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Comment by no_butterscotch | Hacker News Reader

The book's author was recently on Joe Rogan where they discussed the book and many of the policies in SF.

They discussed: de-criminalization, the "Portugal approach", progressive policies, policing, etc. Also the use of language such as "homeless camps" which envisages a camp of homeless people just trying to live. Versus the reality which when social workers and mayors (mayor of Denver) went into these camps undercover only found that everyone was a drug abuser and were being enabled to self-destruct.

Highly recommended, the author is a resident of "San Fransicko".

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Mayor of Denver never went to these camps. You may be talking about the Mayor of Aurora (city next to Denver) who just decided one day to pretend to be homeless. He didn’t work with any organization or ask about the problem. He just went to the most visible camps, met the most visible people and essentially just increased the stigma. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/auroras-mayor-went-unde...

>He didn’t work with any organization or ask about the problem.

If you want to find out what a situation is like, why would asking someone about it be more informative than actually going there and witnessing it yourself? The self proclaimed "experts" are the ones responsible for the policies that have turned San Fransisco into what it is today.

Maybe it’s not a simple problem, in engineering we’re used to cause and effect in a system. With human scale problems it’s more like observing a cat than a machine responding to inputs. It seems to me you could fill a page of bullet points with the many causes of homelessness in SF.

If that really is true, then it makes sense to have someone familiar Guide you through various aspects of the problem. Especially the non-obvious parts.

> "It seems to me you could fill a page of bullet points with the many causes of homelessness in SF.

That's a far better outcome than mindlessly brushing everything under the rug with baseless knee-jerk reactions of pinning the blame on moral weaknesses and failings of individuals.

It is a machine responding to inputs but it involves feedback to the level we don’t usually experience with computers. This introduces non-linearity which is difficult for a human mind to process in terms of cause and effect. They are still there, just more difficult to see.

Consider Jay Forrester in Brooklin in the 70s. He correctly argued (and was apparently almost beat up by saying that), that simply setting up more housing projects increased the problem. The simplified argument went: The word spreads that there’s housing available, people move to the area, housing gets full but the inertia of the word-spread keeps going and people keep coming in. This leads to creation of more projects (as there are still people on the streets) perpetuating the cycle. Meanwhile, the businesses and residents start moving away from the area because of the projects and many homeless, dropping real estate prices and compounding the problem with another feedback loop. Complex stuff. Whatever the solution if SF (that I like very much) is, it better be looking out for that sort of policy resistance.

The Homeless Industrial Complex is as responsible for maintaining the conditions in SF as Chesa and his hands-off enforcement policies are.

A lot of strife in our society today can be attributed to non-profits being incentivized to keep their raison d'être continuing in perpetuity.

It's easy to blame the system instead of making people take personal responsibility for their actions.

It's also easy to blame the system when the system has failed miserably. There is plenty of blame to go around.

When “the system” refuses to prosecute dealers of fentanyl because “they’re victims themselves” [1], you’re damn right I’m going to blame the system.

[1] https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-inquiry/the-trial-o...

I spent many years involved in politics at the city level in Santa Cruz. The Homeless Industrial Complex is a thing. There isn’t a desire to make things better as that will lead to lost jobs.

Their insincerity becomes very obvious when you start pushing for accountability - like status reports / reports on progress and effectiveness - when entities get public funds. Another fun one is asking for a reduction in overlap when you have 2, 3, and 4 entities doing the same thing and all of them want public funds.

> Their insincerity becomes very obvious when you start pushing for accountability - like status reports / reports on progress and effectiveness - when entities get public funds.

I'm not sure what point you tried to make. I mean, this discussion is about identifying the root causes of a problem in order to actually fix it, but your comment focuses exclusively in organizations which, at worse, only work to mitigate it's impact while the problem is perpetuated.

Let's put it this way: homeless shelters do not fabricate homeless people out of thin air, nor do they spend their budget hiring extras or crisis actors to pretend there are homeless people in the city. At most, you're putting up a strawman to attack organizations that exist to take the edge off this problem.

