San Francisco's homelessness is a humanitarian crisis

https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/editorials/article/Editorial-San-Francisco-s-homelessness-is-a-16586799.php

by tosh • 5 years ago

99 200 5 years ago

Completely self-inflicted. Let’s make sure the rest of the US does not adopt SF policies. For that matter, west coast policies (LA, Seattle, Portland).

jorts• 5 years ago

What policies are you referring to besides zoning?

Rebelgecko• 5 years ago

Warm winters

davidw4• 5 years ago

It really is a function of housing and zoning is a big deal in those west coast cities. I found this quite convincing: https://www.slowboring.com/p/homelessness-is-about-housing-n...

teknolog• 5 years ago

There's a lot more than just zoning, although that might be the single biggest factor.

On top of that, the permiting process is insane, takes forever (I've gone through it), and costs a lot of money. Your neighbors get a very long time to file any complaints on your proposal (which they always do, because NIMBY). It is such a painful thing that I'd rather avoid doing any more construction.

CA has a lot of rules that make construction very expensive, and SF even more so (only cast iron drain pipes, because ABS is somehow not good enough in this historic city).

Earthquakes are real, but forcing everybody with 5 units (I believe) to retrofit (at the same time) cost millions of dollars per property - driving up the rent.

And now solar power is mandatory for new construction, and solar is great, but it does add tens of thousands per unit.

coding1233• 5 years ago

Maybe start with these as possible options:

Second house/vacation house (not rented): Multiply property tax by 10.

Rentals (including airbnb): If mortgaged: Max the rental (monthly and daily) to 1.1x Mortgage amount + yearly property tax amount / 12. Unmortgaged: Property tax amount * 2 max per monthly income.

Change the maximum amount you can sell a house to be equal to cost of materials plus 30 days of labor for 5 people.

Owner builder homes can get a 60K automatic grant - everything must be verified - and limit land HOA rules that specify a minimum sized house.

Make "Limited Density Owner-Built Rural Dwellings" possible in areas that are not affected by fire.

Finally to make all this feasible - make junk properties illegal (noise limits + junkyard style land usage)

It would solve a lot of NIMBY issues and please the YIMBYs. I have a billion other crazy ideas like this.

phlakaton• 5 years ago

Consider the cluster of policies that just resulted in the 469 Stevenson St project, alluded to in the article, getting axed. As I understand it:

* The project had been before the Planning Commission for at least a year.

* The project had completed an final Environmental Impact Report that had been approved by the Planning Committee. Another regulatory hurdle of questionable value for a mid-city development.

* An advocacy group, Yerba Buena Neighborhood Consortium, apparently run by a local affordable housing ownership group called TODCO, had their lawyers file an appeal to the Board of Supes opposing certification of the EIR. What could have been a pro-forma approval is now another potential place for roadblock.

* The environmental reasons? Millenium Tower FUD, gentrification, and shadows on a nearby mid-city plaza. The scope of EIRs has apparently gotten massive if gentrification is included. (Whether a Nordstrom valet parking lot better serves the local low-income community than actual housing with an affordable housing carve-out is another question.)

* The Board of Supes reverses the Planning Commission's approval. Back to the drawing board. Or... if you want to _sell_ that property you can't do anything with, I'm sure there's a local property owner that will take it off your hands if the price is low enough. ;-)

We see here multiple stages way beyond zoning where a housing project can get torpedoed, and that these extra stages have grown in scope to cover just about anything local property owners might want to object to. And that's not even considering San Francisco's Discretionary Review process, which gives local groups even _more_ opportunities to delay or kill your project if they don't like it.

kgwgk• 5 years ago

Wouldn't the adoption of those policies in the rest of the US alleviate the issue in SF?

(I imagine many homeless people who is going to SF would be going/staying elsewhere in that case, maybe I'm wrong about that.)

generalizations2• 5 years ago

Or, it would just put the rest of the US in the same situation as SF. Doubling down isn't the reasonable response here. I think it should better be considered a failed experiment.

mlindner• 5 years ago

Homelessness is also assisted by climate. It's impossible to die of exposure in San Francisco.

nemothekid5• 5 years ago

Let’s make sure the rest of the US does not adopt SF policies.

The rest of the US decided to just ship the homeless west. What could the west coast do other than throw them in the ocean?

generalizations2• 5 years ago

They tried shipping them east. Didn't really work.

president2• 5 years ago

Let them stay on the streets but at least they could try prosecuting the ones that break laws (assault, theft, hard drugs) instead of letting them run rampant on the streets.

rendall2• 5 years ago

The rest of the US decided to just ship the homeless west. [citation needed]

rendall2• 5 years ago

The rest of the US decided to just ship the homeless west. [citation needed]

throwaway199373• 5 years ago

Many social problems in west coast cities are self-inflicted but there's also the 9th circuit's Martin v. Boise decision (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_v._Boise). It prevents criminalizing public camping unless there's shelter space for everyone.

Edited to fix link, thanks!

ggreer• 5 years ago

Your link is parsed incorrectly by HN, causing it to be a 404. The actual link is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_v._Boise

While I understand the logic of the courts, this decision has absolutely ruined public parks in much of the western US.

gretch3• 5 years ago

perspective: I own a SFH in lower peninsula and have a lot of homeless near me - daily or semi-daily interactions. I'm typically YIMBY and pro-housing, though I lean against homeless-specific solutions (but it's case-by-case ofc). Read the article, watched the oliver segment.

I think the problem with this angle of argument is that it pretty much solely relies on extreme empathy holding from current homeowners (aka those with power). And when that empathy is worn down, such as the example woman in the oliver segment who has to pick up human poop on a regular basis, then the argument just falls completely flat. Like it basically goes like this "Look how bad these ppl have it, don't you care?" and the answer is "No." - then what do you do? There's no avenue for follow up or iteration - you've just made a assumption just completely breaks.

You can criticize the housed-first perspectives, but at least they try to find win-win common ground between the interest of the house (not picking up human poop) and the homeless (get a home). I'm also a big fan of the tax/finance forward methods and oliver had an example during his segment of a way to save $ per homeless per year spending.

