As anathema as it may seem to some people I think the real answer has to involve dispersing the homeless population in SF.
The SF chronicle did a series on the efforts to house people in shelters and one major problems was that a person who wanted to get clean from opioids is just surrounded by temptation and is just one dose of Fentanyl away from death.
Thus these people are more dangerous to each other than they are to anyone else. Not only is there the paradox of warehousing the poor in the most expensive place in America but also that of warehousing them in the most dangerous place in America insofar as fentanyl is concerned.
> I think the real answer has to involve dispersing the homeless population in SF.
Does it? As the article points out, the homeless population is actually down since 2019. Homelessness is bad, and a hard problem to solve[1], but it's not The Reason Everything Is Wrong, because if it was (1) everything would have been wrong before, when we agree everything was great and (2) other places would be worse, and we all agree they aren't.
Really this article is just like all the others on this subject. It's completely innumerate. It takes crisis and calamity as a prior and writes about it, while having to nod repeatedly that the actual measurements don't hold up the hypothesis.
It's just shocking to me the extent to which this meme has permeated the tech community. Urban homelessness is just not a new phenomenon, it's not a changed phenomenon, and it's not even a new phenomenon to San Francisco!
[1] Largely because it's unsolvable inherently. We've always had a homeless population in our cities going back to the invention of the city. Some people won't/can't/don't-wanna live within the rules of typical society and view street living as acceptable vs. the alternatives. So to that population, attempts to assist them just have the marginal effect of making homelessness more desirable. And... that's just not something that public policy[2] is going to fix.
[2] Well, tolerable public policy. Some of our ancestors deployed asylums and other kinds of para-prisons to control this. But even that works only poorly.
I just visited several cities in Europe. I did not see homeless people just strewn all over the place like one does in SF, in countries which are both equivalent and far poorer than the U.S., and in countries which statistically have significantly lower and higher homeless per capita than the U.S.
It’s almost like if the govt provides basic services that allow even the poorest then even the homeless will choose to live with some dignity.
FWIW: if you walked around San Francisco in the 1990's, you'd see fewer people "strewn all over the place" too. But they were still there! We used to use law enforcement to push them into places you couldn't see. That's not "living with dignity", it's just abuse.
I won't speak to what you saw in Europe except to say that Europe too has large homeless populations in most cities. This is a universal thing.
But really your point is the point in the linked article. We don't want a solution to the homeless problem. We just don't want to see the homeless. And our community has treated that disconnect by meme-ing the existence of a problem that isn't real.
I've lived in SF for about half a century. I've also read up on the history of SF.
What you're saying about "Urban homelessness is ... not even a new phenomenon to San Francisco!" is very much true, at least since the Gold Rush. I believe our Emperor Norton III was, technically, by modern standards, homeless, although the city was his palace.
What changed was the influx of more-or-less normal people. San Francisco has served as a kind of "drain" for the crazies of the rest of the nation since 1849 right up until the late 90's and the "Dot Com boom". Then e.g. Twitter was tricked into opening their office in the middle of skid row and techie culture and "the street" got to rub shoulders daily and it was not so great, eh?
I've come to believe that OP has got the right idea: Civic Center and the Tenderloin should be condemned and razed, just like Kowloon. The issue is what to do with the people living there now?
(BTW there have been cities w/o homelessness but they are rare. "We've always had a homeless population in our cities going back to the invention of the city." this is another meme that needs to die, eh?)
> Civic Center and the Tenderloin should be condemned and razed
maybe the loin, but how does razing the Civic Center help? that area by itself is one of the nicest areas you can think of: a wide-open park-like place to walk around and enjoy the city. What would you even replace it with? and how would it help the problem of those people still around, who would shift to soma or elsewhere nearby.
The problem is that the entire US has zero idea what to do with homeless and mentally ill people, other than "dispersing" them or locking them up. As a result, some (particulary Republican) regions give them one way bus tickets to other (particularly Democrat) regions or deport them outright in sometimes very public stunts - out of sight, out of mind and if it deters others all the better, seems to be the general consensus. Others go where the survival chances are the best on their own, which means somewhere sunny with low rain and snow.
The problem is, the very few regions where both conditions match end up overrun - even though no one can seriously expect these regions to solve the homeless problem of an entire continent-spanning country with 330-340M people.
People with severe mental illness are hard to live with. When I was growing up there was a homeless man who spent all day at the public library that people called "The Professor" who was said to be unable to live indoors because he'd wake up screaming every night. We took in a friend who I think had schizoaffective disorder in and she threatened my wife with a knife after she'd lived at our place for 18 months. Schizophrenics are more likely to be the victims of crime than the perpetrators but every so often they do something that is "batshit crazy"
"Housing first" is an improvement over the status quo but people with severe problems are going to make that kind of environment hard to run. "Dispersal" may very well make it possible because that kind of behavior randomly scattered won't break people's ability to cope with it down, whereas concentrating it in one place certainly does. I can't see how anybody who has any moral sensibility at all could stand to go to SF, never mind live there. Just as the rationalists try to break down our moral sensitivities by spamming us with trolley problems, exposure to that filters for a population of people who just don't care.
