1. A lot of rich residents and rich companies which supply the city budget with sweet sweet tax money
2. A lot of programs and NGOs that draw large budgets to helping the homeless
3. Political climate that encourages spending money on helping the homeless without requiring anything from them, basically free money
4. Generous programs providing various freebies for homeless people, and no consequences for any behavior short of major robbery (yes, shoplifting is allowed too unless it's over $900)
5. Mild weather that makes living on the street possible year around
And we're wondering why homelessness has not disappeared? There's nobody that is interested in it disappearing, that's why. Well, at least nobody whose opinion matters, anyway. There's a lot of people interested in allocating and spending budgets on fighting homelessness, these aren't people interested in doing something that will make it stop once and for all.
If there exists a complicated social problem that involves thousands of human beings and someone on the internet claims to have an explanation for it in 10 paragraphs or less, that explanation is probably overly simplistic.
If the milk of human kindness is all about spreading the wealth..how about spreading the wealth to other countries?
Why should I pay for the homeless in SF when they live in the richest country in the world when I can send the money to Kenya or Vietnam or India and truly create meaningful impact. And so that’s what I do. My taxes already pay towards the healthcare, food and if in SF..smart phone and BART tickets for the homeless. No more tax hikes without an explanation for the $350 million dollars spent in just one year for SF homeless population.
It is always good to get a reminder that for every USA resident the government leaves behind there are hundreds of impoverished non-USA citizen that still has to pay for it.
The USA does not steal wealth from other nations. Please substantiate this comment with an example.
Wealth is not an indicator of quality of life. I have seen this over and over again amongst the rich and the poor. All we can do is live well so we are not a burden to others. The next best thing to do is help when we can.
What I am against..on principle..is that we look to someone else for our happiness. Or survival. I am an immigrant too. I left my country of origin for one reason and one reason only..upper economic mobility. Many immigrants cause reverse brain drain. I have a better quality of life and I can uplift people within my circle of influence. I can do better as an American than as a citizen of my country of origin. And I enjoy the comforts of my new life. And that’s fine with me. I don’t believe we can heal the world by squeezing the hearts of the collective rich.
I don’t understand why I should support someone who doesn’t want to leave SF because it’s chill while I had to leave behind my native country, my family and friends and all things familiar because I wanted the same thing as them. Comfort and quality of life. Only..I was willing to make sacrifices and trade offs. It’s difficult to empathize because it would make a mockery of the sacrifices that I had to make because I wanted something. We can’t ask others to sacrifice their money because some people don’t want to make any sacrifices for their own desires.
We have seen that money doesn’t solve problems. In SF alone..350+ million did not solve homelessness or drug addiction or mental illness or despair due to poverty.
So what is the answer. If the pitchforks against the rich are laid down and the energy is properly channelized to find meaningful solutions, we will get somewhere.
My motto: Do what you have to do. Others are not a measure. What I am NOT is a fan of guilty self flagellation. If I am not going to flagellate myself, why would I allow others to do it to me?
This is a really good and important point. I immigrated from one of the wealthiest countries in the world to the USA. Off course I made sacrifices while immigrating but those sacrifices were not nearly on the same scale as someone immigrating from a place of poverty. I can still visit my family regularly and they can visit me (even though they are of working class; if it were not for a global pandemic off course; for me it’s not that expensive even if it is a little expensive for them). If anything I should be trying harder to empathize with you.
In honesty me and my partner always had the option of moving to my place of origin, they could enjoy the free education we provide there and get a degree there instead. If I were not from a rich nation that would not be an option. In honesty we choice to live in a van. Sure we were underprivileged to the average San Franciscan, but as an immigrant I had it pretty good. And it wouldn’t have been the end of the world if we were forced to live in my country of origin.
We actually ended up moving there anyway. But it turns out that even though USA is officially pretty hostile towards immigrants, my country of origin is far more xenophobic then Americans are, so we ended up moving back (me being a white person probably has a lot to say about the acceptance though).
