San Francisco homelessness: Park ranger helps one person at a time

https://sfstandard.com/2025/02/08/golden-gate-park-ranger-homelessness/

by NaOH • 1 year ago

381 672 1 year ago

searealist7• 1 year ago

Quoting a reddit comment:

Wow, this is almost a parody. An able-bodied meth addict and convicted felon was illegally living in a public park for 20 years, littering the land around him and forcing rangers to spend countless time and resources cleaning up the mess he left behind, making regular emergency room visits due to his unhealthy lifestyle costing the city hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, constantly doing illegal drugs while not holding down a job and suspiciously acquiring new supplies for his encampment after every sweep (how much do you want to be he engages in illegal activity), and giving an extremely hard time to caseworkers and HHS staff who already have a busy workload (including leaving/getting kicked out of housing multiple times). That one Golden Gate Park Dweller has probably cost the city millions of dollars over the last few years while consuming valuable time from caseworkers and park rangers who could be helping someone else (they're already overloaded). Not to mention the potential damage to the park's environment caused by his littering. What this guy needs is outpatient mental health treatment, and it's honestly criminal that our country has basically no resources for people with mental illness and shoves them into jail or shelters without treating their underlying problems.

iancmceachern2• 1 year ago

This is true, I've heard the SF DA and police departments say so as well. They no longer prosecute or convict people of things here also, because there is no purpose, no where for them to be sent for rehabilitation. As a result we have created an open air mental institution combined with an open air drug market. It's getting pretty wild to live here.

titzer2• 1 year ago

It's absolutely nuts to me that the government finds ways to spend money on literally anything but providing shelter, clothing, food, and support to people. UBI would be cheaper and far more humane than practically any policy--or lack thereof--they can think of.

teaearlgraycold9• 1 year ago

Things are still bad in the city, but the state of homelessness has improved. The article states that the number of tents in Golden Gate Park has gone down by 10x in the last 8 years. I would say there's been a similar decrease on the sidewalks of the city in just the last 4. I walked much of the length of Mission Street yesterday, and there are still a lot of sad scenes to bear witness to. But it's clearly improving.

chrisdhoover• 1 year ago

Getting? It has been for years. Frank Jordan was the last mayor that tried a real plan.

galimalint4• 1 year ago

In australia, they put the people with mental illness or addiction in their own apartment and give them pills, and check in with them regularly. Definitely costs less than 50k/year. Most of them do end up getting better after several years.

It seems US has a system that extracts maximumly from their tax payers and just keeps things in (bad) status quo as long as they can. A babying system if you well.

teaearlgraycold9• 1 year ago

I believe the homeless are kept around as a threat to the poor housed Americans. On top of that, those poor people are struggling so greatly that they too don't want to see the homeless helped too much. They don't want to see someone without any job live an easier life than they do with 3.

bombcar10• 1 year ago

So shipping homeless from SF to Australia and paying $100k/yr per would be a win/win?

typewithrhythm• 1 year ago

I have some insight into this, and it might be possible that with good intervention the ongoing costs are low... That being said, in our current system the cases that are severe enough to be in public housing easily cost 10 times that...

chrsig2• 1 year ago

well, one major problem is that you can't force people to get mental health treatment. the courts can, but that means things need to be brought before a judge.

silverquiet• 1 year ago

Given how hard it's gotten to force people to take vaccines, I would think that psychotropic drugs are probably off the table completely.

StefanBatory• 1 year ago

And now with RFK wanting to put people with ADHD into labor camps, any chances of a program to help mentally ill homeless people is close to zero. I am sure that they would accept that "help" :>

TechnicolorByte• 1 year ago

Reopen mental institutions and enable forced is institutionalization. Engage this at the federal level. So sick of this crap.

These “homeless” are not the kind who need clean clothes and shelter and some help getting a job. They want to live like this at the expense of the public’s money and enjoyment of public amenities.

teaearlgraycold9• 1 year ago

I'm pretty far left but I have to agree that some people are not mentally capable of independence, cause public harm, and need to be forcibly committed. I want that to be done carefully and humanely. I don't want someone who sleeps on the street and causes no trouble to get institutionalized. But the worst of them should get jailed, tried, and then sent away.

We also need to support people at risk when they're young. If their parents had mental health support, if they didn't experience a loss of housing as children, if losing their job didn't make opioids looks so attractive, we wouldn't have that many people unable to care for themselves.

bloomingkales6• 1 year ago

Hey, that actually works really well in India:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpIJJPvn_ZI

Edit: This got downvoted because it's a direct retort to what the GP is suggesting.

29athrowaway2• 1 year ago

On one side, having compassion for vulnerable people is fine, but resources are finite.

The government can help people, but who would they rather help?

- a kid full of potential needing shelter, food, clothing

- a brilliant student needing a scholarship

- a scientist that needs funding for important research

- a family affected by natural disasters

- a veteran with PTSD

- the guy in this article

Should a kid go to bed hungry, or a student be denied access to education so that the government can subsidize the self destructive lifestyle of a person that doesn't even care about the people paying for it?

If you pay taxes on your income, plus taxes on everything you buy, etc... you worked at least 5 out of 12 months of the year for the government. So the government not only can waste it but also end up in debt that will be repaid by your children?

johnnyanmac41• 1 year ago

The US is a first world country. Resources are not so finite that we cannot help that entire list and then some. It should not be worrying about funding any of this.

raincole• 1 year ago

I've heard that SF spent a lot of money on homelessness issues. But each time I visited SF, the situation seemed to get worse. I never understood why.

My reaction to the OP article is: Oh... so that is why...

A rare aha moment of mine on HN.

ggm4• 1 year ago

Viewed from 10,000ft it could even be cheaper in the long term, as an overall outcome. Personal attention, guidance through the system, vs constant background EMT interventions, more costly health outcomes, Policing and ultimately incarceration risks.

I don't like reductive economics logic over what is a humane response, but I do like that it may not only be nicer, but actually financially sensible.

snarf21• 1 year ago

Reminds me of an article from a while ago about a homeless alcoholic that ran up over $1M in hospital and ambulance costs over the years.

https://centerforhealthjournalism.org/our-work/insights/mill...

mikepurvis2• 1 year ago

Nitpick, but $1M in unpaid bills is nowhere near $1M in costs. Obviously this is still a troubling result but in all likelihood it was less than 10% of that in actual costs and the costs weren’t in fact borne by “the taxpayer” but rather by slightly inflated fees for everyone else, since US hospitals must bill according to an assumption that some percentage of bills will go unpaid, due to the relationship between themselves, the insurers, and uninsured patients.

sarchertech3• 1 year ago

If they could get the guy with asthma regularly seeing a PCP, the money the public is spending on his constant ER trips would more than pay for housing and the time the ranger has to spend on helping him.

lmm5• 1 year ago

(Also note that if that's your general policy then you effectively allow anyone to blackmail you to get whatever they want, just by making it slightly more expensive to not give them what they want)

galimalint4• 1 year ago

In that case, why not move all the homeless from a park in a metropolis to a park in a cheaper/remote area? Then you can actually employ cheaper custodians in those areas to look after these homeless.

ggm4• 1 year ago

See, thats why I don't like the reductive reasoning. After all, when you're moving them why bother with seat belts and comfy chairs? Just use a flatbed truck and they can hold their pathetic possessions on with string, if they have any. And you also neatly assume the resources in the remote location can cope with the burden rather than already being behind the cost curve, compared to rangers in the SF metro area with direct access to the agencies.

Wait a minute, isn't this why it "paid" for the Texan and Floridan governors to ship their problems to the sanctuary cities?

OgsyedIE• 1 year ago

Then they'll have much further distances to commute on foot to their jobs.

anadem• 1 year ago

It's a lot hard to re-enter society if you're separated from everyone and everyplace you know. Sure, it could be cheaper in some ways to ship the homeless out to bumfuck nowhere, but might be less cost-effective than you think, and certainly less humane.

drjasonharrison• 1 year ago

Park Ranges and Social Services Workers are much cheaper than Police, Paramedics, and Emergency Room Staff.

