I don't think the legal justifications are actually "easily fixable". Remember, until a year or two ago it was illegal to remove tent cities, despite the city of San Francisco fighting hard to get around the restrictions. I think this would require the biggest legal shift in US history.
As for cost, my very preliminary calculations are that the cost of incarcerating all homeless people in California would come out to $30 billion/year, which would require an extra $1,000 per person.
Yes, but by the same token, once you actually spent the $30 billion on homeless incarceration, you'd probably have just done the preliminary environmental surveys for the new prisons you're building.
(I thought the fairest way to estimate a cost was to apply the cost of the current prison system per inmate, which I'm assuming includes some sort of amortized cost of the prisons themselves, though low confidence in this. But the current prisons were built when it was easier to build things, so the environmental review nightmare process would increase those numbers)
If you wanted to lock up as many homeless people as possible you could increase penalties for minor crimes, drastically increase the penalties for repeat infractions and then put a lot of effort into enforcing them. That's all legally feasible.
The two pillars you've got to avoid are
1. You have to make acts illegal not states of being. You can't criminalize 'has done drugs' or 'is homeless'
2. Punishments for crime can't be 'cruel or unusual'. This is not a category with hard defined boundaries, and states generally have a lot of leeway, but measures which are too draconian could get struck down.
(Note: I do not advocate for this. In fact I'm one of the bleeding hearts who doesn't think the tent encampments should have been broken up)
You can make "staying in the park after 11pm is illegal." This is a ruling that got put into place around Occupy Wall Street (I'm not sure if this is misdemeanor/fine territory). I hate the idea of debtor's prisons, but if someone is racking up a ton of fines, I'm pretty okay with "here is a bed, here is a saw, get to work" (out in the middle of nowhere).
Does your advocacy for tent encampments change if they come with foot amputations? (Very much not a joke around here. Nobody sends homeless here, I pray to god).
Being in the park after dark and pitching a tent are ALREADY forbidden in my city. It's been that way for a long time, and yet the homeless epidemic continues.
I don't what else we can do to convince the "solving homelessness is actually simple" people. We provide more and more evidence that the only quick fixes to homelessness involve fatally undermining.civil liberties for Americans.
No matter how much evidence we provide, nothing gets through. But no, you CAN'T treat the homeless like helots while treating the non-homeless like Spartans. It's literally impossible. For one thing, there's too much liminal space between the two categories of people.
Murder is simple. State-delivered murder for people stealing out of dumpsters does exist in this country (they may call it something different, but I'm going to call it murder...). It's what generally happens to the Rambo types.
I don't hear you or anyone else howling about the people killed for stealing out of dumpsters either (Probably because NGOs hate the lack of numbers and difficulty of treating said people).
When my city started enforcing (with patrols) "being in the park after dark" -- the homeless left. They went somewhere "less convenient" (still within easy walking distance of the city center). My city has plenty of homes that sit vacant, plenty of places to build houses. You could put all the homeless in Fairywood, and the only cost would be that they'd have difficulty going begging or getting drugs.
Cops understand how to give incentives to the people with marshmallow problems. They're generally "do this or get beat up or spend some time in jail, and probably get beat there." (it's not murder, generally, unless you kill a cop).
I'm not even saying we should treat one group differently than the other. (although I'm upset at the 30time arrestees who wind up committing murder. Maybe we could keep them in prison after their tenth arrest?)
Based on this, I'm guessing you don't know it's generally legal to dumpster dive in public American alleys. Since you don't even know that, and I don't know what else you don't know, I have no confidence that our conversation will bear fruit.
Solving homelessness in general is not simple, but most people don't actually have a problem with homelessness in general. If an ordinary law-abiding citizen doesn't have a home and is not bothering or harassing me, then they're not bothering or harassing me. It's still a problem for them, and should be addressed for their sake, but it doesn't decrease my quality of life.
If somebody is a public menace and is stealing, vandalizing, harassing, and doing other antisocial problems, then they are a problem and decrease the quality of life for everyone around them.
So you simply criminalize antisocial behaviors, and actually enforce these laws, and then the part of the homeless problem that affects millions of people, as opposed to thousands, goes away. And, importantly, this also helps the good homeless people who themselves are victimized by the criminal ones. The shelters and streets and public services would be nicer for homeless people to be in if the criminals were locked up instead of sharing their spaces. And the general public would be more sympathetic to them because they wouldn't have a lived reality of being harassed by antisocial homeless people all the time.
> criminalize antisocial behaviors, and actually enforce these laws
This is the key. It's amazing how many people fail to get it. If the behavior is the problem, punish the behavior, duh.
I think this also applies to other problems, such as drugs. There are sophisticated discussions about the exact number of grams or milligrams when something becomes a legal problem. I don't care about the grams per se; I care about the behavior that happens as a result. If you steal in order to finance your drug habits, the problem is the theft; I don't care about how many grams exactly you bought for the stolen stuff. If you sell drugs to kids at school, again the problem is selling drugs to kids at school, not whether it was 49.9g or 50.1g; I don't care.
EDIT: This seems to be a part of a more general pattern that goes kinda like this -- People hate X. People notice that X is somehow related to Y. Instead of punishing X, people decide to punish Y. That starts a long and complicated debate about Y; how much Y is socially acceptable, whether punishing Y is limiting our freedoms, how big punishment is acceptable, etc. People provide examples how someone has a lot of Y with very little or no X; it is certainly wrong to punish such people. But then you have people who do very little Y but lots of X, perhaps we should be really harsh to make sure that these people won't avoid the punishment. And all this could be avoided if instead of some related Y we simply punished X directly.
Drugs are not the problem. The problems are the related things, such as theft, criminal gang activities, (self-)harm, tax avoidance, etc.
You don't understand. Solving homelessness is easy, at least to most people. "Homeless" means "the ones that I can see and that annoy me". If you move one from that category to the category of ones that hide, or aren't in middle class or above neighborhoods, that counts as one less homeless in the eyes of 90% of citizens, even though it is still officially a homeless person. There could be twice as many, but if they aren't allowed to bother most people in the city, people will consider homelessness solved.
Serious people and policy makers are concerned about ending homelessness, not about merely ending visible homelessness. Ignorant members of the public may have a different view, but many of them also believe that demons are possessing their political opponents. Many of them believe in Bigfoot. Who cares?
Basically, that 90% you mention 'doesn't “matter,” so to speak. What is it that I allegedly “do not understand?”
> you CAN'T treat the homeless like helots while treating the non-homeless like Spartans. It's literally impossible. For one thing, there's too much liminal space between the two categories of people.
How is it “literally impossible”? Even if you made everyone in that liminal space a helot, the Spartiates-to-helots ratio would still be much higher than in actual ancient Sparta. You can just imagine the boundless contempt someone whose entire culture was structured around the need to keep the helots down would feel for a modern citizen afraid of so few of them.
I thought the Spartan reference was a colorful way to evoke a bifurcated, apartheid style society. But I wouldn't dream of suggesting that America has anything to learn from Sparta.
Lycurgical Sparta was a failed experiment that tarnished Greece's legacy among well-informed observers. This shabby concentration camp of a society was lacking some of the key features of civilization and higher culture.
Spartan society had some good points, but overall, it was a dismal place for dismal people.
I'm an expert neither on law nor on drug testing, but is it actually that easy? We have the ability to check if someone is currently drunk just by having them breath into a machine, but I don't think this is true for all drugs. For example, I read that enforcing weed-based DUIs is harder because the only tests can't discriminate between "currently high" and "smoked weed sometime in the past month." And I'm not sure if the legal standards different for, say, a blood or hair test than for a breathalyzer, or if tests that you have to send off to a lab are of any use here.
I was going to say that "having done cocaine sometime in the last month" means they've committed a crime sometime in the last month. But now that I think about it, it's still a bit more difficult, because can you prove that they didn't hop over to Nevada to do it there outside the jurisdiction of this Californian court?
There is that possibility, but mostly I was wondering about A) will these test results be available immediately, and if not, what are you doing before that? B) What legal steps do you need to go through to perform the test? Can a cop just stop someone and do it? This only works for breathalyzers because driving is special. I assume you need a warrant or to arrest them first or something.
Americans get furious when, thanks to traffic cameras, they are mailed traffic tickets for violations they thought they had "got away with."
Considering that, I can only imagine the backlash if cops started arresting detainees for having used drugs weeks before. Despite what you may have heard, it's normal for drug users to have non-user loved ones and acquaintances who would be outraged by this. So this policy suggestion is fancifully unrealistic, even if you think it pasts the tyranny smell test. (It doesn't).
Even Red China doesn't routinely arrest currently-sober people for having drugs in their system, although the practice is not unknown..
How could you possibly keep your campaign of drug testing from breaking containment? Wealthy people do drugs too, and how could the police resist the temptation to stop and test prominent figures in society. How could the civilians who oversee the police department resist that temptation?
This is the age of Luigi Mangione and the Trump trials. Catching wealthy crooks is good for your career, or at least it CAN BE. Between that Uncertainty and the Certainty of civil libertarians howling about the Constitution, promiscuous drug testing opens the door to chaos.
Even if you consolidate the edgy, anonymous male poster vote, you might be JUST shy of the number of constituents you need to start this particular motor and keep it running.
> At the very least possessing them is, and you need to possess them in order to do them.
Technically not true, I do not think you could get someone snorting a line of coke for possession. And there is always the chance that someone drugs you unwittingly.
Also, I have philosophical objections to criminalizing the mere consumption of drugs. Basically, possession of drugs has some negative externalties so that society may feel justified in dissuading you. Some addict could kill you for the drugs, which would be a hassle for law enforcement. You might sell them. etc.
By contrast, consumption in itself is the ultimate victimless crime. If you break other laws under influence, then you can be prosecuted for these other laws. If you paid for the drugs with stolen money, you can be prosecuted for theft.
You might argue that there are still medical costs as an externality to drug use, but cynically, the homeless who do not regularly gamble with death from OD will probably end up with higher medical costs than those who do.
> Basically, possession of drugs has some negative externalties so that society may feel justified in dissuading you. Some addict could kill you for the drugs, which would be a hassle for law enforcement.
Possessing _anything_ desirable has that kind of externality. Someone could kill you to rob you, which would be a hassle for law enforcement. And states do, in fact, feel justified in dissuading you from being wealthy and in helping you be poorer.
It isn’t exactly unheard of across human cultures, either, the idea that sexually desirable people—almost always women—have some negative externalities, since some “addict” could rape them and, optionally, kill them, which would be a hassle for law enforcement, or, worse, for their friends and relatives honor-bound to engage in a potentially neverending blood feud. This makes society feel more than justified in dissuading them from showing any hint of their desirability and in victim-blaming them.
> You might sell them. etc.
Once anything has been made illegal, perhaps with the rationale above, the possibility that you might sell it, or otherwise propagate the illegality, can be used as an extra argument to keep it illegal.
> By contrast, consumption in itself is the ultimate victimless crime.
If we criminalize possession because you may be a victim of robbery and murder, judging that this is both your fault and society’s business, why not criminalize consumption, too, regarding you as both the victim and the aggressor?
> If you break other laws under influence, then you can be prosecuted for these other laws. If you paid for the drugs with stolen money, you can be prosecuted for theft.
If you break other laws while possessing, then you can be prosecuted for these other laws. If someone breaks other laws while victimizing you, then maybe _they_ can be prosecuted, rather than you.
> You might argue that there are still medical costs as an externality to drug use, but cynically, the homeless who do not regularly gamble with death from OD will probably end up with higher medical costs than those who do.
But those who possess and don’t consume will probably end up with lower medical costs than those who consume.
When I was growing up, I assumed the actual law must be something like "cruel punishment and unusual punishment are both forbidden" and that everyone was just being sloppy when quoting it. I was rather shocked when someone told me that the wording was specifically chosen to continue allowing cruel punishments as long as they were already common when the rule went into effect.
It's a bit more complicated than that; see e.g. Trop v. Dulles, a 1958 case where the Supreme Court declared in part that (per Wikipedia) "the Eighth Amendment's meaning of cruel and unusual must change over time and 'must draw its meaning from the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society'." ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trop_v._Dulles )
I'm a bleeding heart leftist with typical bleeding heart views on the homeless. But for the reasons you mention and others, I think the entire Eighth Amendment should be withdrawn and replaced with a narrower prohibition against torture.
It sounds to me like, if enough people are determined to normalize a new cruel punishment, all it takes is a few heroes to start dispensing it unconstitutionally and suffering the consequences. Then it’ll be a cruel, but usual punishment, so no more protection against it.
I'm all for not breaking up tent encampments assuming they're off grid in the Nevada desert somewhere. At the very least they should be absolutely nowhere kids exist.
You don’t need to imprison all the homeless. Most of the homeless are not derelicts, but rather capable people who are down on their luck. They need homeless shelters (already funded), and perhaps convenient safe places to park their cars (again easily provided).
The derelicts (a minority) have a choice — go to a shelter, find a friend to live with, or move to a city which chooses to look the other way, or, worst case scenario, go to jail. I respect their choice. Only a tiny slice of these derelicts, and virtually none of the affordable-housing group will need slots in prisons.
Differentiating between the derelicts and non-derelicts is harder than you presuppose. It's not like you can tell by one's appearance. I've met younger, sharply dressed homeless people with brushed teeth, each one of whom was a bigger drain on society than a dozen obviously alcoholic, older homeless.
Oops, I made a mistake. I should have written "obviously alcoholic, older homeless." I was referring to older homeless people with shabby appearances who might be considered "hopeless cases."
That contradicts every report I've heard of them. After all, to be homeless is not only be down on your luck, it's to have absolutely no one who will let you sleep on the couch.
On what basis do you say that most are capable and down on their luck?
If most really are derelicts, then housing first is a scam solution, as mentally insane fentanyl addicts are incapable of maintaining homes. The answer is institutionalizing them as per the appropriate tile of law. I am fine with this too, and again California has set aside billions for doing so.
We have ten billion dollar trains to nowhere and billion dollar programs to foster derelicts.
I don't have exact numbers, but it seems to me that the homeless population is approximately:
1/3 generally functional people who had bad luck (economically), e.g. lost their homes in divorce, were scammed out of money, had an expensive surgery, had a one-time legal problem with huge financial penalty, etc. In other words, the kind that probably could immediately become productive members of the society again if they e.g. won a new house in a lottery.
1/3 mentally ill people.
1/3 drug addicts.
For the latter 2 groups, nothing other than institutionalization can help.
For the first group, the problem with homeless shelters is that you force them to live with the latter two. So you have a generally functional person who perhaps in long term could find a job, save some money, any maybe buy some cheap home and escape homelessness... but they are forced to live among the drug addicts who keep stealing their stuff, and among the mentally ill people who keep screaming during the entire night so they can't get sleep.
Great comment. I am not sure what the percentages are, and I suspect those who could gather it don’t want to.
Ideas that would help sort the generally functional are individual (recently closed) motel rooms, old RV Trailers, nice full sized tents in approved areas, parking lots for safely living in their cars, and so on. Of course, the other two groups will quickly abuse and destroy these things. So they need to be held accountable. Again, the people in charge don’t want to hold them accountable, so the system breaks down.
There are certain ways of framing a problem that actively prohibits and (perversely) actually promotes the problem. The way progressives frame homelessness is the root barrier to solving the issue.
I suspect there's a continuum with Mr Screaming Back at the Voices on one side, and Mr Sleeping in My Car Because My Wife Threw Me Out on the other. Programs that help people on the bad end of the spectrum will do very little for the good end of the spectrum, and vice-versa.
