As California governor he is now rolling out that failed policy across the state, attracting indigents and itinerants from far and wide with substance abuse, mental health and/or economic hardship problems.

People who aren't thinking assume 'not in my back yard' is the problem with resisting including these hordes of people 'into their community'. The latest fiasco is a half billion dollars being spent on buying hotels to 'convert into housing' across California. This destroys bed tax revenue, places for tourists to stay while introducing a sizable contingent of people with serious issues into downtown areas.

Proven approaches are projects like loaves and fishes in Austin Texas but California is ignoring cost effective and practical solutions, instead behaving like the well meaning but naive parents of an addict, lavishing money and help on their very sick child until it runs out with no success. https://mlf.org

California's autocratic political class are going to have a serious reckoning soon...

From that SF Chronicle article:

"A decade and roughly $1.5 billion later, the city has succeeded in moving 19,500 homeless people off its streets, roughly equivalent to relocating the entire Castro district. But despite that major effort, the homeless population hasn’t budged, showing that as one homeless person is helped, another takes his place."

I mean, that's just incredible. They relocated nearly 20,000 people off the streets.

What else are they supposed to do? You can't accuse them of not trying. They moved 100x more people off the streets than that Loaves and Fishes housing project is projected to do at some point in the future.

It's a tremendously difficult problem to actually solve within the constraints of the constitution, and human decency.

If there are practical ways, throw some bullet-points down, and I'll be happy to consider them.

It there are easy solutions, I am as interested in anyone to see them.

http://www.sonomacountyhomeless.com

It's no good asking to have ideas presented to you for critique and evaluation. Go and talk to street people and get their perspective. Challenge out of touch politicians and root out corruption or it will get worse.

It worked to some extent.

It generated a lot of ideas, and I learned a lot. I hope it helped others too.

I'm happy with my contribution involving keeping my own severely mentally-ill relatives off the streets. If our family hadn't gotten lucky with some county programs, a couple of people close to me would now be living on the street due to no fault of their own. They're sick, and it's a full-time job split between various family members to keep them above water.

Thanks for your input. I apologize if I come across as overly argumentative. I'm just bored and interested in the subject. If we were in person, I'd buy you a beer.

Correct. Why is the homeless problem in San Francisco so much worse than in San Diego, despite the latter having nicer climate? Because the goodies are in San Francisco and people know it.

https://www.kpbs.org/news/2018/dec/17/san-diego-has-fourth-h...

It's less visible because SD is way larger geographically than SF (231 square miles vs. 372 sq miles in the city proper), plus there's no bay to the East, it just goes into more urban area. But, yeah, there's a big skid-row tent-city southeast of the Padres stadium.

SF is a small city and it just squeeeeezes everyone together so it's in your face.

If you mean in-your-face, I'm thinking it's an urban density thing.

SF is small and incredibly dense. So, the homeless people that are there are packed into this tiny space along with everyone else and you literally have to step over them on the way to work.

If the population of SD was packed into the geographic area of SF with no available land to the North, East, and West, everyone would be stepping over homeless people on the way to work there too.

Same with LA. People come and jam themselves wherever they can fit. If there's fewer miles of sidewalk, density of homeless people goes up, it's more visible, and you get people living on your front doorstep.

On the list of urban density, SF is number 6 and SD doesn't even make the list.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...

No he's not. He's on the record as saying that the approach he applied in SF failed. I'm fairly certain he's said it more straightforwardly, but from a quick Google search with a 2014 quote,

> "There’s a mythology that you can — quote unquote — end homelessness at any moment, but there are new people coming in, suffering through the cycles of their lives," he said. "It’s the manifestation of complete, abject failure as a society. We’ll never solve this at City Hall."

Source: https://www.sfchronicle.com/archive/item/A-decade-of-homeles...

And here's what he said in a recent state of the state address:

> "Of course, the fundamental building block of California’s solution has to be more housing. A comprehensive response to our collective failure to build enough of it. When we don’t build housing for people at all income levels, we worsen the homeless crisis. It’s a vicious cycle and we own it. And the only sustainable way out of it is to massively increase housing production."

Source: https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-aler...

Also noteworthy in that speech is that he spends more time discussing health care and mental health issues than housing, per se.

Newsom's talking points on homelessness are often annoyingly vague (owing to his very ambitious career goals), but note what he doesn't say and what he doesn't support. Notably he doesn't support a legal right to housing, and is on the record saying so. His complete silence on Senator Wiener's bills was also deafening. Following his politics over the years it's fairly obvious he supports Weiner in principle but 1) knew it would never pass and 2) didn't want to burn his political capital on a loser. Also note the sums in his spending proposals for new, publicly subsidized construction; they're ridiculously paltry if the actual intent is to literally use public funds to build homes for all the homeless. Rather, it's obvious he's placating the far left without burning real cash--a strategy that many centrist SF politicians are actually quite adept at.

