Edit: The tech workers that I knew very much so cared about not allowing high density housing to keep their house prices inflated.
That's not really problem. The people needing toilets aren't particularly worried about using one. The root of the problem is sending a message that it won't be enforced, so people literally have no reason not to do it.
Amazingly enough, I think last year or the year before, SF announced they wouldn't enforce "quality of life" crimes, which include outside urination and defecation. Naturally this will be noticed by those doing it, and eventually it allows people outside to gather in large groups because they don't have to worry about how to relieve themselves.
Finding a toilet isn't impossible, but it does require holding yourself until you do find one. For people with no home, this is extra work, but we should all agree is extra work they should be forced to do, instead of treating them like animals with no agency of their own, and pretending somehow the problem doesn't include their decisions and the authorities' incentives.
I think if someone has a 'constant and grinding' exposure to homelessness, like they work near 5th and Market, it can actually have an aggravating affect emotionally.
Expensive housing however, is probably not a root cause of homelessness, because there is absolutely cheap housing all over California and the West coast.
We can argue about 'cost' but I don't think anyone would say that homeless people have some kind of 'right' to live in SF.
If we could feasibly provide more effective housing and services but it happened to be in Modesto or Sacramento than that would be perfectly reasonable.
First - SF was not 'tech' until the mid 2000's.
Some people - yes. But no HQs.
The Silicon Vally was where it was at.
Also - up until the 1990's at least, the Valley was just a burb, mostly affordable, not outrageous except in some little spots.
In the 2000's it started to get weird and 2010+ is when it got 'bad bad' and SF became a true hub.
In the 1990's regular folk could buy homes, Engineers could buy normal homes on normal terms. Large swaths of SF ware garbage.
It doesn't have trouble meeting basic needs despite of the wealth, but because of it.
Henry George observed this fact (that as cities get wealthier, poverty also increases) way back in the late 1800s, and in SF, funnily enough. This is what his book Progress and Poverty [0] covers, and the title is a reference to this phenomenon.
The TL;DR is that as locations get better and progress, much of this wealth gets captured by landowners, because they have an ownership over a monopoly; the supply of land is fixed. This leads to higher land prices and rents, which makes it harder for those on the margins, leading to more poverty. [1]
This problem is worse in SF (and CA as a whole), because Prop 13 restricts how much property tax can be collected, which is the primary way the community as a whole can reclaim the wealth extracted by landowners.
Blaming tech workers for the problems of Silicon Valley seems a little misplaced, given that most longterm homeowners in the Bay Area not tech workers, and they (longterm homeowners) are the ones who benefit the most from Prop 13, and ever increasing housing costs.
The problem in the Bay Area are the landed gentry.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progress_and_Poverty
[1]: A good snippet from the Wikipedia article:
> George saw how technological and social advances (including education and public services) increased the value of land (natural resources, urban locations, etc.) and, thus, the amount of wealth that can be demanded by the owners of land from those who need the use of land. In other words: the better the public services, the higher the rent is (as more people value that land). The tendency of speculators to increase the price of land faster than wealth can be produced to pay has the result of lowering the amount of wealth left over for labor to claim in wages, and finally leads to the collapse of enterprises at the margin, with a ripple effect that becomes a serious business depression entailing widespread unemployment, foreclosures, etc.
Also, the game Monopoly was invented to demonstrate his philosophy, and it’s why it’s not fun with the default rules. It’s supposed to make you feel bad.
Link to the original game: