[saas_sam]

There are three kinds of people experiencing homelessness in SF:

Drug addicts, who settle in the Bay Area because it is Paradise On Earth for drug addiction. Drugs are cheap and plentiful. Dealers transact unmolested in broad daylight in front of apathetic cops. Needles are provided by the government free of charge. Tents can be pitched on just about any sidewalk. Drug use does not even need to be discreet -- anyone who walks in SF for more than a few hours will run across someone injecting or freebasing. It's not just the Tenderloin either.

The mentally ill, who cannot take advantage of services that exist to help them. There are individuals who are so out of it, so schizophrenic etc., that the only way they will ever be helped is if someone physically forces them into an institution. And can you imagine the response of SF constituents if such a policy was enacted? Totally impossible. One cell phone video of a capture gone wrong and it's over.

And lastly, there are tons of people who are 100% content with living on the streets by choice. There have always been transients in society who adopt this lifestyle, in every era of history. It's basically urban camping! No job, no responsibilities. It's a beautiful place with amazing weather. If all of Earth could easily navigate to the Bay Area, you could fill this city to the brim with people who'd "hobo" it by choice.

There MUST be a fourth type. The person who is on the street due to financial misfortune, who had horrible luck and found themselves in a spot they couldn't get out of. Statistically this has to exist. And we need to make sure those people get a ladder somehow to climb themselves out. Absolutely.

But to pretend that this fourth type is all that exists? Or that it's the majority?

Not even close.

[metalforever]

I live in the Bay Area and I have multiple friends that are homeless so let me comment here. A lot of the homeless are on disability due to some physical issue that prevents working , or are seniors. The social security checks do not pay the bills and you need an under the table side hustle in the bay to afford a room and be on social security checks. The section 8 waitlist is years long and you have to “scam” yourself in by saying you are a drug addict when you aren’t. There’s another large category of working class people in the bay that have a job but can’t afford to rent a room in a house . Or they had a job, lost it, and didn’t immediately find a new job. This comment above is extremely ignorant to the situation. Did you know that a lot of these tent camps have a months long waitlist ?

[mycologos]

> A lot of the homeless are on disability due to some physical issue that prevents working , or are seniors. The social security checks do not pay the bills and you need an under the table side hustle in the bay to afford a room and be on social security checks.

Naive follow-up question: why does such a person need to live in the bay area? If you're living off disability, why would you try to do it in the most expensive place in the country? Is community that important?

[metalforever]

The explanation I got was that you can't live outside in many other locales and that the cheaper places cut the social security low enough that it's hard to live there too. The social services and weather situation here is such that from a healthcare and social security check perspective it works out better and is less risky to the tenuously housed.

[anoncake]

If you're homeless, what else do you have?

[mycologos]

I think the literal answer is that if you move somewhere else, you can have a home? There's something about the circular logic of "I don't have a home, but I have friends" --> "I can never leave this place with friends" --> "I don't have a home ..." that requires the person to either lack any kind of long-term planning or place a really high weight on their current friend circle. Or maybe I'm just clueless about how hard it is to save social security/disability income in that situation.

I realize this line of inquiry sounds callous ("why can't they just save some money?"), but I genuinely don't follow why somebody with a regular income who's not tied to the bay area by a) drug addiction, or b) a job would put up with homelessness to stay there.

[saas_sam]

The interesting thing about your comment is it doesn't actually contradict what I said unless you are claiming your friends represent the majority of those experiencing homelessness. Is that what you're claiming?

[metalforever]

It actually does in several respects. You didn't capture the homeless working class, the homeless social security / retirees, and the folks with physical disabilities (you only brought up mental illness). The comment you have made in my opinion vastly overstates the drugs and mental illness aspects and vastly understates the number of people that (1) work at regular jobs and are still homeless, (2) the number of seniors that are homeless, and (3) The folks with physical disabilities, for example chronic physical conditions.

[kelnos]

> The social security checks do not pay the bills and you need an under the table side hustle in the bay to afford a room and be on social security checks.

I find this confusing because you seem to imply that having an income makes you ineligible for social security retirement benefits. But as long as you are 65, you're eligible without income caps. There's no requirement that you're not working.

Social security disability checks do require that you're not working. Is that what you're talking about?

[metalforever]

In a lot of cases they are social security disability checks and the side hustles I see most frequently are table vendors or musicians

[angst_ridden]

I assume you can provide some data to back up the assertion that "it's not even close?"

[spoonjim]

What data would you look for to confirm the claim, and what data would you loom for to reject the claim?

[angst_ridden]

Well, something stronger than "everyone knows this."

It's a notoriously difficult thing to study, but you can get some answers by looking at tangential studies to see correlation between housing prices and homelessness, e.g., https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-ucla-anderson-forecas... or studies showing a majority of the unhoused in California worked here before becoming homeless https://www.capolicylab.org/employment-among-la-county-resid...

[saas_sam]

I wish I did. A city that is so incompetent as to let this situation arise in the first place cannot be trusted to honestly & accurately account for the root cause of the problem. I want a good source for data that doesn't come in the form of a far-left/right propaganda piece. And if I am wrong I will be HAPPY as hell to be wrong.

[jeffbee]

Gosh, your handwaving is almost as convincing as all the hard data available on the causes of homelessness in California. Such as: https://everyonehome.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/2019HIRD...

[ahelwer]

There is no strong separation between 3/4 of your categories. People freely move from financial misfortune to mental illness to drug abuse. I'm sure you have the empathy to imagine the toll being homeless takes on your mental health, and in turn the difficulty with holding down stable employment when you have mental health problems. Drug addiction is of course a mental health issue, not something to be moralized - it's long past time to leave the war on drugs mindset in the past. So developing a drug addiction is a similarly high risk factor for the unhoused. Then you're really screwed. Thinking people with severe drug addictions are living in "paradise" in SF is extremely out-of-touch.

All of this is a cycle, of course. Drug addiction will lead to financial misfortune, as will mental health issues.

The solution to homelessness is to build free socialized housing, lots of it, with integrated mental health treatment.

[jfoutz]

I wouldn't claim that the 4 type is the only type to exist. But I would claim 2 things. (completely unsubstantiated)

First, You can shift classification over time. An example might be drug use inducing mental illness, moving from 1 to 2.

Second, I'd claim a lot (most? almost all?) of homeless spent time in group 4. I think if I exhausted my options, or willpower, I'd probably go all in on group 1, probably develop some group 2 characteristics and resign myself to group 3.

I think there's a desire to focus on group 4, because that's the cheapest and easiest to fix. The other groups are far, far more effort. It may not be an optimal strategy, but identifying and resolving group 4 quickly seems like a big win. Slows the rate of growth of groups 1-3.

[Flatcircle]

Saas_sam is exactly right. Why is it so unbearable to deal with this truth.

[saas_sam]

You know what's weird? I spent part of my morning thinking about "time is a flat circle" today. I swear, the serendipity sometimes in daily life is wild.