0 on social housing (however, there is welfare and healthcare) and there is no homelessness. That said, housing is extremely inexpensive, and nobody really has a lot of money or opportunity either.

Vienna has no homogeneous culture. It is a cultural melting pot comparable to New York City. This roots back to the multicultural Habsburg state. At the moment Vienna grows by approx. 20000 people from all over the world by year. [1] The last years flat rent raised by 16%. If the city of Vienna would not build 13000 new cheap social flats every year, it would have problems like American cities.

[1] https://www.wien.gv.at/statistik/bevoelkerung/images/bev-ent...

Vienna is nothing comparable to NYC in terms of cosmopolitain, NYC is of a different variety entirely. Have you been to both? About 85% of NYC residents are from out of country or out of state. Nobody is from New York. Everybody living in Vienna since the 'Habsburg era' may as well just be 'Germanic', as far as their culture is relative to something like 'Jamaican' or 'Puerto Rican' or 'Chinese' or 'Indian' as you have in NYC.

Also - I'm afraid you might be missing something called 'market dynamics'.

People don't 'move to a place' and then 'wait for housing'. If X number of people are 'moving' to a city every year, then it's because there are already places there to buy or rent. Builders make the assessment of how much the city is growing (as you say, rents are going up - that's a sign of demand) and then build homes and flats based on the types of demand - which enables more people to come.

Given the vast differentiation in prices between city and 'out of city' homes - it's patently absurd for taxpayers to subsidize expensive city living for some people and not others. The 'expensive' part is not the 'flat' - it's the 'property'. The best thing is to let market dynamics have it's way, and have cheaper apartments in the periphery where there is less demand. Reasonable rent controls protects people from being kicked out.

Average rent in Toronto is about $2K for a one room flat. A simple subway ride to the suburbs, and it's less than half that. A little further and it's 66% cheaper. Trying to control home prices is like trying to control the tide of the sea. It's pointless.

For the small amount of those 'very marginalized' - yes, maybe they need their rent paid for, but that's another story.

And if all those newcomers to Vienna require 'subsidized housing' (which I doubt) then Vienna will not exist in 50 years.

"Trying to control home prices is like trying to control the tide of the sea. It's pointless."

Vienna has been controlling the home prices by building houses with great success for decades. [1]

Vienna is the largest apartment owner in Europe and 220,000 community dwellings also the largest property management company in Europe. Hardly any other European city is so valued for their social housing as Vienna.

https://www.wien.gv.at/english/housing/promotion/pdf/socialh...

"Vienna has been controlling the home prices by building houses with great success for decades. [1]"

Vienna is controlling nothing.

Vienna has failed to create global industries that attract value creators from around the world and other kinds of firms.

If they did, there would be people getting wealthy on a global scale, 'screwing up the housing market', and there's little that could be done about it.

Owning 200K homes is a terrible thing for the government to be doing - it's a relic of 20st century socialist thinking. It's incredibly inefficient. The remaining homes will be priced to 're-balance' the actual market dynamics in the region given the government intervention.

This inefficiency amounts to a) waste and b) and unfair subsidy by taxpayers, especially those in the countryside to people living in state-owned homes on land which is really expensive.

Again - it's better just to have basic regulations and smart developers, those people would be living in privately owned homes just a little further from city centre.

Again - you simply cannot control the tides - the money you spend fighting it is wasted, and most government operations are considerably more inefficient than private ones, which leads to another form of waste.

In Toronto (almost the size of Austria), nearly 1/3 of the 'special housing budget' goes to the staff working on the team. It would be more efficient (though unfair) just to directly subsidizes of lower income people and let the market decide how the spaces are allocated.

Vienna is often rated as having the best quality of live in the world:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercer_Quality_of_Living_Surve...

The social (housing) politics for over 80 years now is a big factor for that outcome.

I'm aware of that. It's a great place.

Housing affordability is only one part of the equation.

Also - what makes a place a 'great place to live' is highly subjective. It depends on what you want to measure.

Housing is the root of quality of live.

Not only housing afford ability is important but also quality of housing. Social housings in Vienna come sometimes with pools on the flat roof or saunas. They built Gemeindebauten [1] (social housings) in posh areas. They made exceptional architecture for the people. (for example Hundertwasserhaus) [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemeindebau [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundertwasserhaus

Vienna has failed to create global industries that attract value creators from around the world and other kinds of firms. If they did, there would be people getting wealthy on a global scale, 'screwing up the housing market', and there's little that could be done about it.

- "If you follow development strategy X, housing prices cannot be controlled. Therefore housing prices can never be controlled!"

- Vienna chooses another development strategy that avoids the problem

- "No! They're not supposed to do that! Bad!"

Again - it's better just to have basic regulations and smart developers, those people would be living in privately owned homes just a little further from city centre.

You mean like in Germany where lots of former public housing has been sold to private conglomerates - which have increased rents and cut back maintenance to a minimum?

You don't try and control house prices directly. You use regulations to make unproductive real estate speculation unattractive relative to productive investment.

You control the supply of credit available for real estate speculation, via prudential regulations, and employ capital controls and residency requirements against inflows of unproductive capital from overseas.

Unearned rents in the form of land price increases can be recaptured via taxation, in the form of broad based land tax, capital gains tax and vacancy tax.

According to the article, there are about 8000 homeless people in SF. With a funding of $241 million, that comes out to $30,000 per homeless person. How the heck is SF spending that much money and still failing so badly!?

Something's wrong with your maths there. If you spend a million dollars fixing a million potholes and there's one left, you didn't spend a million dollars per pothole.

I moved to SF in the early 90s. I think you can pin the large homeless population on several things. One is the climate. If you had to pick a place to be homeless, this would be one of the best places. Another is it is relatively safe compared to other cities. But most importantly you can blame Ronald Reagan for dismantling the states mental health infrastructure. Institutionalizing people has its downsides, but its more humane than letting people overdose on a sidewalk. It also doesn't help that other municipalities have a habit of dumping their social services burdens on San Francisco (one way buses from Nevada, etc). I don't see anything changing until we have a national or at least regional mental health system that can actually deal with the scale of the problem.

But most importantly you can blame Ronald Reagan for dismantling the states mental health infrastructure.

Please do some reading on this. Your comment is a gross oversimplification and ignores a lot of other factors, namely the fact that institutionalizing people against their will was regarded as inhumane. Mental health was defunded after it was decided to release these folks. Just like in most western countries.

Care to point towards any resources, authors, or links for those of us who might want to do more reading of our own? Seems like you have some knowledge on the subject, these would be much more helpful.

American Psychosis is an excellent book on this topic.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/14/health/american-psychosis-...

My mother, as first a nursing resident, and then a nurse anesthetist in the '50s, saw the most important input into this process, the "major tranquilizers" AKA first generation anti-psychotics, which came into wide use in-between those two, she was astounded one day when she saw a "hopeless" patient she knew from her 3 months residency in a psych ward working in the same hospital as she was, in some custodial or runner role.

But I strongly suspect he had an informal network in that hospital, which made sure he took his nasty meds (and they are nasty, I had to take Zyprexa at full strength for a while to end a hypomanic episode caused by a doctor prescribing a drug which turned out to be a big mistake, and then not realizing it for a month until my GP noticed and mentioned this to him over lunch; if you're worried about this happening to you, and all sorts of drugs can cause it, keep a diary of your sleep, and if it e.g. has an entry of 3 periods of 30 minutes, seek competent help fast, uncontrolled like this mania is serious medical emergency, and insidious for the patient suffering from it).

See, the thing was, after millennia of psychosis being untreatable, and soon bipolar disorder falling to lithium carbonate, we'd achieved a true miracle. But the transition to a new management regime for these particularly severe disorders was utterly botched. It started with a commission in the '50s, leading to Federal legislation signed by JFK less than a month before his assassination, and only 4 years later does Reagan even come into the picture, seeing as how he wasn't even a position of power until 1967 (read the bare facts in the intro to this article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Mental_Health_Act).

In short, blaming it on Reagan is Not Even Wrong; a wonderful opportunity for humane treatment of the most mentally ill was botched for a bunch of reasons, and he was only following the scheme "The Best And Brightest" came up with before its failings became all too apparent, in part due to the ACLU and willing courts eliminating the necessary force to make it work, e.g. forcing people to take their nasty meds or otherwise get fully institutionalized again.

A cynic would also note that redirecting money from mental hospitals to transfer payments was a much better way to buy votes.... And it's still happening, in the last year or two Missouri Governor Jay Nixon shut one down for the "retarded" just a bit north of me.

Thinking about this further, the ACLU and the willing courts that followed its lead were all that was required to create the current even more inhumane system for our most mentally ill:

It doesn't matter if the venue is a state mental hospital or a community mental health center, if neither can force a patent to take their meds and otherwise get necessary treatment, or in the former case even stay in the hospital, then neither has the slightest chance of working.

