S.F. sued over homeless camp sweeps: city charged with criminalizing unsheltered

https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/S-F-sued-over-homeless-camp-sweeps-as-advocates-17471443.php

by NoRagrets • 4 years ago

56 192 4 years ago

prpl• 4 years ago

So the city says it's legal in light of Martin v. Boise because, while they don't have enough shelter for everyone, the there's enough shelter for those who accept shelter.

I guess we'll find out in 2024 if that argument has legs.

abeppu3• 4 years ago

I think in the context of a legal action, the term "charged" in the current title ("S.F. sued over homeless camp sweeps: city charged with criminalizing unsheltered") is confusing, and doesn't match the Chronicle title.

jelliclesfarm10• 4 years ago

They literally changed the title on the website. Lol.

The original title was : “S.F. sued over homeless camp sweeps activists charge city with criminalizing unsheltered” that I edited due to limits on title length on HN submission.

bergenty3• 4 years ago

Screw that, clean the homeless up. Can’t believe we have let the problem get so bad.

ska3• 4 years ago

clean the homeless up

I'm curious - what do you imagine that looks like?

bergenty3• 4 years ago

Moving them to the shelters and telling them to stay off the street. If there’s no room in the shelter, providing them housing outside the city. If you have a shelter/provided housing it’s a crime to sleep on the streets.

Alternatively start up workhouses and sanitariums again. Government work in exchange for a safe, clean place to sleep and food for the day. Mental sanitariums for those people that are too far gone. That should provide enough of a disincentive over time to camp on the streets.

throwawayb150us• 4 years ago

https://nypost.com/2022/09/13/latino-sfpd-cop-branded-racist... : This smells like Cartel involvement at high levels of government.

m0llusk2• 4 years ago

One potential foundation is the tradition of reading the Riot Act. Normally citizens are allowed to move freely and gather. This is suspended during a riot for public safety. Homeless in general and encampments specifically can be seen as also a menace to public health and safety. Observe and record incidents of disruptive behavior, public drug use and pooping, and calls to responders and at certain level issue a warning then take action. These problem cases can cost communities hundreds of thousands. At some point something has to be done.

blacksmith_tb• 4 years ago

Well, the problem there is that simply being homeless isn't a crime (which I will say seems to me to be reasonable - the alternative is things like the Victorian Poorhouses). Throwing trash all over the place (since there are no public trash services to speak of in most cities, and homeless people don't have service from trash haulers) is a crime, but if they were issued citations, they couldn't pay, and still don't have any way to get rid of their trash... I would think that using public money to haul away trash would have a pretty good return on investment for everyone concerned.

maerF0x04• 4 years ago

but if they were issued citations, they couldn't pay, and still don't have any way to get rid of their trash... I would think that using public money to haul away trash would have a pretty good return on investment for everyone concerned.

One of the points of the justice system is to ensure that people are sufficiently disincentivized from doing things that society has decided shouldnt be done. We shouldnt consider it a good investment to enable bad behavior.

dirtmerchant• 4 years ago

Please enlighten us. What do you mean by "clean up"? Keep in mind, we're all engineers here, so details matter.

I'll wait.

cultofmetatron• 4 years ago

undefined behavior. implementation details left to discretion of implementer

bergenty3• 4 years ago

Get them off the street. Move them to workhouses or sanitariums.

mjevans• 4 years ago

Further clarification requires far more nuance and assessment than is likely to be read. There's probably not even one single cause but a multitude of social ills. Some people in this situation might experience one, but are probably each a unique snowflake of mixed problems. Unaffordable housing, mental illness (across a huge spectrum of many different illnesses, probably several different experts just for this), even the occasional grifter who just happens to prefer panhandling or urban scavenging to scrape by.