The sad fact is that plenty of California politicians know exactly what needs to be happen, including and especially Newsom. But California voters, both liberal and conservative, don't want to loosen housing regulations state-wide (including overriding local restrictions), and far too many on the left unthinkingly assume it's feasible to publicly fund or exact, dollar-for-dollar, enough construction to "fix" the homeless issue. Newsom definitely no longer believes, and he, like Brown and many others, are also perfectly aware how hopeless the situation is in terms of electoral support for meaningful reform and choose to stay clear of attacking the issue head-on.

Don't blame the politicians for failing to produce solutions according to the electorate's inconsistent and incoherent preferences. And especially don't blame a man who successfully[1] implemented a widely popular but destined to fail policy and then publicly went on the record as admitting to the fundamentally flawed premise. We need more politicians capable of doing that and fewer that simply point fingers.

[1] He promised to create beds for every homeless person at the time, and by the time the program wrapped up it succeeded in creating that number of beds. Of course, for every homeless person given a bed and taken off the street someone else replaced them on the street. And he admits it--lesson learned.

As I said, it's clear from the sums and structure of the funding that Newsom isn't actually trying to replicate the SF program. But it's easy for conservative pundits to make hay out of things (especially when the announcements themselves are tailored to placate the left) rather than support actual reform efforts. As I said, the politics in California is fscked up. But using Newsom as a scapegoat merely evinces partisan blinders.

America's, and particularly the west coast's, homeless problem is uniquely bad. It'd probably be worthwhile to just scrap whatever they've been trying these past few decades and adopting methods used by almost any other country out there.

And I know this is an incredibly unpopular statement in HN, but the lax attitude towards drugs is a big contributor to the problem. I don't think people should be in prison for smoking or swallowing whatever they want, but I don't think public intoxication should be permissible either. When I lived in a certain large west coast city, it wasn't uncommon to see someone sitting down on a street corner and pulling out a syringe. It wasn't uncommon to see someone who clearly just took a solid hit of meth and decided to start stripping off their clothes on the streetcar. It was just part of city life there.

The attitudes towards this behavior are known pretty far and wide. Some people actively move to west coast cities because they know they can just give up on everything and abuse drugs all day without a care in the world. Treating drug addiction as some unavoidable pitiable disease hasn't been helping. Sometimes people do need a kick in the butt to get up and get their life together, and I think some cities are afraid of perpetuating the equally harmful effects of the drug war and end up doing nothing at all. Some have legitimate mental illnesses and can be treated in other ways, but most of the people I encountered were people living a completely carefree life in a place with good weather.

Specifically in California, among them are:

* weather that's survivable without permanent shelter

* other states in the American West bussing their homeless to the state

* CA Governor (and later US President) Reagan's abdication of the role of the government in aiding the chronically ill (especially mentally ill) and/or homeless.

The following is an excerpt from [0].

Around the same time, the Court ruled, in O’Connor v. Donaldson, that a Florida man named Kenneth Donaldson had been kept against his will in a state psychiatric hospital for nearly fifteen years. The ruling added momentum to a nationwide campaign to “deinstitutionalize” the mentally ill. Activists decried the existence of mental hospitals that were filled, as one account put it, with “naked humans herded like cattle.” During the next two decades, states across the country shut down such facilities, both to save money and to appease advocates pushing for reform. But instead of funding more humane modes of treatment—such as community mental-health centers that could help patients live independently—many states left the mentally ill to their own devices. Often, highly unstable people ended up on the streets, abusing drugs and committing crimes, which led them into the prison system.

[0] http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/02/the-torturing-o...

The only way to implement what you're describing I can see is arresting people and putting them in prison on non-violent drug offences.

That brings with it it's own set of problems.

But the bigger problem is the ACLU and especially homeless advocacy groups, who have decided that being drunk, high, and shitting on the sidewalk are constitutional rights. It is literally impossible to get a homeless person the treatment they need for their mental illness or drug dependency because these groups have blocked all efforts by the city and county to administer such programs.

Is it constitutional to arrest mentally ill people for being mentally ill?

That's a complex question.

I don't think homeless advocacy groups have any interest in obstructing homeless people's access to municipally-administered mental health and substance-abuse programs? Sure, they don't want people harassed, but I see no evidence they're actively trying to prevent people from getting treatment.