Your reductive suggestion could be implemented by busing the homeless to prisons. That's probably not what you were proposing, but it's one interpretation.

Aunche12• 1 year ago

What you're describing is universal healthcare being cheaper in the long term, which I would agree with. What is described in this article absolutely does not sound like a productive use of taxpayer money at all. Any one of the ranger's clients that gets semi-permanent shelter is someone else who doesn't. At best, we're pay a full-time salary for someone to play a zero sum game. IMO, it's actually worse than that because such housing is more efficiently allocated to those who are able and willing to navigate the bureaucracy of public housing themselves are more likely to rebound successfully.

ErigmolCt3• 1 year ago

Exactly. The economic argument shouldn't be the only reason to push for better solutions, but it's a compelling one (especially in a system that often prioritizes cost over compassion)

idlewords5• 1 year ago

The title let me down; I was hoping this would be an article about a trebuchet. [edit: I see the post title has changed, the original one was something like "park ranger uses extraordinary methods to remove homeless from SF parks"]

I lived next to the park for several years and grew to loathe the dynamic where the lives of people sleeping rough in Golden Gate Park or Civic Center merit months of one-on-on outreach, while the lives of all of those who can't walk through the park in safety, can't send their kids there to play, and can't sit on the grass for fear of stepping on a used needle or a pile of human excrement, don't seem to matter.

I would like to see the city adopt a compassionate approach that doesn't at the same time enable years of lawbreaking by people who make nominally public spaces off-limits to the law-abiding. I'd like to see a San Francisco where there can be at least one clean, safe, working public toilet.

smohare• 1 year ago

Just an anecdote but I was with my young child in GG park not too long ago and perhaps 50 meters from the artierial road encountered a homeless guy brandishing an axe. This in in a spot that routinely fields families.

marcus_holmes8• 1 year ago

You should tell your elected officials that you support more initiatives to help the unhoused then.

I've ben homeless. It's not fun. Nobody does it because they want to. Ending up on the street trying to make the most basic of normality work is really hard work. I didn't end up on meth or anything (I stuck to alcohol), but I understand why some people facing this do. When your life is utter shite, drugs help.

Without any kind of social safety net the people who fall out of the bottom of society have nowhere to go except this. Build a decent safety net and they won't be living in the park and the park becomes the better place you'd like it to be.

So, on behalf of the unhoused: sorry your kids can't play in the park but we're facing bigger problems. Helping us with our problems will help you with yours.

tptacek9• 1 year ago

I left San Francisco 20 years ago, but, speaking to the situation in Chicagoland: our municipality funds long-term housing, support, and bridge services for local unhoused, and my understand is that the biggest problem we have with problematic unhoused people --- the people shooting up out in the open, or using vestibules as toilets, or accosting passers-by --- is getting them to take up those services.

It is the case that we have difficulty placing public toilets because of the risks their abuse will pose to unsuspecting users. I don't think it does anybody any good to pretend that these aren't real problems, or that we can moralize past them.

I think, at least in most major metros, we're past the point of it being a live issue whether to fund services to transition homeless people off the streets. Residents will fund those services simply because the alternatives are so disruptive. With that in mind, I feel like any response to this problem that centers on "well we should fund more services" is basically stalling.

seanmcdirmid4• 1 year ago

I support initiatives to get really aggressive with drug dealers/users. I wish we could better help the unhoused in humane ways, but when 99% of our social resources we allocate to that effort are forced to go to fent zombies to no appreciable effect, I am very pessimistic we will make any progress no matter how many billions we throw at it.

idlewords5• 1 year ago

San Francisco's homelessness budget in 2021 was $1.1 billion, for a homeless population of maybe 10,000. That works out to $110K per person before you add in state and Federal money.

Say this budget was doubled. What should that money be spent on, that isn't being funded now?

MichaelZuo3• 1 year ago

Clearly the local electorate has decided such desires and aspirations are not worthwhile enough to change their voting behaviour…

So the question is how do you plan to change that?

Trying to convince random HN readers seems pointless if that’s your goal.

aprilthird202110• 1 year ago

This isn't true btw. In San Francisco the constant homeless and drug and crime issues have led to voting changes.

xyst2• 1 year ago

Blame the rapacious capitalists that have essentially ripped away the safety nets that Americans used to enjoy. Cost of living has skyrocketed while labor wages have stagnated.

Blame awful economic theory such as neoliberalism, “trickle down economics” that has allowed a few people and corporations to acquire a significant amounts of wealth while not paying back into the system that helped them get there.

Decades of tax cuts to the wealthy while cutting funding for federal/state programs.

Corporations are buying up all of the property and jacking up the rates. Minimum wage hasn’t been increased since 2009.

What we need is a political party that _fights_ for the middle class. We need power to shift back to labor instead of the rapacious capitalists that instead of investing the profits into the company (ie, increase wages for labor) it’s reinvested into stock manipulation tactics such as stock buybacks. The shareholders, often foreigners as well, get paid while labor holds the bag.

Fuck the culture war. The next war is a class war and it won’t end well if this country continues at its current trajectory.

johnnyanmac41• 1 year ago

I don't like saying this much as an ex-redditors. But it's a shame seeing this downvoted as if a huge cause of a lot of things isn't our gridlocked politics bribed/powered by donors and billionaires robbing the country blind.

WeylandYutani• 1 year ago

America has no social safety net and a drug epidemic. What did you seriously think was going to happen?

I even find a weird sense of respect for the folks who want to build concentration camps because at least they are honest.

ambarp2• 1 year ago

My solution to this was to sell my home and leave San Francisco after living there 19 years. The moment I had a baby on the way, it no longer became tenable for me to deal with the lack of cleanliness or safety on the streets.

The irony is that I moved to Mexico City. It’s a far safer place than San Francisco.

blovescoffee• 1 year ago

That’s pretty debatable and entirely depends on how you define safety. I live in cdmx btw.

rafram4• 1 year ago

Just for the record, CDMX has a crime rate of over 50,000 per 100,000 residents, meaning that there’s one crime for every two residents each year. SF’s crime rate is about 6,000 per 100,000 - so about eight times safer. CDMX might feel safer than SF to you, but it is unequivocally much, much more dangerous.

When the housing crisis there reaches its breaking point (driven by gentrifying transplants), we’ll see if even the feeling lasts.

gadders• 1 year ago

As Rob Henderson said "San Francisco is the only city where dogs tread in human shit."

habosa2• 1 year ago

As someone who has enjoyed your writing, I find your trebuchet comment to be so distasteful I’ll have a hard time not hearing it if I read your posts again in the future. These are human beings you’re talking about.

And before you say I don’t get to have a say, I’d like to point out I live only 3 blocks from Golden Gate Park and I’m raising my child here. I’ve lived all over the city including in some of the worst areas (6th Street). I do understand the problems we have here, but I don’t think it’s appropriate to suggest we trebuchet people.

ltbarcly33• 1 year ago

Then why are the parks still full of homeless? Maybe they need to re-evaluate such extraordinary methods.

codezero• 1 year ago

according to the article there were 9 tents in the park, this person's efforts reduced the tents by 10%, also worth noting that 9 tents in the park is insignificant compared to the 8000 homeless in the area.

pessimizer• 1 year ago

Why does it take seven months and a team in order to fill out the paperwork to make one eligible for a room at a state SRO?

idlewords5• 1 year ago

Because this is a person wants to sleep rough in a park and has to be pushed through every step of the process to leave it. I would imagine things go much faster if you hate sleeping in a park and want a roof over your head.

bombcar10• 1 year ago

The problem is CA weather is too nice.

If the park was -40° for a few months a year things would be drastically different.

johnnyanmac41• 1 year ago

Well he stayed there for over a decade. Yoj have to pay thst cost if you took that long to resolve things. Or fail to resolve the root issues.

umvi• 1 year ago

I have a pet theory that love is a basic human need (and a requirement for good mental health), and governments are notoriously bad at providing love no matter how much money you throw at mental health therapy, treatment programs, UBI, etc. Barrows is setting a good example here, but how to get more citizens involved so the burden isn't all on a few rangers?