BTW, the one way bus ticket was tried in SF long ago, just like they've tried the other obvious non-solutions, but they came to the conclusion that the offer of bus tickets away just made it more attractive to go there.
There are certainly homeless people with serious mental illnesses, but from my experience with talking to homeless people on the street this is not most homeless people. They just fell by the wayside for one reason or the other, and once you're in that position it can be hard to get out – hard to plan for the future if you're worried about getting enough food for today (and/or enough drugs or alcohol) and the situation just seems hopeless.
Looking at SF specifically, the causes seem to be "job loss (26%), alcohol/drug use (18%), eviction (13%), argument/asked to leave by friend/family (12%), mental health issues (8%), and divorce/separation (5%)".
One thing that seemed to have worked in London a few years ago is to give people a bank account with £3,000 with no strings or obligations attached.[1] While the pilot was small (13 people) and time period relatively short (1 year), the results were promising. I seem to recall it's been tried elsewhere too, but I can't find the report on that right now.
Turns out that just giving people a chance and autonomy goes a long way. Unfortunately "free money for homeless people" is politically difficult, even though the alternative is far more expensive.
“but from my experience with talking to homeless people on the street“ - you are not going to get a good sense of someone’s mental state by taking to them once. Crazy people can present themselves as completely normal for quite long periods of time. It’s one of the many blockers for family members trying to get them help.
Sure, but the idea that the overwhelming majority of people are homeless purely due to mental illness related issues just doesn't bear out. It's the same as "most homeless people are addicted to something", which also just isn't true.
If there were a few studies, and it's overwhelmingly successful, why do you think it's difficult to find the results? SF spends something like 90k per homeless person, conducting an experiment with 3k per person sounds like a drop in a bucket. I bet, showing great results on a group of 100 people, would get more investments into this experiment.
> If there were a few studies, and it's overwhelmingly successful, why do you think it's difficult to find the results?
The internet is big and I just didn't look for it very long.
> I bet, showing great results on a group of 100 people, would get more investments into this experiment.
You'd think so, but policy is often penny wise and pound foolish. I think the biggest obstacle is that "free money" just doesn't fit in our culture very well (or maybe it just doesn't fit human nature).
> The internet is big and I just didn't look for it very long.
You'd think so, but for the majority of homeless programs I was interested in, I couldn't find any data. For example, I was trying to find efficacy of tiny villages, what are their goals, how they track graduation rate. What's even their success criteria? Nothing, despite my decent google-fu.
> You'd think so, but policy is often penny wise and pound foolish. I think the biggest obstacle is that "free money" just doesn't fit in our culture very well (or maybe it just doesn't fit human nature).
For policies, sure. What about non-profits? Why wouldn't someone who believes in the efficacy of such methodology organize something like that? Changing someone's life for the better with only 3k sounds like a no-brainer to me. I would personally contribute financially and direct other people to contribute.
Dispersal of any kind doesn't work unless you confine the affected to a specific region which raises serious ethical questions on its own, not to mention it makes life significantly harder for them.
And for a lot of people, giving them a roof and a room of their own is enough to help them out of the worst. Yes, you'll still have a sizable population of hardened homeless, but hey - if you manage to get the 80% low hanging fruit off the street, it still reduces the amount of homeless by a significant degree. And don't forget an awful lot of homeless are people actually having fulltime jobs but unable to afford a place on their own!
> We've got zero idea how to repair broken brains.
I think this is inaccurate. We have many ideas, medications and therapies.
What most homeless populations lack is regular access. Free clinics barely scratch the surface. Bouncing people between the street, hostels, pop up kitchens and offering no stability just makes everything worse.
Dispersal only helps problem areas. Unless you're taking people off the street and homing them with support elsewhere, you're not helping them.
> As a result, some (particulary Republican) regions give them one way bus tickets to other (particularly Democrat) regions
Seattle, Portland, Denver, San Francisco and many other "blue" cities all have "Homeward Bound" one-way bus ticket programs to incentivize homeless people to leave their city. In fact, the City of San Francisco invented the entire concept 15 years ago. This is a primarily liberal strategy to deal with the overwhelming collapse of their public welfare systems.
These programs are always privately run, with the idea that some homeless people are only homeless because they are in the wrong city and they actually have housing available to them somewhere else. But the program has been abused by many who just want a free bus ticket, and don’t have family willing to take them in at the other end.
Private programs in conservative states do this as well. Prisons in Texas will give prisoners on release an open bus ticket if they have no one picking them up. That’s how many people without options wind up in fairer west coast cities in the first place. If you look at “popular greyhound bus destinations”, west coast cities are at the top of that for reasons. Homeless don’t even need a ticket given to them, they can also scrounge the cash they need for one in a pinch.
It is not wrong in a moral sense: people will go where they have the best chance of survival. The problem is that they all choose to go to the same places (which provide the best odds) and then…it is simply another tragedy of the commons.
Going somewhere they won’t freeze to death overnight is definitely one reason to pick SF / LA / San Diego over many Midwest and East Coast destinations.
Let's ignore that almost 100% of the homeless population in America is addicted to drugs. Having experienced drug abuse myself I know for a fact affordable housing is not going to do anything for these folks. They need treatment, and that unfortunately doesn't happen voluntarily when you are sick.