To me this article reads as the epitome of 'bleeding-heart' syndrome, and lacking critical thinking toward actual problem solving with multiple stake holder interests in play.

ProfessorLayton• 5 years ago

I take issue with framing homeowners as "those with power", particularly when talking about SF. Most people in SF are renters, not homeowners, and could easily overpower any self interested NIMBY homeowners... But they don't, for various reasons, but one of them is that they don't care either.

Aside from housing, a lot of homeless people are in need of mental healthcare, and that's something no particular city is equipped to deal with without backing from the state.

RC_ITR7• 5 years ago

I find it so weird that people blame homeless people for defecating on the streets.

Where else can they go? One of c. 2 dozen 'pit stops' that mostly close by 8pm?

That's the reason you've lost empathy for them, because they are humans who have to shit and are denied access to toilets?

vineyardmike• 5 years ago

That's the reason you've lost empathy for them, because they are humans who have to shit and are denied access to toilets?

Its totally fair, and expected that people lose sympathy when they have to clean up shit.

Yes, if there were safe, available, places to shit then that'd be a good step to avoid this issue. But the root issue is that people no longer have sympathy because its so disruptive and so gross and has been going on for so long.

I find it so weird that people blame homeless people for defecating on the streets.

They're blamed because they did it. They did it because there is no alt, but they did it, and "it" is gross and not desirable. SF has been talking about the issue for years, and its not resolved, so your tolerance and sympathy drops over time.

jerry19794• 5 years ago

I had to clean up another person's poop because they pooped next to my car. I felt pretty angry about it because I hate poop, and I had a hard time understanding why this person left their poop on the ground instead of putting it in a nearby dumpster. Then I remembered they were probably high or had a mental illness. It takes a bit of stoic zen to get un-angry about cleaning up another person's poop.

JumpCrisscross4• 5 years ago

That's the reason you've lost empathy for them, because they are humans who have to shit and are denied access to toilets?

Oxytocin--the hormone critically involved in empathy and social behaviors--has been linked to toxin-elicited and socially-mediated disgust [1]. If that link holds, it suggests why public defecation is the emerging turning point of the debate.

Rhetorically, this means trivializing the problem is unlikely to be successful. People will lose empathy for people who shit on their street. On the flip side, this offers a well-scoped beachhead. Solving the public defecation problem could rebuild empathy for San Francisco's homeless and give political oxygen to the broader, more-intractable problem of homelessness overall.

(I'm honestly shocked nobody has run for office in San Francisco on a vision zero-esque pledge to eliminate public defecation.)

[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1111/gbb.12...

throwaway199373• 5 years ago

That's the reason you've lost empathy for them, because they are humans who have to shit and are denied access to toilets?

Nope, I lost empathy because in Seattle the homeless are exempt from prosecution and commit crimes with impunity. People like Francisco Calderon (https://komonews.com/news/project-seattle/warrant-issued-for...) or Travis Berge (https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/meth-mental-illness-murder-...) are repeatedly released to commit crimes and harm others.

tosh• 5 years ago

FWIW: Vienna had a housing crisis 100 years ago which lead to “Gemeindebauten” and eventually turned Vienna into one of the most-livable cities in the world. I know, it would be naive to reduce this to housing policy but it certainly played its part from what I can tell.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemeindebau

dmitrygr• 5 years ago

Similar ideas in some other places did not end as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khrushchyovka

nivenkos2• 5 years ago

Still better than not having any though?

yayr• 5 years ago

you could say this to anything, e.g. startups. so what is here to learn?

nemothekid5• 5 years ago

That's socialism/communism/anarchy and would never fly in the US. Almost half of Vienna is owned by the government and 60% of residents in Vienna live in social housing. It would require the US to stop treating housing as an investment vehicle.

nivenkos2• 5 years ago

It was the socialist authority that carried out a lot of the construction though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Vienna

Can't see that happening in SF, they'll probably just tighten up the laws on loitering and rough sleeping and send them to private prisons instead... even if it costs more.

dimitrios12• 5 years ago

SF isn't sending anyone to prison. It's open season on any type of burglary or theft. You have to leave your car completely unlocked and windows rolled down or they will 100% get smashed in.

JamesBarney• 5 years ago

I wouldn't be surprised if 1934 Vienna could build housing an order of magnitude more cheaply and efficiently than the San Francisco or California governments.

buzzert• 5 years ago

Especially in a city where the board of supervisors will block a 500 unit housing development for fears of "gentrification".

https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/Why-did-S-F-superviso...

strangattractor• 5 years ago

I have lived in SF for 20 years. There are no good single solutions once an individual becomes homeless. The barriers to re-entering housing are high and homelessness is often the result of multiple problems making a single policy ineffective.

In my opinion, I lack evidence, the money should be targeting preventing people from ever getting homeless in the first place. The intervention needs to happens earlier because once a person is homeless the problems that contributed to their situation become insurmountable.

Flatcircle9• 5 years ago

The huge surge in homelessness is the result of drugs. Cheap opioids.

craigmcnamara5• 5 years ago

It's a common misconception that people experiencing homelessness are all junkies, but it's not true. A large number of homeless people are working poor. Estimates vary from 25% all the way up to 60%. If you sleep in your car because you're priced out of an apartment and you have a job, you're still homeless. Not everyone that's homeless has a needle in their arm, shouting at traffic on the street.

riffic3• 5 years ago

does A cause B or does B cause A?

craigmcnamara5• 5 years ago

In my opinion, I lack evidence, the money should be targeting preventing people from ever getting homeless in the first place. The intervention needs to happens earlier because once a person is homeless the problems that contributed to their situation become insurmountable.

The city of SF does this already. There are nav centers and they triage cases for people that are on the brink of becoming homeless. The first step is prevention, but in an area that has booming rents, booming homelessness is never far behind. If you grew up in SF and you become homeless you're likely going to return to the place you know even if you don't have a place to live. The complete inability of SF to build housing at any income level is the biggest driver.

agumonkey• 5 years ago

yes homelessness is often complex and multifactorial. years of abuse, psychological traits, bad luck. Pick any combinations in any order.