And once that's true, and you're only allowed to pretend to take care of them, heck, you might as well fail in the cheapest way, which would be community mental health centers.

Sort of like how outsourcing can "work" for corporate software development projects: most of them fail, either outright or by not delivering even if they're declared to be a victory, so failing more cheaply by outsourcing can make sense.

I'd start with Willowbrook, which was a rallying point for getting rid of institutional care.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willowbrook_State_School

It's a really complex and sad issue.

Actually, what _you_ should do is have first hand experience of dealing with a good friend in the midst of a severe drug addiction crisis (who can't phone mommy and daddy for help with rehab). It was impossible to get him committed for any length of time, even after he set fire to someone's house. He would have been way better off if he had been on lock down for 3 to 6 months, but instead had to completely destroy himself, lose everything, get thrown in jail, etc. He's just lucky he didn't end up in our shadow mental health system also known as state prison, which happens to an awful lot of people whose only crime is to be mentally ill and poor.

The ACLU was pivotal in forcing through the policy changes. They even take credit for it on their website: https://www.aclu.org/other/aclu-history-mental-institutions?...

I do have first hand experience with a family member who needed real mandatory mental help. We could not do anything for years until she tried to kill herself.

Ideological organizations often lose sight of basic human realities, or fight to end one ill only to birth another.

Edit: Deleted my earlier comment, as I misread yours.

Regarding what you said: The GP is not disputing the need for mental health institutions. He is pointing out that the ones that existed were horrible, to the point that closing them down was better than running them.

At the moment, too much of mental health is being handled by prisons. Whenever I read from people who study the problem, they all agree that:

1. It shouldn't be the prisons' responsibility.

2. The prisons are doing a better job than the mental institutions that were shut down.

Your first point is correct, but your second lacks clarity of insight.

If one were to read the history behind why the Reagan administration dismantled the mental health system, one would know that, in fact, what Reagan allowed to happen was a state sponsored ignorance of block grants that were initially allotted for the purpose of establishing local administration of mental health care. Reagan's mouthpieces said this was a wiser (letting states handle the money) way than Federal action to implement the plan Kennedy had initiated after witnessing his sister's incapacitation from her own 'treatment'.

The Reagan bunch then turned their heads and coughed while states deliberately ignored the intent of the money and spent it elsewhere, and did not, in fact, build mental institutions for short term treatment and release (with periodic checkups) that Kennedy's plan had described in exquisite detail.

To malign the intent and say that prisons are somehow better than the mental health treatment that was being administered is to suggest there was no alternative, which is implicit in your defense, though certainly not directly expressed. I seriously doubt you have spent any time in a correctional facility or mental hospital because you would then know that prisons are quite literally the worst place for a mentally ill person to be. Better they be homeless an under the care of the shelters and soup kitchens than locked in a concrete cell with hundreds, if not thousands, of undernourished, maltreated, and relatively unsupervised bangers.

There is the slimmest veneer of an attempt to rehabilitate addicts and/or treat mental illness within these facilities, but God knows there have been PLENTY of attempts for several decades to realign the institutions such that they are congruent with our understanding of what constitutes psychological healing.

It truly WAS Reagan's administration that put the decision to opt-out of locally 'sourced' mental health treatment in ultra conservative governor's and their respective cabinet advisors' hands.

Let us not obfuscate what the worst ever was with what may have been were cooler heads to have prevailed.

And what you should do is have first hand experience dealing with a poor or non-white or politically active person locked up in a hospital an declared insane for backtalking to a police officer or government official.

I was born in a country where declaring people insane and involuntarily committing them to mental hospitals was standard operating procedure for the secret police to shut up dissidents.

I think America has the right idea here, frankly. You should not be imprisoned by the state unless you are openly convicted of a crime.

The evidence seems to suggest that the people the state wants out of general circulation fare no better when they're tossed in prison or otherwise hounded/destroyed.

You also require doctors acting as criminals, with weak oversight to make your fears come true, in addition to a criminal government. If a government goes really wrong, and wants you out of the way, they'll get their way. Jean Seberg for example, didn't need to be locked up to be destroyed. We didn't need to lock people in hospitals to ruin their lives, we just used a blacklist.

You shouldn't be so frightened by your personal history that you lose sight of the fact that the root cause is a government out of control, not the means they use.

Then America should stop throwing people in prison for refusing to hand over a share of the currency they receive in private trade to pay for the goods and services the homeless receive from government organizations.

You can't impose authoritarianism to force productive people to support the poor, and then act sanctimonious about committing the mentally ill and drug addicted who contribute nothing to the economy.

This literally only makes sense if money/the economy is the only thing you care about.

Refraining from throwing people who have not violated anyone's rights in prison makes sense if you care about human rights.

You seem to throw all concern for human rights out the window when the object is to take someone's money from them.

Or... y'know... I care about people as a whole more than I care about a rich minority's desire to become a bit richer.

The interests of 'people as a whole' can be used to justify both (compulsory treatment leads to less drug abuse and fewer homeless, compulsory income redistribution leads to more funding for the homeless, respectively), so really what you're saying is that it's okay to throw rich people in prison, but not poor people.

That's what your 'value system' comes down to. Knee-jerk judgments on moral value and rights based on whether a person is successful.

It's very easy to pay taxes. People do it all the time, and it's pretty well documented how to do it. Worst case scenario, you miss something and pay a bit more than you might otherwise have to. I don't know of anyone who's paid taxes properly and been thrown in prison for paying taxes. Hell, if you look like you might be trying to make an honest effort to pay taxes and got it wrong, you can pay them after someone catches you!

It's not very easy not to have a mental illness. It's not something you choose to do. See the difference? One is putting you in prison for something you very easily could've avoided - the other is putting you in prison (because that's what compulsory treatment really is) for being a human being.

Here come the rationalizations for your favored brand of authoritarianism.

Human rights violators always think that their particular authoritarianism is justified.

It wouldn't be so bad if you didn't simultaneously admonish those who support authoritarian laws to force those who are massively abusing drugs to the detriment of themselves and the rest of society into treatment.

I think we will disagree forevermore on whether or not property and money are the most important things in the world.

No, we disagree on whether it's okay to throw someone in prison for not handing over their money to you, and whether it's okay to rationalize this form of authoritarianism, while admonishing the much more sensible authoritarian policy of forcing those with severe drug addictions to stop putting themselves and the rest of society in danger by getting treatment.

Reasonably sure we don't. We disagree mostly that your specific definition of property is a thing that should be considered a human right at all.

Unlike most other human rights, the only reason that property is considered one is to prop up capitalism and prevent experimenting with alternatives. Property doesn't exist to the extent it does today without Government intervention - the alternative is that nobody owns anything aside from that which they can defend personally by force. Property is thus subsidised by Government - Government says that in return for taxes, they'll keep some concept of property separate from the concept of whether or not you happen to have enough firepower to defend it. This, of course, doesn't actually work unless the Government is powerful enough to take down any group which might want to steal your property.

There are various alternatives to this Government-subsidised definition of property, some of which have been tried out small-scale, some larger scale. I'm not really sure why one specific definition is encoded into your definition of human rights (which, of course, doesn't match any human rights treaty currently in force anywhere).

On the bright side, with enough firepower, you can defend yourself from the Government and essentially become your own country and do whatever you want. Wee!

No we disagree on whether throwing a person in prison for refusing to hand over something they receive in private trade is a human rights violation.

It goes beyond even this. Income and sales tax laws require a person to surrender their privacy rights, and disclose how much currency they received in private trade, and from what sources, or be imprisoned. You don't consider this blatant authoritarian violation of privacy rights to be a human rights violation.

You define actions that are clearly human rights violations as not being so, because your ethics are purely designed to rationalise your political ideology, as opposed to consistently defending people's rights.

You're also not above misconstruing the debate and misframing your correspondent's position in an attempt to disparage them while evading their criticisms of your position.

So you only drive on toll roads and went to a private school?

If it had been a decision concerned with "humane" considerations, there would have been a transition to outpatient treatment, family resources and education, and generally an attempt to change rather than destroy the mental health infrastructure of a country.

The result, which is an ugly combination of the profoundly mentally ill being incarcerated in jails and prisons, often among the general population, and homelessness, is hardly a decision calculated to improve anyone's lives. The population of people with schizophrenia living rough in this country also testifies to the lack of humanity in both the decisions that were made, and total lack of concern for people once they left an institution.

Now, we have to act shocked every time the Jared Lee Laughners of the world act in a tragically predictable course and murder a group of people. It's not shocking, it's predictable; when a family can't do a thing for a loved one who is falling apart in front of their eyes it's true that most of the time it only ends badly for the sick person. Sometimes though, it ends badly for society as a whole.

> Please do some reading on this.