My belief is that homelessness / 'unsheltered' is a catchall result of all the gaps in society's integration of individuals; and it's also a national level problem since the individuals can also be shipped around like those migrants that made the news recently. At least in America, but I've also heard that one of the emotionally motivating factors of Brexit were migrants from outside of the EU, we refuse to even provide a path and set of requirements for those who do want to participate in the system that's setup (instead in the US it's "build the wall" or "war at the border" extremes). Closing gaps in social safety nets and providing pathways for those who are troubled to integrate into society in mutually useful ways, or perhaps even caring for those who are incapable of such self care when provided help getting out of that hole, logically seems like a far harder challenge than any single city can face in a vacuum when we can't even handle easier issues on a national level.

nostromo3• 4 years ago

The lawsuit alleges that the city violates state and federal laws, its own policies and homeless individuals’ rights by “punishing residents who have nowhere to go,”

They have shelter beds available. People need to stop repeating falsehoods from activists and well-meaning people who keep saying this.

Some homeless people prefer not to use them for a variety of reasons -- usually because shelters tend to be drug- and alcohol-free -- but also for reasons like not accepting pets or not housing couples of opposite gender together.

deathanatos• 4 years ago

officials estimate 20,000 people will be homeless in San Francisco over the course of this year and demand can’t keep up despite the city having 13,299 supportive housing units and 3,571 shelter spots as of last week.

nostromo3• 4 years ago

There are beds available. That's all you need to know. When police go to an illegal camp and say, you need to go to a shelter, it's not accurate to say they have nowhere to go. They do have somewhere to go.

Handwaving this away and saying, well, maybe according to some estimate we may run out of beds in the future -- when we haven't run out of beds and never do, is not a serious argument.

criddell• 4 years ago

Why not have a variety of shelters to better serve the people who need them? It seems like you could more efficiently provide services when people of similar needs are clustered together.

omegaworks2• 4 years ago

usually because shelters tend to be drug- and alcohol-free

Shelters are rife with abuse and have no place for you to store your belongings.

for reasons like not accepting pets or not housing couples of opposite gender together.

You so casually dismiss the fundamental human desire to be close to the people and animals that you trust while being inside a facility that offers you the absolute barest of minimum and is sometimes outright designed to expose you to predation.

lostdog• 4 years ago

They have shelter beds available. People need to stop repeating falsehoods from activists and well-meaning people who keep saying this.

I hope you are able to cite some sources the next time you try to make this point.

olivermarks5• 4 years ago

'Unsheltered' is a propaganda word and a fig leaf for the very sad reality that we have a chronic opioid and meth crisis which tips many people over into serious mental illness. Giving these individuals expensive housing is not going to solve anything. California is a magnet for substance abuse casualties and as then SF mayor Newsom found at the end of his grandiose plan to 'end homelessness' ever more people arrived to take the places of those who have been given resources.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/archive/item/A-decade-of-homeles...

There is a lot of land and resources in California to help these individuals focus on recovery and it should be possible to keep the cartel drug dealers away from them in a non urban area.

crhulls• 4 years ago

Why is this comment getting downvoted? I understand in progressive circles this statement maybe controversial, but I've always admired hacker news for being slightly more sensible when it comes to shunning people for statements that are not politically correct.

Zigurd• 4 years ago

It is getting downvoted because "sweeps" are a showy way for the cops to look like they are part of the solution. Don't buy in to copaganda. More police is a high-cost, unaccountable, self-perpetuating approach demonstrated for decades not to work.

In conservative Utah, they know their housing-first approach works. It isn't 100% effective, but it is more effective than police-based approaches.

O__________O• 4 years ago

See HN’s guidelines on commenting on voting:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

runarberg5• 4 years ago

Probably because it has nothing to do with the article. It is derailing the conversation from something interesting (the legality of the war against homelessness) to something unsubstantiated (whether substance abuse is to blame for homelessness, and the role of organized crime). I’m gonna go so far as to say that it is even a little flamebate-y.

colpabar• 4 years ago

Before you jump to comment on downvotes, just give it some time. The comment is 13 minutes old as I type this, things can change.

Also, commenting on downvoting is generally frowned upon here. Discuss the article and the comments themselves instead.

triceratops13• 4 years ago

But it's not "not politically correct" it's just plain "not correct". Every homeless population in every city has its share of drug-addicted and mentally ill people. What most cities don't have is SF's insane expensive rental market. Follow the money.

jelliclesfarm10• 4 years ago

I bet many would like to sue the city as tax payers for not fixing the unsafe and unsanitary streets that are part of the commons. Parks, streets and even public transport hubs are unusable for the tax paying citizenry.

at-fates-hands• 4 years ago

> Giving these individuals expensive housing is not going to solve anything.