I honestly don't know what homeless people need, if they even want to go back to 'normal' life. What I think is possible is helping the volunteers to do more with less to provide essential care (hygiene, medicine, basic nutrition and warmth). Then there's safety.. Even some free lockers would be a boon for them. Keeping critical stuff when you sleep is a luxury for most.

All I know is that with not much funding, a bit of space, and smart care (invest in the easy to save, make them volunteers, and grow ~exponential self sufficient resources that way) you could tame these problems by a lot. Most naive solutions (renting hotels) backfire in cost or quality. I was quite stumped after hearing guys saying they'd rather sleep out than in a shelter, in the winter.. I don't want to assume but it's pretty telling.

heymartinadams• 5 years ago

Problem: “63% said an inability to afford rent was the primary culprit”

Solution: redistribute rents

How: land-value taxation or municipal land trusts + basic income

frockington1• 5 years ago

Wouldn't a land-value tax just increase rent? I would increase rent directly proportional to a land-value tax if I were a landlord in the city.

davidw4• 5 years ago

LVT taxes the land. If you have 1 unit on 1 acre... it's going to pay the same amount in taxes as 10 units. So it's an incentive to use the land intensely enough in order to pay less in taxes.

vletal• 5 years ago

Sure it would. Yet not to the full extent. The system is complex, not all people rent, not all home owners would be hit by the tax equally, ...

Flatcircle9• 5 years ago

When will we call the homeless crisis what it really is? A drug problem. The majority of the people you see on the streets in tents etc, are drug addicts. Reframing the problem as a drug crisis can give the people that are trying to solve it new solutions.

In a drug crisis, focusing on more housing might not solve the problem.

We have been trying to solve the problem with more affordable housing for a decade and every year the problem gets worse.

Because we're dealing with a drug epidemic. IMHO. It's opioids.

craigmcnamara5• 5 years ago

You're very incorrect. There are a huge number of people that are homeless that have full time jobs. There are a huge number of homeless people that don't use drugs. The problems they have are many and nuanced, trying to blame it on a single thing is a gross oversimplification of a complex problem. The solution to homelessness is housing first.

liveoneggs• 5 years ago

people in tents?

Flatcircle9• 5 years ago

Funny enough, your point of view has been the consensus over the last decade and has been used to formulate solutions and the problem’s only getting worse. So perhaps you might consider other points of view?

jerry19794• 5 years ago

I came across research showing that the drug use people commonly find in homeless encampments leads to disaffiliation or the severing of social ties to people outside the encampment [0]. What do you think about the idea that addiction may not lead directly to homelessness, but rather that addictions prevent people from finding a place to live outside the encampments?

[0] https://filtermag.org/drugs-homelessness/

x3n0ph3n32• 5 years ago

Drug use is more likely a symptom rather than a cause. They are used for self-medication for other underlying social, mental, and other maladies.

Gigachad6• 5 years ago

Drug use prevents treatment until the drug use is resolved. Shoving an addict in to a house and calling it job done will result in a destroyed home and a soon to be homeless person again.

v7p1Qbt1im• 5 years ago

No. This reframing of the issue is incredibly reductive. The best thing you can do for homeless people us provide them with housing. Shocking I know.

Once they have housing — no strings attached housing — you need to provide health care (mental/physical). Now they have a chance to get reintegrated into society.

But without permanent housing nothing is going to happen.

Having said this, of course drug problems are extremely prevalent among the homeless population. It‘s rarely ever the root cause of the homelessness though. Maybe they had an accident or illness and were prescribed opioids frivolously and for too long. After they are sandbagged with crippling medical dept they are addicted and can‘t pay for their expenses at the same time.

Also, living on the street in extreme poverty is terrible and bleak. So no wonder one would end up depressed and start using even more opioids to mentally escape.

s1artibartfast12• 5 years ago

We should just build a resort city for them somewhere in the central valley and provide free housing, healthcare, and training opportunities. Anyone who doesn't want to go is left on their own and subject to the same expectations & laws as everyone else.

stevecalifornia• 5 years ago

There are broadly two kinds of homeless: those who lost their job and are discreetly trying to get back on track... and those who choose this lifestyle and shit all over the place, make enormous amounts of trash, smoke meth in bookstore bathrooms, steal from stores and assault people.

All day long I see the second group all over town destroying stuff and causing mayhem that ends up hurting innocent bystanders.

Yet when the media talks about homelessness they only speak as if all homeless are in the first group-- down on their luck and needing a helping hand and if you feel anything other than deep guilt you are less than human.

The ruse is up: everyone has too many anecdotes of being assaulted, having to walk out into the street to go around heaps of garbage, watching people openly inject drugs on sidewalks in front of unwilling witnesses.

There are clearly two distinct things going on and they likely have two totally different solutions. If media and politicians keep communicating as if there is only one problem, despite what our ears and eyes tell us every single day, then this will continue to get worse and the outcome will likely be the same as the 'defund the police' movement-- a voter referendum that says 'enough of this nonsense'.

Flatcircle9• 5 years ago

We're living through an opioid epidemic and people are reframing it as a housing problem, SMH

nverno4• 5 years ago

It blows my mind how out of touch people have to be to reframe the problem in this manner. Better housing is always a good thing to strive for, but clearly not the driving factor for the vast majority of homeless.

UseStrict• 5 years ago

Pretty much yes, can't force people to get mental health help, can't force people to quit opioids. People who think housing and access to mental health and counselling programs will solve the entire homeless crisis are incredibly short-sighted.

Anecdotal for sure, but a couple of my friends have had parents who were addicts, even when they had the love and support and housing options of being with family they chose to stay on the streets, unless they decided they needed to rob a family member for some more spending money. Spreading subsidized housing out doesn't work, addicts will just hang out closer to their dealers/sources on the streets. Putting up highly concentrated housing programs just make this problem even more dense, creating a radius of exceptionally high crime.

