[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]

What would the police do about it, arrest the homeless person? Would the local criminal justice system have the capacity to charge and convict them if the cops did so? Many of the cities where visible homelessness is a problem also have shortages of cops that cause them to triage what sorts of incidents they send an officer to respond to?

I probably would not have called the police after this person if this happened to me, because I expect they would do nothing about it.

[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.

[Taek]

I personally have close to a dozen friends who have spent between 2 and 6 weeks of their life (but not longer) living out of their car in a state of actual temporary homelessness. Almost always due to financial issues.

Temporarily living in vehicles is absolutely a thing.

[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.