Firstly, that's a lot of addicts. I was also unable to find what study they were citing on mobile, but I am extremely skeptical. In my city (Philly) we have a population of homeless heroin addicts larger than most towns in the US. Those that aren't in that cluster are generally mentally ill. At the very least, the homeless who are not mentally ill or addicts aren't the ones disrupting our lives, and they are not the cause of the problems we're talking about.
This video is from two weeks ago (you can find many more like it): https://youtu.be/ipivYAHEoIM . It doesn't come close to capturing the scale of the neighborhood's blight but gives you an idea. The transient addicted population and people with extreme mental illnesses in Philly have been increasing in number and spread throughout the city though.
Let’s try not to create more homeless population. That will be a great start. Yes existing population may have problems and they need help beyond just housing, but not adding to that list is a great way to even start helping the existing homeless population
anyone that has any depth of knowelege of the homeless knows there are generally 2 types of homeless population.
Transitory economic homeless, these homeless can be assisted by affordable housing, housing first, and other programs. Often these homeless of covered pretty well by current homeless programs, as they are the type of homeless people most easily identify with, and engineer programs to solve.
Then there are chronic non-economic homeless. For this group it is not economic issues they face no amount of affordable, or even free housing will make them not homeless, even if you give them a home chances are they will not stay in it. CA has an outsized portion of the latter type of homeless population, and only have programs designed for the former, that is why the problem does not get better. Infact many of CA programs actively harm the latter population
I have no idea, but I suspect it is combination of factors.
Let me ask, does Spain have and enforce loitering laws that prevent homeless of camping in front of businesses? Is this a factor in driving them to under the bridges instead of roaming the streets?
Because CA prohibits the police from enforcing any of these laws, and many prosecutors refuse to charge anyone with "low level" crime.
SF and LA (and CA in general) has the nicest weather, unlike other parts of the US where you have Extreme cold, extreme heat, or both in many area's LA and SF have mild temperate weather with limited rain fall, this promotes a "roaming the street" style of living.
You can see homeless people in my mid-sized city. They typically sit in front of supermarkets or places where they can get money. It's always the same faces. If there's a law about that, it isn't being enforced.
It's almost like the second group has been deeply traumatized over time by a society whose only response to their mental health issues was a "fuck you" to the point that their mental health just keeps deteriorating and they become completely anti-social and actively avoid help, because fuck it why contribute back to a system that won't contribute to you. Many view the assistance as just being a pathway to get them back to contributing to a system that already failed them, not real help.
We could always do what Finland does: admit that these people will never be productive members of society again and get them into housing with social workers on staff. Yes, it’s a constant drain, but Finland says it actually saves money doing it that way, since the services people use on the street turn out to be even more expensive.
The big issue is that the USA doesn’t have a national strategy for dealing with homelessness. So any city offering programs that provide housing will become popular very quickly, with predictable results.
>>The big issue is that the USA doesn’t have a national strategy for dealing with homelessness.
This is likely saying "the EU does not have strategy for dealing" remember the USA stands for "United STATES" States here is the key... We are 50 independent states, and most of our problems are because we look to the incompetent and corrupt federal government to solve problems they are not constitutional empowered to solve. There is a reason we are not "America" but instead our United States we seem to be losing that foundation, to our own demise. Not every problem is a national one, and homelessness certainly is not
>>We could always do what Finland does: admit that these people will never be productive members of society again and get them into housing with social workers on staff.
Well we used to do that, after many many many human rights abuses the US stopped doing that, and if you look at the graphs of institutionalization, and homelessness there is a striking correlation as the rate of institutionalization drops the rate of homelessness increases.
I am not sure bringing back institutionalization is going to be a popular solution
Finland is part of the EU and has a national strategy. While migration is easier between member countries, it isn’t unrestricted. You have to live in an EU country for some time before qualifying for welfare there, which means poor people can’t easily shop for the best social welfare. Finland doesn’t put its homeless in institutions, just in semi assisted living situations.
Homelessness is definitely a national problem. The fact that someone without housing from Great Falls Montana first winds up in Spokane and then Seattle should give you a clue. Yes, you can’t be homeless in great falls because you’ll die, so you move to a place where you’d at least survive with services and maybe better weather. Expecting the west coast cities to shoulder the nation’s homelessness burden is not just ludicrous, it is ultimately futile.
The premise is important in how the problem can be solved or not. If it’s a national problem and we treat it like a local problem, no solution can possibly work. If it is a local problem and we treat it like a national problem, likewise. Non-profits that count these things don’t do it very well, eg when they did the count in Seattle they found out 70% of its homeless population was from pioneer square (probably where they were counted), which is crazy if you know Seattle. We have a huge data problem which leads to bad solutions given wrong assumptions.
>>Finland is part of the EU and has a national strategy. While migration is easier between member countries, it isn’t unrestricted. You have to live in an EU country for some time before qualifying for welfare there, which means poor people can’t easily shop for the best social welfare. Finland doesn’t put its homeless in institutions, just in semi assisted living situations.
you have completely missed the Point, Finland is comparable to the single state of California, in fact Finland by most measurements is smaller both in economics and population than California.
