My understanding of how it worked was that if you were functional enough and willing, you could walk into a certain building and they'd get you an apartment very quickly, although not sure if on the spot (I didn't work that part, just repairs part). I sometimes moved big bundles of keys for newly vacated or repaired apartments from the real estate building to the social workers in the homeless building they can then give out to new tenants.
I've now lived San Francisco for 5+ years and Helsinki basically does not have homeless people compared to what I've seen here.
I wondered a lot why California seems to be failing at the homeless problem. I see at least one comment here in threads that is saying that homeless are drug addicts and should be forced to go into rehab as a condition to give a home. While I was working for Helsinki I rarely heard anyone suggest the people being given homes needed to pay that back somehow, it was seen as obvious that the main problem is not having a home and the other problems can be dealt with later, and it's inhumane to make demands.
I don't know if "housing first" would actually work in California. Housing is super expensive, and I think California also has a lot more homeless than Finland ever did.
The ex-homeless tenants tended to need more repairs and care. I remember some funny/weird stories like we had a woman who could not use the toilet in her apartment because it was bright green and that caused her panic attacks. And some other tenant who painted literally everything (ceilings, windows, cabinets, furnite, floors, etc.) black.
My take on it (after living in SF for many years):
1. Many homeless people do have mental illnesses and/or drug addiction problems (for some, this is the result of their homelessness, for others it's in part the cause). California is very much against involuntarily putting people in psychiatric hospitals or drug treatment programs. This largely due to backlash over abuses from decades ago, where people were put into horrible conditions in mental institutions.
2. I think a housing-first program would absolutely work, but it's politically infeasible. Most people would seemingly prefer to have homeless people all over the streets and sidewalks when the alternative is to give them free housing, because it's "not fair" to the people who've worked to pay for their own housing.
3. The option of busing/flying homeless people out of a high-cost city like SF and into a lower-cost region where their needs can be met is also politically fraught. There are (voluntary) programs that help homeless people travel to a place where they have family who can help them, though I don't think it's used as a solution as often as it could be. But the idea of forcibly moving homeless people to a random place or places where they have no connection or support network is considered inhumane and a violation of rights.
I think #2 would be more acceptable to people if #3 could be used more, since presumably people could be housed in a location where housing is much cheaper. As much as I'm not super comfortable with the idea of just forcibly moving people to a different location, I think it overall can be better for the people involved, if it's done well. But that's the trick: can we actually ensure that the people relocated elsewhere will have their needs met, and will end up in clean, well-maintained housing?
Beyond that, I think we need to get over our aversion toward requiring people to go into (and stay in) psychiatric care or drug rehab. This shouldn't be a requirement for receiving housing; it should happen concurrently with being housed, though a live-in rehab program is probably appropriate for many people, at least to start. But I think refusing treatment should just not be an option.
And as a public health issue, and just an issue of keeping our spaces a nice, clean, safe place for everyone to live, ultimately I think we should make homelessness illegal, as long as we can provide a good alternative for every single person in that situation.
This. I am old enough to remember those bad old days. We have simply replaced one form of inhumanity with another. There are people who need our compassion and help. We should give it to them. We also need to protect against abuse of and/or by the system. Why is this so hard to accomplish?
No need to deal with the high housing prices of the bay area, and you're ensuring the person has a place to live when they get to where they're going. Definitely don't do this involuntarily, but I imagine many people (once such a program proves itself) would voluntarily sign up.
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Random miscellaneous comment- I found it really challenging to get a part time job around where I lived without a car. One of the interview questions was typically "how will you get to work" and I could see a change in the interviewer's demeanor when I responded that I would walk or have someone drive me. I can't imagine how difficult it would be to get a job without a permanent address on top of that.
Maybe you could revitalize and absolutely dying city somewhere by hiring everyone who lives there to support the incoming population.
Finland had a massive homelessness problem after WW2. Many homes were destroyed in the war, and many people from lost territories had to be resettled. Most working age men were veterans, and mental issues were common.
The problem persisted even after the "deserving" homeless had been housed due to popular attitudes. Vagrancy laws were still in force, making homelessness effectively a crime if you didn't behave. It wasn't until the 80s that the society started seeing homelessness as a problem that should be solved.
If you don’t fix any of the other issues then you just end up throwing money in a bottomless pit on housing
After all the entire country of Finland has fewer people than the SF metro area (5m vs 7m).
Having experienced drug addiction, even with a strong support system of relatives and friends rallying around you with love but also holding you accountable for your recovery and dragging your arse to therapy three times a week, making sure you stick to the program and take your medications, with all that it is still very hard to get out, particularly if you are on stuff like heroin and meth.
I just don't see how the homelessness problem in the US will ever be solved just by wishful thinking that by giving people a home, meals, clothes and clean needles they will by themselves get well and leave the streets.
It will never happen that way, and the right solution, which is forced rehab and medications, is ironically seen as inhumane.
What are those incentives? Asking as someone who never felt any desire to use. (Also never been to SF or US for that matter.)
> almost no incentives not to
Isn’t money a pretty big incentive?
You would be surprised what sort of drugs these people are using. They aren't paying for cocaine. They spend all day begging for pocket change to scrounge up $10 for some crap meth-like drugs who's sole purpose it to make you not feel anything. For the 4-8 hours after they take the drugs, they can forget everything they hate about their life and maybe fall asleep.
Realistically, strangers are quite happy to buy food for homeless people if they ask. So then the incentive is to get money to for "entertainment" and relaxation in form of drug use.
If California tried this, it would probably attract too many people to the state and run out of money.
They shouldn't get it for free. They should be required to be in recovery programs and have jobs. Create state or federal jobs for them if necessary.
Recovery program or not, they are going to have to live somewhere. If it's not a publicly funded home then it's going to be a tent in a public park that I am paying taxes for.
@shepardrtc said people who get free housing should work for it, and @legitster is saying that it is in the taxpayer's self-interest to spend some taxes housing the unhoused. I took that to mean that a work requirement is secondary to getting them off the street in the first place.
I agree that we should be providing drug recovery mechanisms and promoting a work ethic in people who are long-term houseless, but our options seem to be (leave them on the streets, parks and front lawns of our cities), (put them in prison), or (put them in publicly funded housing ala halfway houses).
First one seems like none of us want it (unless you live in the suburbs and have fled the problem). Second one is too far, and even with good healthcare services, involuntary commitment should only happen for the severely ill. That leaves the third.
these are the same people who will scoff when you suggest that stealing from Walmarts or Targets or whatever is wrong. they'll tell you, "dude, shrinkage is a thing, they build the cost of stolen or damaged goods into their budgets. and, anyway, why do you care so much about massive corporations' bottom lines, anyway?" obviously I don't, but I sure do care about living in a place where brazen broad-daylight theft is rare, and not something you see every time you go to the store!
It might still be worth it regardless, but keep that in mind
Anyway if we’re designing hypothetical people, we can come up with sympathetic ones too, so it seems like a wash policy-wise.
It isn’t a matter of whether or not I’m a tool. The proposed solution is just unrelated to the problem.