What exactly do you believe would happen if suddenly all homeless shelters disappeared from the face of the earth? Do you believe homelessness would go away with that too?

If you are taking public money and come back the following year wanting more, there should be a plan and data showing why you deserve money. Specifically the effectiveness of what you are trying to do. Most of them want money without any accountability.

Most times when you apply for a grant, there is a proposal with a plan and expected outcome.

> If you are taking public money and come back the following year wanting more, there should be a plan and data showing why you deserve money. Specifically the effectiveness of what you are trying to do.

Do you understand that you are talking about funding homeless shelters?

The job of a homeless shelter is to provide homeless people with temporary shelter instead of having them living on the streets. It is not in their job description or responsibilities or power to mitigate or eliminate the socio-economic problems that lead people to become homeless. That requires local government to put in place policies that addresses the root causes, such as ensuring housing is affordable, or those struggling with mental problems can receive help.

There is more than just "homeless shelters" when it comes to working with the homeless. Also, it is usually the job of counties (due to having the office of County Health) to spearhead handling the issues around homelessness. However, there are cities like Santa Cruz (the county seat, but the city government) that take it upon themselves to try and handle things without coordination at the county level.

The expected outcome could be "allow/convince homeless people to sleep in the shelter rather than on the streets".

Not every non-profit needs to solve every problem, but most of them should work to solve al least one of them; having that problem clearly specified helps in distinguishing efficient use of public money from inefficient use.

>The job of a homeless shelter is to provide homeless people with temporary shelter instead of having them living on the streets.

The job is more than just warehousing people. Its making sure that shelters are clean, safe, sanitary and efficiently operated. Here in New York homeless shelters are filthy, understaffed, overcrowded and filled with violent predators, leaving many homeless to feel safer sleeping on a sidewalk. Like San Fransisco, the problem certainly isn't from lack of funding - its from corruption and mismanagement.

A reporter looking for a story went into my highschool while classes were in session and talked to some kids.

Naturally these kids were skipping class (since classes were in session), and of course they told him everybody does it because in their social circle that was true.

Needless to say the students that he could not have interviewed (since they were actually attending class) would have given him a different perspective

So you’re saying his own experiences should be dismissed because he didn’t gather information through “official” channels?

Clearly it wasn't the "right" opinion, so it must be dismissed!

> So you’re saying his own experiences should be dismissed because he didn’t gather information through “official” channels?

That's a rather disingenuous take.

Isn't it plausible that taking anecdotal evidence at face value doesn't actually add insight to not only the root causes but also the prevalence of some of it's different categories?

I mean, spending a week living in a tent isn't exactly a way to gather proper statistics on the issue, not to mention the likelihood that the observer might be biased to begin with.

No it's not a disingenuous take. I read the article. You have a politician who actually goes and talks to a group of homeless - which is more than 99% would ever do - then come back with his observations.

Sure, you can say "that doesn't represent all homeless", but I don't think the mayor was saying that. Here is a direct quote:

"We can clearly do more to help people and move them on to stable housing," Coffman said. "What isn’t working is spending more money on it without changing behaviors. People are never going to [move] forward with their lives. You don’t want to be in a situation with public policy where you’re enabling really bad, destructive behavior."

What is so terrible about those conclusions?

And the gatekeeping by homeless advocates is really stark in that article. Their attitude is literally "You want to know about homelessness, you talk to me, don't go out there talking to these people on your own".

How in the hell is that anything close to a reasonable take?

> No it's not a disingenuous take. I read the article. You have a politician who actually goes and talks to a group of homeless (...)

Sorry, it actually is.

You have a guy who decided to live in a tent for a week as a publicity stunt, and that is supposed to make him an insightful expert on the nature and causes of the problem, in total contrast with the observations and experience of every single person that ever did any serious work on homelessness?

The "goes and talks to a group of homeless" take sounds an awful lot like an attempt to go on the confirmation bias path, intended to fabricate a justification to continue to not address the root causes, than an honest and objective approach to understand issues.

