[TheBlight]

I also like clean safe unobstructed sidewalks and parks but along with benches, we've made a decision. We've decided that putting the mentally ill in a facility and arresting people for public drug use is not something we're comfortable with at the expense of those other things. I don't personally ageee with this decision but it is apparently the consensus.

[strictnein]

> it is apparently the consensus

And what a strange consensus it is. The prevailing belief seems to be that preventing people from slowly/quickly killing themselves on the street (or, more accurately, dying from addiction) is somehow not "progressive" and the moral thing to do is to pretend like these people have made the choice of their own volition and that we cannot judge them for this choice.

In reality, the people who are just rotting away on our streets would be better served if they were brought somewhere against their will and kept there until they were better. Society would also be better served if we did this. The government choosing to involuntarily constrain people isn't something that should be done lightly, but sometimes it is the lesser evil. We've completely abandoned these people and somehow done so in the name of compassion. It's really depressing.

[JoshTriplett]

What a strange false dichotomy. Either we do absolutely nothing to help people, or we involuntarily incarcerate them?

The actually progressive option is to provide meaningful public support programs, and also make housing affordable (by building enough housing). The US mostly doesn't do either of those, but it should.

[zdragnar]

These programs exist, but they are underutilized to a significant degree.

From a partner who used to work in one, people:

- didn't trust the program and wouldn't sign up

- didn't actually want to quit using so they avoided it

- wanted to get the benefits from the program without changing anything (i.e. showed up to get free food etc)

- tried but didn't like it and went back to using

Very few people actually went all the way through compared to the population in the city that could have used it.

The real question is: how do you help people who do not want your help. Do you let them waste away and die on the sidewalk, or do you institutionalize them?

[Loughla]

The answer to that question in a society that allows (mostly) autonomy of choice is that we let them die on the street.

I'm not convinced that involuntary incarceration will actually fix the problem. I believe it will just take it off of the streets and out of the public consciousness.

[cameldrv]

I have a very good friend who was an addict, and I tried to help him turn his life around in many ways, but I couldn’t figure out a way. Professionals told me “he has to hit rock bottom.”

Anyhow he wound up getting arrested and spent a couple of weeks in jail where he got clean and decided to turn his life around. He went on to get a couple of masters degrees, get married, have two kids, and has a good job. He credits his time in jail for saving his life.

[ryoshoe]

At the core of this is that your friend came to the realization that he wanted to change his life. He can credit his time in jail for this. However that doesn't mean it will be the same for everyone, or that there's only a single potential trigger to get someone to recover from drug addiction

[ratelimitsteve]

I have a friend who picked up heroin in jail, came out an addict and died of an OD in his basement. His daughter found him.

If your anecdote can prove your point, then mine can disprove it.

[pessimizer]

I knew somebody who turned his life around after surviving an attempted murder. I still don't think that means that trying to murder people whose lives are going awry is a rational solution.

[potsandpans]

Wow, it must be true if you said it!

[charcircuit]

>I believe it will just take it off of the streets and out of the public consciousness.

If antisocial people do not exist in the public consciousness, then that means the problem is fixed. Even you never have to worry about locking your front door, then the problem of burglars has been fixed even if technically would be burglars may exist in prison.

[pessimizer]

Drug addicts and the mentally ill don't have the problem of being "antisocial." They have drug addiction and mental illness. "Antisocial" is the problem that you have when you see them, and is the problem that is solved when you don't see them. It's a completely narcissistic way of looking at things.

For example, putting you in prison would also solve the problem of your objection to them. You would still be surrounded by drug addicts and the mentally ill in prison, but we wouldn't have to listen to you complain about it, so our problems would be solved.

But that's also not a good solution.

[hn_throwaway_99]

> I'm not convinced that involuntary incarceration will actually fix the problem.

Not to sound too crass, but doesn't that pretty much "fix the problem" (i.e. homeless people on the street) by definition?