As you say, if someone really wants heroin, they’ll get heroin. So, making their life miserable won’t stop them from getting it. What do we gain as a society from making sure they shoot up and sleep in public?
> Isn’t it a moral hazard? […] If there are no consequences for behavior, what’s the disincentive for not doing it?
There are still lots of downsides to becoming a heroin addict so I think letting them get out of the public eye is fine.
> The nice thing about living in Ballard is I can point out to my kid what happens when you do fent, at least.
It is your responsibility to parent your kid I guess, but I’d be wary of this sort of thing. What if you accidentally show off a corpse to your kid? That could be pretty traumatic, right? Also, is it really a good lesson, that it is OK to talk about people like that? They are people, not objects of derision.
> “We will coddle you while you OD on fent” doesn’t sound appealing to me.
This is one of those things, right? It is often the case that the right policy decisions don’t fit in with our personal moral inner monologue. It is what it is.
If we consider countries like China, where there really isn’t much net at all, drug addicts are rare because they can’t survive very long, and that creates a feedback loop against being a drug addict.
We don’t have corpses in Ballard, just a lot of fent addicts who hang near the park. They get free food at the church next door, and there was an encampment at the park for about two years that we had to walk by often.
> This is one of those things, right? It is often the case that the right policy decisions don’t fit in with our personal moral inner monologue. It is what it is.
Your comment specifically asked what good could it do, it didn’t specify moral inner monologue correctness:
> What do we gain as a society from making sure they shoot up and sleep in public?
This even solves the other problem that you haven’t brought up: the person who sleeps on the street smashing windows all day is likely to wreck the free apartment you end up giving them, too.
Since we currently aren't doing those things, people are searching for alternate solutions, but there don't seem to be any that show much promise (though I'm sure people can cite a study that "proves" I'm wrong and can explain why the $17B spent by California doesn't count as counterevidence, even though a lot of that money was spent on "housing first" friendly policies)
Yes, that is exactly my proposed solution.
We're better off actually helping people. Getting to the root of what's wrong and what threshold we declare someone needs help and of what type is what we're trying to figure out.
Have we? For every 1000 broken car windows in SF or LA, how many convictions (or even arrests) are there?
Some cities have tried and failed, others haven't tried and also failed. Trying to solve a national problem on a state level is almost always bound to be a failure because the problem has to do with things that occurred 10-20 years ago with Purdue Pharma starting off the whole opioid epidemic. We're just now seeing the height of the problem they kicked off.
The other 'unspoken truth' about this issue is that people in the rust belt and such have just as many problems with drugs and crime. The difference is that they have homes and these issues aren't visible until someone dies from suicide or an OD.
I mentioned SF and LA because TFA is about California. You can ask my question about any city though: for every 1000 broken car windows, how many convictions (or even arrests) are there? I know that number is extremely low in Seattle as well.
> Either you accept that an entire class of people need to be jailed for life for the crime of being homeless, or you try and fix the revolving door.
It’s not for the crime of being homeless, it’s for the actual crimes they’re committing. What you’re doing here is you’re setting up the homeless as some sort of protected class that’s allowed to victimize the rest of us with impunity. That’s been the cornerstone of policy in cities like Seattle for years and that’s why those cities have the biggest problem.
> Trying to solve a national problem on a state level is almost always bound to be a failure
It’s definitely going to be a failure if you make your city one of the best places in the country to be homeless and commit crimes.
There's two reasons this type of crime occurs: gang activity and homelessness. People turning to gangs represents a crisis in opportunity. Things like hate groups, gangs, etc do not generally occur in places where peoples needs are met and when opportunity to change your circumstances if desired are bountiful.
> That’s been the cornerstone of policy in cities like Seattle for years and that’s why those cities have the biggest problem.
The problem is actually both. Progressive policies fail because progressives are allergic to enforcement, conservative policies fail because conservatives are allergic to addressing underlying causes. It's a tale as old as time.
If you want to improve things you need to address underlying causes like the housing and opportunity crisis. Enforcement can be used in a way that changes their circumstances rather than putting them in a box. You need both.
I see how treating underlying causes would help, but people are mobile, so doing it with local resources is never going to be a winner. So conservative solutions will show more effect locally than progressive ones, unfortunately, and local voters want to see improvement, not futility.
The other problem is that we are still conflating a drug crisis with a homeless crisis, the people busting your car window and stealing your Amazon packages are more likely in the former category even if they might be in the latter.
I'll say this again, as I stated in another comment, there are different reasons for homelessness. Some people are just in a bad rut and need a stable place to go while they sort their lives out. This is the minimum order of difficulty; build damn shelters, and resource centers, and these folks will get help first.
The larger component of homelessness has mental health or drug issues and far more overlap with gang activity root causes. It's worth trying to solve those together and taking an approach that instead of demonizing them for their choices/mistakes seeks to help them set their lives on a more stable path.
Mental health related homelessness requires access to healthcare that can fund whatever they need to be on and courts that can recognize this is the case.
> far more overlap with gang activity root causes
I have no idea why you are talking about gang activities in retaliation to homelessness, since we have plenty of homelessness in Seattle and virtually no gang activity. I'm guessing that is more of a Californian thing?
> It's worth trying to solve those together and taking an approach that instead of demonizing them for their choices/mistakes seeks to help them set their lives on a more stable path.
We really need to do both? The choices definitely need to be demonized, lest our kids think they are OK choices. My greatest fear would be my kid somehow makes these bad choices in the future because our schools taught him that these people were just victims of society rather than victims also of their choices.
> Mental health related homelessness requires access to healthcare that can fund whatever they need to be on and courts that can recognize this is the case.
We've found this to be problematic because cases will be misdiagnosed as mental health problems when they are really severe substance abuse problems (or the patient will say they don't have a substance abuse problem given the stigma associated with it), to predictable ineffectiveness.
I live in Portland, but yes, it is more of a Portland thing. The visible things that create opposition to our homelessness policies are:
- Store looting, which is mostly driven by a scheme developed by gangs. Gangs are often enlisting the homeless to carry out these stunts.
- Open air drug use, which requires drugs facilitated by gangs
- Property crime, which is either done by gangs or is incentivized by gang-related activity
"Organized crime" is probably a better term than "gang" here. Gangs are generally recruiting in places where opportunity is low and costs are averagely above peoples means. My point is that there's some overlap with homelessness and we'd benefit by looking at them equally empathetically.
> We really need to do both? The choices definitely need to be demonized, lest our kids think they are OK choices. My greatest fear would be my kid somehow makes these bad choices in the future because our schools taught him that these people were just victims of society rather than victims also of their choices.
What you've said here and what I've said are slightly different. Holding people accountable is important, yes. If they are unwilling to change their ways they should be held accountable. At the same time, when someone struggling with drugs or mental health says, "I want help" there's a short window of time where that help can be transformational. Once they've chosen to right their life, and demonstrated it, we need to provide them capacity to move on, which is where we fall short these days. If you've been convicted of a felony, regardless of whether you're homeless at the time or not, then it'll be difficult if not impossible for the person to gain and maintain meaningful employment that pays their bills in a capitalist society. This situation can put people right back into the cycle of drug use, homelessness, a mental health crisis, or all of the above. Mainly, what I'm saying is when someone has demonstrated reform we need to stop punishing them at some point.