II2II2• 1 year ago

I suspect that few people want to be involved. It is difficult and dangerous work. It requires a personality that both cares for others, while being resilient enough to face the challenges of those in their care. By in large, it is also a thankless job. Just look at many of the responses here. The public don't care about the time and effort involved. Many think that it is best to just lock them up. Quite often the recipients don't care. They are too busy battling their own demons.

It's probably best to have safety nets in place so that people don't reach these depths in the first place.

aprilthird202110• 1 year ago

We have social safety nets in the US. We just don't have one robust enough that you can live in housing and have enough income without working in San Francisco permanently.

bloomingkales6• 1 year ago

The safety net for everyone is your friends and family. Drug addiction destroys that, so you are left alone. They kind of don't have anyone else. People see homelessness, but all I see is a slow trek to a suicide for many. They are dying slowly - and do not make any mistake about that. It's fatal.

Overall, there are many drugs addicts and homeless people in the world. It only bothers us when it obstructs our vision, very disgusting sentences like I cant even visit the beach anymore. I think that's fine, there are many beaches and many other places. You can visit the beach somewhere else, these people are dying.

Millionaire Rogan found the sight of homeless people unbearable so he had to leave the state (could be the taxes, but he's also filthy rich. I don't want to say he's just rotten, that's mean. I'll say a few other things instead).

Your society creates an inordinate amount of homeless people, that's first. Worry about the view later. You are lucky that you even get to see poverty up close, most just move the living fuck away from it.

Wait.

Edit:

I bring Rogan up because if you go through his entire catalog, you will see he has hours and hours of content that just bullies homeless people. He has done that to a few other groups, literal hours if you stack them side by side in a compilation. So there was already a lot of damage done in terms of mindshare by this media-arm.

tsimionescu4• 1 year ago

It requires a personality that both cares for others, while being resilient enough to face the challenges of those in their care.

Not only resilience to the challenges, but resilience to the fact that some people you will just fail to help. The more you care about those in your care, the more it will generally consume you when they don't succeed.

This is a hugely difficult thing to overcome, and it's a big reason why, for example, hospital doctors typically end up with relatively little empathy for patients: it's very hard to maintain your mental health while empathizing with people hurting and dying every day. You really have to build some kind of wall between you and them to cope with the inevitable losses.

dannc• 1 year ago

Get more folks involved in local volunteering opportunities, especially ones with direct outreach to people in need.

I'm heavily involved with Austin Bicycle Meals [1]. When a homeless person already knows you are there to help, it creates an entirely different social dynamic than normal. You get opportunities to make conversation and connections, which humanizes how we view these issues.

That's a total reversal to how most people interact with the homeless: in an entirely avoidant manner either randomly on the street or through a car window. That's why so much of the general public is numb to their plight.

The change in mindset that happens is really powerful, can take only a couple of hours of volunteering to happen, and something I hope more people seek out.

https://linktr.ee/austinbicyclemeals

anon291• 1 year ago

There's this thing called religion where we chant hymns and sing songs in an attempt to reorient our psyche to suppress our innate selfishness. By raising our oxytocin levels amongst our community via shared belief and communal celebration, we leave the room in an exuberant mood to serve others.

I know people think the prayer meetings et al are corny, but when you realize what comes afterwards (or should) then it really all makes sense.

And it's not just about helping strangers it's about helping others who are maybe not your best friend but still in your circle.

Congregational religion is one of the most tragically trampled upon secular fences.

It's no surprised that the same methodology was arrived at by the world's great religions. Buddhist and Christian mendicant and service-based monastic orders come to mind

moralestapia• 1 year ago

You'll be glad to know that your "pet theory" is a topic that has extensive literature around it, even going back milennia.

I've read a lot around this, happy to provide some suggestions if you choose to dive into this.

xyst2• 1 year ago

The rising homeless crisis is a symptom of a much larger issue: poor economic policy propagated by decades of awful neoclassical economic theory and neoliberalism (ie, “trickle down economics” or Reagon-omics)

mrlambchop2• 1 year ago

I was really swept up in this article and the portrait of Amanda Barrows - what a unique and strong person and this city is incredibly lucky to have her.

Unlike some here, I came away with a deep sense of empathy, and today’s HN snark and frustration bounced off me pretty hard. The public order issues - homelessness in parks, the challenges of shared spaces—have certainly impacted me. But more than that, I struggle with how to translate the state of the world to my boys. I always remind them: every unhoused person was once a little boy or girl. We might be older now, but we’re still kids inside, and nobody dreams of growing up in these circumstances.

What struck me most was the balance of compassion and pragmatism that Amanda brings to her work. It’s easy to be frustrated with the policies and bureaucratic inefficiencies that slow down real solutions - but they are, in some ways, understandable.

The biggest frustration for me is the gap between the mental state of many unhoused individuals and the requirements needed to secure housing. The city surely understands the long-term costs of its policies, and it’s run by highly pragmatic people with limited budgets. But rules are rules, and at some point, top-down accommodations (including medical interventions...) are necessary to bridge this gap.

searealist7• 1 year ago

This was written by AI.

II2II2• 1 year ago

If it takes an AI to display empathy, perhaps we should surrender to the AI overlords.

dang5• 1 year ago

Please don't do this here.

Edit: I called this wrong - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43075184. Sorry!

mrlambchop2• 1 year ago

In the spirit of tech conversations, here was my original input from my history:

---

I was swept up in this article and the portrait for Amanda (barrows) - what a unique and strong person - this city is soo lucky to have her.

I want to respond that unlike some here, I came away with huge empathy and today's HN snark and frustration bounced off me pretty hard accordingly. The public order issues such as homelessness in the park have impacted me, but more so, how to translate the state of the world to my children. I always remind them that this person was once a little boy / girl and we might be older, but we're still kids inside and nobody dreamt to grow up in this environment.

The compassion and my own empathy shown here coupled with the pragmatic approach shown by Amanda washed over me and the policies and bureaucratic inefficiencies that make solutions slow and ineffecient are understandable, but also highly frustrating.

The unhoused individuals and their mental state vs the requirements to find a home are very frustrating - the city surely understands the cost of housing policies and is run by highly pragmatic people, but rules are rules and some top down accommodations and medications are needed to help merge this.

---

I personally don't see my opinions changed here - I think the posted text is a bit better but also agree on the uncanny valley issue. A little less brain swelling and I would have been all over the small signals :)

Personally, I find AI and the derivatives extremely helpful when it comes to communication (a booster for the mind!) and use it all the time when translating into other languages and also removing my northern British dialect from communication over in California.

nocoiner• 1 year ago

This comment captured a lot of my thoughts about the article, Amanda and many of the other comments on this thread, except that you put them into words much more capably and eloquently than I was able to do. Well stated.

nullc6• 1 year ago

That's what the article was written for-- and it's one valid perspective on it.

To those whose lives have been irreparably harmed by the violent mentally ill people inhabiting SF's streets and parks while the police stand idle and billions of their tax dollars are spent annually failing to solve the problem-- it might hit a bit differently. That isn't the story here, but when you see people taking it differently than you it isn't necessarily because are in any way lacking in compassion.

The article paints the person in question as a harmless Garden Hermit ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_hermit ), perhaps he is but many of the support-resistant homeless are certainly not harmless.

vlovich12314• 1 year ago

If a black person attacks you, does that mean that black people are then violent? All the statistics I've ever seen indicate that while the homeless and mentally ill are particularly prone to being victims of violence, they don't seem to actually pose a higher issue of safety than anyone else you encounter in your daily life.

It makes sense that would be the case when you think of it - do the rates of violence decrease as you move up the socioeconomic ladder? By all indications the rate of violence among the very wealthy is not dissimilar from those lower on the socioeconomic ladder. Why would you think homelessness is a cliff through which people suddenly become drastically more violent, especially considering how people like Putin and drug lords are extremely wealthy while paying people lower on the socioeconomic rung to do violence on their behalf to protect their economic interests?

sweeter2• 1 year ago

I think it is an understandable reaction. They're a long history of articles like "man saves multiple orphans from the orphan crushing machine" and people go "ahhh that's so sweet" and nobody stops to ask "why do we have an orphan crushing machine and why can't do anything about that?"