They tried this in Minneapolis during COVID to try and get a bunch of homeless people off the street in a nearby hotel that had been emptied due to COVID.

It didn't turn out very well:

A report of a drug overdose led to the eviction Tuesday of more than 200 homeless people from a hotel in south Minneapolis that had become a refuge during protests that erupted in the wake of George Floyd’s killing in police custody.

But some residents at the hotel said conditions had begun to spin out of control in recent days, with people injecting heroin and methamphetamine in the hallways, and fights breaking out at night. Volunteers became overwhelmed.

“It started out well, then descended into chaos,” said Jennie Taylor, who had a room on the second floor. “People got the message that this was a place where you could use drugs freely and that attracted the wrong crowd.”

https://www.startribune.com/homeless-evicted-from-former-mpl...

lotsofpulp3• 4 years ago

This would have been known to anyone who has operated a motel for even a couple months. There is a reason any half decent motel requires credit card security deposits with matching government issued photo ID.

twblalock14• 4 years ago

Realistically, the only way we can solve this is with incarceration.

This has little to do with the availability of housing, or the cost of housing. Some people will simply refuse to live in the housing that is provided. Many are so mentally ill and addicted to drugs that no amount of money we give them, either directly or indirectly, will get them off the streets.

Proposed solutions that don't involve incarceration should be ignored as unserious and unrealistic.

Is that harsh? Is it "not progressive?" Yep. Progressive attempts to solve this problem have all failed. Progressives have allowed San Francisco to turn into an open-air drug den, attracting homeless people from all over the country, and nobody should listen to their ideas anymore.

hezralig4• 4 years ago

I know plenty of homeless people in San Francisco without drug issues. The reason they are on the street or living in their cars or crashing on a friends couch in between either other spot? They cannot afford rent. Both friends I am currently in contact with are also CURRENTLY employed.

alsetmusic• 4 years ago

This is the most cynical and heartless response I’ve seen in perhaps ever.

notch656a7• 4 years ago

I've been homeless without using drugs and without being mentally ill. Honestly I don't see the big deal if you sleep in a tent and use appropriate sanitation. I was always careful to pack in pack out, to respect the community, to not become intoxicated, and to dispose of waste appropriately.

IMO the homeless issue is San Francisco is because they've practically incentivized being homeless by subsidizing the homeless and also making any defense against the crimes of homeless toothless (misdemeanor theft is barely enforced, it is illegal to use violent self defense to defend property, and weapons laws are among the most restrictive in the nation.)

You don't even have to incarcerate them. Just make city policies such that there's no advantage to being homeless in SF, other than maybe the weather.

erellsworth• 4 years ago

Yes, because we certainly don't do enough of that in this country.

triceratops13• 4 years ago

This has little to do with the availability of housing, or the cost of housing.

This is a startlingly ignorant take. Shelter is among the basic human needs. If people were starving to death, would you blame mental illness or food prices?

Progressive attempts to solve this problem have all failed

Yes. Because they don't focus on creating more housing. Not "affordable" housing, just housing.

They're called "progressive" attempts because the city's politics is dominated by progressives. But every property owner and voter, regardless of political stripe, is responsible for this state of affairs.

There is exactly 1 solution to California's "housing crisis". More housing. Not "affordable" housing. Not mass transit alone. More. Housing. Moar. Build baby build. If that doesn't work, you know what you do? Build more housing. Beat those prices into the ground with construction cranes and hammers.

ineptech• 4 years ago

"The only solution to my problem is more candles", says the man with more candles than anyone else on Earth.

cpuguy832• 4 years ago

This is absolutely appalling. Considering we've historically incarcerated these people and it didn't fix anything, I don't see how you can blame "progressive" attempts to solve the crisis.

Do more people come to these cities that have such policies? Probably... but that's not an indictment of the policy. We have a national crisis. We have some cities/states who literally pay for 1-way bus tickets out (as an alternative to jail).