Even in the most idyllic scenario of creating perpetually well-maintained and totally free housing, many will end up choosing the streets anyways, out of convenience, mistrust, or mental health issues.

anon90012• 5 years ago

We should just go a step further and hand out oxy or percs to addicts for free.

The pills are incredibly cheap to manufacture.

A few things would happen if we started handing out opiods for free:

* petty crime would decrease -- it's not the drug that causes the crime, it's trying to pay for the drug

* organized crime would decrease -- moving opiods is a lucrative operation, and our addicts are bankrolling very bad people by doing business with them

* users would get clean product -- opiods laced with fentanyl are a huge problem and responsible for the majority of hospitalizations and overdose deaths

* more users could hold stable employment and rehabilitate themselves -- i've known plenty of opiods addicts, but you'd never know they had a problem, because they were all rich tech workers that were not stealing to satisfy their addiction

* most injection users would be pill users if it wasn't so expensive -- giving them free pills would encourage a less risky route of administration and decrease sepsis cases

If we still have a homeless problem after that, communal housing outside of the city with free drugs might be enough to get them to relocate to where they're not a problem and in considerably less danger.

But then I remember that we live in a god-fearing christian nation, where drugs are bad and addicts should be shunned, so my plan probably won't work.

standardUser2• 5 years ago

Many homeless people suffer from physical and mental disabilities that make them incapable of living independently. They aren't volunteering to live in grotesque poverty, nor are they in-between jobs, so they don't fit into your overly-neat dichotomy. I'd argue that any serious steps towards addressing homelessness should start with a realistic assessment of the issue, not axe grinding.

gotoeleven• 5 years ago

Somehow we've collectively decided that the best way to deal with people who can't take care of themselves is to ... let them take care of themselves and also give them free needles.

We clearly need to bring back insane asylums and institutionalization. Why can't we just try this again and try to make them less abusive?

pjs_• 5 years ago

If you grow up in a shitty environment there is an increased probability that you will get into drugs. Once you start doing strong drugs all day, there is a considerably increased chance of shitting all over the place and causing havoc.

I don't know if you grew up in a shitty environment or not but please consider that even if you did, the fact that you are not smoking meth in bookstore bathrooms cannot be purely a product of your own stout moral fiber, it is also due to luck, and the people that you see running riot in the city are the other side of that coin.

Speaking for myself, I am a post-graduate educated rich white guy who does my recycling and helps old ladies cross the road, and I am absolutely certain that if I got deep enough into serious drugs I would be shitting and yelling with the best of them, and I fuckin pray that if I ever get into that state, that educated people would have the sophistication to view me as something other than the unforgivably evil cartoon villain that you describe.

lapetitejort• 5 years ago

Everything I've heard and read from current and former unhoused people points to the fact that mental health drops rapidly upon losing a home. Not being able to sleep a whole night without waking up and being fearful of people invading your space is sufficient. Add in food insecurity, nearby drug use, violence, etc and your brain gets fried. Just like a physical injury, this wound could take months or years to heal.

jaywalk2• 5 years ago

I disagree that the parent described an "unforgivably evil cartoon villain" but how does your comment help? It's clear that particular type of homelessness is a massive problem in SF, and how they managed to get to that state isn't particularly relevant in solving the crisis. It's still important in helping prevent people from getting to that point, but that's not what we're talking about here.

nverno4• 5 years ago

A shitty environment certainly contributes, but drug abuse has risen in every demographic, and genetic predisposition is a huge factor (40-60% cited here[1]).

[1] https://americanaddictioncenters.org/rehab-guide/addiction-s...

BobbyJo2• 5 years ago

I don't see how you can consider it 'painting a cartoon villain' when it's acknowledging a shitty reality through the lens if objectivity. There really are people doing those things. Commonly. I'd visit SF maybe once a month when I lived out there, and seeing people do all of those things on any given visit was a coin flip.

Also, you are right, people are very often victims of their environment. A component of that environment is the ease of doing bad things. If you treat people who do bad things as victims, that makes doing bad things easier. You have to balance compassion with consequences. One without will fail.

kooshball• 5 years ago

by this logic, anything anyone ever does is due to their "shitty environment". what an insane way to absolve people of all personal responsibility.

s1artibartfast12• 5 years ago

I fuckin pray that if I ever get into that state, that educated people would have the sophistication to view me as something other than the unforgivably evil cartoon villain that you describe.

Why should they if you act like a cartoon villain? Should they pretend you are helping an old lady when they are acting like a villain and robbing her?

At some point the causality doesn't matter. IF something is broken, it doesn't matter how it got that way. You can fix it, throw it away, or mitigate the damage it causes.

Some people can't be helped. Some can with significant effort. Some need to be locked away so that they don't hurt people. Sometimes the best you can do is mitigate their suffering.

crooked-v• 5 years ago

shit all over the place

This is some very convenient blame-shifting to avoid noticing SF's distinct shortage of 24-hour public bathrooms[1].

[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/local-politics/article/San-Franc...

jaywalk2• 5 years ago

Talk about addressing a symptom instead of the problem.

Apes• 5 years ago

You mean 24-hour private meth dens?

San Francisco built a bunch of 24-hour public restrooms in the early 2000s downtown, and today they're horrendous. The problem is cyclical: people shit on the streets because there's no public restrooms -- but there's no public restrooms because San Francisco is filled with psychopaths who have no problem dropping their pants and shitting in the middle of a street. Give them a public restroom and they'll destroy it.

The people causing these problems aren't normal people who think like you and just happen to be homeless. You can't relate to them by trying to project yourself into their position. They're completely different mentally. They do not think rationally, and they do not have any empathy for others around them.

mtalantikite• 5 years ago

Breed’s proposed program budget was $4.6 million annually for 25 toilets, none 24/7.

Meanwhile Paris has about 400 of them, 150 of which are 24 hours, costing €6 million per year.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanisette

[2] https://en.parisinfo.com/practical-paris/useful-info/public-...

riffic3• 5 years ago

the second group speaks to societal failure. If anyone wants to address this in a serious manner, you have to address people's humanity, needs (we're talking Maslow's Hierarchy here), and do so in a way that preserves dignity.