I know I didn’t really answer you in a meaningful way here. I really only said that your voice matters as much—if not more—as mine. After all I am a person of privilege by virtue of both my skin color and my place of origin (even though I’m born of working class). So to third party readers I guess I’m saying: Read the parent carefully, and understand their perspective. I might have a lot to say because of my experience of living in a van in San Francisco, but there are other people—like the parent—that also have a lot to say, and their perspective is just as valuable—if not more—then mine.
It cuts both ways. I can’t make any assumption about anyone’s privilege or lack of simply because it’s none of my business and your privilege(or lack of, as the case might be) doesn’t impact my life at all.
However your actions directed towards me and it’s impact on my life would be subject to observation. There are concentric circles of influence for every individual. Yours and mine might never meet.
You could argue there's enough money to solve both problems, and a tax on the wealthiest would help accomplish that. that is a view I'm very sympathetic to.
But I think the comment you're responding to is making the first point, rather than the latter.
Imagine you walk into a theatre thinking it’s going to be a Hitchcock movie. After the 12th minute, they start showing Groundhog Day.
They ask you to come back the next day.
You return. Again, after the 12th minute, Groundhog Day. Again, they ask you to come back the next day.
And they don’t return the money you paid for your ticket. Or a credit. You have to pay for a ticket again. Everyday.
Now. How often are you going to keep returning to someone who steals from you and knows you will return. Meanwhile, any theatre next street is playing the Hitchcock flick.
What would a reasonable rational person do?
I don’t really follow your theater analogy, perhaps you can provide an alternate argument so I, and others can understand why you feel that resources are scarce, limited, and the objectives are mutually exclusive.
And who is ‘we’? Peter and Paul want to tax Bob to hand over $$ to Jack and Jill.
2. Please elaborate ‘..we can do both’
I’d want to focus enforcement on criminals (homeless or otherwise) and people who are a danger to public health rather than the homeless in general.
The rich have polluted the planet, raised the global temperature up a whole degree. The damage is that now I can’t go outside in late summer, if it doesn’t rain the week before, because the air is poisoned by soot from forest fires. The rich are the reason I couldn’t afford a place to rent in San Francisco, their speculative housing investment and gentrification raised the marked rate so much that a working class person from one of the richest country in the world couldn’t afford to live there. The rich are the reason—unless you are one of them—that you are not making significantly more money from your current job, they consistently take away from your contribution to the wealth you generate in your current job without contributing anything of value.
Actually, for a significant part of Bay Area - anybody who is working in a startup or a company that has been a startup (including Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, etc.) "the rich" are the reason they have a job and a salary with which they can afford not being homeless. Who do you think makes up VC capital from which startup investments are made? I don't idealize rich people - as a whole, they have the same percent of assholes and criminals as any other group, and as people with many resources their assholery has an outsized impact sometimes - but claiming "the rich are the reason" for all problems and without them we'd all be paid tons of money of of somewhere magic - is just sheer idiocy. Sorry, I lived in a country where (almost) nobody was rich, at least legally - and it was shitty. I do not recommend it to anybody.
Sorry but in my experience nothing ever good comes out of K shaped economy. I have a good reason to be salty towards the rich. I know that currently they are paying my salaries, but I am also aware that I am contributing more towards the wealth they are retrieving then I am. So strictly speaking I don’t need them. But even so, I would be fine if my entire industry would collapse and would leave me unemployed if it meant that the wealth the rich folks are accumulating at record pace would be distributed towards the working classes of every nation. I would rather make minimum wage in a world where that was the norm then to be taken advantage of by a wealthy class who consistently adds to their own wealth while the rest either stays the same or gets poorer.
Iceland I guess? If you like what you've got, don't try real actual socialism. Believe me, it sucks. You'd regret it.
> I have a good reason to be salty towards the rich
If my guess is correct, you experience is an unique result of a very bad situation which was manufactured by some dirty politicians, some PhD'ed idiots and some greedy bastards (see my comment about the assholes above). That doesn't mean everybody who is rich is a bastard. Having money is a wrong marker, and your saltiness is way off target.