I think it's important to do both.

rsktaker• 1 year ago

Wonderful analogy

red75prime• 1 year ago

why can't do anything about that

Maybe because it's not the orphan crushing machine, but the lack of the low functioning orphan saving machine. Or a mix of both.

username3322113• 1 year ago

I get the impression that the reaction right now is more likely to be caused by someone in government turning off a lot of those orphan crushing machines recently.

And the only thing to show for it is gangs of feral orphans raping and pillaging. (If I can stretch the metaphor a bit too much.)

I suspect if someone did a survey, they'd find that most places in the internet have grown consistently less empathetic in terms of social policy since mid 2020.

aprilthird202110• 1 year ago

We don't have anything like a machine that causes homelessness though. Homelessness has existed for thousands of years if not all of human existence and we are probably the closest any society has gotten to eradicating it entirely. We are dealing with probably the hard last 10% of a hard problem. It's just not at all as if we have a terrible system that leads to these outcomes. On the contrary, we've built many systems to successfully prevent these outcomes. They're just not perfect

optimalsolver• 1 year ago

HN readers might be interested to know that the machine's codebase was recently ported to C++ 17 from Fortran. It was a nightmare to maintain!

ninetyninenine8• 1 year ago

I mean the article dances around it. I hate to say this, but we have to face reality.

It is empathy that is in great part responsible for for the crime ridden shit show that is much of SF.

How do we balance empathy while making SF not a gigantic pile of shit? I don't think there is an answer here. It's choose one, or choose the other.

slantedview• 1 year ago

I thought it was expensive housing.

archagon5• 1 year ago

"We have to face reality" is a thought-terminating cliche. The causes of homelessness are myriad and there's a ton of conservative propaganda denigrating left-leaning politics. Also, many would beg to differ that SF is a "gigantic pile of shit."

james4k5• 1 year ago

Empathy created the housing crisis?

xivzgrev2• 1 year ago

I mean, empathy for a criminal is ensuring they have their day in court. Free counsel if they can’t afford. Innocent until proven guilty.

But their rights can’t trump victims, that’s not justice. Like someone else mentioned prop 47 was a bad idea.

ncr1004• 1 year ago

Ah Empathy is not what screwed up these guys' childhoods. Don't blame empathy without acknowledging that both of these people are black in America.

There are so many reasons why this happened and it's way more than just San Francisco being supposedly more empathetic.

Rhetorically speaking, how about the fact that China is quite happy to supply precursor drugs to help make fentanyl cheap? How is that related to San Francisco's perceived empathy? Again, rhetorically.

It makes me angry that this problem is reduced so frequently when it's been proven time and time and time to be a complex problem. It's almost like citizens / voters / taxpayers are willing to play sport with this problem in order to score some kinds of points around being right, or to avoid the sense of blaming oneself, because they know they can do something about it and yet they aren't.

Being honest is a big part of making progress with this, and I think honestly this problem is way more complex than many of us have actually appropriately characterized.

The article goes a long way towards characterizing the problem well, by talking about each individuals, perspectives, situations, and how the system succeeded or fails, knocking them off the path to gaining public support.

Aunche12• 1 year ago

What struck me most was the balance of compassion and pragmatism that Amanda brings to her work.

Nothing about this article strikes me as pragmatic. She's spending all her energy attempting to help people with the least likelihood of success and then gets angry at the system when they inevitably fail. The city didn't kick Morrisette out of the hotel because they like zero-tolerance policies, but because other people deserve a chance a chance to live in a free hotel room as well.

xivzgrev2• 1 year ago

I’m not sure what the right answer is, but asking people who are used to rough and tumble life outside to then behave civilly indoors with zero tolerance seems…set for failure?

There are those that do succeed but those are certainly the most motivated to do so. Others are in transition: know they should get indoors but know their difficulties.

Rather than kicking them out, maybe they are required to attend some mandatory psych sessions. Maybe they go maybe they don’t but at least there support to help them work thru their issues of why they blew up at the staff (as in this instance).

mordae2• 1 year ago

I am sorry to hear that the richest country on earth cannot afford tiny private flats for anyone and everyone unhoused.

robswc5• 1 year ago

This is one of the core problems and I don't think people want to admit it "can't be solved."

When I was naive, out on my own after 18 I found a low-income/income-restricted apartment complex and thought I got a steal. It was $1k a month for a 2 bed when everywhere else was closer to $1.5k.

I soon realized I would _never_ live in a low income place if I could help it. Someone was killed in our building. Fights in the parking lot every other day. People leaving trash in the hall ways. People smoking 24/7. Of course, maybe only 25% of the people were "problematic" but that was more than enough to make you feel totally uncomfortable in your own home. The last straw was potheads causing a fire alarm at 3 AM and having to evacuate into the cold night in a panic.

Some people are simply selfish and will not be able to live close to/with others without causing problems. _Most_ people do not want to live next to them.

tclancy• 1 year ago

There is honor is such a quest. https://blog.granneman.com/2005/09/30/cuchullin-fights-the-o...

ErigmolCt3• 1 year ago

Amanda's work is proof that personal engagement makes a difference, but scaling that kind of approach is incredibly difficult

dsign2• 1 year ago

Indeed. But I have another point of view: what if our society is utterly broken? To see what I mean, imagine a world where that level of effort would cure any disease, even aging. How would that split us?

throwawaymaths6• 1 year ago

what happened to "do things that don't scale"?

RobertRoberts• 1 year ago

Most people I met when homeless didn't want the help the government offered. There's a direct conflict between people who lead and those that actually want to help.

Unfortunately, a lot of the homeless I knew were very proud, arrogant, angry, bitter and many other emotions that made it nearly impossible to get them to take care of themselves through any intervention.

And if people refuse to take care of themselves, they will always be in a state where they need others to step in. Once they become destructive to society, I don't think any expectation of mercy from leadership should be expected. That leads to the situations we currently see in some places today.

It's not the lack of shelter that's the issue. There's plenty of shelter and housing if you want it.

ncr1004• 1 year ago

It's a good set of points you make.

When programming, when engineering, I often run into these sorts of intractable problems.

Changing the rules, changing the preconditions or some aspect of the problem itself, that's usually how I solve them.

In this article, it looks like the Park Ranger is changing the rules by making the system work for the person who is experiencing homelessness instead of forcing the person to go alone into a system that they don't like and they don't necessarily see the value of.

SO it is possible to fix with the appropriate smart thinking and willingness to maintain multiple simultaneous perspectives, it seems.

throwawaymaths6• 1 year ago

The city surely understands the long-term costs of its policies, and it’s run by highly pragmatic people with limited budgets.

Is that the case? maybe there are highly pragmatic people in the org, but i dont think they are "running" things. and the city's budget for homelessness is astoundingly high (look it up)

Miraste• 1 year ago

If anyone is wondering, it's ~1 billion dollars per year, for a homeless population of less than 10,000. With this money, they have achieved basically zero change in that number for years. Staggering, incredible levels of waste.

bagels7• 1 year ago

I wish that park rangers didn't have to bear the cost of this problem. Nobody has the appetite to do anything effective about it.

wnc3141• 1 year ago

I search through the internet looking for these type of stories that renew my faith in humanity. Thank you for sharing.

radu_floricica• 1 year ago

shepherding him through what one Recreation and Parks Department official described as the “arduous and achingly bureaucratic tasks” necessary just to be eligible for housing.

I'm going to risk a political statement and say that this is why I'm mostly hopeful about DOGE, even if parts of it are a shit show.

Building civilization comes with a hefty dose of institutional entropy, which keeps accumulating, despite (or often because) good intentions and competence. Everybody is improving their piece of the map, but this means you get stuck in a lot of spots of local maxima. Some can be fixed from a level above, but some need a round of creative destruction every 10 years or so.

I've read this yesterday: https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/why-japan-succ...

