SF residents don't want the solution.
Real estate is the primary wealth building asset class of long-term residents who bought property ages ago or inherited it.
In California property taxes as assessed at time of sale, so you hold onto properties realistically valued at multiple millions while paying taxes at rate appropriate to tens of thousands.
Bulldozing a single family home to build a multi-family unit has an enormous cost on the back end given re-assessment.
Any potential drop in property values has massive protest. It's such a nice free-ride you will fight tooth and nail for.
These residents just want the homeless population "dealt with".
The only solution viable for these residents is getting rid of homeless people through force.
This in untenable give that these residents also have internalized a set of liberal moral values, which mostly means alleviating guilt by dumping money onto ineffective non-profit organization who at worst are siphoning public funds for themselves or at best are trying their best at executing strategies which have minimal impact.
Consider that between 2010 and 2020, SF built ~25,000 new housing units.
Charlotte, NC, a city with a lower population, built 160,000 new units.
Norway has homeless population of 0.07% by mostly doing one thing: building and giving homes to people who don't have them.
That would cause property values to plummet. Many long-term residents would have to seek employment after a lifetime of living off rents.
However, in San Fransicko and in other places it is pointed out that New York City, that also has astronomical housing prices and also doesn't build enough, has a fraction of the people sleeping rough that SF does.
NYC has lots of temporary shelter for people who are homeless. SF doesn't have enough.
From https://medium.com/@josefow/new-york-decided-to-end-street-h...
"New York has an extensive shelter network with over 748 locations that house more than 62,000 individuals and families experiencing homelessness every night. This extensive network means New York has an unsheltered homeless rate of 45 per 100,000 residents¹. San Francisco’s rate is 492 per 100,000 residents², almost 11 times as high."
"San Francisco, despite a shelter waiting list of more than 1,000 people, has fewer shelter beds than it did in 2004."
I'm most of the way through San Fransicko and would thoroughly recommend the book. It also does mention NIMBYs and YIMBYs but the focus is on the way that SF and other West Coast US cities have dealt very poorly with homeless people while NYC and other cities in the East have dealt much better with the problem.
NYC, prior to our current Democratic mayor, had aggressive law enforcement during Giuliani and Bloomberg terms. They would corral the homeless into specific areas (the poor neighborhoods) and push them out of sight (actual strategy to hide the homeless). You can be homeless in NYC, just not around areas where ‘decent’ folk live. Interpret that however you want.
If SF corralled the homeless to the ghettos, no one would notice.
Overall, if we take a census of the homeless, we’d easily learn that a good percentage of them are mentally ill and/or drug addicts. It’s much cheaper to build tents for them than provide institutional treatment (prolonged stay in clinics and mental health wards of hospitals). Generally these hospitals don’t have enough beds for everyone and constantly try to release everyone within 72 hours, no matter how severe the situation is. Plus, the cost of healthcare is immense (I’d say orders of magnitude over the tent housing solution).
These are forsaken people, we will never solve this. I would recommend SF hide their homeless and get them off the beaches and boardwalks, and put the tents out of sight somewhere desolate. We as a society don’t have a sustainable altruism to succeed here.
Yes, NYC housing is very expensive, but that's because Manhattan is the most densely populated island in the world having a population greater than 150,000 people. Yes, you can squeeze a few more people into NYC proper, but there are physical limits that cannot be overcome, and New York is as close to those physical limits as anywhere else in the world.
The New York metro area does not have those same physical limits, and is much more dynamic than California with regards to new construction and real estate sales—at all pricing levels—as a result. Yes, as you get closer to Manhattan things get more expensive. But Manhattan is not the only housing option for people—even for people who don't own a car.
I live and work in a town of ~25,000 people that is connected to Manhattan by rail. In the past few years we have seen several hundred rental units be constructed in the center of the town. This is not atypical. Similar buildings have been going up throughout the region for years (although most affordable options are connected by bus rather than by train).
I have to agree with GP's conclusion that California's problems primarily stem from its tax system—which is objectively ridiculous. If every time you move houses your tax rate resets and suddenly you are paying 10x (or more) in taxes than you did previously, why would you ever sell?
In the NYC metro area, most of the people who in California would be suburban NIMBY types live and work in high-property-tax areas in relatively big homes while they raise their kids and send them to public school (which are well-funded by high property taxes). It is very common that when their kids go to college they sell their homes and move to smaller places (or to, say, Florida). They are incentivized to do this because doing so will lower their tax bill. As a result, the real estate market is very liquid, with most homes turning over every 15 to 30 years.
In California the tax system works in the opposite manner, by disincentivizing sales. Even inherited property isn't sold, because doing so would result in a reduction in the net cash flow that the property can yield. Isn't it the case that most heirs typically sell property they inherit, in order to have access to liquid funds that they can use in a manner that is more consistent with their own personal needs and preferences? Not in California! In California, if you inherit a house, suddenly you are a landlord.
None of this is to say that there isn't political resistance to higher-density housing in the northeast. There certainly is. However, the way that this resistance is typically mobilized is through the use of zoning restrictions. Zoning restrictions can be amended—and have been amended—as the need for housing has grown.
If people are not willing to sell their properties—if the real estate market is not liquid enough in a certain area—then new development will not occur, regardless as to whether or not zoning ordinances are changed. In fact, the primary advocates for zoning changes are often developers who want to build specific projects. If there are enough properties for sale in an area to attract the interest of developers (and capital that legacy owners may not have access to), then it is more likely that there will be effective advocacy on a local level to amend zoning rules that will result in a more profitable use of those properties.
