[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

[cameldrv]

If the jail is properly run (and I will admit that this is a big if), there aren't any drugs in the jail. Some people, if they get clean for a little while, are in a position to reflect on what they're doing. The indignity of being locked up also puts a very fine point on it.

Now I don't think that this would necessarily work for everyone, but it worked for my friend, and I've heard a number of other similar stories. Sometimes you need to get a very clear message from society/the system that your behavior is unacceptable, and you need to get that message sober or it may not get through.

[y0eswddl]

what a naive position... "if a jail is properly run"

no cage can ever be a healthy environment.

[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.

[ipaddr]

I think I know that family. Didn't the daughter get beat up everyday by that father and that's why he went to jail. Her life is so much better now.

[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.

[0xBA5ED]

You're saying that spending time in jail is roughly equivalent to being a victim of attempted murder.

[pessimizer]

No, I'm saying that both things could have them same effect, so the existence of that effect isn't a proof that the solution makes sense.

If I tell you that covering something in red paint and covering something in tomato sauce will stain them both red, I'm not saying that red paint is tomato sauce.

I also know people who have changed their lives after heart attacks. Am I saying that heart attacks are roughly equivalent to prison stays?

[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.

[charcircuit]

I think you are underestimating how few bad actors it takes to ruin a system, but I do agree with your point that you can also remove the people who think they are negatively impacted. For example in Counter Strike you can either ban the small percentage of cheaters or you could cultivate the community to not care if people are cheating.

[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.

[hn_throwaway_99]

That is a completely irrelevant analogy. I wasn't advocating for the Soylent Green solution.

[cwmoore]

You seem to have missed my meaning entirely. Making a problem invisible makes two problems. Soylent Green is the opposite of the direction I would advocate.

[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

[Loughla]

Have you ever interacted with a heroine or meth user?

Sometimes using drugs is fine, depending on the drug, the reason, and the person. For example, I did cocaine once and immediately knew I needed to cut ties with those friends because if I had access to it regularly, I would ruin my life. Others can do coke recreationally and not have an issue. Others can't form the insight I had until their lives are in shambles, and maybe not even then.

[mx7zysuj4xew]

  > Have you ever interacted with a heroine or meth user?

Yes, I have, and so have you. The thing is You wouldn't notice that they were in fact drug users unless they told you.

[Rendello]

> Crack?! I've got company!

> Oh, relax! "Oh, I'm Mark, I'm in the '80s, I'm dying of heroin in a puddle in the corner in an advert!" Drugs are fine, Mark, everyone agrees now. Drugs are what happen to people, and that's fine, so shut up.

https://youtu.be/yoZ1EGxPaOE?t=19

[0xBA5ED]

You actually changed what I said then declared it nonsense. I said abuse, not use.

[mx7zysuj4xew]

Because the word "use" and "abuse" are interchangeable for prohibitionists

[amanaplanacanal]

How do you separate those legally? I ask, because we are discussing using the legal system here.

[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.

[Taek]

When I was in San Francisco, I had a homeless man with one eye (the empty eye socket actively oozing) come up to me unprovoked (quite literally unprovoked, I was just on a walk and not interacting with anybody at all), get within 2 centimeters of my face, and scream at the top of his lungs "I WILL MURDER YOU". He then walked away and nothing else of note happened (aside from me spending the rest of the evening with my pulse at 140).

Suffice to say, I don't think it's fair to categorize me as a Karen for asserting that San Francisco has a large number of problematic homeless people. I could give about 8 other stories (from SF, Boston, NYC, and Chicago) that happened to me, two of which (both SF) include grown men dropping their pants, exposing their genitals, and visibly pooping on public streets where children were present, with no attempt to obtain any degree of privacy.

These aren't stories from my friends, these are things that I personally witnessed and experienced. These aren't 'oh that guy is ugly and smelly' stories, these are 'if I did that myself I would be arrested' stories.

[jancsika]

> He then walked away and nothing else of note happened (aside from me spending the rest of the evening with my pulse at 140).