This solves nothing. Having more people in jail solves nothing.

runarberg5• 4 years ago

Just imagine living on the streets for an extended period, while also dealing with substance abuse and/or other mental illnesses. The state has failed you, there is no denying that. Indeed the state has repeatedly failed you. Every time you’ve tried to improve your living conditions has failed. Everytime you’ve tried to fix your substance abuse problem has failed, and every time you’ve found shelter, you’ve lost it for some reason. This has happened multiple times over.

Do you honestly believe that after all that, people are still rational and blindly accept help from the state? No, they’ve failed so for, you might as well just accept that things are as good as they’ll get.

When tackling this problem, we don’t only have to deal with the current situations, we also have to consider past failure, because people remember them, and they do affect current behavior.

spamizbad• 4 years ago

Proposed solutions that don't involve incarceration should be ignored as unserious and unrealistic.

Incarceration has been our primary approach for dealing with drug addiction and mental illness over the last 42 years. It is extremely expensive, with cost-per-inmate figures ranging from $15K-64K depending on the state, with California being the most expensive. I don't know of any public policy experts, regardless of their political leanings who consider this an effective approach.

I think people fail to recognize that part of the push to "decriminalize" drugs and homelessness isn't necessarily bleeding-heart progressivism but calculated austerity: Prisons are full. We want murders, rapists and violent criminals locked up in them. We cannot do that if they are clogged up with people whose primary offenses were being mentally ill and/or drugs.

I understand that California in particular has been more lax the rest of the country, but coming from the midwest our hard-ass drug laws didn't prevent meth and then heroin from ravaging both urban and rural communities.

So if you do want to simply lock these people away, I think you also need the political will to do two very important things:

1) Provide evidence that spending $15,000-$65,000 to incarcerate a homeless drug addict will produce a better outcome than spending those same public tax dollars on something else that could also benefit society and/or the individuals in question.

2) Raise and invest tax money into prison infrastructure to house these people. This will likely mean hiking taxes and/or cutting them from things like education.

hotpotamus2• 4 years ago

I agree that incarceration isn't progressive, but is it conservative? I mean I'm sure conservatives will appreciate brutalizing (those they perceive as) criminals for little more than the sake of it, but prisons in California aren't cheap, and is there much appetite for even more taxation?

andirk3• 4 years ago

Trivia: what country incarcerates the most people per capita? Oddly, that country is the topic of discussion here. And I live and work in/near San Francisco and it's plenty a shit show depending on neighborhood, but a very far cry from an "open-air drug den". Let's dig in deeper for solutions.

TaylorAlexander5• 4 years ago

So what you’re saying is we should pay $60,000 per year for government housing for these people?

You know there have been studies where giving people homes, or building subsidized housing, absolutely does improve peoples lives, cut addiction and crime rates, and generally do the things most progressives say they will.

Your proposal also puts them in expensive government housing but it does so in a way which significantly harms the individual. Incarceration might “solve” the problem for you but it does so at an extreme cost to others. And the financial burden to the state is still high. Meanwhile social housing solutions like those in Vienna actually make positive changes to peoples lives while still getting them off the streets:

https://www.huduser.gov/portal/pdredge/pdr_edge_featd_articl...

Honestly it’s like you people think the police and prisons are free.

munk-a4• 4 years ago

When you say incarceration do you mean prison and jails or recovery clinics?

America (and Canada too!) had horrible issues with abuses in mental institutions that led to a short sighted knee-jerk reaction of shuttering all of them to prevent abuses rather than cleaning them up and addressing the actual concerns. As someone with a family member with developmental disabilities (comorbid with other issues) I've seen my family member thrive in institutional settings - not getting locked in a padded cell institutions but facilities with enough staff and patients to respond quickly and with specialized labour to sudden issues. I think it'd be wonderful if we could, as a society, get our minds away from Victoria Era sanitoriums where patients were exhibited as carnival shows and start seriously investing in larger facilities - home care options and group homes fall extremely short in providing ample care for folks while being extremely costly.

I don't think any of the people sleeping on the street are there by choice - it's just that their alternatives don't exist. A fair number of shelters are run by religious organizations that shame and preach to the homeless - offering a bed in exchange for prostelitization, other shelters are short on beds for the population they need to serve and prevent long term residency sometimes allowing a few consecutive nights - sometimes offering a single night, kicking everyone out in the morning and offering beds first come first served.