> We've found this to be problematic because cases will be misdiagnosed as mental health problems when they are really severe substance abuse problems (or the patient will say they don't have a substance abuse problem given the stigma associated with it), to predictable ineffectiveness.
I wouldn't call it problematic, I'd call it frustrating, because typically it's both. Again, addressing one problem ends up persisting both problems. I blame this, again, on policy that doesn't understand the systems it's up against.
> Mainly, what I'm saying is when someone has demonstrated reform we need to stop punishing them at some point.
Sure, but we aren't asking for that anymore. Its like...ok treatment, but if you don't take it, you still get to walk, so why bother? Jail isn't in the cards anymore unless you at least bash someone's head in, and even then its questionable. Also, our system now seems to be based on financial disincentives (e.g. you get your car towed if you park illegally) and that really doesn't matter to someone who has nothing to lose (e.g. the towing companies won't go near certain vehicles because they know they are never getting paid). We need to do everything possible, maybe throw most of our resources at, people getting to a point that they have nothing to do lose (e.g. make sure felons after jail/prison have a way forward that they don't want to lose).
Instead, for the criminal minority of homeless people, the root cause of their homelessness isn’t a housing shortage or a lack of opportunity; it’s extreme untreated drug addiction or mental illness. This is also the root cause of their criminal behavior. If you try to give those people housing, they will just end up destroying it. These are not functional human beings acting rationally.
If you want to address the root cause here, you’re going to need to involuntarily commit these people to drug rehab or psychiatric treatment. Enforcement and addressing underlying causes go hand in hand here: if you arrest drug-addicted or mentally ill people for the crimes they commit, you already have them in state custody and you can just transfer them into involuntary commitment. We need to build and staff the facilities to do that, but that’s the solution.
People that are homeless and just need a place to live because they don't make much money are one story, and that does need an alternative but common approach to homeless that are committing crimes. They will all need housing at some point in that flow chart.
I mention gangs because homeless folks with mental health issues and drug addiction commit similar crimes for similar reasons as gangs. I disagree that a "minority" of homeless people commit crime. I live in SouthEast Portland and I watch these folks chop up bicycles, steal property and food, and do drugs openly in parks and on the side walk. That also invites gang activity into an area because the homeless become vectors for more drug use and territory expansion. Ignoring the interconnectedness of these things is a giant mistake, as well as the similarity in their underlying causes.
But at that point you’re talking about housing people who are leaving state custody. It’s not really a common approach because on the one side you’re talking about how you release people from prison or involuntary commitment and on the other side you’re talking about helping peaceable but impoverished people get housing.
> I disagree that a "minority" of homeless people commit crime. I live in SouthEast Portland and I watch these folks chop up bicycles, steal property and food, and do drugs openly in parks and on the side walk.
You wouldn’t see the ones who sleep on a buddy’s couch and mind their own business though.
Homeless activists like to cite a lot of statistics about how the majority of homeless people just can’t afford housing and aren’t mentally ill drug addicts. What they’re missing is that the actual social problem people care about is the crime and public disorder.
> I mention gangs because homeless folks with mental health issues and drug addiction commit similar crimes for similar reasons as gangs.
I’m not sure I agree with that. But it turns out that I think there’s a very similar solution to gangs as there is to homeless criminals though: lock them all up. That seems to be working in El Salvador.
This is a lot better than social workers "helping" people on the street with "treatment".
1. send them to extremely cheap housing in bumfuck
2. jail
3. let them be homeless if thats what they want
Imo most of the people who think this way are addicts or mentally ill and should be involuntarily committed, so my preferred option is
4. Rebuild the asylums and commit people(with heavy oversight) who are completely incapable of caring for themselves. Although this option is similar to 2
“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”
But if your question is if I believe in absolute freedoms, I absolutely do not. You are not free to harass people on the street. Not free to monopolize public parks. Certainly not free to be violent.
I wonder who it is you imagine will administer this involuntary servitude program? Does it particularly matter if the work is done to some standard or other? Do you imagine the state of California is competent to manage this system?
I'm not sure how giving someone a home and money for essentials is involuntary servitude. If these people don't want to do the service they can get a different job. I just realize that a lot of the homeless have what it takes to be successful, they just need structure and a little help.
It's tricky.
Don't do this.
100 years ago this question would've sounded ridiculous, yet here we are today.
if I woke up tomorrow on the streets of SF, homeless, without a penny to my name, and in dire immediate need of taking a dump, I would do it literally anywhere that could even be slightly considered "out of the way of other people."
when you take a shit in the middle of a crosswalk or sidewalk, you're implicitly displaying your total rejection of even the most baseline expected behavior of the society you physically reside within. this is completely obvious to anyone who has never immersed themselves in one of these decaying societies to the point where they become numb to it.
Homelessness can be caused by a variety and combination of factors. Plain bad luck, drug addiction, mental illness, etc, and Finland may have a different distribution of causes of homelessness than, say, San Francisco. It's possible that housing first works for the plain bad luck types, but will just enable the drug addiction types.
All that said, the federal government in the US of course would also face all kind of pushback and obstacles in part due to the way it's set up.
Also, there are housing assistance programs for everyone who makes less than a certain amount of money, and I think everyone who advocates for more housing for the homeless would agree with more affordable housing in general. Mostly people who work in this space agree that housing costs are the primary driver of homelessness.
and the ironic thing is that housing-first measures would likely end up saving taxpayers money, but the awful fear of someone undeserving getting something counts for more.
Honestly, there are so many arguments around public housing, you could at least pick one that makes sense.
Source: I grew up in a housing project.
The amount of tax revenue forgone by the government for the capital gains exemption alone surely dwarfs the money it would take to provide affordable housing for many people. To salt the wound further, these benefits turn home ownership into a lucrative investment vehicle that drives up prices, worsening the crisis!
For me, it’s not about “getting something for free” so much as it is about being efficient or inefficient.
Housing people in San Francisco instead of cheaper locations is like solving the carlessness problem by only buying teslas instead of hondas.
And then complaining that you don’t have enough money to buy everyone Teslas.
The plan is dumb. It won’t work. It’s stupid to fund such a plan. It’s not “never give free stuff to people” and “don’t give expensive stuff to people when cheap stuff does just as well, and especially if by doing so you incentivize more people to come and ask.”
I don’t think they want to solve the problem. I think they want to generate funds for consultants and NGOs that pay lots of people.
Until there aren't large segments of SF who work very hard and are housing insecure anyway, it's just going to be politically impossible to provide homeless free housing.
They aren't "tech bros" down on their luck either... they're not failed entrepreneurs, or folks who just couldn't afford one too many rent payments.
They're people who chose to be there for many reasons, including the friendly environment that tolerates their lifestyle.
I have lots of sympathy for the drug-free homeless community. I think the drug addicted should be put in treatment programs or charged for possession of these drugs so that they can be treated in prison. I'm angry that we allow people to smoke fentanyl out in the open in SF. It's bad for everyone including those who are addicted.