It's a good read and a good blog for many reasons, but the relevant part to this conversation: Japan managed to keep a very high level of living even through decades of economic stagnation and aging population in large part by having a sane zoning system. Yes, that simple. They have 12, nation-wide, mostly inclusive zoning types. This means the permitted building types carry over as you move up the categories, allowing mixed-use development by default.

And indeed, you can actually go to Japan and buy a house for about the price of a decent car - which coincidently used to be the case in most of the world, before the double pressure of zoning/coding on one hand, and migration towards urban centers on the other squeezed the housing pricing way above what actual costs would have it be.

croes• 1 year ago

The problem is if you want lower bureaucracy you have to change laws and not fire people. Most of the time you still need them, they just have no time to do what they are supposed to do.

For instance, would you fire doctors to reduce bureaucracy in medical services?

anon7000• 1 year ago

Great point. And if you fire all the insurance middlemen, but don’t get rid of the legal requirements which spawned those middlemen in the first place, you end up with medical professionals swamped with paperwork they shouldn’t have to deal with it.

rahimnathwani3• 1 year ago

  The problem is if you want lower bureaucracy you have to change laws and not fire people.

Not every excessive process is the result of legislation. Some of these processes arise gradually and unnecessarily, because, in an organization without competition, there's no pressure to be efficient (i.e. focus on increasing output).

gosub1004• 1 year ago

For insurance companies? Yes doctors can be fired. They do not provide treatment.

selfmodruntime• 1 year ago

You most definitely have to fire people. After all, their number one aim is to make sure their job still exists in a decade.

crooked-v2• 1 year ago

How in the world is randomly firing people supposed to make anything more efficient? They literally don't even know what the people they're firing do, as seen with the latest mess with the Department of Energy.

givemeethekeys• 1 year ago

Maybe it forces the people who're left to prioritize which civil services to keep.

clarionbell• 1 year ago

It's probably not. At this point I would place my hope in second order effects. But I'm not the sort of person to do that.

Workaccount22• 1 year ago

Fiery take, but Elon eviscerated twitter and just kept kicking people out seemingly randomly. Anyone who didn't like it was encouraged walk out too on top of that. Twitter was doomed and the internet was rife with how it's collapse was immanent.

But he we are three years later and twitter is still running and still top dog in the message-post space.

I can't help but feel that in the presence of lots of money, organizations just bloat and bloat and bloat, and all that bloat will be sure to have a long winded explanation for why it is _critical_ to stay in existence.

jccalhoun• 1 year ago

Agreed. Maybe the government is terribly inefficient. I don't know. However, this isn't the most efficient way to make it better. Moreover, efficiency is not just saving money which seems to be all that is going on.

BLKNSLVR• 1 year ago

The necessity for delicately traversing the path to a solution that's more long-term sustainable than that which already exists seems to be something that DOGE is entirely incapable of.

Musk seems to want things to scale; fewer people to achieve more productivity. People that already fall through the cracks aren't going to suddenly find themselves better off via a system that scales better, because better scaling actually creates wider cracks.

The median flows better, at the cost of the fringes.

Your comments regarding Japan are interesting. Japan's definitely an interesting example to use due to the odd, unenviable economic situation, but that makes your point stand out more rather than less, I think.

UltraSane4• 1 year ago

Musk is using DOGE to shut down agencies he doesn't like. The dude likes firing people WAY too much.

Philpax• 1 year ago

Such a thing requires a redesign, not an uncontrolled demolition.

archagon5• 1 year ago

You think conservatives care about actually helping the unhoused? Their ultimate goal is to funnel money from public services into private hands; and their "solution" to homelessness involves prison, concentration camps[1], or exile[2] — because they see the problem as undesirables reducing quality of life for the worthy rich, not abject human misery. (Indeed, Musk considers recipients of federal aid to be part of the "parasite class."[3])

[1] https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-polit...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_homeless_relocation_pr...

[3] https://atlantablackstar.com/2025/02/14/elon-musk-faces-back...

bagels7• 1 year ago

Musk is the biggest parasite in the parasite class.

majormajor2• 1 year ago

DOGE comes from the political machine that believes more restrictions on eligibility for government assistance are a GOOD thing and that spending on such assistance should be dramatically cut.

So good luck with that.

Zoning as a silver bullet? When you have a huge economic difference as a conflating factor? If the US had had decades of economic stagnation the housing price pressure caused by the beneficiaries of many sectors of the economy NOT stagnating, but instead of booming at more-than-anywhere-else-in-the-world-levels, seen in SF in particular, would be far less.) Look at housing prices in hollowing-out former industrial towns in the Midwest. Economic stagnation and lower cost of living go hand in hand. Japan stagnated at a pretty high level, quality-of-living-wise. That doesn't seem like a bad thing. It's certainly not comparable to Nigeria, Pakistan, or Chile. It's also not comparable to the US. And do you know who else doesn't want the US to stagnate like that for the elite professional class? Elon Musk. (And Japan's economic situation has more than a few darker aspects to it.)

(Republicans also fucking love zoning, so..... again... wtf)

aprilthird202110• 1 year ago

If the US had had decades of economic stagnation the housing price pressure caused by the beneficiaries of many sectors of the economy NOT stagnating, but instead of booming at more-than-anywhere-else-in-the-world-levels, seen in SF in particular, would be far less.) Look at housing prices in hollowing-out former industrial towns in the Midwest.

But the article isn't wrong though. Zoning things like Tokyo in San Francisco would be a silver bullet to the woes there and it would go a long way to making people feel prosperous. If you live in the bay area, you'll be shocked to see people with quite large net worths, feel like they have nothing because the only place they can afford near their workplace is $1M or more and we're talking about condos here.

energy123• 1 year ago

But DOGE, Elon Musk and Donald Trump don't have zoning on the agenda.

Trump's campaign platform was verbatim in favor of single family zoning according to his website. Harris's official platform was to ease permitting restrictions and provide incentives to states to reduce these regulations, according to their website and the multiple times they discussed this on the campaign trail.

Look past the marketing hype of DOGE and see that it's not actually deregulating anything that matters. The regulations that are blocking housing and energy are only going to be accelerated under this administration -- wilfully so.

The technocratic center-right have at times embraced deregulations like this, but not the new populist-right. The populist-right, if anything, see these regulations as useful because it empowers the immigrant scapegoat tactic as an explanation for housing costs.

Tade0• 1 year ago

This means the permitted building types carry over as you move up the categories, allowing mixed-use development by default.

That is more or less how it works all around the world except the US. Or rather: mixed use is the default, outside of specific cases

genewitch3• 1 year ago

Cool. The US is the third largest country in the world; not all of us have to live above a restaurant or laundry. Or in apartments or other multi-tenant housing.

Those of us that want to can move to San Francisco or New York.

The state i live in has fewer people than metro Los Angeles. What works for them for housing is unnecessary for us.

aprilthird202110• 1 year ago

I think zoning is THE reason for what the article explains (and thanks for sharing it by the way, it was very insightful, imo).

But how does fixing our zoning issues translate to, for example, firing thousands of IRS workers?

johnnyanmac41• 1 year ago

Yup. Top bad Trump's actual political stance wants to focus on single family households.

BrenBarn• 1 year ago

I mean, the other conclusion from that article is a negative, namely: constant GDP growth is not a great measure of success. Who cares if GDP goes up or down? What matters is quality of life.

hatmatrix• 1 year ago

Indeed there is administrative bloat everywhere, and I can sympathize with your hope that tearing down the current system will leave room for building anew.

However, it's hubris to assume that everything is bloat. There is the adage of Chesterton's fence, which reads: "...reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood." Many things that appear to be bloat that serves a useful function, and tearing them blindly is going to do irreparable damage.

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Chesterton%27s_fence

fergie• 1 year ago

Despite the hype, DOGE is about replacing government employees with private contractors rather that actually saving money. Therefore it will almost certainly end up costing more in the long run.

At a high level, the current administration is seeking ways to cut tax for the wealthy and pay and conditions for workers. As a property developer, Trump has a literal vested interest in maintaining high property values.