I’ll bite, but I think you ought to know that I cannot so far understand you’re reasoning.

Who, then, is qualified to speak on these issues? Is only aggregate data through official channels, and not individual experience, relevant to the discussion?

It seems to me that homelessness is a desired state by the far-left progressives. I don't get the sense from talking to people here in Berkeley/Oakland that they want to eradicate homelessness. If you offer a few discussion points about possible solutions, you get sneered at and shot down. The arguments are weak and don't hold up, so they are varnished with emotional appeal (be kind to homeless) and other soft-tactics of altruism. I disagree with this whole premise. You can still be kind and try to solve homelessness and clean up our streets. There is nothing wrong with that and infact the only right thing to do. Like every city in the world. No one should be afraid of calling homelessness a problem that we want to get rid of. Methods of doing that can be debated but resist the appeal for this so called wokeness that is endemic in places like Universities.

Desired state seems like a stretch, but the cynical part of me does wonder sometimes whether having visible homelessness around is seen as inevitable proof that the capitalist system is irredeemable and must be replaced.

A more likely explanation is the way that paternalistic administration of care is anathema to the current way of thinking. That is to say that one should never presuppose how to solve someone else’s problems, but rather one should listen to their lived experiences and give them what they say they need to solve their own problems. This is a good principle to follow in most situations, but like all prescriptive outlooks it fails when exposed to certain edge cases. In this case, the edge case is people who lack the executive function to know how to better their situation, or even to take advantage of situations that will when they’re presented.

> Desired state seems like a stretch, but the cynical part of me does wonder sometimes whether having visible homelessness around is seen as inevitable proof that the capitalist system is irredeemable and must be replaced.

I think these are two separate variables and Capitalism when properly regulated works extremely well (it has moved millions from poverty in China and did the same in the US - wages went up by 350% from 1930-1970).

Agreed, but I’ve noticed that over the past few years there’s been a shift away from talking about implementing some socialist policies into capitalism and towards the irredeemably of the capitalist system. At least that’s been my experience among my liberal circle. I think it’s the influence of the growing far left movement, who are now the cool kids on the left. The word “liberal” is a pejorative to them; synonyms with someone who defends the status quo, which is deeply uncool.

The social problem of homelessness is thus an issue of the intentions of a specific political group? And their manners? They sneered, did they? Not nice, but that seems like a distraction. Political groups and intentions are apart from the business of dealing with the problem. What you are dismissing as "wokeness" might just be familiarity as this problem has festered for a while now.

There is some evidence that this just clean up the streets approach is part of the reason so many ended up here after having been cleared out of wherever else they started. In Berkeley/Oakland cleaning up the streets just shifted people around at great cost so now the focus is on cleanup and portable toilets for basic sanitation.

The far-left position on homelessness is simply "let's build enough houses by whatever means necessary" (depending on where one is on the authoritarian/libertarian scale, the list of acceptable means varies).

The difference is in the language. "Clean up our streets" puts the emphasis on the homeless as the problem for everybody else, as opposed to homelessness being a problem for the homeless.

> Who, then, is qualified to speak on these issues?

For starters, can we agree that a publicity stunt like spending a week in a tent as a live action roleplay is no way to get any insight on a deep-rooted social and economic problem? Specially given the clear preexisting bias and political motivation to ignore the problem, avoid accountability, and continue doing absolutely nothing?

> Is only aggregate data through official channels, and not individual experience, relevant to the discussion?

I am really perplexed by the insistence of this take. I mean, aren't these "official channels" actually people paid by him to work for him full time on this issue?

How terribly disfuncional and incompetent is a whole local government, led by this mayor, supposed to be if he feels the need to waste a week's worth of his personal time to do something himself when no one in his own organization, not a single person, is able to reliably gather any info or insight onto the problem?

I mean, in other issues we see the executives of local governments appointing people to actually fix the problem with clear goals in mind, and hold them accountable for the outcome.