It's possible to involuntarily commit someone to a mental hospital. That's not an arrest, it's a civil commitment of a medical nature without any criminal implications.

Sure, they don't want people harassed, but I see no evidence they're actively trying to prevent people from getting treatment.

Homeless advocacy groups recently blocked the construction of a homeless shelter in Lancaster because they didn't like the location. They've blocked multiple attempts by the city to force violently mentally ill homeless individuals from being treated, even though such individuals are a harm to themselves and to others...especially others. More than dozen homeless individuals have been murdered this year by other homeless persons who were prevented from receiving medical treatment by homeless advocacy groups.

The problem is that the idiot advocates base their views of "harassment" on academic ivory-tower views of personhood, and don't understand what it means to be mentally ill and homeless. It means to be shitting yourself every day, to be eating food off the streets, to spend your days and nights fighting off rats and cockroaches, and to avoiding drug dealers and persons more ill than yourself, to be lost in haze or to be seeing people and creatures that don't exist.

Nobody wants to be mentally ill, and once treated, the individual always prefers sanity. The problem with most mental illnesses that lead to homelessness, especially the schizophrenic family of disorders, is that the disorder itself makes the individual paranoid of treatment, and the homeless advocates focus all of their attention on that refusal instead of actually making the person better.

A homeless person that has their mental illness under control can transition to permanent housing and become a functioning member of society again. But in order to do that, you need to let them be treated, even if they don't want the treatment.

If we had a system where people could be placed on a medical hold, and taken somewhere to receive humane treatment with a safe environment to get better, my god, I wouldn't have any problem with that at all. But, I have spent my fair share of time bringing patients into county mental health facilities, and oh man they can be kind of terrifying places. The system, as it exists now, is not even remotely capable of what you describe.

It would be great to see a system for humane, limited-term institutionalization with long-term follow-up like you're talking about. If there's a coherent policy platform somewhere that outlines what this would look like and how we get from A to B, I would love to see it.

On the other hand, the state mental hospitals are very good at what they do. I had multiple clients treated at Patton (one of the state mental hospitals for criminal offenders) and they are all still maintaining self-medication years after treatment.

Almost all of the state mental hospitals are for criminal patients. AFAIK only one is open to non-offender patients and they only take referrals.

> Almost all of the state mental hospitals are for criminal patients.

Is this a specific legal thing, like criminally insane?

> AFAIK only one is open to non-offender patients and they only take referrals.

I wasn't aware there was the possibility of referrals. We'll look into this the next time it comes around...

My severely autistic adult nephew finally got placed in a county-affiliated group home, but getting him there and keeping him in the program is a full-time job split between various family members. He's been on a few 5150s, and anywhere he winds up half the time they have him drugged out of his mind.

Our country's infrastructure for handling these problems is borderline criminal.

I sincerely hope that you guys are able to get your brother in law some help.

Moving from here to there is just, well, daunting to say the least.

The way I see it, it should work like both the rights and responsibilities currently work for children. Children are not tried for crimes as adults (most of the time), because we understand their lack of capability, but that also means they cannot drive, drink, vote, sign certain contracts without an adult, etc., and small children can be coerced by their parents to an even large degree.

Either you are an adult and can participate in society, but then you have to take responsibility for your actions, including going to jail, mental illness or not.

Or, mental illness excuses you from responsibility due to limited capability, but then your rights can also be restricted accordingly.

The choice for someone committing a crime and claiming mental illness should be jail, or involuntary treatment.

A) Where do we put these folks?

B) Can you constitutionally 'put' someone somewhere they may not want to be put?

C) How do you help mentally ill people without resorting to dystopian means?

So, a good (not showpiece) solution could have no one place to "put" them. Any solution optimized for the needs of the homeless rather than for their advocates will necessarily be an ever-adapting patchwork based on lots of experiments that are allowed to fail, one that can't ever fully solve the problem but gradually gets better at it, like genuine, evidence-based medicine addressing the needs of sick people.

I don't believe you can constitutionally put someone anywhere they don't want to go unless they threaten others, but you can tell them that they "can't stay here" and let them decide where else to put themselves. Like all of the patches, that will only work for some. Others are unable to put themselves someplace safe, so options have to be created--again different options for different categories. "You can't stay here but you can go here" will be an important patch in the patchwork.

But it still leaves many categories uncovered. Those who are predators can constitutionally be taken off the streets and locked up and need to be. Their most likely prey are other homeless, who need to be kept safe even if you haven't found a housing solution for them. And the mentally ill? There are categories of mental impairments, too. Some aren't too bad off and might be "bribed" in various ways to take their meds.