I really wish people wouldn't use this line in HN comments. It shuts down meaningful discussion by implying that someone would see things your way if only they were more well informed. Maybe they have done the reading and don't agree with you.

Even better, which is what prompted my comment: if you're speaking in dissent, asserting there's more to a story, please for the sake of other readers who may so be inclined to learn, do more than drop a one liner as if this concludes all counterpoints of debate.

a reference would be great!

> One is the climate. If you had to pick a place to be homeless, this would be one of the best places.

My experience here in Portland OR seems to reflect the same feeling on this. During the spring/summer months the homeless population explodes... then they move down south for the fall/winter seasons.

When you don't have a home, cold and damp are literal killers.

None of that is specific to San Francisco.

All of South California and North California has great weather, including other big cities like LA, San Diego, San Jose.

As to crime, I don't have the stats but again I doubt SF has meaningfully lower crime rate than other cities. Generic "crime stats" are pretty meaningless anyway. I doubt anyone keeps stats that would be specific to homeless people (we have stats for "homicide rates" but not "homeless homicide rates").

And even if Reagan is to blame, it was a national thing, so doesn't explain why San Francisco has more homeless.

Reagan was governor of California before he was president.

And California has had both assembly and state senate dominated by Democrats for 50 years or so.

The republicans earned their way to obscurity with Reagan and the likes of Pete Wilson. It goes without saying that the governor can do a lot of damage in California.

SF spends $241 million on homelessness. Per year. The reason SF has so many homeless is because it provides the most services, the most programs, the best support network and a sympathetic population (not to mention rich tourists and locals to panhandle from, and a good mix of urban and park areas).

I thought Reagan had little choice since the Supreme Court ruled forceful institutionalizations deprived people of their civil rights if they weren't an immediate threat to themselves or others.

There was a choice to fund education for families and former patients, and attempt a transition to outpatient care. Dumping them on the streets and into prisons most definitely was a choice.

I think "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" had a lot to do with this as well.

> But most importantly you can blame Ronald Reagan for dismantling the states mental health infrastructure.

Again, with this.

Any time the "Reagan dismantled mental health!" argument comes up, all I can ever find are references to the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act - which was co-authored by Democrats, and followed the accepted medical advice of the time - and vague accusations of acts by a Congress more often than not Democrat-controlled under Reagan's tenure.

What specifically did Reagan himself do?

They all were following JFK's (and Eisenhower's) Best and Brightest, as enshrined in the Federal 1963 Community Mental Health Act (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Mental_Health_Act), all that done back when he was on the "rubber chicken circuit" for GE; he had no political power until becoming governor in 1967.

I've never seen any city with a homeless population like San Francisco's and I've been to much poorer places. Side by side with the artists and web developers is a parallel tent city, and it seems to have a lot of mentally ill, people with drug problems, and traumatized military veterans. People who in any other nation would be taken care of.

Simply put Americans don't seem to care very much about other Americans.

> I've never seen any city with a homeless population like San Francisco's

The other west coast cities have massive homeless populations, too. LA has largely cleared the homeless encampments out of areas they are trying to spruce up (the revival of downtown LA and all that), but I've seen camps in LA rivaling those in SF. Portland and Seattle also get pretty large homeless populations during the spring and summer, although the homeless population drops precipitously during the rainy season up there.

Simply put Americans don't seem to care very much about other Americans

Now there's a vast oversimplification if there ever was one. Using SF, which is highly anomalous economically and socially, to extrapolate out and project it on "Americans" and their attitudes toward poverty is a lot like saying the City of London's particularities are the same as the rest of England.

It's kind of true, though. Compared to other developed nations, the US is a country that doesn't care if you get sick or die. It's about as social-Darwinist as it gets. SF is even much more liberal than the rest of the country, so it's a best-case.

Don't mean to be inflammatory, just how I see it having traveled a lot. It's wonderful to be rich in the US, you can get anything you want, but there's no sympathy for the poor or unfortunate or social underclasses (immigrant labor, etc) at all.

Having lived in chicago, DC, San Diego, and visited NY, philly, LA, honolulu and baltimore, extensively, and volunteered among the homeless in SF, SD, DC, and Fargo - SF is much worse than the rest of the country.... Except maybe Baltimore. I think the US had a long tradition of taking care of the downtrodden outside of state-run institutions. This tradition was slowly dismantled starting at the beginning of the progressive movement (1920s-1930s through FDR) in favor of having the state run things. The net result now is that the state runs things poorly, and people now think that there is no longer any need for private charitable action, because government will deal with it.

You make a point about SF/America being Darwinist. Compared to the European socialist countries, Canada, Australia, it's a stark difference.

Is America too big of a country to be able to fix this?

It'd take a dictator to fix the USA. I think I could do it, but it wouldn't be peaceful.

Simply not true. City of SF spends a lot of money on social services specifically for homeless people. So it's not that they don't care if people get sick or die. In fact, it seems like they care a lot, based on dollars spent to try and alleviate a problem that is very tough to mitigate.

Portland's homeless problem is supposedly vastly, vastly worse than San Francisco.

What does it mean to "take care of" our homeless? House them? Who is willing to pay $3k/mo rent per homeless person?

In a third world nation, the "homeless" in San Francisco would be allowed to build a shantytown and would not be considered homeless. I'm not trying to minimize the real issues of poverty, but you can't avoid the fact that part of the problem is that regulation/civilization/whatever you want to call it has disallowed poor housing.

   >Who is willing to pay $3k/mo rent per homeless person?

If someone is willing, I just because homeless.

I know, right? I've been running a entrepreneurial business for nearly ten years, and lost my payment processor (still owes me for two months of sales) because they went out of business. I'm trying to get a Patreon to bring me in $800 a month and failing, even though I'm now giving away the products for free to try and scare up quantities of people who can spare a dollar a month.

I consider myself pre-homeless at this point.

"Simply put Americans don't seem to care very much about other Americans."

You hit the nail on the head. What else do you expect from a society that won't even provide the option of healthcare to its citizens, that has massive industries whose sole purpose is to profit off the sickness and death of others, and that incarcerates over two million people at any given time, many for ordinary, everyday activities or mental health problems? It's a reflection of the people and many of the people are stupid, cruel, hateful, and puritanical to the point that they will do anything within their power to stop others from enjoying life. For example, the next time you hear someone talking about something they don't want their tax dollars going to, listen carefully to what they're saying. Rarely will it be the unjust wars we fight or other horrors like that, and often it will be others' well being and health. Or just talk to any Trump supporter (or almost any Republican at this point).

Please don't post angry political boilerplate to HN. It turns every thread into a generic shouting match.

So which part should I censor again?

Moderation is not censorship: http://www.wizzu.com/corrs/moderation.html

(I am not a moderator, of HN or of anywhere else, but it's the same principle)

"People who in any other nation would be taken care of."

The US actually spends far more than almost any other country in the world on programs for the poor. In many of the countries with less homelessness/drug-addiction, there is very little social welfare spending, and drug addicts are enrolled into compulsory treatment programs, something that has been deemed a human rights violation in the US.

Government in Thailand for example spends FAR less on social welfare programs than government in the US, but it has compulsory treatment.

>...One is the climate...

71% of homeless people were living in SF just before becoming homeless. Only 10% come from outside of California (and its climate)[0]

This pretty clearly shows homeless has alot more to do with the cost of housing relative to wages jobs then good weather.

[0]pg 33 of http://sfgov.org/lhcb/sites/default/files/2015%20San%20Franc...

It shows nothing of the kind. Perhaps, if you were living somewhere with a lethal climate, and you became homeless, you would leave.

Or perhaps you would stay, thinking "homeless presence has nothing to do with the weather", and die. In either of those cases, the weather has shrunk the homeless population.

It's been about 40 years since Reagan was governor of California. Using him as an excuse for conditions today is a bit bizarre.

Not so sure about the mental health part. The article uses Bangkok's low homeless population as a counterpoint to San Fran's homelessness. I was born and raised in Thailand and occasionally visit or have Thai relatives over. I would say in Asia, mental health awareness is pretty nonexistant. The fact that they have a low homeless population and low mental health awareness does kind of refute your mental healthcare point imo.

I think it's the fact that in Thailand, as the article mentions, there is a lot of gray area between "poor" and "rich". There's not many super wealthy people and not many super poor people. There's more of a "middle poor", "average", and "middle-rich", and the "middle poor" get by pretty well because of how cheap everything is. Healthcare is also dirt cheap compared to America, so you can get medical care for basic stuff and pay like $20 for it. My parents have even thought of doing some medical tourism to Thailand to do dentistry stuff because its just so damn cheap. Oh, one more thing, motorcycles are the poor man's transport, and just like everything else they are also dirt cheap. Cant afford rent? Well you can just go and live in a basic shack because a lot of people do that anyway. So yeah, if you're poor in Thailand you will generally get by pretty well because everything there is relatively cheap.