If no one is selling, however, and if no one is buying, then no one has any interest in changing anything with regards to how the land is used.
You can achieve the same and more by releasing unused housing back to market instead of sitting idle for speculative reasons.
Increasing property taxes seems like a first viable solution, but it has drawbacks. It can apparently br avoided in some cases and they wouldn't affect owners of empty lots or derelict ruins that need the release back to market the most.
This is solved by a tax on land value, not on propery value. Empty unused lots would get a massive tax, regardless of if there is a skyscraper on it or it is an empty space. High rise properties wouldn't get impacted much because the same tax would be amortized across many units. Properties outside of cities wouldn't get affected much, because land values outside of cities are low.
Land value tax is a mechanically brutally simple and effective solution to the problem of congestion in city centres. Politically completely infeasible, because if there is someone fighting tooth and nail against such policies, it is the nimbys who inherited at the right time - modern day aristocracy.
If homes are abundant in Charlotte, why do so many homeless people live on the streets in San Francisco instead, where there’s not even sufficient housing to support working middle class families?
When Newsom tried this approach as mayor, his conclusion was that for every homeless person they put into housing, two more would show up the street. And over 90% of the chronically homeless placed in supportive housing there never move out. So what percentage of the nation’s chronically homeless population can be housed indefinitely at taxpayer expense on a tiny landlocked peninsula where seemingly everyone wants to live? This has become a statewide/nationwide problem and it needs solutions on a bigger scale than one city in isolation can provide.
Is it actually higher in SF than in NYC?
> When Newsom tried this approach as mayor, his conclusion was that for every homeless person they put into housing, two more would show up the street.
This is a fascinating idea. Does this mean that kicking one person out of housing somehow remove two from the street?
Or could it mean that three people end up homeless in the time that it takes to house one homeless person?
That it’s such a huge issue in 2 separate massive municipalities makes me agree - it’s a problem that needs solutions at a higher level (often by forcing lower levels to do what is necessary)
Homelessness may be a solved problem in Norway, but it does not mean that Norwegian solution is readily transplantable into San Francisco. Much like we failed to transplant modern way of life to Afghanistan.
Which attempt are you talking about. The 3 times the British empire invaded, the three times the Soviet Union invaded or the latest Nato-American invasion.
(Historically there was the Sikh, Mugal, Muslim invasions too, etc. etc.)
Possibly the locals got a poor view of western "civilization" by being on the wrong end of its armies multiple times.
Strangely, I agree with your general point, but possibly from the opposite direction.
For example, when Finland was doing its equivalent of the New Deal, I find it unlikely there were any Finn's that would try to use that as political leverage to delay anti-lynching laws and vice-versa.
Racists seem to be one of the most corrosively self-defeating forces in human society.
In biology, this is typically either the ability to eat or the ability to eliminate waste.
A city will always reach a limit. It could be water, transportation infrastructure, economically viable activities given the location, etc, or if you are lucky as a result of the location being desirable, physical space.
You can't build your way out of the San Francisco affordability issue even if you (for example) double the aid per homeless person and double the free housing.
There is an error in the common thinking about the homeless problem in San Francisco.
San Francisco has a homeless problem because it's affluent and provides services, not despite being affluent and providing services.
If San Francisco wanted to provide assisted living for members of society that can't support themselves, it would get the most bang for it's buck to provide food, shelter, clean bathrooms, trash services, electricity, and wifi in other willing cities in California. You could build a range of accommodations and shelters, all the way from campsites to cabins to resorts, and you could get user feedback from the residents to determine which operators to expand with and which facilities to shut down.
The idea of trying to build your way out of homeless problem in the most expensive and physically constrained city in California is madness. That's just enriching the interests that have become the San Francisco homeless industrial complex.
Article: "S.F. pays $61,000 a year for one tent in a site to shelter the homeless. Why?"
https://www.sfchronicle.com/local/article/S-F-pays-61-000-a-...
But not to the middle class, no, just to the homeless. Then how many days do I need to survive on the street in order to get a free house? If it's a hundred days, and one of these places is 800K, then that's like paying me 8K per day -- it's a no brainer. For a free house, I'm even willing to mutter to myself and defecate on your porch. You are right, this would cause property values to plummet -- it's literally paying me to come into your neighborhood and be antisocial.
Just give me the date and time of the degradation olympics and there will be lots of people willing to participate. More people than SF can afford to build houses for.
You get more of what you subsidize, not less.
What I don't understand is why you think cities should provide shelter for people who don't contribute to them.
If you can't make a city a better place - you should have shelter, somewhere cheap and distant. If you get your life together there, you can come and try living in a city again.
Living in a city should be a privilege, not a right - cities take a lot of work and if you aren't doing your part - it's ok and you should live with dignity and respect (because we have plenty of food and electricity to go around, for now), but you don't get to live off of other people's efforts by insisting that you get to stay in a city because you were born in one or whatever.
Cities are like night clubs, if you don't get the ratio of men to women right, the night club sucks. The same applies to productive and unproductive citizens.
Just because we can let anyone into a night club, doesn't mean it won't make it suck for everyone involved.
Following the night club analogy, what needs to happen is we need to lower the barrier to opening up new night clubs. There is no reason why we can't build new towns that make use of modern technology that people would flock to - it is not a resource issue, it is an imagination, competence and regulation issue (implementing land value tax to get rid of rent seeking on land), much like everything else in human society.
This feels a bit icky but is a recurring pattern. For example, when slaves were emancipated the previous owners were often compensated, because if not they would politically block it happening.
