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Comment by pstuart | Hacker News Reader

Many of their points are valid and should be addressed, but the criticism is rather narrow.

Case in point: homelessness. Yes, it's a huge problem, but San Francisco is a dumping ground for the homeless, e.g., other states buy one-way bus tickets for their indigents/miscreants to shift the burden. It's a national issue that needs to be addressed on a national level.

Then there was this pandemic thingy, and the WFH shift has decimated the office worker economy.

So they blame it all on "crime, vagrancy, and drugs" without any note of the the external pressure helping to create those problems.

That said, the pols should always have their feet to the fire on their ability to do their damn jobs and be responsible.

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A lot of states give prisoners open bus tickets on release if they have no one coming to pick them up. They are not technically sending them to LA, SF, Portland, or Seattle, but where else are they going to go? Living outside in LA is much better than doing the same in Houston.

But this is another point of the problem: anyone who solves the problem well is bound to just attract more of the problem. People are not immobile, and will move to where they have the best chance of surviving, so if Seattle is rumored to be handing out tiny houses to the unhoused, it will simply attract more of the problem. Whatever local resources are thrown at the problem will not make a noticeable dent in the problem locally (though the national problem will get some small improvement relative to its size).

My second paragraph explicitly said it: it's a national issue and can only be solved at that level.

It would be collectively cheaper and far more humane to boot.

This is just an excuse for why the party with decades of majority rule has failed to solve problems at the city and state levels. Why would the federal government be able to solve a problem that California has failed to address? California has a larger economy than many nations!

The correct solution for individuals is to move out of these mismanaged high density areas.

SF does not solve the homeless problem, but there is good money to be made in the welfare-industrial complex pretending to help.

Salt Lake City, that bastion of left-liberalism (/s) does a much better job, specially at preventing vulnerable people from becoming homeless in the first place.

Ultimately SF’s problems are well understood and the solutions as well, but there is no political will to confront the entrenched interests that led to this and an apathetic electorate that does not demand accountability is responsible.

Salt Lake City is actually pretty liberal, not just by Utah standards.

And the “SLC solved homelessness” was a last decade story that has already unraveled due to sustained and increased funding not being applied (again national problem, local solutions can’t do much).

The solutions to homelessness are well understood? What are they?

1) remove NIMBYs’ ability to limit construction with procedural chicanery and keep housing prices high

2) Build subsidized housing. SF likes to complain about the end of the state redevelopment agencies but did you know that with just one year’s worth of the $7B a year windfall from the much-despised Tech (difference between the 2022 and 2008 budgets), SF could buy or build a $1M condo for every single of the 7,000 homeless men, women and children in the city? Instead at least half of that was captured by civil self-servants in the city bureaucracy in the form of salaries and benefits.

3) Restore involuntary committal of some mentally ill unable to care for themselves, that was abolished by the well-meaning but clueless Lanterman-Petris-Short Act in 1967

4) means-test rent-control (half of SF’s residential units), which creates haves and have-nots and raises prices to astronomic levels for new entrants

5) remove land-use restrictions like single-family zoning that covers half of the city

6) force drug addicts into treatment, using coercive measures if necessary

House the people. It's that simple.

The hard part is finding affordable ways to do so. This is compounded by the fact that a large portion of the homeless suffer from mental health problems (my mother was in that boat).

On the mental health front, we need to collectively find a way to institutionalize the mentally ill in a manner that is fair and humane. That should include indigent drug addicts who are unable to care for themselves.

> House the people. It's that simple.

It's not, though. Seattle ran into loads of problems with housing-first policies where the houses would get trashed and people with substance abuse problems would continue camping out as groups.

Yes, the LPS Act of 1967 that left the mentally I’ll to their own devices was well-meaning but clearly written by people who no clue about the realities of mental illness.

But at the same time, groups who are responsible to resolve the homeless issue quote that only 8% of people are out of state based on HIRD research. So what is it?

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