So they're explicitly designed to not shelter the majority of people needing them, that seems counter-productive. Is smoking crack in the shelter somehow worse than doing it in the street? Are they supposed to work out their addiction problem while they've got no where to live and no job?
If you're going to run shelters like that then they're just a feel good measure to make people think there's help available and nothing more.
Certainly it is going to be a lot worse for the politician who approved/backed this shelter, once this is packaged into a nice little media story like „X pays for smoking crack“.
There are not many politicians out there willing to do the right thing and being prepared to handle the expected uninformed outrage.
You have evidence of this?
It may be illegal within CA, but apparently it happens. I happen to believe him.
For those of you not from this area, it'd be hard to believe just how bad the SF homeless situation really is, and how it's tied to drug use and mental illness.
SF has a lot of resources for homeless people, so functional homeless folks who want help can get it. Shelters and low income housing up and down the peninsula don't allow drug use, don't allow people with criminal records, and some don't allow men. Cold weather shelters make exceptions, but those are very temporary. Those conditions exclude a lot of the homeless who would like to use them. Then, you have the issue of the homeless who are heavy drug users, mentally ill, or simply don't want to be in a shelter. These three groups are most of the homeless you see in the streets. San Francisco (and San Jose's) big homeless problems are exacerbated by the fact that peninsula cities crack down on homeless people by buying a bus ticket to SF or SJ, whichever is cheaper, and police escorting them to the bus.
So, as someone who's lived in the area for over twenty years, I'm sick of San Francisco's lack of action on this problem. On one side you have shelters, but on the flip side is utter lack of enforcement of loitering, since being on public land isn't illegal. These people need help, rehab, or even institutionalization, but you can't force that, and nobody's willing to pay for it. It's a mess, and the more money SF throws at homeless people in the form of food, shelters, and safe injection sites, the more homeless people it "hires" from abroad.
edit: That article is disingenuous. The homeless on the streets of SF are not due to displacement by tech, though I'm sure that contributes. They come from all over for the perks. The weather is mild, food is available, police turn a blind eye to minor crimes and shooting heroin on Market street, so as far as being homeless goes, it's not the worst place to be.