I saw this tweet from the Y combinator ceo that says 25% of those in a permanent housing program in SF died. (I assume of overdose). Getting people housed shouldn’t be the priority, the priority is getting them drug free. https://twitter.com/garrytan/status/1659972231328583680?s=20
The unfortunate reality of drug addiction is that even for people who want out it’s very hard. For people who don’t, it’s quite a lot harder. If there was a magic pill that cured addiction I think we might make different policy choices, but given that there isn’t I don’t see how your plan can really work.
Just giving the homeless a moldy and bug infested tiny room without any additional help isn't going to help much. It's "housing first", not "housing only".
I don't think you understand addiction and rehab, frankly. Getting people to stop using drugs is quite easy, just keep them away from it for a while. You can send anyone to prison or rehab, and they'll stop using drugs for a while.
The hard part is getting people from restarting to use drugs once you let them free, and you can't even hope to do that successfully unless they are motivated themselves, which they won't be if they live on the street.
While I agree, there are many shelters that people don't use because they don't want to be sober, which defeats the purpose of reducing homelessness.
Sobriety is not a condition of housing. Many housed people drink and do drugs and don't get kicked out of their apartments for it. Why should we apply a harsher standard to our most vulnerable population?
If you can’t function to a degree where society needs to clothe you, feed you and house you; it should come with strings attached. Resources are finite and “the vulnerable population” isn’t entitled to everyone’s else labor.
If there is no standard for behavior or "giving back" to earn one's keep, bad actors will bring everyone down.
There's a different way to look at it as well. I don't so much pay for housing as I pay for my choice of housing. If I couldn't afford housing I'd just get whatever was deemed enough for me, the system would essentially make the choice. What i pay for is the privilege of choosing something that I want, instead of what's convenient for the system.
I think that’s the nice thing about UBI. It’s a little different to rail against u employed people getting $1,000 a month when you’re also getting $1,000 a month.
I also think that people who point out that a huge percentage of the people on the street are on drugs, so the drugs are the problem are not entirely correct either. The drug use is a symptom that also exacerbates the problem. One of the big contributing factors to California's homelessness problem is that wages have not kept up with rents, and it is not even close. If you're working two full time minimum wage jobs in SF you won't be able to afford an apartment, and that's a fundamental problem. Either bring rents down or wages up, neither of which are popular with the people who have political power.
Bring labor supply down and suddenly the market has to pay more. This seems to be simple oversupply in a saturated market.
Consider that for many people in this situation, missing a few days of work to look for a new place to live might mean getting fired. Even if they don't get fired, the lost wages for missing those days of work could put them behind on their bills or make it difficult to buy food.
And even if they are able to spend time to find a new place to live without putting their finances in jeopardy, remember that they also have to find a new job in the new location, and doing that without further financial hardship could be difficult.
There are also other considerations: someone barely able to afford living in SF or NYC might not have a car, and walk or take transit to work and to do errands. Living in a lower-cost area might mean needing a car to do things like buy groceries or get to work. If you already can't save money, how are you going to afford a car before you move to the new area?
Many of us here can afford to take weeks or months off to take a break between jobs. Sometimes it's hard to understand that many people can barely take sick days without risking financial ruin.
I think these days we forget that the gov was never meant to provide a social net. The mechanism for that is charity. It's much harder nowadays with disconnected communities, but reaching out for help often works.
I myself spent years with belongings only as burdensome as I could carry (at worst case) or pack into my sedan. It made moving from one place to another easy, and I could always rent a cheap hotel to live in since I wasn't burdened by possessions.
It absolutely was. Government has grown into this leviathan we have today, and the world's drastically more complicated since the days of living in huts in villages but the underlying principal is we take care of our own.
Welfare is right there in the founding document, and a safety net is part of that.
What you are you are referring to is the following: “ Article I, Section 8, Clause 1: The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States…”
First, “welfare” here means “the state of well being.”
Second, it is tied to the “United States” as a whole - not any given individual, especially because the Supreme Court has ruled the government has no duty to protect its citizens from harm (Deshaney v. Winnebago County Department of Social Services, 1989; and The Town of Castle Rock v. Gonzales, 2005).
Thus, if the Supreme Court has established that the government has no obligation to protect citizens from harm, it has no obligations to economically provide for citizens either. That’s called “charity” and it’s what churches have typically done by collecting revenue (tithing) from its congregants.
20th century governmental usurpation of charity by rebranding it as “welfare” is a distinctly modern concept, that also happens to be constitutional, insofar that the government collecting taxes to distribute benefits on a needs basis does not violate the Constitution, which is entirely different than being enumerated in the document itself, which you erroneously conflated.
The constitution should be ripped apart and rewritten — if it requires hordes of over-educated lawyers to faff about on what it actually means.
The supreme court was a mistake. Congress was a mistake. The executive office was a mistake.
The only thing all of these organizations do is further their own interests.
Here’s the one, let’s see if it renders:
Chinese jiong should be the only emoji allowed on HN, since it is a valid Chinese character, but then so is a swastika (in both directions, non-nazi Buddhist meanings of course).
Moving may be easier in that it doesn't have a high risk of death, but much harder in actually surviving at your destination. You don't just grab a plot of land and start building your own house these days. America did that hundreds of years ago and charges for it now. How are you paying a security deposit in another state on minimum wage, let alone the travel and job seeking?
https://www.ca-sba.org/california-exports-its-poor-to-texas-....
Many of my colleagues can still afford to live in SF because they have their parent's homes or something in that area, and thus pay no rent, or have way lower expenses in housing.
And even so many are doing it.
It creates new problems, including lack of a job.
I believe the biggest factor is mental illness. The addiction and homelessness are the symptoms/results. (Obviously not in every case)
We’re at record low unemployment. If you’re able and willing to work you can 100% make enough money to pay rent somewhere…it just might not be in SF.
Idk why people feel that everyone should be entitled to live in any specific location.
Also, FWIW the US homelessness rate is below 0.2% among the lowest in the world.
https://www.oecd.org/els/family/HC3-1-Homeless-population.pd...
It’s just objectively true that the US enjoys much higher living standards than the rest of the world…even if Brazil’s homelessness rate in 2015 is 0.1% smaller than the US 2020 figure…
> Brazil’s homelessness rate in 2015 is 0.1% smaller than the US 2020 figure
Not sure how you count that. For me it's 0.18% vs 0.05%, so US rate is over three times or 260% higher (or conversly Brazil's homelessness rate is 73% lower). I can't do anything about 2015 vs 2020, that's the latest data available for this report, I guess.
I'm not trying to "brag" about the US homelessness rate. I'm trying to point out that things are honestly pretty good here. You can get educated, find work, and build a beautiful life for your family. The median household income here is like 6-7x the global average. Despite the recent political polarization, our government is the oldest and most stable in the world.
To me, 0.18% is a reasonable rate and the long term trend is undeniably downwards. I hope you levy these same criticisms against the likes of Germany, France, Sweden, etc... because they all have higher rates according to your chart.