In America, it's either you are above the average line or you sink to the bottom. Like, if you don't make enough money, you can't expect to pay rent and then have money for food/healthcare/car. And in America, you NEED a car. How are you gonna get from San Fran to LA if you have a job interview? Taxi is out of the question, trains are 200+, buses dont arrive early in the morning. So the only answer is a car. Oh you have a problem with drug abuse? Are you poor and cant afford health insurance? Then hospital or rehab visits will cost thousands. Cant afford rent? Guess you're homeless.

It's a brutal system we have in America honestly. Lots of tech innovations, lots of good economics in Silicon Valley, but honestly it just sucks to be poor here. You need to be hovering in the neighborhood of the high GDP per capita if you want to survive. In Thailand, the GDP per capita is low enough that most people are near it, and the rich can enjoy a luxurious lifestyle with housemaids and stuff.

There at a lot of places in the world that have a smaller inequality gap than San Francisco not for any noble reason, but simply because they drove out all their poor people.

Show me a city with massive inequality, and I'll show you a city that has found a way to allow its least-fortunate citizens to make a way of life there.

Yes, this is the true answer. Like many KPIs, Inequality is not a good measure of anything on its on.

I disagree. I was just reading an article by Jeremy Grantham that cited data showing how inequality is correlated with basically every measure of health and social problems. See https://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/resources/the-spirit-level, especially the PowerPoint slides linked from that page. To quote:

It shows that for each of eleven different health and social problems: physical health, mental health, drug abuse, education, imprisonment, obesity, social mobility, trust and community life, violence, teenage pregnancies, and child well-being, outcomes are significantly worse in more unequal rich countries.

I don't think you can compare cities and countries this way. A city can drive out its poor in a way that a country generally cannot.

So we have bunch of things that correlate together.

Now tell me which one is causing it and which ones are effects. It's also possible that all of these are caused by some hidden thing.

The site and the related book go into great detail as to why a casual relationship from inequality to these social ills is the most reasonable hypothesis.

I don't think it's 'one hidden thing'.

It's a 'million little things' in the system, and most of it is cultural values, some of it is social policy, some of it is not evident, for example, 'inequality' in SF is driven simply by the fact that some people are creating so much value, making so much money it skews the numbers.

When some people in a community make a lot of money - it makes it's way into the housing system and really screws things up.

Also - a lot of the most 'equal' societies are very poor, so having 'equality' should not be a social objective in and of itself.

> Also - a lot of the most 'equal' societies are very poor, so having 'equality' should not be a social objective in and of itself

This is false. Most countries with low Gini coefficients are places like Japan and Scandinavia, while high Gini countries are places like Sub-Saharan Africa and South America. There are outliers, but the trend is clear. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_...

The most 'equal' societies were communist - i.e. Eastern Europe before the end, Cuba today.

When you have absolute equality it's called 'communism' - it was the most destructive and murderous idea in all of human history.

Everybody that I know that is 'poor' is 100% responsible for their level of income. 100%. I have a huge family - many extended cousins. I have relatives that are constantly working, saving - they are wealthy - some who do nothing all day - they are poor.

Fortunately, nobody in my family falls into the category of 'poor because of circumstance'. They all had roughly the same opportunity and made very different choices - every day in fact.

But the variation in wealth is huge. To try to create 'equality' in my family would simply mean those that have worked really hard all their lives would have to hand over money to those who did little.

Equality as a social objective is oppressive and unfair - the Silicon Valley could not exist in that context because those who are creating value on a global scale would be the bad guys.

Also - Japan is a rich country, but they per-capita income is a little behind most modern nations. As far as Scandinavia - they do a pretty good job - but I don't believe their GDP numbers are representative - this is because 'government spending' is part of the GDP calculation, and in those states you have massive government spending, more than 1/2 the economy. Just because the government spends a dollar on something, doesn't mean that a dollar of value is created. Basically - according to the GDP calculation - a dollar taxed from a private citizen, then 'given' to a public sector worker - is a dollar added to the GDP calculation as though it were 'wealth/value creation' and this is rubbish. Also, students in Stockholm region cannot find places to live and there is a several year waiting list for dorm rooms (!!). Same for subsidized housing which is something like 20% of the housing market. This would be unheard of in North America. Also, in North America, homes and properties are much bigger - and this again is not part of the GDP calculation and yet it is (arguably) a measure of greater wealth. So it's very relative. Though again, they do many things well in Scandinavia.

As far as African and less developed nations - there's no point in measuring 'equality'. You have a corrupt elite that consumes 100% of the natural resources money, and then a totally defunct nation otherwise. They don't need to aspire to 'equality' - they need to aspire to 'get rid of corruption' and have an 'intelligently organized' society. More equality will happen as a result of that.

The objective should not be 'equality' it should be 'fairness', and then taking care of those who really actually need help.

It's not false and that trend is nothing but clear.

There is no clear trend in countries below 20 000$/person/year GDP (ppp).

There is clear trend of lower Gini = higher GDP in countries that fall in range of 20 000$ - 45 000$. Above that, the trend reverses.

I had to exclude Afganistan, Cuba, Myanmar, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Syria and Ivory coast becase the data didn't have gini for them.

"outcomes are significantly worse in more unequal rich countries."

Causation is not correlation.

People who are not healthy, may not be able to be as motivated and productive, and are 'pushed out of the economic system'.

America is a highly competitive place, in comparison to most other countries and I think that all of these factors have feedback cycles.

Also - America does not have socialized medicine or 'full coverage' and I think that really skews the numbers.

Some countries with high inequality also have totally different cultures / groups living side by side, and that also changes the numbers.

There is also a tension between "helping" someone and "infringing their rights as a human."

Somehow I think that Thailand/Bangkok doesn't worry all that much about the "rights" side of that balance.

At what point do you declare someone with mental illness "sick and unfit"? This is not an easy question. Family members, who would know a person best, can't always answer that question well.

I think this is true, but it can't explain most of the difference by itself as most of the major wealthy cities I have been to do not have anywhere near the scale of homelessness and mental health issues as San Francisco. (I say this as someone who has lived in the UK, France, and San Francisco (albeit briefly).

I really think the local people (I don't mean you here) have a kind of blindness to the problem in San Fran, perhaps because after a while you start forgetting how abnormal it is. There is so much wealth in the city but clearly not enough people commited to acting.

You make it sound as though we're not incarcerating them already... we are, we just use prisons instead of a facility where any kind of treatment could ever occur. If you think being mentally ill in prison is somehow a celebration of humans rights...

> If you think being mentally ill in prison is somehow a celebration of humans rights...

I do not. But I also don't claim to have a "solution", either.

You don't need to, just look at countries that actually take care of their mentally ill instead of warehousing them or tossing them on the streets. You don't need to come up with a solution, you just need to learn about the ones that have existed for years.

Are they perfect? No, but as I often see here in relation to new technologies with far less at stake and far less of a proven track record, "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good."

Culturally, there is a huge difference between American nuclear families and Thai extended families. As was mentioned in TFA, when someone in Bangkok is unable to support themselves they fall back on their extended family as a support network. This can mean moving from Bangkok to a rural village where they are given work doing farm labor... it can mean they are given a "job" for room and board by a family member with a business in Bangkok, etc. etc.

There is no social safety net to speak of, but the extended family model provides a functionally equivalent version. Again, this was explicitly stated in the article itself.

Your insinuation that there is forced institutionalisation because the Thais don't respect "human rights" is, quite frankly, racist.

> As was mentioned in TFA, when someone in Bangkok is unable to support themselves they fall back on their extended family as a support network.

Why do you magically assume that the same is not true in the US? Why do you magically assume that the homeless actually have living relatives or families? And what happens if the person refuses to move or is too far gone? What then? Who makes that call?

The fact that you are quite so glib about making such an assessment, quantifying it as a "solution" (Have you ever taken care of somebody with severe Alzheimers? That's a 24/7 job.), and imposing it upon both the individual and their family shows a distinct lack of understanding.

> Your insinuation that there is forced institutionalisation because the Thais don't respect "human rights" is, quite frankly, racist.

You will have to do better than an ad hominem attack to excuse the human rights situation in Thailand, thanks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Thailand

And, an insinuation about institutionalization is probably the most charitable characterization given that many of the homeless also have substance abuse problems.

Allow me to be particularly uncharitable: I suspect that many of the urban homeless simply "disappear" if the Thai police don't find them useful for shaking somebody down.

Human rights is subjectively defined. You and your fellow social democrats define it as forcing a drug addict into treatment. You use terms like "human rights" to stigmatize those who don't share your beliefs.

A sensible person would define throwing a productive person into prison for refusing to hand over a share of the currency they receive in private trade (i.e. refusing to comply with income tax law) as a human rights violation before they would define compulsory treatment as one. You and your fellow social democrats have absolutely no problem imposing authoritarian measures to force people to forfeit their private property to pay for the programs you want.