[verall]

> society has decided to stop jailing (committing) the homeless

> leaving them on the street is not helping them. committing them would give them access to (force upon them) care, and is the more humane thing to do

> I'm not convinced that involuntary incarceration will actually fix the problem

> doesn't that pretty much "fix the problem"?

Which problem? Every misunderstanding is someone replying to someone else without knowing who was replying to whom

[cwmoore]

Breathing problems? Stop the breathing. Solved, by definition.

[JuniperMesos]

Taking the problem of crazy severely-mentally-ill people off the streets and out of the public consciousness is strictly better than having that problem be on the streets and in the public consciousness because it's happening around the public all the time. If nothing else, it reduces the chances that a random commuter will get randomly stabbed on the subway by a severely crazy person.

[cwmoore]

Rather have people hauled away on suspicion then? You know, before something happens? The people in the public places are the public. It’s likely that random stabbers have already been hauled away before for something else. You’re talking about running a training program for reinforcing the antisocial tendencies, and pensions for their paid captors.

[0xBA5ED]

Not a great solution, honestly. Long term drug abuse is almost never a victimless habit. I'm tempted to say never.

[mx7zysuj4xew]

This isn't the 1980s anymore. Using drugs is perfectly fine. A ton of people here on HN take drugs regularly, but few think it's worth to rock the boat against this kind of nonsense you're spreading

[convolvatron]

maybe the problem here is the gate that requires them to quit cold turkey before offering them any help? I know it offends people morally to 'subsidize drug use', but that's a really high barrier for an opioid or crank addict to meet. the other issues are that people complain that its very prison like, in terms of the volume and severity of rules. the other really unfortunate thing is that some fraction of the homeless population is _really nasty_. so no one really wants to get locked up with these people.

but to say that the majority of them don't want any help is just wrong.

[breakyerself]

West Virginia has much lower rates of homelessness and public drug use compared to liberal states despite having higher rates of drug addiction. Because housing is much more affordable.

Homelessness rates increase and decrease in direct proportion to the cost of housing as a proportion of median income. When housing costs increase more and more people become homeless and the ones that end up on the street tends to be those already living at the margins so you see more drug addicts and mentally ill people on the street and assume it's the cause.

Its well understood that being homeless makes it much harder to provide treatment and services. Sweeps of encampments make it even harder as their belongings tend to be thrown out.

So we have places with lots of services, but extremely expensive housing or places with affordable housing, but no poor public services.

Imagine if people could have housing and services how much better it would be. Maybe we wouldn't even have to strip people of their freedoms to make improvements. Wouldn't that be preferable? Isn't it worth trying?

[KingMachiavelli]

Frankly, I think we need to bring back corporal punishment for specific crimes. The process to arrest, prosecute, and then imprison people for "public space crimes" is basically flawed.

Arresting and prosecuting is slow and expensive, prisons are full. A prison sentence destroys whatever remaining support system a person has and a conviction like that makes getting a job in the future nearly impossible.

We should just have a quick path to short and non-damaging corporal punishment. A quick video recording, an instant review by a judge via zoom, then immediate punishment. This would deter theft, damaging public property, etc. while not costing a lot to taxpayers and not causing long term damage to the individual. Crime is never on the record at all so does not affect background checks. Treatment programs are always offered instead of the corporal punishment.

(Of course mental health conditions complicate this, it's difficult to solve that without forced institutionalizing them).

[lobf]

Too bad about that pesky “cruel and unusual” clause in the constitution for the bloodthirsty like you…

[cwmoore]

Nothing unusual or cruel about living locked in a concrete box overcrowded with unemployable men for weeks, months, or years, or is there?

Prison is as medieval an institution as the mindsets of those that see it to be appropriate.

[linksnapzz]

Birching minor criminals would not have been considered cruel or unusual to any of the men who wrote that clause.