Its really difficult to see how this will translate into more affordable housing for poor people.

Fin_Code• 1 year ago

I'm with you in that hope. There has been wild growth for a very long time. Realignments are painful but necessary.

UltraSane4• 1 year ago

Elon Musk is a liar with zero credibility. All his claims about government "inefficiency" are lies used to make people like you OK with him shutting down agencies he doesn't like.

namuol3• 1 year ago

Can you point out the parts which aren’t a shit-show?

evantbyrne• 1 year ago

Really not seeing the forest through the trees on this one. The president is not supposed to have unilateral authority to axe written law. He's trimming the legislative branch, not the budget.

yibg5• 1 year ago

Personally I can get behind the stated intentions of DOGE (although I don't think that's the real intent). I can also see the logic of having to break a few things / start over to really get to a clean state. But the way it's done doesn't seem intentional or calculated, it's just randomly smash things and seeing what breaks.

To put it in software terms, this is like doing a refactor without knowing what the current code base does, what the intended functionalities are and without having a design. Instead, someone just goes in to delete chunks of code based on the file name and see what happens.

With a random CRUD app that might be ok to some extent, but we're talking about people's livelihood, national security matters, environmental and consumer protection and such. The current DOGE approach using the most charitable take is either reckless or hubris.

pfannkuchen• 1 year ago

Paul Graham approves.

alluro22• 1 year ago

The frustration of some of the people in the comments is clear - "the city is spending a lot of our tax money on these criminals, savages and addicts and they don't even want help".

It's incredibly privileged and reductive to think of it that way - that, after surviving in a park for 10 YEARS, struggling for food and shelter, surviving the seasons, rest of society and getting beat down to square 1 so many times -and basically being in constant fight or flight mode as the article states - you think you wouldn't resort to escaping through alcohol or drugs, and could simply "decide to get your act together" and adapt to anything the govt agencies expect from you on daily basis in some of those housing solutions.

Those people did not cheerfully decide one day to dedicate their life to shitting all over a park and be addicted to meth. A lot of homeless people got there either by being let down by the society very early on, or by 1-2 bad events in life making it impossible to pay rent and getting dragged into a downward spiral from there.

Solutions should be focused on the root causes, and not the symptoms. If the country is such a late-stage capitalism shithole that so many people are 1 medical emergency away from not being able to pay rent, and there's no safety net or effective government support to prevent them from going homeless, the cost of trying to rehabilitate someone after years on the streets / in the parks is going to be multiplied. I'd like to see how those large budgets are being targetted first at number of new people coming into this situation being reduced, and then additionally decreasing the existing homeless population.

As usually, there are methods being successfully (at least to a larger extent) used in other societies - but USA is very often dismissive of them, because it's special and different.

hcurtiss5• 1 year ago

Nah — usually they decided to do meth and the rest followed. I used to be pretty libertarian about drugs. Victimless crime and all. But in the last ten years, it’s become clear to me that they exploit fundamental human weaknesses. TBH - I’ve become a much bigger fan of the war on drugs, and very heavy penalties for dealers.

Double_a_92• 1 year ago

Why did they decide to do meth?

Ylpertnodi• 1 year ago

In the war against drugs, you're losing very, very, badly.

What, though, is 'pretty libertarian' about drugs? I ask, 'cus every professed-libertarian I've met doesn't seem to be very clear in their arguments about anything really.

ErigmolCt3• 1 year ago

This story shows a rare instance where the system actually helped someone... But unfortunately I think without a truly personal approach, most initiatives (in this field) end up as half-measures at best

lisper3• 1 year ago

Almost 20 years ago I spent two years trying to get a homeless person off the street and made a movie about it:

https://graceofgodmovie.com/

It's an incredibly complicated problem, but if there is one message I can share it is this: homeless people are, first and foremost, people. They span the full range of human experience (the main subject of my movie had a masters degree in psychology) and there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Homelessness is not one problem, it is a symptom of at least half a dozen different problems, all of which need different solutions. (And, BTW, some homeless people voluntarily choose the lifestyle. It's definitely a minority, but it's not zero.)

harlanji• 1 year ago

Yea, I'm a regular HN reader and I've been stuck on the street for going on 7 years. Used to be commended for persevering against the odds and the like, as a child and young programmer at 15 onward, home owner at 22.

I've left SF and landed in a college town in Sac Valley last year. Rent is $750/mo here. Been working in a kitchen for a year. Am I housed yet? Nope. Just gotta save a few thousand dollars. I have about the same amount of bills as a housed person, between gym + storage + take out food + car insurance.

But then the social aspect, my old relatives and network need to distance themselves from me. Any kind of old reference or something, non starter.

I will beat this. I only keep posting here on these threads because as you say, we span the full range of human existence. I like to think I'll use my approach as a template to help others. Get out of the big metro and into a peaceful place with cheap rent and lots of opportunity, yadda yadda.

Cheers.

thierrydamiba• 1 year ago

Goodluck and Godspeed my friend

wnolens• 1 year ago

Get out of the big metro and into a peaceful place with cheap rent and lots of opportunity

This always comes to mind when I see folks on the street here in NYC/Brooklyn. Is it too simple a solution? Is a dense metro better in some ways?

carlosjobim2• 1 year ago

Have you looked into joining the merchant fleet? They need people working in their galleys as well, and you'll have no bills to pay.

ncr1004• 1 year ago

Good luck, sincerely.

ericmcer2• 1 year ago

That is really interesting, do you mind sharing more info about how you went from a skilled engineer (skilled enough to get a house at 22) to homeless? If you make it back up you will have a pretty fascinating life story.

ericmcer2• 1 year ago

Does that mean we need some kind of big brother/sister program but for the homeless? Would having one capable volunteer who met with them for an hour a week or something and could advocate and help them navigate the system make a big change?

I really struggle with this because it feels like helping as much as possible is the only moral stance to have, but I also question what level of responsibility the homeless have for their own situation. If we keep approaching them with these 0 consequence strategies does that encourage failure? Would the second guy who was smoking meth have benefited if he got thrown in jail for two months, forcing him into sobriety and then released into some kind of temporary housing with strict work and curfew rules?

We balk at the idea of limiting someones freedoms, but it seems like a mercy to take someone who is killing themselves and endangering others and putting them through some kind of rehabilitation that forces them to get physically and mentally healthy. It might be a relief to have a schedule and safety and some kind of guiding hand.

lisper3• 1 year ago

The fully honest answer is that I don't know. I have some first-hand data but no actual expertise in this area. But my personal advice is this: one of the best things you can do for a homeless person is simply to talk to them, to make them feel seen. One of the worst things about being homeless is that you become invisible. For many people that's almost as bad as the physical hardship.

tlogan• 1 year ago

For those who live in San Francisco and witness homelessness and drug addiction across the city, this article feels deeply out of touch and even insulting.

We need to acknowledge that San Francisco has spent billions over decades on homelessness programs, yet the crisis persists, leaving us to ask: Is this truly the best we can do? Are we investing efficiently, or are we simply maintaining a broken system?

presentation11• 1 year ago

The latter

martinald3• 1 year ago

The core problem imo is there is simply not good enough treatments for addiction (yet?). For opioid addiction there is methadone and buprenorphine etc. But I suspect these have became even less effective with so much fentanyl around now, requiring much higher doses. But these all really work (simplifying massively) by replacing the addiction with something that is easier to eventually titrate down.

For meth, crack, etc there are effectively no pharmacological interventions available. And many (most?) of the street homeless have dual addictions to a stimulant and an opioid, so even if they did manage to switch from fentanyl to buprenorphine they would almost certainly be extremely unstable with their stimulant addiction.

Obviously there are psychological interventions and peer support groups, but these require quite a lot of stability to stick to and get to, which I think is extremely difficult for someone in a very chaotic addiction cycle.

To me, it seems some of the billions that cities spent on social services for homeless should be diverted (or in addition to) to pharmacological research. There is so little funding available for this - I read Prof David Nutt was doing an interesting PET study for kappa opioid response in addiction but ran out of funding. The funding requirements were low-medium hundreds of thousands of dollars and couldn't find it to continue the research.