>It seems a terrible statement about my home country that my children will encounter homelessness and mental illness much more vividly in the wealthiest nation in the world than they did in Thailand, where we previously lived.

>During a trip back to Bangkok I spoke about this paradox with Nopphan Phromsri, the secretary general of the Human Settlement Foundation, an organization that assists the homeless there.

>Greater Bangkok, a sprawling metropolis with more than 10 million people, has 1,300 homeless people, a survey this year found.

* Thailand spends far less on subsidies for the poor.

* The government intervention that does take place in Thailand to address homelessness is much more balanced in the authoritarianism it imposes on taxpayer vs tax recipient. Drug addicts can't receive welfare their entire life with zero accountability. Instead they are enrolled into compulsory treatment programs.

Western culture considers compulsory treatment a human rights violation, but does not consider throwing someone in prison for refusing to hand over a share of the currency they receive in private trade, to pay for welfare, similarly a human rights violation. This irrational, ideology based approach to human rights is behind this imbalanced approach to drug abuse and welfare.

* Thailand has far less effective enforcement of authoritarian economic prohibitions, like prohibitions on running an unlicensed business. This provides more space for the poor, who have more difficulty meeting licensing requirements, to participate in economically productive activity. That's why Thailand has bustling street markets and an informal economy (derogatorily referred to as a "shadow economy" in some circles) that provides stable sources of income for millions of people.

The US also has zoning laws which prevent construction of low cost housing (such as dormitories), and minimum wage laws which prevent employment of marginally employable people.

…which really puts the damper on an otherwise thriving slave labor demographic.

People earning below US minimum wage (in purchasing power terms) are not slaves. Those at the margins would benefit from being employed. It teaches them valuable skills that improve their position for the future.

Well, what does it say? The article seems to abruptly end without laying out a thesis or conclusion.

I agree - in fact, I thought that the page had cut off half of the article. It just ends with something about Walmart. I thought he was going somewhere with that.

The Walmart bit draws a parallel between factory labor and US consumerism along the lines of: global capitalism inserts laborers into Southeast Asian manufacturing assemblages and similarly corrals consumers into Northern Californian box stores.

While I think the comparison is at least interesting if not actually useful (to help think about the effects and consequences of transnational capital), that bit of reportage misrepresents the municipal reality that SF does not have a Walmart.

In fact, SF has been a bit of an outlier regarding the corporate giant Walmart, and some of SF's elected officials have vigorously opposed Walmart's setting up shop in SF. [0] Four years later, the Walmart closest to SF (Oakland) closed. [1] Presently, the closest Walmart to SF is 18 miles away (42 mins by car, which is an eternity in the Bay Area) in San Leandro.

The homelessness in SF is dispiriting and, yes, a sign of US sociopolitical attitudes about wealth and social welfare. Another sign of US sociopolitical attitudes (SF's in particular) is its continued rejection of Walmart which is notorious among Bay Area liberals (and conservatives, for that matter) for its anti-union and anti-employee policies.

[0] https://www.baycitizen.org/news/development/san-francisco-po... (bad cert, sorry)

[1] http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Walmart-to-close-nearl...

EDIT: readability; rhetorical emphasis on political opinion about Walmart

It's pretty ludicrous to write an article about "What San Francisco Says About America" and then fixate on the things which most distinguish San Francisco from the rest of the US.

San Francisco is a huge outlier in many respects. Some of the most notable things which the article talks about are unheard of elsewhere: almost anywhere else in the country you will not see visible homeless and you definitely won't see marijuana advertisements.

The Wal-Mart bit seemed especially out-of-place. I don't think San Francisco even has a Wal-Mart (and that fact alone distinguishes its culture from most of America).

Came here to make the same comment.

Interesting map on Walmarts and Whole Foods in SF [1]

[1] http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/03/11/map_whole_foo...

What I found odd is how the author fixated on bizarre things like marijuana yoga, vegan shoes, bluetooth toothbrushes (missed opportunity for portmanteau), as if Americans or San Franciscans find all of this normal. We're bewildered and laughing too.

It does say something that the city that most embodies American capitalism also boasts its largest homeless population.

This is a complicated problem and I admit that I don't have a good understanding of law or social studies... so take this with a grain of salt.

I sometimes wonder if we have a little too much freedom in this country. Heroine/meth/alcohol mixed with mental issues have demolished the lives of many people. They turn bitter and blue. Life becomes a loop of temporary satisfaction through chemical escape.

The ones that end on the streets are often not violent, and I don't believe they belong in prison. But defiling public spaces with needles and shit is not acceptable. Fines and nights in jail don't matter to them, but freedom on the other hand...

I imagine a state institution somewhere between jail and trade school. Drug use would be tolerated to some extent. Food, shelter, and hopefully some sense of community are provided, along with opportunities to learn useful skills.

I realize this is idealistic and that the monetary cost would probably be immense. I'm just sick of all the biohazards strewn across the city and felt like wondering out loud.

> I sometimes wonder if we have a little too much freedom in this country.

No, you don't. Many of the problems faced by the poor arise specifically from restrictions and limitations on freedom. The number of US persons perpetually disenfranchised by poverty is hard to comprehend. They have fewer rights, not too many.

The disparate treatment of poor people by the justice system tops my list. Poor drug users face convictions, and thereafter perpetual unemployment, while the rich are diverted to programs without convictions (see Rush Limbaugh). The rich are also allowed to self-medicate with prescriptions whereas the poor turn to illegal drugs (again, see Rush). To exacerbate this by rounding up the poor into camps only sweeps the problem under the rug.

"I’m confounded how to explain to my two children why a wealthy society allows its most vulnerable citizens to languish on the streets."

Well, here is part of the problem. You are asking what your society can do, not what YOU can do. Meanwhile you are busy racking up your credit card on consumer goods you don't really need (yes, he does admit this - read the article).

Nothing would prevent people from pooling their money for a cause. And this does indeed exist - it is called a charity. Many charities exist to aid the homeless, and if none of them suit your needs you can start a new one with a new goal.

The good thing about charities is that they compete with each other. If a charity is corrupt (like the Red Cross? [1]) you do not have to donate to it. Tax dollars, on the other hand - you realistically have little choice where they are going in spite of whatever guise of democracy you think you are operating under.

[1] https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-red-cross-raised-...

Charity is a nice idea, but when people are paying their taxes, and seeing trillions wasted in Afghanistan and Iraq, boondoggles like the F-35 and the LCS, and even to an extent the Zumwalt, they might have a right to speculate that their charity or lack thereof is not the primary issue.

Then they might look at the state of healthcare in this country, and how a combination of bought politicians, insurance, and some particularly greedy pharmaceutical companies cough albuterol cough Mylan cough and realize that the problem is bigger than a spirit of pooling resources.

We already pool our resources, then those resources are wasted. That's the problem.

good points :)

Thanks, I respect the points you're making about charity, and especially about the need to start somewhere (i.e. with ourselves), but we shouldn't lose sight of the enormous and unconscionable waste much of what we already give with that in mind is subject to.

Thanks for pointing that out, I've come to similar conclusions myself as well. As someone who lives in the city and has paid six figures in taxes last year, I also wonder if people not contributing enough to the pool is really the problem. To me it seems that the culprit is mismanagement of the funds that are generated by taxpayers every year. How much more should I be spending as a taxpayer to improve the situation?

It's a crazy and infuriating situation, when we're essentially forced to pay into a common fund which we then watch be grossly misused. I'm honestly not sure how much more an individual can do; this strikes me as an issue that educated voters have to come together on.

Of course then it becomes ever so clear as to why the drive to make sure that voters are often not educated has been so intense during the same period of this mismanagement.

Education is only part of it. I think that we are all generally aware there is some abuse of the budget, but the greater enemy IMO is apathy and/or feeling powerless to change our current situation.

Who knows, maybe one day we can have the BOJ pay the IRS on your behalf?

Unlike voluntary charity, government "charity" does not come with the discipline of the donors. That is, money comes in whether it is wasted or not. In a voluntary charity there is clear responsibility to the donors.

Part of the problem is that pro-growth- and pro-economic-stability- ("pro-jobs") policies (economic stimulus, bailouts) erode the purchasing (read: surviving) power of middle and lower class, who are massive contributors to charity in the US. They also make it more difficult for a charitable organization to continue operating by increasing program costs.

You could also make a more subtle meta-argument that these policies more dramatically bias wealth to the selfish, which decreases the giving at the top, as well.