The other side of homeless is "Mr sleeps in his on-campus office for a few days before his new rental unit is open."
And the actual continuum starts with Rambo in the woods slowly starving to death, until he starts raiding dumpsters and gets shot (said person is nearly impossible to catch, let alone help).
Both of these people are nearly untreatable. The former because "He's fine" (in fact, could probably afford a hotel room). The later because "He's very unfine, and is armed and dangerous."
Somewhere in the middle, we have people who "could use a reasonably well run work camp" or "a treatment center for drugs/mental health"
Isn't there some fraction of people who weren't crazy when they became homeless, but were driven crazy by homelessness? Extended lack of sleep and constant fear can do that to people.
That is possible. But there are probably many who got insane the usual way, or perhaps who were previously insane but they had a caretaker, and now the caretaker died or something.
But regardless of etiology, the crazy need medical help, while the homeless for purely economical reasons only need a place to sleep and store their things, so they have a chance to get a job.
Many homeless people have jobs. That's one reason why they tend to have cell phones even though the only way is to buy a new phone once you use up all the hours on the old one.
I knew an older woman once who had a pension/disability that let her keep a roof over her head and food on the table, but who had a life-wrecking mental illness that made her just *barely* able to keep functioning on her own. I suspect that if something had knocked her into homelessness, she would never have made it back out. As it happened, she kept her home until she got sick and died, which was probably the best possible outcome for her.
Do you disagree with any specific part? I don't want to write an entire thesis defending an internet comment, so it would help me to know which part you consider suspicious.
Is it the existence of economically unlucky people? I have talked to one homeless woman about 50 years old, whose story was (skipping complicated details) that she was single and lived in a house that legally belonged to her father. One day her father died, leaving tons of debt, so the debt collectors took the house. The woman had little job experience (because she spent a lot of time taking care of her mentally retarded brother), she could make barely enough money to pay for food, but not for food + rent. So the brother ended up in some institution and she ended up on the street. I also talked to a guy who claimed to be a victim of divorce: his ex-wife got the house they previously owned together, and his little savings were spent on lawyers. Then he got drunk and fired from his job, so he couldn't even rent and ended up homeless.
Do you doubt that the homeless who are "otherwise okay" have a problem reconnecting to the society? The specific problems I mentioned are the ones they told me. They can get sleep in a shelter, but they often won't get much sleep, because there is an insane person in the next room randomly screaming at night. Their possessions are in constant risk of being stolen by other homeless, e.g. while they use the shower. If you don't have clean clothes and didn't sleep well, you won't make a good impression at a job interview.
Do you doubt the existence of the mentally ill who don't have a caretaker. Or of drug addicts?
Plus I have talked to some people who are professionally involved in taking care of the homeless, but that was long ago, so I can misremember or misinterpret what they told me.
The claim was statistical. Argument by anecdote is therefore irrelevant.
At that, by your own admission, of your two examples, the second one falls in your third category: it was his drinking, not his bad luck, that landed him on the street.
The parts about anything but what proportion of the homeless are simply bad luck are -- what? Bad-faith attempts to distract from the statistics?
I also have talked with a person professionally involved with the homeless, and she told me that virtually all the homeless *want* to live on the street, because to be homeless required you to have NO ONE willing to let you sleep on the couch.
Last I checked it was something like 50-60% (although it probably depends on location) who were "merely" homeless, and might be employed or have a car or something like that. This segment of the population tends to only be homeless for a brief period of time, which is where we get the figures about the average time spent homeless being under 6 months. They're basically capable of living a civilized life, but were only scraping by, and then something pushed them over the edge. Our existing systems work pretty well for these people, but they could be better, and cheaper housing would help them. And we should make sure to help them, because the longer they stay homeless, the more likely it is that they'll fall into the other type.
The other 40-50% have some combination of mental illness, drug abuse, or general antisocial behavior. They cause most of the problems for other people (including committing most of the crime), and tend to stay homeless for years at a time. They typically get thrown out of shelters because they are unwilling or unable to follow the (often very strict) rules. Giving them housing just destroys the housing; I know people whose job it is to clean up after them.
The numbers vary from place to place, and also by methodology. If you survey people on a single day, you'll get one figure, but if you're tracking discrete individuals who experience homelessness over a period of time, you'll see larger numbers of the first group, as they cycle in and out.
If you are only focused on the visible homeless in SF which this article is focused on, there are between 2900-8000 estimated by the PIT count of 2024. So maybe 5,000 long-term, chronically homeless max.
And how many of these folks were SF natives/workers who fell into homelessness vs. folks who were drawn into SF streets because of drug addiction and mental illness? I'd guess the majority are of the latter. Again, the focus is on the visual street homeless, not all 'unhoused'.
For this problem, the assumption that these folks need perpetual paid housing is not correct.
These folks can/should be rehabbed. There need to be enough beds to house them for rehab. They don't need to be suddenly released into the most expensive city in the US, with an affordability crisis. They need to be rehabbed, and given transitional services to get them jobs in places with lower cost of housing.
And if you have enough beds, then you can shut-down the homeless street drug and social network. There is no tent city to fall into. If you are being a vagrant, you simply get put into a proper rehab program, or you leave, or you go to jail. In my opinion, it's the more ethical way to do it.
Are you American? This conversation gets so muddied by international commenters who have big gaps in their knowledge of American law.
Vagrancy was eliminated as a legal category here 53 years ago. Because it seriously undermines our constitutional right to travel. Sounds like you don't understand or respect that. ANY legal regime that favors long-time residents over new residents must fail in the same way.
All of that is mainstream American jurisprudence. I would go a bit further and argue that
any policies that can be interpreted as the government implicitly telling people, "Don't you dare move to a new community if doing so will put you at risk of homelessness," must also fail to respect the Constitution.
You just need to enforce rules against camping/sleeping in unapproved areas. Most places do this today, and it is in no way unconstitutional. JP is correct.
Yea, simple broad laws against vagrancy were ruled unconstitutional by the SCOTUS in 1972. SCOTUS rulings though can be reversed by later Courts and the makeup of that body is dramatically different now than it was in 1972.
Just last year the current SCOTUS ruled that, notwithstanding the 1972 ruling, a municipality's banning of people from sleeping or camping outdoors on public property does not violate the Constitution even if there aren't enough (or any) locally-available shelter beds.
Since relocating to a place necessarily involves having someplace to sleep, it is under current US jurisprudence not true that "any policies that can be interpreted as the government implicitly telling people, "Don't you dare move to a new community if doing so will put you at risk of homelessness," must also fail to respect the Constitution."
I SAID in the comment you are replying to that my final statement was going "further than...American mainstream jurisprudence." So you just paraphrased me.
I realize that precedents can be overturned but I see no reason to think that the Supreme Court is going to bring back vagrancy laws. Last year's ruling was certainly not a step on the way to overturning the 1972 ruling. This is not like Roe V. Wade, where there were millions of committed activists constantly pressuring politicians to overturn the precedent.
Laws against camping on the sidewalk apply equally to people with jobs and people with no jobs. They apply equally to people who are migratory and people who have lived in the community all their lives. So I don't agree that this return to the status quo should give anyone hope that vagrancy laws will return.
If you don't mind my asking, are you an American or a Canadian?
Didn't suggest that vagrancy laws will return. They don't need to: the bans on camping overnight now being established (by around 200 US municipalities thus far since the "Grant's Pass" ruling) have the same practical effect, as the Ninth Circuit had made clear and then the SCOTUS majority ruled to be irrelevant.
> These folks can/should be rehabbed. There need to be enough beds to house them for rehab.
I haven't seen it come up here yet, but rehab has a 70-80%+ failure rate among those who actively seek it out, and succcess rates are ~5x lower for those coerced into it. So you're recommending a course of action that would be A) extremely expensive, and B) have a 90%+ failure rate. Not a great use of taxpayer money, nor a great use of all the people involved's time and effort.
Cites:
Drug and opiate rehab success rates, for people who *voluntarily self-select* into the programs, is ~30% for alcohol* and <20% for opiates.**
The success rates for heavily coerced "do this or get years of prison" populations is likely to be considerably lower (it's ~5x lower for alcohol in non-self-selected pops).
* White 2012: "An analysis of reported outcomes in 415 Scientific Reports, 1868-2011"
Combined alcohol and drug abstinence rates average 30.3%, "although remission from opioid addiction appears to be less stable and durable than other patterns of remission."
** The best number for long term opiate relapse is Hser 2007, which has findings from 33 year followups. 18% achieve abstinence "for at least 5 years."
Hser, Y (2007) Predicting long-term stable recovery from heroin addiction: Findings from a 33 year follow up study. Journal of Addictive Diseases. 26(1), 51-60.
>Remember, until a year or two ago it was illegal to remove tent cities
But that was because, under controlling Ninth Circuit precedent at the time, laws against camping in public, etc, were de facto cruel and unusual punishment.
It is still cruel and unusual punishment to criminalized the status of being homeless, though. So there are indeed limits on the ability to use criminal law to address the problem.
As a practical matter though how much difference is there between "no camping overnight on public property" and "don't be homeless"? Particularly since in "Grants Pass" (2024) the SCOTUS ruled out questions such as whether adequate shelter is otherwise available in the area or whether the person camping is "involuntarily" homeless.
Seems clear that bans on overnight camping on public property will now gradually spread as voters in places with visible homeless populations learn that the SCOTUS has decided that's not cruel and unusual punishment.
Interesting approach. If you must punish behaviors, well, what practical difference is there between “don’t reflect and absorb light following a spectrum too close to this one” and “don’t have this skin color”? Remember, we’ve already established that it doesn’t matter whether the behavior is voluntary.
My brother was a meth addict for several years. He was never homeless but for a while he lived in a motel. One day he set someone's car on fire ("demons told me too") and got arrested. He was never actually convicted, but spent a year in the county jail as his trial got pushed off and eventually they dropped the charges. He couldn't get drugs In jail, so he dried out and got sober. It was the best thing that could have happened to him.
I don't know any of the details, but fwiw my mom was very active politically and knew a lot of people in local government. For all I know kept him there as a favor.
As I understand it, you CAN demand an earlier trial, but defense lawyers recommend against it because the odds of conviction typically decrease quickly with time.
Also, very few people take trial instead of the plea deal.
Not sure about the US, but I have heard that "time served" before conviction even counts as a multiple on your sentence, i.e. 30 days counts as 60 (or something, I don't know if it's double).
If you're likely to be convicted, then time before trial seems an optimization to minimize the total punishment.
This also interacts with plea deals, where the lesser offence you plea to may end up with a maximum sentence less than the time served (possibly in conjunction with the multiplier).
A criminal defendant has a right to a speedy trial. However, this is often not to the benefit of the defendant, because most defendants are guilty, and speeding along the process that will get you convicted is usually percieved negatively. Thus, defendants and their defense attorneys, including public defenders, will often string cases along through multiple continuances - each time waiving their speedy trial rights - for various reasons including (1) plea negotiations with the prosecutor, (2) looking for more evidence, and (3) hoping the state gets tired/bored/disorganized and gives up.
I don't know; I didn't follow those proceedings closely. Also, my limited experience in criminal law is in CA state misdemeanor courts, not federal. Also also, what I said above is a general trend, not a specific predictor for what happens in any given case. Some defendants and lawyers want to move things quickly.
Have Larry Ellison pay for it if he keeps his beard, otherwise have Peter Thiel pay for it unless he manages to out of the news, or just make “Silicon Valley” as a whole pay for it until they (and the “grey tribe”) all decamp for Detroit
I don't know what mischief Peter Thiel would get up to if you gave him all of SF's homeless people to experiment on, er I mean, care for, but I am pretty sure I don't want to find out....
Many should be in mental health facilities which aren't cheaper but are a bit nicer and less coercive, while also being helpful and designed for the purpose. I think governments need to bite the bullet and admit that tens of thousands more adults need expensive residential mental health facilities.
My low-confidence understanding (someone please correct me if I am wrong) is that if you are poor/homeless, it is almost impossible to get any kind of mental health treatment other than by being in some kind of crisis that gets you taken to the hospital.
I don't know how the budget would work out, but my intuition is that we could probably save a fair bit on mental institutions if it were at least *possible* for someone who was seriously mentally ill and also poor (perhaps because their serious mental illness makes it very hard for them to hold down a job) to get some kind of treatment outside of being sent to the bughouse.
Even if you had social workers walking around handing out free anti-psychotic medication to people on the sidewalk, you'd still have the issue of getting them to take it. Residential mental health facilities are often the only way to make sure patients keep taking their medication.
It's actually common to treat people in this situation with long-acting injectable antipsychotics (weeks or months in duration). This doesn't fully solve the problem, though, because you need them to stay sane enough, reliably enough, to voluntarily come back every 3 months under their own power, or you need to keep track of them. (But it does help.) And even when they treat the symptoms perfectly, antipsychotics tend to have pretty unpleasant side effects that make people not excited to remember to return for their next dose, even if they agree in principle that they intend to.
It’s not easily fixable. The kind of law which would let you dump random people into long prison terms is the kind of law which gets preempted by the Bill of Rights.
I suppose I don’t believe in the political will for higher taxes, either. Between the current climate of populism and California’s already eye-watering taxes, who is going to champion that policy?
Not "random people," we're talking about homeless people who commit crimes, see the context of the quote:
"CalMatters presents the cynical view of post-Grant anti-homeless enforcement. The usual problem with enforcing laws against the homeless is that no plausible punishment can make their lives worse: you can’t fine people without money, or suspend the drivers licenses of people without cars. All you can do is imprison them - but there are too many, it’s too expensive, and the legal justifications are too weak to keep them in for long."
The only crime being discussed here is camping in public, and making the case for long prison sentences there is difficult. Like, if you want to imprison a homeless person for a year, you're arguing that public camping should be punished more severely than assault and battery (max sentence 6 months in CA, according to Google), and I think courts would be skeptical of that.
I should also point out that someone who's in prison is unable to acquire a home, so I don't see how this would change the homeless population even if you *could* jail them for as long as you wanted.
Someone who is in prison has acquired a defacto home of "jail" (where at least they do not lose feet to hypothermia) and we do already have programs to house people coming out of jail (halfway houses).
If imprisonment is taken as an imperfect, short-term solution, then reluctantly 'yeah, imprisonment'. The homeless might get a chance to get clean off drugs, or get their mental health problems addressed.
"Just stick 'em in jail and let 'em rot" is not the solution. The problem is with those who are the most visible: the ones rotted on drugs or with severe mental illness. When you're trying to deal with people as in the video below, there comes a point where local government intervention needs to happen, be that taking them off the streets and putting them into treatment centres or hospitals against their will, because otherwise we are saying "let them just decay in public view but not intervene".
The most visible ones are the ones that, even if you provide them with housing in the morning, are not going to be able to live in it. They'll either turn the place into a health hazard or start ripping it apart to sell stuff so they can buy more drugs. They are the ones who need the most support and are probably the least capable of managing their own lives.
The images of people literally folded in half on the street, their trousers down around their ankles, unable to stand up because this is the side-effect of the particular drug they have consumed - yeah taking people's liberty away from them is a slippery slope, but how can anyone look at that and think "Nope, for the sake of society, much better to let them continue on like this rather than sweep them up and institutionalise them like the bad old days of lunatic asylums".
On the other hand, a single person seeing a homeless encampment is 99% of the negative utility of actually being homeless, or getting your stuff stolen, or encampment taken, etc.