Depending on how you are defining incarceration I'm either in agreement with you or I guess - yea, it'd work, but it's a terrible solution to just force people with mental illnesses into the prison system where they will receive next to no mental healthcare and just rot as human beings. Mental disabilities don't make you subhuman.

jwlstn4• 4 years ago

If this were true why are the giant homeless populations almost exclusively in insanely expensive housing markets like SF, LA, NYC?

Drug addiction is far worse in WV yet they don't have a major homeless problem.

Explain this discrepency please if it's all because of drugs

jelliclesfarm10• 4 years ago

It seems like they are literally bussing in homeless into San Francisco because of the services and money. It has become a drug distribution hub that is supported by the govt and tax money. There is little to no consequence for peddling drugs on the streets right under the nose of law enforcement.

gnicholas• 4 years ago

I think part of the reason SF and LA have large homeless populations is because of the temperate climate. It's much easier to survive a winter outside in LA than in WV. NYC is a different story, and I'm not sure that if they have the same number of homeless on a per-capita basis as cities like LA, SF, and Sacramento.

foobarian• 4 years ago

Of those 3 I can explain SF and LA (nice weather) but no idea about NYC.

twblalock14• 4 years ago

It's because places like SF, LA, and NYC tolerate it more than other cities. It's that simple.

profile53• 4 years ago

The discrepancy is because this is untrue. Almost every city on the west coast I’ve been to has a large and obvious homeless population.

abeppu3• 4 years ago

Giving these individuals expensive housing is not going to solve anything.

The "housing first" approach does seem to have a number of successful examples. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_First#Evidence_and_out...

we have a chronic opioid and meth crisis which tips many people over into serious mental illness.

But also the most visible homeless population is not the only homeless population, and people who became homeless through other paths can get stuck. Having a home is really helpful for e.g. getting and keeping a job, resolving or managing health issues, etc.

LawTalkingGuy3• 4 years ago

On the ground in a city determined to kill people with its liberal drug policies I can say this housing-first does NOT save junkies. Its main benefit is to provide people who do not know the conditions and the costs a way to attack those of us who do. Read the wiki page - their examples are primarily before 2010 when the opioid crisis really kicked in and many of the examples are about alcohol addiction - not hard drugs.

You can't give a junkie anything you don't want them to trade for drugs. If you give them an apartment they'll sell the plumbing fixtures and everything else. They'll also go back to sleeping outside, right next to where they procure their fentanyl, because nothing but acquiring and using matters.

Vancouver and SF also both insist you can't give someone a dingy basement suite (like many of their residents actually pay for and live in) but you have to give them a bright cheery condo in an expensive area. All done seemingly to avoid ever having enough money to house more than a few people. Housing first isn't actually being tried, in a way that taxpayers or foreign drug-policy experts would expect.

It's more about the careers of the literal thousands of people, poverty pimps, who "manage" the problem every day, and the power it gives them in city council to make sweeping decisions for the city. The number of lives lost positively correlates with dollars spent because the money goes to feel-good nonsense and bandaids, and actually counter-productive measures like fentanyl vending machines which have been proven to increase, not replace, street crime.

omegaworks2• 4 years ago

California is a magnet for substance abuse casualties

The data[1] shows that over 70% of all of SF's unhoused people became homeless while living in San Francisco. What we're dealing with is a housing crisis.

Every $100 increase in median rent is associated with a 9 percent increase in the estimated homelessness rate. [2]

[1] https://hsh.sfgov.org/get-involved/2022-pit-count/

[2] https://nlihc.org/resource/gao-report-congress-finds-increas...

geokon• 4 years ago

I just visited SF for the first time in a long time and I noticed many many homeless crushing crystals in aluminum foil and then smoking with a torch and glass pipe. (Never saw this previously.. was always people shooting up)

Out of morbid curiosity.. is this not crack cocaine?

jaywalk2• 4 years ago

Sounds more like meth.

space_fountain2• 4 years ago

Is this an intuitive take or a data take? My understanding is that much of the data disagrees with the idea that homelessness is driven by drug abuse. Things like the strong association between homelessness and housing costs + just survey data implying most homeless people don't move to SF as homeless people, all sort of implies that. Worth noting though, unsheltered isn't the same as homeless. Many homeless people are sheltered either in shelters, their cars, or friends homes.