I feel it's going to get to a crunch in some places before people do anything about it but various places will start adopting variants of this to deflate the bubble.
Basically passing some of the land value tax onto the lucky current property owners as an annuity, and allowing them to move somewhere cheaper and decouple safely from the local property market.
Probably needs enough of a threat that they'll just be forced to pay the full tax before they'll cave though, so it's just politics at that point. Who has more power and/or propaganda will decide the outcome.
It is but I can 100% confirm that nobody in cali wants to solve that problem.
>The only solution viable for these residents is getting rid of homeless people through force.
This solution isn't viable neither. The Cali government policy(ies) is increasing the rate of homelessness. Even if you were to round them all up and send all homeless out of the state, it isn't viably going to solve the problem.
>This in untenable give that these residents also have internalized a set of liberal moral values, which mostly means alleviating guilt by dumping money onto ineffective non-profit organization who at worst are siphoning public funds for themselves or at best are trying their best at executing strategies which have minimal impact.
It's worse than that. You might expect there's some benefit there but this mechanism itself is actually making the situation worse. Though it's certainly not popular to discuss that direction. Afterall what you're saying is road to hell is paved with good intentions.
>Norway has homeless population of 0.07% by mostly doing one thing: building and giving homes to people who don't have them.
Not quite accurate, they dont give away free homes. It's more like bomb shelters and such that the homeless can live in, but even that'snot quite accurate. The sole reason Norway has practically no homeless is because they have no actual minimum wage.
Charlotte, NC also has way more open space to expand than SF, which has none, surrounded by water on three sides and other cities to the south.
Plenty of places pretending they solved the problem by shipping people to jail or similar if they refuse to live somewhere the authorities demand they do.
That said, SF is pretty much a poster child for almost worst case homelessness (and if adjusted by regional per capita income may legitimately be the worst).
I guess part of the difficulty is what exactly the definition of ‘the problem’ in ‘the homeless problem’ means seems to vary a lot by person, and most of the plans or influence here are coming from people who are quite explicitly not homeless, which is the group being ‘helped’. Which sets up some serious moral hazards.
Could you tell me where you got your data on this? Not because I want to pick it apart, but because I'm in the process of figuring out where I want to live long-term now that I've decided to leave Texas for good, and rate of new home construction is one of the data parameters I'm looking at in hopes that it'll be at least one positive indicator of realistic housing costs in the area.
I'm looking at TONS of other factors as well, but this is a critical one since housing is by far the most expensive line item in any family or individual budget these days. Thanks!
So I don't think the extra space and houses is doing much.
Can you link to the details of the program in Charlotte?
As somebody who is from NC, most home building is driven by for profit developers and it actually increases demand. They target higher end construction since the margins are higher. This is a feedback loop since the increased density of wealthy residents results in areas gaining even more amenities that the higher density will support, and thus becoming more attractive places to move for people in higher col areas out of state.
Building wealth by ensuring new units end up in the hands of low income people is a wonderful idea, but around here it seems to be the opposite occurring.
Is there data supporting this claim? It seems quite extraordinary that supply would create more demand than it satisfies. That's just not how economics usually works.
If affluent people from around the country are moving to Charlotte, I would think they're likely drawn by other factors, such as their jobs or family roots bringing them there, not by the mere existence of fancy housing and gentrified neighborhoods. If the new development didn't exist, those people would still be moving but would end up choosing slightly lower-end housing -- forcing up the prices and thus forcing out existing residents.
This "making fancy houses only increases home prices" argument seems like a rationalization invented by people who are looking for a reason to block such development. It seems highly unlikely to me that this would actually be true.
Politically, it's easy to be angry at developers for only building high-end housing, when it seems like the real problems are at the low end of the market. However, in reality, you can't expect it to be any other way -- and that's OK, because building high-end homes actually does help the low end of the market too.
New construction is inherently high-end. It's actually hard to build a new house or apartment building that isn't desirable to affluent people -- you'd have to go out of your way to use old design standards and bad materials that don't cost any less but make the home less desirable. This isn't economically viable for developers. So of course developers are always going to target mid-to-high end.
But that's fine, because when you build more high-end housing, then people move up from slightly lesser housing, making that housing available for people to move up to from even lower-end housing, and so on. This eventually makes housing available at the low end of the market for people who couldn't previously afford housing at all -- or perhaps for the government to rent on behalf of homeless people at an acceptable cost.
San Francisco is bizarrely full of terrible 100+-year-old apartments with high-income techies living in them, just because there's nowhere else for them to live. This is a failure. That should be low-end housing, but it's not because there's not enough high-end housing for all the affluent people.
Norway is cold. Show me a city where people can sleep outdoors year round without dying that doesn’t have homeless and then we can see what an effective solution looks like.
[1] https://www.salvationarmy.org.au/need-help/homelessness-supp...
Doesn't that make the tax percentage very low when prices have risen so much? And in addition the percentage varies from unit to unit, even if they are identical in all aspects (including their value) except when it was last sold. What a weird system.
Perhaps you advocate for removing these zoning laws and then letting the market clear?
1350 sf for $599,000 thats $450/sf - wtf. in the ghetto in SF. and the home is a ghetto looking home on the outside with zero land.
I LOVE Joe Rogan shitting all over LA and SF.
The podcast with the author is fantastic to have in the background and listen to.
again, I want to help the homeless with 'Care Fleet' -- See my other comment on that.