About a decade ago, I spent a few summers volunteering at a soup kitchen (St. Anthony's Foundation) in the Tenderloin, and they had an orientation for new volunteers that explained exactly why lowering the permanent homeless population in SF is so difficult:

- Homeless population is bimodal in distribution of time they've been homeless

- Most homeless people actually cycle out of homelessness quite quickly; they lost a job or got sick, went bankrupt, family's on the streets, but they're basically motivated and get back on their feet quickly (within months)

- The longer you've been homeless, the more likely you are to stay homeless

- Among the long-term population, a significant fraction (like half) of the population have mental illnesses (clinically diagnosable e.g. schizophrenia, PTSD); a large fraction were also vets; drug addiction is rampant

- The veteran stat was very surprising for me and IMO a particularly shameful part of our country's history: http://www.nationalhomeless.org/factsheets/veterans.html '33% of male homeless population are veterans' '47% Vietnam Era' '67% served three or more years'

- The closure of mental institutions and sharp reduction in bed counts in the 80s put a lot of mentally ill people directly on the street; since they had been institutionalized, many of their own family support networks were also gone

- It's very hard to transition back to normal society once you've been out of work for a decade; to even apply and interview for a job, you need to give a return address and phone number, and applications have moved online; a lot of homeless have no computer skills

- Even the very basic logistics of getting a shower, decent clothes, a clean shave, and showing up to an interview is difficult for someone who has lived on the streets for a long time

- For those reasons above, to a first approximation, most long term homeless are unemployable

- SF is an expensive city; a decade ago, a room in the Tenderloin would run >$1k a month; this makes it even more difficult to transition back to regular society without outside support

Basically, to get someone employed and back on their feet is a very large investment (and for many homeless it's more or less impossible), and probably a significant fraction of the homeless should be in a state mental institution of some kind (with all its attendant downsides and potential for abuse) rather than out on the streets.

> to get someone employed and back on their feet is a very large investment (and for many homeless it's more or less impossible)

The investment here is time, as much as money per se.

Someone who is long term homeless and has no support network, no savings, no recent job, no home, no clean clothes to change into, no place to shower, and most importantly no stable schedule and set of habits needs not only a sturdy financial food/shelter/clothing foundation, but also needs someone who cares about them to put in a ton of work every day making sure they stay focused and motivated and on schedule.

Devoting that much care and attention to a stranger isn’t something that most people have the bandwidth or motivation to do, and it’s the kind of work that’s not easy to scale.

> ... but also needs someone who cares about them to put in a ton of work every day making sure they stay focused and motivated and on schedule.

The only people who freely (paid through taxes) provide a similar sounding service, at least that I can think of, are public school teachers

SF actually attracts homeless people. The last homeless count done showed 29% of homeless people in SF lost their housing outside the city, with 10% of that from out of state:

https://sfgov.org/lhcb/sites/default/files/2015%20San%20Fran... (search for "place of residence")

I rather suspect SF is a nice place to be homeless, as people seem to be "voting with their feet" and going there.

Tom Fuller is one of the best reporters at The New York Times. He covered the Arab Spring in North Africa. He covered the military junta in Myanmar, sneaking over the Thai border. His life work deserves a Pulitzer, and now we're lucky to have him in SF. I've worked with him directly, and he's the real deal and also a nice guy.

The big questions about San Francisco are: How does it manage to be so rich and so poor at the same time? What does it mean for a city to have one of the highest number of millionaires per capita among its inhabitants, and also a large and growing homeless population?

When you think about San Francisco, you think about tech and homelessness. It's a city that's the seat of a global industry trying to grapple with a regional problem. That is, both the tech and the homelessness are part of larger systems over which San Francisco has little control.

The city has more to offer the homeless than many other US cities: weather that won't kill you, laws that support free healthcare, a citizenry that, until recently at least, believed the problem should not be swept under the rug or erased like LA took care of Skid Row.

But the weird thing about SF is how the city is becoming more and more disjointed. It has become a city that attracts people from around the world with economic opportunity. The tech workers that form the middle and upper middle class here don't have much else in common besides the economic opportunity they sought. They didn't come to solve homelessness in SF, and we can't blame them for that. And the homeless themselves come from many other places in the US.

So tech workers and homeless come to a city, but many of them are not from here, and therefore don't identify as belonging to the same community, a community which under other historical conditions might have tried to care for itself and solve its own problems.

I'm aware of a few attempts in SF to address homelessness: Handup, LavaMae, etc. And they're great, but they aren't the norm for tech.

There's also something strange about tech as an industry, which shapes its impact on SF. Older industries like carmakers employed hundreds of thousands of people, and employed them locally (at least until NAFTA). That is, organizations devoted to the accumulation of capital were also the source of a lot of employment in the cities where they were based.

Tech is different. Google employs an order of magnitude less than that. And it is addressing a global market rather than a national or local one. The bits at the base of its business have no ties to SF. It's solving problems and offering services worldwide, and doesn't really have to think much about the state and fate of the local economy. Maybe that's just the weirdness of globalization.

>> "The big questions about San Francisco are: How does it manage to be so rich and so poor at the same time? What does it mean for a city to have one of the highest number of millionaires per capita among its inhabitants, and also a large and growing homeless population?"

Isn't this the same for any major city? It doesn't seem like an SF only problem.

Only in principle. San Francisco's occupation of the extreme ends of those scales is what makes it particularly interesting.

I don't think it's a San Francisco problem either.

I don't see it going away.

I have given up on debating it.

I would like to see certain cities/counties in the United States open up areas where people can camp legally. If there's crime problems, law enforcement will help; not harass though.

I know there's a lot of people who will fight it. I'm tired of hearing, "If you build it, they will come."

I'm just asking for a few acres that people can put up a tent, and have access to a few out houses. Maybe a hand washing station? Maybe a few shower heads? I know, enough with the maybes. This is where it gets crazy. I sometimes think they put too many maybes in the debate, so people will just throw up their hands, and do nothing.

For all practical purposes, it's illegial to live without money.

We all can't be expected to move to Alaska, and live off the land. Those days are gone.

I have know people who literally got ticked for sleeping in their vechicles. They were between rentals.

I have known two men who died of pneumonia while living on their boats. No--it can't proven. I just knew the guys, and they died too early. They lived on their boats because they were not economically viable anymore. They didn't have understanding families. They didn't have connections.

This is not the America, I was so proud, of growing up.

(I won't be back to debate. These are not just my wishes. I have a friend who's been homeless for years. The police have harassed him to--someone I don't completely know anymore. He just wants a place to put a tent, and access to a toilet.)

Live off the land in Alaska? It is one of the least suited states to agriculture, better like meat.

There are plenty of places you can camp legally (and freely). All along the Appalachian Trail, for a start.

Is SF simply the capital of homelessness, the same way New York is the theater capital and Washington is the government capital and LA is the movie capital?

He says SF has six times as many homeless as Bangkok, but maybe SF is just attracting homeless people from a wide radius because it's a nicer place to be homeless.

Year-round mild weather is a big factor in "homeless capital" status. There are plenty of other factors, though. Cool cities, cities where people in general want to live, have a lot more homeless folks; of the places I've been, homelessness was most common in the "great" cities: Austin, SF, Portland, San Diego, Dallas, NYC.

But they have other commonalities: They're expensive to live in, and owning or renting a home in those places is more expensive than a lot of surrounding cities. They have an existing community of homeless folks, and it's easier to live homeless if you're not alone.

I know a bunch of street kids and traveling kids, who choose homelessness (or, at least don't try very hard to not be homeless from day to day). There's a list of places they travel among, particularly down the west coast. Seattle, Portland, Eugene, trimming weed in northern California, SF, Venice Beach, Slab City. Sometimes, they go for specific opportunities. Sometimes, they go for easy access to drugs (Eugene is infamous for easy access to psychadelics, and the old home of Ken Kesey and the Pranksters). Sometimes they go because that's where they can jump on and off of trains or where they can hitch a ride to/from.

Very small towns are viewed as a really bad idea for homeless folks for the same reasons. It's hard to hitch a ride out when there's only a half dozen people leaving town each day. It's hard to find food, drugs, money, a safe place to sleep, when there aren't a lot of people walking around shopping and such, or other homeless folks to interact with. Police in small towns often feel empowered to be more aggressive with homeless populations, because they're often alone or in small groups, and the local populace is already suspicious of outsiders, so very little pressure to not treat homeless folks terribly. It's dangerous to be homeless in many small towns.

So, yeah. There's a lot of reasons for SF to have a big homeless population. Partly it's just that SF has a large population in general (for its size); dense cities have dense and visible homeless populations. It isn't "The Capital" for homeless folks, but it definitely has a larger than average homeless population for a city of its size.

> so very little pressure to not treat homeless folks terribly

I'd go even further - the locals put pressure on the police specifically to treat homeless folks terribly.