If we don't stop this silly conflict fueled by internal anti-american sentiment, our country may implode.
It's a United States problem.
Short review of the research can be found here:
https://www.brookings.edu/research/what-does-economic-eviden...
There is a lack of affordable housing in all US states.
It's extremely hard to live without a car in the US and cars are a huge expense, plus our car-centric culture means lack of a car is a barrier to employment, both practically and because people are reluctant to hire you.
Medical expenses can be a factor in the US. Universal health coverage could help.
There's no one cause and the oft cited "addiction and mental health" is largely prejudice. In a nutshell, you wind up homeless when you have too many problems and not enough resources to handle them and the US doesn't provide a robust social safety net.
Is it a lack of affordable housing or is it a lack of wage growth compared to cost of living?
Personally, I've started to think it's the latter, because it explains why upper middle class non-millionaires are also getting pinched. They too often rely on income rather than capital gains.
My personal conspiracy theory, and I admit it's a conspiracy theory, is that land owners are the ones centering popular conversation and data around affordable housing rather than wage growth. It opens doors for rental assistance, a multitude of rental-based density expansions, and other programs that put more money in their pockets rather than expanding the money income-based people make and keep via ownership.
In the 1950s, the average new home was 1200 sq.ft. Post 2000, it was over 2400 sq.ft. and held on average one less household member. We've also torn down a million single room occupancy units in recent decades.
My house was built in the 1950s at around 1200sq ft. It's since expanded to over 2000, mainly from finishing a basement and expanding the top level. I'd be curious to see the data you base that on, because the people I bought it from passed this down generation to generation and had their entire family living in it. The house I grew up in has a similar story.
Another anecdote is that about half of the 1950s homes on my block were bulldozed and replaced with single units that have largely gone vacant. My cities issue is that we have plenty of housing, but even the bottom line single units are too expensive compared to wages because permitting and building costs are through the metaphorical roof.
Between 1955 and 2013, almost one million SRO units were eliminated in the US due to regulation, conversion or demolition.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy
I'm pretty sure the stats on 1950s housing vs. post 2000 housing were federal stats, but I don't have a citation handy. I've been talking about housing issues a lot of years.
In Texas I don't remember seeing much if any SROs. I've only seen them in abundance since I've lived in Portland.
Land owners aren't really incentivized that much to talk about affordable housing. Housing developers would like to fix the problem by building market-rate housing - as supply goes up, demand begins to be satiated and prices can come down over time. All the while, developers make more money.
But building dense and inexpensive housing is often blocked by leftist-type politicians for being unsuitable for living, and NIMBYs of all sorts of political spectrum block it on wholly different grounds.
More housing = affordable housing. Not subsidized housing, not regulated housing. Just more of it will help America.
> More housing = affordable housing. Not subsidized housing, not regulated housing. Just more of it will help America.
Last caveat that I'd add to this is also more diverse housing street by street. Having space for single family homes alongside dense housing isn't just a good vibe, I think it also incentivizes a normalization of value. Combine that with shopping/retail and I think you can build some pretty equitable places with shorter commutes.
Something like ~97% of people live on ~3% of the land.
My target housing costs for getting off the street was $400. I searched half the country to find it and moved a long distance to get it.
I've heard from other homeless people that they could be off the street if they could find a place for $500 or $600 and they were willing to move to get it on the condition that it was real and could be counted on.
Additionally, I live without a car. So a hypothetically cheap place without bus service that's in the country where I would need to buy a car, pay monthly insurance, gas and maintenance adds X amount to the cost of living there on top of the direct housing costs, which makes a lot of those "cheap" places a lot less cheap. (That's just thinking of cost, overlooking the minor detail that I can no longer drive.)
This is evident, for example, if you look closely into the studies saying stuff like "most homeless people in the Bay became homeless in the Bay area", etc.
"Why am I paying rent for myself and rent for the drug addict on the corner (through taxes) while I cannot afford to pay for my son's college/medicine/whatever?"
Living in a country with virtually no drug use (besides heavily abuse of alcohol ofc) it feels that while drugs are not the main problem for many, they are for some, and definitely make other problems worse.
Easy fix: Give them a free apartment, too. Let them see what it's like. If they do better there than paying rent or mortgage, great. But I bet they won't last more than a day or two before turning that key back in. They think a free apartment is some great thing to have, as if their neighbors won't be all the people they didn't want to be around in the first place.
I'm sure established families wouldn't actually go through with that plan, but they are also older and more likely to vote against those programs. the youth would take the most advantage of it and may even put up with it due to alternatives for housing being 2K/month into their college loans and the idea that it's a temporary discomfort. And we all know that the 18-29 demographic doesn't turnover nearly as much as that 50+ bracket.
A lot of people seems to accept tax cuts for billionaires much higher than anything spend on the poor. It is all about framing and repetition.
Humans like to help other humans. The problem is that there is a push towards selfishness from the people that has the most and profits more out of it.
The only defense is electing people that stop the bleed and force the government to prioritize what they spend on. Talk amongst yourselves and decide if building a new park or helping homeless people is more important.
And much of it is effectively subsidizing Walmart and friends anyway.
Drug use may be a symptom in some cases, but very often is the cause. Either way, it isn't good.
All you need to do is walk down almost any street in San Francisco and take a secondary glance at the homeless people you see, and its obvious that "can't afford a home" is just one of their many problems. Most of these people couldn't hold a job because they're addicted to really hardcore drugs (you might even get an opportunity to watch them smoke or inject some during this secondary glance), and often severely mentally ill. "Homeless" is to a great extent besides the point, this is a mental illness / drug addiction problem.
Even if you could find a solid place for $800/mo in SF, these people wouldn't be in it because the vast majority of them are unfit for employment. If that was really the issue then we could solve all this by just sending them to Omaha.
But this “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” mentality most people have is ludicrous; it simply isn’t that easy, when you have either mental health problems, or, quite simply, no hope.
This is just confirmation bias because the only people you immediately identify as homeless are the people with these issues. The people who are only homeless because they can't afford a home don't look homeless. For example, imagine a person who has a job but fell behind on rent due to some emergency medical expenses. Now they spend their nights in a shelter while slowly amassing savings from their minimum wage job in hopes to eventually be able to afford a home again. How would you visually identify this person while passing them on the street?
You're right that people who have several physical or mental health issues would be hard to help, in any system.
But the number one cause of homelessness isn't addiction; it's poverty.
And for that matter, the overwhelming majority of people who are substance-addicted don't become homeless. Lots of the people you work with are addicted to something.
There are so many steps before people literally have to sleep on the streets. They stay out of sight. You surely have noticed all the camper vans on some streets in SF. I'd bet that for every person actually on the street there are 10 who are effectively homeless but managing it in a way you can't see. Living at their place of work or study, living in a vehicle, couch-surfing, illegal sublets, and things I'm happy to never have to imagine.
The article the OP posted details many stories of people who are competent to hold down a job, even multiple jobs, but cannot find anywhere to live.
Those are the homeless that attack the elderly. Those are the homeless that shit on the street. Those are the homeless that lie naked sprawled across the sidewalk or at the end of a BART escalator.