They discussed: de-criminalization, the "Portugal approach", progressive policies, policing, etc. Also the use of language such as "homeless camps" which envisages a camp of homeless people just trying to live. Versus the reality which when social workers and mayors (mayor of Denver) went into these camps undercover only found that everyone was a drug abuser and were being enabled to self-destruct.
Highly recommended, the author is a resident of "San Fransicko".
If you want to find out what a situation is like, why would asking someone about it be more informative than actually going there and witnessing it yourself? The self proclaimed "experts" are the ones responsible for the policies that have turned San Fransisco into what it is today.
No idea if that’s a good idea, but living in SF I can definitely say that whatever the city, or even the US as a country, has been doing until now has been useless.
Disclaimer: I used to live in Chicago, and while not as bad as sf, the homeless situation was the worst I had seen in my life at that time. So that sorts of tells me that this might be a national issue, not just an sf issue although it is definitely much more noticable in SF.
But why do they stop at drug addiction?
Or worse, decide that drug addiction is the underlying root cause that now needs to be treated with rehab, detox, or what have you.
Drug addiction is not the cause of poverty. Poverty is the cause of drug addiction.
The stories of the people who get into drugs recreationally, then descend into addiction, and destroy their lives are the exception vs those that start using to escape deeply challenging lives with poverty, physical abuse, and mental health struggles.
The dramatically rising rates of homelessness and addiction across US/Canada are the side effects of the toxicity of our society, the erosion of social safety nets, and runaway wealth inequality, capitalism, and housing affordability crises.
The Portugal model works when the rest of your society is cohesive enough to support those at the fringes. I don't know if it actually can succeed in nations founded on rugged individualism and who instill the obsession with liberty and freedom in every person from birth. This not only leads to society unwilling to help those that need it, it also makes those that need that help unwilling to accept it.
That explains the rampant drug abuse in the wealthy?
Is the stigma of "living with your mom/parents" that people are willing to live on a park bench and not go to their homes and live with their parents for free? Do the parents have problem accepting back "children who have flown the nest"?
Genuinely curious. In India, when we have " migrants" living somewhere, locally or abroad even. If something happens or job loss or whatever, people just return home and survive. india on the whole does have some homeless problem but its not an epidemic level stuff. last year when the lockdown hit, the entire nation basically walked to their home towns and villages because they knew no work meant no rent and no place to sleep so everyone just packed their bags and returned homes. same for a lot of expat population, they all just returned home. i wonder if that happens there in the US or not?
Can you elaborate?
On it's face this seems really counter intuitive to me.
Drugs cost money. Not having money doesn't somehow force you to use drugs.
Where the opposite direction seems obvious: The cost of maintaining an addiction and the reduction in reliability from drug use can result in being unable to work, increasing your poverty.
As a newly-former SF resident and worker, what I witnessed over the past decade confirms your sad summary. The unintended consequences of misguided yet well-intentioned political policies.
We're seeing that all over the world, especially in Europe with the remains of the Lumières ideals, ideals which don't scale nor work in our globalized/capitalist world
Addiction can be linked to dopamine regulation disorder e.g. ADHD and risky behavior like gambling addiction, drug addiction, alcohol addiction, etc.
We need to address the mental health problem underlying homelessness
Yes, a small part of homelessness is caused by drug issues (far more drug problems are the consequences of homelessness) but you only have to look at the absence of a proper welfare state, health system, and other essential safety nets, to see why things are so bad.
You want to live in a society without massive social problems, you have to pay a decent amount of tax to support the services that sustain a good society.
That's a great quote. When I worked at a harm reduction site (pre pandemic), I also noticed the meth users seemed to be deteriorating more rapidly than usual, and this was in Canada.
Whatever the solution to this problem is, I worry something has become broken in our societies. You can even see it in this thread, with people quoting a goddamned podcaster (Joe Rogan) and spreading a ton of misinformation about addiction (eg. disputing that addiction is strongly linked to socio-economic status).
Google scholar exists and this crowd is supposed to be educated. This quote from the article says it better than I could:
>"Crystal meth is in some ways a metaphor for our times—times of anomie and isolation, of paranoia and delusion, of communities coming apart. Meth is not responsible for these much wider social problems, of course. But the meth epidemic is symptomatic of them, and also contributes to them."
A frequent critique of those that want to solve the homeless problem by sending in the police to crack heads and send everyone to prison. The main goal here of course being to ensure that the homeless "go away" somewhere out of view.
In reality most of the "crimes" that people are wringing their hands about are things like petty theft, drug use (a medical issue) and loitering which are so incredibly and hilariously minor that any judge will laugh in your face at the notion of sending one to prison for such abuses as this would obviously be a cruel and unusual punishment and not at all reasonable. The legal system will never send such offenders to prison.
It never occurs to those venturing mass imprisonment of the homeless that um, simply building housing for the homeless is a dramatically more affordable solution.
Therein lies the answer to the posed question:
> How can a place brimming with resources and good intentions fail so flagrantly to meet the basic needs of the population?
Despite our incredible wealth we simply do not provide in any way reasonable incomes and housing for those that are (for many reasons) unable to work, and so of course the problem festers. Why would we expect any change to magically happen?
In my home town of Vancouver BC, which has very similar chronic homelessness problems as SF, our minimum income assistance is $935 a month. Of this sum, the shelter allowance is $375. There is of course virtually nowhere in Vancouver where one can rent anything for $375 a month, thus ensuring systemic, state sponsored homelessness, poverty and misery and people camping outside in parks.
Why is there such poverty and homelessness? Well with $375 a month for housing good grief why wouldn't there be?
I hope you experience your things being stolen one day and not being able to afford to replace them and change your mind.
