This is a problem I want to see solved very much.

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.

The general principle is that incentives work. Make one option better than another and people will flock to it. Current implementation is that you will get fed, housed, medical care, and even paid with no participation on your part. You are incentivized to continue what got you homeless, usually drug use or not attempting to work. The simple solution is require recovery to receive benefits - require drug tests, require attendance to lectures, require applying for jobs or that you get one. The point is to make good behavior better than the alternative. Another way to incentivize good behavior is to make programs benefit both parties. Can collecting was one such program, litter is collected and people without other options make at least some money. When you give people the money there is little benefit to a city in return. A lot of the complaints can be rectified by cleaning jobs in particular.

That is a great approach for people without mental illness.

If you're in California get involved! I have

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.

The irony is, the point of my comments in this thread were to move from Zhenya's bagging on both politicians and homeless people without offering any constructive solutions, to having a productive discussion about how to make things better.

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.

All over the western world we urgently need political leadership who are interested in investing in holistic prevention of expensive worst case scenarios. We don't have viable safety nets and support systems but we do have a burgeoning 'homeless industrial complex' that is intimately linked to the prison industrial complex. This is profoundly wrong IMO and I am very vocal about that. This lack of a safety net coupled with labor and cost intensive care for the mentally ill and addicted is corrosive to society on so many levels and fundamental to everyone's quality of life. The only way to change this is to be extremely noisy and aggressive about what our 'leadership' is doing IMO. I am partially motivated from a young bay area relative dying from opioid o/d this February after his family had burned through a huge sum on rehabs, chasing after him + the emotional burn out toll. We are headed in the wrong direction...

>You've missed the fundamental flaw in the logic - as you spend lavishly to 'house' (actually pay to put in a flophouse) one person another shows up, having heard through the grapevine the pickings are excellent in San Francisco.

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.

San Diego has more homeless people than SF.

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.

San Diego County (not city) also has more than three times the population of San Francisco, so all the more dilution of the homeless. But there's no way that you can tell me that the homeless problem is worse in San Diego than in San Francisco. My comment was to point out why this is so, despite the former's much nicer climate.

What does 'worse' mean?

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...

Why does SF get to embrace all the tech talent it atttacts, but not need to deal with rising population of less desirable demographics? Is there something about California that makes it more worthy of the countries wealth than the communities with less resources?