But no. I this case we're only seeing a former senator turned mayor somehow arriving at the conclusion that homeless people are all drug addicts and/or suffering from mental health problems. From that starting point, the solution is, surprisingly, to go with the same political tropes of using the police to brush the problem under the rug by banning all the undesidables to get them out of sight.

https://www.denverpost.com/2021/05/18/aurora-homelessness-ca...

So you’re saying any attempt by a politician to go and talk to homeless people in person - not to get to the root of the cause, but just to listen to them and observe - should be avoided as it’s just a publicity stunt?

And what do you mean “ignore the problem”? I directly quoted his conclusion which included “we should do more to house them”. Can you point to a conclusion of his where he actively sought to ignore the problem?

I’m struggling to wrap my head around your rationale. If the situation were different - let’s say a lack of childcare options - would you also tell politicians not to talk directly to parents looking for childcare? Only talk to advocacy organizations because such a “stunt” doesn’t get to the “deep seated social issues at hand”?

And what do you mean “waste a week”? Since when is having leaders directly engage people a problem? What angle are you coming at this from? I’m trying to understand your motivations when you’re actively rejecting efforts to find solutions.

I believe he is trying to say that 1) drawing conclusions from the one-time observations of a single individual is unlikely to be accurately representative of the actual situation, and is at great risk of all sorts of selection, recall, and confirmation biases. 2) in that context, ignoring all the other managerial responsibilities of a mayoral position so you can engage in a relatively non-scientific attempt at information gathering when you have people you can consult who are experts on the topic and have spent years studying and collecting data, is quite rightly a poor use of time.

All of those biases are also applicable to experts. We hope they are less biased, but they can never be bias free and there are certainly cases where experts have been egregiously biased, often is very subtle ways, that have led policy grievously astray. Like when the USDA pushed the country away from fats and toward processed sugar

I think you two might be talking past each other here. There's nothing wrong with a politician (i.e. an elected leader) getting first hand experience with an issue. Many leaders do this all the time and get depressingly little press for it--and others do it purely for a PR win unmindful of the cynicism they're generating. I think this mayor was sincere in his intent, and also I think it's a good habit to assume positive intent (to be super corporate about it).

What I think people are taking issue with is the Mayor's seeming dismissal of some homeless as irredeemable, and his failure to acknowledge that homelessness is more than an issue of mental illness, substance abuse, and personal responsibility. That plays into the common stereotype of unhomed people, and as many pointed out, that makes the problem worse because it justifies doing little to solve the problem.

So while I believe the Mayor's intent was good, I also think he was misguided and a little arrogant. I'd be pretty peeved if my non-technical boss did a coding boot camp and came back all "huh I did that camp and I was right, your job isn't hard at all!"

It's also worth saying you don't need to go urban camping for a week to figure out how to solve homelessness. It's probably more effective to just go to endhomelessness.org.

Can you quote the exact statement by the mayor that you feel is unfair and/or unhelpful?

Sure but, I feel like you're gonna try and deeply litigate it so, I'm skeptical it'll be productive:

"What isn’t working is spending more money on it without changing behaviors. People are never going to [move] forward with their lives. You don’t want to be in a situation with public policy where you’re enabling really bad, destructive behavior."

It might sound kind of anodyne, but it's basically what leaders say when they're playing the personal responsibility card.

Personal responsibility is good though right? Not that a lack is the cause or having more is a cure for every homeless person, but if those who didn’t currently take person responsibility changed and did - would that be a bad thing?

I guess it depends on exactly how you interpret his statement, but the core idea that money alone isn’t going to fix the problem seems reasonable.

I mean, if someone is out on the street due to addiction, they won’t recover without personal responsibility. If someone is on the street due to untreated mental illness, then yeah, personal responsibility likely won’t help.

I though his statement was relatively even handed.