"Move somewhere else" assumes that there is actually somewhere more affordable to live, (and one has the funds to relocate) which is not necessarily obviously the case. Further flung places with arguably cheaper housing costs add increased living costs in lack of public transportation services and support services.
In the BC context, it doesn't matter how far one gets from Vancouver, there is really no where where $375 satisfies market rents.
Either we're spending enough money that people can afford to live indoors or not.
$375/month is obviously not enough money for anyone to afford to rent anything anywhere.
Accordingly, the real cost of solving homelessness is more.
That doesn't happen in most of the rest of the country. Sure you can load up the circuit court sites and find it but effectively you don't even need to lock anything
I have excellent health insurance by US standards (the most expensive plan offered by a big tech company in SF). I've been battling mental illness for the last two years (more like two decades, but getting treatment for two years after it became untenable), resulting in months of medical leave from work on the advice of multiple doctors. Even with "excellent" insurance, I'm approaching $50K out of pocket over the last two years. It was more than that before my insurance company decided to cover my illness and reimbursed some of what I had previously paid (after 18 months of me, my doctor, and HR fighting them). What if I wasn't lucky enough to have "excellent" health insurance and sufficient savings from years of high paying jobs? If I wasn't so lucky and ended up homeless, what chance would I have of recovering from my condition? I've avoided alcohol and drugs my entire life because I know I'm prone to addictive behavior - I'm guessing one cold night on the street would be all it would take for the first drink. It's scary to think about where it would go from there.
Healthcare for homeless people tends to be emergency rooms and under-resourced free clinics. Given my experience being treated for mental illness, I can't conceive of making any progress in free clinics or ERs. So why wouldn't I be a permanent resident of the streets?
I see talk here of homelessness being less of an issue in Europe and China... in my opinion, access to healthcare is a key difference. Treatment for homeless people is great, but how sane is a system that pushes people off a health/financial cliff before they can get such treatment? Financially feasible access to treatment long before we get there is crucial.
I worked in mental health in the UK. In my area an initial mental health consult has a 6 month wait. You are unlikely to receive ongoing care in the first 2 years after the initial consult, but most will never be offered ongoing care. Lack of treatment pushes people out of the job market and into destructive behaviour. The fact that it is free at the point of care matters little when poor health is itself financially destructive.
I also cared for a relative's health in China. If you want a basic level of hygiene you will pay for everything. If you want clean sheets and avoid bed sores you may need to pay extra. Bring a good blanket, the hospital may not have a heating system.
Part of why it took me so long to get treatment (I mentioned that I've been dealing with this for decades) is that 20 years ago I could only afford to get treatment that I knew my insurance company would cover (cover == 80%). I was on two waiting lists... the insurance company's own list and one at Stanford Medical Center. I tried to get on more lists, but I couldn't find any that weren't "full". I checked regularly on the two lists, each time being told I don't have to check as they'll reach out when I'm at the top. I gave up checking after three years and they never reached out. I never got as far as a consult. It's expensive for me now because I didn't go the insurance company's route - I just went straight to a doctor and submitted insurance claims after.
I almost couldn't reach out for treatment this time. I knew I was nearing a point of no return. It felt like reaching out for treatment meant facing potential rejection on my last chance and the added stress made me almost non-functional. That's part of why I describe myself as lucky. I was able to amass the savings needed for treatment before my illness incapacitated me so much that I could neither work nor seek help.
While it's a bad situation that it can take years to get ongoing treatment in a system like the UK's, I still would have had treatment many years earlier. Things need to improve all over if we actually want to make progress on homelessness. We need approaches to get people off the street. But we also need to have better systems in place that reduce the number of people ending up on the street in the first place. I don't believe that remediation without prevention will do much to reverse current trends.
One possible explanation: California has become the dumping ground for the nation's homeless population.
We have a nationwide shortage of housing. Both in person and online, I continue to hear homeless people plan to move someplace relatively warm and dry while stuck on the streets.
California is on a short list of states with dry weather and the weather there is more temperate than, say, Nevada or Arizona. You can die in the extreme heat of summer in some of the dry states.
I don't think the mess in San Francisco is entirely due to local policies. I think the nation as a whole needs substantially more affordable housing.
"Throughout it, they emphasized that the homeless were just like you and me, just poorer. Today, many of California’s leading homelessness advocates insist that the current crisis is due mostly to the housing shortage. Homelessness experts and advocates disagree.
'I’ve rarely seen a normal able-bodied able-minded non-drug-using homeless person who’s just down on their luck,” L.A. street doctor Susan Partovi told me. “Of the thousands of people I’ve worked with over 16 years, it’s like one or two people a year. And they’re the easiest to deal with.'” [1]
[1] https://www.studentnewsdaily.com/editorials-for-students/why...
This right here. Nearly all homeless I've worked with were non-neuronormative and/or drug abusers. They're almost never just normal folks who have fallen on hard times. The reason they aren't rooming with a family member or friend is because their behavioral outbursts and/or stealing things to buy drugs has exhausted all the goodwill of those who would help them.
The same thing is happening in Austin. As a liberal city in Texas with relatively homeless-friendly policies, it was been well-documented that many rural areas in Texas are giving their homeless one-way bus tickets to Austin.
So we're left with the dilemma that relatively liberal cities have their homeless problems blamed on their policies, when a fairer criticism is just that these liberal policies attract homeless to their locales.
Without a national or at least comprehensive state-wide solution for homelessness, this will be a difficult problem to solve.