This is actually backwards. A small group who care a lot is incentivized to organize, while the majority who are impacted a little bit each are not so incentivized. This is how we got things like the auto tariffs, regulatory capture, the farm bill, and most other forms of targeted subsidy.
I meant to add a point like that, but got distracted. You're right that this doesn't apply to homeless people directly, but I suspect a similar dynamic applies with a small group of ideological "homeless advocates."
I would dispute that, the fact that the multi-billionaires successfully lobby politics to protect their class interests does not make the US undemocractic.
(Yes, I know, technically the fraction of people who would vote for higher taxes on Musk is less than 99%.)
You probably mean 1%. But even so, the cost of enforcing public decency is also probably 1% the cost of a “solving” the problem of actually being homeless.
huh, I would've said "1%", and then added that being worried about the possibility of becoming homeless, due to a lack of social safety net, is additional negative utility for everyone who worries about that.
This strikes me as something that fails the veil of ignorance test pretty badly.
If you thought there was a real chance you could end up homeless, with mental problems or addiction, would you still see not taking away their tents as "suicidal empathy"?
Yea, I dislike the veil of ignorance and after many years of agreeing with it I dismiss it. For generations my family and community worked hard to build something to ensure this would never happen to me or mine. That should be the higher good. I appreciate the concept, but I'm keeping my kidney and asking for lower taxes. I do appreciate the response.
As I see it, there are two main things that we give labels like "morality" or "the higher good" to. There's compassion, and there's solutions to coordination problems.
If you feel for people outside of your family and community- if you feel bad when they feel bad and good when they feel good- that's one reason to try and make their lives decent, but it's not the only one.
Every day, we're presented opportunities to benefit ourselves or something we value like a particular community, but at the expense of causing bigger externalities for other people or other communities. Individually, we're all incentivized to take those opportunities, but when everyone does, everyone is much worse off.
A staggering amount of value is locked away in these coordination problems; to get at that value, we have to be able to trust each other to hold to principles even when doing so doesn't benefit us or the people close to us. In practice, this means things like not stealing or killing even if we're certain we could get away with it, being very honest even when dishonesty would help our political cause or social standing, helping people even when no one would know if we hadn't, etc. Deontological morality, in other words.
The veil of ignorance isn't a perfect proxy for that kind of thing, but it's a good heuristic. If everyone in the world committed to it strongly, we'd be vastly safer and more prosperous. If humanity had always been even just somewhat more willing to hold to it, we'd likely have had so much material surplus that we'd have invented cures for aging and a post-scarcity supply chain generations ago. Your family and community would benefit enormously from broad adoption of this kind of moral commitment, even though individually it would involve giving up things like enjoying improved aesthetics by taking away peoples' shelter.
>Every day, we're presented opportunities to benefit ourselves or something we value like a particular community, but at the expense of causing bigger externalities for other people or other communities. Individually, we're all incentivized to take those opportunities, but when everyone does, everyone is much worse off.
>A staggering amount of value is locked away in these coordination problems
Be curious to know what you mean by this, because I look at my life and don't see it at all. Only arguable case is carbon emissions, but then the case hasn't been made that the costs exceed the benefits.
I do think there's a real chance you or I could end up homeless. A worldwide depression is on our doorstep. In that case, the chronically homeless of NOW are dead.
"Society will have the morality it can afford." -- Niven/Pournelle
And that will occur, and as belts tighten, these people will die, of overdose or lack of homeless shelters, or because we stop letting them waste $5000/night in the Emergency Room when they Aren't Ill.
We can, however, get the "less chronic" on their feet now, invest in places for you and I to live when we become homeless, soon, and make sure that only the worst of the worst cases has to die.
People act as if the Great Depression never happened. They act as if we didn't have a situation where a huge number of hard-working, decent people became homeless despite their best efforts.
Did the Tough on Crime conservatives of the 1930s react to the Depression by giving homeless people the benefit of the doubt, or at least by trying to differentiate between the Worthy Homeless and the Unworthy Drunks?
Not at all! All of them were treated like animals who were dangerous to society. Said conservatives stuck to their article of faith that serious financial hardship MUST be a sign of moral failure.
If more people studied homelessness in the 1930s, perhaps they would understand how the aforementioned injustices could easily be repeated in the future. In fact, they might be getting repeated RIGHT NOW!
Important to note that there are already a huge number of decent, hardworking people who are homeless. Now you can say *relative to the population* it's a tiny number, but it's still a huge number in absolute terms, especially given the stakes.
Also, 'hard working' is a bit of a moving target. Plenty of people with a work ethic within the normal range are homeless, and there's always someone ready to snipe from the sidelines that they deserve no sympathy because if they were *even more hardworking*, prudent etc., they wouldn't be homeless.
If many many people fail the marshmallow test, it doesn't exactly matter how hard working they are, if they are addicts.
What are the "stakes" exactly? Let's talk say, 1000 people in a metro of 3 million. That's not a lot. We lost a lot more than that from covid19 (although covid19 was probably cheaper than any ordinary euthanasia program would be).
Most people who are "homeless" are like my friend, "temporarily unhoused" and crashing in an academic building for a night or two. Or other people who have assets like a car (which provides safety among other things), and are merely "between houses."
Yeah, they mostly did. They ran CCC work camps. They ran hoovertowns with military efficiency. When it was draft time, everyone got thrown towards that.
How much do you trust your savings in the event of a worldwide depression?
The veil of ignorance test does not properly apply to those without proper agency or who fulfill conditions of criminality/making others lives noticeably worse. The thought experiment falls apart when applying to homeless drug addicts who are not part of the general scheme of society. Rawls himself explicitly does not apply it to criminals.
It's probably fair to apply it to mental illness, though.
And if you start asking the question "What would you want, in a society where you have (say) a 1% chance of rerolling as severely schizophrenic" then I don't think the answer is "the right to pitch a tent under a freeway overpass", it's "clean safe pleasant asylums where I can get the treatment I need".
I just don't think either of Rawls' two principles have anything to say about mental illness or homeless policy. The first principle grounds general rights (which perhaps apply to the homeless, but "the right to pitch a tent on the sidewalk" is nowhere to be found), and the difference principle is about how we justify economic inequality. I guess you can say that the mentally ill are the biggest losers after the veil is lifted, but their mental illness is normally unrelated to the economic system.
Rawls' system grounds very broad principles about the basic structure of society and I think people get lost in the sauce applying the veil of ignorance to specific policy issues like homelessness.
Walk a block in a San Franciscan's shoes these last few years. Entire segments of the city were given over to tents and worse. This impacted the city, the economy, jobs, and people who wanted to stay here. That is suicidal empathy for a society.
The veil of ignorance is intellectually vapid. As Scott pointed out in a links post a while ago (IIRC) the only reason it caught on was that it appeared right when Marxism fell out of fashion. It gave intellectual cover to Marxist academics who wanted to continue advocating for the same terrible anti-capitalist ideologies.
The kill shot for the veil is to consider dynamics. The world doesn't consist of a static amount of wealth that must be distributed equitably. Wealth depends heavily on production and incentives matter much more for that. It's the basic grow-the-pie vs slice-the-pie issue that liberals are always terrible at understanding. On a podcast a while back Steve Hsu talked about the time he had dinner with Robert Nozick and asked him how Rawls would have responded to this point. Nozick apparently said that Rawls never even considered it and generally lacked the capacity for solve-for-the-equilibrium type economic thinking.
That's a flat out lie. Rawls was explicitly considering growth in a thought experiment. His point was balancing growth, which often comes with inequality, with maximizing utility for people at the bottom end of the distribution
Growth isn't the same as innovation, which is really the thing that matters. It's been a while since I've read Rawls but my memory is that he didn't consider that. And if he did then he's just flat-out stupid because maximizing the minimum is obviously the wrong way to incentivize productivity growth.
Again, your recollection of a podcast host recalling a decades old (at least) conversation with a moral philosopher’s rival turns out to not be a valid assessment of said moral philosopher’s work.
The entire point of the minimax principle is to understand that growth and economic dynamism come with economic inequality, but also assert there’s a moral imperative to minimize the downside for the losers.
The sheer ignorance you’ve displayed is astounding.
The veil of ignorance makes more sense as (I think) Harsani envisoned it. Not "how would you arrange society if you were going to be its worst-off member" but rather "how would you arrange society if you were going to be its average member" or "how would you arrange society if you were going to be randomly assigned to a position in it?"
In practice, all the decent societies we know how to build are one kind of Omelas or another.
This isn't about moral superiority, this is about empathy and compassion. It is not suicidal to see yourself in others and extend a hand and a net.
Even though you have wealth, you could lose it all, you could have your wealth expropriated, or you could be separated from your wealth through legal means. You are not invincible. I do not know how to convey to you how important it is for society to care about other people. The sociopathic society you seem to want would tear itself apart.
As part of that 99%, I'd rather occasionally drive past some homeless tents than occasionally encounter reporting that makes me worry that we're treating these people with excessive cruelty. Cruelty makes me angry and depressed; homeless people only inspire mild worry.
Granted, I'm sure middle-class people living near homeless encampments feel more strongly about this, but they also represent a very small minority.
Hi! When you have skyscrapers RiGHT BESIDE the littered needles, it turns out there are a LOT of middle-class people living near homeless encampments.
Driving by homeless in tents, you are PROTECTED by your car. You aren't on a bike, in danger of seriously injuring a drunk, or someone having a mental health crisis. You aren't walking, which makes you easy pickings for the more criminally inclined either.
A homeless woman set up a giant cubby/fort on the benches next to my bus stop, filled with junk and rubbish. It smelled terrible. None of that changes that my priority is the welfare of the vulnerable and likely severely mentally ill woman.
The welfare of the homeless and non-homeless alike can be greatly increased by a simple policy of ensuring there are always enough shelter spots available.
Most of the homeless on the streets seem to consistently say that homeless shelters are not safe for them. I attribute this to many mentally ill people being in the shelter, am I wrong about that?
Sounds correct to me. The danger are mentally ill people and drug addicts that live in those shelters next to them.
If the shelter has a system like "two people in the same room", you are screwed. Your roommate will steal your stuff, keep you awake all night, and maybe do something worse.
- the shelters don't have sufficient staff to prevent altercations. Though I'm guessing they can shut them down pretty quick
- the shelters have rules about not bringing in your drugs, and not doing them on the premises. Which many will refuse. There is some justification, where would they store them outside?
- I doubt they search the homeless when they do come in. So there's drug use inside I'm guessing. See my first point. Yes, people on drugs can be violent.
- Also I'm guessing they can't ban someone from a shelter unless they've already had multiple serious problems with them on previous stays.
- Ban someone from a shelter due to previous problems. Can a different shelter also ban them? Should they be able to?
We could fix all this by making Swedish style prisons, for the homeless. You'll get searched for drugs, get a mini-room to yourself, and in general be treated better than we treat most prisoners.
This is a LOT less expensive than $5000 per night when the homeless (and not sick) go to the Emergency Room for a warm bed and a meal or two.
Sounds like it didn't help the 99% though. Dispersed homeless in the city cause as much trouble (if not more) than the same amount of homeless focused in tent emcampments.
With this justification being accepted as valid, I would have absolutely zero scruples extracting all wealth from the 1% in San Francisco so we could improve the lot of the 99%. Maybe we shouldn't stop there, though. There are tons of 1% to expropriate and dispossess.
Hasn’t the US prison population been shrinking pretty quickly? It seems like it’s ~20% lower than a decade or so ago, so where are all these beds that were formerly occupied by prisoners and now are empty? Maybe the prisons were just at over capacity so fewer prisoners doesn’t mean more beds, but it seems like there’s a solution for where to put people if the declining prison population continues.
A prison isn’t necessarily a very nice place to live (neither is a mental institution), but there must be some point where decreasing prison populations frees up a lot of beds all of a sudden.
Scott mentioned that in a previous Links thread: a lot of people who's been put in on long sentences in previous decades were getting out, with not many coming in to replace them.
I wonder if this is why there's so much more crime. People get arrested then let go without trial because there's nowhere to put them when they've convicted.
Seems like team "be as tough as possible for the benefit of the vast majority of society" got our way, and it immediately had a big payoff. I hope other cities can learn from this
It's not even being tough. It's about doing something at all. For years in San Francisco, law enforcement would not even confront vagrants on the street, no matter what they were doing.
My experience of talking to a good number of street homeless in SF is that the main thing keeping them out of shelters is mental health issues or unwillingness to make reasonable tradeoffs, and that their drug use is comparatively unproblematic.
Some examples of unwillingness to make tradeoffs are having an unallowed pet, not leaving an explosive partner who keeps getting expelled, being unwilling to accept single-gender housing in order to stay with said partner. Some examples of mental health issues are extreme paranoid anxiety, having memory issues that cause serious executive dysfunction, or having uncontrollable outbursts.
So creating more housing and clearing encampments doesn’t necessarily qualify such people for housing or make them more willing to take the housing.
How do you differentiate between inborn mental health issues and those caused or exacerbated by long-term drug use? Unfortunately, many drug users are dishonest or even delusional about it, so just talking to them and taking it at face value seems rather unreliable.
Where I'm from it was mostly just alcoholism, but even those would often swear up and down that they don't drink that much, and anyway it's not causing any issues anyway. But they suspiciously do have a lot of issues, which just-so happen to be typical symptoms of alcoholism... The symptoms you mention definitely fall into the bucket of rather typical for long-term drug abuse (though admittedly depending on which drugs that category can be so large as to be not very meaningful).
Self medicating with any substance is usually in response to an underlying(not unusually undiagnosed due to the obvious issue of money) mental illness/disability.
Not to say that's the case with all, but a great deal of the homeless people who use turn to drug use looking for some kind of relief from their symptoms.
Does "self medicating" mean taken to treat an underlying mental illness or disability? Wouldn't 100% of people self medicating with drugs have an underlying condition by definition?
Long-term use of cocaine, meth, and several other drugs are strongly associated with paranoia and anxiety. MDMA, alcohol and others can cause memory problems. I don't think this answers how severe someone's paranoid anxiety was before taking drugs vs how much worse it became after long-term drug use.
You're not getting it. Drug addiction ITSELF is LITERALLY listed as a mental illness in the DSM5. Each addiction is listed individually and collectively they are called Substance Abuse Disorders. Right alongside schizophrenia. I'm not saying we have to take every word from the DSM5 as true, but "drug addiction is a mental illness" is such a well-established, evidence-based and foundational part of modern psychiatry. That if you are going to reject this, you might as well throw the whole book out and start blaming evil spirits for mental illness.
Like any number of mental illnesses, addiction is biopsychosocial. One may argue that addiction is more socially modulated than say, schizophrenia. But physiology always plays a role in addiction, just like social factors play a role in modulating paranoid schizophrenia.
"I don't think this answers how severe someone's paranoid anxiety was before taking drugs vs how much worse it became after long-term drug use."
My comment argued that this question is not especially relevant to the broader topic of how we should think about and address the crisis of homelessness.
Our colloquial separation of "drug addiction" and "mental health problems" is not supported by the psychiatric community. Psychiatrists insist that drug addiction IS a mental health problem. Really for Real. And this isn't a weird artifact of ideology that can be easily corrected by overruling bleeding heart liberals. On the contrary, psychiatrists were FORCED to call drug addiction a Real Mental Illness; in the face of an implacable chain of logical reasoning.
I think the practical difference is that with drug addicts, you need to take special care to isolate them from dealers. Compare to e.g. a non-violent mentally retarded person who can take a walk around the town without that having any negative impact on their condition.
