[zer0faith]

"The justices left in place a 2018 ruling by the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that fining or jailing homeless people for staying outside or in unauthorized places if a bed at an emergency shelter is not available is unconstitutional"

It is no secret that San Francisco has a homelessness crisis and if they can't prosecute how are they expected to clean up their city of homeless people?

Edit: This is a legit question why all the down votes?

[ethanbond]

I don't know, by solving their rent problem with better tax structures and/or more development? Under what possible ethical or legal argument could you make it illegal for someone to be homeless?

[zer0faith]

How about we rehabilitate them, teach them skills that are needed in the workplace in order for them to be a productive member of society and stop enabling.

[SolaceQuantum]

Yeah, that'd be great! One of the fastest ways to help this process is to provide housing, as bolstered by many studies, so let's definitely do this.

[dtech]

In you first post you say prosecute, in the follow-up you say rehabilitate. Providing people with stable basic needs and like housing and education is a prerequisite for rehabilitation. It's not "enabling" in the negative sense of enabling bad behavior, rather it's enabling people to make something of themselves. Or at the very least, keep them of the streets and out of criminality.

Prosecution only leads to more problems, as people cannot adequately gain the skills they need in US prison and are then shunned by US employers.

[alistairSH]

they can't prosecute how are they expected to clean up their city of homeless people

Prosecute what? Simply being homeless? I'd rather buy the homeless some apartments/shelters than put them in jail. Jail is more expensive. It's dangerous. It prevents them for working their way out of homelessness.

Jailing people for the crime of being too poor for your tastes is shitty policy.

[kelnos]

That presupposes that "prosecution" is a reasonable solution to homelessness. It's not. "Housing people" is a reasonable solution to homelessness.

[205guy]

The 9th Circuit court of appeals is a federal court that just happens to be based in San Francisco. It has no direct influence over the governance of the city (and county) of San Francisco, other than that the jurisprudence it establishes is federal law for all of California and the other states in the 9th circuit.

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

Also, what is prosecuted is a crime. The homelessness crisis is not a crime per se (as established again by this very ruling), so it cannot be prosecuted--only actions that are actually crimes.

[threatofrain]

I don't think it's worth asking for explanations on votes because a negative comment is often due to a <handful> of voters, and there's no insight into the makeup of these voters and whether they're as representative as you hope. IMO just make your comment and let the reactions come; some comments will be upvoted and some won't. Some reactions are helpful and some aren't.

[SolaceQuantum]

Providing housing?

[adventured]

> Providing housing?

It's one of the most affluent cities in world history. That is exactly the obvious solution that SF has intentionally avoided implementing.

If it was a matter of 25,000 people, sure, I understand that would be a huge problem for a city of that size. It's a matter of closer to 5,000 people that need housing (out of SF's 8k to 10k homeless, some are long-term homeless, some are short-term homeless, so you end up with a lower tally of how much housing you need at a given time than the max figures). They have no excuse for the grotesque human rights abuses going on there.

I'm overwhelmingly in favor of the Federal Government stepping in and doing some very unpleasant things - as necessary - to the city in order to force their hands on fixing homelessness there. If they won't fix it, bring the full weight of the US Government down upon their collective heads until they squeal and capitulate (as they are guaranteed to do). The Feds have dozens of ways to beat on the city until it does by forced measures what it should have been more than happy to do on their own.

[anigbrowl]

I'm overwhelmingly in favor of the Federal Government stepping in and doing some very unpleasant things - as necessary - to the city

I get what you're saying here but you're expressing it poorly, and without regard to the fact that the overwhelming unpleasantness is likely to fall on the vulnerable rather than the excessively comfortable, as exemplified by the proliferation of bad policy choices currently taking place at the federal level.

[clairity]

not the federal government, it should be the state government.

pass a version of sb50, one that especially forces SF and LA to open up large tracts (but not all) of the city to immediate housing construction.

in LA, mayor garcetti tried pushing through the construction of shelters in each of the council districts and got so much push back that only like 2 have gotten anywhere. we need to put local political pressure on the mayor and the council. the federal government is not the right political body for this effort.

[gamblor956]

We could do what the Midwest does with their homeless, but in reverse: we buy them bus tickets back to home and let their home states deal with it.

I don't know what the situation is like in SF or Boise, but in LA more than half of the homeless aren't even from California. They're just here because they were given a free bus ticket and told they would get free food and drugs and good weather if they rode all the way to the end.

[reaperducer]

We could do what the Midwest does with their homeless, but in reverse: we buy them bus tickets back to home and let their home states deal with it.

