[tptacek]

I don't understand your second graf; you seem to be referring to an Occupy protest as an "encampment of homeless people", but those two things obviously aren't equivalent.

San Francisco differs from Chicago on homelessness in two significant ways: the weather and environment is amenable year-round, while Chicago is inhospitable for 1/4 of the year, and San Francisco's politics regarding homeless people are "hands-off".

Based on the last spot counts I could find, Chicago and San Francisco have roughly comparable homeless populations, despite the fact that Chicago is more than 3x larger. That difference is not simply because Las Vegas busses homeless people to SF.

I dispute the notion that SF does a particularly good job taking care of homeless people. It's indeed possible that SF does a better job of this than Chicago and NYC, both of which see clusters of indigent people on the streets as a quality-of-life problem for residents. But if you can find a source that says SF is doing a good job of actually delivering services and getting homeless people off the streets and into society, I'd like to read it; the sources I've found say the opposite.

[debt]

The CPD definitely makes it a priority to treat people as "blight" in the more touristy areas(Grant Park, Loop, Navy Pier, North Ave. Beach, etc); be it protestors or homeless people, they're quick to, literally in some cases, extricate them from the area. The Occupy protests in NYC turned into an encampment of people for some time. They weren't homeless people, but I fail to see the difference between an encampment of homeless in a public space vs an encampment of protestors in a public space. If there's nothing from stopping the protestors, I assume they will protest indefinitely, thus they'll be "living" in Grant Park for some time.

Someone on here had mentioned something I never thought of before, and it might be a cop out I don't know but "quality of life" isn't something for people of authority or higher societal status to figure out for another person. To put it another way, just because a person is living on the street doesn't mean that person doesn't want to live on the street and you, as an individual, shouldn't make such assumptions. They may seem to be in a bad state, but, perhaps, that's their lifestyle. SF is hands-off for that reason.

The services exist in SF for those who want treatment; a homeless person may subsist on the nice weather and any government social services alone if they choose that lifestyle. People go in and get their treatment, food, medicine, blankets, etc. and then they're on their way back to their living area.

Is it right for me to judge them based on their lifestyle? Should the government insist that they're living incorrectly and explain to them that they're messed up in the head and that normal people don't want to live on the streets?

[tptacek]

Three things:

1. The difference between an Occupy encampment and a clustered homeless population is that the Occupy encampment is there to disrupt the surrounding area (that's the point: to generate awareness) and the homeless cluster is there for safety and convenience --- in other words, for the intrinsic benefit of the people in the cluster. Policy responses to those two different circumstances aren't comparable.

2. I do not disagree that displacing organic, emergent clusters of homeless people to improve optics and quality of life for residents and tourists is an unfriendly and probably unhelpful policy response to homelessness. It is not my contention that shuttling homeless people out of the Mag Mile in Chicago is a positive step. This is, however, the standard policy response to homelessness in much of the US (not just Chicago), because the overwhelming majority of urban residents want it to be.

3. The relativism underpinning your sentiment about not judging the lifestyle of the homeless is disquieting. Homeless people aren't hobos. They aren't deliberately living a different lifestyle. They are an underserved population of mentally ill, substance-dependent people continually victimized by their circumstances through lack of medical care, death by exposure, and crime. Let me help you out: it is OK to judge homelessness as bad. Homelessness is bad.

[debt]

1. Regardless, I believe the Occupy movement in NYC wasn't very disruptive. It was more of a peaceful protest. So I was going off that.

3. While I agree a large percentage of the homeless in Chicago are as you describe; it seems, at least from what I've read, SF contains a large enough percentage of homeless people that also seem to choose the lifestyle.

http://www.dailycal.org/2012/10/22/homeless-by-choice/

Read the comments for more insight into the mindset.

[tptacek]

The belief that homeless people in SF want to be homeless and should be left alone to be homeless does a pretty good job of encapsulating the qualms people have about how SF deals with homelessness.