I'd look towards FDR who came closest in the last century to addressing this with the model of the second (economic) bill of rights.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Bill_of_Rights

jdavis7032• 5 years ago

I’ve posted links before, but SF publishes a regular homeless census. It includes information about mental health, substance abuse and what locale the person became homeless in. This data clearly shows that most homeless people in SF are not choosing to engage in extreme anti-social behavior. Rather what’s happening is you’re noticing the worst cases, and extrapolating that to people such as a single mother working as security guard at night living in an RV.

s1artibartfast12• 5 years ago

Doesn't this just reinforce the point of the parent post, that there are two types of homelessness?

They are explicitly separating the worst cases from those like the working mother in the RV?

Looking at the 2019 report[1], the chronically homeless better fit the negative stereotype.

Sixty-three percent 63% of chronically homeless survey respondents reported alcohol or substance use. 53% reported living with a psychiatric or emotional condition, 52% with post-traumatic stress disorder, 48% with a chronic health problem, and 21% suffered from a traumatic brain injury

This is from self reported survey data, so the actual numbers could be more grim (e.g. problems not acknowledged or diagnosed).

https://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/FINAL-PIT-R...

umvi• 5 years ago

Isn't it sort of like the dead sea effect? People that are mentally stable, hard working, but down on their luck will eventually get out. People that are mentally unstable get trapped in drug cycles and stay homeless forever. So type 1 would be more temporary homelessness while type 2 more permanent homelessness.

thereisnospork• 5 years ago

There are clearly two distinct things going on and they likely have two totally different solutions. If media and politicians keep communicating as if there is only one problem, despite what our ears and eyes tell us every single day, then this will continue to get worse and the outcome will likely be the same as the 'defund the police' movement-- a voter referendum that says 'enough of this nonsense'.

The establishment's failure to humanely deal with the problem is making a non-humane solution inevitable. I'm not sure anyone wants that, but sooner or later a plurality will be willing and eager to look the other way.

Hokusai• 5 years ago

Why do Americans do drugs and have more bad behavior than other parts of the world if it's just a personal choice?

Blaming the poor for being poor does not help. Other countries does not depend so much inn police but on other social services, that 'non sense' actually makes a lot of sense and works. Police cannot solved social problems.

So, I agree that voters do not back up these policies. And that is why you get the problems and human suffering that you get.

JumpCrisscross4• 5 years ago

Why do Americans do drugs and have more bad behavior than other parts of the world if it's just a personal choice?

Do we? (Genuine question.)

fhood6• 5 years ago

I'm definitely not agreeing with the parent comment in fact it really rubs me the wrong way, and I'm probably not even entirely disagreeing with yours, but ffs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_homeless_... Sort per capita, and yes I know this is probably a flawed list whatever it's good enough. We are not talking about "America" we are primarily talking about SF or more broadly coastal California.

jjulius• 5 years ago

... and those who choose this lifestyle...

I don't think that "choice" is the right word for a large portion of that second category.

m0llusk• 5 years ago

This is a really shallow take on the situation. Like any big problem there are multiple factors involved.

Every time there is a crisis or economic hard times it shakes the tree and we get a new crop of homeless. Those who work with organizations trying to help have long noted this cyclic nature that mirrors business cycles. For long timers this crop of homeless are notable as being by far the oldest and sickest yet.

The primary question isn't their character, but how best to manage the situation. Opining that they brought it on themselves does not get them off the street or reduce expensive calls to responders.

JumpCrisscross4• 5 years ago

Opining that they brought it on themselves does not get them off the street or reduce expensive calls to responders

OP's point, charitably, is that advocates to San Francisco's homeless may need to stomach a harsher response to the most-extreme cases, e.g. assaults and repeated public defecation, to avoid voters turning on the issue as a whole.

Empathy is needed. But human nature is human nature, and when people feel their safety and security is threatened their empathy modulates down. That's what you're seeing in OP's comment. That's happening in San Francisco.

(Oxytocin is critically involved in empathy and social behaviors. It has also been linked to toxin-elicited and socially-mediated disgust [1].)

[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1111/gbb.12... § 7.1

matthewmacleod• 5 years ago

those who choose this lifestyle

Approximately nobody chooses this lifestyle, dude. You’re not going to make much progress on this issue if you start from what seems a very skewed perception of it.

In reality the problem is quite large and complex, and is exacerbated by the intersection of many different factors. Boiling it down to “those who deserve a helping hand” and “those who chose this lifestyle” is worryingly reminiscent of the idea of “deserving” and “undeserving” poor. There are way more than “two distinct things going on”.

chernevik• 5 years ago

It was more complicated than that in Seattle

https://www.wethegoverned.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Hom...

Definitely from a point of view, but well argued and documented

asow924• 5 years ago

There is a fine line between empathy and enablement.

asow924• 5 years ago

This has been up/down voted a lot fyi.

fhood6• 5 years ago

haha, as it should. Taking the "hard line" here seems awfully stupid to me though. Isn't that what causes the problem? I would happily pay my share of taxes to provide the most problematic homeless with a lifetime supply of heroin and hookers if it meant my family could safely park their car when they visit.

fhood6• 5 years ago

Let's get one thing out of the way first, I support tax money being used to support the homeless, regardless of the cause of said homelessness, so maybe I am not the correct audience for the article but...

I am incredibly confused as to why both this article and the Oliver piece are so proud of themselves for pointing out that not all, or not even the majority, of homeless suffer from serious mental health and addiction problems. Maybe these articles aren't targeted at me, BECAUSE I ALREADY KNOW THAT.

Is there really ANYBODY who is referring to a single mother living out of a car because her rent got raised when they complain about the homeless?!?! In SF I would imagine most people aren't even referring to your garden variety homeless similar to what is most visible in cities like NY. The actual problem is not being able to park anywhere with anything in your car, and passing people lying on the street that look like they are barely even alive, as well as your traditional human waste and the smell that comes with.