> it meant that the wealth the rich folks are accumulating at record pace would be distributed
That never ever happens. I mean, even if it happened it would amount to tiny crumbs for you ("you livelihood and all you've done for living are gone and you have no means to support you family or procure food, but here's your check for $275, enjoy it!") - you can't both whine about "tiny number of people owning stuff" and expect taking their stuff would make you rich - "tiny number" means you only get a tiny part of it. Arithmetics is a cruel science.
But in fact there's no "distribution" ever possible. Never happened, never will. There's only destruction and desolation. It is possible to target Bill Gates's wealth and destroy it. Shut down Microsoft, make all its workers unemployed, blow up the campuses and wipe out the backups. Can be done. You won't be even $275 richer from that though. Nothing will be "distributed", just destroyed. This is the only way it has ever worked or can work. Revolutions do not make anyone richer, but they do make a lot of people starve and die.
> I would rather make minimum wage in a world where that was the norm
No you wouldn't. I lived in that world, and I haven't seen any single person who after experiencing both wanted to remain in the minimum wage world. Millions wanted to move out and took extraordinary efforts - often risking their lives - to do it. Remember the Berlin wall? Why do you think they needed the wall - is it to hold out the West Germans itching to experience the blessings of the East German minimal wage? How many South Koreans you think want to move to North Korea to enjoy the guaranteed rice rations?
> a world where that was the norm then to be taken advantage of by a wealthy class who consistently adds to their own wealth while the rest either stays the same or gets poorer.
But that's not true. The rest doesn't get poorer - in fact, the number of people living in poverty is declining steadily. Yes, I know you had a bad experience in 2008, but if you're willing to have a broader look you can easily see it: https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty
Rich people aren't tipping over trashcans or shitting on my sidewalk.
> raised the global temperature up a whole degree
This doesn't actually affect you, you've just been brainwashed into thinking it's the most important thing ever. Emissions are going down in all of the most highly developed countries. As technology improves, this will improve as well. You're complaining about progress that has lifted billions of people out of squalor to having powerful computers in their pockets and being able to transport goods across the globe.
> The damage is that now I can’t go outside in late summer, if it doesn’t rain the week before, because the air is poisoned by soot from forest fires.
Maybe they should do some forest management with the billions in taxes they take every year, instead of giving it to street-shitting, drugged-out hobos.
> The rich are the reason I couldn’t afford a place to rent in San Francisco, their speculative housing investment and gentrification raised the marked rate so much that a working class person from one of the richest country in the world couldn’t afford to live there.
When demand goes up, and supply doesn't, the price goes up. This isn't rich people's fault, it's basic supply and demand.
> The rich are the reason—unless you are one of them—that you are not making significantly more money from your current job, they consistently take away from your contribution to the wealth you generate in your current job without contributing anything of value.
They provide you with a job. You are free to start your own business. Rich people can't stop you.
No one owes you anything.
Are you seriously equating globally warming the planet with littering? Yes the latter is annoying but the former is literally killing a significant number of people around the world every day. You can’t blame the fires solely on bad forest management. Yes forests in California could (and should) be managed better, but with the climate disaster fueling them I think those effort would be futile.
> They provide you with a job. You are free to start your own business. Rich people can't stop you.
Again, seriously? Reality check, if this were an actual option more people would do it. How many people get rich (or are able to at least make a living) after starting a business from a working wage? In the real world, normal folks can’t afford to start a business, and even if we could, the risk of failure is too great for us to risk loosing everything and ending up in debt for it.
How much more? US has over 31M small businesses. How many do you need to conclude it's an option? 99.9% of businesses in the US are small businesses (obviously, since you only need one person to make a small business and 100K persons to make a Walmart). If normal folks can't afford it, who are all those? I know several people having businesses, in what way they are not "normal"? Not all of them are rich (in fact, most of them aren't, most are making a good living, some better than others, but none I know are billionaires so far) but how this is not normal? I think your picture here is very skewed.