California has a State wide (in this analogy would be a "national" Strategy)
The US is comparable to the entire EU, so it would be a "union wide" strategy not a "national" strategy.
Each State in the US, in this analogy would be a "nation" in the EU.
Critically here as well, most states do not have any kind of time limit on welfare, and I am not sure if it would be legal to do so in the US.
>>Homelessness is definitely a national problem.
Homelessness is a State Problem.
>Expecting the west coast cities to shoulder the nation’s homelessness burden is not just ludicrous, it is ultimately futile.
yet we expect Boarder stated to shoulder the nations burden for unregulated boarder? Any attempts by those states to move that population is viewed negatively, and any attempt to stop that migration is likewise negative.
>>We have a huge data problem which leads to bad solutions given wrong assumptions.
And you believe the federal government will solve this? Really? What examples do you have of them solving any social problem ever.?
You can easily move from Texas to California (greyhound flows are still vastly biased that way). You can’t easily move from Greece to Finland. It isn’t comparable at all, in fact, the fallacious premises you hold are why we can’t make any progress on this problem despite dumping billions of dollars of resources into it (LA alone has a $1.3b/year budget for the problem).
Not just Texas, from the whole country. Texas is just the second biggest state out there and lacks social programs, also I took a greyhound across the USA when I was a kid and saw it first hand.
Think about it: lots of people from LA aren’t from LA or even California, why would its unhoused population be any different? The same is true with Seattle, Portland and San Francisco. We have freedom of movement in the USA, anyone can just show up and live in a city without permission, it isn’t like the “EU” as you claimed. Free migration of people means that if any city or state decides to just give housing to all its unhoused population, unhoused in the rest of the country would quickly congregate on that place. No, we don’t have that in Seattle or LA yet, but the sucky social services in those places is way better than Great Falls MT or Houston TX. So people come.
Most states also don't really have a comprehensive strategy for dealing with homelessness.
And social care is not institutionalization. In Finland specifically homeless people are given independent housing. It's a completely different thing. Look it up before you start comparing it with failed Titicut Follies-esque institutions in the US.
100% of the visible homeless problem maybe, but there is also a homelessness problem that involve people who lack homes but aren’t ranting and pooping in the street, so they aren’t noticed (you might not even realize they are homeless if you see them in person).
But this is an important point: there is a real homelessness problem in the USA, but there is also a mental illness/drug addiction problem that often co-exists with homelessness (some say that being homeless causes one to become an addict eventually, but that is controversial).
Yep. As the article points out in SF this is most concentrated but honestly the US overall seems to have largely abandoned institutionalizing the mentally ill or drug addicts.
Rates of drug use or mental illness among the homeless can be as high as 30-50% depending on where and how you measure it, and anyone who has ever met people in that state knows they need to be in professional treatment, by force if necessary.
The long and the short of it is that institutions were pretty damn bad back in the 70s which is what lead to states shutting them down. California bought into a community mental health model where municipalities would take responsibility for dealing with mental illness. Reagan bought into it too and turned it into an unfunded mandate.
There've been a few efforts over the years to remedy the problem, but in general institutionalizing people and forcing them onto any sort of medication is very difficult to do in California.
That's why the goal of many "affordable housing" and "housing first" initiatives is to provide a space with easy (often mandated) access to social workers, occupational therapists, and addiction therapists in addition to a place where people can sleep without being harassed and have a shower.
Use the proper term, concentration camps. Y'all need some fences less they make their way back to civilisation. Some guards too. Once you've seen the costs y'all start debating attrition vs. euthanasia for these lost causes. Makes sense right? The losers of American capitalism have proven themselves unworthy to live along side us. No better than vermin. Extermination is the only humane act right?
Fascism visibly pulsates under the skin of these dehumanising HN discussions.
I assume if you keep providing free drugs, you don't need fences, and the metaphorical irony of that is almost beautiful. I think for branding purposes, I'd try out the term "party camps", but yes, they are quite obviously concentration camps.
> Fascism visibly pulsates under the skin of these dehumanising HN discussions.
Yup, and the technology that permeates everything now is designed and implemented with the same mentality, which I think is even more alarming. We've forced everyone into software Skinner boxes.
Is there supposed to be a one-time eternal solution, a solution that isn't just kicking a can down a road?
The only way to keep housing affordable without building more, and have some semblance of fairness, would be to stop new building, impose a price/rent cap, then have a lottery to determine who gets the limited supply of houses.
That is a one-time eternal solution that satisfies degrowth ideology, so long as you're willing to ignore the unlucky folks in the lottery.
You can’t build land, but in cities we deal with that by stacking floors on top of each other, turning one square foot of land into 100 if we want.
Trying so hard to preserve rundown two-story crap boxes built in the postwar era just because some folks think that’s what SF should look like isn’t a solution.
And how does it manifest in dense cities ? I mean was it a very old tradition of spending time with others, that people kept along centuries ? Is it just sitting at a cafe ? or are there different ideas/rituals (sharing problem fixing, organizing cooking, etc) ?
It's easier to make friends and keep contact. What I've always been told by americans is that keeping in touch becomes difficult because everything is hoping in a car and spend a lot of time driving back and forth.