Psychiatrists were perhaps driven by logic to give a certain answer, but they were asked a wrong question.
It really doesn't matter. The reason laypeople argue about this is because they think the argument can be used to justify their personal preferences, whether it is for harsher punishment or more compassionate treatment.
But psychiatrists have wisely stopped focusing on this. There are plenty of neurologists working on the issue, and even though they are trying their best, we aren't even close to finding an answer. We don't even know how much humans can consciously overcome their unconscious impulses.
In the meantime, the question of how much "guilt" to assign to an addict is pointless. Assigning and punishing guilt is the age-old method of dealing with criminals and addicts. That method has clearly failed. Or at least it only works in a brutal police state where you're willing to destroy all freedoms to maintain order.
The people themselves don’t want to lie about their gender and act like a gender they don’t identify with just to get these benefits. Maybe you think they’re unreasonable for that.
I don’t think you know what you’re talking about. Being trans isn’t just a card one plays in a game for strategic purposes. It’s an actual commitment to a lifestyle, even if it’s one you disapprove of.
Uh huh. You're telling me that if you tell a homeless couple who're suffering outside on the streets to be together that all it takes is if one of them to check a different box on the intake form for them to get shelter, no questions asked (ex hypothesi; I don't know that it's actually true that one can do this), you think they share your ideological commitment not to do that?
I doubt there will really be "no questions asked". Just because people are willing to trust trans people about their gender identity doesn't mean they treat gender as a game where someone who makes no effort to present as a particular gender will get no questions asked when in a single-gender facility.
I was under the impression the truscum/transmedicalist position lost, hard, and anyone that says they were trans was trans. It requires no commitment.
You may think it's *rare* that people will take advantage of this clear loophole and lack of gatekeeping, but that doesn't change that there is virtually no gatekeeping.
This appears to be a flippant comment stirring up culture war topics for the sake of it, rather than a sincere question about housing policies. This is pointlessly inflammatory and less than the standard of discourse I prefer to see in ACX comments.
Fair, sorry for misjudging you. I would suggest adding more elaboration in your original comment so it's easier to distinguish sincere efforts to discuss culture war topics from trolling. It's very annoying to try to have a discussion about any topic and end up with several comment threads of predictable "what about the transgenders" back-and-forth.
Abandoning one's pet doesn't seem like a "reasonable" trade-off to me. I could hardly think of a more children's-cartoon-villain sadistic choice to present a person with than "either abandon your pet or risk going to jail".
You're assuming the pet is actually "being taken care of properly" ain'tcha? I'm okay with finding facilities that will let someone have a pet... but I wouldn't assume that letting a dog walk around unshod on probably glass-strewn streets is "actually taking care of the dog properly."
This is a complete non-sequitur. Whether some people are capable of properly caring for a pet is completely unrelated to their emotional attachment to said pet.
> You're assuming the pet is actually "being taken care of properly" ain'tcha?
Not necessarily, but putting myself in a homeless person's shoes, in a world where I know things like kill shelters exist, *even if I'm aware that I'm not a very good caregiver* I still might not take my chances with an underfunded facility telling me "if you want access to one of our ratty beds, please give us your beloved dog. no we probably won't give it back". And them adding "anyway it's this or prison" would not increase my confidence in their overall trustworthiness.
Besides, I'm not *just* looking at the welfare of the dog here. "Emotional support animals" are a meme, but they're a meme for a reason. Taking care of her two mangy, ill-tempered mutts (maybe not very well!) might be the only thing that keeps a homeless woman going, not to mention providing her with a modicum of safety against less-well-behaved bums when she's walking the streets. Suppose I'm her. Am I going to give them up forever, just for a shot at mediocre accommodations for a few months? Is that rational? At best it's a gamble.
I'm not saying it's never the right choice (whether morally or practically) for a homeless person to give up a pet. But picking the pet over the shelter doesn't seem "unreasonable" in the same sense as "but I just can't walk out on Sam who beats me up every other Sunday, he needs me".
Excuse me. You've never been abandoned at summer camp by your parents. A child of less than about 15 years of age can probably not make enough money to afford a house, and is probably in trouble with the law for not going to school regardless.
You've never had to live under a bush (or car) for days, not knowing when food (or parents) would arrive. Without a car or other transportation, I could easily see this form of homelessness as being "terminal."
And all that takes is having dumbdumbs as parents.
Forgive me for asking a very stupid question, but... where are the summer camp organizers in all this?
Like, if I were running a summer camp for 15-year-olds, and one of the kids was just abandoned/the parents never showed up for him at the end of the camp, I sure as hell wouldn't just shrug and say, "Nice knowing ya, kid, camp's over, byyyyeeee!"
I would either attempt to contact the parents (don't they have to list their phone number and address on the summer camp registration form?) or if that proved impossible, I would call Child Protective Services and say, "Here's a kid who's been abandoned at my camp by his parents, he needs a place to stay, can you either track down his family or find a foster family for him?" This seems really really blindingly obvious to me, were all the personnel at that particular summer camp completely oblivious/lazy/callous/stupid? What am I missing?
This is a really good example. But... I gotta say, this is highlighting an issue that someone could actually solve. "I don't trust the animal shelter" could be solved with "here is this person, who is willing to sign a contract to take your dog for 6 months." (we're assuming there aren't that many dogs, versus "people who want dogs" -- less than 1% of a city's population is homeless, and they probably don't all have dogs).
I do not think a homeless person choosing "living outside" when that may mean having your foot amputated is a rational choice, even if it's the only way you get to stay with poochie, but yeah, it's a different sort of "unreasonable"...
The percentage of homeless people who lose feet because of sleeping outdoors is vanishingly small. I'm not sure why you brought up amputation or what it adds to the conversation.
Are you sure that there's a "wool socks charity" in every city? Because I"m not. And we HAVE a wool socks charity in my city because a single doctor got tired of unnecessary foot amputations.
"Vanishingly small" -- are you sure? I'm just going to say that hypothermia at 40 degrees is quite a possible thing, and we don't open the "dayum it's cold" shelters until 25 degrees or so.
>I gotta say, this is highlighting an issue that someone could actually solve. "I don't trust the animal shelter" could be solved with "here is this person, who is willing to sign a contract to take your dog for 6 months."
If you try to set up a system where you can reliably find people to offer this sort of personalized support, I think you end up circling right back to "we need to invest a whole lot more in social services."
I don't think this is very necessary, honestly. You put up flyers (or you ambush people at the vets or the shelter). There are a lot of people already who take in pets, the only difference here is "where the pet goes" after you're done with it.
These people do it out of the kindness of their heart, already, and I think if they knew this was an issue, they'd be trying to help.
How exactly are governments supposed to house people communally if those people can't be compelled to give up a dog that they keep specifically because it's aggressive towards strangers?
As November said in this comment https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/what-happened-to-sf-homelessness/comment/176528265 , there would be ways of alleviating their concerns (i.e. a transparent system by which homeless people's pets are cared for, with a clear path to getting the pet back once they leave the shelter), it's just that none have been set up.
I'm sorry, but the number of people willing to volunteer to take in someone else's poorly socialized pit bull (it is usually a pit bull, but sometimes it's a chihuahua) on zero notice, care for it for an indefinite period of time, and return it, is basically zero.
The few who would sign up for this will probably drop out once the poorly socialized pit bull that was raised outdoors by a person with poor executive function destroys their house, or bites someone, or the owner shows up to their door at 3 AM, high on meth, to demand the dog back after being bounced from the shelter due to behavioral problems.
If your solution is to pay professionals in an organized way to care for poorly socialized pit bulls, you have just reinvented "animal shelters", which November found unacceptable.
The fact is, having a dog is not a human right, and people every day are forced to make the difficult choice to surrender a pet because a change in life circumstances leaves them unable to care for it. The homeless should not be relieved of this responsibility so that they can continue living outdoors.
This is ridiculous and bigoted. It is a fact long-established that dogs, left to their own devices, will live outside and not wear shoes. If the presence of glass means that this is now harming the dog, I ask you apply the same standard to every person who takes their dog on a walk without shoes.
Glass on the streets is just as dangerous to children as it is to dogs. I consider it to be just as abusive to let children run around without shoes in such situations. I know where the glass, or potential glass, is around my house. There are places I do not walk without shoes.
If most people taking their dogs on a walk came home and the dog routinely had glass embedded in their paw, they'd put paw-covers on the dogs' feet (debatably, this really should be done in the winter, anyhow, if there's a lot of snow and you go on long walks).
Is it just me, or do most people when they break a glass, manage to find that last little sliver and get it embedded in their foot?
Get over yourself. I ran around the street and in the woods around my house all the time when I was a kid, and not because I didn't have shoes. It's hardly abuse.
Specific instance of: "there is broken glass on the street" entails "child with frequent cuts/embedded shards of glass in their feet."
If that's not the instance you're talking about, it's not child abuse, of course it's damn well not!
(Neither is it child abuse if the parents take their children to pick berries, and the child gets a dozen thorns embedded in their skin. That's "doing something useful" -- dare I say it? fun AND economically productive).
We know that, if left alone, ownerless dogs can survive tolerably well on their own, as plucky entrepreneurs on the margins of human society. Their tough little paws seem to be up to the task. Knowing this, I am convinced that dogs are not unduly jeopardized when their owners become homeless.
One might retort, "Ownerless dogs don't do tolerably well. No dog should be exposed to hunger and misery like that." True or not, that objection is stems from a strong cultural value about canine welfare. Homeless people also share this value, confirming their ability to own dogs responsibly.
I'm especially bothered by "homeless people can't be responsible dog owners," because I know this argument is used by some to justify straight up stealing dogs from the homeless.
I'm not PETA -- peta stole dogs from responsible owners.
I'm willing to say that anyone homeless living with their dog in a decent park is probably taking good care of the dog. That's a decent place for a dog to live, owner or not. Sitting on 100 degree pavement or sidewalk is not a good place for a dog to live.
(In short: sure, have the dog and be homeless, but don't live with the dog in "Skyscraper Downtown.")
Is your position that ownerless cats also survive "tolerably well"? Because we know that most of those cats are dead within two years (that's... not a good life, but one that is brutal and short). Googling for this, stray dogs have a lifespan of about 5 years on the high side, and 2 on the low. I wouldn't say that this makes them "plucky entrepreneurs"... (this sounds like "desperate enough to eat cats")
Her perspective is exactly what it has gotten us here. Nobody is willing to do anything over the smallest so-called rights of the homeless that inhabit the streets of San Francisco. This even pertains to drug use.
Okay Rachel, what about the significant number who are stark raving mad drug addicts that you can't even talk to. Please don't tell me this is a small minority, and some areas of the city. There are several on every block.
I genuinely think most of them aren’t drug-addicted, just insane. The drug addicted ones are the ones slumped comatose on the next block over. Or just having a mostly normal ass time with a few hits of heroin a day! Plenty of functioning addicts.
I appreciate hearing your observations. However, I think it's worth noting that the sample of people who are very visibly homeless (i.e. pan handlers) is not an unskewed sample of the homeless population. My understanding, is a large chunk of the homeless population who are much more functional, some of whom even hold jobs, but can't afford rent and are forced to sleep in a cars or tents. I agree that reducing rents probably won't have much effect on the folks you're describing, but I think it could help this second group a lot and thus hopefully reduce the overall problem.
I don't disagree, but I feel like the missing statistic "how many homeless people are actually in SF compared to last year" is a really important missing statistic. Citing other numbers that don't include SF feels not really relevant to the question.
Sorry, I hoped I made it clear - there is no such statistic, because SF hasn't done its point-in-time count this year. That statistic will exist next year. That's why I'm trying to estimate based on other regions and data.
If you're attempting to evaluate the effect of SF-specific actions such as electing a new mayor of SF, saying "we'll just extrapolate what happened in SF using this data from some nearby area" feels to me like you're baking in an assumption that the SF-specific policy had zero effect.
I respect the argument elsewhere in the essay that probably none of the SF-specific policies did have an effect, but I don't feel that citing non-SF statistics helps that argument at all.
Point-in-time counts are also a very imperfect proxy for how many homeless people there are. For example: Was it a rainy day when the PIT count was done in year X and a sunny day in year X-2? You may measure what seems like a double-digit drop in homelessness, when what you're really measuring is homeless people hunkering down out of site, and census works slogging around discouragedly in the mud trying to find them. Methodological changes in surveying from year to year, how many people volunteer to do the surveying, and whether the localities are incentivized to find more or find fewer homeless people for political reasons, all also come into play.
Looks like the next count is pretty soon, in January 2026. The outcome of that count would be a great prediction market question, rather than relying on comparison cities to estimate -9%.
What do you think it should have said about these? IIUC, only 500 people were enrolled in the CARE Act - even if they were all homeless (not true) and it rescued every single one of them from homelessness (not true), it could only explain less than a tenth of the true homelessness decline, which itself is less than a sixth of the encampment decline. Pretty sure SB 43 is equally small scale.
I was surprised given (a) you tackled programs like HHAP, Project Homekey, Breaking the Cycle, etc. despite limited results, and (b) the outsized impact CARE/SB43 had on county HCAs. I’m unclear to what extent they’ve actually succeeded (either by directly putting people in conservatorships or more indirectly, by e.g. giving enforcement a stick) since they’re not my team’s primary client population, but every DHCS quarterly meeting, SUD/MH conference, or stakeholder group I’ve attended / County HCA or nonprofit meeting I’ve taken for the past couple of years (before they were even signed) has been dominated by concerns, debates, and updates about CARE Courts and SB43.
If nothing else, they’ve had an outsized impact on the operations and focus of many HCAs, Health departments, and CA exec agencies. Which seems like it’d be worth mentioning even if only to argue that they too are failures.
BHSA and “Mental Health for All” also significantly disrupted county funding in ways purportedly meant to assist the homeless. Again, I have no clue how effective or worthless their actual results have been (if any), but if nothing else they’re a significant part of the .gov conversation about homelessness over the past few years.
"But I think it speaks against the argument, common during the height of the crisis, that there was no tradeoff and actually enforcement was the truly compassionate option."
Huh, it doesn't seem likely that many people could have truly believed that. A more likely option is that few people understand what the word "tradeoff" means.
The motte is that people respond to incentives, and therefore, anything which makes homelessness less unpleasant has to increase homelessness.
I’ve definitely encountered this argument in the wild, but it is usually paired with a bailey that happily accepts the “tradeoff,” since it’s happening to the outgroup.
The counter to this is that some people don't understand the incentives very well. It's not like most people INTEND to have their feet amputated, even though that's a probable outcome of unsupported homeless populations in the Northeast.
There is some level of desperation which causes someone to go homeless in the Northeast, even knowing that they risk frostbite.
There is some lower level which causes the same decision *if* they don’t know the true risks.
In either situation, the presence of a safety net is only going to make the level lower. Therefore, by removing safety nets, we should be able to prevent some number of people from deciding to go homeless. Since those people would almost certainly be miserable, shifting the incentives is actually compassionate.
I kind of hate that I’m defending this position; I don’t believe homelessness is generally a “decision” as this implies. But it’s definitely one of the ways people justify tougher enforcement.
We'll note that (aside from pets), it's not that expensive to get out of the Northeast by bus. So while it's possible to "go homeless" in the Northeast, one is making a choice by not leaving when it gets brutally cold.
Removing safety nets isn't the only way to change preferences, of course. Simply by moving the homeless into "out of the way" encampments, you disincentivize being homeless (it's more of a schlep to beg, to get drugs from your favorite dealer, etc).