But this dichotomy of homeless vs. the rich is really silly. You have less to fear around the rich because they are rich, the homeless might be in a desperate situation and behave accordingly, or as put in the Movie Parasite:
> Ki-taek: They are rich but still nice.
> Chung-sook: They are nice because they are rich.
The danger the rich pose is not something they do to you as you are walking home. It is something they do to the planet (like spilling oil or emitting massive amount of carbon), what they do through the legal system (like evict you), or even just fire you, paying you unfairly, stealing from or influencing your government, etc.
I live and work in the Portland, OR area. Homelessness is a real problem here, and they are moving out of the city into the suburbs.
1. I’m not from SF, I came there to live with my partner who was in school there but we couldn’t afford a place to rent.
2. I’ve never been homeless anywhere else and I wouldn’t have been homeless in SF if rent was fair.
3. I’ve never pan handled, but I didn’t need to. Dumpster diving is easy, there is plenty of free food options (including free farm stand with organic vegetables; I also cooked for food not bombs but that was more for the fun then the food).
4. Didn’t get any free phones, paid for my own bus fairs (or just jumped the muni).
5. Police never hassled me too much. Only one time when I parked near Dolores Park too see if they had their porta potties open all night (they didn’t). Police advised us to stay out of this neighborhood. We did and moved back to a friendlier neighborhood in the lower mission.
6. Showering is impossible for the homeless. I could really only shower and shave once a week. I had to wait in a line for a ticket at a charity and then wait there for an hour or two at a cramped space for my turn. Sometimes I would sneak at my the campus of my partner’s school and steal a shower.
Speaking from experience the only thing that is creating the homelessness in SF is lack of reasonable, affordable, and accessible housing options.
To provide a more detailed explanation. They were already renting a room when we met, and their landlord (who was them self subletting from another landlord because they couldn’t afford their own rent even though they have rent controlled price from the 80s) didn’t want us both living there.
My partner had a year left in school but they finished quickly because we didn’t want to push my immigration status.
The question how representative are you of the general homeless population in SF. I would guess not much. Am I wrong?
Note that I never considered my self homeless. My 1981 VW vanagon—which we named Sunny—was a plenty good home for me. It was the first home I bought with my partner and we had a really good life in it. We would have stayed in it longer if it wasn’t so difficult to immigrate into the USA. But I know—and understand why—many people consider that homelessness.
Street parking everywhere because parking garages are being converted into affordable homes for people who can’t afford to live in one of the most expensive zip codes in the USA.
Homeless people who park their RVs and vans in public parks and open spaces are removing them from public consumption for those who paid taxes to maintain these spaces and commons.
The homeless worker ..one of them..had more benefits than the young girls. I wish I could have worked more with them. People need help. The right help at the right time for the right people is more effective than blanket free for alls.
He was living in his grandmother’s two million dollar Mountain View home and the first thing he asked me was if he could smoke his pot because granny wouldn’t approve...while the girls were huddled and chaperoned at all times.
I would pay more in social taxes if I could choose the programs and if there were more transparency as to where that extra money went.
[The homeless worker] was living in his grandmother’s two million dollar Mountain View home
and I have a hard time imagining why anyone would consider that "homeless". Could you elaborate/clarify?
Because he was in jail twice consecutively and was out on bail, if he could claim mental disability he doesn’t have to go back. But if he can claim mental disability and homelessness..citing them as a reason not to work, he could get benefits for life.
He skipped something legal and was at risk for going back to jail. So he just claimed that he was sleeping on the streets and didn’t have an address.
Look..he was really smart. At that point, I really wanted to help him and I can even appreciate some lateral thinking for problem solving. I didn’t mind that he was using a break to get back on his feet. If someone says they are mentally disabled, I am going to believe them and not question it.
