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Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

As anathema as it may seem to some people I think the real answer has to involve dispersing the homeless population in SF.

The SF chronicle did a series on the efforts to house people in shelters and one major problems was that a person who wanted to get clean from opioids is just surrounded by temptation and is just one dose of Fentanyl away from death.

Thus these people are more dangerous to each other than they are to anyone else. Not only is there the paradox of warehousing the poor in the most expensive place in America but also that of warehousing them in the most dangerous place in America insofar as fentanyl is concerned.

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> I think the real answer has to involve dispersing the homeless population in SF.

Does it? As the article points out, the homeless population is actually down since 2019. Homelessness is bad, and a hard problem to solve[1], but it's not The Reason Everything Is Wrong, because if it was (1) everything would have been wrong before, when we agree everything was great and (2) other places would be worse, and we all agree they aren't.

Really this article is just like all the others on this subject. It's completely innumerate. It takes crisis and calamity as a prior and writes about it, while having to nod repeatedly that the actual measurements don't hold up the hypothesis.

It's just shocking to me the extent to which this meme has permeated the tech community. Urban homelessness is just not a new phenomenon, it's not a changed phenomenon, and it's not even a new phenomenon to San Francisco!

[1] Largely because it's unsolvable inherently. We've always had a homeless population in our cities going back to the invention of the city. Some people won't/can't/don't-wanna live within the rules of typical society and view street living as acceptable vs. the alternatives. So to that population, attempts to assist them just have the marginal effect of making homelessness more desirable. And... that's just not something that public policy[2] is going to fix.

[2] Well, tolerable public policy. Some of our ancestors deployed asylums and other kinds of para-prisons to control this. But even that works only poorly.

Re: 1]

I just visited several cities in Europe. I did not see homeless people just strewn all over the place like one does in SF, in countries which are both equivalent and far poorer than the U.S., and in countries which statistically have significantly lower and higher homeless per capita than the U.S.

It’s almost like if the govt provides basic services that allow even the poorest then even the homeless will choose to live with some dignity.

FWIW: if you walked around San Francisco in the 1990's, you'd see fewer people "strewn all over the place" too. But they were still there! We used to use law enforcement to push them into places you couldn't see. That's not "living with dignity", it's just abuse.

I won't speak to what you saw in Europe except to say that Europe too has large homeless populations in most cities. This is a universal thing.

But really your point is the point in the linked article. We don't want a solution to the homeless problem. We just don't want to see the homeless. And our community has treated that disconnect by meme-ing the existence of a problem that isn't real.

I've lived in SF for about half a century. I've also read up on the history of SF.

What you're saying about "Urban homelessness is ... not even a new phenomenon to San Francisco!" is very much true, at least since the Gold Rush. I believe our Emperor Norton III was, technically, by modern standards, homeless, although the city was his palace.

What changed was the influx of more-or-less normal people. San Francisco has served as a kind of "drain" for the crazies of the rest of the nation since 1849 right up until the late 90's and the "Dot Com boom". Then e.g. Twitter was tricked into opening their office in the middle of skid row and techie culture and "the street" got to rub shoulders daily and it was not so great, eh?

I've come to believe that OP has got the right idea: Civic Center and the Tenderloin should be condemned and razed, just like Kowloon. The issue is what to do with the people living there now?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Walled_City

(BTW there have been cities w/o homelessness but they are rare. "We've always had a homeless population in our cities going back to the invention of the city." this is another meme that needs to die, eh?)

> Civic Center and the Tenderloin should be condemned and razed

maybe the loin, but how does razing the Civic Center help? that area by itself is one of the nicest areas you can think of: a wide-open park-like place to walk around and enjoy the city. What would you even replace it with? and how would it help the problem of those people still around, who would shift to soma or elsewhere nearby.

I haven't been down to the Civic Center in ages, I just checked it out on the Google st. view and it looks like they already cleared it out.

The problem is that the entire US has zero idea what to do with homeless and mentally ill people, other than "dispersing" them or locking them up. As a result, some (particulary Republican) regions give them one way bus tickets to other (particularly Democrat) regions or deport them outright in sometimes very public stunts - out of sight, out of mind and if it deters others all the better, seems to be the general consensus. Others go where the survival chances are the best on their own, which means somewhere sunny with low rain and snow.

The problem is, the very few regions where both conditions match end up overrun - even though no one can seriously expect these regions to solve the homeless problem of an entire continent-spanning country with 330-340M people.

We've got zero idea how to repair broken brains.

People with severe mental illness are hard to live with. When I was growing up there was a homeless man who spent all day at the public library that people called "The Professor" who was said to be unable to live indoors because he'd wake up screaming every night. We took in a friend who I think had schizoaffective disorder in and she threatened my wife with a knife after she'd lived at our place for 18 months. Schizophrenics are more likely to be the victims of crime than the perpetrators but every so often they do something that is "batshit crazy"

https://www.mlive.com/news/muskegon/2017/11/look_back_thanks...

"Housing first" is an improvement over the status quo but people with severe problems are going to make that kind of environment hard to run. "Dispersal" may very well make it possible because that kind of behavior randomly scattered won't break people's ability to cope with it down, whereas concentrating it in one place certainly does. I can't see how anybody who has any moral sensibility at all could stand to go to SF, never mind live there. Just as the rationalists try to break down our moral sensitivities by spamming us with trolley problems, exposure to that filters for a population of people who just don't care.