I'm also unsure how much homelessness is a "decision" versus "people too scatterbrained/incapable of making decisions."
Worldwide depression is coming soon to a theater near you. The people currently chronically on the streets are not likely to make it in the necessarily harsher environment. From that perspective, giving them money now is counterproductive.
Cash cost of a bus ticket might still be nontrivial for someone in a desperate situation, and then there's the less visible cost of needing to learn your way around a new area.
I'll note that there's often someone willing to pay for bus tickets out of the Northeast (sometimes cities, sometimes states, sometimes a gullible schmuck). This isn't something that we need to depend on the homeless to be able to do (so long as we recognize that "Yes, it is actually preferable for these people to leave before winter hits hard").
I mean the problem of this kind of naive incentive theory is that 1. it's never general equilibrium, or dynamic (eg in static equilibrium, free healthcare necessarily increases demand for healthcare. In a dynamic one, it might well reduce it bc of prevention). 2. Even if it gets the sign right, the elasticity is still an empirical question. If it's -0.001, than what are we even talking about.
As a SoCal surfer who spends every single day at the beach, I can tell immediately if control of the tent-living-homelessness (aka derelicts) is working or not. What really seems to matter is that the cops forbid tents, criminal activity or obvious vagrancy. That’s it.
This drives them somewhere. Hopefully to all the tens of billions in shelters we have funded over the last few years. If not there, then at least to those cities that choose to display their endless compassion. I consider this a win/win, as the homeless get to live in their tents, progressives get to feel good about themselves every time they see their cities filled with addicts, and the rest of us get to enjoy our communities safe from these criminals.
I think it is important to separate the two types of homeless though. Most homeless in California are not the tent/shopping cart derelicts, but rather people who were kicked out of or can’t afford their home. Shelters and organized parking lots (many own cars) can work for these.
You mean win/win ironic of course, but there is some validity in this line of thought. You're implicitly referring to the Tiebout model & a Tiebout equilibrium, named after the economist Charles Tiebout.
Tiebout suggests that individuals "vote with their feet" by moving to communities that best match their preferences for public goods and services. This model posits that competition among local jurisdictions leads to an efficient allocation of resources, as people can choose to reside in areas that provide the desired level of taxation and public services.
The problem with Tiebout's idea is that the most desired level of taxation and public services is "low taxes and high services," which rich people can get by forming their own community and excluding poor people through zoning. Rich exclusionary suburbs free-ride off the economic growth provided by the central city, and import cheap labor from adjacent municipalities with cheaper housing, without paying into those other jurisdictions' accrued debt and pension obligations.
I am of course familiar with Tiebout, but the argument is broader than that. I believe institutions are complex adaptive systems which evolve over time. It is important to have a diversity of differing and competing institutions and local systems that can learn from and benchmark each other, and which compete not just for residents, but ideas, investments and flourishing. A side benefit Is that people with different goals and values can choose the one best suited for their preferences.
I am serious that I believe a substantial number of people want to live in cities where derelicts are allowed to run amok. I want to live in (and visit) cities where this behavior is strictly prohibited. Win/win. Over time, we will see which cities thrive, which ones learn from their neighbors, and which don’t.
They are feeding the problem of derelicts setting up tents in parks and sidewalks, public defecation, constant theft and open drug use.
The key distinction is not visibility vs invisibility. It is between derelicts and homeless people. These are not in any way the same groups.
Most of the stats on homeless measure people who got kicked out of their rental or their household for various reasons, often economic. These people don’t want to sleep in tents, steal from your car or defecate in public. Shelters and places where they can park work great for this majority. Shelters and food and toilets make their lives better.
The other issue is mentally disturbed derelicts. These are small in number, but extremely destructive in behavior. And yes, as you suggest, more visible.
The solution is shelters and enforcement against crime and vagrancy. This is an extremely easy solution and it works overnight at eliminating the problem with derelicts. Either they go to the shelters, they leave town, or they go to the pokey. I do not know if this makes their Lives better or worse. I am willing to live with worse though.
I think this might be downstream from the general reluctance of the left to accept that some people are different than others.
Because once you accept that "people who had a one-time crippling economic problem" are not the same as "mentally ill people" which are not the same as "drug addicts", the solutions seem kinda obvious.
* cheap housing for the economically unlucky (perhaps just enough place so that you can get some sleep and put your stuff somewhere, so that you can get a job, and then save money for something better)
* free health care for the mentally ill
* mandatory treatment for the drug addicts (in a guarded place where they can't easily buy more drugs)
This would work much better that e.g. building shelters for everyone, where the economically unlucky get their stuff stolen by the drug addicts, and cannot sleep at night because the mentally ill are screaming all night long. (And then, obviously, if they can't get solid sleep and can barely keep their own clothes, they have a problem getting a job.)
But the style of thinking "there are different kinds of people, and we need different solutions for them" is kinda taboo for the left, which prefers to attribute all human suffering to the same generic underlying reason (patriarchy, capitalism, whatever) and treats all details as attempts to make excuses for the system.
We've been trying to separate the deserving poor from the undeserving poor since government policy on this started. It's not been successful yet, and every ten years of so we have a commission to figure out why and how to do it better. Then people ignore the commissions because they always say that trying to separate deserving from undeserving isn't effective.
I think mounihan from the 1960s is the best known one.
OK so to be clear your answer is visible homelessness. The fact that the visible homeless are mostly what you'd call derelicts doesn't change the fact that you think the problem is visible homelessness.
To get back to what I had in mind from my original comment ... you say progressives are doing things to "feel good about themselves", seems like the implication is supposed to be that they aren't trying to solve the problem. But they also might have a different definition of what "the problem" is.
I think affordable housing is a relevant issue, and is very important to the non-visible homeless problem. I see very little being done on this front, and much waste and featherbedding. The billions are spent and cheap housing and even temporary shelters are never really built.
On the visible tent city derelict problem, the progressive response in places like SF has been actively counterproductive. You don’t solve this issue by opposing rules against sidewalk camping, or by supporting open air drug markets or by reducing penalties for indecency or theft.
I actually agree with you that progressives have a different definition from the average person on what the problem is and they also have different from common sense ideas on how to solve issues. That is the problem.
I really can't think of any of you celebrating this as a win as anything but sociopaths. The articles and especially comment sections on homelessness on ACX are perhaps the primary factor in my disinterest in personally identifying as a rationalist or engaging with the rationalist community beyond reading blog posts. Rest assured that the poor are as disgusted by the rich as vice versa.
I’m not really sure where you got the idea that Scott is celebrating this given that this post is pretty agnostic as to weather the trade of that San Francisco is making is good or evil. The only other post Scott has written on the topic was pretty sympathetic to homeless people. I suppose it’s possible, you think that it’s sociopathic not to care about the preferences of the people who dislike seeing homelessness, but that’s a pretty unusual View so I think you are probably talking about lack of concern for the homeless.
What do you mean, exactly? Is it wrong of me to say "Roughly 6 million jewish people were executed by the Nazis" without also adding "and I think that sucks!"? Surely not that, but some number of statements where this requirement to announce a non-neutral position kicks in maybe? Or perhaps the neutral statements need to have a Nazi-adjacent perspective- is it wrong to say, "The Nazis sought a Germany without jewish people and, through their policies of terror and extermination, accomplished over 90% of this goal during their tenure" without slipping the word "evil" in there?
The latter bit overlooks that the overwhelming majority of Jews killed in the Holocaust were not German but instead from further east (though there were also a large chunk of Jews from countries west of Germany).
Suggesting that someone’s attitude towards a situation is sociopathic generally implies a lot more than only suggesting that their tone is not one that you approve of. To me it appears obvious from what Scott has written that he does care about homeless people, and frankly if you look at the ACX pole results The policy positions of his readers don’t seem that unreasonable or cruel either.
I’m not really sure why a neutral discussion of the Holocaust would be objectionable as long as by neutral, you mean that it takes no normative policy position as opposed to thinking the holocaust was morally neutral. This is especially true if some of your readers are nazis who are unlikely to change their minds. No point compromising readability by making them emotionally defensive, especially when they act like reasonable people on other topics. I also think it’s standard practice even in academia for papers on positive topics to try to be professionally neutral, although it’s not a hard and fast rule.
Do you feel a specific tone? Or by "tone" do you mean that they attempt to be "tone-less", and you find that distasteful?
Genuine question, I'm not trying to set you up or anything, but do you think discussing object level facts is impossible? Like, human beings don't have the ability to talk about the world as it is without implicitly signaling how we would like it to be?
Isn't the whole point of the rationalist community prioritizing rational analyses over tone and optics? It sounds like the complainer values the opposite and so rightly does not identify with the rationalist community.
Scott is not celebrating it. But he is bending over backwards to be neutral precisely because a lot of his audience wants to celebrate this sort of cruelty.
Hmm there seems to be a lot of background in your comment that escapes me. There was no discussion of socialism in this thread, and no one said homeless people were morally superior beings, just that they are in fact people, and are worthy of some moral concern in the same way all people are.
I agree with that, but as I mentioned in a later comment, I’m just not sure why that is objectionable because to me it appears like the common sense thing to do if that is the attitude of a good portion of your readers and you don’t think that you are likely to change most of their minds if you tried, although in fact, in his previous post on the topic, Scott absolutely tried. In any case, I think there is great value in morally neutral discussion on policy topics, even where you think one side is horrendous. Honestly, we have literal neutral discussions of the Holocaust in the scholarly literature and I don’t think anyone considers that a bad thing, so I’m really not sure what the problem is with Scott having a neutral tone on this topic. And he’s not even all that neutral in this post, since he frequently goes out of his way to mention how these policies weren’t compassionate, but does not make any comparable shots in the opposite direction.
Definitely nothing cruel about letting drug-addled psychos destroy the commons and attack passers-by with minimal consequences for years on end, either. Nope. Nothing wrong with that. Only the least of these have sentient value.
Kenny shows no desire to curtail anyone's undesirable behavior, and some comments that approach acceptance if not not explicit endorsement of that behavior.
And given that we're talking about San Francisco, can we agree that there is a substantial subpopulation that is explicitly in favor of, or at minimum resistant to any treatment of, such anti-social, self-destructive behaviors?
My point is that your comment is an accusation of "You condemn some behavior but not the other. Thus, you are blind to, or support, said other." I don't think that's charitable.
Kenny supports Scott's willingness to try and curtail any feeding of people who see the homeless as irritations at best and civilizational liabilities at worst. That should not be treated as support for the behavior or existence of the homeless.
Or, for that matter, accepting a status quo that entails a marginal, precarious, and humiliating existence for its supposed beneficiaries, at the same time it destroys the capacity of their host cities to provide services - or even a facsimile of consistency and safety.
Perhaps that sounds unfair, but advocates haven't found politically viable solutions to root causes after at least three decades of tireless work, and it's clear that many of them consider visibility to be an indispensable motivational tool.
Much better said than my own feckless comment, thank you.
I find the "slow, repetitive suicide" approach San Francisco has adopted for many years and at incredible cost to be horribly inhumane, both to the visible and unlikely to be resolved homeless, and everyone that has to deal with them.
You assume that "advocates" actually want to find solutions, rather than get praised on the cocktail circuit and feel good for "donating" time and effort.
"Feed the homeless" makes a lot of people feel good about their wasteful spending, after all. Creating channels that commercial entities can use to offer "lower price leftovers" doesn't make Sue Ann the Housewife feel very good, even if it's overall more efficient and a better use of everyone's resources.
Do you think that changed? Are people being arrested for violence that they weren’t arrested for before? All I see is that the non-violent as well as the violent have had their personal property stolen and destroyed because it is on public property.
So the goal is to decrease public safety and increase theft and property destruction, as long as it happens to people too poor to have a place to live? I would have thought the goal was to *increase* public safety and *decrease* theft and property destruction, but now it seems like you just wish there was more of it happening to the people you disapprove of.
It is not clear to me what changed, and it's not clear to Scott who's much closer and much more invested in the problem.
Public property is, as the name suggests, for the public. Privatizing it because some people think they have a right to colonize some of the most expensive land in the country is absurd.
Perhaps in some limited sense, like gang members are also more likely to be victims of other gang members. As the saying go, the worst thing about being poor is being around other poor people.
I think you underestimate the ability of normal people to just fuck with homeless and not suffer any consequences for things that would land them in court with assault charges if done to people with an address.
Scott is nigh-infinitely more sympathetic to the homeless and more willing to put up with them than a substantial part of his commentariat, so calling us out is unsurprising but lumping in Scott is suggestive of someone that doesn't really pay much attention.
A charitable reader of the original comment might assume that the commenter doesn't believe that Scott is cruel to the homeless, but she looks askance at Scott for providing a forum where people feel comfortable expressing contempt or hatred of the homeless.
Alas, it is difficult to choose one's fans, and to disabuse the principles of free speech to protect the feelings of people committing slow public suicide is a strange tradeoff to me.
But indeed, thank you for providing a charitable alternative reading.
The stakes are much higher than the feelings of the homeless. You seem to want to to isolate the homeless in word as well as deed, people who are already relatively isolated. But only relatively.
Despite what you may think, homeless people have friends, family and loved ones who care about their welfare. We will not be dissuaded and we our influence has grown in society for 40 years. I have no reason to think this trend will not continue. Tolerance of tent encampments in obvious places was a relatively new thing, and I don't think a return to the norm on that represents a sea change in overall attitudes towards homelessness.
Nor is our mission to protect the homeless from petty tyrants incompatible with a commitment to public order.
Or maybe the people in this conversation each are expressing their own views, and Scott is ultimately responsible only for his own words, not for having a discussion where offensive-to-you views are sometimes aired.
I would gather most people commenting are empathetic, largely because they don't deal with this firsthand face to face. Empathy has its limits, when your car gets broken into over and over, when your children volunteer for used needle pickup at the playground, when you find human feces in your driveway.
I'm commenting because I'm empathetic, and have seen these people from 12 stories up. Yes, the human feces is real (and in hospitals, contaminating the air supply to vulnerable populations). Yes, the used needles are real.
In a city that's insolvent, I'm first for "get the businesses running again" so we can afford a bit for the homeless (kept someplace in Fairywood, preferably. We have plenty of abandoned dwellings).
I believe in creating cities that make money (and we can discuss "helping the helpless" after the budget is solvent again). I also believe that sending homeless to hospitals for $5,000 a night care is ridiculous. We could throw all these people into forestry camps (with somewhat okay mental health care), and save money -- and solve depression while we're at it, most likely. Let these "mostly ablebodied" people pay for their own care, if possible. It'll be a lot more possible if we put them someplace that doesn't cost $2000/month for housing (is that low? I didn't pull the numbers.)
Both America and Australia have been throwing children into detention camps against their will (granted in America the children were kidnapped -- and not by our government).
Camel's standing right in front of you, I think it's past time to complain about it's nose.
Well, cheap labor could restore the viability of producing goods here in the states... That's going to be important if we're serious about removing illegal immigrants from the country.
And we shouldn't ignore the implications of the alternatives, like letting them commit slow suicide in the streets, or harass passers-by with minimal consequence, or end up in a Jordan Neely/Daniel Penny situation thanks to the state playing catch-and-release with an unstable, violent person incapable of caring for or controlling themselves.
The whole thing where we let people commit multiple violent crimes and still leave them on the streets is very bad, but it does seem pretty distinct from the problem that we have many people living on the streets. Most homeless people, even most crazy homeless people, are not attacking anyone. And for the ones who do attack people, they need to be locked up for everyone else's safety.