[CSSer]

I suppose you really enjoyed Leviathan…

[linksnapzz]

I've named servers Nasty, Poor, Brutish and Short before.

[stult]

Yes, exactly, there's a reason the term is "continuum of care." There is no one-size-fits-all approach to solving addiction because, to quote Ted Lasso, all people are different people. Maybe some people do need to be involuntarily incarcerated, but many, many others would be able to recover with far less intrusive interventions.

Also we are chasing a lagging indicator by focusing exclusively on the homeless population. The vast majority of people who end up homeless because of addiction would have benefited from some far earlier, far milder form of intervention, or from the absence of something that actively drove them into addiction, e.g. some quack pushing oxycontin on them because Purdue Pharma promoted it as non-addictive. Or job loss because of offshoring pushing them into economic despair that then drives addiction, which they are unable to recover from because of the lack of affordable or accessible retraining or educational opportunities.

In many cases over the last 20-30 years, it was the combination of both job loss and careless opioid prescription that pushed people into an unrecoverable spiral, especially in the rust belt, where the opioid crisis hit the hardest. We may not have fixed the job loss side of the problem, but at least doctors aren't pushing pills the same way they were 10-20 years ago after Purdue's corporate downfall, so the number of people driven into addiction-mediated homelessness by that disaster should at least start tapering off soon. But if we don't help people before their lives fall apart with a continuum of support options that are accessible before they are in deep crisis, and are accessible to people who are beginning to spiral but don't yet appear to be in deep crisis, it will cost far more and be far more challenging to help them recover once they are on the street.

[Taek]

I'm not sure if you've had a drug addict in your life at any point, and if not that is a blessing.

Drug addiction is a dark place and it's very common that the availability of free support programs is entirely rejected by the user, and the only hope at a normal life requires forceful intervention by family and friends.

The only way to solve drugs on the street is to look at the cities that have solved them and copy what works. And, at least with what I'm familiar with, arresting people tends to work and alternatives tend to not.

[JoshTriplett]

You seem to be equating "homeless" with "drug addict". The article talks about taking away public benches because of homelessness.

There are different programs needed for drug addiction than for homelessness. Not everyone who's homeless has a drug problem, and not everyone with a drug problem is homeless.

[Taek]

We didn't eliminate benches in public spaces because we wanted to reduce the presence of the nice, respectful, and polite homeless. We eliminated benches to reduce the presence of the problematic homeless, which has a much higher rate of drug abuse and mental illness.

[cucumber3732842]

>We eliminated benches to reduce the presence of the problematic homeless, which has a much higher rate of drug abuse and mental illness.

We eliminated benches to reduce the rate at which the problematic homeless cross paths with the complainers.

The DPW as an organization doesn't give a shit about how many commuter's asses a bench serves from 6am to 8pm. It just knows that every day when Karen sees a homeless man sleeping on that bench at 5AM she submits a complaint from the web form.

From their stupid "not my job, I just solve tickets" keyhole view of the situation removing the benches makes the problem smaller and they will iterate on that until complaint equilibrium is reached.

[Auracle]

That Venn diagram is pretty close to a circle, at least when talking about homeless people that don’t have a friend/relative they can stay with.

[JoshTriplett]

> That Venn diagram is pretty close to a circle

False, and harmful. US HUD says it's ~16% of homeless people, other sources give different numbers, but it's certainly not a majority, let alone anywhere near 100%.

The biggest problem, unsurprisingly, is housing cost. The US GAO states that a $100 increase in median rent correlates to a 9% rise in homelessness. Rents have gone up a lot more than that.

[queenkjuul]

Oh yeah, 60 years of arresting people in the US for drug crimes has gone so well. Couldn't be better! Cities that decriminalized have better outcomes.

I hope people like you lose every election for the rest of time.

[0xBA5ED]

Which specific cities are you referring to that have better outcomes and which ones have worse outcomes?

[linksnapzz]

People seem to not like stepping over fentanyl zombies. It's a vote winner.