In my city it's 20 min walking max. In Madrid it's not that easy, but still. And it's walking.
Improvising plans with people is also easy because you don't have to plan ahead too much.
I see, that's for personal relationships it seems. What about larger groups and larger tasks.. do people also find it natural to gather to renovate a house, or maybe a road, fix a pipe etc etc
Every time I got to SF I'm surprised how far along they've gone in making the city look like Johnny Mnemonic. Just need to neurolink a dolphin to an LLM...
Maybe it's because the friends i used to visit live in the tenderloin but to me San Franskidro tipped a decade ago. I live in the south side of Atlanta and there is constant gun crime, car theft, gang violence, etc. but to me that is wholely different than being harassed in a targeted manner on the streets for being in a perceived "class." There may be an occasional clash of culture in ATL for sure, but not an outright culture war. Oh and no one poops in the street here. That is nice to have.
thank you for sharing the wikipedia page. it looks like the only category of crime more prevalent in atlanta than san francisco is aggravated assault. simple assault is not included in violent crime statistics in this chart for whatever reason.
I would imagine that this has something to do with atlanta being in an open carry state with no restrictions on gun ownership, and thus more crimes committed involve a gun and would explain why violent crime is statistically higher even though san francisco has 19% more crime overall.
There are expensive challenges with converting office buildings to apartments that historically made it non-cost effective, since commercial demand was always high enough that building owners could always make a bigger profit leasing to commercial tenants versus converting their buildings to residential.
But if remote work has permanently emptied SF’s downtown office buildings, pushing commercial demand to near zero, but demand for housing in the Bay Area is still red-hot, perhaps large-scale conversions will become cost-effective as commercial leases begin to expire, since the alternative for building owners is to just let them rot empty.
Housing shouldn't be an investment vehicle. It seems pretty obvious but no-one wants to give up their imaginary number. (Imaginary because most people have 1 or fewer houses and will always need to live somewhere, so they can't spend the paper value of their home).
The cost of rent feeds into everything, its such a clear drain on everyone's resources (apart from landlords). If you have time to give, please think about how to change things. Though I'm an internet rando so ymmv
The number is not imaginary if you have kids, the idea of leaving your children some of your wealth is dear to many people, and most often they will have acquired their own place by the time you die.
It is arguable that inheritance taxes should prevent accumulation of wealth, but point is, real estate survives you.
In California the real estate value survives you. Your children inherit your Prop 13 tax assessment which means your children inherit a tax bill that's a fraction of what it would otherwise be. That's a pretty strong incentive to drive values up and not sell.
The point is they would need less wealth if they also weren't spending the second half of your life saving up for a house...
And you can still give them the money
Perhaps housing was always an investment vehicle. St. Petersburg is full of 4-5 storey buildings, initially with apartments for rent, most of whose were built to provide {Surname} with a stable income in the old age.
Short of going all the way to banning private ownership of housing, there will always be an investment aspect to a significant financial asset like a house.
So if you are going to have private ownership of housing, the question is more about how policies should be structured. Should policy favor home ownership, should policy focus on housing affordability, etc.
People complaining about treating housing as an investment vehicle are often referring to policy choices in the US that treat home ownership as a good result in itself, regardless of the impact on affordability. So we have things like long term mortgages backed by quasi-government entities or local policy choices that focus on maintaining real estate prices (vs things like quality, availability and affordability).
Wealth concentration has only increased and everyone else just have less and less, at some point the situation will be dire enough that the only resource left for the majority will be violence, nothing makes a house affordable like burning it down and located in a neighborhood known for its need of firemen; landlords will say the attacks are a work of savages, but when you make it hard for people to barely survive in your civilization (aka City) it's is you and only you who are making your civilization less civilized.
Because doing that has worked great so far right? You keep ignoring the problem and pretending that billionaires will allow any change to happen and people just need to go and get into politics.
It's worked before. Some places in the world have a healthier housing situation and it didn't happen by accident. Politics doesn't go away no matter how many buildings you burn down.
Yeah, ask AOC or Bernie how good is working out to get the country to get some affordable housing/healthcare/etc. It's broken beyond repair, but you keep believing whatever helps you sleep at night.
there are enough lots (or owners who are happy to sell their apartment, so the building that would get demolished could), but then the dear neighbors make every effort to prevent building a nice dense housing tower, so they don't get built. it's that simple. burning down a building doesn't change the drivers of zoning
At the same time, there is a large municipality right next to San Francisco (Colma) that consists entirely of graveyards. Homelessness in SF is not just a housing problem, but the housing crisis amplifies it and could be instantly ameliorated by just building the hell out of things.
No, but it revitalizes your downtowns and increases density, which keeps city centers from hollowing out and getting taken over by homeless camps. High density also puts pressure on police and city authorities to deal with the violent mentally ill. And abundant, low cost housing gives you blue collar immigrant communities, which have little patience for angry junkies.
Well it’s an expensive place to live so of course you have to hire experts and social workers at $400k/y! Then they make powerpoints and present them to each other. It’s probably the police department’s fault so they better be defunded and that money should be rolled into the homeless social services program so they can hire more people.
Same problem with any region where people don't have roots but rather come for the opportunity. Turns out it's as easy to leave once the opportunity no longer exists.