I don't want to act as though I am disagreeing with the conclusions of these articles, for the most part I'm not. I'm also not judging people for ending up homeless. Just please stop pretending that addiction and mental health issues are some sort of unfair characterization, because it is clearly a very accurate description of the group that is responsible for the most unpleasant manifestations of the homelessness in SF. I'm also not saying we should stop trying to help and house that specific group either. I'm just baffled by how this is being framed. "A humanitarian crisis, not an unsightly inconvenience"?!?!?!?!?! Has it not crossed the author's mind that IT COULD BE BOTH.

nemothekid5• 5 years ago

I've lived in SF for 10 years and seeing this problem grow everyday led me down a rabbit hole where I tried to understand what I could do politically and who I should vote for and support to at least show that I cared about the problem. It led me down a path where I came to understand housing and it's role in Europe and China. The most important thing I've learned is people don't care about the homeless and just think they are unsightly. It's a humanitarian crisis in the same way your dirty dishes are a humanitarian crisis, for most people. These are not people to be saved, but dirt to be washed off the sidewalks.

There are 4 ways to deal with the homeless that I've summarized:

(1) Kill them. I mention this one first so that it's in the back of your mind as you read about how politicians, nationwide, strike down any effort to alleviate this problem. It's the feeling I get when people say "we should do something" but then oppose any housing-first approaches.

(2) House them. Another poster mentioned it in this thread but this is essentially the approach to Vienna took. House people, in houses, not shelters, unconditionally. Once they have housing, then you can work on rehab and social/mental work. Without housing, the mental problems are impossible to solve. Of course, this would require effectively socializing the housing market and people & blackrock would scream about asset prices.

(3) Inprison them. This arguably more expensive than (2) but it doesn't affect asset prices as much. You could even recoup that cost with free prison labor. Sure most of the guys who argue we should do this are also the ones that say vaccine mandates are an infringement on basic freedoms and that being forced to wear a mask is essentially 1984. Of course you would have to figure out where you would build this prison, and the NIMBYs would prefer you built it on the Moon (they wont say that though, they will say something like "Building prisons is racist").

(4) Let them camp on the streets. This is unsightly, but it costs the less and maybe you will get a bit of (1) too when they die of exposure. Most cities already employ (1) through (4), they just wait for winter to roll around and problem solved. And as we see in San Francisco, as long as the housing market is sufficiently limited, then having a homeless camp outside your window wont reduce your property values all that much, and you get to use them as a political tool to prevent even more housing from being built.

Barring some political revolution or deadly plague I've become doom-pilled about this situation ever being resolved. Too many people, either directly or indirectly, largely benefit from the status quo. Paying $1B/year and extracting taxes from Salesforce is ultimately preferable solution than tanking the housing market.

fhood6• 5 years ago

I do wonder about number 2. Obviously it's a great solution, and even a less expensive one that you might think for a pretty good swathe of the homeless. But I've always had a pet theory that the real reason NYC and SF homeless seem so different is winter, and Vienna also gets really fucking cold. Ideally I am wrong in this, but I wonder if the most visible group in SF need something closer to assisted living than just housing.

Which honestly I am fine paying for, I just wonder if rehabilitation just isn't possible for many.

kevingadd2• 5 years ago

There will always be people you can't rehabilitate, but we know there are lots of people who are only homeless because they got priced out or their house burned down or they got laid off. Those people definitely can be helped.

StanislavPetrov2• 5 years ago

(2) House them. Another poster mentioned it in this thread but this is essentially the approach to Vienna took. House people, in houses, not shelters, unconditionally.

I think we should house them, but not unconditionally. Housing should be offered to everyone, but continued housing should be dependent on ongoing participation in drug rehab and mental health programs. This should be paired with enforcement of public health, shoplifting, vagrancy and other quality of life laws. Housing and rehabilitation services should be available to everyone without regard to their ability to pay, but if they choose to reject this, and insist on acting in a publicly disruptive and criminal manner, then they should be locked up.

kevingadd2• 5 years ago

Mandating drug rehab and mental health programs requires actually having good ones to offer, which is not something the US can really do right now. It's not a bad idea on paper.

"Rehab" in the US can look like unpaid forced labor, using up time and energy that the homeless person could instead be using to earn money to get themselves into a better situation: https://www.law360.com/articles/1311467/all-work-and-no-pay-...

Many homeless people are already working 2-3 jobs to try and earn enough money to get off the street, so mandating they spend a bunch of time and energy on shoddy programs would be sabotaging their progress.

As someone who's benefited from access to adequate (but not great) mental health care through my employer's insurance, I definitely think it could help. But I sincerely doubt the qualifications of most of the organizations and people who want to force "mental health" on homeless people who are already struggling.

nemothekid5• 5 years ago

but not unconditionally. Housing should be offered to everyone, but continued housing should be dependent on ongoing participation in drug rehab and mental health programs.

The problem with this is it attempt to fix too many problems at once. The US does not have robust drug rehab programs, and if you make this a stipulation for housing, then those people will end up on the streets again and tax payers will eviscerate you for building housing and still having homeless. Secondly, various interest groups will use your arbitrary lines to impose their brand of morality. The christians will come in and say no weed and alcohol, and now no one wants to live there, and you've effectively replicated 70% of the problems that cause the homeless to not live in homeless shelters.

I think a better question to ask is why you want to impose this drug law. Are you letting your morals get in the way of public policy or do you actually believe that the people who live on the street today will just unilaterally decide to stop living on the street and give up heroin? Refer back to my list. Once they have failed the drug test you have (1), (3), and (4). You can go with (3), but prisons, in the US today, do not rehabilitate people and are more expensive than just housing them.

my_usernam3• 5 years ago

I feel like your (3) isn't discussed openly enough. As an antidote, I have a family member that was an addict living on the street. He was arrested for multiple petty crimes, and through prison was able to sober up and get the help he needed. He's now a productive member of society and we couldn't be more proud.

