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Comment by wolco | Hacker News Reader

Tents? I didn't realize it has gotten that bad. Do they try to remove them?

The city has a limited ability to remove them. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Martin v Boise, which held that it was illegal for the city (of Boise, Idaho) to remove homeless people from public spaces if the city has insufficient homeless shelters. This is a binding precedent in San Francisco, which is also in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. The city of Boise, Idaho appealed to the Supreme Court, prodded by several cities including Los Angeles, but the Supreme Court declined to see the case.

San Francisco is still held to Martin vs. Boise. They need to either build sufficient homeless shelters for all of the homeless in SF, (lol) or allow them to sleep where they please in public places.

I am not a lawyer, but I got an A in Political Science 101 and I read the news. This is not legal advice, but my personal advice is that cities in California oughta build more homeless shelters.

cities in California oughta build more homeless shelters.

Oh, please, god, no.

California desperately needs more actual housing. That's a huge issue in California.

More homeless shelters just drags out the problem. It doesn't solve it.

The people who scream at me in a schizophrenic drug addled haze aren’t going to go away because cheap 1br housing pops up in an affordable neighborhood. They do need help though. They need homeless institutions.

I spent nearly six years homeless and I have had a college class from SFSU on Homelessness and Public Policy.

There are mentally ill people in housing. They don't generally follow you down the street and scream at you when they have housing.

Being homeless is enormously stressful. It is itself crazy-making.

Lack of sufficient housing supply is a root cause of high housing prices and of homelessness. California has been under building for decades.

Counterpoint: SROs are the most common location of overdoses in the city of San Francisco. Mentally ill people in housing probably don’t bother you, but that doesn’t mean they are safe and healthy.

When you find the planet that has solved all personal problems, let me know.

In the meantime, I will keep harping on best practices for this planet as I best understand them.

Residential housing costs $750k to build per unit in California, and most of those costs are unique to the process of developing infill in NIMBY cities with high costs of labor. We are two orders of magnitudes away from enough funding to solve homelessness with residential housing in San Francisco for the existing population, notwithstanding induced demand. Treatment outside of city centers for people dealing with mental health and substance abuse issues could be built far more affordably elsewhere by saving on the land and labor costs. They’d also be cheaper to operate.

More generally, your comments come across and smug and sanctimonious — everyone has an interest in solving the problem, and falling back to “homelessness is a housing problem” amounts to tautology which is not particularly insightful.

Plus if you throw all the poor people in 1 building you're not solving anything.

It's a great way to help them share their diseases and fun stuff like that. I went to soup kitchens about six weeks and then began doing everything I could to stay away from that crap.

I'm sad that this is the first thing we're thinking about, removing them. What does it mean, displacing them so that it's somebody else's problem? Putting them in jail? Killing them?

Killing them?

Given how much lower the average lifespan is for homeless individuals, we are more or less killing them.

I came from tribal origin with nomadic goat and sheep herders recent ancestors. Life is not easy there but sense of community is strong and lifespans are at par with cities with best healthcare despite not having good healthcare facilities there. Not sure how it compares to people who are homless in cities.

Being from the tribal origin I've been conned by city dwellers a lot before I wised up. In tribe we trust everyone, there is no need to be shrewed and sense of community and living together in harmony is valued above everything else.

Not sure how it compares to people who are homless in cities.

UK data from 2011:

Homeless die 30 years younger than average

The new research found that the average homeless person has a life expectancy of 47, compared to 77 for the rest of the population: a startling difference of 30 years. The life expectancy for women was even lower, at just 43 years.

https://www.nhs.uk/news/lifestyle-and-exercise/homeless-die-...

I think this is US data from 2017:

The average life span of a homeless person was shorter by about 17.5 years than that recorded for the general population.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5739436/

In tribe we trust everyone

Yeah, my dad was part Cherokee. I can be sort of stupid at times about thinking the best of people and I've been burned by that.

But I also think my native heritage helped me survive living in a tent for nearly 6 years and helped me profoundly in other ways.

That sense of community is very life giving and it tends to be lacking in most modern American places.

These people ostensibly have no other place to live. Why should the state or anyone else destroy what little housing they have?

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