I think intuitively it seem likely to me that drugs might be the difference between chronically homeless people and merely temporary, it also seems like it might have a relationship with the people you encounter on the street and get mad about seeing, but the studies of the overall population seem to say homelessness is causing drug use not the other way around

colinmhayes6• 4 years ago

the strong association between homelessness and housing costs

I'd be careful with this. High housing costs are also likely highly correlated with areas that provide a lot of services to the homeless which might be the cause of homelessness.

scelerat3• 4 years ago

Primary cause of homelessness in SF, according to a 2019 survey conducted by Applied Survey Research for the City of San Francisco:

Lost Job 26% Alcohol or Drug Use 18% Eviction 13% Argument with Family or Friend Who Asked You to Leave 12% Mental Health Issues 8% Divorce/Separation/Breakup 5%

https://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/2019HIRDRep...

gamblor956• 4 years ago

California has enough shelter space and housing for the true (involuntary) homeless, meaning those who are homeless because they can't afford housing, or because they have a mental illness and can't maintain housing on their own. Almost all of our shelters are sober facilities, meaning no drugs or alcohol, which is what led to the formation of homeless camps: drug addicts don't have to get rid of their drugs if they set up camp on a sidewalk.

The point of the sweeps is to make the camps an undesirable option compared to shelters, or moving back home, by increasing the friction and hassle of camping vs the alternatives.

Most of CA's homeless aren't local to SF, LA, or SD, or even to California. For example, LAT reporting on the subject has confirmed that as much as 75% of Hollywood's homeless may be from the Midwest. Several Midwestern states (specifically, Texas and Oklahoma) openly brag about shipping their homeless to CA to avoid dealing with the costs of caring for their own residents. Moreover, the great majority of the drug-addicted homeless population is comprised of out-of-state residents, and drug addicts are more than half of California's homeless.

Camp sweeps are a good thing. They disincentivize drug hotspots, get the mentally ill into shelters where they can be treated, and improve safety for everyone else.

convolvatron• 4 years ago

ignoring the plight of the homeless for a second.

these camps are a serious problem for the rest of us in SF that are trying to lead quasi-normal lives. it just cant be acceptable to have dogs trained to harass and attack people running around free on the streets.

i'm hardly a law and order kind of person, but methheads arguing outside your window every night is real problem. it really hard to run a retail business when there are 5-6 seriously messed up people living right outside you door who have reluctantly agreed to keep a tiny path free.

it really sucks to have to pick up their biological waste because they cant be bothered.

as a society, not just the city of SF, we should really wonder what we're trying to accomplish here and how this situation came to exist instead of wondering if there is another rug we can push this all under.

abeppu3• 4 years ago

Camp sweeps are a good thing. They disincentivize drug hotspots, get the mentally ill into shelters where they can be treated, and improve safety for everyone else.

I think if it disincentivizes drug hotspots, the effect is weak. I would say it temporarily moves the same people by a very short distance. You still see the same issues in the same neighborhoods, week after week. Similarly, if this is meant to be a mechanism for helping people with mental illness get to help, it's not effective. I see the same characters over and over again.

I would also argue it doesn't improve safety for everyone else. If anything, when a sweep happens, it creates a sudden stream of agitated, physically and emotionally unsettled people, moving through the street. Normally in my neighborhood walking _past_ an encampment isn't too bad. Walking home when a sweep has just happened nearby is much less comfortable.

I think what's really happening is theater. Local officials and institutions need to appear to be active more than they need to be actually effective. So while we're not actually solving problems, we're having the most visible homelessness shepherded from block to block.

jl62• 4 years ago

The complaint estimates it would take $4.8 billion to build the thousands of units San Francisco says it needs

When they say “units”, do they just mean housing, or does it also include mental health and rehab units?

killjoywashere• 4 years ago

Keep in mind the total number of homeless outside SF vastly exceeds the number inside, so this dose of money will no doubt create "vacancies on the street" which will be quickly filled by homeless from other areas, and require an additional dose of money. As word gets out, the problem would likely get larger, not smaller. This seems like a losing proposition for one city, surrounded by water on 3 sides, to try and solve on their own.