[mmooss]

> arresting people tends to work and alternatives tend to not

What I've read many times is that (essentially) the oppposite is widely accepted consensus: Arresting never works. The US tried the 'drug war' for decades and it was ineffective. Do you have evidence otherwise? It's also unjust to criminalize illness and medical problems for poor people (rich people get sympathy, rehab, and lots of second chances).

What does work is overdose prevention, including needle exhanges and safe injection sites, treating addition as the disease it is (which is how it's treated for rich people), and housing (people experiencing the great instability and stress of homelessness are much less likely to make other changes). Maybe some others I'm not thinking of, too.

[mlsu]

At least in California, there are a lot of public support programs. I mean, a looooot of public support programs. A LOT. Like, to the point where the state is spending tens of thousands of dollars for each homeless person, and probably north of $100k per person per year for a subset. Talk to a firefighter or paramedic in a CA city sometime. They will tell you, there's "regulars" that they have to deal with every single week. The cops and firefighters know all of them by name.

We're paying hours a day in overtime to basically have the cops, firefighters, and EMTs deal with the same small population of mentally ill people on the same street corner every week, for years. These people cannot get better because they choose not to stay in the mental hospital or substance abuse programs offered to them. Someone is 5150'd, placed on a 3-day hold, and 72 hours later they walk out of the hospital and back to the same street corner, where they have a mental breakdown again the following week. You can offer support -- they will basically tell you the same thing, I'm not sick at all, there's nothing wrong with me, I am not a danger to myself or others, and you are shit out of luck.

At the same time, there are way more homeless people who are silently and cleanly living in their cars and showing up to work every day at a low wage job. Most people won't ever see them unless they look closely. Visit /r/urbancarliving sometime to get an idea of what that population looks like. Those people might get a 15 minute "knock" from the cops once a month.

The actually progressive option is to involuntarily incarcerate people who need it, while not criminalizing car/RV living, offering work placement services, housing assistance etc. The most realistic thing would probably be to build subsidized mobile homes and clean, low-rent central places to park an RV.

You correctly identified the biggest thing here though which is making housing affordable. Unfortunately, that will never happen.

[showerst]

I mostly agree with your points, but I think the involuntary incarceration is a major rock and a hard place situation.

There are definitely people for whom it would be a compassionate (and often societally optimal) thing to do. Giving the government the power to decide to take people away indefinitely is just a spectacularly bad precedent. Especially right now.

[mlsu]

Yes, you have to be very, very careful. Lots of abuse with involuntary commitment, that's part of why it was abolished so completely.

I mean the reason this is a pipe dream and we all just opt to deal with it is that our state/institutional capacity has been eroded so completely. So, we just take away the public benches and call it a day.

The cruel way to do this is to just criminalize the behavior and then move all these people into the prison system. I think that would be a moral sin, but I see why people go there -- the alternative would be to construct a totally new, parallel mental health system with kinda like a jury/parole board type system, representation, and so on, and make it explicitly not part of the criminal justice system. Since the point is rehabilitation, not justice. All that would probably be insanely expensive, but a society focused on the humanity of its citizens would probably see it as worthwhile. Our society unfortunately, just does not see its citizens that way.

[JuniperMesos]

One of the benefits of institutionalizing the problematic homeless (either via incarceration or involuntarily mental health treatment, there's not a whole lot of difference between those two things from the perspective of the person subject to them anyway), is that it would allow the state to relax certain laws about simply being unsheltered without otherwise causing problems for people. Someone who is living silently and cleanly in their car is not a problem for me - I know more than one relatively well-paid, reasonably-intelligent person who is basically living that kind of lifestyle voluntarily - and I would prefer it if they weren't even getting a 15 minute knock from the cops once a month.