> especially comment sections on homelessness on ACX are perhaps the primary factor in my disinterest in personally identifying as a rationalist
Have you ever read comment sections on news websites and social media?
Everywhere you go online, you can see hundreds of examples of people being dumb-asses. But it's important to remember that those hundreds of people actually represent less than 1% of any community.
My point being, don't shy away from rationalism or any community because of a hyper-minority of people that write on comment sections
Yeah, I think Scott's article is high-quality, but then it's telling that the first comment immediately jumps to "But couldn't we do even better if the law let us imprison anybody we don't like for the crime of being poor?"
I mean, a lot of them are just crazy. Nobody *decides* to be schizophrenic. Nobody really *decides* to become a fentanyl addict, either, though at least that involves a sequence of increasingly bad decisions.
>I really can't think of any of you celebrating this as a win as anything but sociopaths.
Suppose the public park nearest to you was turned into a liquor store or a strip club or something. Do you think you have a right to be upset about it? Most liberal people would say "of course I do."
Well then we have a right to be upset about the nearest public park becoming unusable for us because of homeless encampments.
> Do you think you have a right to be upset about it?
Yes, but that doesn't give you a right to celebrate a "solution" which involves utterly ruining the liquor store owner or strippers' lives, particularly if (for whatever thought-experiment reason) they had no other option than to exercise those careers at that particular place. Homeless people are a nuisance, but being homeless is a tragedy. Both are problems, but prioritising the first thing over the second is like thinking that medicine is the art of stopping the wounded from staining healthy people's carpets with all their leaking bodily fluids, by any means necessary.
If we think about a real-world strip club, yes. But homeless people are homeless because they don't have any other realistic options. As Scott points out in the post, cracking down on campers typically only results in them having even *even worse* living conditions. I think it would be immoral to forcibly close down the strip club if, say, the strippers' only fall-back option was full on sex-slavery.
I don't think that's the right analogy. Mostly they're going off to live in tents somewhere else (the credible threat of tent confiscation exists, but it's unclear how often it's actually carried out vs just used to convince them to move the tent, or how hard it is to obtain a new tent). I don't think the real negatives here are comparable to the stripper to slave jump you describe.
(conversely, in the real strip club case if the strippers decided that instead of going to work somewhere else they'd rather stick around and do private dances in the shut down club they'd eventually get arrested for trespassing)
Well, that's a factual question. The impression I get from Scott's post is that they're sleeping on sidewalks instead of tents. If in fact the vast majority manage to keep their tents and are setting them up somewhere else, that'd be a very different matter.
>But homeless people are homeless because they don't have any other realistic options.
California has 48 million acres of government-owned land according to the internet. Surely they could spare a few acres for some hinterland shantytown to store away all those people that have no interest in treatment and no interest in participating in civilization.
Begging money from rich(er) people is a form of participation in civilization. It's probably not one you approve of, but if it's something you want to prevent people from doing then you have to own up to the fact that you're planning to prevent them from doing the non-violent thing that they want to do, and can't pretend you're just giving them what they want.
>Both are problems, but prioritising the first thing over the second is like thinking that medicine is the art of stopping the wounded from staining healthy people's carpets with all their leaking bodily fluids, by any means necessary.
It depends on WHY they're leaking bodily fluids all over the place. Whether you consider the homeless to be victims of circumstance, victims of society, or responsible for their own condition. I think it's the latter.
ERs do not, in point of fact, refuse to patch up a bleeding patient just because they injured themselves deliberately, let alone because they got themselves injured "by their own fault" out of stupidity or clumsiness. They just restore anyone up to a baseline standard of health, no questions asked — responsibility doesn't come into it. Call it morality, call it a provision of the social contract, call it just plain supererogatory charity — but that's how it works.
I regard homelessness as another state that is abject enough that a civilised society ought to try and rescue *anyone* it feasibly can from it, on principle, whoever they are and however they got there.
How do you intend to rescue Rambo? Do you intend to have a cross-country manhunt to find the special ops guy who has "gone rogue"? I can assure you that spending more than ten days trying to find a guy like that (before he starves and starts hunting dumpsters) is going to cost a mint.
Should I assume that your denialism about mental illness extends even to cases of severe paranoid schizophrenia?
Should I assume that you think paranoid schizophrenics could stop hearing voices and seeing people who aren't there, if they just TRIED harder? Schizophrenia among the homeless is greatly disproportionate.
> Whether you consider the homeless to be victims of circumstance, victims of society, or responsible for their own condition.
I think it's different causes for different people, and everyone who insists that it must be the same reason for everyone is contributing to our inability to solve the problem.
Some people choose to experiment with drugs (hey, even many "rationalists" will insist that this is perfectly safe, because they did their "research" on the internet), then they get addicted, then they lose the ability to function like normal adults.
Some people lose their house in a divorce, or need to sell it to pay their medical bills.
Any solution that suggests the same treatment for both groups is stupid, no matter whether the treatment is harsh or kind. The people who take drugs need to get the drugs taken away from them. The people with huge medical bills need cheap housing, preferably not with the drug addicts in the same room.
Every law we have gets enforced in ways that are (or can get) mean and violent and life-wrecking. Keep violating even a pretty minor law and you'll find yourself hauled off to jail for it, and maybe losing your job when you don't come in for a few days because you're in jail, and then losing your apartment for nonpayment of rent, and....
I think a lot of the people who agree with you (like me!) just don't engage with the sociopaths. Some of the names here are common posters but a lot I think only show up for homelessness posts and in any event I don't know that most of them identify with rationalists.
Turok's not acting like a sociopath. He's acting like an idealogue who has a decent solution (legalize flophouses). Not only is the solution he's proposing "something that will work" -- it's something we've already seen work.
Im all for legalize flophouses / boarding houses. Society used to have a place where down-and-outs lived but we removed them because landowning became the most important asset class and so everyone needs to keep their land prices high.
In the meantime, until those places exist, criminalizing being poor or homeless, or being so concerned about how tents are an "eyesore" or "kill the vibe" that you want to make the lives of homeless people worse is extremely unempathetic and wrong.
Actual violence is a different story, violence should result in prosecution. But the amount of people who want to tear up tent camps because they just generally dislike having crazy homeless people around is saddening.
Okay, can I ask a simple question? Do you feel people have the right to litter needles and deal drugs Wherever They Please? Because that's what you're saying to me, when you say "tents are an eyesore" is Not Allowed As An Opinion.
I say this because that's what we had. We also had tent sites causing collisions with bicycles and otherwise making walking paths unsafe -- please note: this is a problem that can be caused by the mentally ill, without them trying to be criminals. (Also imagine dogs that want to chase bikes).
We, for that matter, are a city with low cost of living, and a relatively brutal climate (unsupported, homeless lose feet in the winter).
My city is bankrupt, by the way. And we lost a lot of business downtown due to COVID. I'd like to get downtown rolling again, and that's a LOT HARDER with tent encampments scaring "suburban white flight boomers" whenever they come down for a baseball game.
Meh. I'd do so if I thought it would work. As it is, we have a ton of abandoned houses, that we could put homeless in, if we wanted. Of course, to some, this is "concealing the problem."
There are a dozen different ways to square "take care of the homeless" and "don't scare off the money-spilling white flight boomers". But not if we say "homeless have Super Big Priority, and cannot be forced to move 5 blocks from where they set up, right in front of a large convention hotel."
I’m not sure that today’s down-and-outs are in the same boat as those of the Gilded Age. But then, I’m not really familiar with the history of flophouses. If you’ve got any more on the subject, I’d be interested.
My naive model is that America used to have much more demand for unskilled, intermittent, fungible labor. This gave down-and-outs a credible source of income. Automation and the pivot to a service economy have reduced that demand, squeezing the bottom of the housing market out of economic viability. There’s still some demand, but it gets handled by fitting half a dozen day laborers into a bedsit.
I don’t know if this model holds up to the realities of economics or regulation.
I'm on nextdoor (I know, I know). People have a lot of demand for unskilled intermittent labor. They're generally not willing to hire the homeless to come into their house and clean, though, or chop trees or mow the lawn. This may be because the Gilded Age indigents were more mentally stable and less criminal (or because we had other protections that led to "letting this possible weirdo into my house" is less of a problem).
In the Gilded age, we had six people living in a two room apartment. That was tenement life. People didn't complain much.
I don't know that it survives economically, I just know that they weren't pushed out for economic reasons - they were pushed out by government policy at the local level by interests that did not want there to be boarding houses for land value reasons. This took the form of zoning restrictions, minimum parking lot sizes minimum bathroom numbers minimum space requirements etc.
I don't know that removing those restrictions (bad for all building and all housing generally) would mean boarding houses make a come back (though I expect the number the market demands is definitely not _zero_) but it would at least make it possible. The reality is since they weren't removed for economic reasons, we just don't know.
Easing the kinds of rules that make boarding houses possible also just makes building anything easier generally so it's really more about "make it possible to build anything in SF"
It’s in there somewhere, but that’s like blaming regulation for the unpopularity of coal.
There’s just not as much demand for unskilled, transient labor. Employers would rather automate or outsource. Even if you removed all degree or cert requirements, I don’t think you’d have the critical mass needed to make flophouses profitable.
Ive been commenting irregularly since it was SSC. There's probably a way on my profile to see my comment history. I mostly argue with Deiseach or get pulled in against my better judgement on trans issues comment threads
I think the same logic which dictates that solving visible homelessness is a solution to homelessness, also implies that the solving rationalists commenting on bad policy is a solution to bad policy.
Visible homelessness and homelessness are *both* problems. Different people put different weights on which one is more important, but both are real problems.
Rationalists commenting on bad policy is not a problem. At least no one sane would put that in the same level of actual bad policy.
The desire to curtail the obnoxious effects of segments of the homeless population is popular in most circles, it's certainly not a rationalist specific thing. I think only certain very progressive groups have the opinions that you're looking for.
This comment and its concurring replies are rather Bay Area filter bubbled. You're referring to a sentiment something like "we are happy that the homeless affliction is receding from our lives, and it's acceptable for that to entail a moderate regression of homeless people's experiences", right? Considering the country outside the Bay Area, to say nothing of the rest of the world, practically nobody is going to call that sociopathic.
It's going to be so interesting to see how people like them react when their bubble pops. When they see what humanity is capable of when they truly just want something gone.
I hope your weird fantasies about harming society's sickest and poorest bring you sufficient satisfaction in and of themselves. Because the American Constitution ensures that your fantasies will not be translated into reality.
The Constitution was never meant to be treated as scripture, but even if it is, if people stop believing that it's useful, it's little more than a rotting piece of paper. Thankfully, the Supreme Court can be very... creative with their interpretation of words, so it isn't even necessary for legislature to modify it in the first place.
Have you read the comments? There’s several out and out psychological fascists who fit the profile to a T in the comments demonstrating evident psychosexual glee that the people they think deserve the boot are getting the boot.
Did you read the post I was responding to? "I really can't think of any of you celebrating this as a win as anything but sociopaths"
Though I will grant you that there are some authoritarian tendencies on display. For too long there has been a preening moral crusade against enforcing laws that has destroyed public areas. That really brings out the fascist in people as for years the more reasonable requests for public safety are mocked and derided. And when the progressive view is that the tent people are blameless victims with no personal responsibility or free will who are entitled to behave however they want wherever they want, and anyone who says otherwise is a fascist and a sociopath, don't be surprised when the pushback goes from reasonable to angry and frustrated to extreme.
The progressive policy has been tyrannical, in that they have enforced extreme policy without any regard for other voices. They are finding out that doing so makes people angry. Anti-racism was always just racism, and has created enormous numbers of out-right racists. Open borders has led to a cruel backlash. And allowing tent cities and drug markets in the public parks has led many to dehumanize the tent people. This was entirely predictable but they were getting high on their own supply and didn't care.
Second time I see a comment here conflating the poor with the homeless. Why? Do people here think the two are similar? I have very different attitudes toward them, but maybe I'm the weird one.
Yeah this is an intentional straw man, no one except very fringe commenters said anything about locking people up because they don't have money. 99% of people don't believe in that. But that doesn't mean they think you can break any law you like when poor.
This is a non-sequitur because in this type of comments section, we see plenty of tough guys suggesting vigilantism or police brutality as solutions to homelessness.
Clearly, respect for the law clearly isn't the sole motivation for these homeless harassers.
No one here has suggested that the law should be broken. What is being suggested is that the law be changed to make these common sense solutions legal.
I agree. I think about hell, an idea I've always opposed as a moral good. I don't wish it on anybody, but the closest I've come to viscerally supporting it in a while is reading these comments. I really get where those Old Testament prophets were coming from when they railed against those who oppressed the widow, the orphan, the foreigner, the slave, and the destitute. Many readers here may not care about religious scriptures, but scriptures from most major traditions since the dawn of time are full of terrible curses upon those who write comments like those here, and I think that says something about the moral heritage of humanity- how we found ourselves here, and how posterity will likely think of it.
Essentially, the proposition in question is that we should do terrible things - not just allow terrible things to happen, but actually do terrible things - to people who are unable to take care of themselves [or in a handful of extreme cases, may even just be unlucky]. We should do this because those people's inability to take care of themselves makes us feel awkward when we walk past the evidence of their destitution.
This is combined with wholly unpersuasive appeals to utilitarianism. A utilitarian would certainly *at the very least* ensure an adequate number of shelter spots before going ahead with any measure like destroying tents.
To me, it's actually worse for someone to advocate these measures, in cold blood, with malice aforethought behind a computer monitor than to commit many sorts of very serious crimes. Of course, I believe in free speech, so I don't think it should be *banned*, but that does not make advocating such any less objectively grave. I regard many of the comments here as similar in wickedness to, for example, assaulting someone on the street.
Are we really doing the "speech is violence" thing unironically now? All we are doing is proposing solutions. It is ultimately up to the will of the people to decide the measures the state should take.
If you argue for an unjust war recklessly, you have a measure of that war’s blood on your hands. That's the case at its highest, but much the same applies in principle, though not to the same degree, to supporting any other immoral policy through recklessness or immorality.
Of course political speech in favour of violence in a democracy participates- whether justly or unjustly - in that violence. That we have decided to exempt it from prosecution for good reason doesn't change that. If a gang is deciding whether or not to whack Johnny, and you speak in favour of yes, you bear a portion of the guilt, a very large portion, for whacking Johnny, and the same is true of the political arena.
I do not agree with this. If you argue for an "unjust war" and it just so happens to include nuclear armageddon, something you were not expecting -- and could not have reasonably expected, you are not particularly responsible for the increase in tentacle porn consumption.
Experiences with Neocons inform this comment. Do not hire neocons, even if they come under the "Joe Biden" mantle.
If by "terrible things" you mean crucifying people or boiling them in oil, I agree we should not do that stuff. If by "terrible things" you mean arresting people who are violating the written law by camping in a public park and throwing away the stuff they are illegally keeping in the public park, I don't think that is especially terrible as normal uses of police powers go.
If we are going to have public spaces, then it has to be possible for the public (working via law/elections) to determine how those spaces may or may not be used. And the tools we have for enforcing those decisions are police and courts and jails and the like. The alternative is that those public spaces become no longer available to the public in general, but instead owned by whichever people happen to be the hardest to dislodge.
It's probably worth noting that people do routinely have their car impounded when they're arrested (and if they can't come up with the fine + impound fee, they don't get their car back). Plenty of people lose their jobs when they end up in jail for awhile and can't make it to work. And so on. The police doing normal law enforcement--stuff we have to have done to keep a functional society--regularly will mess up the lives of the people who are being arrested.