The current status quo seems a bit like trying to treat TB without antibiotics. The treatment back then was basically similar to current 'rehab' programs - send them to a quiet place and give them care and help. Obviously not a bad thing to do; but once you had antibiotics the prognosis improved by many orders of magnitude almost overnight (and a lot less costly to provide).

starspangled2• 1 year ago

The core problem imo is there is simply not good enough treatments for addiction (yet?).

Isn't that still treating a symptom, rather than the core problem? If homelessness is caused by drug addiction, what causes drug addiction? Underlying mental health? Lack of opportunity? Government welfare dependence?

habosa2• 1 year ago

Please try to speak only for yourself, not all SF residents.

I’ve lived here for a decade, in 6 different neighborhoods (including 6th street). I now live near Golden Gate Park where this article is mostly set. I found it inspiring, not insulting.

archagon5• 1 year ago

Ditto. (Except I live in the Mission.)

johnnyanmac41• 1 year ago

I can't speak for SF, but LA had judges recently come down very hard on housing organizations for having basicslly zero data on where 20 billion dollars went. The judge forced actual audits and homelessness is actually slightly improving as of late 2024.

I would nlt he shocked if similar issues are happening in SF. at best very inefficient spending on minor factors, at medium they may be "fixing homelessness" by paying for more security than actual homes (this was one of the LA factors). Or at the damndest it's hurt outright Embezzlement.

Nifty3929• 1 year ago

The problem is that money cannot solve homelessness, because you cannot live in it or eat it or be treated by it. It's just money - numbers in a computer.

Things that might help would be housing, food or treatments. But those real-world things are often very hard to come by, and often encumbered by the very people who profess to want to help.

For example, maybe building more homes would help - but developers are often hamstrung in their ability to do so - and often by exactly the same people that want to fund homeless programs.

So what happens when we give people a lot of money to "solve" a problem, but then prevent them from taking the actions that might help? Well, they still will always find a way to "use" the money (I'm not necessarily implying fraud here), but the results will never materialize. What this looks like in practice is funding studies, working groups, paper-pushing bureaucracies, etc.

So the money is gone, any we don't have anything to show for it.

lukerramsden2• 1 year ago

California is simply amazing. In so many areas they have problems simply nobody else has (wildfires due to bad fire control policy, homelessness and public drug usage as discussed here) or is at magnitudes worse scale than elsewhere, and then policymakers handwring about how “nothing can be done”. Nowhere else I have ever been even comes close to what I see in California.

johnnyanmac41• 1 year ago

Yeah, meanwhile California alone is a top 10 economy and houses more billionaires than any other place. I wonder if it's a coincidence that increased greed fuels (or buys) less empathy?

IceHegel• 1 year ago

I’m 24 (which I think is younger than most people in here) and I live in San Francisco. I’m pretty ashamed to live here and hope to move soon.

The “on the ground” feeling is bad. Every issue we had 5 years ago is worse (except the drought).

Daily life involves walking calculated circles around drug addicts to avoid agroing them (like Dead Island).

I’m seeing more trash on the streets, more graffiti covering highway signs.

People have given up trying to change anything and just tolerate it now. I thought I’d meet high agency tech people when I moved here. The tech scene is way better than Boston but the sprit of SF is really dead. All the money in the world and they can’t run a city half a well as was done before cars…

presentation11• 1 year ago

lol San Franciscans never tried to change anything for the last 50 years, they never gave up since they never tried to begin with - they actually prefer it this way.

kelnos• 1 year ago

Where in SF do you live? I'm guessing Soma, or near downtown? Get out of your neighborhood now and then. Most of the city does not have a drug addict or three on every block, and trash everywhere.

infecto• 1 year ago

You need to get out of SoMa. The rest of SF is pretty nice, there are definite hot zones like near Bayview but generally what you describe is just SF. I left to raise a family and one of the reasons was the homelessness BUT SF has always been like this and if it was not the homeless it was the gangs or other issues in different parts of the city. Try living in a different part of the city, it might change things up a bit.

cancan• 1 year ago

My experience suggests the opposite; the city was an upwards trajectory until 2018 or so but it's taken a turn for the worse since.

I lived in SF from 2009 to 2024. Every part of the city has gotten worse. When I moved, parts of Mission were definitely rough and they've cleaned up quite a bit. Even SoMa became somewhat interesting, as much as area like that could have before Covid.

robotburrito• 1 year ago

Weird. I’ve lived here for 12 years. Things seem slightly better if not the same.

MisterTea• 1 year ago

Same with NYC. People just moving here are unaware of the history and think OMG so much homelessness, so much crime! Meanwhile I grew up remembering seeing crack vials all over the street, the mob was ever present actively extorting and murdering people, numerous abandoned buildings creating ghost towns of squatters, and the homeless camps were quite elaborate - I remember a big encampment around the foot of the Manhattan Bridge complete with burning trash barrels and a large teepee. Today's NYC is sterile compared to the 80's I grew up in.

ycsf999• 1 year ago

Overpaid tech workers like yourself have done much more to destroy the "spirit" of San Fransisco than some homeless people sleeping in a park. You can look all the way back to the 1960s and see the same complaints about "lawlessness" in San Fransisco, there's always a marginalized scapegoat to blame - first the beatniks, then the hippies, then the gays, now the homeless. The homeless are not an aberration or a new phenomenon in San Fransisco. It's the entitled, overpaid tech transplants rampaging through the city that are destroying it.

scoofy• 1 year ago

Lol… yea, definitely the people who’ve moved here to make a better life for themselves and not the native population doing whatever they can to try an preserve a 1970’s nostalgic lifestyle without thinking about how their own children would need a place to live.

The xenophobia of the late-comer San Franciscan is one of the most cliched examples of why the utopian fantasies many leftist have are doomed to fail.

The transplants didn’t cause the housing crisis. That was built piece by piece by San Francisco over the last 50 years all in an effort to grant people with seniority special privileges.

namuol3• 1 year ago

It can take time to get to know any city, but SF has the advantage of being relatively dense and walkable.

I moved here in 2015, and I was about the same age when I arrived. It was an adjustment for me back then too. The problems don’t really seem worse to me overall, but I will say that market street and SoMa in general feel worse than I remember but not really because of homeless people or drug use (that was already a highly visible problem); I think it’s important to point out how much commercial real estate has gone fallow since tons of stuff was shuttered during the pandemic. That’s the most noticeable change to me, and it just makes the whole area that much more depressing.

So before writing off the city entirely as has-been or whatever, maybe try a day of walking around the northeast corner when the weather is nicer. Nob Hill into Chinatown, then North Beach. From there you can enjoy a view from Coit Tower before taking one of the semi-famous stairways down to the Embarcadero. Levi plaza is a nice spot to rest your feet. If you need a place to stop and work, and you don’t mind tethering, find your way up into the Embarcadero center. The upper portion is an open air walkway over the streets with really well-kept gardens/trees along the way (at least once winter passes). Below you’ll find shelter from cold or wet weather, with lots of places to sit. It’s kind of the best kept secret of the city if you work remotely.

All the money in the world and they can’t run a city half a well as was done before cars…

This is hardly unique to SF. Hell, the city is a diamond in the rough among other post-industrial cities anywhere in the world.

If not the northeastern corner, maybe try the mission near 24th and Valencia, or Fillmore near Japan Town. There are other spots too of course but these are all places I walk or take the train to regularly and I will miss them dearly if I leave.

teaearlgraycold9• 1 year ago

You’re ashamed? I have to be honest with you - I just moved into the city last year after living in the suburbs since 2018. SF is the most beautiful city I’ve ever been in. Do you not have a strong attachment to the communities here? I’m finding the city surprisingly good at cultivating niches.

yieldcrv• 1 year ago

The park rangers empathic personal approach is interesting, she is working within a system not worth navigating as even that best case outcome is still a poor case outcome

For him, “it was overwhelming,”

I’ve dealt with people that take 15 years to do some basic action because of something considered overwhelming. The only thing I observe is that you could literally start from scratch, the age of zero, and be competent in any field by this time

In this guys case, it took 7 months to get basic identifying paperwork regenerated, so that he can walk into one of those classic grifter housing projects

So many issues with that, masqueraded as a solution

jonstewart• 1 year ago

The last time I was in San Francisco was 8.5 years ago. My family had a cabbie with a pile of new tube socks in front seat. When he’d have to stop at a light, he would look for any homeless near the intersection, get their attention, and hand them new socks.