Sadly at this point geology is the last, best hope for West Coast urbanism. Something like BART could not be built today unless the Bay Area was a pile of rubble. Reconstruction is the only way to get Japan-like high density housing and transit infrastructure.
San Francisco and Oakland are facing combined close to $500 million budget shortfall and are requesting a federal tax payer bailout. The second major federal bailout in eight years. Oakland has one of the highest violent crime rates in the entire country and they just cut more public safety and health jobs. I can't see how anyone can look at the situation in the Bay area and not anticipate anything other than continued decline.
As of 2019, the stats show Oakland around the middle at 1,300 violent crimes per 100,000 people and San Francisco towards the bottom at around 700 per 100,000. The worst were around 2,100 violent crimes per 100,000.
I agree mixed government wins. I moved to Massachusetts almost 20 years ago and I don't understand why it isn't held up as an example for other states. Everyone thinks MA is deep blue, and it is on social issues. It was the first state to allow same sex marriage. It has the toughest gun law enforcement in the US (break the law and you are going to jail for 2 years) and consequently has the lowest gun death rate in the US - 80% lower than many red states!
But MA also elects Republican governors on the regular. Mitt Romney was Governor from 2002-2006. Republican Charlie Baker ran the state so well that by the end of his second term the state's "rainy day" fund hit the legal max of 15% of the state's annual budget, so last fall every taxpayer in MA got a check for 13% of their previous years state taxes! And state income taxes are not high, basically a 5% flat tax. I would argue this frequent election of people who have run businesses is what also keeps the state at the top of the list of states in per capita GDP.
You're not going to find open-air downtown drug markets, public defecation and decriminalized theft in Mississippi or Arkansas. For that, you need to visit one of our progressive West Coast cities.
Why don't all American cities look in these regards like San Francisco does? They don't, so something is going on. I think there's something broken about San Francisco, and people have been suggesting that for coming up on 3 decades now:
That's because Mississippi And Arkansas are too damned poor to support the homeless. They've pushed them all out to the West coast where people actually have pocket change to give them.
Can you explain how the homeless people who defecate on the streets because of a lack of facilities and shoot up drugs in parks are better off on the West Coast?
Drugs are taken and sold openly in San Francisco and LA.
Exactly. One party rule is bad. The failurs of the GOP to put up viable local candidates in SF and the the Democrats in deep red states are not good for the health of the country
I used to hear conservatives lament that large cities were unwinnable for Republican candidate, and these days I don't even hear that; it seems that they just accept it as a law of nature that they will be governed by Democrats. And as an example, Jacksonville, Florida just flipped that way.
And I wonder - what would Republicans offer a city? My assumption is that they'd just blow a hole in any city budget with tax cuts for the wealthy, thereby achieving defunding of city services, but that's my bias. Still it doesn't seem like anyone in a big metro is buying what they're selling to the point where the Republicans don't even seem to try selling it anymore.
There are a lot of local policies that are in the vein of the traditional GOP politics (small govt, personal freedom, less regulation, etc.) that are very applicable to urban living but do cut against national GOP politics. If they could separate the local from the national they'd do great.
Some examples:
* Cutting land use regulations to encourage more housing development. Urban areas suffer from ridiculously high housing prices due to overburdensome regulation
* Give parents more input into how their children's education via school choice.
* Reduce red tape/bureaucracy for accomplishing things in cities like slow permitting processes and starting businesses
From what I see in the comments about San Francisco (I'm a neophyte about it, never having even visited), it does not seem like people are desirous of less regulation. It seems that a tent city/open drug market is about as unregulated as it gets. (I get that ignoring regulations is different from removing them, though the practical difference seems small). I'm also suspicious of the idea that there's some great supply of land or buildings available for cheap housing if only it was deregulated; isn't San Francisco a small place?
Not sure if you meant this as a counterpoint or as confirmation, but let's be clear that that ALSO doesn't sound like solidly-entrenched one-party rule is good.
I wasn't sure if the person I was responding to was expressing a sincere belief, or just one of the conservatives that love hypocritically pointing out SF's flaws. Figured with this we'll find out.
11% is not the number for the Supplemental Poverty Measure. The percentage for the Supplemental Poverty Measure is under the heading SPM. It's 15.4% for California, which is the highest of any state. D.C. is at 16.5%, but D.C. is not a state.
It's unfortunate this is legal. It's contrary to the whole notion of anti-federalism that experiments gone wrong in one location can receive investments to continue from the federal government. I'm sure someone will rebut this by saying that the federal government bails out everyone everywhere but that is missing my point. Not every city is suffering a budget shortfall.
While I think SF should be able to function on a much leaner budget (There's so much waste and corruption in the city), this isn't a great take.
Investing in one of the most important cities in one of the most important states in the USA is in everyone's interest.
SF contributes 6.5% of California's GDP, a state that alone would rank as the world's 5th largest economy. SF's economy is higher than several other states put together [1]. Additionally, Californians pay significantly more federal taxes than they receive in return, so they are the ones subsidizing other states' budgets.
It's not investing. The city has gotten worse in spite of a larger budget over time. The waste and corruption need a way to be corrected and budgets need to be managed; there's no incentive if bailouts have a well established path. If you want more of something, subsidize it.