[RAMJAC]

I live in a shelter, if you looked at the cost per person, it would probably be north 20k per resident to be housed here. This is the overhead of rent, utilities, salaries for case worker, security, maintenance, etc. When you include other parts of the system, it's easily another 5k; this isn't even taking in account of SNAP, cash assistance, medicaid, etc. There is a whole system and it ain't cheap.

Now, this isn't to say living is great. You are living in a dorm with 20+ felons, you have bedbugs to contend with, and it's dirty. I still have a normal ass job as well. Being homeless fucking sucks.

[strictnein]

I didn't create this "false dichotomy", nor did I say that those were the only two options. I'm just observing the fact that the current system that the major cities in the US seem to be employing is to treat homeless as a valid choice, even if much/most of it is a result of addiction and mental illness. The end result of that treating it that way is the death and suffering of people who actually need lots of help and who would be better served by more aggressive tactics.

[JoshTriplett]

I don't believe it's a deliberate decision by (most) policymakers. I think it's a structural failure across several axes, including failure to make enough housing for it to be affordable, and attacks on every front by people who treat all social programs and public assistance as evil. Most places have one or the other problem, if not both.

[SoftTalker]

A drug-addicted/mentally ill chronically unsheltered person is not going to be able to afford a home at any price. If they could hold down any kind of regular job and sustain an income they would find someplace to live.

Also most "affordable" housing initiatives attack it by mandating "affordable" for new construction instead of just letting developers build what they can make the most money building. No developer wants to build "affordable" homes if they can build and sell high-end homes. So by imposing "affordability" mandates, they just encourage developers to go elsewhere.

New high-end homes make the older homes more affordable. New "affordable" homes simply don't get built, at least not in anywhere near the numbers that are needed.

[JoshTriplett]

To your first point: people don't typically start out that way, things spiral down. And it's much harder to get out of that spiral if homes are completely unaffordable. It also doesn't help that the most temperate places (where you won't die of exposure if unsheltered) are also the least affordable places (because they're prosperous and haven't built nearly enough housing).

> Also most "affordable" housing initiatives attack it by mandating "affordable" for new construction instead of just letting developers build what they can make the most money building. No developer wants to build "affordable" homes if they can build and sell high-end homes. So by imposing "affordability" mandates, they just encourage developers to go elsewhere.

> New high-end homes make the older homes more affordable. New "affordable" homes simply don't get built, at least not in anywhere near the numbers that are needed.

Complete agreement that the current approach is not working, yes. The right approach is to build, and keep building, until everything is affordable. And the political challenge is the existing cohort of people who think a house should be an asset that appreciates rather than a necessity of life that everyone should be able to afford. People who are put in a particularly bad position by that (e.g. difficulty moving or retiring because housing prices went down) may need help.

[JuniperMesos]

Any meaningful public support program that actually keeps severely-mentally-ill visibly-homeless people from acting crazy in public will necessarily involve involuntarily incarcerating at least some of them, some of the time. A lot of very dysfunctional people genuinely do not want to cooperate with meaningful public support programs or are simply too out of it to meaningfully consent or not consent to participation in such.

[ohnei]

That is going right back to false dichotomy. Something can be meaningful and not clean up the streets of all things uncomfortable.

[JuniperMesos]

Sure, but if it doesn't specifically solve the problem of cleaning up the streets of visibly-homeless people, then it doesn't solve the problem of public transit authorities wanting to remove benches from public transit waiting areas.

[Anvoker]

Unfortunately, framing the problem as this kind of dichotomy is something people are inclined to do because then the problem can be reduced to the unwillingness of the opposing side to face reality.

Sometimes the dichotomy is correct, but the bias exists.

[User23]

You should read a little book called Games People Play. Focus particular attention on the section on the game "Indigent."

This isn't a resource allocation problem, or rather, it isn't a resource allocation problem the way you seem to think it is.

[xp84]

Nothing?? What are you talking about? Go look up how much tax money the SF government spends trying to help the unhoused in their current budget. But no amount will fix the problem because if you ask a drug addict if they want help (and it’s not help getting drugs) they usually say “no thanks.” Many addicts are never ready to accept that kind of help. Sadly.