Whatever the cause, these homeless do have mental health and substance abuse issues, often are voluntarily homeless (and will resist help.) They're not all of the homeless problem, but they are a major part of it.
Getting rid of hard drug dealers would solve a large part of the issue. Making it illegal to be on hard drugs (and enforcing it) would be as well.
Some people want to fix homeless because of empathy while others want to fix it because of selfishness. Your comment reveals that you are in the latter group. You don't actually want to get homeless people into homes because you empathize with how horrible their lives must be without one. You just want to the minority of homeless people who are a nuisance to stop bothering you and people you actually do empathize with. All those other homeless people who aren't attacking the elderly or shitting on the street can keep on living the same invisible life of suffering because their suffering is not actually a problem in your eyes.
And what the hell, how is caring about elderly people being attacked "selfish"?
Fixing part of the problem is a good thing. Different strategies might solve different parts of the problem. Objecting to progress isn't helpful and isn't compassionate, it's the way we got our current harm-maximization policies.
I certainly didn’t.
> Where did I even imply one was a higher priority than the other?
Because your counter to the idea of the invisible homeless population was to complain about the nuisance homeless population.
> And what the hell, how is caring about elderly people being attacked "selfish"?
Because you are the one prioritizing the suffering of one group over another.
But I'm just going to say: I've lived in San Francisco. I currently live in Vancouver, not far from the epicentre of unhoused and addicted people.
Vancouver has many of the same problems and for the same reasons.
I have never, not once, feared for my safety around poor or addicted homeless people in Vancouver. Nor did I even feel like they hated me, specifically. I remember walking out of a doorway in Gastown where there was a woman smoking a crack pipe, and she was very apologetic and moved her stuff. It seemed oddly Canadian to me, even at the time.
In San Francisco I often felt sheer rage from unhoused people, or even just poor people. Acting out aggressively at the slightest provocation. Screaming for apparently no reason.
If you've lived your whole life in America it may be hard to imagine that these things aren't universal. But they aren't. If you think about it there really isn't any reason why being poor has to be the same as being dangerous.
I have no evidence as to exactly what the difference is. I think maybe Canadian policies are a little more generous and a little more available. Canadians were just as racist, but maybe American chattel slavery really went over the top in causing such social rifts. I don't really know.
Bribed? You seem to think that the homeless actively use their immoderation as some kind of protection racket.
Alternately, we could say the Americans have decided to make the lives of poor and addicted people as bad as can be achieved without actually killing them.
Also not saying that it isn't a problem which should be solved, because it absolutely is. But if you did solve it, and you told people that homelessness was down by 90%, they would look at you like you were crazy, because it's only the other 10% they were complaining about in the first place.
Similarly most mentally ill people are able to muster the ability to sleep indoors.
Let’s agree that nothing about drug addiction or mental illness precludes living indoors.
The increase in homelessness seems as though it corresponds almost exactly to California’s housing crisis and unaffordable rents. Heroin has been around for a long time. It cannot be the explanation for a sudden increase in homelessness. Mental illness is a constant more or less, so it cannot be the explanation either.
What changed over the past decade, and especially changed in the past few years? Housing prices and rents.
I’d love to hear other explanations for the rapid increase of homelessness in California this past decade or two. It cannot be attributed solely to drugs or mental illness.
You are, presumably unintentionally, using a blanket descriptor "mentally ill" and "drug addicted" to describe an extremely wide spectrum of expressions.
"Serious Mental Illness" definitionally requires substantial interference with or limiting of one or more major life activities (including maintaining a safe house, and maintaining employment).
You are conflating people's common use of the term "mental illness" - yes, we can agree that most people with say, seasonal depression, can hold down a job and maintain a house. This is not what San Francisco's visible homeless "mental illness" is referring to. They are suffering from Serious Mental Illness.
No, we cannot agree that most folks with Serious Mental Illness are able to muster the ability to sleep indoors, definitionally.
Again, "drug addiction." There is an appreciable difference between the character of the drug, and the addiction - aka "Chronic Substance Abuse."
That is, once again, I do not agree that someone with open meth sores on their face is going to hold down any sort of a job and/or be able to muster a safe home environment.
Next, you ask what has changed in the past few years? Then conclude only two things have changed in 10 years - "housing prices and rents."
While there may be a correlation, possibly even a causation, this is still an oversimplification of the problem. There are other cities, even in the US that have seen an increase in housing prices and not the corresponding inhumane treatment of both the housed, and unhoused in SF particularly.
I wonder if anything else has changed in SF in 10 years that makes it uniquely inhumane to the homeless, and also disproportionately affecting the entire character of the city? Could it be policies? Complete lawlessness and availability/encouragement/facilitation of new drugs and drug addiction?
There are at least two obvious problems that are unique to the West Coast, perhaps namely SF, 1) an overall increase in homelessness caused by certainly a multitude of factors that include much more than "rent," such as the bifurcation of particularly the SF labor market and the educational/cognitive barriers to "information technology work" versus the alternatives. That is to say, the problem isn't necessarily inherently that rents went up, the corollary is true that pay didn't go up for those experiencing homeless who were happily housed and paying rent before. Ought they move? Ought we relocate them? Ought we pay, say, fast food workers similar to MAMAA developers? It seems you suggest affordable government project housing? And 2) policy that makes it such that those who do suffer from Serious Mental Illness/Chronic Substance Abuse (by some counts, the majority of those experiencing homelessness) that does everything it possibly can to ensure they maximally suffer, while having the greatest possible negative impact to the bystanders, often other people experiencing homelessness, but also the housed, and business owners. That is to say, SF policies it as absolutely easy as possible to stay addicted, and as difficult as possible to overcome the addiction, while simultaneously pretending severe mental illness is not a thing (i.e. you [paraphrasing for emphasis] "most mentally ill people can maintain a house and a job".)
It seems our conceptualization "homelessness" is corrupted by inadequate, and inconsistent use of nomenclature.
Finland, a tiny baltic nation that has almost nothing in common with the USA.
I agree that we are working with more “technical debt” than Finland is, and copy-pasting exact policy won’t work. But strategically I don’t see a major difference.
As an example of just one contributing factor, population churn has an extremely negative impact across nearly the whole spectrum of social issues. What is the population churn in SF vs Finland?
The exact same things that burden the private housing sector in the US (excessive land cost, overly restrictive zoning, neighbors suing and constantly throwing roadblocks) also restrict the public housing sector, since the public dollar goes less far, and the public sector has to comply with the exact same laws.
Would love to hear examples of great public welfare/healthcare programs from countries that accepts 6 million refugees / year like USA. In my head these are two opposing goals but curious to know if there are counterexamples.
see my comment here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36172283
In 2021, the US accepted 11,411 refugees (approx. 1 refugee per 28,900 citizens), and Finland accepted 1,282 refugees (approx. 1 refugee per 4,300 citizens).
* https://www.statista.com/statistics/200061/number-of-refugee...
2.76 border crossings in 2022 . I know there might be dups in this number but there are also crossings that are unaccounted for. There are also 1 million visa overstays/yr. This is on top of 1 million legal immigrants.