I live in a suburb of Portland. There are a lot of homeless people in the city, and the folks in the suburbs view the police as the only thing keeping their nice towns from being overrun by bums. As a result, the sheriff's platform is aggressive, the mayor's platform is aggressive, and the police chief who is appointed by the mayor is aggressive. Being the suburban Charlie Hales is a very bad idea if you want to stay in office.

The next town over is even more aggressive due to being even closer to Portland - bums who get picked up usually spend the police officer's entire shift handcuffed in the back of the squad car. The message is clear. Get the fuck out of our town, go back to Portland where you belong. Or Gresham.

> Austin, SF, Portland, San Diego, Dallas, NYC. > But they have other commonalities: They're expensive to live in, and owning or renting a home in those places is more expensive than a lot of surrounding cities

While Dallas is more expensive than the rural cities and towns not far away, the real estate market in it (median home price around $150k) is a night and day comparison with cities like SF and NYC.

That's true. There's a big difference between "expensive for Texas" and expensive on the west coast or in NYC. Still, a house or apartment in downtown Dallas (where the homeless folks are living) is nowhere near $150k.

I'm not sure what's causation, and what's merely coincidence, when it comes to "expensive places have more homeless people". It may just be that density correlates with both for a variety of reasons. If you don't have transportation and need to eat every day, being in a metropolitan area is pretty much mandatory. Those also happen to be the most expensive to live in.

I'm sure that's true of Houston, Indianapolis, Detroit, Tulsa, etc. However, I think there's some unique elements in SF beyond just being an expensive city.

Central Florida has a lot of homeless and near-homeless people. Some of that is mental illness, some people are just "outside dogs" and some of it is veterans.

When the bits become tied to the region somehow, like better transport through autonomous cars, maybe there will be more of an incentive for tech companies to invest like how Rockefeller pushed for mandatory public education to create the next generation of obedient, literate, factory workers and how Ford built an entire city around his manufacturing plants and created the idea of weekends and minimum wage in order to reduce turnovers. Nothing like that is happening or happening at scale in tech companies, but it's changing. Incentives are aligning.

Isn't that already happening indirectly through higher salaries leading higher property prices, and those leading to higher property taxes?

It seems the entire Bay Area is from someplace else, myself included. I landed at San Jose Airport from Illinois in 1989, just in time for the Loma Prieta earthquake.

In 2010, 31% of the residents of Alameda county, home of Berkeley, Oakland and Fremont, were born in a different country. Another 3rd, like me, were American born outside the State of California. I'd wager that less than 10% of the residents of Alameda County were born in Alameda County (the remaining from some other part of California).

I'm not sure how that stacks up to other parts of the US, but in Boise, for example, 7% of the population is foreign born [0].

[0]http://www.census.gov/quickfacts/table/PST045215/1608830

Why is it that one city can 'say' anything about America as a whole?

People (this author included) seem to forget the vastness of America's size and the depth of it's diversity. People and society in San Francisco are nothing like that of Birmingham Alabama or Fargo North Dakota.

Seems to me like stereotypes and generalizations being leveraged for views/clicks.

Yes, it is kind of difficult to accurately use SF as representative of the USA as a whole. However, I think there are some things in SF that could happen, as Don King used to say, only in America.

I completely agree. I recently moved to San Francisco from Iowa. The city itself is truly shocking. I find myself looking back on life in Iowa quite frequently, and I think of it very similarly to this Nabokov quote: a kind of private universe, a whitewashed cosmos within the blue greater one that blazed outside

The smells, the noise, the mental deterioration. The shear amount of people that just resign to the world in big cities---and San Francisco in particular---is more than an order of magnitude greater than anything you'll find east of the Rockies and west of Chicago.

The USA is a lot more homogeneous than it is diverse.

The comparisons the author makes are on a scale much larger than the diversity of the USA.

If you cannot see this I cannot work out how to tell you, except perhaps to suggest that you and live and work on the other side of the world.

if it's more homogeneous than diverse why pick a city which is one of the most diverse in the country as the example?

don't understand your last sentence. been in china/hk, there's a lot less diversity there, at least racially. are you using diverse in economic terms? gender? age? consumer habits? religion?

I'm saying that the diversity of the USA is not so large as to make irrelevant a comparison between a part of it and women somewhere else in the world.

This does not require the destination to be diverse, simply very different from the USA.

> The USA is a lot more homogeneous than it is diverse.

Have you travelled outside of the major cities, or even > 50 mi away from an international airport? I've been traveling the country for a living for the last 15 years and the diversity is staggering.

If the USA is so homogeneous, what nation on this planet would you consider more diverse?

China seems pretty regionally diverse. They have whole regions with completely different languages and large variations in cultures.

Given the enormous size of the U.S. I think a comparison to western Europe is not inadequate. I know it's comparing a single country to multiple, but given the size different that seems fair. The only other countries that seem like fair comparisons in terms of size would be Russia, China and India. I don't know either of them very well, but understand at least India to be very diverse.

I too lived overseas for several years and returned to the Bay Area recently to be astonished in the same ways.

Another surprise that the article does not reveal was that in speaking to long standing friends who remained in the Bay Area, I have commonly heard them say homeless people choose to be homeless. These are normal bay area professional class people who read the Atlantic and the NYT. But to hear repeatedly such notions form well education otherwise forward thing people is something I still can not remotely comprehend. And how they would develop such views is even more incomprehensible.

> I have commonly heard them say homeless people choose to be homeless.

I believe that's an old meme. I first experienced it among middle class Mexicans. I heard them say "the poor stay poor because they choose to" more times than I remember.

It boggles the mind.

One the other hand, I've run into people who live out of an old van or are otherwise either homeless or close to it. Some have substance abuse problems or mental illness ( or both ) but many are just sort of hoboes.

I'm somewhat of a musician, and that's the nominal career most of these guys (It's almost always guys ) have had.

It's complicated.

There are definitely people who choose to be homeless! This is not the same as saying that people in poverty want to remain that way, or the nasty ideologies that say the poor deserve to be poor.

For various reasons a small amount of the population does seek out the vagrant lifestyle. Check out https://squattheplanet.com

That is because they have a religious belief in the tenets of capitalism and cannot doubt the proposition that there's a correlation between work and compensation.

When you see that 'wage theft' (nonpayment of earned wages) is well in excess of all criminal theft combined, when you see a class of people compensated in millions or billions for doing nothing, when you try to get entrepreneurial and find it's basically a lottery for trying to attract the money of (a) money, or (b) an underclass of people who simply don't have money to spend on your goods or services, that's when you lose faith in not only the Western implementation of capitalism but even the concept itself.

Which is a shame as it's a darn fine pachinko machine for distributing resources without much human oversight. It's not a social system, but it's a handy mechanism in its place.

Just remember 'the poor choose to be poor' is essentially a religious tenet.

It's an instinctive and defensive response. The problem has to be explained away somehow and victim blaming is the simplest tactic for explaining away inconvenient and complicated truths.

I've caught myself imagining what it would be like to be homeless and how I'd go about things. I always think the first thing I'd try to do is sign up for some kind of social welfare program and work my way out of whatever rut I was in but this is clearly the wrong perspective. It becomes much harder to plan for things when you are socially ostracized and malnourished. Your IQ takes a huge hit and mental capacities start to slowly and consistently wither away. Then it becomes clear that it is definitely not a choice when you end up in such a situation. Making good choices that compound becomes exponentially harder. So the usual agency that regular people take for granted and the perspective they analyze the problem from simply does not exist for the homeless person and saying "it's a choice" in the words of a famous physicist is "not even wrong".

> But to hear repeatedly such notions form well education otherwise forward thing people is something I still can not remotely comprehend. And how they would develop such views is even more incomprehensible.

Do they say all homeless people choose to be homeless? Some people certainly do choose it. Hell, you come across posts on HN all the time of people who have real jobs or work at a startup and choose to live in their car (which counts as homeless for statistics).

I want to say that being homeless can be really bad for your mental health in its own right. I spent two months homeless and living around hostels a few years ago. The feeling of having nowhere to go home to starts to gnaw at you. You feel vulnerable and insecure, all the time. I got really paranoid, and had an emotional crisis before finding a permanent place.

Homelessness seems to be something anyone can get trapped in, like alcoholism. If you ended up long term homeless, nobody would think of employing you.

I'll second that. I was homeless about twenty years ago. It doesn't help you be an effective person in any sense.

Well, given you have money, where does choice end and mental illness begin?

I talked to a few army vets who are homeless and stayed near the building where I lived. They still had income but chose to not be a part of the system. They were cogent and fairly convincing.

I think the problem is largely cultural. People see it as an acceptable thing to do if you fall on hard times or if your philosophy changes.

This is in contrast with Japan where people wouldn't see it as an option and even Russia where income/expense ratios are even smaller.

Japan has plenty of homeless people and people who live outside the system, they are just much tidier than those in other countries, but extremely visible if you just look around a bit.

How do you explain this? Are Japanese homeless less mentally ill, or less anti-social?