[JoshTriplett]

No amount of help will solve a housing problem in a city where people can't afford to live. Build more housing.

[xp84]

Super strongly agree with you on that. But unfortunately building tons of housing is quite politically unpopular as well, unless it’s wildly stupid housing, like the “affordable housing” that costs more (paid by the city) to build than market rate costs for some reason.

[AussieWog93]

I think a big part of this queasiness comes from the fact that a lot of the institutions we would put addicts and mentally ill people in really were nightmarish.

And ignoring the whole issue of the sanitariums being full of abuse, I don't think you can argue that sticking a drug addict in a regular prison full of criminals is good for them either.

[citizenpaul]

The main reasons those places lost support is they became convenient prisons without due process. Why do you think there are so many horror movies based on the setting of a sane person involuntarily put there?

While not ideal you gotta admit now that those people that need help are in your face rather than conveniently disappeared you are thinking about their plight some.

Maybe try to think of something better than forever prisons and stop becoming a ghoul.

[jaapz]

When a drug addict does not have an internal drive to be rid of their addiction, forced treatment will not help.

Just putting them somewhere until the withdrawal symptoms fade will not change whatever drove them to use the drugs in the first place.

[queenkjuul]

They would be better if they were given support. Locking people away is not a solution to anything. You've been sold a lie about the mentally ill, and the homeless, which isn't true.

[mmooss]

'I think you would be better served by not posting to social media and studying personal liberty and ethics.' Should I be able to enforce it? I think people who make comments like those above are much more dangerous than people on the street - the people on the street can't really do harm.

Thankfully, we do have liberty, and they can do what they want - and I can do what I want - and it's none of your business whether it's healthy or not. People also smoke, are sedentary (lots of people here), eat very poorly, use psilocybin (relatively popular here), drink too much, etc.

The only way to begin to approach it is, rather than making judgments on overused stereotypes (another reason to be banned from online comments), talk to each person and ask what they are doing and what they need. I know, I know - it's outrageous to ask the opinions of people you deem substandard, even about their own lives.

[HEmanZ]

Yes the guy who screamed “I’m going to f*ing kill you!” Out of nowhere at my daughter and then chased us, or set fire to random trees in my neighborhood for fun, or cut the copper wiring off the side of my house, or took sledge hammers to local park statues, these people are definitely not a problem. No the problem is really the people who think it should stop. Those horrible, insensitive people.

They’r being so selfish. Drug addicted should have every right to pull you down screaming by your hair because they’re tweaked out of their mind. And after seeing that, you should be welcoming every one you see to your home.

You’re really the problem for feeling uncomfortable walking by the man jerking off to passerby’s, so intolerant of you.

(Every one of these is a true example I have witnessed, along with too much other insanity to write down, from just the last year in Seattle. so don’t tell me im exaggerating)

[InsideOutSanta]

You are describing actual crimes, not homelessness. Nobody is saying that people who are violent should just be left to their own devices.

[HEmanZ]

And no one is saying eat the homeless.

My city is deadlocked on doing anything about the literal crimes I’ve described because acting against violent offenders is seen as oppressing the downtrodden. Building new shelter capacity is insanely difficult because no one wants concentrations of this near them, and concentrated homeless services turn the area into a waste land (like pioneer square) due to the amount of criminal and antisocial behavior. Raising enough money in taxes seems out of the question because everyone thinks someone else should pay.

So you get common crime and antisocial behavior in much of the city and no one can do anything about it.

[mmooss]

> Every one of these is a true example I have witnessed, along with too much other insanity to write down, from just the last year in Seattle

Now that you bring it up, it looks to me like you're exaggerating or extremely unlucky. It reminds me of the litany of crimes people claim happen with immigrants; weren't they eating the cats in one town?

