Weird, right? This is in Hoboken...extremely (bay-area-levels) rich area.
SF median household income: $65,519.00
Hoboken: $105,710
(population difference between Hoboken and SF is an order of magnitude, fyi)
Weird stuff. Anyway... it's definitely not "a good feeling" to see homeless people around. I donate and try to help, but I definitely get a big pang when asked for some cash for food, and the conversation goes like this:
"I don't have any cash on me, can I buy you something from this pizza place with my card?"
I live in a similar situation in Brooklyn, in an area ripe for shantytown-living.
The commenters who are disgusted at the lack of compassion, while on the morally-correct side of the equation, fail to consider the practical aspects of streets saturated with homeless people. It's at best 'tolerable', often 'kinda scary' and very often 'downright dangerous'[1]. Seeing this every morning and every night, in a walking city, is a drag on public safety and, yes, neighborhood value and progress. Retail and housing suffer when people have to step over passed-out zombies on their way out of their apartments or into their stores.
I don't know what the right answer is, but from my observation it seems that the police and the prisons play the role of the mental health worker and the shelter. The former is more expensive than the latter, but it's easier.
In the article below, it took several dozen overdoses before the police finally cleared the homeless off the street. It's not a coincidence that in New York City, the homeless (and associated social problems like aggressive panhandling and threatening behavior, as well as sexual assaults) tend to hang out not too far from their shelters. The location being referenced below is near several shelters (in a neighborhood that has a huge percentage of all the shelters of the city).
The answer is engagement. Vancouver's safe injection site has an amazing record of 1) reducing the transmission of expensive diseases like HIV and Hep, 2) reducing crime (the Vancouver police are 100% behind the site), and getting users into rehab and having them be clean a year later. Basically, it's a public policy win all around--it more than pays for itself in reduced health care and police spending.
I think substance abuse and mental health issues are huge, huge factors into why able-bodied men end up 'having' to live on the street. Getting your fix is expensive and can definitely take precedence over paying your rent (or showing up at work).
I live on one side of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside (DTES), work on the other side, and walk through it twice a day. DTES is the centre of gravity for at-risk populations in the lower mainland, and it's basically where you see the homeless, the crazy, and the addicted hanging out, shooting up, and pitching tents.
It's never bothered me, and I've never been bothered. My property value is still amongst the highest in Canada. Various agencies have wisely decided to colocate services in the DTES to help the at-risk groups, and a touch of gentrification keeps police and city services involved.
So basically, I don't give a shit about a "homeless colony" (what, they're an infestation?) right next to my current house, and I'm glad that the attention it receives is focused on helping the people there rather than trying move them somewhere out of sight and out of mind.
From what I've read, poverty definitely leads to lifestyles where you're "trapped" in poverty for a long time, or forever. It's like the disability we have in the US: once you're on it, you're very unlikely to ever get off it.
However, it's not just poverty that's the issue. It's mental health, it's drug abuse, and the lack of paths to a sustainable (long-term) lifestyle for these people who are homeless.
That means education: how to manage your money, what's a "good deal" involving various things, and how to take care of yourself.
It's incredibly surprising how many of these people get taken advantage of.
If you have close-to-or-zero skills, how can you possibly sustain yourself? If you have skills but you cannot recognize (because you were never taught) when you're being taken advantage of, how is that sustainable?
Counterexample: you could live where I live (upstate New York) on a tenth of the cost of San Francisco. A homeless person with marginally employable skills that moved from SF to upstate NY could work and afford to live in a home with heat and running water.
But if people choose not to work, I don't see what makes them any more "entitled" to live in a city than the people who work to make rent and pay taxes to support the services the city needs.
You don't earn an entitlement to live in a city; the city is obligated to justify excluding you from its area. In the U.S., vagrancy laws allowing police to generally run undesirables out of town have been found unconstitutional under due process analysis.
Everyone on the street is there for a variety of different reasons. You can't reduce it to choosing not to work.
I still live in a place where there are homeless people all around me. The difference is that I try and look for systematic policy solutions and not just move the problem somewhere else. It's not easy, I really don't like it, but I'm not going to shirk from reality or my duty to society.
I also identify as a socialist so we're probably just not on the same page. I don't victim blame homeless people, and I don't try to sweep society's problems under the carpet.
This is where the "this is a blaming comment speaking for others" button would come in handy to downvote this comment to oblivion. It matters not if the rationale for this comment is sensible or not - making statements that are non-provable and overarching is not a way to discuss something that is as important as a fellow human's health and well being. Rich people or not, tent cities are a less than ideal way for people to live. We can do better...together.