I think the article is not as bad as you think, it shows the situation is cruel, even if it says it in a somewhat neutral tone.
But yes a lot of the comments are quite frustrating. But is it really the "rationalist community", I am really unsure, to me it feels like there is a lot of far right/trumpist who are here since a long time without being that much interested by epistemology (except when it is used as a weapon against who they don't like, which is why they are here).
Your graph and trend line for accidental overdose deaths is sloppy and way below your usual standard.
The Six-Month Average for the first month immediately after Lurie took office was higher than the month prior to him taking office. But the Six-Month Average fell in subsequent months. Your trend line is completely misleading.
It's a six-month average, so as each new month is added, the 7-month-prior month is removed. If you look to the immediate left of the Lurie elected line, you can see the prior months were lower than the later ones. Replacing a low month with a higher month raises the average, even if the new month is lower than the average.
So all the data seems correct, the Six-Month Average has indeed increased every month of Mayor Lurie's tenure. That appears to largely be due to a drop in the 6 months prior reverting to the more typical values over the prior few years, but it's not sloppy.
Yes this is immediately obvious to anyone who has done a rolling average on time series data, it's completely misleading and in this case is glaringly obvious on the actual chart!
As anecdotal evidence on the "Homeless encampments have a much bigger impact on perception than raw numbers" I have lost count of the number of Europeans I've spoken to who have offered shock or sympathy at 'America's homeless problem' while residing in countries that have higher per capita homeless numbers than America. Several times I had people literally not believe me even while being showed numbers online because it was so askew from their perception.
Tbf there is a big problem of definitions. At the extreme end, somebody indefinitely couch-surfing from friend to friend on amicable terms isn't usually what people think about when they say homeless, and it's not even clear whether this is a problem where the state ought to jump in and solve it.
But even in less extreme cases, it can be unclear; Surfer guys who just earn barely enough through occasional day-labor or teaching and might not even have a van or other place are in many ways much closer to "traditional" homeless, but they often just like the lifestyle and don't bother anyone much.
I definitely get the impression that the US has more disorderly, disruptive homeless which is driving the impression, and of which encampments are just a symptom. But that's actually not that easy to measure.
On a previous thread I looked into homelessness statistics in Australia.
It turned out that they were counting people living in overcrowded accommodations as homeless, and that these accounted for about 70% of the problem. Another big slice were people living in short term crisis accommodations (ie the thing we use to solve homelessness). Then there were a bunch of couch surfers and car sleepers, and finally the central-example rough sleepers who were just one thousand out of the headline number of 200,000.
So yes, I recommend not comparing homelessness statistics across different countries which may use different definitions, because some countries will say that three people sharing a two bedroom apartment can all be homeless.
Harvard's busy claiming (I cited upthread) that a single human being "not able to afford a two bedroom apartment on minimum wage" is a violation of the human right to housing.
I disagree. Efficiencies (or one-bedrooms) are much cheaper than 2 bedroom accommodations.
And saying "you can't live on minimum wage" is different from saying "a mom and three kids can't live on minimum wage" (please note: many moms would sleep in the same room as their kids, particularly if young).
I wasn't the one putting that up. That was Harvard. It's probably a pretty standard "right" from the "positive rights" people, though, alongside the "right to healthcare" (Here's a hint: it takes well upwards of ten million dollars to do a sex change properly (some people pour a lot of money into passing, I guess). We're not going to pay that, even if it does actually make one person's life easier.)
Of the 122,494 people experiencing homelessness in Australia in 2021:
Two in five (39.1%) were living in 'severely' crowded dwellings
One in five (19.8%) were in supported accommodation for the homeless
One in six (18.1%) living in boarding houses
Then about another 13.5% temporarily staying with other households.
Overall, 94% of people classified as homeless were in fact sleeping indoors, and only six percent were "living in improvised dwellings, tents or sleeping out", of whom the majority are sleeping in cars.
I also exaggerated about the three people in a two-bedroom apartment being classified as homeless, actually the criterion is "residents in dwellings needing 4 or more extra bedrooms under the Canadian National Occupancy Standard". So that would be six unrelated people in a two-bedroom apartment, which is genuinely pretty crowded... but still not homeless!
And this is in Australia, where they have PSAs saying "don't sleep on the road." (I'm... assuming we can believe that these are substance abusers... if they aren't homeless).
You don't seem to consider the possibility that "getting tough" and removing encampments might have encouraged some homeless people to move in with relatives.
"Second, rents fell in most big California cities. Although unsheltered homeless usually can’t afford apartments at any rent, low rents still make it easier for friends and family members to house them."
That strikes me as really unlikely. What kind of homeless encampment is better than relatives in the first place? And if the relatives are managing to be worse, it's not a win to make people live with them.
That strikes me as a little naive. Isn't it likely that some people have relatives that are willing to take them in under certain conditions? "You can stay here but no drugs (and/or drinking and/or smoking) in the house"; "You can stay here but you have to wash your clothes weekly (or yourself daily)"; "You can stay here but you have to go to an AA (or NA, etc.) meeting daily." Or maybe the homeless person just hates the relative, but will tolerate him/her when a tent is no longer an option. There are dozens of possibilities.
You're talking about people who have chosen a life without heat or plumbing, over what their relatives have already offered. I don't think taking their tent away will send them home, I think it will send them into a dark alley, or a hole in the ground, for the same reason they didn't go home the first time.
About 50% of homeless people refuse shelter beds when offered.
"Fewer than half the people referred to shelter by the city’s (Seattle) HOPE team last year actually showed up to shelter and stayed there for at least one night, according to data released by the city’s Human Services Department during a meeting of the city council’s homelessness committee this week.
If you are intellectually honest, you will now and forever abandon the idea that every homeless person will take a shelter bed if offered.
Until we acknowledge the reality that many homeless actually DO prefer to live on the street "without heat or plumbing", we aren't going to offer realistic solutions to the problem.
First note: the homelessness may very well have been affected by the decrease in illegal immigrants.
Second note: 2 bedroom Apartment? We are no longer in "There is an efficiency, that people can live in." We are in "human rights include having a spare bedroom" territory. College students live worse than we are discussing as "human rights."
We could solve the homelessness problem very simply: "Double Up" (sans mental health issues). If every family that lives with one bedroom per person (let alone one bathroom per household), was instead willing to put two people in there, we'd be golden. [My neighborhood has half the number of people as at peak, and we have tons of space in these "mansions" designed for a full family, including uncle and grandma]
I'm afraid that traditional solutions for "homelessness" are now considered inhumane. Such as a hotel with one bathroom per floor, and, say, living in rooms the size of the Roosevelt Hotel's (sans bathroom -- and actual clothesline).
The link doesn’t say anything about whether first generation immigrants are a small percentage of the population. They cite someone from a Chicago homeless organisation, and when I Googled them they were asking for funding after a political stunt where migrants were bused to Chicago - I didn’t find any actual numbers.
Asheville had immigrants dropped on them by the federal government, without anyone bothering to tell them they were coming. Said immigrants were the last plane in before a hurricane, which, needless to say, they were homeless throughout.
The Biden Administration was rather intentionally stuffing immigrants wherever people would let them, or at least not complain so much.
Also, Texas was sending a lot of immigrants to Chicago and New York (sanctuary cities, the Texans said "well, we got too many, how about you stand by your word, and take the extra off our hands")
Tens of thousands? Whatever stupid AI skimmer said 80,000 immigrants bused out of Texas. We're just going to say that a lot of them are homeless. There's a reason why Democrats are fighting so hard for free healthcare for immigrants.
I'm not sure I agree with the "trade-off" framing. It's like saying, there's a "trade-off" between putting a murderer in prison (bad for murderer) and keeping society safe (bad for society if he's on the loose). You *shouldn't* have a right to just set up a tent in a public place and live in it! This is a basic civilizational tenant.
I liked occupy wall street. You shouldn't have a right to litter in order to say "this is my space" and "non-homeless" keep out. We should be careful about instituting "rights" that compromise fiscal stability of government.
But that *is* a trade-off. Maybe you consider it an obvious one to take, but you shouldn't ignore the cost side for the murderer.
Like, if we tortured criminals horribly, and someone suggested we could do prison instead, which would equally well keep society safe, but be more humane, the fact that the prison would be more humane than the torture (i.e. less cost to the criminals) would mean that this is a better tradeoff, and we should take it. And you'd miss it if you didn't want to consider the cost side of our cost-benefit analysis for crime.
I actually think it is. Otherwise you wind up locked in absolutist thought patterns. When you think of something as a trade-off then compromise is automatically baked in. That lends itself to a more functional political process.
Take "No child left behind" as an example. *NO* child, really? Don't you think it's more realistic to recognize that SOME children actually can't keep up and we shouldn't spend arbitrarily large amounts of money to make sure we perfectly adhere to an unreasonable principle?
Sure, I'll just concede that. I think the point stands that ignoring the cost side will prevent you from looking for or noticing more humane options, since they only affect the criminal cost side.
Your example is only true if the suffering of criminals is not inherently good. Many people strongly disagree with that view. They would say revenge is a legitimate goal of punishment, and murderers should be made to suffer for their crimes, not live in a 5 star hotel at government expense for the rest of their lives.
I'm just going to stand up now and take a position against using demonic possession to punish criminals. This sounds both inhumane and extremely unwise....
I don't know if people believe this as much as you think. I expect most people would consider *some* amount or kind of punishment to be "inhumane". If they actually thought that the suffering of criminals was inherently good, there would not be such a point, since more good, would be more good. After this point, under this worldview, the suffering of criminals once again becomes a cost.
Second, I personally think this is an evil point of view. Pain and suffering is bad, and you should only do it insofar as it produces more good than it causes in harm (e.g. through deterrence). I understand this is personal opinion.
Finally, there are still costs to consider (how much does it cost to create the suffering, for instance), and thinking of things in terms of trades or trade-offs is generally a correct thing, even if you want to put the suffering of criminals on the benefits side. I understand this is a utilitarian point of view, so perhaps controversial, but I still wish to defend thinking of things as tradeoffs.
Hum... tit-for-tat anyone? A system with no punishment i.e. suffering for criminals will have a higher equilibrium crime rate than one with punishment. Imposing suffering on criminals to reduce suffering on the non-criminals is a win in my book. Finding the optimum balance when everyone is using a learning strategy is dynamic in time problem.
Even within this (evil) framing, surely there has to be a sense of proportion to it. Eye for an eye and all that. Homeless people's lives already suck far more than they ever inconvenience honest people.
Well, sure, I meant more that "if homeless people start out that badly, any attempt to make homeless people's lives noticeably *worse* than they already are, as punishment, will land at disproportionate punishment".
Just to clarify, we're talking about punishing homeless people who commit crimes that inconvenience others, such as illegal camping, right? And you're saying that they should not be punished at all for these crimes, as they are already suffering because of various other reasons?
What's the alternative? What will they do instead of camping? The homeless person has to sleep *somewhere,* and "they should sleep in prison" is not necessarily a better choice. Not for the homeless person, who is in prison, and not for society, which now has to pay for additional police, courts, and prisons to punish them.
Like, in an ideal situation, nobody would set up camps in public because they all have nice homes to sleep in. But we are not in an ideal situation, and so we have to choose between multiple non-ideal possibilities, and *all* of them impose a cost on society.
(And this isn't an unusual framing for crimes, either. Have you ever driven over the speed limit? Well, lucky for you, society has decided that the trade-offs required to strictly enforce the rules of the road are unacceptable, so they will let you continue to drive at 70 mph even though by doing so you are making everyone else on the road less safe.)
I'm not making an argument for what should be legal, I'm just pointing out that there are logical constraints on the situation. A homeless person has to sleep somewhere. By definition, they don't have anywhere private to sleep, so they must sleep on public property. Where do you think that should that be?
In a shelter? That costs society money.
In prison? That costs society money.
On a sidewalk? That costs no money to society, but imposes a cost in aesthetics and convenience.
Somewhere else? I'm open to suggestions, but I can be 100% confident that no matter where you pick *someone* will pay a cost for it.
"Trade-off" is exactly the right way to describe this situation. There is no magic Safe And Invisible Place Where Homeless People Can Sleep For Free waiting to be found.
When I've gone wild camping, I've typically done so somewhere people cannot see me, like in a forest. But surely setting up a camping ground somewhere secluded would not have to be terribly expensive.
I wonder if cracking down on drug dealing in general caused a decline in the number of people who became homeless because they did fewer drugs?
My impression of the RV homeless is they're mostly the type of guy who likes a little too much to get stoned, and as a result can't keep a job. In a low CoL area, they get a cheap apartment or trailer and the landlord puts up with it because he usually gets paid most of the rent, eventually. In expensive areas, the landlord has better choices for tenants, so this type of guy can't keep an apartment, either. So he buys a used RV and moves into that. But that life sucks more, so he smokes more pot and maybe gets into other drugs. If the city cracks down on drug dealing, it's easier to just stick with pot and alcohol, and it takes longer to go from RV to tent.
This ship is 40m. It holds 2,767 guests and 912 crew.
I'm sure it would take another 40m to refit it to work as a medical/rehab facility and make rooms bigger. So maybe 2000-2500 beds at the end of the day, assuming most crew do not live on the boat. It does not need to actually go anywhere, so the mechanics probably don't need to be updated much.
There are huge dining/casino/theatre spaces that could be converted to the group spaces for rehab/medical/social/health spaces. On deck there are great outdoor spaces/pool, etc. Nicer than any rehab facility in the world. And of course you could build-up the railing to be safer from suicide risk.
I know 2500 is not enough to 'house' all the homeless. But, those are 2500 rehab beds, so you could have the top rehab missions, etc. from SF run them. So, ideally, these folks are rehabbed after x number of months, and they can return to life via half-way houses, etc. in SF or elsewhere. And opening this number of beds in rehab could enable to missions to convert the current rehab spaces into more transition/half-way housing in the city.
So, for 100m (which is really investing in a depreciating asset which could be sold if it fails), you could make a major dent in the problem.
Never heard anyone even mention this approach. Why?
Aside:
Yeah, after they leave half-way, where do they live then? No, this does not solve the affordability issue which is often blamed for the homeless situation. But, IMO, that's not the tightest correlation. I think that most of the homeless do not have tight ties to the city. Rather, they were drawn to city and downtown areas because SF permitted it, and people in addiction were drawn into these areas because of drug access and the fact that they could do whatever they wanted. The vast majority did not come for jobs, and got addicted because they did not have affordable housing.
And yeah, there are lots of people and families which are 'working homeless' but this is a different problem, which is directly correlated to the affordability issue. This is not focused on that problem.
The primary actual problems the city is dealing with:
- even when they achieve funding (and they have!) process fetish makes it almost impossible to actually _build_ anything with it. The government hasn't literally run out of parcels of lands to put shelters on, it has multiple shelter projects and then can't complete them for less than an exorbitant amount of money per bed because of had governance
- even when they achieve beds the 'problem' homeless don't actually want to go them and resist using them.
HomelessButOnBoats doesn't solve either of these and probably makes them both worse.
Separately you've also just unbelievably glossed over what a technical nightmare it would be to actually do that retrofit and then keep the boat maintained. Not a chance it could be done that cheaply and then wouldn't have horrific upkeep costs and besides as mentioned the problem isn't that there are literally no parcels, it would certainly be less dollar efficient than a traditional building. Plus wherever that boat was parked would suffer heavily. Centralizing that would be a disaster. And finally it would be an optics nightmare as well.