And I have to repeat, some things will help these people, some things will help those people, and there will always remain unsolved categories. I can no more provide the solution to homelessness than the solution to all illness, but an adapting, experimental, evidence-based approach to solving it in pieces--focused on measured reduction in homelessness rather than on benefits to the service providers--is the most likely to succeed, as is the case with medicine.

Decriminalize drugs and provide injection facilities and treatment options.

Provide homeless people with homes.

Provide hungry people with food.

Maslow's hierarchy of needs is pretty understandable.

How do you balance individual, constitutional rights with the need to help people who are ill.

We either force people to undergo treatment, or leave them alone to live in a cardboard box, scream at mailboxes, and self medicate with heroin and amphetamines.

I have heard, and am swayed, by arguments on both sides. I tend to lean in the direction of getting people help (maybe against their will), but at the moment we have zero infrastructure to accomplish that in a remotely humane way. We have some short-term systems in place, but they don't extend beyond the duration of a 51-50 hold.

Enough voters are not confronted with the issue of homelessness and mental illness on a regular enough basis for it to have become a national talking point, but damned if it shouldn't be.

It saves money and it's more humane.

I think it says a lot about the HN crowd that people are downvoting you for saying this. Everyone wants either to police/arrest homeless people (even more than they already are, apparently) or to make their lives even harder so they'll go somewhere else. Neither of those "solutions" addresses the root of the problem - that these people have nowhere to go - and homelessness will continue until they are provided with housing. People love to wring their hands about how homelessness is such a hard problem but they don't want to even consider the obvious solution that would both fix the root problem and treat people with dignity.

Homelessness is simple to fix. Build homes, let people live in them. But the framework we've created, our beliefs about capitalism, fairness, and that survival should be "earned," prevent a lot of people from even considering the obvious options.

When some people look at homeless people, sometimes they think "This is gross, I wish I did not have to look at homeless person," and they stop their analysis there. The empathy of "wow damn, imagine being that guy and how much it would suck" doesn't really happen, for whatever reason. Maybe it's just a self-assurance "that could never happen to me, because I make good choices. Conversely, that guy must have made bad choices, and that is why he deserves to be swept away from my sight. His crime of looking weird on public transit is yet more evidence of his unworthiness." Y'know, the Just World fallacy, and all that.

The "empathy gap" talked about in Big Tech is a bit of a misnomer, I think. I don't think that the kinds of people running FAANG are any less empathetic than the oil tycoons were, or Ma Bell, or the leaders of any other profitable industries.

But we didn't expect Big Oil to help out the little guy, to give a damn if their procurement pipelines were ethical. We all know the guys running BP Gas only rebranded "green" in a cynical attempt to clean up their image after the Deepwater Horizon spill.

Big Tech, though, is different in what it promises. It promises not to sell you cheaper oil, but a better life. Voice assistants are the Star Trek future, Facebook is a way to stay in touch with Grandma, OKCupid is a site to help people find their soulmates. Robots will free us from toil and drudgery, Uber empowers drivers, Nextdoor brings communities together, and a hundred other obvious lies get told to us.

The "empathy gap," when it comes to tech, is the gap between what they promise, and what they deliver. Twitter doesn't ban Nazis and encourages "engagement". Facebook spreads political misinformation. AirBNB and Uber are just barely-regulated clones of hotels & taxis. Github sells services to ICE. Amazon works their employees to the bone. Google promotes slot-machine apps on the Android store because they get a cut of their users' gambling addictions. Youtube directs people to white nationalist videos.

And, when a company is clearly unethical, but it's making you rich, how could that select for employees with high empathy? How could the workplace culture not tend toward siding with the rich over the poor, when everyone there is making 6 figures and dreaming of the day they'll cash out on 8 figures?

SF's tech boom not only attracts people who aren't empathetic, it selects for it and encourages it. As rents rise ever higher and gentrification continues to squeeze out those on the margins, how could the result not be a growing anti-poor-people sentiment? When all your coworkers are wealthy, when all your neighbors are wealthy, that guy who hasn't bathed in a week (because he has no way to) stands out like a sore, gross thumb. They don't see anything of themselves in him, or of anyone they know.

People who are poor, or who have been poor, consistently rate higher on empathy. A pool of rich people (or people who strongly value wealth) congregating in an area and driving everyone else out, is going to reduce the empathy in that space. Whether that space is San Francisco or Hacker News, the culture changes, and people stop caring so much about those who aren't as fortunate.