I think there needs to be some kind of program and either homeless are enrolled and attending and getting help, or they aren’t allowed to stay within city limits. It’s just really frustrating how the city has done nothing to sort the homeless into people who want help and the people who don’t. I think between the lazy DAs, cops who don’t care, juries who won’t convict, and judges who won’t sentence—we’ve created a situation where no one is actually improving the homeless crisis, just ignoring it. BART has become a de facto homeless shelter. Antioch trains regularly have 5-7 homeless people sleeping in each car during rush hour. I read in SFGate that they arrested 66 fugitives in the Tenderloin in one sweep this week... it just doesn't seem safe to have this level of lawlessness in a major city.
I feel bad for these people because most of them are mentally ill or struggling with some other issue, but this is not the way to run a world class city. There is clearly money to fix the problem, but no political will to actually put the structures in place.
They want to go wherever they want to, camp out wherever they want to, they want to collect whatever garbage they want to and they don’t want to clean up after themselves, they want to do as much drugs and alcohol abuse in public as they want to, they want to piss wherever they may happen to be at the moment because they don’t want to be burdened with the responsibility of thinking out their actions.
This doesn’t describe every one exactly but it generally describes most that fall into this category.
Ultimately these are people who refuse to play by the rules of society. No amount of public support is going to change them because they simply do not want to change. They are perfectly happy where they are right now, doing whatever it is they want to do. Nobody can solve their ‘problem’ because as far as they are concerned there is no problem.
So understanding that fact, society needs to decide just how much of that behavior it is willing to tolerate.
people who are not so extreme perhaps fall into the first category. I mean, I know people who live free because they want to. They don't cause any issues to the public around them except that they don't pay local taxes and are therefore a burden on the state in some minimal way (simplistically, they do use the roads and other services provided by the government). If housing were cheap enough they might take advantage of that.
(How do these people get into this state? Is this just a concentration phenomenon, where people who think that all move to the same place?)
Which is why it is so perplexing that Bay Area progressives strive so hard to protext libertarians.
Santa Monica had a bunch of public restrooms and you NEVER see poop on the street like on San Fran.
I think it's hard to talk about it, because people hear it and think you're saying all homeless people choose to live that way. It's not like that, but some people definitely do choose that life.
The key difference is that people like this who are living on the streets intentionally, if they get kicked out of the area they're living in or if the friend group gets broken up, they'll just go back to living in regular housing. Things like housing centers aren't useful to this group, but if you have cops go through arresting people they will go away.
(For what it's worth, my source knowledge here is totally personal and anecdotal. When I was a new grad student at Berkeley I was surprised when a roommate of a friend told me he had recently spent a few days on the streets. He explained to me that he did this often, panhandling to make some extra money, thought it was generally fun, and met a number of people doing it for similar reasons.)
> For what it's worth, my source knowledge here is totally personal and anecdotal.
Mine too. Same goes for the author of the article, I suspect. Everyone should take it with a grain of salt.
> And they shit and piss on our streets, block sidewalks, litter profusely and otherwise do whatever they feel like.
People who choose to live on the streets. Go talk to people. Ask where they're from. The people you're most likely to encounter (the ones being visible, doing drugs visibly, camping visibly) are travelers of sorts. Adventurers even. Sure, many are drug addicts or have mental health issues. But so do millions of people with jobs and homes. Unlike those people, these people choose to eschew social norms wholesale and live a nomadic lifestyle.
You see much less of this outside of the temperate climate of the West Coast. But here, it's a growing problem. They have plenty of food and can earn above minimum wage by spare-changing and are given adequate healthcare. And they shit and piss on our streets, block sidewalks, litter profusely and otherwise do whatever they feel like.