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0 pointsgtirloni1y ago0 comments

> San Francisco has an odd tolerance for the tent communities

When I visited SF for the first time in 2019, it felt really weird that such a rich place would have so many people living in tents in public spaces. Being naive, I saw dozens of tents in Sue Bierman Park and thought they were having an event or something. Then it dawned on me what I was seeing and it never made sense because certainly it doesn't take a lot of money to give these people something so they don't have to live in tents.

Where I live (South America), the city had this situation about 20 years ago and what they did was buy a bunch of cheap land in the outskirts, build small houses and relocate these people. To avoid it being called charity, they "lent" the money that these people could pay in >50 years without interest. And this is a place with no tradition of philantrophy or billionaries. So I'd imagine a single billionarie could fix SF's situation in a blink of an eye, no?

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milkshakes1y ago

I don't think it's a resource allocation issue. SF government alone spends almost a billion a year[1] on trying to improve the situation. That's not including the non-profit spending. Money won't buy the city out of this situation as long as there exist people who don't want to live in homes and play by the rules.

1: https://hsh.sfgov.org/about/budget/

ToValueFunfetti1y ago

1 billion dollars / 8500[1] homeless people = 117 thousand dollars. The median household income in SF is 119 thousand[2]. I get that you wouldn't want to just pay them a salary because of second-order effects, but that kind of spend without even getting them sheltered strongly suggests resources are not being allocated well.

[1] https://www.sfgov.org/scorecards/safety-net/homeless-populat...

[2] https://smartasset.com/retirement/average-salary-in-san-fran...

EricE1y ago

If you gave them $117K a year they would be dead within a month ODing on the mass quantities of drugs they can now afford. Money is not the issue with homelessness, and until people get that out of their heads the problem will not be solved.

sfmz1y ago

They cleaned it up for President Xi's visit.

https://sfstandard.com/2023/11/14/city-clears-homeless-encam...

maxerickson1y ago

Seems you need to evaluate the effectiveness of that spending to conclude that it can't be a resource allocation issue.

adolph1y ago

Maybe a problem could be on the allocation side rather than the resource side.

janalsncm1y ago

> spends almost a billion a year

That sounds like an allocation issue. There aren’t enough beds. If you became homeless in SF tonight, you would be on the street.

analyst741y ago

I think it's mainly corruption. A significant amount of budget (hundreds of millions) is allocated to "deal" with homelessness in SF, so efforts to actually solve the problem are going to face significant challenges from existing beneficiaries.

fosk1y ago

The so called "homeless industrial complex" [1].

1 - https://www.nationalreview.com/the-weekend-jolt/californias-...

squigz1y ago

> So I'd imagine a single billionarie could fix SF's situation in a blink of an eye, no?

There's no money in that though, and there's lots of money in keeping Americans divided.

moduspol1y ago

If the problem were literally that "these people want houses and just can't afford them," I think that'd work. But that's not the issue in San Francisco.

labcomputer1y ago

> the city had this situation about 20 years ago and what they did was buy a bunch of cheap land in the outskirts, build small houses and relocate these people.

That will never work in SF because it involves moving the homeless someplace else involuntarily and moving them all to a singular place.

So the homeless “advocates” will accuse you of being a Nazi who is trying to create a literal concentration camp.

It doesn’t matter how nice the community is, nor that the people would own their space, nor anything else about your plan.

As a meta-consideration, part of the problem is that many of people who work “for” the homeless really enjoy living in SF. Threatening to move their jobs to someplace less desirable is the reason they will call you names.

Also, if you fix homeless, you no longer need homeless advocates. That goes to the core of their identity, so of course they will fight you.

lucianbr1y ago

But why are the homeless "advocates" such a force? Don't the rest of the people living and voting in the city outnumber them by multiple orders of magnitude?

telotortium1y ago

In politics generally, there's much more incentive for a small interest group to lobby[1] or advocate for a policy that provides a concentrated benefit to the group, than there is for the whole population to fight back to eliminate the small per-capita cost of the policy to the population. Also, many of the voters in SF have at least progressive sympathies, which include not "oppressing" groups that are seen to be "oppressed", even if they happen to break the law or make life unpleasant. So lots of money is spent in an ineffective but superficially compassionate way.

[1] In the broadest sense, not at all restricted to professional political lobbyists.

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kardianos1y ago

That probably works when people have no money and no place to go. I used to live near Portland OR, and in that case many or most choose to be there, they wanted drugs and ANY house they lived in would soon be trashed.

lupusreal1y ago

The people of SF think that solving the problem as you have described, relocating the street junkies into cheap homes in the outskirts, is "literally fascism" because "how dare you tell these people they're not allowed to camp and shoot up heroin anywhere they like?"

atmavatar1y ago

I imagine most in the US would be more interested in reducing homelessness by producing soylent green than by producing housing - especially the billionaires.

KingMob1y ago

The number of people in the comments blaming homelessness solely on homeless people is embarrassing. Sure, mental health, the economy, drug use, and housing costs have no effect, apparently.

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