Clearly something other than the misdemeanor/felony classification is at play.
This seems to be, in large part, due to their policies. Housing is not their primary goal, addiction and psychiatric treatment are. You get housing when you comply, it's the carrot that is used to motivate people to engage with the program.
The author recently did a Joe Rogan podcast and did a very good job of explaining this and it's practical effects and differences in detail.
I wish more people realized this. Every city seems to be having people complain about homelessness. The three cities ive lived in in the last 6 years has. Idk why it is on a city of 60,000 people to try to fix homelessness. Especially when a ton are homeless veterans. The national goverment is dumping their problem on places to small and unorganized to deal with it.
>I think the nation as a whole needs substantially more affordable housing.
And San Francisco will never be a place with affordable housing.
Modesto, ok. Manteca, ok. Not SF. No one ever thinks, I'm homeless, lemme go to SF and see if I can find something there.
It's political. Otherwise you'd see more homeless in San Diego than SF.
It's definitely a regional problem, not just something isolated to a single city. I often wonder if people move around from town to town as their connections in the community shift, or they get a bad rep with local law enforcement... a friend who was formerly an EMT had an anecdote of a woman he picked up in Antioch for a meth-induced mental health incident who he saw, years later, stumbling around outside the hospital in Oakland in much the same state.
I think it's entirely possible that people come to SF or LA as an intentional destination and then, over time, get flushed towards the outlying cities, if they don't get ground into the dirt first. The current Atlantic article about the changing meth trade features a transgender person on skid row in LA who came there from the Midwest, believing that they could eventually gain access to gender reassignment surgery: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/11/the-new...
I'd argue that part of the issue with San Francisco is the concentration of the homeless into a small area. You don't see homeless in Atherton, for example. The wealthy enclaves in the Bay Area have zero problem with pushing the homeless out of their areas into somewhere else. In the Bay Area, there aren't that many "somewhere else" left so the ones that remain get overloaded.
California itself has a population which is the size of a medium sized European country. It is large enough to have a sizable homeless population. If you are homeless are your chances of getting food and services better in the central valley or in SF? Also, are there significantly less homeless people on the East coast by comparison?
Something is at play, though it need not be anything too complicated. Good weather and significant resources dedicated to making the homeless comfortable make California the obvious destination.
There are possibly network effects within homeless communities that are hard for outsiders to understand as well.
There's multi-billion dollar lawsuits going on because it's been documented as a policy of nevada hospitals.
It doesn't seem like trying to simplify challenges in large cities to a single dimension like housing is a path to success. Basic needs and social services beyond housing go a long way in supporting people, which (sadly) can't be provided by just addressing a housing shortage/affordability gap.
It's worth taking a look at the SF Point in Time and Housing Inventory Counts data [1] to provide context on this conversation.
[1] https://hsh.sfgov.org/about/research-and-reports/pit-hic/
I'm fairly sure this is an issue with at least all the western democracies. Not to mention other countries. That issue includes housing that is used as an investment, eg kept empty / kept high priced. Then there's the unsuitability of a lot of housing, eg not enough rooms, too many rooms, poor locations.
If your employee, nanny, maid, servant or dogsbody has a one hour drive to get to work each morning, don't expect them to stick around if they can change to a better opportunity.
The great resignation sums this up nicely. Why work there when I can work here?
When folks live paycheck to paycheck almost anything can lead to them becoming homeless.
That said, there are more then enough homes for everyone, in the form of vacant homes. https://sf.curbed.com/2019/12/3/20993251/san-francisco-bay-a...
Even more than Skid Row? To be honest that wikipedia page blows my mind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skid_Row,_Los_Angeles
First, you must understand that the population of San Francisco is growing, but slowly. Over the last decade San Francisco grew by just under 10%, which sounds like a lot, but it really isn't when looking at a larger data set compared to many other metropolitan areas. San Francisco is now the 17th largest city in the US, which I believe is unchanged from a decade ago. Looking at the data a huge number of cities are growing dramatically faster than San Francisco.
The fastest growing big city in the US is Seattle, which grew over 27% the last decade. That is a lot of growth, but Austin, Fort Worth, and Denver grew at nearly the same rates (26%, 26%, and 24% respectively) and the first two were 50% larger, which is a phenomenal amount of growth in raw numbers. This year Austin bumped San Jose to become the 10th largest city in the US and last year Fort Worth became the 12th largest city. 10 years ago Fort Worth was the 18th largest city in the US. In the next 10 years Fort Worth will also likely surpass San Jose and become the 11th largest city in the US, though its only the 5th largest city in Texas.
Why is it then that housing supply is a major issue in San Francisco, but not in these other cities that are growing so much faster? It cannot be due to geographic constraint, because Seattle and Dallas are geographically restricted as well, Seattle due to ocean and mountains and Dallas due to encapsulation by suburbs.
Secondly, when this conversation comes up people in the bay area tend to be unable to differentiate housing from houses. More specifically from any place to live versus owned single family real estate. This is likely due to restrictions on size and affordability not present in many other locations. There is a substantial difference with regards to equity, taxation, value, availability, and inflation.
Third, the actual data suggests absolutely no relationship between housing inventory and growth. Most people want to quibble about some high school economics class they once took with regard to supply/demand without looking at the data. The supply/demand relationship typical of retail does not apply to fixed assets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_asset
In high growth markets the speed of population growth is a direct correlation to the availability of inventory. This means that the more housing that exists for purchase the more the population grows to accommodate. When housing inventory shrinks, often because they can only build so many houses at a given speed, higher density housing units are introduced in place of single family homes, thus further accelerating the rate of growth. This is not observed in San Francisco because San Francisco is not growing that fast and has constraints on home ownership not present in many other locations.