m0llusk2• 4 years ago

The worst thing about this is it is extremely unlikely to help with homelessness, but it will almost certainly earn big bucks for lawyers involved in the homeless industrial complex. The level of perverse corruption here is phenomenal.

azinman22• 4 years ago

homeless industrial complex

First time I’m hearing of such a complex that sounds oxymoronic. How big is this complex? Who are the players? How do they make so much money to become a complex industry?

bombcar3• 4 years ago

Apparently there was a decent amount of money being spent in Houston I think it was, that wasn't effectively housing hardly anyone until all the agencies got together and started working together. There was an HN post on it.

lotsofpulp3• 4 years ago

See motel owners getting paid $100k and even $250k+ per key by the government:

https://mynorthwest.com/2744155/seattles-two-new-hotel-homel...

The motels would be worth nowhere near that much if sold as a motel, and it is happening all up and down west coast cities. I know one property that sold for $150k per key, which would have sold for half that to a non government buyer, and the kicker is that it sits empty except for housing 2 guests that were already living there when the government bought it in summer 2021.

mancerayder• 4 years ago

"The ultimate goal of the lawsuit is to push the city to instead spend billions on affordable housing to provide shelter for everyone and fix its homelessness crisis, which the lawsuit says is a result of decades of failed policies and underinvestment." .. "Mayor London Breed has touted her effort to expand shelter beds and permanent supportive housing. Still, officials estimate 20,000 people will be homeless in San Francisco over the course of this year and demand can’t keep up despite the city having 13,299 supportive housing units and 3,571 shelter spots as of last week."

Demand, it says.

Here's the problem with homeless advocates and their goals: they're idealistic and absolute. What percentage of homeless people are locals? Maybe 50 percent or less? We live in a country of over 320 million people and porous-by-law borders between 49 other states. What do you think would happen to a place that would create supportive housing structure, have the most liberal laws on public drug use and property crimes, with volunteers on stand-by to provide needles and medical attention as needed.

It's all a bit perplexing to me that people keep touting "housing shortages." I live surrounded by homeless people. They're not homeless because rents are high, they're homeless because of a slew of other psychological and addiction issues. And almost no one was born in the city that they're homeless in.

scelerat3• 4 years ago

What percentage of homeless people are locals? Maybe 50 percent or less?

70% by recent counts. 22% from California (and 14% from other bay area counties). The remaining 8% are from out of state.

https://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/2019HIRDRep...

And almost no one was born in the city that they're homeless in

Not clear on why that is particularly relevant. Almost no one I know lives in the town they were born in, myself included. Of the few homeless people I know personally here in Oakland, all of them were born and raised in Oakland.

jl62• 4 years ago

Is there data showing a migration of homeless people towards SF? Presumably we would see a reduction in homelessness elsewhere if SF was acting as a magnet?

entwife• 4 years ago

It would be impossible to build enough housing in San Francisco for everyone who wants to live there.

masterof02• 4 years ago

I fail to understand why people feel entitled to live in a place they can't afford. I would love to live in Beverly Hills, but I can't.

clint3• 4 years ago

Because they are there and they don't have money to go elsewhere, its not about "Where they feel entitled to live"

clint3• 4 years ago

A bald face lie if I've ever heard one

colinmhayes6• 4 years ago

Kowloon walled city had a density of 3.2 million people/sq. mile. SFs 47 sq. miles would be enough for 150 million people.

jelliclesfarm10• 4 years ago

I would recommend that anyone who pays taxes boycott and cancel San Francisco. it will only make a dent, but it’s a start.

Everyday, there is a missed opportunity to clean up the streets: https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/bayarea/heatherknight/article...

[..]In what has become a five-alarm fire for many women in the city — spread on social media — several alleged victims have posted photos of the distinctive-looking Hobbs, a 6-foot-4 white man with a buzz cut and a body covered in tattoos, including the E-V-I-L tag on his fingers.

The fact that a San Francisco Superior Court judge dismissed a case against Hobbs in which he was accused of following and grabbing a 15-year-old girl — first reported in this column — is well known by now. So is the fact that he’s back on the streets despite a long arrest record in four counties, despite admitting to me in a phone interview that he follows women he finds attractive, and despite the flood of new complaints.

