Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

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I left San Francisco 20 years ago, but, speaking to the situation in Chicagoland: our municipality funds long-term housing, support, and bridge services for local unhoused, and my understand is that the biggest problem we have with problematic unhoused people --- the people shooting up out in the open, or using vestibules as toilets, or accosting passers-by --- is getting them to take up those services.

It is the case that we have difficulty placing public toilets because of the risks their abuse will pose to unsuspecting users. I don't think it does anybody any good to pretend that these aren't real problems, or that we can moralize past them.

I think, at least in most major metros, we're past the point of it being a live issue whether to fund services to transition homeless people off the streets. Residents will fund those services simply because the alternatives are so disruptive. With that in mind, I feel like any response to this problem that centers on "well we should fund more services" is basically stalling.

I've lived in Chicago since 2001 and when I got here it was pretty rare to see homeless people (and I lived in Uptown for a while back when Broadway was still borderline skid row).

First big wave of it (when you started to see tents appear under the highways and such) was 2008. Second big wave where that seemed to metastasize were Rahm Emmanuel's budget cuts. In particular, he shut down all the mental health clinics, and you ended up with a lot of people getting forced off their meds.

EDIT: Another thing, when I moved here there were still quite a few housing projects. I am not going to pretend they weren't rough. I walked through the ABLA homes most days and watched them get torn down. I had a kid hit me with a rock while biking through Cabrini. But there was a place where people could be off the streets back then. Now where do you go? What's waitlist for section 8 up to?

I'm in Oak Park, for what it's worth. I went to high school next to the ABLA homes. I don't think redeveloping the projects is why we have homeless people; those buildings weren't full of mentally ill people, they were full of families. We replaced the CHA homes with Section 8 vouchers, and that has, I think, improved things.

Well I don't think you're a renter then. I am so glad I bought a house in 2016 because everyone I know who rents has been on a wild ride.

Section 8 has long wait lists. It seems kinda unbelievable to argue that destruction of thousands of units of low income housing didn't cause people to not have housing.

I don't doubt that many people are mentally ill. Before Rahm's cuts, we had a taxpayer-ran system of caring for the mentally ill.

I'm just saying: the ABLA homes weren't a relief valve for people who could not safely take care of themselves. It wasn't where all the people in tents on the streets came from. The CHA projects were overrun with gangs, for sure, but the median CHA tenant was a taxpaying full-time employee. I guess what I'm snagging on here is the assumption that there's an equivalence to draw between an ABLA tenant and a fentanyl addict.

(I've been a renter and a homeowner in Chicago; I grew up here).

Your premise seems to be that homelessness is caused by mental illness. I think homelessness is very often caused by not being able to afford homes. Chicago has a lot less low-income housing now than it did when I got here. There's some basic arithmetic you can do.

To the extent that your premise is true (and I believe that, for many individuals, it is) that also speaks to our city pulling up the ladder on people. I was living in Logan Square when Rahm shut the mental health clinics down. There was one on Milwaukee. People protested for months. People on the streets obviously being in a very bad place and not getting help became a lot more noticeable after.

I'm a zoning reform person. I believe that increasing the supply of housing will reduce homelessness. But I have evidence to support my belief that it won't resolve the problem of people shooting up in the CTA vestibules, because I know many of those people have been offered secure housing and refused it.

I’m just not convinced homeless drug addicts are on the street because they’re shy of a house payment. The ones I’ve know have wound up there because they became drug addicts, and that addiction drove them into the abyss, exploiting family and friends and every relationship until they’re under a bridge.

We’ve spent billions and billions on the “homes are the solution to homelessness” crowd. And the problem has only grown worse.

> We’ve spent billions and billions on the “homes are the solution to homelessness” crowd. And the problem has only grown worse.

The agenda for during my adult life has been cutting services for needy (public housing, mental health, etc). Since we seem to agree that homelessness is getting worse isn't it also rational to agree that cutting these services is, at the very least, not helping.

I don't think it's true that funding for services for the homeless have been consistently cut in Chicagoland (or San Francisco) during your adult lifetime. In fact, I'm not even sure that would be true for public housing --- again, a different problem than the one we're talking about --- I think if you look you might find that we spend more on housing assistance now, in constant dollars, than we did in 1980.

My spouse works in homeless outreach in Texas. Essentially doing the exact thing mentioned in the article that the park rangers are doing - Helping people jump the bureaucratic hurdles of no ID, no birth certificate, etc that preclude the client from obtaining housing or employment. 80% of the clients are grateful and work towards housing. The other 20% refuse any help whatsoever.

This is the nuanced perspective that’s sorely needed in our society. Some people refuse help, and it becomes a talking point and a reason to never offer help— but that simply shouldn’t be the case.

Totally agree, and I'm not trying to minimise the harm that this does to our spaces.

Decades ago there were institutions that these people were placed in. We decided not to do that any more, for good reasons and bad, and I think maybe we should revisit that decision.

Sounds like a parallel issue. Homes won't help with addiction. If Nixon didn't utterly ruin the term, a "war on drugs" would be applicable here. Or rather a "war on addiction".

Hard to make compulsory though. Nixon didn't do it, but that era also gave asylums a horrible reputation.

Isn’t it so stupid how cities don’t just install port a potties everywhere? Same issues here where they aren’t installed because people will make them gross. Well the alternative to a gross port a pottie is to have people poop and pee in the road which I’d say is a lot worse. Like none of our train stations in LA have bathrooms because they would get “gross” so instead people piss in the elevator on the floor because that is better apparently than having a dirty bathroom. Not building bathrooms doesn’t stop biology from happening.

Port-a-potties require frequent emptying and other kinds of maintenance. Other kinds of dry toilets are under development which would address this issue in a variety of ways (e.g. composting toilets) and be applicable to all sorts of interesting scenarios (e.g. remote places in the developing world, where proper disposal of human excreta is a severe public health concern) but overall they're not yet ready for prime time.

The elevator at the train station also requires frequent power washing because people pee in it. The maintenance of the porta pottie is already being paid by society especially by our metro in added custodial needs. Why not just implement it then? Contain the piss and poop?

Shouldn't a train station have restrooms somewhere already?

It took my muni months of meetings to come to the conclusion we could not safely set up public toilets. No, cities can't simply install port a potties everywhere.

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