[ibeckermayer]

This idea that the "homeless problem in SF" is primarily a problem of "people being unable to afford homes in SF" is just laughable.

All you need to do is walk down almost any street in San Francisco and take a secondary glance at the homeless people you see, and its obvious that "can't afford a home" is just one of their many problems. Most of these people couldn't hold a job because they're addicted to really hardcore drugs (you might even get an opportunity to watch them smoke or inject some during this secondary glance), and often severely mentally ill. "Homeless" is to a great extent besides the point, this is a mental illness / drug addiction problem.

Even if you could find a solid place for $800/mo in SF, these people wouldn't be in it because the vast majority of them are unfit for employment. If that was really the issue then we could solve all this by just sending them to Omaha.

[neilk]

Those are the homeless you can see.

You're right that people who have several physical or mental health issues would be hard to help, in any system.

But the number one cause of homelessness isn't addiction; it's poverty.

And for that matter, the overwhelming majority of people who are substance-addicted don't become homeless. Lots of the people you work with are addicted to something.

There are so many steps before people literally have to sleep on the streets. They stay out of sight. You surely have noticed all the camper vans on some streets in SF. I'd bet that for every person actually on the street there are 10 who are effectively homeless but managing it in a way you can't see. Living at their place of work or study, living in a vehicle, couch-surfing, illegal sublets, and things I'm happy to never have to imagine.

The article the OP posted details many stories of people who are competent to hold down a job, even multiple jobs, but cannot find anywhere to live.

[repsilat]

> Those are the homeless you can see.

Those are the homeless that attack the elderly. Those are the homeless that shit on the street. Those are the homeless that lie naked sprawled across the sidewalk or at the end of a BART escalator.

Whatever the cause, these homeless do have mental health and substance abuse issues, often are voluntarily homeless (and will resist help.) They're not all of the homeless problem, but they are a major part of it.

Getting rid of hard drug dealers would solve a large part of the issue. Making it illegal to be on hard drugs (and enforcing it) would be as well.

[neilk]

These are real problems.

But I'm just going to say: I've lived in San Francisco. I currently live in Vancouver, not far from the epicentre of unhoused and addicted people.

Vancouver has many of the same problems and for the same reasons.

I have never, not once, feared for my safety around poor or addicted homeless people in Vancouver. Nor did I even feel like they hated me, specifically. I remember walking out of a doorway in Gastown where there was a woman smoking a crack pipe, and she was very apologetic and moved her stuff. It seemed oddly Canadian to me, even at the time.

In San Francisco I often felt sheer rage from unhoused people, or even just poor people. Acting out aggressively at the slightest provocation. Screaming for apparently no reason.

If you've lived your whole life in America it may be hard to imagine that these things aren't universal. But they aren't. If you think about it there really isn't any reason why being poor has to be the same as being dangerous.

I have no evidence as to exactly what the difference is. I think maybe Canadian policies are a little more generous and a little more available. Canadians were just as racist, but maybe American chattel slavery really went over the top in causing such social rifts. I don't really know.

[imtringued]

The difference is that Europeans an Canadians are willing to bribe their homeless people to stay in line. It is called coasian bargaining and welfare payments are the only widespread application of it that has had any semblance of success.

[neilk]

Friend, every person gets benefits from the state. Be thankful that all the help you got was education, policing, infrastructure, community wealth, tax policies that favor asset owners, indirect subsidies, or privatized profits from public research. Or policies that would be obvious redistribution if Russia had done them in 1950 but because America does it it’s capitalism. If you look at where America’s defense spending goes it is rather obviously an employment and welfare program with a side hustle of war profiteering and global power projection. Closer to home, there would be no Stanford or Silicon Valley without massive, sustained defense spending in the Cold War.

Bribed? You seem to think that the homeless actively use their immiseration as some kind of protection racket. Maybe there are social services and non-profits that we can legitimately criticize for that (see OP’s article) but the people themselves? Really?

Alternately, we could say the Americans have decided to make the lives of poor and addicted people as bad as can be achieved without actually killing up them. Perhaps they serve a vital function as an example to others about what can happen.

[slg]

And this is the dividing line on this issue of homeless, how people identify the problem and the motivation for the fix.

Some people want to fix homeless because of empathy while others want to fix it because of selfishness. Your comment reveals that you are in the latter group. You don't actually want to get homeless people into homes because you empathize with how horrible their lives must be without one. You just want to the minority of homeless people who are a nuisance to stop bothering you and people you actually do empathize with. All those other homeless people who aren't attacking the elderly or shitting on the street can keep on living the same invisible life of suffering because their suffering is not actually a problem in your eyes.

[repsilat]

Who says we can't help both groups? Why is my position (that we should help the "noisy" homeless) incompatible with the position that we should not help the "silent" homeless? Where did I even imply one was a higher priority than the other?

And what the hell, how is caring about elderly people being attacked "selfish"?

Fixing part of the problem is a good thing. Different strategies might solve different parts of the problem. Objecting to progress isn't helpful and isn't compassionate, it's the way we got our current harm-maximization policies.

[slg]

> Who says we can't help both groups?

I certainly didn’t.

> Where did I even imply one was a higher priority than the other?

Because your counter to the idea of the invisible homeless population was to complain about the nuisance homeless population.

> And what the hell, how is caring about elderly people being attacked "selfish"?

Because you are the one prioritizing the suffering of one group over another.

