[romanoderoma]

Wow.

Thanks so much for teaching me how to live.

I'm sorry that the city where you live is such a terrible place, I come from a poor country in Europe and homeless people here are treated freely by the State, because people taxes pay for public universal health care.

And every neighborhood in every city has their own local homeless that are part of the living tissue of the place, not a nuisance (or something to bring up when you talk with others about what's wrong in your city, we use holes in the road and waste management).

I understand that when you are a rich country, you can't afford to waste resources on it.

I also understand that it's easier to blame a middle aged man like me for "virtue signaling" (I don't even know what that means, sorry) than apologizing.

Homelessness as "a problem" is the symptom of a selfish society, more than a failure in city management.

Anyway "that incident" is an anecdote, it doesn't prove anything, nobody knows if it's the truth, it's simply blaming the poor, disguised as caring about the city.

[BobbyJo]

How many homeless people have you met in SF? I've talked 1:1 with about 3, and in all three cases the people refused ample help due to 1) not wanting to go to rehab or 2) paranoid schizophrenia, which the city won't deal with to avoid civil rights problems.

Boiling everything down to 'homelessness means society is selfish' is over simplifying an incredibly complicated problem. There are things that can be done, but it requires a lot more thought than holding hands and handing out free stuff. SF is probably the least selfish city on the planet, which is arguably part of the problem.

[romanoderoma]

Homelessness as "a problem to deal with" means society is selfish, means exactly what you wrote.

A society where people refuse to see it as a social issue, like sickness, and one that requires a lot of thought because you have to remove them from the eyes of people but don't want to deal with the consequences because it's actually a cleanse under a different name (decency, decorum, etc.).

If SF is the least selfish on the planet (which it isn't, unless you consider a few American cities the World), why people refuse to live with what is obviously a byproduct of their lifestyle?

You can't have all the advantages without any of the drawbacks.

Thinking that it is indeed possible is a symptom of a selfish society.

I live near the Colosseum in Rome and there are homeless living here, in the city centre. Some of them have been living here more than I've been alive.

Nobody thinks they are a problem or have to accept the help, people here accept that where there are people with a lot of money there are gonna be desperate people as well.

Because it's only natural.

And because many have been poor or come from poor families, before being wealthy enough to afford a better life.

It's easier for homeless to find what they need to survive in the big city in the wealthy neighborhood than in the small village in the country in the poor quarter.

They also feel more protected, for obvious reasons (more people with money means more people willing to give, means more wasted food, better illumination, better public services, etc.)

For those in need of medical attention, there is the national healthcare, we call the ambulance, they already know who these people are, bring them in, give them food, a bed and a warm shower and they already know they'll be out on the streets again in a couple of days. At least they have been checked and their health conditions assessed. Because it's their job, they don't have to respond to some kind of profit based mechanism, people taxes already paid for it.

Homeless are not treated like a problem, like rejected or defective people, they are taken care of. Because it benefits the society at large.

Of course some of them are a problem, but it's a tiny minority, our biggest issue is finding as many as possible in winter so they don't die in the street for hypothermia or other cold related disease.

Of course is not all roses, we are still talking about people living in the edge of society and sometimes dealing with them is not a pleasant experience, but it's rare.

Also the police here don't treat them like criminals, which is an important difference as well, police usually protect them from bad people. They are in fact much more often victims of violence than perpetrators.

(According to LAPD report in January this year more than one out of three times police officers used force against homeless people in 2019, a 26% increase from 2018)

It's really not that hard, especially for one of the richest cities in the richest country in the World.

Unwillingness is a form of selfishness.

Not learning from what others already do better is a form of entitlement.

Which is a form of selfishness.

[BobbyJo]

Are you saying things are fine the way they are and their isn't a problem? Are you saying that there is a problem and it's easy to solve? Are you saying there is a problem and it's hard to solve?

I'll be honest, it seems like english is your second language and you're struggling to connect a few different ideas, but I'm just not getting where you're going.

[romanoderoma]

Thanks for the question.

I'm saying it should be easy to solve for the richest country in the World given the sheer amount of resources it possess.

It looks impossible for the same exact country, because the society there doesn't like the solution.

Or to be more precise, they don't like being told that if other have solved it, they should just copy what the others have done.

Looks like that if you try to teach America something, the knee jerk reaction is always "X is of course underestimating something, the problem is hard, the solution can't be that easy and if X is proposing it is obviously wrong, or X would be richer then us"

Other countries have solved it, so it is solvable.

Solvable doesn't even mean it will disappear in this case, it means the situation can drammatically improve just by tuning a few knobs.

Like wearing and not wearing a mask, keeping or not keeping social distance, etc. you put all of these precautions together and you magically have much better chances of avoiding the contagion.

It is that simple.

Why it isn't in the US?

Because they don't want to solve it.

It would be as easy as reading the Wikipedia page on homelessness in Japan, for example

I'm taking Japan as an example because it was struggling with the problem, then they changed approach to it and have radically improved the condition of homeless people and reduce their number.

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

> At the beginning of the 1990s, the homeless in Japan were viewed as a nuisance. The government tried to get rid of the people on streets because of "beautification programmes". Only in 1997 did Tokyo at last acknowledge the existence of homeless group representatives and start listening to their issues.

> I'll be honest, it seems like english is your second language and you're struggling to connect a few different ideas

I could write it in Italian, French, Spanish and even in bad German, but that would make it harder for people to follow.

The best I can do is my confusing English, sorry.

[BobbyJo]

First, Japan's lower incidence of homeless is an anomaly mostly owing to the countries culture of extreme personal responsibility. If you've ever been to Japan you'd notice that extends to basically everything they do in public. Changing the culture of a melting pot of 300 million people is significantly harder than reading a wikipedia page. Side note (as someone whose been to Japan several times, and has several close friends who are Japanese citizens) Japan's homelessness problem is much more extreme in severity than raw number would lead you to believe. They have a smaller incidence, and the homeless themselves tend to try very hard to stay out of the way, but in the words of a Japanese friend "Japanese homeless are very very homeless". They aren't just people down on their luck, they are people with extreme mental and developmental impairments. Japan has an altogether different problem when it comes to homeless than other nations, not to mention many non-profits think the government's official numbers underreport the population of homeless by 2-3x.(TL;DR: Japan is a really awful model for any other country to follow.)

Second, the US has a lower incidence of homeless people than many countries with much more generous social programs (Canada, France, UK, New Zealand). Saying we just aren't throwing enough of our wealth at the problem is also evidently wrong. (You can look that up on Wikipedia)

Third, the homeless rate in the US has been on the decline for decades. So blowing San Francisco's problems up into some larger conversation that the US as a whole is failing is just inaccurate.

[pompeirules]

> Second, the US has a lower incidence of homeless people than many countries with much more generous social programs

US have 17/100k of population, Italy has 8.

We are not famous for being big on personal responsibility.

> Japanese homeless are very very homeless

They are 0.3/100k of population though or roughly 56 times less than US.

At that level the problem is solved, not completely, but at least the number the country has to deal with is manageable.

If US had the same share of homeless people of Italy (and they could do muuuuuuch better than us) they would have half of the homeless population.

Which is a radical improvement if you ask me.

> Third, the homeless rate in the US has been on the decline for decades.

Is it?

According to the stats it increased from 2018 onwards from previous years

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/09/18/surprisin...