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Comment by joenot443 | Hacker News Reader

There are so many countries on earth with a far, far more apathetic voting base than San Francisco which face a fraction of the homeless issues. It’s not fair to tell regular citizens that the homeless people harassing them on their walk to work are only there because they haven’t protested hard enough, that’s just baloney.

Something’s very, very wrong in SF and it’s absolutely okay for tax paying law abiding citizens to be making noise about it.

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People in the neighborhoods with fewer problems (let’s face it, there are many very quiet expensive neighborhoods in the Bay Area) have very “progressive” views on the homelessnesses. They don’t experience its effects frequently, so don’t think it’s a big problem. They vote for policies that grow social services for the homeless, even though those policies don’t work. But the idea they have is that these services just need more money. And then more money again, and again.

Progressives live in cities more than anywhere else, San Francisco being a center of progressivism. The critics live elsewhere, and love to tell people in cities what they really should want and do (more guns, no progressive reforms, etc. etc.). In NY, the anti-progressive vote was in the suburbs; in the city they do well. In Philadelphia, the progressive DA did best in African-American neighborhoods.

I am including SF proper neighborhoods in that. If you live in Twin Peaks it’s much easier to be “progressive” and ignore homelessness.

You may misunderstand me. I’m not saying tax payers are at fault for not protesting hard enough. What I am saying is that Direct Action is required to force the hands of people who have the authority make the direly needed changes.

I’m not interested in quibbling about how the homeless population grew so large unless it is explicitly for the purposes of calculating reparations and identifying perpetrators.

Make all the noise you want, complaining about people peeing is ineffective. I see trust fund brats pissing in public regularly and have never seen this volume of outrage directed at this population of people. More public bathrooms is the solution to that particular problem.

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