Sure, but it's so insufficient that to even bring it up is a red flag. It's like if we were all getting together to try and solve climate change and someone said "I'm super religious, I spent the last week in nature speaking with God, and it's clear to me that while there are other things we can and should do, this will never work without everyone individually praying every day." We would collectively be like "huh, convenient that the thing you're already super invested in seems to be critical to our efforts here, despite being completely unbacked by evidence...."

It's simply not the case that people will start making better decisions to the point that homelessness diminishes to background noise. It's a non-solution. We have to question the perspective of a leader who keeps pushing clear non-solutions.

The end of the road of the personal responsibility argument is "'good' people shouldn't waste their resources on irresponsible people". But homelessness isn't the result of an outbreak of personal irresponsibility (is anything?), so typically when leaders start talking about it, something else is up.

> Sure, but it's so insufficient that to even bring it up is a red flag.

This is the crux of it. Your position disagrees with mine, that's fine, but please don't assume that bringing up an issue based on personal experience with the problem is a "red flag." That's disingenuous and unproductive.

You then go on to strawman a bizarre tale of a religious person being overly evangelical about a deeply individual experience. Homelessness is a problem of society, and people. Yes we cannot address the individual at every point in a conversation, but that shouldn't mean we can't talk about the problems affecting individuals.

Personal experiences are valid and important, but they're almost never representative. That's why we run studies and experiments: our anecdotal experiences don't give us enough data and often lead to generalization fallacies. They also typically come along with confirmation bias, a pitfall which the Mayor here likely fell into.

For the rest of your post, I'm not saying we can't talk about problems affecting individuals? I think a lot of good can be done on the individual level: drug treatment, counseling, medical care, etc. Not sure where you're coming up with any of this.

There are policies that increase homelessness. But even if you do everything right, you won't be able to solve the problem completely in liberal societies. In some more authoritarian countries, homeless people are simply arrested, taken back to their hometowns, put in institutions or just driven out of the cities. That's one way to deal with it.

It's absolutely right to put emphasis on self agency, there's actually a very concerning trend in society that people expect the government to solve all problems and ideally even pay them for simply existing (see the antiwork movement). Should this sort of thinking gain popular support the problem is going to get much bigger than it already is.

I think your post needs a lot more research. Most Americans want to work. Most Americans want to have savings, own a home and a car, be in a relationship and have a family, etc.

Homelessness isn't the result of an outbreak of personal irresponsibility, nor is substance abuse [1] [2]. They're systemic failures. When opium overtook China in the early 19th century, it wasn't because suddenly everyone decided they'd throw caution to the wind.

It's nonsensical and leads to intense political problems (see: "Welfare Queens"). We put ordinary people into extraordinarily bad situations, and then we blame them for not being extraordinary enough to dig out.

[1]: https://stjosephinstitute.com/understanding-the-relationship...

[2]: https://borgenproject.org/addiction-poverty-connected/

Misunderstanding, that part of the comment wasn't directed at those who're already poor or homeless. I completely agree with what you say.

You characterize it as a publicity stunt which is a dismissive way to put it, and then go on to say since in your opinion it was a publicity stunt none of what he says really matters. Not sure I agree with that.

I think you are simplifying things. Try to live in a tent in a homeless camp for a week and I promise you will have more insight into all the dynamics there than any outside observer will ever have.

> For starters, can we agree that a publicity stunt like spending a week in a tent as a live action roleplay is no way to get any insight on a deep-rooted social and economic problem? Specially given the clear preexisting bias and political motivation to ignore the problem, avoid accountability, and continue doing absolutely nothing?

No, we cannot agree on this. I don't understand how this is walking the walk, and not just talking the talk. If the mayor went on to make grandoise claims about homelessness that were unreasonable, I would start to agree, but I don't see that happening here.

> But no. I this case we're only seeing a former senator turned mayor somehow arriving at the conclusion that homeless people are all drug addicts and/or suffering from mental health problems.

This is strawmanning the mayor's point. He is claiming that we are not addressing the root cause of homelessness. He's not saying "homeless people are all drug addicts." Those are your words.

