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Comment by roc | Hacker News Reader

I don't even think a stronger safety net would have helped in this case. It sounds like she simply wasn't interested in changing anything and that just doesn't work when you have to move and have to change your lifestyle (e.g. stop hoarding).

This is all-too-familiar to me, after having helped a couple older relatives through serious late-life changes like this.

Further, the general lack of safety net doesn't really apply when you're talking about a person with $1300/mo in disability/SSI, 'free' medical and some savings (/settlement payments). She could live, certainly not lavishly, but at least as well as she did before, just not where she did before or how she did before.

Which is the crux of this entire story.

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>she simply wasn't interested in changing anything and that just doesn't work when you have to move and have to change your lifestyle

not interested? or not being able to? it starts to look like a diagnosis (as an extreme illustration Rain Man comes to mind). It is not a big stretch of imagination to allow that after 20 years of being in the same situation an elderly person may lose ability for "changes", just like many lose ability to bend and reach the floor or make a split. Brain is just a biological organ and there is a lot of information around about it losing its "flexibility" with time.

Basically the society is very cruel to its members who lose the ability to function above specific level, be it physical or mental abilities.

But is that reason to be mean and obstruct anyone who challenges your comfort zone?

that is the point - it is basically a definition of diagnostable situation when reasoning machinery doesn't function well (i'm not a doctor of course).

I mean, was she mean and obstructing by explicit willful choice or was it a panic reaction and collapse of reasoning machinery in response to what she perceived as destruction of her world? Former is ill will, while later would seem to be a diagnostable episode.

What difference does it make? Pretty much everything has reasons behind it. A diagnosis is just giving one of those reasons a name.

>What difference does it make?

to me it does. I think as a society we're at the level when we can allow and thus must allow to cut some slack to disabled people, and temporarily or permanent lack of ability to reason is a disability just like not having a leg for example. When some limping guy with a stick say stumble and hit you while falling, would you deploy your anger like it would be in the case of intentional hit? The same way with people who may not be able to function in the society and manage their societal responsibilities at the level we think of as minimally acceptable. Whatever reason for their current condition, to me these are just ill people who need help instead of full legal violence deployed against them. Though, from pure logical point of view, we can just say to this woman that last 20 years she should have learned her some Python, and thus her situation is her own doing. In my personal view, our ability to rein in such logic and deploy compassion instead of it is what determines whether our civilization goes forward or backward.

Honestly... if some random limping guy (not my family) fell and hit me with his stick every other day and often fell and hit my neighbors too... I would certainly want that guy out of my house. If I tried to help him get out of my house and he kept falling and hitting everyone that tried to help him... well at some point I would stop caring and just want him gone. Based only on what is in the article, since that is all we have, I feel they did start out with compassion. But you can only get hit with a stick so many times before you start losing that compassion. When they bought the house, they knew they were getting an illegal rental unit... not a one bed mental hospital. It wasn't their job to make sure she got help. It seems like they did more than they should have to.

What more could be done? The courts bent over backwards to accommodate her, going so far as to award her $14,000 after patiently exhausting every other option. 14k and a moving crew seems pretty generous as far as evictions for hostile, unsanitary, non-paying tenants go. Her story is depressing because she is clearly a troubled woman, but you can't just ignore reality and expect everything to work out, it's unsustainable to allow every person with poor reasoning skills live rent free.

The courts didn't award her $14k. She agreed to it in arbitration and signed a contract specifying that she'd get it in return for moving out. She then declined to move out, and I assume didn't get any of that $14k (because... why would she?).

The story mentions later on: "Her settlement money comes in small increments, so it is difficult for her to save up." So she got the 14k even after she refused to honor the contract she signed.

Wow. Truly, these heartless landlords have things all their own way.

"to me it does."

How? What action should be taken, given a diagnosis, that should not be taken otherwise?

Do you think she would voluntarily accept treatment that would make the eviction process easier?

> it is basically a definition of diagnostable situation when reasoning machinery doesn't function well (i'm not a doctor of course)

Sure, but this condition is called "stupidity", and there's a whole section of society that takes offense at the concept.

The problem is that, via rent control, she was given 20 years protection from reality evolving around her. That is the issue here.

There would be much less sympathy for a tenant who moved into a place at below-market rent, and then the rent was adjusted to market. But because a feel-good policy has created a broken market, the day of reckoning eventually had to arrive.

In a city of housing shortages, giving a small minority special protection under the law is a very bad outcome. Too bad for those not under the umbrella, too bad for those when the time comes and the umbrella is removed.

This is pretty much what I was thinking.

$1300 a month isn't a lot, but I would be really surprised if there's not somewhere in the SF bay area or a nearby city (Sacramento, etc) where it couldn't cover a small apartment or studio, utilities, and normal monthly costs like groceries.

As noted in other comments, it makes the focus of the article feel disingenuous as compared to people who are being priced out of their homes and don't have any safety net at all.

I don't think you have to go quite that far.

$~1300 will get you a decent Studio/1BR/Shared in the East Bay (Dublin, Livermore). Not bad neighborhoods, close to BART.

Go even a few miles East of these areas, rent drops rather quickly.

He wasn't talking about just rent, you have to figure in food costs and medical costs etc. Though I do agree that you can make it on that much in certain parts of the Bay.

As mentioned in the article her medical care is already taken care of by a union-sponsored health insurance plan run by a big HMO. These typically require very low or zero payments by the insured.

From the American Community Survey (ACS), $1,300 per month will put her in the 13% percentile in San Francisco household income. This looks like a decent safety net to me.

http://factfinder2.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/...

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