Social pressure is still there. They can crash in the park, even setup tents, as long as they are discrete and clean about it...the police/society just have a contract with them of sorts to let them be if they aren't too bothersome. Their are definitely those who are mentally ill, anti social, or just down on their luck...Japan doesn't have a very strong welfare system, which is a bit surprising.

If you look at the official figures:

San Francisco - 7,539 homeless out of population of 837k[0]

Tokyo - 1500 - 5000 homeless out of 13.62 million [1]

It is orders of magnitude difference.

[0]http://abc7news.com/news/data-shows-sf-has-2nd-highest-homel... [1]http://blogs.wsj.com/japanrealtime/2014/10/17/homelessness-i...

Japanese statistics are hardly reliable, many people hide their homelessness quite well. Anyways, it isn't socially unacceptable to be homeless, after encountering a few homeless encampments in Osaka parks, it doesn't feel that unusual.

I know people who have been homeless and got off the street that say many homeless people want to be homeless. Perhaps in a high pressure, individualistic society people seeing themselves at the bottom of the chart express themselves by refusing to conform. A homeless ex-teacher I spoke with said she had no interest in leaving the streets. Perhaps the arrogance is in believing that the way of life we choose should be desired by all others in an individualistic society.

I highly doubt that the majority of homeless people in San Francisco (at least where I lived, Tenth and Market) fit into the category of non-conformist hippies that want to live outside of the System (neoliberal capitalism, really).

Many of them suffer from mental illnesses like schizophrenia, so their entire view of reality is distorted, like a broken prism that takes in light and reflects color all over the place. Addiction is also prevalent among the homeless, usually to help them cope with an underlying mental illness, for which they don't have the means nor the will to receive treatment for.

I don't think it is arrogant to want to help someone who might be a danger to themselves and/or others.

I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted.

My experience of San Francisco is that a lot of the homeless people I saw had addiction or other forms of mental illness. In this context, it clearly is not a 'choice' in the meaningful sense of the word. Having experience with an alcoholic who was incapable of escaping her situation alone, I think you make a very valid point.

>>It was as if there was a symmetry across the Pacific between the producers and the consumers, between the factory and the cash register.

Conceptually, transportation and warehousing are artifices of the distance between producers and consumers. So why not think of the end of the manufacturing line being the cash register?

Migrants are a global issue. Their numbers have increased drastically everywhere this decade, and will continue to do so at alarming rates. Even potentially epochal rates once the rising seas displace a billion or 2 people.

The most powerful societies are the ones who put high value on citizens conforming to certain values.

Homeless people are just individuals who can't conform to social norms, and thus they end up being excluded.

Let's be frank: most voters don't want their tax dollars being given to the poorest. Redistribution sounds like some kind of soviet communism, and people considers than everyone has the free will to become successful.

The most vivid image I have is a motivational speaker in front of an audience of homeless people.

I took issue with many of the points:

Firstly San Francisco isn't America though the same way that London isn't the England. They are aberrations and not representative of the majority of the country.

I took issue with some of his other points:

"Blindingly white teeth. The burrito that was so huge it felt as if it would break my wrist. Police officers covered in tattoos."

I don't even understand these. White teeth are not a salient characteristic of San Franciscans, neither is a police force covered in tattoos. I think the burrito he's referring to is Pancho Villas in the Mission and that is no way a normal portion even by America's generally larger portion sizes.

"I’m confounded how to explain to my two children why a wealthy society allows its most vulnerable citizens to languish on the streets."

He could be equally confounded on how to explain how a Buddhists society could refuse to help the Rohingyas drifting off the shore in the southern part of Thailand. Or why Thailand doesn't do more to keep its young girls from being stunted and exploited by the sex industry there. Paradox is not the exclusive domain of either S.F or the US.

Then this overwrought closing:

"I stood in the checkout line and watched milk-fed Americans unloading their carts onto the conveyor belt. My mind flashed back to the diminutive workers in a factory I visited in Tianjin, China, who for a few hundred dollars a month stitched leather boots and who giggled when they thought about the giant feet that would one day fill them."

Milk-fed? Why is that relevant? Dairy isn't as common in Asia because the majority of Asia is lactose-intolerant. Diminutive? What is that a reference to? People in Northern China have the same average height as do people in the US.

I think it is unfair to look at the homelessness of SF as an attribute or failing of the city or to extrapolate out as if it were synecdocheic of the country.

Homelessness in the whole state gravitates to SF because of the climate: sure, it's cold in SF, but it's never freezing. Sf has (one of if not) the mildest winters of any city in North America; the record cold is 28F. And the record high is 103F. Some of the homelessness moves around the state, but a lot settles in SF because of the climate.

Additionally, there are instances of homeless people being bussed to SF (like Nevada did).

SF tries very hard to deal with homelessness, but it's dealing with the homelessness of a much larger area and population than the population of SF can afford to help. The US itself needs to step up (like refunding a national mental health institution, to remedy one of the most braindead things Reagan ever did).

Uh, the title is ambiguous, is it about America the two continents? North America the continent? Or about the U.S.A., the nameless, official-language-less country?

I know of many South Americans who would prefer the ambiguity to be solved so they can have their American identity not hijacked by the biggest and most powerful country on the same longitude.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States

"The United States of America (USA), commonly referred to as the United States (U.S.) or America..."

Yes, I know, but still it is a problem, is it not? I feel that in the USA many people are very careful to not hurt the feelings of some minorities inside the country, which is done with good faith even if sometime it becomes very difficult to navigate through a normal conversation with soeone you do not know too much. But then, why not put the same effort in avoiding to hurt the feelings of all non US Americans? It would actually be easier.

Not sure if you have seen Milton Freidman's talks on Poverty and Equality, but I would highly recommend them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKc6esIi0_U

To summarize:

How free are the poor and what is the government's role?

[1] Governments don't have responsibility, people have responsibility.

[2] The free-market is the most effective system towards ending poverty.

[3] Bad government failures result in welfare schemes has been machine to produce poor people.

Much of the homelessness problem in SF (and also NYC, LA, Boston, DC, ....) can be solved by not spending more money, but by simply reversing "economic rents" sought be landlords to create zoning density restrictions. These zoning density restrictions create a politically induced scarcity of housing and other real estate which results in a regressive tax transferring wealth and income from renters to landlords.

"Economic rents" are a type of "market failure" of an efficient market. Much of fixing the economy can be stimulated by identifying market failures that are often created by special interest groups (in this case landlords like Donald Trump). Instead of focusing on wealth creation, they use political connections to create artificial scarcity with the resulting higher housing and office costs to benefit them but hurt the overall economy.

Interestingly, there was a prominent NYTimes article which demonstrated how Trump received $885 million in tax abatements, etc. but there have never been articles by the NYTimes about the fact that Trump and other wealthy landlords are realizing far more than they would if the "economic rents" were fixed.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/18/nyregion/donald-trump-tax-...

Renters spend more money on rent and less money on goods and services.

Reversing the politically induced housing scarcity by eliminating the "rent seeking" laws would in addition to freeing up money that renters spend making landlords wealthier on goods and services stimulating the economy while at the same time would stimulate a housing boom.

See Harvard Economist Edward Glaeser's article about building affordable housing in NYC (which of course applies to SF and other cities as well).

Glaeser: Build Big, Bill http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/build-big-bill-article-1....

In general "market failures" such as this one are a "brake" on economic growth and costs no money to fix, simply take away bad laws that serve the few, well connected, over the many. Before trying stimulus, raising minimum wage, etc. simply reverse laws that create "market failure" benefiting special interests such as landlords and let the economy to its thing when the markets are made more efficient again.

You should watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6ZPg6kOBkc

> It almost seems that we have created needs so that we can cater to them.

I think this statement sums up the type of consumerism we have today, across the developed world.

All people really need is food and some basic shelter.

The way economics began is the farmers create the food, and non-agricultural workers trade non-essential goods and services with the farmers. Over time, the percentage of people working in agriculture declined. In less developed places like India, 50% of workers are still in agriculture.

All I can say is that San Francisco might as well be another planet. And I'm glad I'm not ever going to live there.

In terms of homeless San Fran is the Mecca. It's shocking and sad to experience!

heroin is a huge problem in san francisco among the homeless. apparently it's cheaper than it's ever been and it seems to be attracting a lot of very bad people.

i love it here but i've never seen it this bad.

What San Francisco Says about America is logical equivalent of "What Osama says about muslim people" or what "Donald Trump says about White people." It is stereotyping and we should avoid it.

isn't there a duplicate posting filter in HN? I posted the same article (atleast an hour or two before the current one) earlier (1). this happened few times now!

or am I missing something obvious? thought the filter is supposed to prevent dupe posts?! @dang ? @sctb ?

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12521824

What does America say about San Francisco?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com