Comment by throw2016 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throw2016 | Hacker News Reader

There is a homeless epidemic. Anyone who lives in the US can see it. But these issues are being closely tracked and discussed widely in political problem solving contexts, and HN is more of an observer reacting to the most extreme examples that make news usually with very little empathy focused mainly on the consequences to others, so the discussions are weirdly 'disconnected' and stuck in 'first principles'.

Look at every single homeless discussion on HN over the last 5 years, its homeless people are bums, weirdoes who enjoy living in poverty without homes or people who are 'choosing this lifestyle' based on anecdotal evidence mostly focused on how they negatively impact the commentators life, untill the next article. Is having this same discussion over and over again helpful to anyone?

The software community used to be associated with freedom, liberty and not being jerks, more connected to the human experience and with empathy. Now they build surveillance systems, are increasingly authoritarian in their outlook and are snarky about others suffering. There may be a serious problem of homelessness but it seems this absence of empathy is a much more serious problem for any society leaving it unequal to any social challenge.

It’s easy to preach empathy from a leafy suburb. I certainly used to. When you are actually inhaling piss, stepping over feces, and weaving through tents every time you go outside, the situation is a bit different. Much of HN lives in urban SF and moves around the city without a glass and steel cage. In that light, homelessness moves down Maslow’s hierarchy from a moral reasoning problem to a visceral disgust/fear, a threat to the safety and dignity of home.

It’s one thing to be “against” mass incarceration and the criminalization of the poor, another to be okay with zero police response to your own assault/burglary. It’s one thing to be pro legalization, another to be okay with street dealers on your block. One thing to believe homeless people have a right to go where they please, another to stay committed when they decide to camp at your doorstep.

Maybe I am the only fake/uncommitted liberal but I get the sense that this kind of right-shifting after a few years in SF is not uncommon.

Indeed, I feel the Bay Area has made me more hard-hearted and conservative when it comes to the homeless over years. I'm happy to donate to local charities that try to give them the help they need, but it's best for me to keep my distance from street folks day-to-day, as they produce in me a deep instinctive threat response with their smell and unpredictable behavior.

> I get the sense that this kind of right-shifting after a few years in SF is not uncommon.

I'll believe it when it shows up in voting behavior. Nothing is going to improve until you change who you elect. Nothing at all.

FYI; someone camps out on my doorstep they're gone with one call; no debate. Your "homeless" problem is not a nation wide phenomena. This is you; the government you chose, the policies you voted for. No one else is at fault for this. It's you. Look around at what you made.

You're not the only one. The daily grind of dealing with this shit on the streets and homeless/muggers on muni is giving me a noticeable rightward shift from my typically progressive politics. And I used to BE homeless!

My homeless friends in Berkeley pine about the good old days before the nuts, tweakers, dope fiends, and dirtbags started to multiply and swarm the community. If HOMELESS people are complaining about the homeless people in your city, you have a big problem.

Anecdotally, a crazy homeless lady was stabbing random people with scissors in my neighborhood last year, and I just checked up on what happened with her. Charges reduced to misdemeanors and set loose back on the streets. Meanwhile uppity rich liberals complain about police treatment of the homeless, and launch anonymous opposition to shelters and new housing development when they come to their neighborhoods. That basically sums up everything going wrong here from my perspective.

There's a homeless NIMBYISM joke around here somewhere.

Its easy to label those who advocate for more empathy as 'leafy liberals' or hypocrites. But this this just a ruse to justify the lack of empathy for those who make this argument.

The immediate shift of the focus from those who are homeless and suffering to the consequences just confirms their priorities. They don't care about anyone else, they just feel entitled to a life without homeless people and that's what bugs them about homelessness. But no one promised you that. 100 years ago poverty and suffering was widespread but this got solved, not by complaining about their existance but with better policies and concern. Thats why modernity is associated by a more humane caring society compared to the past.

Dehumanizing others carries a great cost, you are just dehumanizing yourself and a society that has no value or concern for human beings is not a civilization. Homelessness cannot force anyone from left to right, these people were nowhere near left or liberal to start with. These are not labels for your personal living convenience, they stand for values and ideas.

Hats off to anyone who truly empathizes and engages with deepest suffering of the world each time they go to buy groceries. I really mean it. I thought I would do that, I said things like you’re saying here, and when push came to shove I couldn’t. If the price of living in a city is to be some kind of monk, it’s not for me.

What I won’t respect is people who have simply chosen a different way of excluding the homeless from their community - car dependence - being sanctimonious about people in higher density environment wanting the same things.

Empathy is the first step to action. if you were born 100 years ago this would be a fact of life, child labour, poverty, racism and homelessness was rampant. And economic downturns like the great depression brought these right back. How do you imagine these problems were solved?

Talking about liberals, hypocrisy and inconvenience is not going to solve anything and is not designed to. How is talking about car dependence going to solve the problem of thousands of homeless people in cities? This just highlights how without empathy the only problem people can see is how their own life is impacted.

But widespread homelessness is simply an early warning system telling you there is something broken in your society. Those without empathy will keep complaining about how their lives have been ruined by the existance of homeless people like HN has been doing for the last 5 years without any engagement with history, economics, policies or inequality and those with empathy will solve this like they have done multiple times before.

My local camp is great: no drug use, good structures, waste disposal and a portapotty provided by the city. And because there are always people around, we have less crime otherwise.

The problem comes when there aren't better options for people: neighborhoods break down and rather than get to know the people of their community, the haves come to see their neighbors, many of whom were here before the haves moved in and jacked up rents, as somehow less than human. When someone's very existence is seen as a threat, yeah, you'll end up opposing the effective policy solutions and instead look to ineffective punitive solutions that further destroy the basic bonds of society.

You can always move to Walnut Creak. San Francisco has always been thus (or worse), and the expectation that it's going to transform into your shiny polished city of glass and steel is a remarkably clear description of the entitlement behind gentrification. This was their city: you are the interloper here.

So the rough sleepers I see are the people whose city it was - people with jobs and households, relationships and support networks. They got renewal offers they couldn’t sign, and had nowhere to go / no money to relocate when their leases expired.

Jesus. For like $3,000 I can buy someone a plane ticket to a more reasonable market and a few weeks of temporary accommodation there. That’s all they would need to have permanent normal lives again, and our government is somehow not doing this? Who even cares, if this is real I’ll do it myself starting tomorrow.

Or could it be that our social services agencies are not actually stupid, and the homeless population has extensive special needs that are incompatible with the modern world for deep-seated reasons unlikely to change this century?

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