I'll try to defend the argument of "first hand anecdotal data vs statistics". At least i'll provide some arguments.

Imagine going to any place of work for a week. Let's say a trading center. How much will you learn from first hand but short-term experience? People tend to say you need 10,000 hours of practice to be good at a given skill. In a week you are barely starting to get familiar and it's already over. You haven't experienced any depth or any breadth of the domain.

Another example would be: how much of a country can you learn by visiting 1 city? At some point to fit the huge problem space into 1 mind you need to generalize and use statistics. In addition to practical experience so you're not lost in abstract concepts.

Personally i think that both first hand experience and stats/theoretical knowledge are necessary to be effective at a domain. So I'm glad to see a politician getting personally involved.

To the defense of the other side, I would say first-hand experience tend to be more engaging than theory/stats, especially to politicians (usually non STEM profiles who got where they are through developing EQ, not critical thinking). This results in politicians only engaging with that type of approach, and typically having a limited/personal understanding of the problems they are in charge of.

I wish for instance that a politician in charge of a topic would have to go through a mandatory 1 week intense course from domain experts to broaden their perspective and understanding. Instead it tends to be all emotion, all urgency, and leaning the way most people are pulling, whatever the rational merits of that position.

> And the gatekeeping by homeless advocates is really stark in that article.

That's because if you actually solved (or even reduced) homelessness, those people might be out of a job.

Would it matter to be out of their job if homelessness would be solved? At least they wouldn't be homeless as a result of job loss.

A week of lived experience is qualia, information which can never be captured through statistics. It is definitely useful.

I have my own experiences interacting with the homeless in seattle. They're a bunch of overlapping groups.

Around 1/4 are short term homeless, just folks at the margins of society who fell off the page, and now cannot make ends meet. Alot of these folks do find their way off the streets of their own, but this is the group that we need to most urgently help.

Around 1/2 are long term chronic homeless, often they were just short term homeless folks, but now have fallen into the trap of the homelessness. They want out, but cant figure out how to navigate their way there.

Around 1/4 are willingly homeless, as in they do not want help.

And of those who are homeless, they seem to have the same common problems:

Around 1/3rd do have some measure of substance abuse issues (more prevalent in long term chronic homeless).

Around 1/3rd have moderate issues with excessive alcohol consumption (more prevalent in long term chronic homeless).

Another 1/2 have untreated mental health issues of some sort (seen in all groups).

The most common reasons the interventions for homelessness seem to fail:

1. Requires giving up too much personal freedom/dignity - can't come and go as you please/its treated as a pseudo-probation, have to go listen to a preacher, cant bring your pet (usually a dog).

2. too many prerequisites/hurdles to get help (must be sober/clean, must have kids/not have kids.

3. shelters feel less safe than being on the street (your stuff gets stolen, you'll get gay bashed).

4. requires you to give up too much of your SSI or other benefits to get it.

5. long waiting periods for help or not enough bed slots.

It's why I believe in a housing-first approach, housing without hurdles or prerequisites, its much easier to provide services to a sedentary population than it is a mobile one with no fixed address.

I think the case that every homeless person is a drug addict is wildly overstated, but I think the solution that SF and Seattle is doing wildly ineffective in actually solving homelessness, if anything, it makes the problem worse, while also reducing quality of life for folks who do have homes and live there.

I have been reading some of your back comments prompted by your comment about organization policy on my white house fire story and I think you should write blog posts

it's clear you think really deeply about things I think you have a lot of interesting stuff to contribute. And you've had an interesting intersection of experiences and combine that with your good analysis and insights often seemingly to me not obvious, and your easy to read writing style, I think you'd make a really good sort of writer that people would love to read about all kinds of tricky issues so I hope you take up blog posting and share here!

Hrm - I'd never considered long form blogging, I'm not sure what I'd write about.

Any suggestions?