BTW, the one way bus ticket was tried in SF long ago, just like they've tried the other obvious non-solutions, but they came to the conclusion that the offer of bus tickets away just made it more attractive to go there.

Dispersal of any kind doesn't work unless you confine the affected to a specific region which raises serious ethical questions on its own, not to mention it makes life significantly harder for them.

And for a lot of people, giving them a roof and a room of their own is enough to help them out of the worst. Yes, you'll still have a sizable population of hardened homeless, but hey - if you manage to get the 80% low hanging fruit off the street, it still reduces the amount of homeless by a significant degree. And don't forget an awful lot of homeless are people actually having fulltime jobs but unable to afford a place on their own!

There are certainly homeless people with serious mental illnesses, but from my experience with talking to homeless people on the street this is not most homeless people. They just fell by the wayside for one reason or the other, and once you're in that position it can be hard to get out – hard to plan for the future if you're worried about getting enough food for today (and/or enough drugs or alcohol) and the situation just seems hopeless.

Looking at SF specifically, the causes seem to be "job loss (26%), alcohol/drug use (18%), eviction (13%), argument/asked to leave by friend/family (12%), mental health issues (8%), and divorce/separation (5%)".

One thing that seemed to have worked in London a few years ago is to give people a bank account with £3,000 with no strings or obligations attached.[1] While the pilot was small (13 people) and time period relatively short (1 year), the results were promising. I seem to recall it's been tried elsewhere too, but I can't find the report on that right now.

Turns out that just giving people a chance and autonomy goes a long way. Unfortunately "free money for homeless people" is politically difficult, even though the alternative is far more expensive.

[1]: https://www.jrf.org.uk/report/providing-personalised-support...

If there were a few studies, and it's overwhelmingly successful, why do you think it's difficult to find the results? SF spends something like 90k per homeless person, conducting an experiment with 3k per person sounds like a drop in a bucket. I bet, showing great results on a group of 100 people, would get more investments into this experiment.

> If there were a few studies, and it's overwhelmingly successful, why do you think it's difficult to find the results?

The internet is big and I just didn't look for it very long.

> I bet, showing great results on a group of 100 people, would get more investments into this experiment.

You'd think so, but policy is often penny wise and pound foolish. I think the biggest obstacle is that "free money" just doesn't fit in our culture very well (or maybe it just doesn't fit human nature).

> The internet is big and I just didn't look for it very long.

You'd think so, but for the majority of homeless programs I was interested in, I couldn't find any data. For example, I was trying to find efficacy of tiny villages, what are their goals, how they track graduation rate. What's even their success criteria? Nothing, despite my decent google-fu.

> You'd think so, but policy is often penny wise and pound foolish. I think the biggest obstacle is that "free money" just doesn't fit in our culture very well (or maybe it just doesn't fit human nature).

For policies, sure. What about non-profits? Why wouldn't someone who believes in the efficacy of such methodology organize something like that? Changing someone's life for the better with only 3k sounds like a no-brainer to me. I would personally contribute financially and direct other people to contribute.

“but from my experience with talking to homeless people on the street“ - you are not going to get a good sense of someone’s mental state by taking to them once. Crazy people can present themselves as completely normal for quite long periods of time. It’s one of the many blockers for family members trying to get them help.

Sure, but the idea that the overwhelming majority of people are homeless purely due to mental illness related issues just doesn't bear out. It's the same as "most homeless people are addicted to something", which also just isn't true.

> We've got zero idea how to repair broken brains.

I think this is inaccurate. We have many ideas, medications and therapies.

What most homeless populations lack is regular access. Free clinics barely scratch the surface. Bouncing people between the street, hostels, pop up kitchens and offering no stability just makes everything worse.

Dispersal only helps problem areas. Unless you're taking people off the street and homing them with support elsewhere, you're not helping them.

> As a result, some (particulary Republican) regions give them one way bus tickets to other (particularly Democrat) regions

Seattle, Portland, Denver, San Francisco and many other "blue" cities all have "Homeward Bound" one-way bus ticket programs to incentivize homeless people to leave their city. In fact, the City of San Francisco invented the entire concept 15 years ago. This is a primarily liberal strategy to deal with the overwhelming collapse of their public welfare systems.

These programs are always privately run, with the idea that some homeless people are only homeless because they are in the wrong city and they actually have housing available to them somewhere else. But the program has been abused by many who just want a free bus ticket, and don’t have family willing to take them in at the other end.

Private programs in conservative states do this as well. Prisons in Texas will give prisoners on release an open bus ticket if they have no one picking them up. That’s how many people without options wind up in fairer west coast cities in the first place. If you look at “popular greyhound bus destinations”, west coast cities are at the top of that for reasons. Homeless don’t even need a ticket given to them, they can also scrounge the cash they need for one in a pinch.

San Francisco's Homeward Bound program is run by the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing. Obviously not privately run.

Ok, wow, 183 people in 2022. Consider me corrected. At least they aren’t giving them open bus tickets.

What's wrong with giving them open bus tickets that allow them to decide where they want to go?

It is not wrong in a moral sense: people will go where they have the best chance of survival. The problem is that they all choose to go to the same places (which provide the best odds) and then…it is simply another tragedy of the commons.

Going somewhere they won’t freeze to death overnight is definitely one reason to pick SF / LA / San Diego over many Midwest and East Coast destinations.

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