Somehow in my experience in urban life, in many different neighborhoods, I haven't encountered a fraction of what you claim to have seen in the last year, and all the things you describe are so dramatic, while much of what I do know about, not experienced, is mundane and depressing. And of course, nobody would live in cities if things were that bad.

As someone else said, crimes are crimes; plenty of housed people commit them too. I see unhoused people every day and interact regularly, and I haven't seen a crime (of course, crime happens in any population).

Isn't liberty and human rights more important than whatever you're trying to accomplish? You diminish it for others, yours is diminished too.

[HEmanZ]

What cities? You’re right that I never saw anything like this when I lived in Oslo, nor did I see anything like it living in Sydney.

I’m reacting to a specific environment in two major west coast cities, Seattle which I now live, and San Francisco where I regularly travel for work. What I’m describing is not unlucky in these cities, it’s “I take the light rail to pioneer square for work every day.”

[wiskinator]

Yes, I don't think that arresting people for the crime of not having money is a good idea.

We also cannot seem to fund any actual drug programs, because US citizens hate the idea of anyone getting something for free.

[socalgal2]

SF spends ~$100k per homeless person.

[lotu]

Yes but critically none of this money is actually given to the homeless person. So we aren't giving them anything for free we are just dealing with the consequences of them not having a proper support system. Spending money to do that is okay, because it doesn't really directly benefit the homeless person.

[AnotherGoodName]

Also the essence of ‘San Francisco has a lot of homeless’ isn’t really a logical argument against those policies since homeless will often migrate to where the functional support services are. San Francisco may well be doing amazing things with getting people back on their feet at a relatively lower cost than prison.

You need to go many levels deeper on statistics to understand if it’s working or not.

[giraffe_lady]

> since homeless will often migrate to where the functional support services are.

I've heard this a lot but I don't have any reason to believe it's true. Never seen a reputable study that asserts it. I've known a lot of homeless people but none that relocated for this reason. Most who moved were looking for work or trying to get closer to family. Most didn't move at all and were just where they had always been, or in the city they were living in when they became homeless.

[throwaway-11-1]

when I did homeless outreach in San Diego I was told around 40% of the people we were helping were from out of state that moved there but couldn't stay afloat for various reasons, leaving them homeless in the area

[nradov]

Drug tourists migrate to San Francisco because they can get free money to buy drugs.

[bpodgursky]

Sorry this is very wrong. SF has so many homeless people because they come to SF to get free things.

Most of that is not direct cash transfers but they absolutely receive more in services than in other places, that is why they attract homeless from all over the country.

[gottorf]

> arresting people for the crime of not having money

Such people are not arrested for not having money, but instead for being a pox upon the public by virtue of their behavior.

[queenkjuul]

Aka "the behavior of having no money in public" i.e. laying on benches or sitting on trains etc

[artyom]

Them staying in the sidewalk is free. Or the cost is so indirect that nobody is responsible for it.

Facilities like asylums and jails are super costly though. And extra expensive to operate if you don't want to treat the inmates as cattle.

[AnotherGoodName]

I'll add that treating the inmates like cattle is actually the most expensive option of all in the long term. The USA has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world largely due to high recidivism due to the system not providing proper rehabilitation.

So it's costing the USA 65k/yr per inmate on average right now with the 5th highest incarceration rate in the world. The 4 countries above it are not nice places to live contrary to the thought that locking even more people up would make the USA just like the other western nations of the world.

No other country is as stupid as the USA when it comes to homeless. They don't spend a lifetime $65k/yr repeatedly locking up such people. Instead they spend a fraction (when amortised over a lifetime of jail costs) on rehabilitation and public health programs.

[kQq9oHeAz6wLLS]

> Them staying in the sidewalk is free.

Disagree. When the tax-paying public doesn't feel safe around the people living on the sidewalk, they move and take their tax money with them. That means less money for services, roads, education... everything taxes pay for.

That's the cost.