Even more unexpected is that house prices, as in actual houses that people own, is only loosely associated with demand. In my area houses have increased in value about 34% over the past year and continues to climb, though very slowly now. That price growth was due to unassociated economic material constraints that have since recovered and now the supply of new single family homes are again exploding and new apartment complexes are popping almost as fast. Access to existing inventory was not interrupted and growth of new units did not dramatically slow during this price volatility, yet prices sky rocketed and demand remained constant.
There's the actual rate of growth vs demand- and the demand for h I using in SF was quite high in the 2010s compared to other metros.
I feel we need to open up vacant federal, state, and local land to free camping.
(Neusome is doing some good work. Near Candlestick Park boat launch, there is a lot set aside for RV's, and car, to those that are homeless. Could you imagine parking overnight without getting a ticket? I've know two people who were living out of their cars. They both told me it as a nightmare of cops ticketing them, and whatnot.
Sausalito has a dedicated spot for homeless, but it's no model of success. The town decided they didn't want low income, or homeless individuals mored off shore. Anchorouts have been in Richardson Bay for over a 100 years. The town let a private harbormaster decide who stays, and who's boat is going to be crushed. People had knowhere to go, so they set up tents at Dunphy Park. The Liberal citizens didn't like looking at the homeless, so the town moved them.
So basically Sausalito crested their own homeless problem?
The new spot of dirt the homeless were given came with a bunch of rules. (Homeless have a lot of problems. A huge list of rules is not the answer. I happened to read a Section 8 lease awhile ago. It was 47 pages of rules.
Cops are handing out tickets for minor infractions. The one that got me were two $500 tickets. The cops said, they won't pay them, so the fine doesn't really matter.
As usual the cop missed a lot of legal training when going to the academy. You don't pay a ticket, and it eventually turns into a bench warrant. The homeless are housed eventually in jail. Brilliant!
Local rant over.)
As I said previously we need places they can camp.
We need outhouses, and hand washing stations, and maybe a place they can cook.
Their are some people who will never get off the streets.
I'm done waiting for housing.
Oh yea, don't like stepping in crap; provide porta potties.
I have a hard time finding free restrooms in SF, and I'm not homeless.
Watch the increase in Homelessness in CA in the next few months. It's going to be ugly.
I don't feel like debating anyone. The way homeless are treated has bothered me for years.
“Very cheap” is relative.
American society has died. Many here will reply that that’s a good thing, and then continue complaining about the wealth divide or housing or whatever else fits their political agenda.
The world is a dark place and we are fragile creatures. Through technological hubris and the idea of “progress” we’ve destroyed the balance our ancestors maintained. The System has tried for over 100 years to take on more and more of the family’s roles, and even though it’s incapable of providing us with what we really need, it’s strong-armed us all into believing it’s been a success, and that this is what progress looks like, and that this progress is the greatest good.
Society proceeds from the family. The family is the center of a human’s life, and we’ve destroyed it. Divorce, broken homes, a lack of tribal cohesion, a lack of god, a total lack of all autonomy unless you’re one of the lucky few who have the ability to find it within abstractions. In this new anomic landscape parents become shadows. They have nothing to provide us because they are also confused. The filament that once held families together through generations has been snipped and there’s no way we can reconnect it now. We look away from our families and attach ourselves to a reactionary “culture” that’s completely fabricated out of the whims of the moment rather than being a mesh work that develops over time. We identity ourselves with our own coping mechanisms. We forsake the past because our ancestors were strong but it’s a kind of strength we’ve been taught to deny, because that kind of strength is dangerous to the System.
The only thing connecting us now is our sickness.
That’s not what the article is about. It’s about bad governing and policing as the primary cause of SF’s homelessness problem.
> He[Michael Shellenberger] blames San Francisco’s woes on a culture of permissive lawlessness and a mistaken view of what constitutes moral policymaking. For example, many on the left believe the lax prosecution of laws is compassionate.
The article also mentioned that this is a problem that’s specific to SF and homelessness in the rest of the country is not as bad.
While I’m as much of a fan of philosophical rants about the decline of human civilization as the next guy, that’s not what the article is about. Also, some comments are unrealistically pessimistic
> The family is the center of a human’s life, and we’ve destroyed it… We look away from our families and attach ourselves to a reactionary “culture” that’s completely…
I see where you’re coming from, but many people’s lives are not like this. The world might be heading this way with all the challenges we’ve faced transitioning society online, but the internet is still very young. We can learn from our mistakes and build healthier social systems.
Makes me wonder how SF compares to NYC in the 70s and 80s.
It suffered from the same flight to the suburbs many American cities suffered from and benefited from the reversal of that trend.
But whose to say we’re not entering another cycle where QOL suffers in big cities so people leave (usually the wealthiest first) and you see a downward spiral.
They help homeless youth ages 12-24 in San Francisco with a full range of services. Housing, mental and physical health, education, job training, etc. 75% of the people that enter their program exit street life permanently.
I have worked with them for years and can vouch for the character of their employees and the effectiveness of their programs.
They make bad decisions, and those decisions have effects. It isn’t always some opaque “the system”. Sometimes you’ll have to see that these people are humans just like you are, and just like you are responsible for your decisions, so are they.
Anything else, which aims to make them less than you, is a problem. Treat these people like human beings.
> Mr Shellenberger thinks they are on the streets in part because of a “housing-first” approach, which holds out for permanent, individual homes at the expense of building enough temporary accommodation.