Did you call the police after this person made a threat on your life?

[JuniperMesos]

I assure you that problematic homeless people sleep on benches in public spaces at times during the day when normal people using the public transit system normally would like to use them (also sometimes people, reasonably enough, want to take public transit late at night or in the early morning). That's why the authorities remove the benches.

[fortran77]

You use disparaging slurs ("Karen") to refer to a woman who just wants to ride the bus to get to work and earn an living, and you politely call a person who is a public nuisance a "homeless man".

[cucumber3732842]

Karen isn't a name in the same way that Boommer isn't an age. It's a state of mind.

We're not talking about the people who have been genuinly victimized. We're talking about the people who wring their hands over some smelly guy in some corner on the subway. Because they dominate the stats.

[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.

[ipsento606]

> US HUD says it's ~16% of homeless people, other sources give different numbers, but it's certainly not a majority

"Homeless people" is a broad category that includes people temporarily living in vehicles, bouncing between family members, or sleeping on a friend's couch. It also includes people who are about to lose their home, young people living alone.

But when everyday people use the term, they usually mean, specifically, visible homeless people - i.e. people who are homeless long-term, sleeping rough on the streets or in parks, etc.

The two groups are pretty different to each other. I would be very surprised if the rate of drug addiction in the second group was the same as the rate of drug addiction in the first group

[queenkjuul]

The people you think are "temporarily" living in vehicles are not doing so temporarily.

[Dylan16807]

> I would be very surprised if the rate of drug addiction in the second group was the same as the rate of drug addiction in the first group

But that's a far far weaker claim than the one above.

If the rate is 90% or higher in the second group, then we get close to the claim being true. (Though still a subset rather than the circles being the same; lots of people with drug problems have homes.)

[fourseventy]

Walk down the makeshift tents on the sidewalks of downtown San Francisco and tell me with a straight face that only 16% of those people are addicted to drugs.

[cwmoore]

This is a textbook example of a biased observation. The conversation on this topic is so basic.

[cyberax]

> False, and harmful.

Sorry. But you're either misinformed or actively malicious here.

> US HUD says it's ~16% of homeless people

It absolutely is close to 100% of _unsheltered_ people. Some social workers helping the unsheltered homeless are now saying that they have not seen anybody who's _not_ on drugs or who is not mentally ill.

If you want authoritative source, here's UCLA study from the blessed pre-COVID era: https://capolicylab.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/Health-Co...

> The biggest problem, unsurprisingly, is housing cost.

No, it's really really not.

> The US GAO states that a $100 increase in median rent correlates to a 9% rise in homelessness.

And the correlation disappears when you look at the states with cold climate.

[JoshTriplett]

> If you want authoritative source, here's UCLA study from the blessed pre-COVID era: https://capolicylab.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/Health-Co...

Which specifically leads with a page saying:

> Hundreds of studies - including our own - show economic pressures are the primary drivers of homelessness, that housing people ends homelessness, and that targeted financial assistance helps people at risk of homelessness stay stably housed

Also, the cited study blatantly does not show the numbers ("close to 100%") you claim it has, even leaving that aside. You're also now equivocating between drugs and mental illness, as well as between drugs and alcohol. And you're not taking into account the direction of cause and effect (e.g. which came first, the homelessness or the addiction).

I understand that you're also referencing anecdata from social workers. In those cases, there's an inherent bias: people with a drug problem are going to be harder and more memorable cases, which makes them feel like a larger proportion than they are. People homeless for economic reasons are likely to loom less large in people's minds than the times they dealt with someone who had a drug problem.

[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.

[SoftTalker]

And once things have spiraled down, they won't recover just by giving them a home. My town tried that and the homes were quickly trashed to the point of being uninhabitable because nothing (or not enough) was done to address the addictions and other self-destructive behaviors or illness.

Any kind of assistance has to be built on a foundation of mandatory rehab/treatment and staying clean or it will fail.

[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.