[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.