But it turns out city officials had another chance to intervene on Aug. 11 — and again came up short.[..]

[..]A police report states that he entered a home on Avila Street in the Marina while the owner, who left the door unlocked, was out walking his dog. When the owner returned and found Hobbs standing in his hallway, he called police and told them the intruder kept saying, “I want a house like this.”

Hobbs, according to the report, initially told officers he was “Scott Peterson,” using the name of the California man who notoriously killed his pregnant wife.[..]

andirk3• 4 years ago

Rent should be < 30% of income [1]. If the cost of housing is far more than that, then homelessness is expected. Where do service workers live? Do they drive from hours away via expensive gas? It's unsustainable unless there are artificial balances such as tax-paid subsidized housing.

Anyone who is chronically homeless should be offered jobs and paid housing. If that doesn't work, then they become a ward of the state and treated as a child.

[1] https://www.chase.com/personal/banking/education/budgeting-s....

horns4lyfe• 4 years ago

That’s going to be most of them, as most are drug addicts. And no I don’t have any stats for you, frankly just walk around SF or Portland, it’s obvious.

triceratops13• 4 years ago

frankly just walk around SF or Portland

Have you considered that you only notice the addicts and mentally ill? Because they don't give a shit about being seen as homeless. Everyone else is probably trying to keep up appearances by hanging out in libraries or coffee shops during the day.

colinmhayes6• 4 years ago

Most homeless are effectively hiding from you. The ones you see are the ones who don't care about being seen, the mental/addicted.

volkhavaar• 4 years ago

There's quite a bit of confusion in this thread regarding "chronic homelessness" vs "temporary/short-term homelessness". The solution for short-term homelessness is generally the use of "emergency shelters", of which San Francisco has many. However, emergency shelters do little to nothing to address chronic homelessness, which requires long-term supportive housing, something San Francisco has very little of.

This difference, which gets lost in discussions such as the one here, leads to bad-faith statements by politicians and others regarding the true amount of housing available for homeless people. For example, the number of "available beds" touted by Newsom and others are almost entirely within short-term emergency shelters, which do not address the real problem (chronic homelessness) much at all. Instead, this "number-of-beds" statistic is used to gloss over the fact that a real solution has not been found, and then justify (probably illegal) police action against homeless people. The true intent of such actions is probably to cause regular disruption in the lives of homeless people to increase the difficulty of simply being homeless in San Francisco. Whether or not you agree with such police action is up to you, but it's important to acknowledge that the argument that "there is available housing" is a bad faith argument, and that this argument is simply used to redirect attention from both police action against homeless people as well as the fact that a real solution has not been found.

Here's a citation that describes the differences between short term emergency housing and long term housing, which illuminates why the current approach being taken by San Francisco is not genuine as well as approaches that might actually work:

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. (2018). Permanent supportive housing: Evaluating the evidence for improving health outcomes among people experiencing chronic homelessness.

jelliclesfarm10• 4 years ago

https://twitter.com/chezpim/status/1574824441854324736 : reading this thread, I found out that it’s possible to buy stun guns. What does the law in CA say about using stun guns for self defense? And where does one buy them?

protomyth• 4 years ago

As to the drug-addicted or mentally unwell folks, we are going to have to figure out some other method than asylums, in neighborhood group homes, or the streets. All of these had major scandals and disfavor from the communities affected.

Its going to have to be an involuntary solution (yes, incarceration), and its probably going to involve moving people to a ranch-like area away from the city with a much different housing setup than some cells or apartments, maybe something with individual shelters with outside spaces. I expect its going to be a commitment of years or forever for some of these people. Working on people's mental health and addiction is not some 30 day process. Just the dentist bill alone will be scary, but its not going to get better in a tent in SF.

Society cannot last with this level of filth and crime in major cities.

The homeless because of cost folks, well, move to somewhere else or we are going to need a wave of mini-apartments approved at some point, but SF doesn't like such things.

_blz2• 4 years ago

It is amusing the usual 'war on drugs' sentiment is completely absent in this thread. Everyone is nimby is one way or the other.

S.F. sued over homeless camp sweeps: city charged with criminalizing unsheltered

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