>He's saying homeless people are an eyesore. You're saying the government should create more homeless shelters.

I think the difference is found in empathy. Take two cases: One, I feel bad when I see a homeless person because my empathy makes me feel bad, and I want to remove that bad feeling and thus I help them. Getting them 'out of sight' might reduce the bad feeling a little, but any time I think of their being homeless people, I still feel bad for them.

Two, I feel bad because the homeless person is making the place look worse. So I want them to be gone. Once they are out of sight, I no longer feel bad.

I think the two above are more similar that many people treat them because of how selfishness and empathy interact, but I do also think their is still a significant difference because one is based off of empathy and the other is based off of pure selfishness.

I think a lot of people fall into both categories. Most people have empathy and most people like beautiful things. What differs is the weight of one feeling vs the other in these types of situations.

He's saying homeless people are an eyesore and trashing the city, that's unquestionably true.

He's also saying the government should fix it, what other options are there but homeless shelters?

I don't get why people are acting like this guy wants to send the homeless to concentration camps and gas them.

Well, repealing the Ellis Act, for one. You (and he) are looking at this as if the homeless spontaneously came to exist as NPCs in the RPG that is his wonderful techie San Francisco existence rather than identifying the things that led them to this place in life like the Ellis Act, skyrocketing inflation, lack of lower-middle income jobs, etc.

What? The homeless are here because the city attracts more people than there are room for (development reasons) and because SF spends huge sums to care for homeless immigrants

No. 71% of San Francisco's homeless population once lived in the city: http://sfist.com/2016/02/11/71_of_sf_homeless_once_had_homes...

"Seventy-one percent (71%) of respondents reported they were living in San Francisco at the time they most recently became homeless, an increase from 61% in 2013. Of those, nearly half (49%) had lived in San Francisco for 10 years or more. Eleven percent (11%) had lived in San Francisco for less than one year."

What are these "development reasons?" Airbnb? Property owners have had no issue knocking down buildings in places like the Mission to build high-rent properties in their place. There is ample opportunity to satisfy demand for low-to-middle income housing by building upwards which developers choose to ignore in favor of satisfying the rich.

29% is a lot though.

The article specifically coted the Super Bowl as a positive example. The Super Bowl bullied people away from the venue, didn't help them into homes.

The thing that people are missing is how much dealing with this on a day-to-day basis changes you. You can't walk past/through that much human misery without hardening your heart towards it. My commute to work for the past 4 years has taken me through the 6th st corridor. I walk past homeless people, SRO hotels and what I believe is a methadone clinic. People in wheelchairs with diabetic amputations are disturbingly common. And even those with all their limbs seem broken physically in a way that means they'll never be productive members of society, even if they could get past the mental illness/drugs. Any money spent on them is simply softening their descent into death rather than helping them live.

At first, you feel bad for these people. But, over time, it changes you and you stop feeling as much empathy towards them. They're the people yelling at 3am in the morning that make you tired at work the next day. They're the people shitting on the sidewalk and forcing you to jump around it or walk in the street. They're the people leaving uncapped needles on the sidewalks.

And add to this that the situation has gotten significantly worse lately. SF is a powder keg ready to explode. There are two SFs living in close proximity to each other and both headed in opposite directions. As the one SF has gotten richer and the other has gotten poorer and evictions have increased, there's a general feeling of combativeness that's very scary. It's common for people to try to intimidate me on the sidewalks as I walk to work. They stare at me and walk directly at me no matter which side of the sidewalk I attempt to walk on. My projection is that there's a message being delivered..."you may have everything else, but I'm taking the sidewalk." Homeless people will urinate/defecate in the middle of the sidewalk in ways that make it as difficult as possible to avoid. And while it's mostly passive aggression at the moment, it feels like we're not too far off from that aggression turning active. This deeply unhealthy dynamic is why I've chosen to leave SF.

It would take an extraordinary person to be dealing with this on an everyday basis and not try to compartmentalize it in ways that appear cold and unfeeling to people viewing it from the outside. You can't understand the fear, and fear will cause people to do and say things that others would consider unconscionable. You can't understand the hopelessness of the situation that leads you to write those people off a subhuman. Out of sight is really out of mind. And anyone that isn't experiencing this problem on a daily basis isn't going to really understand this open letter. They're going to attribute the tone and callousness of the letter to the individual who wrote it rather than the experiences they've been subjected to.