Re:We moved to Turkey from San Francisco to continue working...
by FabHK on Monday June 24, 2019 @01:07PM
(#20265785)
> 2.) A general laissez-faire attitude toward the homeless. [...] There's widespread opposition to criminalizing homelessness and say arresting or tazing homeless people.
I want to point out that it is a departure from laissez-faire to criminalise, arrest, and taze the homeless, but another conceivable departure from laissez-faire is to house them.
EDIT to clarify.
Re:We moved to Turkey from San Francisco to continue working...
by nostrademons on Monday June 24, 2019 @01:47PM
(#20266267)
SF does this in a big way for the ordinary family that lost a job or suffered a health emergency and then got evicted because housing is hella expensive in SF. That's what much of the $241M goes to.
The homeless people that you see crowding Civic Center BART or the Tenderloin or the Mission are generally not people that want housing - they're addicts, or mentally ill, or veterans suffering from PTSD, or just rebel against the strictures of modern society. You can't force them into housing without involuntarily committing them, which is what cities generally did in the 50s and 60s. That's definitely not laissez-faire, and has its own moral issues.
The main reasons there's such a visible homeless problem are:
1.) Housing crisis in general. A lot of that $241M goes to lower-income residents who are at risk of homelessness, not ones actually on the street, to keep them in their homes. From there, it largely goes to the landlords, if the apartment isn't rent-controlled, since it's more money chasing the same amount of housing. If the apartment is rent-controlled, it goes to the tenant + other landlords, since rent-controlled apartments drive up the rent for everybody else.
2.) A general laissez-faire attitude toward the homeless. SF has a strong culture of live-and-let-live; if you don't bother the homeless, they won't bother you. (This attitude may or may not reflect reality, but it's the culture.) There's widespread opposition to criminalizing homelessness and say arresting or tazing homeless people.
3.) Poor mental health & substance abuse services. This is a legacy of history: JFK moved responsibility for mental health services from the state to federal government, Reagan consequently cut the budget for the state of CA's mental health services, and then when Reagan was president, he moved responsibility back to the states, without any corresponding increase in funding. As a result, the mentally ill are nobody's problem, so they just sorta hang out on street corners or wander across major boulevards.
4.) Mild climate. SF is an attractive place to be homeless. I grew up in Boston; we didn't have much of a visible homeless problem. Why? Because come wintertime, they would all either freeze to death or huddle together in the subway stations, keeping them out of public view unless you took the T. In SF, they sprawl all over the Tenderloin, the Mission, the Civic Center, SOMA, etc, all of which are prominent neighborhoods that get a lot of gentrified and/or tourist traffic.