Re:Why is San Francisco covered in human feces?
by olliej on Monday August 20, 2018 @12:25AM
(#17797727)
But many democrats, while believing in "helping X" still have the American "you can't give people money" ideal.
SF has many incredibly good systems for helping the homeless - medical care, varying amounts of temporary shelter (SROs are kind of required in SF, but it's terribly implemented, and doesn't actually give people a place to live, just sleep). But the help for the homeless does not involve giving money, but you need money to pay rent, so your only real option is to remain homeless.
Honestly though, I feel there's so much accumulated cruft it would take decades to deal with homelessness in America. For instance, if you turn around and give money to the homeless tomorrow the first problem you'll hit is there are now a few thousand additional people competing for the already limited housing in SF. The decades of mismanagement of mental health in CA mean that you have a huge population of mentally ill who are homeless and may not have cognitive resources to make use of (or even get) the money. You also have to deal with decades of drug [ab?]use in the long term homeless - simply having access to a home isn't going to resolve that.
SF has many incredibly good systems for helping the homeless - medical care, varying amounts of temporary shelter (SROs are kind of required in SF, but it's terribly implemented, and doesn't actually give people a place to live, just sleep). But the help for the homeless does not involve giving money, but you need money to pay rent, so your only real option is to remain homeless.
Honestly though, I feel there's so much accumulated cruft it would take decades to deal with homelessness in America. For instance, if you turn around and give money to the homeless tomorrow the first problem you'll hit is there are now a few thousand additional people competing for the already limited housing in SF. The decades of mismanagement of mental health in CA mean that you have a huge population of mentally ill who are homeless and may not have cognitive resources to make use of (or even get) the money. You also have to deal with decades of drug [ab?]use in the long term homeless - simply having access to a home isn't going to resolve that.