Expect a lawsuit.

Both Newark and Elizabeth, New Jersey are suing New York City for busing its homeless over the Hudson River.

California has a long history of doing the same. It wasn't that many years ago that Los Angeles agreed to stop busing its homeless people to Nevada.

[gamblor956]

California has a long history of doing the same. It wasn't that many years ago that Los Angeles agreed to stop busing its homeless people to Nevada.

This is blatantly false. SF and LA were sending the homeless back to their cities of origin. Their is a great deal of reporting on this in the NYT and LAT. (See, e.g., https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/14/us/homeless-busing-seattl...)

Texas and the Midwest represent the biggest non-local sources of the homeless in Southern California. Combined, the Midwestern states generate more of LA's homeless than California itself. It was the openly stated policy of Texas for more than a decade to deal with the homeless by buying them tickets to Los Angeles, and it is still their official (but unstated) policy with respect to addressing homelessness. Their governor has admitted as much on television.

[Keverw]

I heard both Nashville, TN and Key West, FL does this too. Homeless people aren't good for tourism, so have to hide it from view. There's a little mini documentary on YouTube I seen before discussing this. Then if you accept the bus ticket, and end up coming back you are on some blacklist to not be able to receive any more services.

[seriesf]

Hrmm, what is a way to solve the problem of HOMElessness, other than throwing people in jail? Trying to think here, just brainstorming. Here's my list of top solutions to HOMElessness:

1) Zone 90% of the city for detached single-family homes? 2) Mandatory decade-long design review for every new home? 3) Lots of parking lots? 4) Designate every extant building a "historical resource"?

Some combination of those policies should eventually solve the housing crisis, I think.

[gamblor956]

You're confusing the underhoused with the homeless. The underhoused cannot find affordable housing near their places of work. This is a serious problem in CA, and even with the intense residential building of the last 3 years CA is not making much headway.

But homelessness of the kind at issue in this case is a very different thing. The vast majority of these homeless are mentally ill, drug addicts, or both. Re-zoning single-family lots won't do anything to address this problem, because most of them have families with homes who've simply given up on trying to take care of them.

[seriesf]

Wait, I only just noticed where you said “intense residential construction”. You must be joking. Current rates of construction across the state are far below historic norms. The only people who think this is a building boom are those who haven’t glanced at a fifty-year housing starts chart.

[gamblor956]

CA is a huge place. Yes, across a gigantic state housing starts aren't great.

But within 7 miles of me in any direction, more than 100,000 new units have come online in the past 2 years, and more than another 100,000 are expected to come online in the next 2. Across LA, there are a few hundred thousand more units in the pipeline, some of which would already be built and occupied if not for NIMBYs in single-family houses opposing the construction.

And quite frankly, even if we could build at the speed of historic norms, there simply isn't the available land. You'd end up with housing tracts hundreds of miles from their associated job centers.

[seriesf]

I'm sorry but there is no way your characterization is accurate for any given point on the map. The entire Los Angeles metropolitan statistical area only authorizes about 2500 new dwellings per month, and not all of them get built. Prior to 1990, the rate was normally above 5000 dwellings per month. This is despite the fact that Greater LA has grown more than 22% in population since 1990.

So, my point stands. The only people who believe this is a boom haven't looked at this graph: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LOSA106BPPRIVSA

[gamblor956]

Across the street from me are 3 new apartment buildings which collectively house 1500-2000 people.

Down the street are two new apartment buildings which house another 1000-1500 people.

Two blocks away from that are a cluster of apartment buildings which collectively house more than 10,000 people.

And quite frankly, you are simply wrong about the statistics you are citing.

The pre-1990 figure is primarily residential single-family homes, so each structure was on average capable of housing just 4 people. Current residential construction is primarily multi-unit residences, so each structure represents residential capacity, on average, of several dozen people.

So my point stands, and I would strongly recommend you take a statistics course.

[seriesf]

So they need supportive housing. I endorse building a lot of housing of all kinds, everywhere, as fast as we can. SF has by far the highest municipal revenues per capita in the nation and it can afford to build.

[alistairSH]

The vast majority of these homeless are mentally ill, drug addicts, or both.

Citation? That's a much repeated trope, but I've yet to see actual numbers to support it.

[gamblor956]

Walk down LA's Skid Row and count the number of homeless people you see who aren't (a) on drugs or drunk, or (b) mentally ill.

Thousands of homeless live on or travel to Skid Row each day, but most people who attempt this challenge don't get to double digits.