Not letting one of the US's crown jewel cities with a 236B economy spiral into decay over a ~.7B shortfall is financially prudent. Not doing so would certainly cost the taxpayers more than that, so it definitely meets the literal definition of investment!
Again, I agree that there's plenty of corruption to stamp out, but letting one of the most important cities in the USA decay over a relatively meager amount of money is not the way to go.
Ok... I'm travelling to SF (I live in the UK) for a few days for work this August.
I was looking forward to it but now I'm mainly scared!
Is it still good to visit but just not to live in?
The last time I was there was 2007. I've got a couple of days to myself whilst I'm there. What should I do?
I live in the SFBA and I continue to go there weekly and bring my family and children there, etc.
I would recommend Jackson square (Cotogna, Blue Bottle, Maison Nico) as a hangout spot, perhaps venturing uphill from there to the Grace Cathedral on the peak of Nob Hill[1] (remember: crime doesn't climb).
I would also highly recommend walking the top of the new transit center which is basically a High Line of the west[2] and is well worth your time and trouble.
If you want to glimpse, but not immerse yourself, in the angst and tension of post-pandemic SF, you can walk to Union Square.
Finally, get yourself to Hayes Valley without crossing through the Tenderloin as that is, without question, ground zero for all of the disturbing headlines.
SF City had a 2021 GDP of $230 Billion [1]. The City had a budget of $6B in 2007. [2]
What do folks on here think - if the City could cut the homeless population in half for $100 Million per year, would it be worth it? How about $50 Million per year to cut it by 25%, would that be worth it? [3]
The city of San Francisco already spends $70,000 annually per homeless person! <https://abc7news.com/sf-homeless-plan-housing-all-san-franci...> More money for the Homeless-Industrial Complex is not needed. The homeless there are homeless because severe mental and addiction issues cause them to reject help, not because resources aren't available.
I feel bad for the poor people that moved there for the service industry that supported the startup zero interest rate gold rush. They can’t leave. They didn’t use their stock options to buy a house in the Hamptons or Aspen. They are waiting tables in an empty restaurant and have to make rent and can’t afford to move. The home prices look like this-
I'm not saying they should, but why can't they leave? even Sacramento a little over an hour's drive away is already much more affordable, let alone other cities and towns in the Central Valley and it only gets cheaper the further you go East. https://www.epi.org/resources/budget/budget-map/
“San Francisco has had what felt like an endless, year-after-year boom,” says Aaron Peskin, president of the Board of Supervisors, the city council. “And now the bubble really burst.”
Years of policies that hurt honest people, entrenched landlords and those already here, and made it difficult for new families and groups to come to the city are why the good times are ending. People like Peskin burst the bubble.
Lower taxes, lower regulations especially for home builders, reduce immigration, mass deportation of illegals saving trillions of dollars in education and other costs, end bail reform, end reparations, allocate funds to cleanup homeless encampments, create new job opportunities, grant liability protections for police so they can do their jobs, crack down on crime by empowering judges and district attorneys, end the green energy initiatives that are costing the state billions, do a full audit.
> reduce immigration, mass deportation of illegals saving trillions of dollars in education and other costs
That is actually going to drive home construction rates though the roof. Part of the labor shortage in construction is a result of reduced illegal immigration. Who could ever tell by the day laborers standing in front of Home Depot that illegal immigration was so entangled with construction?
> end the green energy initiatives that are costing the state billions,
So cede the entire green energy to China? Smart, it would also solve our illegal immigration problem as the USA would be less desirable economically.
Illegal immigrants take good paying jobs away from Americans. Employers seek illegal immigrants to lower their labor costs which is good for them but bad for the economy. It’s also morally wrong for 2 reasons: immigration is motivated by white genocide, and 2, it is a substitute for slavery by exploiting immigrants for their cheap manual labor. Green energy might be good for the long term but it is crushing the economy right now during the homelessness crisis.
Then why is there a huge labor shortage in home building construction? Were all those Americans who are out there to do those well paying home building jobs? Are they at home watching FoxNews while complaining about illegal immigrants stealing their jobs to notice that their is still a labor shortage, especially in home building?
Green energy has nothing to do with the homelessness crisis. Yes, it might someday take away those well paying oil extraction jobs and replace them with wind turbine and solar panel installation jobs, but economically is positive or a no-op for everyone else.
The labor shortage is caused by crippling regulations on home building especially in California. Do you really think that Americans are unwilling to work construction jobs? The influx of so many illegals is suppressing wages and destroying the industry for American labor. The reason to vote Republican in 2024 is the same as in 1850: to end slavery, and the reason to vote Democrat is also the same, to preserve the institution of slavery.
Green energy provides negative return on investment, does not create jobs, and those funds could be better allocated solving homelessness.
What amazes me is that the Valley gazillionaires are not spending their fortunes to fix their own habitat. They can just BUY the city government they want.
Instead, they are shoving mountains of cash to turn the United States into some perverted libertarian fantasy, where the government is weak, paralyzed, ineffectual, and out of their way OH WAIT.