So his approach is that San Francisco should have third world-style slums?
The solutions are simple: rent control and public housing. There just isn't political will for these policies: wealthy real estate investors fight them tooth and nail.
Worst part is, like in NY and SF they are often putting these permanent housing units a block or two away from schools, and allow drug addicts, sex offenders, and violent criminals to live there. It's only a matter of time before they commit crimes. Meth makes it difficult not to - gotta have that next hit. Why do this? Fuck me if I know. You can see the problems this will inevitably cause from a mile away.
And don't get me wrong, I'm not against sheltering the homeless and such, _as long as_ you actually make not being homeless the lowest energy state, and take care of their underlying issues. Housing them permanently without that is a recipe for disaster.
Generally the #1 problem faced by homeless people is a lack of housing. Issues 2-10 will require support and help as well if we care about rehabilitation and reentry into society. Even if flawed, giving these people homes in converted hotels is likely better for them and for us than not doing that. So what else shall you have us do? Less, hoping we can ‘fix’ them with some good old fashioned tough love? (Hard to argue plenty of places haven’t done that to…basically no effect) Or, more, with learning and fixing mistakes along the way?
There will be a small subset of people who can't support themselves due to disability and such, and I'd be OK with providing such folks permanent housing. I don't want anyone freezing to death on the sidewalk. Everyone else needs "tough love" as you put it.
There was actually an illustrative example in the public hearing: after the county representatives were done telling everyone how expensive it is to put people in jail, a former homeless person came up to the mic and told people how, if it wasn't for jail (where he ended up for stealing a bicycle to sell in order to get his next meth hit) he'd likely be dead now.
Jail is clearly not the answer, but forced rehab MUST be part of the answer. We will lose 100K people (yes, go check the stats for last year) this year to overdoses alone. We shouldn't pretend people can get off the needle on their own somehow, or that hard drugs are somehow socially acceptable.
And able bodied folks should be required to work, and pay what they can. Otherwise they aren't ever getting out their predicament. SF should have taught our local government something, but apparently they're so dumb they can't put 2 and 2 together anymore. It's now down to who signals the most virtue and funnels the most taxpayer money to the right nonprofits.
* it's a hard problem to solve
* nobody wants to solve that problem
* it's a national crisis, not just an SF crisis
* people are incompetent and governments are slow to move (and rarely make use of data correctly)
* things generally tend to get better only after they get worse
It's not a deliberate relationship, but housing prices correlate with homelessness. If landlords and property owners see their properties increase in value, that means that people on the margins are becoming homeless.
Landlords ... who make money from people paying to rent their units, want to deliberately keep would-be customers from handing over their money.
Solutions require money, which requires taxes.
The wealthy benefit by doing nothing about homelessness as taxes are kept low and the problem of homelessness is kettled into some tiny district far away from their leafy suburbs where they never have to see it.
I knew there was an unusual level of homelessness in America, i didn't know people cared so little
I dont want to conclude the problem is these attitudes, but the relative distance between the average opinion here, and how China treats you is what?
--
The CCP leadership care about materialism and power, before other people; and simplistically, but not incorrectly, that is why they abuse and lie
Certainly on average the comments here reduce your distance to them
[1]: https://wisconsinexaminer.com/2021/10/13/bill-calls-for-stat... [2]: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/using-new-law-la-city-coun... [3]: https://www.civilbeat.org/2021/01/honolulu-police-spent-1500...
Why should the ones in SF get such special treatment and massive sums of money spent on them over other homeless people? The majority of homeless people in SF aren't from SF, and >30% of the homeless population in SF moved to SF already homeless.
Why should SF residents pay exorbitant amounts of money to house them when it's the most expensive city for housing in the US?
SF already spends > $100 PER month PER resident - ~$300 PER month PER taxpayer on homelessness. The budget has swelled since 2018 - and yet the problem has almost doubled in the same period.
It's almost as if pouring money on the problem doesn't solve it.
That changed somewhat later, and the left is fine with funding as long as it’s not in their back yard.
Secondly, there is no "housing shortage". You're just looking in the wrong place. That's like saying there is a shortage of air in outer space.
It's generally good policy to argue towards the strongest and most charitable interpretation of a counter argument if your goal is to persuade.
As a counter to your statement: I believe the crux of the issue is not just more housing, though having more housing available for low and middle class workers is important, but the fact that we (the US) as a country have a bit of a paradox in how we think about hosing:
1. We generally want everyone to be able to afford to have some kind of shelter.
2. We expect all real estate to increase in value over time.
We can't have both, but until we change how we think about real estate and it's role as an asset, we're unlikely to have a robust, long term solution to a lack of housing that's affordable to the average worker.
Correlation is not causation. Perhaps homelessness is discouraged in low-density areas. Try putting up a tent up in front of nice homes in a single family neighborhood and the cops will quickly tell the camper to move on. But setting up camp under a downtown highway? One can probably last at least a few weeks before public works sweeps out the camp.
They have the wealth base to do it, they have the income base to do it. They're a mix of cowards and immoral misers (those who refuse to act).
2019: "Bolstered by its transformative tech industry, San Francisco has the most billionaires per capita than any other city, according to a new study from Wealth-X that measures the number of billionaires and where they live in the world. For every 11,612 people in San Francisco, the study says, there's one billionaire. And that's a much smaller ratio than the second most billionaire-dense city. In New York City, there are 81,211 inhabitants for every one billionaire."
https://money.com/san-francisco-billionaire-density-income-i...
