You mean "chronic homeless." There are homeless that you don't notice because they aren't standing out. They are living in cars or maybe crashing on someone's couch. Let's not equate homelessness with mental illness drug abuse.
We are perpetuating a permanent dependent underclass along with a bureaucracy that is incentivized to maintain the class to maintain their power.
How? Getting accurate statistics is impossible, and what we get is self reported. "I'm not on drugs anymore!" (while smoking fent) is not uncommon. Every group will roll out self reported data to support their positions, scientific studies are frowned on, if they are even possible anyways.
When we got rid of them, many of their former inhabitants ended up on the street.
[1] For an incredibly broad definition of 'not functional'.
You mean: the people who run the cities did that, who all happen to be incredibly Democratic. They also did it in San Diego, where I bet a Republican mayor was in power at the time (since you know, that was mostly true in the 80s, 90s, and 00s), but economics rather than political ideology was the main driver of the gentrification.
> You have mental health institutions closed down a decade earlier as well.
Mostly by that famous Democrat named Ronald Reagan?
https://igeek.com/Reagan_emptied_mental_institutions_and_cau...
So you don't assign any responsibility to the people who passed it? How quaint. Why even bother to vote? BTW, one of them is governor right now.
If a Republican did it, vote them out of office too.
In the SF case that I was referring to, it really was all Democrats. I was talking just about SF. Brown opened it up. Newsom continued it.
Having trouble with basic reading comprehension, facts, and culpability? Or just biased?
Now twenty years later, you have Newsom as governor and angling for the Presidency. Not one peep about how his policies helped cause those problems.
Why was it so easy to build all those tech campuses and tech dorms yet so hard to build anywhere else in the city? People complain about NIMBY SF but where was the NIMBY there and then?