Now obviously we shouldn't just throw addicts into prison, and there is a laundry list of other hurdles to solve. Primarily I think the punishment after the punishment from having a criminal record (which I think we've quietly made progress on, see Fair Chance Odinances by SF). But it's a process we already have in place, and could be expanded in a humanitarian manner with less red tape than some of the other radical solutions. At the very least I'd love to see it in the running of options discussed, but all I hear is prisons=pure evil

s1artibartfast12• 5 years ago

Agreed, it is very close to the mental institutions which were once more common.

I don't think people should be institutionalized for simply being homeless, addicts, or mentally ill, but if their issues are leading to unlawful behavior, we should be able to put them in a more humane prison system that includes assessment and rehabilitation.

rufus_foreman• 5 years ago

There are a variety of ways that people become homeless, and one solution would be to go back to what we used to do, which was to house them.

If they were homeless because they were mentally ill, we housed them. In an asylum.

If they were homeless because they were drug addicts, we housed them. In a prison.

If they were homeless because they didn't want to work, we housed them. In a workhouse.

If they were homeless because they couldn't afford a safe, decent place to live, we housed them. In a flophouse.

Those solutions for the most part have been regulated out of existence (not prison, for example, but prison as a solution for narcotics addiction).

rweichler• 5 years ago

My uncle moved to SF in the early 2000s and died in May 2020 on Eddy St. Even before he became "homeless" he just did drugs all day and thought the world owed him something. He had a college degree and everything, worked white collar jobs, but decided he liked heroin more than that stuff, so he moved to the Tenderloin. Lack of housing wasn't part of the equation, it was the lifestyle that drew him.

maccolgan• 5 years ago

Lifestyle of doing heroin while homeless? Is that a thing?

Redoubts• 5 years ago

crust punks are definitely a thing

ghostbrainalpha• 5 years ago

I'm sorry about your uncle. The crazy thing about Heroin, I think they talk about it in Trainspotting, is that it isn't entirely irrational to value heroin more than everything else in life. That's how unbelievably good it makes people feel.

My great fear is that someday someone will make something as powerful as heroin, that doesn't have the same barrier to entry, and can easy be smoked out of a vape pen or something. Just that could easily be the demise of civilization.

sizzle• 5 years ago

Your last paragraph and username are evoking a lot of strong imagery of what this substance might look or feel like. How does fentanyl compare to H?

huevosabio• 5 years ago

I like Steven Buss's sketch of a strategy for dealing with homelessness in SF: https://sbuss.substack.com/p/plan-to-end-street-homelessness...

riffic3• 5 years ago

mind summarizing this a bit before I click over blindly to your link?

mikestew• 5 years ago

I'll save you a click: "Subscribe now so you don't miss part 2." Part 2 is (I'm assuming) where the "strategy" is explained. The link provided is just the lead-in describing the problem as the author sees it. D---, would not click again.

lkbm• 5 years ago

I just skimmed very briefly, and the above link seems to just be defining terms and establishing a model of homelessness. Part 2[0] has the first part of the plan, "mitigation", which seems to boil down to add a bunch of prefab structures as homeless shelters.

Part 3[1] is the next step, "prevention": rental assistance, eviction defense (already exists, but underfunded), and informing residents of the programs. And add more housing

Part 4 is supposed to be "treatment", but I don't think it's posted yet.

[0] https://sbuss.substack.com/p/plan-to-end-street-homelessness...

[1] https://sbuss.substack.com/p/plan-to-end-street-homelessness...

abeppu5• 5 years ago

We can’t begin to solve homelessness without building more housing.

Yes we need to build more housing. But ... there are more vacant units in the city than there are homeless. The most recent ACS stats said there were >40k vacant units in the city. Meanwhile, the city was willing to pay $60k/yr per _tent site_ in safe sleeping site parking lots.

Almost certainly in reality we will need to build more housing. But there's enough money being poorly spent that honestly we could afford to solve the _housing_ portion of it by putting people in 1BD apartments. We _choose_ not to, and this reveals our preferences if not our values.

The revealed preference is, we'd _rather_ have homeless people sleep in parking lots at $5k/mo per tent than pay for an apartment at $3k/mo. We'd rather live in a society where property rights are respected than one where housing is considered a right (as in the state of NY). And we'd rather move the problem around continually than solve it.

https://data.census.gov/cedsci/table?q=vacancy&g=0500000US06...

https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/S-F-officials-w...

https://missionlocal.org/2020/05/trove-of-text-messages-reve...

https://sfist.com/2020/12/18/mayor-breed-takes-to-medium-to-...

RC_ITR7• 5 years ago

The most recent ACS stats said there were >40k vacant units in the city.

It’s critical to note that “vacant” can mean a lot of things when the census starts throwing the term around. For example, in San Francisco it could mean any of the following:

* 6,694 of those vacancies were units currently listed for rent that hadn’t yet found tenants. Another 1,031 were homes for sale that didn’t yet have buyers.

* 6,294 were homes with either current owners or renters that were just not living there. This can happen for any number of reasons: hospital stays, long trips out of town, delayed move-ins, even cases of homeowners who have died but are still technically counted as the resident.

* 8,523 were “occasional use” homes—i.e., these were second homes, vacation homes, some types of short-term rentals, or just any unit that was accounted for but not lived in most of the year.

*Finally, the census designated 11,760 homes in the catch-all category of “other vacant,” which primarily means vacancies without an obviously stated cause.

For a city with 800K residents, 8k 'occasional use' homes and 10k 'potentially vacant' homes is not a lot. And it's not as though this crisis was caused by those numbers going up faster than residents.

So yeah, more housing is 100% the answer.

abeppu5• 5 years ago

Again, I agree that we likely need to build more housing. But when you're living in a "humanitarian crisis", leaving empty units empty is a luxury which we currently choose to permit. But that choice isn't mandatory, and it does reflect on us.