But he was doing things that made me feel unsafe because he was setting up the stage for me vouching for his mental instability if I were questioned. Like fire. He would get the blow torch for everything..wasp, weeds, gophers. I have worked previously with the homeless and previously incarcerated. And the most harrowing, addicts. With the former, it’s easy to integrate them back into society. A lot of times you know when you are being lied to and that’s ok too.
But our loopholes are so gaping in CA that people who need help are not getting the right kind of help. And it’s nuts to keep doing the same thing again and again ..and keep expecting the same results. And just throwing more money at it is not doing it differently. A lot of organizations, non profits and sub contractors who win bids are making more money than what actually goes to the homeless people. Homelessness alleviation is an industry of its own. Without the homeless, there would be a lot of jobs that do homelessness outreach. Which by itself could be a way to prevent future homelessness. But that’s just creating jobs to give people money..those needing other kinds of help are not getting it. Because at the end of the day, money doesn’t solve the problem entirely.
https://www.provost.usc.edu/initiatives/wicked-problems/home...
I played along because I knew she was harmless. Then one day the dog disappeared and my general rule at the farm was not to leave any tools outside unlocked. Someone must have left a shears outside one evening. When I came back, she had gone on a rampage at the lavender field and shredded the greenhouse plastic. I don’t know if she was ill or she had lost her meds.
I had to call the cops and I had to check with insurance. I did not want her in jail. I only wanted her to get her meds.
But the cops(they were remarkably kind and they were already frazzled by this kind of issue in a semi rural area) said their hands are tied. They literally can’t help her or get her meds or even find out if she has any next of kin without arresting her. Because of fourth amendment and privacy issues. If booked, she could get fingerprinted. And then they can find out if she is a missing person or if she has any prior history etc.
This was difficult for me. I agreed that the next time I will file a complaint because I didn’t want her to be in the system and on police records. But she never came back. We’d never know what happened to her. She disappeared..just like that. Did I do the right thing? I don’t know! Did the cops have enough authority? I don’t know! There are homeless advocates.
Because I have a story for that too. There were a bunch of young homeless people who became squatters in my farm. They stole things. Used the place to sell drugs. Stole electricity. Destroyed my property and fencing multiple times. Again the cops couldn’t do anything. They had to go via the homeless advocates and non profits because cops are not allowed to deal with this issue. But are they drug dealers(and we are not talking marijuana here) or homeless people? Net net, I have to absorb the losses on a farm that was not making much anyways. Worse, they were cutting the trees by the creek, build bridges from the greenhouse lumber they cut, made make shift ‘apartments’ and cottages with plywood and tarp... and pooping in the creek and I would go every weekend and pick up poop, condoms, needles because I grow food. I can’t have stuff like this around. And the homeless advocates did nothing while they continued to trash my farm and made it their sales HQ.
And start ups. Don’t get me started. A billion dollar company that could have provided safe solutions to mentally ill and homeless population BACKED off from selling their product because they didn’t want to work with the police. Because it would affect future funding and the woke progressive climate in SV won’t look favourably on anyone who works with cops and law enforcement. The clowns had taken over the circus when the employees tender woke feelings matter more than delivering actual solutions to the needy. This is tragic. And I will not pay any more taxes to enable this lunacy that is The California Democratic Goat Rodeo.
I honestly think SF and Seattle need to be tougher on the street-homeless but IMO it's important to remember that there are a lot more homeless people than the obnoxious ones. Those are just the ones you notice, because they are obnoxious.
Again, the people sleeping in homeless shelters are still homeless, you probably just don’t notice them because they aren’t causing trouble
Actually the ratio seems higher if you compare street/outside/tent/encampment/abandoned building vs. the other options.
SF resident for 15 years until I left.
I walked around and talked to homeless. From the dozens I have talked with:
1. They are not from SF.
2. They were homeless somewhere else and it sucked.
3. Pan handling cash is easy. $100+ a day.
4. The SF programs kick ass. Suboxone clinics, Free cell phones, free bus passes, monthly stipends $$, even occasional housing
5. The police do not hassle much, you can shoot up on the street no problem.
It is a system designed to create more homelessness.