How about a new topic every week? From areas you're interested in or at least journeys along your way. Stories from, ideas about or advice on how to be a good manager; what makes good mothers; how to think clearly; how to plan for the future; your pov on how to fix politics/tech/industry/manufacturing/foreign relations/media/cities/the future; how to be a good human; how to bring up kids right; how to run a business; how to drive safely; how to manage your time and all the things your want to do; how to connect with people while doing everything else; how to travel well; how to prep for the end of the world.

How to, or how you, up to you :p;) xx

Basically if you were to leave something behind on this world to benefit future generations... What would you want to contribute? What do you think you could help other people with, save them some pain, bring them some relief or even joy? Best of luck with it all :)

So what should we do? Locking everyone up seems like it would be even more expensive with even worse long-term results.

Social services, with punishment for not participating.

I listened to part of the podcast and if I remember correctly his proposed solution is to offer treatment and housing, but it you don’t follow that road: prison.

No idea if that’s a good idea, but living in SF I can definitely say that whatever the city, or even the US as a country, has been doing until now has been useless.

Disclaimer: I used to live in Chicago, and while not as bad as sf, the homeless situation was the worst I had seen in my life at that time. So that sorts of tells me that this might be a national issue, not just an sf issue although it is definitely much more noticable in SF.

I do some work with the homeless in chicago, and the people you see living on the street are, by and large, not drug addicts.

In Chicago, drug addicts are transient-homeless. They're in and out of shelters as they get evicted or kicked out of a place, but they find somewhere new (indoors) to live. Some may be periodic homeless.

The chronic homeless in Chicago are usually physically and mentally disabled, and while they may drink, it's not substance abuse that keeps them from holding down a job and getting shelter.

One of the recent encampments we visited had an interesting story. It sits on what was the future site of a factory, and the group had all gathered there to work as labor for the construction. However, the builders found contaminated soil, and were working on a mitigation plan when covid hit, and these guys (and a few women) have been living there ever since. They recently called the police because someone who moved in to camp had stolen propane tanks from the neighborhood grills.

They're not all like that but it's a much different scene than a warm weather city's homeless camps. Edit: One thing that makes this plain is the lack of sharps in the chicago homeless camps. Most of the time you won't see orange caps!

True! Not the same homeless population. Chicago homeless begs aggressively, the one in SF are just zombies.

> Chicago homeless begs aggressively, the one in SF are just zombies.

Have had many outdoor dining experiences in SF that I would consider aggressive begging...

I feel like it’s rare to be asked for money in SF. While in chicago everyday on your path you will hear the noise of agressive coin shaking.

Build facilities to rehabilitate drug addicts and facilities to treat and house the mentally ill. Allowing those who cannot take care of the themselves to roam the streets and engage in behavior that is self-destructive and destructive to society is not compassionate or logical - its a system that has proven to be a failure.

Why do we need to do anything? Whats the problem with people being homeless and keeping to them selves?

So being homeless isnt the problem, mudering isnt exclusive to homeless people. Drugs and prostitution aren't problems. Cities not having adequate public serivces like bathrooms is a problem.

So you'll host a camp in your backyard then?

I think you should take a step back from this topic if it's making your responses that emotional or elaborate more. Nothing you said is a rational response. That was 100% flame bait.

Seriously, if homeless camps aren't a problem then why aren't you hosting one?

Because no one should be expected to solve a societal problem personally.

Drugs create big livability problems for the neighborhood residents who aren’t using them. For example, despite the presence of needle exchanges throughout my city, it’s not uncommon to find a used needle on the ground. Or, people who are high on meth do all sorts of disruptive and disturbing things, like having screaming matches with themselves in the middle of the street. So yeah, drugs are, in fact, a problem.

The problems around drugs exist because theyre illegal.If we were more accepting, legalized use, and had real support systems in place for people struggling these problems would go away.

We have littering rules, we as a society don't find it important. Why is styrofoam or cans OK. If you thinks drugs are a problem because they are a source of litter you should also think take out and portable food and other things people litter with are a problem?

There's a huge difference between styrofoam litter and used needles in terms of health hazard.