We gave the cabbie a good tip.

barrenko• 1 year ago

Root cause of this issue all wonderfully explained in the Tom Holland's Dominion (not to be confused with the Spiderman actor).

namlem2• 1 year ago

Yep, thought the same thing when reading the article. Christian morality. I think it's a good thing for society to care for the poor and downtrodden, but when it reaches the point of self-flaggelation, it's gone too far. Imo, we need some form of institutionalization that's milder than what we have for the criminally insane, but still coercive.

tehjoker2• 1 year ago

What a horrible problem with such a simple solution. Give people adequate and decent housing at reasonable prices or for free if necessary. Laughable this is still a question in the richest country in world history.

teaearlgraycold9• 1 year ago

Did you read the article? Some of these people don’t want to live in housing. I think what they’d prefer (and it’s not realistic) is to live in the woods on a few acres of their own in a cabin with all of their needs met.

But I agree if housing was more affordable the problem would not be as bad.

tehjoker2• 1 year ago

Do you really believe that if people had access to cheap / free housing there would an enormous homelessness problem? How many weirdos do you really think are out there??

1024core• 1 year ago

If this person wants to be left alone and live by himself, why doesn't he find some place in the wilderness, away from a city; maybe an area managed by BLM where he won't be bothered? Why does he have to fuck up one of the few parks in a city of 850,000 people?

itishappy• 1 year ago

The article speaks explicitly to this point:

Barrows slowly learned that he’d had a rough childhood and had grown up in a foster family. The park was his childhood refuge, a place where he’d spend afternoons wandering around and riding the carousel. She understood then why he had such a deep attachment to the place.

nickvec• 1 year ago

How do you expect them to get necessities to survive in the wilderness?

sidgarimella• 1 year ago

the hn cynicism is crazy but unsurprising. turns out can really easily spend your whole life obsessed with a pragmatism that betrays taking any action, however directionally correct

namlem2• 1 year ago

Sorry but the idea that such a system of personal involvement is a practical solution is a pipe dream. We need some system of involuntary confinement that isn't prison or psych hospitals imo. A place where we can put these people in humane conditions that is meant to transition them into being able to take care of themselves. A place where they can have private rooms and be given useful work to do, as well as counseling for their mental health issues.

owenversteeg• 1 year ago

It's nice to read an article showing someone with serious empathy and understanding. We need more of that these days.

But it's also immediately obvious that more of this cannot possibly be the solution. This article is basically the "California liberal" solution turned up to 11: maximum personalized attention, empathy, "softness" plus several opportunities for housing. And yet as the article shows, you put a homeless person with extreme mental illness and/or addiction into a shelter/apartment/SRO/wherever and they will usually end up homeless again. And this system has an extremely high cost. People harassed or attacked by the homeless. Volunteers and government employees with their own trauma from the things they deal with when working with the homeless. Sections of cities that are unlivable. Even when there's a "success story" it is usually "this person's life still sucks, they're still addicted and have the same other demons but now life sucks in a shitty apartment in a shitty neighborhood instead of in a park where it's other people's problem."

The only real option is prevention. We need stronger communities, stronger families, mentorship for young people. The interventions from the article, across the small handful of homeless men described, cost at least several million dollars. Take a fraction of that money and invest it in new windows and fresh paint and flowerbeds in the neighborhoods they grew up in. Give them access to nutritious food and exercise. Provide for regular contact with community leaders and mentors and people who can make a difference in their lives. Allocate money to wholesome community activities (sports, robotics, arts, etc) such that they can vacuum up all the free time of a teenager with nothing better to do. Every dollar invested in each of these things will repay itself a hundredfold.

Much of homelessness is a disease without a cure. What do you do with a disease without a cure? Prevent it.

ncr1004• 1 year ago

Great article highlighting a complex problem, and the steps required to solve it.

EDIT: May be a situation that would call for "Dog Fooding", to solve for the detailed use-cases?

USA does not spend enough resources to get a highly effective suite of services together, nor appreciate enough the value of human life to consistently provide care to people, ironically.

I'm currently dealing with the impact of a homeless, mutually abusive (shouting, fighting), drug-using couple camping either on the strip of grass directly in front of my home (most recently for weeks) or various sidewalks / bus stops in a 2 block radius, here in Seattle.

Worse, they attract "pals" who are : heavier drug users, very very disruptive to the neighborhood by causing nuisances including walking into traffic and being struck / killed here, creating public health issues with drug paraphernalia and human waste, etc.

This article reminds me of the complexity the couple faces, freeing themselves from the shackles of their abusive relationship, moving away from the homeo-statically well-know life on the streets.

I want them gone. I see it's difficult. I wish more Civil Servants were available to guide them.

There aren't that many. The Seattle Unified Care Team has been ineffective for this couple, they have been here for over four years, and it has not improved.

willywanker2• 1 year ago

Gotta love the change in terminology. 'Unhoused' people instead of homeless, as though their being without a place to live is now someone else's (the American taxpayers') responsibility.

AStonesThrow6• 1 year ago

So I've been looking through overhead map views, and identified possible swastikas near Mental Health Care facilities. For example, This "Specialized Pharmacy" dispenses BH drugs

https://maps.app.goo.gl/ktnBzitvbKjPrFp78

Is this clockwise or widdershins? I need to squint and ponder the shape before the swastika spins out. Like the arrow in the FedEx logo.

Activate the Satellite Photo view to see the building design

This area in Glendale, AZ is a large medical complex, and the two "spins counterclockwise swastika style" buildings are "Advanced Health" which is boutique cosmetics and upgrades for the wealthy, mostly, and there are dentists and imaging/radiology and vision care. You can Street View the shingles hung outside. No BH here that I found.

https://maps.app.goo.gl/srBLyNUkMLNmD3gt6

Another interesting clockwise swastika, if I am not hallucinating it, is by road design in Tempe 85288:

It's at Priest Drive, [psychiatrists and physicians are a priestly class who practice a religion of Aesclepius, wearing casual blue or dressy white vestments and stethoscope rosary, in temples that smell sanitized and sterile], and there is a little international food court with good falafel and Hindu fare, cybersecurity/IT firms kitty-corner to that, homes going up, a train station, and oh yeah, up the road to NW there's the central behavioral health authorities and crisis line operators, a large disability center, the D.E.S. services for SNAP, unemployment, not far actually from the Phoenix Zoo, etc, (is the Zoo hiring this month? any vacancies for carbon-based homeless?) and a housing agency for the Mentally Ill, Disabled and Chronically Homeless, commercial blood testing lab, etc.

https://maps.app.goo.gl/PXz44uHWc4vTw8hR9

Now of course a Swastika is not automatically rabid Nazi supremacist style, but it helps to understand the positioning of Mental Health Care and ordinary normal physicians and hospitals, the legal authority they carry to route patients out of the community, and into court-ordered drugging, or the penal/corrections/prison system, and the pipeline to cemeteries such as White Tanks or crematoria. Of course many mentally ill people also die or become gravely disabled, or felons, without any treatment.

But I just looked at the graceful curved arms of Priest & Washington as the wheel spins clockwise, I suppose.

Don't forget that the WWII losers and refugees migrated to elsewhere and contributed all their research and intellect to receiving nations. Herr Mengele drowned off South American coast. So it goes.

AStonesThrow6• 1 year ago

Almost forgot - dial the peer support line at Solari: the last four digits on your phone's standard TouchTone keypad spell "FIQH",

which is an Islamic Sharia legal term... probably just

accidental coincidence; you know how PSTN RBOC companies can be

San Francisco homelessness: Park ranger helps one person at a time

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