Rough math is 5 million. But I think no one really has any idea what the actual number is.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigration/migrant-border-...
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/04/re...
The other problems are the severely mentally ill and hardcore drug addicts, who tend to get kicked out of any free housing that gets provided to them.
Most people would chose camping over them.
If I saw a reasonable housing first program where it actually provides cost-efficient housing for all that need it, I'd be a strong proponent.
The current system is not that, it's incredibly unfair, a tax-payer funded lottery in which residents provide accolades to homeless advocacy groups in return for inclusion on lists that make them more likely to win a spot in the residences. Huge amounts of tax-payer money is siphoned off into these non-profits throughout the process.
https://sfstandard.com/politics/san-francisco-nonprofits-con...
SF can barely build a public toilet without it turning into a taxpayer trough feeding frenzy, so expecting it to be the Mecca of the homeless, the addicted and the downtrodden is comedic at best, and tragic at worst. Even if someone were to get back on their feet from addiction, SF is the last place where they would want to try to live, given the astronomical cost of everything, unless they're going to suddenly become senior ML engineers who can afford a downpayment on a $1M 400sqft run down shoebox. Many non-tech people like school teachers can't even afford to live in the city, and they're not fighting against a crippling meth addiction.
There's plenty of room in Bakersfield, Stockton, Lancaster, Fresno.. there's plenty of space, housing is more affordable, the local governance more amenable, the cost of living night and day, but nobody in policy will ever be able to pull that off, so we'll be stuck with the current status quo that nobody is happy with.
But it points to an irony when you’re there, going to a meeting at the Transamerica pyramid or walking past the headquarters of Salesforce, or having a michelin starred meal, then walking down the street and a guy in an alley has a knife.
(Yeah, personal experience. I wasn’t very scared. Probably because I just had michelin starred wine pairings…)
They are not entitled nor are tax payers obligated to insure they have parity with people who can afford to live and work in SF.
And I buy the argument providing homes is humane and cost efficient compared to options. Any treatment medical or mental in the US is stupid expensive. But I think/hope DBT which is effective mental side is not the most expensive
All that has to happen is tax revenue has to fall and the spending will decrease and the homeless will go to some other place where they can live a better drugs and camping lifestyle. Having lived for some time a few years ago in the Tenderloin, the idea that the homeless in S.F are normal people who have fallen on hard times is a complete simulated reality that has almost nothing to do with the actual situation.
Also, why would someone run for a district they didn’t live in?
And nobody said he doesn’t live in the district. He moved to SF as a lawyer, then became Deputy City Attorney, then was elected to Board of Supervisors, then elected to state senate. His quote about not being able to afford to live in SF is most likely to point out that rent control in SF keeps qualifying rents affordable while market-rate rents are extremely unaffordable.
They should just drive in their cars to those cheaper places, true
We already have a (very successful, uncontroversial) program that provides free bus tickets to unhoused people who came from elsewhere and have a support system wherever they came from. That leaves the other 70%.
You can state all the facts you want and some people downvote because they simply didn't like it; others downvote because your replied topic was about a downvote (against policy) and those same problematic people who downvoted may also have multiple accounts.
Ultimately its a bridge too far and violates free speech by de-amplifying what you said (because it goes invisible once it goes under a certain vote) but that's mainly just my opinion that the vast majority of people (or bots) here don't hold.
Those people still deserve empathy, but they're a very different group than those who once were productive and housed in SF and then ended up on the streets because of a bout of bad luck.
No, that isn’t the context here. When I wrote this here, and when I put this figure on a Muni bus ad for Street Sheet’s ad campaign in 2015, I was responding to the often-repeated false assertion that SF is “a dumping ground” for unhoused people, that people “come here to be homeless”, that “other cities send their homeless here”, etc etc etc.
Claiming that “housed in San Francisco before becoming unhoused” should only include “productive” people who were paying their own rent with their name on the lease is moving the goal posts by an entire football field.
Cities are full of poor people. They ought to be — cities are great places to find opportunities to get out of poverty. And lots of people, self included, show up in cities with no money or plan, and crash on couches, in hotel rooms, in their cars, etc, until they land on their feet.
San Francisco has always been a place where people have done this. We didn’t have large-scale homelessness here until the second half of the 80s, after federal public housing was gutted and especially after the Loma Prieta quake wiped out a lot of affordable housing.
If cities don’t make room for poor people, those people will end up on the street. People try to make this more complicated than it is, but every serious study on this lands in the same place, every time — just provide housing.
Sure. But the approach to dealing with that subset of people should be different than the approach for the subset who were once employed and renting in San Francisco and then ended up homeless through a health emergency, job loss, or eviction. The latter group has shown the ability to sustain themselves in SF in the past, while the former hasn't. And, morally, the place of original residence is responsible for them, not the taxpayers of San Francisco.
If nothing else, people with longstanding ties to the community and economy should get preference for services compared those who didn't. And homelessness advocates get this: the entire point of conflating them is to increase sympathy for the people who just turn up.
How do you even begin to discriminate on that? The USA lacks a residency system like other countries.
I agree with your point, but it’s not possible to implement here, which is why the non profits continue the conflation.
That covers the large majority of homeless that SF should target for help and are all easily accessible to the city government. You can imagine corner cases (attended a private school, lived in SF but worked outside it) but it'd be an improvement over the status quo. Even many of the corner cases could be captured with additional documentation that would require a bit more effort on the applicant's side.
I believe you would find that this is illegal. Shapiro (Shapiro v. Thompson, 394 U.S. 618 (1969)) and its progeny address this issue on point.
(I feel obliged to mention I believe your number because of your expertise, simply because of the number of people in this thread who failed to say that).
This is how the system already works. The Homeward Bound program provides free bus tickets to people who have a support system elsewhere. That still leaves a substantial population of people who do not have any other support system, or whose support system is in San Francisco.
> If nothing else, people with longstanding ties to the community and economy should get preference for services compared those who didn't.
This is how the provision of services currently works. The problem is not prioritization, the problem is a lack of available housing for even your narrowly-defined “deserving” unhoused people. And arguing about a few percent being moved into a different category of eligibility does nothing to fix the underlying problem.
It's not San Francisco's responsibility to pick up the slack for places that don't take care of their homeless. Declaring that it is doesn't make it so, and both creates perverse incentives (for other places to shirk on their responsibilities) and makes it impossible for San Francisco to fulfill its own responsibilities.
Also, I don't think I used the word "deserving," despite your quotes. They deserve help, but San Francisco is not obligated to be the provider of services for the entire country. Once we do manage to build successful programs for the homeless who originate here, then we can talk about whether it makes sense to build aid systems and SF housing for people from other communities.
As it stands, we fail all the homeless in San Francisco. It's silly to think we can tackle homelessness nationwide before we even can get a handle on those who come from here.
There are a lot of false assertions made, often with no consequence for doing so, which is an ongoing problem; and worse a lot of these people actually believe what they say is true despite well researched facts showing to the contrary. Its disheartening that so many people are completely irrational when it comes to discourse on these things.