I live in Portland. Last year the voters in Oregon voted to decriminalize all drugs when in user level quantities. No one bats an eye when someone shoots up, smokes meth, etc on the streets. There are needle exchanges available. I’d say that’s fairly accepting, and the legal risk has been removed for the user. And yet the problem has gotten much, much worse. Why? Because people who are out of their heads on meth or nodded out on the street can have no meaningful interaction with the rest of society without disrupting it. Meth, at least in its current form, makes people confused, paranoid, and violent. No support system short of full on institutionalization can cope with that, and there is a mountain of case law that makes involuntary commitment extraordinarily difficult in this country.

They don’t have proper sanitation or garbage services. There are basically no public restrooms in SF. The vast majority are drug abusers that need money to pay for their addictions. They don’t have jobs, but they still get that money. How they get that money is the problem.

We already have laws the prohibit people doing illegal things. Crime isn't exclusive to homelessness.

And i seem to remember public bathrooms near the bart stations. they were like temporary green plastic things. but sure the city should have more in general. those kinds of things help everybody

It's good that people investigate homelessness and go one level deeper.

But why do they stop at drug addiction?

Or worse, decide that drug addiction is the underlying root cause that now needs to be treated with rehab, detox, or what have you.

Drug addiction is not the cause of poverty. Poverty is the cause of drug addiction.

The stories of the people who get into drugs recreationally, then descend into addiction, and destroy their lives are the exception vs those that start using to escape deeply challenging lives with poverty, physical abuse, and mental health struggles.

The dramatically rising rates of homelessness and addiction across US/Canada are the side effects of the toxicity of our society, the erosion of social safety nets, and runaway wealth inequality, capitalism, and housing affordability crises.

The Portugal model works when the rest of your society is cohesive enough to support those at the fringes. I don't know if it actually can succeed in nations founded on rugged individualism and who instill the obsession with liberty and freedom in every person from birth. This not only leads to society unwilling to help those that need it, it also makes those that need that help unwilling to accept it.

Poverty is the cause of drug addiction.

That explains the rampant drug abuse in the wealthy?

Nobody said poverty is the only cause of drug addiction period.

The point was that with homeless people, the poverty and homelessness tends to be what causes the drug addiction.

That’s actually the opposite from what I’ve heard. Drug addiction results in poverty. Plenty of examples of people who had problems with drugs or alcohol, lost jobs and became homeless.

> Poverty is the cause of drug addiction.

Can you elaborate?

On it's face this seems really counter intuitive to me.

Drugs cost money. Not having money doesn't somehow force you to use drugs.

Where the opposite direction seems obvious: The cost of maintaining an addiction and the reduction in reliability from drug use can result in being unable to work, increasing your poverty.

Not an american, so don't take it personally. I understand in many big cities, most if not all are migrants from other places. If a person has left his home town to say SF, they live there, work there but if they become homeless there, why do they stick around?

Is the stigma of "living with your mom/parents" that people are willing to live on a park bench and not go to their homes and live with their parents for free? Do the parents have problem accepting back "children who have flown the nest"?

Genuinely curious. In India, when we have " migrants" living somewhere, locally or abroad even. If something happens or job loss or whatever, people just return home and survive. india on the whole does have some homeless problem but its not an epidemic level stuff. last year when the lockdown hit, the entire nation basically walked to their home towns and villages because they knew no work meant no rent and no place to sleep so everyone just packed their bags and returned homes. same for a lot of expat population, they all just returned home. i wonder if that happens there in the US or not?

Michael Shellenberger does not live in San Francisco, or at least he did not when he came in dead last in the 2016 governor election.

Apparently he lived in San Francisco in the past, and now lives in Berkeley. He came in 9th out of 27 in the 2018 gubernatorial election.

wow youre right, he got 30,000 votes

he had pretty far to go to beat Newsom's 2,340,000 votes

Shellenberger at least beat the guy who's entire campaign was appearing in ads dual wielding pistols ( Peter Liu )

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