[amanaplanacanal]

That sounds correct in theory, but is it true? Are tax revenue down? Are vacancy rates up?

[Taek]

The cost is not measured in dollars, but rather in the pollution of the pubic space. People feel less safe and more bothered. Stores nearby get less business, and suffer more theft. Passerbys get accosted.

[pessimizer]

> We've decided that putting the mentally ill in a facility and arresting people for public drug use is not something we're comfortable with at the expense of those other things.

We've decided this about every kind of health care. Instead of providing treatment for people who can't afford its bizarre, artificial prices, we prefer to leave them on the street or warehouse them in prisons. After leaving them in prison for an arbitrary amount of time, we then release them into the streets again, with nothing, more screwed up than when they went in, to murder you.

I have no idea what the "tough love" advocates are advocating for. Locking them up in prison is like hiding rotting meat in a freezer; it only works if you're willing to do it forever. The only answer that seems compatible with the spoiled upper-middle class worldview is to shoot the homeless (which often happened* in a lot of South American countries through semi-official paramilitaries), or to drive them into the wilderness outside of town to hopefully die on their own.

As the layoffs of programmers continue, I predict there will be a lot of changes of heart that won't matter at all, because they will be coming from homeless people. Middle-class culture is all about only being interested in issues that harm you directly, even if that issue is somebody dying too loudly nearby.

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[*] Happens? My info is out of date.

[User23]

This postulates that policy is set by consensus.

Now I haven't done any scientific polling, but my informal anecdotal experience is so overwhelmingly to the contrary that I'm comfortable believing that consensus isn't determining policy here.

[NotGMan]

This.

Even an extremely small population of homeless/junkies is enough to "taint" benches.

The same with parks.

[breakyerself]

There are other options that are more effective than either of the things you mentioned, but people's feelings get in the way.

[userbinator]

but it is apparently the consensus.

Not everywhere, fortunately.

[thinkingtoilet]

This sounds like it's from someone who say a video on the two square blocks in SF or Philly and has let the propaganda make them believe this is common everywhere in every American city.

[pocksuppet]

What's wrong with both? Why can't we have public benches, and also not arrest drug users if they are sitting on the benches and smoking?

[kQq9oHeAz6wLLS]

Because sitting on benches quickly turns into living on benches. Then the drug dealers move in, because there's a ready customer base of drug users.

Then the productive members of society move out.

[pocksuppet]

So basically the problem is that productive members of society and drug dealers are incapable of existing near to each other?

Why is that?

I pass by some drug dealers sometimes on the way to work. I don't see the problem. Occasionally I get asked if I want to buy some drugs. I don't want to buy drugs so nothing else happens.

[triceratops]

> [why are] productive members of society and drug dealers incapable of existing near to each other?

Drug dealers are criminals. Criminals commit other crimes and attract other criminals and crime. For example, rival drug dealers who want to take their spot and use violence.

[InsideOutSanta]

Seems like something decriminalizing drugs would solve then.

[amanaplanacanal]

This only solves one problem (you don't get thrown in jail for using drugs), but there are other problems. Drug dealers and gangs still exist. The drug user doesn't know what he is actually buying. Overdoses are easy to do since you don't actually know what you bought.

The way to solve these issues is legalization and regulation.

[pocksuppet]

So the problem is that someone who does one crime is a criminal and being a criminal means someone does every crime? For example, someone who removes DRM from a video game is a criminal, and therefore he also shoots people, so we have to put DRM removers in jail to decrease shooting deaths?

I have to admit, I'm not really following the logic there.

[joenot443]

When you argue in bad faith like this you shouldn’t be surprised nobody takes you seriously.

[9x39]

Because you made a strawman out of their point. Reasonable people avoid drug markets for good reason.

Drug crimes and non-drug crimes (assault, robbery, x/y/z) commonly cluster[1], and citizens with working risk estimation skills move on and cede the space.

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2719901/