If a property hasn't sold for months, why _shouldn't_ someone be able to live in it? Some units listed for rent remain listed for an extended period. I lived across from a unit which was empty for more than 18 months. It was listed at substantially above market, and the landlord was just being picky. Should it remain her prerogative to leave it empty until she finds the tenant of her dreams if in the meantime people's lives may be threatened by living without shelter?

Maybe the answer is yes. Maybe you think the rights of a property owner to make decisions about how they will profit from their property is more important than all the other considerations, including risks to life. Is it yes for all such goods in short supply? When hospitals didn't have ventilators, if you had functional ventilators unused and in storage, would it have been ethical to let them remain there? Should it have been legal?

These are all choices. And currently we choose to privilege rights of property owners above a human right to shelter. And when we do build, if we build luxury condos, that's a choice too. If we repeatedly and consistently decide that it's more important that property owners and developers be able to make as much money as they can than for people to be housed, then we've chosen to have a homeless crisis, because we're a homeless crisis kind of people with homeless crisis values.

Hooray, we got what we want.

s1artibartfast12• 5 years ago

There are obvious problems with putting many homeless people in vacant apartments.

Mentally ill drug addicts will destroy the unit and end up back on the street. Not all homeless fall into this category, but many do.

abeppu5• 5 years ago

we could afford to solve the _housing_ portion of it by putting people in 1BD

I'm not claiming that apartments solve the opioid crisis.

But notice the pattern.

NIMBY property owners in SF profit while contributing to the housing shortage. We protect their rights to preserve a shortage while looking disdainfully at displaced victims.

Sacklers make >$10B selling opioids. They declare bankruptcy, keep >$5B and are protected from further liabilities.

The recipe seems to be:

- profit while creating a disaster

- accept no responsibility

- blame your victims

You think mentally ill drug addicts will destroy property. But what if mentally ill rich people are destroying society?

verdverm• 5 years ago

Michael Shellenberger in his book San Fransicko offers a solution he is calling CalPsych. I recommend his interview on JRE (https://open.spotify.com/episode/5NxzDE5TmviUV8te2eZjMP)

His analysis and solution centers on treating this as a mental health issue, consolidating the efforts to deal with the problem, and generally modeling CalPsych after what the Dutch and several other European cities did to deal with their similar situations in previous decades.

shartshooter• 5 years ago

I just recently read this article in The Atlantic[0] that, to an extent, tied the wave of homelessness to a new version of meth that's taken over.

the subheadline is Different chemically than it was a decade ago, the drug is creating a wave of severe mental illness and worsening America’s homelessness problem.

It was worth a read for some context

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/11/the-new...

JumpCrisscross4• 5 years ago

a new version of meth

There was a recent article on HN rebutting this hypothesis [1][2]. (Convincingly, in my opinion.)

TL; DR There isn't a different kind of meth as much as there is just a lot more meth.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29027284

[2] https://dynomight.net/p2p-meth/

joshuahaglund• 5 years ago

I feel like everyone talking about drug addicted homeless people shitting everywhere are really just upset that the issue affects them, in their otherwise class-insulated world, somehow.

Here's a story about homeless students living in their cars. It's not just some drug addicts making bad decisions -- they are a minority. There are thousands of people sleeping on the streets and in cars because they can not afford housing.

https://ktla.com/news/local-news/safe-parking-program-homele...

profeatur• 5 years ago

The sad truth is that the people in this situation lack shame. They lack the sadness that you feel when you see the way they live. They will take what you give them, and then they will take more. They will make you feel guilty for not giving enough. They will steal from you when you’re not looking. They will make you realize that beyond the external features towards which you empathize, there’s nothing inside. To whatever extent they were once alive, they’re gone now. The living dead. Their only remaining use is to be the partially sentient puppets of a childish political fantasy.

Flatcircle9• 5 years ago

The homeless crisis is a drug epidemic caused by the law of unintended consequences.

Marijuana being legalized forced Mexican drug cartels to pivot into making synthetic meth (P2P meth)

Synthetic meth is much cheaper to make and is hard to regulate because it can be made from a cocktail of various household products, (the older meth was made from ephedra, and could be somewhat regulated by curbing the sale of large amounts of ephedra)

Whereas P2P meth can be made cheaply in large quantities with ubiquitous household chemicals

Unfortunately P2P causes psychosis at a much faster and more prevalent rate than ephedra based Meth.

So that’s what’s going on, there’s a huge influx of synthetic meth coming into America and really destroying a lot of lives. And homelessness is exploding

For further reading https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/11/the-new...

jart4• 5 years ago

According to Hollywood one does not simply homebrew Phenylacetone. In movies like The Witness or the TV show Breaking Bad their entire plotlines revolve around people killing to get a drop of the stuff. It's not like it's anything new or that ephedra is some kind of natural produce that grows on trees. Skimming through your article it sounds like these cartel chemists are dropping dead in their laboratories trying to make it and producing a final product that's more like krokodil if anything.

Flatcircle9• 5 years ago

You shouldn’t skim the article and assume things and down vote stuff you don’t know about. Sam is a friend of mine and one of the leading experts about this crisis. You should read his book dream land and not jump to conclusions. He’s dedicated a lot to this story. https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1620402521/ref=dbs_a_w_dp_162...

padastra• 5 years ago

Like most readers of this forum, I advocate supplying free drugs and free housing in some of the most expensive real-estate in the world, no strings attached, to people suffering mental health and addiction issues that destroy their insight and self control. Anyone who is against this position or wants to have a more nuanced discussion is privileged and clearly suffering from a lack of empathy and is therefore a worse human being.

RickJWagner• 5 years ago

San Francisco has the benefit of some wealthy taxpayers to stick for the sizeable bill that will be necessary.

Seriously, this is a problem for the ages. If they take a continued 'soft' stance on homelessness, it's just a beacon to draw more to the population. To take a harder stance requires political change, which will take courage and some backtracking.

As techies, many of us have a connection to SF. I hope for good results here, it will be something sociologists can discuss for a long time.

greenail• 5 years ago

The questions that seems obvious to me are "Who's in power? How are leaders held accountable?".

San Francisco's homelessness is a humanitarian crisis

Related Stories