Of course not, I was going to say that, actually - they live on protected, isolated compounds. Logically they should not care about what is happening elsewhere, right? But they do, just not the stuff in their backyard. There are woke people in New York, you see! And they are the real concern.
Don’t you then lose out on something. Feels akin to living in a covid lockdown for life. And a monoculture. What I like about Sydney for example is you can go anywhere and feel safe and do stuff.
I agree, but some people seem not to - what they apparently do is create safe "enclaves" where they can wander around and pretend not to see the abject poverty right next door.
They can't buy the government they want. They'd dump tons of money into candidates that would get crushed due to the insane progressive tilt of most SF voters or they'd get in for a term or two, which is not enough time
> Policies are generally not that clean cut and clear.
Policy clearness is a legislative choice. If someone tries to mail a bomb to the White House the policies are very unambiguous about what happens next.
> Many progressives already fight against policies that would increase housing (like adding overly burdensome restrictions to the development process)
Such statements confuse me. Let’s go point by point on this:
1. How does one “buy” a government? With bond purchases? With campaign contributions? With voter fraud? And in the chosen case, what powers would they gain to “fix their habitat”?
2. Which valley “gazillionaire” is actively spending money in any way that doesn’t align with progressive politics and larger stronger less-accountable government? For the purposes of this question, anybody invested in Palantir is ineligible.
3. What “their way” would a strong government be “in”? What specific harm to whom are you suggesting?
4. If they have infinite power over government, why do you think they would be happy to have it “out of their way” versus active assistance?
5. If we observe that “the government” is quite powerful at the present moment, then how do you resolve the contradiction. Are they wasting their money?
> What amazes me is that the Valley gazillionaires are not spending their fortunes to fix their own habitat
The habitat of the gazillionaires is not the same as the habitat of the people experiencing the issues facing the city. In order to become a gazillionaire, you need to be at least a bit selfish, so if you're selfish, why would you spend your money fixing other peoples habitat?
What makes you think they have not done that already and what we are seeing is not their desired state of affairs? It's not that Zuckerberg or Brin, for example, take BART or need to fend off the deranged junkie who camps in the entrance to their apartment every night.
I wish I could pay 2$ to read the article by clicking a button on an independent service, instead of giving all my info and signing up to a subscription which is probably a nightmare to cancel. Sigh.
Why do you think newspapers/magazines don’t allow people to pay per article (obviously at a steep markup to subscription)? Do you think it’s because they’re afraid of cannibalizing their revenue?
It seems such a perfect use of Apple Pay online - click a button, pay $1-2, the newspaper gets $0.50-$1 or so (way more than an ad impression) and they get the chance to convince someone to subscribe.
There is plenty of affordable housing in America, it's just that SF, NYC, etc doesn't have enough. I am sure there are cities in Europe like London, Paris, etc that also have these same problems.
Profit should be aligned with public good. That's where the system is currently failing majorly. Most people in all economic systems will strive for self-gain. The great thing about capitalism is that it realizes that this will always be the case and tries to co-opt this basic human desire into something good.
If it was all just Capitalism, we'd still be working six-day weeks without health insurance alongside our kids. There has to be a trade-off between satisfying some people's hunger for profit and, well - civilization itself.
Honestly we have a fair bit more regulation than we had in the past, and other capitalist nations don't have the problems we do. It's a lot more than just economic policy.
Mostly I think the problem is our death cult of individualism and exceptionalism. Half the country thinks everyone should either pull themselves up by their bootstraps or die.
I think it's the giganticness of the country and how that leads to a low degree of education for the average person (among other things, like safety nets). In a developing New World nation, you need individualism because that's how you settle a frontier, even if the individuals eventually become towns and states. The problem is that it's difficult to eventually coalesce that into a system that supports people the way Western European or Asian nations have. It takes loads of resources and hence loads of political will. If the Swiss single-handedly colonized North America, they wouldn't be able to replicate their system across the continent either. It takes a long time. Things are improving, though, I think! It's just a slow-moving process.
SF Techie here. Lived and worked here, for many years.
Every day I literally step over bodies to get to work. Drugs are openly dealt and consumed. Mentally ill people roam the streets, screaming. People openly use the sidewalks as a toilet. Crime is rampant. And if anyone doubts it's that bad, I invite you to come and look for yourself.
Almost all of these people come from elsewhere in the country. They aren't "priced out" local citizens, they're junkies and mentally unwell who come here because they know they will get services and be tolerated.
By its own accounting, the city spends over $1b per year on homeless services, for supposedly < 10k "homeless". You do the per capita math. Notice anything strange there? $100k per homeless. Something is off - way off.
Meanwhile these people suffer. Even if they have city housing, they are on the streets anyway, because they need drugs, plus they are driven by their mental issues. It's horrific and uncivilized, and it's a creation of a culture that says "all they need is housing", and then enables them in their drug addiction and psychosis. That's go on for years and years, steadily getting worse. Every year more of them come to SF. And every year more of them die, and the city declines further.
The solution is obvious: mandatory treatment for drug addiction and mental illness. No more tolerance for crime and drugs. Enforce basic city codes.
But somehow, this is "inhumane" to the extreme left that runs SF. They'd rather keep the status quo, and let people suffer and die, while the city falls further into ruin.