As for the lack of housing, to me its clearly not a money problem. Also, in other areas they do hotel vouchers instead of actually creating affordable housing; and while programs may limit it to no more than 30 days, there are loopholes which allow a revolving door between multiple hotels accepting vouchers. I would guess this is where most of the money is going, and this doesn't do the same thing as providing permanent housing first.
Additionally, the vouchers themselves are often traded, for drugs and other things and the areas where these are accepted, quickly become crime-ridden because the dealers follow the vulnerable populations; its one of the reasons some areas refuse to add additional local transit resources. They simply don't want to deal with it; or they deal with it in a way that makes it someone elses problem (like what happened in Santa Ana).
Everyone seems to have an opinion on what needs to be done, but none that I've seen have actually followed through on what the rigorous studies have shown. There always seems to be some loophole, corruption, backroom deal, etc for business to capitalize on homeless services without actually improving the situation in any way while draining resources meant to help people get back on their feet.
ETA some additional numbers[0]:
Of that [71]%, the top six places they were housed before their most recent loss of housing:
With Friends/Relative (31%)
Home Owned or Rented by Self or Partner (21%)
Subsidized Housing or Permanent Supportive Housing (11%)
Hotel/motel (9%)
Jail or Prison (8%)
Hospital or Treatment Facility (4%)
So only 21% of that 71% actually rented their own place. Granted, the "with friends/relatives" can cover some situations where I'd agree they count as originating from SF, but also covers things like people moving here and crashing with a friend for a week before being kicked out.
Note also that any homeless who has become housed at any point of their homelessness (including jail, hospitalization, supportive housing) would then persist in the "has been housed in SF before" stat.
[0] https://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/2022-PIT-Co... , see page 31
Rent control: A random windfall for whatever tenant snags these coveted apartments when someone dies in a 3 bedroom apartment they haven't needed in 30 years but "can't afford" to downsize from since they have been paying $650 since 1989. Also the illegal subletters who are numerous and shameless, from personal experience.
Low-income housing minimums: A random windfall for a few lucky lottery winners, while everyone else from indigent to middle-class has to struggle because the developers need to build only luxury housing to make up for eating the cost of the low income housing.
And then this housing first thing is more of the same.
> siphoned off into these non-profits
Indeed. The homeless-industrial complex of nonprofits in SF is huge, but popular since it is a jobs program for all the people with social science bachelors and masters degrees, and no marketable skills.
Solving it requires relocation. There's no getting around it because the total cost of living is incompatible with people with slimmer means.
This is a misrepresentation of SF rent control. Rent increases for pre-1979 apartments are only capped if the same tenant lives there continuously -- when the apartment lease turns over, the rent can be raised to market rates.
That being said, there are some people that abuse the system by keeping a lease for a place they haven't lived in for 20 years and subletting it, sometimes for a profit, but there aren't apartments where the rent is permanently capped at 80s levels like you're suggesting.
Smart landlords will fight adding a cotenant, but tenants can always claim discrimination which is an uphill battle for the landlord especially in SF where juries are notoriously anti-landlord.
There's no issues around discrimination for this, and it's not an uphill battle. Replacement tenants are not co-tenants, and do not have rent control protection if the original tenants move out. Landlords cannot reject replacement tenants in most cases, but they have no requirements on accepting replacements as co-tenants. Replacement tenants are added as sub-letters of the original tenant.
I was a real estate agent who worked in property management, and I've also lived in rent controlled apartments in SF. You're absolutely wrong here.
1 million dollars in San Francisco real estate is a one room (maybe two room if it's in extra bad shape) hovel.
And that's the real problem. San Francisco is not a place for the poor to try to raise their lives to middle class. It's a place for middle class to struggle to stay above water. The homeless in sf need to be given decent places to live in a place where land costs something normal. That place does not currently exist in or near San Francisco, but can be reached by an hour or two bus ride.
Also, the median value for an owner-occupied house in SF is 1.15MM. So half the people live in something less than that.
This contradicts your earlier statement. If the median owner-occupied house 1.15M, that means more than half of homeowners are living in houses worth $1M or more. Clearly that includes middle class people, since it's more than half of the people.
Also, note that it doesn't take much money to live in a $1M house if you bought it a while back.
Looks easy from the outside but rarely is
Please let SF die so I can buy some affordable real estate there. Thanks!
Seriously though. SF’s problem is that it is too crowded. If people left, then it would be less crowded, an equilibrium would be reached eventually (if you believe we aren’t at one already).
It includes _some_ middle class people. Fewer and fewer as property taxes raise and the value of their home rises. Sure, they'll have a bunch of cash once they sell it, but not everyone wants to move away from where they were born just because there's a bunch of overpaid tech bros now living next to you.
CA should have taken the 17B and invested it the lowest-cost-of-living regions in the US to build out communities + housing with full wrap-around services for different purposes (homelessness, mental-health, vets, etc) and focus on therapy/recovery.
It seems spending 17B in CA would just get you a hotdog and bicycle these days.
SF has a lot of issues and the money went to places that were ineffective with only a small portion going to housing first.
17B shows this isn't a homeless problem, this is a corruption and accountability problem.
It’s called NIMBYism in the Bay Area and elsewhere.
Was it amazing? No. But it wasn’t The Wire either, and one of the only reasons I was able to have any hope and eventual success is that my family had a roof over our heads.
SF, like much of California, has refused to build housing for half a century, while the population has kept increasing.
To house a homeless person there, someone else pretty much has to move out.
Sure, if the alternative is “do nothing.” But if you committed the mentally ill who are endangering themselves and others to mental institutions (not jail) then 90% of these problems go away.
There are a lot of social programs. So many, in fact, it seems like an increasing number of people find it better to live off those than pursue traditional methods of earning income to support themselves.
Among my extended in-laws, there are several groups gaming the welfare system, scamming family, and doing whatever they can to live on the dole and they become downright sinister when something threatens their benefits. They have no interest in becoming productive citizens. To the best of my knowledge, they are only parasites, provide no value to society or family, and their offspring are following in their footsteps.
I’d be more than happy to cut people like that off, but how so without potentially harming those in need who want to improve their lives and the lives of those around them. Is it reasonable to expect adults to attempt to, minimally, live a life with neutral utility?
I have no problem using my Federal taxes to house the homeless. But I can't stand when my city tries to house people using my property taxes. It doesn't make any sense, they have no control over the inputs. It's creating an incentive at the national level to relocate to my city/county/state.
In addition, I’m not convinced you need to buy them housing in the worlds most expensive region—and one that’s deeply permissive about drug use and theft.
> has been proven to work in Finland
could be parsed in 2 different ways.
> (has been proven to work) in Finland
or
> has been proven to (work in Finland)
Which has radically different meanings for applicability to the US.
The idea that homeless people need homes to be able to advance further seems to trigger some people — after all, most of us pay for our housing, so why should they get it for free?
What people don’t consider is that when “we”, the people with houses, don’t spend our dollars housing homeless people, we pay sooner or later in other ways whether we want to or not when society around us partly disintegrates and additional effects start stacking up: substance abuse, violent crime, healthcare costs etc.