[repsilat]

My counter to the dismissal of the problem of "nuisance homelessness" was to insist that they're a problem. But argument aside, it sounds like we're agreed policy-wise: let's aggressively fix the problem of violent law-breaking lifestyle-choice homelessness with all the obvious tools we've been neglecting to use, and with the money and peace of mind freed up by their absence (carried out in tandem, no doubt you'll want to accuse me of favouritism for law-abiding seniors again...) turn our efforts to the more difficult issue of the invisible law-abiding down-on-their-luck homeless.

[goatlover]

The invisible homeless seem like the people that most likely can be helped, and the ones I feel more empathy and respect for. The visible ones that trash public places and make them unsafe, I want them dealt with so that the problem is fixed for everyone else. If that means involuntary commitment because they refuse drug treatment or being relocated to some sort of housing facility, so be it. I don't think people should be allowed to trash parks, camp on sidewalks or use walking paths for bathrooms and doing drugs, all of which should be illegal.

[fallingknife]

But when people say "homeless" that's who they mean. Not saying that you are wrong about there being 10x as many people living in camper vans or whatever, but that's just not who anybody means when they talk about homeless people.

Also not saying that it isn't a problem which should be solved, because it absolutely is. But if you did solve it, and you told people that homelessness was down by 90%, they would look at you like you were crazy, because it's only the other 10% they were complaining about in the first place.

[2devnull]

You overestimate how much talent it takes to live indoors. Living in a house and being a drunk or junky is actually much more common than being a homeless drunk or junky. Drugs and alcohol do not magically deprive one of the ability to live indoors. Have you ever heard of a crack house? Totally possible to be a housed druggie.

Similarly most mentally ill people are able to muster the ability to sleep indoors.

Let’s agree that nothing about drug addiction or mental illness precludes living indoors.

The increase in homelessness seems as though it corresponds almost exactly to California’s housing crisis and unaffordable rents. Heroin has been around for a long time. It cannot be the explanation for a sudden increase in homelessness. Mental illness is a constant more or less, so it cannot be the explanation either.

What changed over the past decade, and especially changed in the past few years? Housing prices and rents.

I’d love to hear other explanations for the rapid increase of homelessness in California this past decade or two. It cannot be attributed solely to drugs or mental illness.

[RobertRies]

I believe I am seeing the problem here.

You are, presumably unintentionally, using a blanket descriptor "mentally ill" and "drug addicted" to describe an extremely wide spectrum of expressions.

"Serious Mental Illness" definitionally requires substantial interference with or limiting of one or more major life activities (including maintaining a safe house, and maintaining employment).

You are conflating people's common use of the term "mental illness" - yes, we can agree that most people with say, seasonal depression, can hold down a job and maintain a house. This is not what San Francisco's visible homeless "mental illness" is referring to. They are suffering from Serious Mental Illness.

No, we cannot agree that most folks with Serious Mental Illness are able to muster the ability to sleep indoors, definitionally.

Again, "drug addiction." There is an appreciable difference between the character of the drug, and the addiction - aka "Chronic Substance Abuse."

That is, once again, I do not agree that someone with open meth sores on their face is going to hold down any sort of a job and/or be able to muster a safe home environment.

Next, you ask what has changed in the past few years? Then conclude only two things have changed in 10 years - "housing prices and rents."

While there may be a correlation, possibly even a causation, this is still an oversimplification of the problem. There are other cities, even in the US that have seen an increase in housing prices and not the corresponding inhumane treatment of both the housed, and unhoused in SF particularly.

I wonder if anything else has changed in SF in 10 years that makes it uniquely inhumane to the homeless, and also disproportionately affecting the entire character of the city? Could it be policies? Complete lawlessness and availability/encouragement/facilitation of new drugs and drug addiction?

There are at least two obvious problems that are unique to the West Coast, perhaps namely SF, 1) an overall increase in homelessness caused by certainly a multitude of factors that include much more than "rent," such as the bifurcation of particularly the SF labor market and the educational/cognitive barriers to "information technology work" versus the alternatives. That is to say, the problem isn't necessarily inherently that rents went up, the corollary is true that pay didn't go up for those experiencing homeless who were happily housed and paying rent before. Ought they move? Ought we relocate them? Ought we pay, say, fast food workers similar to MAMAA developers? It seems you suggest affordable government project housing? And 2) policy that makes it such that those who do suffer from Serious Mental Illness/Chronic Substance Abuse (by some counts, the majority of those experiencing homelessness) that does everything it possibly can to ensure they maximally suffer, while having the greatest possible negative impact to the bystanders, often other people experiencing homelessness, but also the housed, and business owners. That is to say, SF policies it as absolutely easy as possible to stay addicted, and as difficult as possible to overcome the addiction, while simultaneously pretending severe mental illness is not a thing (i.e. you [paraphrasing for emphasis] "most mentally ill people can maintain a house and a job".)

It seems our conceptualization "homelessness" is corrupted by inadequate, and inconsistent use of nomenclature.

[borski]

Both things can be true at the same time. Drugs are a significant issue in the homeless community, but providing housing and hope can do wonders for many of the homeless out there. When they feel like garbage, because society doesn’t care about them and treats them like they are, it’s impossible to consider a life with hope. If you’ve never been in that place, it’s very hard to understand.

But this “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” mentality most people have is ludicrous; it simply isn’t that easy, when you have either mental health problems, or, quite simply, no hope.