So this approach hasn't been mentioned because it provides literally nothing of utility to the problem (not trying to be mean just realistic)
I don't understand how you can say 'government has run out of parcels' and then say that adding 2500 beds on 'free' land (water) doesn't solve that exact problem.
And if you did this, you could convert a lot of the current spaces into transitional housing, which is needed just as much, and impossible to build because of land costs.
RE: "even when they achieve beds the 'problem' homeless don't actually want to go them and resist using them".. Yeah, well, this is not relevant to the argument, since any solution would face this same problem.
But, if you actually had enough beds, and rehabilitation services, and transitional housing, which the boat could solve, then you could shut-down the homeless via existing vagrancy laws, so the drug and social network of the street would no longer exist. It's no longer acceptable to live on the street, period. You don't want to take your meds, well, that's fine, but not on the street.
I literally said the government _has not_ run out of parcels. The problem isn't the land it's the building. They can't spend the money they do have (billions!) to effectively create shelters on land they already have.
And this is downstream of the structural housing issue in the first place. Houston doesn't have less homelessness than SF because they throw them all in prison or have more shelter beds, they have less homelessness because the median house price is one third that of SF and critically they actually _keep building more housing_ (country leading rate many years!).
Houston is also kinda hellish in the summer without Air Conditioning. And I doubt Houston actually bids for illegal immigrant homeless (if they did, I suspect the Texas State Government would do something about it).
That's not a direct causation, it is loosely correlated. Houston/Texas is more aggressive with prosecuting drugs and crimes, so they are much less inviting for homeless in general. SF chronic drug/mental illness have a social network which includes drug access and lots of help from clinics, etc. Houston is the opposite, they make it very inhospitable. Also, ever been in Houston in the summer? Yuk! ;)
The second thing the boat concept does it allow you to do the modification/construction outside of SF, so you don't have to deal with city/planning/state bs. You could have it fitted anywhere, very quicly and cheaply relative to building in SF.
Putting people on boats would circumvent a lot of the process obstacles to building shelters. There would be no locals who could complain, and much less accretion of past tedious city regulations.
Is there spare space in the bay? It’s a major working harbor, with gigantic container ships and others coming in and out all the time. I don’t know what kind of maneuvering space these ships actually need, do you?
Yeah if you look around the piers that take cruise ships in the bay, there are many piers which could take a ship that size. It would also probably stay docked, and it would not need mass boarding/customs etc like an actual cruise ship dock.
So, if they wanted to, the city could do it. There are various gov levels which control some of the docks/piers so they might get the access for free.
Generally: I think maybe 10% actually have boats docked at the point of the sat photos.
If you look at them one-by-one, there seem to be several that could function as a pier, but are not actually being used as a pier. There are also a few which seem muni/fed/etc piers which are probably not used for much.
The existing residents and businesses would (quite rightly) object to having a literal boatload of psychotics dumped on them, and the conditions on the ship would be Hellish for those on it (because of all the psychotics)
Yeah there are many (maybe 20 piers) which seem like they could accommodate, and several of those seem to have some kind of muni/state/fed building on them, which may be under-utilized.
So they would be set-off onto a pier, likely without any businesses to disrupt. This is my main point really; this gets by the 'I'm liberal but i don't want a rehab facility on my block' argument.
RE: "Hellish" These boats are huge, and have huge open spaces and a huge deck/recreation area (which would need to be modified for safety). I suggested 1/2 potential capacity to +double the room size, and then you also would have group spaces which become twice the size that they were designed for (because half the people). So it would require some modification, but it could be a very nice solution from a design/functional perspective.
Manoeuvring space isn't a big problem for cargo ships, there's far tighter harbours than San Francisco Bay which take far more cargo ships. Take a look at the Port of Rotterdam on the map, for instance.
Plonking a few extra ships in San Francisco Bay is not a problem. The prison hulk idea is bad for other reasons, but not for this one.
A big part of the problem here (actually it causes quite a few other problems) is that the US is divided into tiny local governments with too much autonomy. The problems of San Francisco should not need to all be solved within the arbitrary tiny city limits of San Francisco, they require a more statewide approach, and to the extent that facilities need to be built there's far more suitable locations than SF itself (or the middle of the bay).
This seems like the standard US response of "make the visible symptoms of poverty illegal." This is an extension of the common plan of "if we make bad things illegal, only good things will be left."
Health care isn't affordable? Mandate buying health insurance. Problem solved. Jobs don't pay enough? Make it illegal to have low-paying jobs. Problem solved. Poor people can only afford bad option X? Make X illegal. Problem solved.
Unsightly homeless camps? Make it illegal to be visibly homeless. Problem solved.
The most likely alternative to "bad thing" is usually "even worse thing" rather than "good thing." If "good thing" was already a viable option, people would probably not have been going with "bad thing."
You are not engaging with the argument. The solution in California is to go to a homeless shelter. California has spent enough on this issue to pay for a hundred beds for every homeless person.
Sleeping in a tent on the sidewalk is not a sanitary or safe practice. It is a terrible idea, whether you like it or not. No government officials who would allow such a thing have any place running any city I live in. If you disagree, please consider including your address, so we can let the mentally disturbed junkies set up a tent on your sidewalk and crap in your yard.
Our preferred solution is easy to describe and infinitely more compassionate than what you suggest.
1) Create shelters and parking lots to safely house those hard on their luck.
2) Require those who do not want to go to shelters (primarily mentally disturbed) to either go to a shelter or get arrested (warnings can compassionately build to enforcement)
3) Criminalize drug trafficking, prostitution, theft public indecency and using the streets as toilets.
In the real world, what actually happens is that cities that do enforce these common sense solutions clean up. They still have homeless, but they are not out destroying the community. Those cities which refuse to adopt tough love will keep their initial problem and attract any leaving the other cities.
I think the article has been quite clear that homeless shelters are not in fact generally available. If that were not so, the Grant's Pass decision would not have been such a big deal.
If those in charge decided to spend the billions (or was it tens of billions?) on wasted crap, then it is on them. It is obvious that the people in charge of the problem don’t want to solve it, they never wanted to solve it and they probably thrive by making it worse. This isn’t incompetence, it is evil.
I could solve the “shelter problem” in ten minutes of thinking with one one hundredth of what we collected to address the issue. Send me a billion dollars and I will share my ideas with you. In California, this is called a bargain.
So, based on your feedback, I will revise my steps.
1) Fire anyone involved in the current homeless industrial complex and investigate them for fraud and cronyism
"I could solve the “shelter problem” in ten minutes of thinking with one one hundredth of what we collected to address the issue. Send me a billion dollars and I will share my ideas with you. "
How about you share your ideas first, and if enough people are convinced, they'll give you the billion dollars? I am highly, highly skeptical that you have a magical solution that successive governments all over the country haven't thought of.
They could ship them all to Missouri, pay market rate rent *for each person*, and still have $40K left over for their other living expenses. Over $3K a month for food, entertainment, clothes, drugs, whatever. And that's not even assuming cost-saving measures like *sharing apartments*.
For some reason they don't do this! Reasons include: Missouri doesn't want them, they'd rather stay in SF for cultural reasons, SF has a network of NGOs that don't want to lose the profits or the aesthetics of having a permanent supply of crazy drug addicts and other indigents.
I don't think this is magical, I think it's common-sense. The problem is that common-sense breaks down in San Francisco's craziness field (and rampant corruption).
Yep. They either don’t want to fix the problem, or they have framed it so poorly that every step they take moves them backward. (See my comment immediately below to Gres).
You've already listed two good reasons that scheme won't work, and no ways to get around those obstacles. Are you proposing that California should enslave homeless people and force them to live in Missouri, and then go to war with Missouri to force them to take crazy drug addicts?
I was being facetious, but for pennies on the dollar they could…
1) Set up parking lots with really nice tents, security guards and outhouses
2) Buy 250 used dirt cheap RV trailers and set them up for everyone
3) Find a recently closing motel or two and convert these to shelters
4) Pay some of them to get on a bus and go somewhere else.
5) Buy some army surplus Quonset huts and add cots and porta potties
6) Safe parking lots for those living out of their cars
7) Convert an old warehouse or industrial building to a temporary shelter
8) Arrest anyone committing a crime
9) Some mixture of the above
But no. We are dealing with cities run by dysfunctional progressives who can’t do anything without three years of environmental reviews, five years of community outreach meetings, union featherbedding, million dollar grants to community organizers, and so on.
They either don’t want to solve the problem or they are fundamentally incapable of doing so. Maybe both.
As my initial comment days ago stated, I live in SoCal and spend every day at the beach (I surf), and I can tell if the homeless situation is under control or not. Most communities solve it and do so quickly and easily. All it takes is cops prohibiting open sleeping and crime. This drives the homeless to shelters (which have been funded with billions), or to friends, or to those cities which don’t want to get tough.
They can have them if they want them. And if they don’t get tough, I am reading this as “wanting them”, as they will certainly get them.
It reminds me of the old joke about hikers and the bear. You don’t have to outrun the bear, just the other hiker. In California these other hikers have been feeding the bears and covering themselves in lard. They are going to get the bear (or the bear is gonna get them!).
Building 250 shelters with the budget available should have been quick and easy. So, yes, either he did not want to solve it, or he wasn’t really in charge.
I will add though that it is possible that most people think they want to solve the problem, but that the way they frame the problem makes solving it impossible. Similar to how some Muslims want their societies to become rich and powerful like they were a thousand years ago, so their solution is to become more fundamentalist. Poor framing, can make problems worse, even if they actually do want to solve it.
The article has actually been quite clear that from September 2023 up to Grant's Pass, a decent number of beds were available when the encampments were cleared, but the homeless from the encampments mostly didn't take them anyway. If you look at the trajectory, Grant's Pass wasn't actually the big deal.
In places with nice weather such as SF, it really isn't a lack of shelters that's the issue.
Yet another person who's not spent a minute in San Francisco. We've had raving drug addicts running amok on our streets for years. It's fentanyl, not poverty.
The "problem", for most people, isn't the plight of the unhoused, it's how the behaviours of the unhoused affects them. So if the effects of said behaviours are removed from their lives, it is indeed problem solved for them.
In concrete terms, the vast majority of people care about their vehicles not getting broken into, not stepping on used needles and/or feces on the sidewalk, etc. This is "the problem" for them. Very few people think of making sure that the homeless are living their best lives as "the problem", that one is mostly a thought exercise for those who typically don't have to deal with the more concrete problems above, used as a form of virtue signaling.
This is very interesting! Around the same time, there was a similar debate in Lisbon, but the data didn’t actually support the idea that homelessness had skyrocketed. The numbers showed only about a 20–30% increase, while public perception suggested a five- to tenfold rise.
That actually helps explain what happened: before, there were no tents in Lisbon, but during and after COVID some areas became more lenient, and small clusters of tents began to appear.
I feel this vindicates both sides of my earlier arguments! Mine, because there likely wasn’t a massive rise in homelessness overall; and theirs, because there clearly is a homelessness problem in Lisbon, which I already acknowledged, though the people I debated didn’t.
It's kind of amazing that one marginal change (the post-Grant enforcement changes you describe) can make such a massive impact on the perception of what was considered an unsolvable issue a few years ago. Makes you wonder about other marginal policy changes and the incredible ramifications they can have.
Nu. We solved government shutdown by making private jets land at podunk airports (and making executives have to "drive into town"). 8 senators changed votes in a single day.
Some threats are more powerful than death threats, apparently.
if I have children it's actually nice to be able to go to a park without them seeing people defecating, injecting drugs, are otherwise occupying the park that I would otherwise use.
the fact that myself and my children contribute literally infinite percent more to the functioning of society than the homeless person injecting drugs/defecating seems like it should influence the thrust of our governance.
What, *exactly*, does the homeless person slowly killing themselves in the street contribute to society? "Character"? Local flavor? A Jack Chick tract warning of why you shouldn't do drugs?
A person is a part of society, and if that person finds life worth living, that is a good thing. Even if you think their life is not worth living and you think the world would be better if that person were killed.
The preference of the voters is to not be affected by the bad behaviours of the homeless. The preference of the politicians should be to enact the preference of the voters, which their revealed preference seems to match. That's a good thing.
Just as you do not really care about my problems as long as they don't affect you (and rightly so), the voters do not really care about the problems of the homeless, if those problems do not or can be made to not affect them.
Suppose you’re riding the train and a homeless person in the seat in front of you takes off his pants and starts jacking-off.
In some sense, the only difference between him jacking-off on the train and him jacking off under a tree into a ditch is the visibility. In another sense, the difference is that jacking-off on the train is sexual assault, and jacking-off into a ditch doesn’t bother anyone.
The visibility is a real aspect of the harms being done. Removing the visibility reduces the harm.
It reduces the harm of that behavior to third parties for sure. But when it comes to homelessness, the impact on third parties is only a tiny fraction of its impact.
That seems like a shocking conclusion to me, to say that having a home is only about 99 times as good as not walking past homeless people. It sounds like an entrepreneur should be able to make a large amount of money figuring out how to monetize this!
Tent encampments, open drug use, and mentally ill people who may commit violent acts are a considerable negative externality on the 99% of the population who have homes.
And while the size of the externality is small compared with the large negative effect of being homeless, the fact 99% are suffering the negative externality may be a greater total effect than the negative effect of being homeless on the 1%.
I would like to see someone work out that calculation in earnest! What fraction of that 99% actually walk by the relevant streets on any given day? How much impact does it actually have on their day?
When an area of the city becomes known for large homeless encampments/tent cities, normie people won't go there anymore. So, in that sense, a lot fewer normies get exposed to tent cities than one might think, but "this area of the city is so unpleasant to walk through that normies have pretty much given up on" is a big cost to society, relative to the counterfactual.
Example: Vancouver's Downtown East Side (DTES) is located right next to downtown Vancouver, it could be a thriving area with great condos and retail and tourism, but it's completely overrun by homeless drug addicts and their tents, so nobody goes there unless they have to.
As a foreign correspondent, over the years I’ve seen multiple countries with multiple problems that seemed impossible to fix and then a new government shows up aaaaaand the problem is fixed. Above all, we need to be optimistic.
Here in Santa Monica we've been enforcing encampment bans forever because we've always had sufficient shelter capacity to be able to under Grant's Pass. So definitely here for a while the primary compaint has been the mentally ill just being around (and being aggressive/violent sounding/actually committing violence sometimes.)
Why can’t we create high quality homeless encampments in rural areas. The cost of providing yurts and food is trivial. Make it nicer to be homeless in an out of the way place, don’t police lifestyle choices that don’t involve violence, and let them be.
If you can't leave, it's a camp or a prison (or some similar word). This strikes me as misleading terminology analogous to, for example, "diversity, equity, and inclusion" as a term for legalized racial discrimination.
The point is that they're technically not prisons, and are thus theoretically not subject to the same legal and moral standards. Prisons are for punishment. Accountability centers are for containment, similarly to mental asylums.
+1 to this. As a bonus, make them into forestry camps -- then folks who can work, can make money to get out of them.
I'm imagining the main issue with this is drug abuse (with a secondary issue of "safety is a problem when there's a lot of homeless around -- it's still a problem even if their neighbors are also homeless.")
Well, that and NIMBY.
Even the cost of an entire youth forestry camp (with education/mental health/etc.) is $100,000 per year, per person. That's quite a lot less than $130,000 that California is paying per prisoner.
What about the lifestyle choice of sleeping in a tent on a street corner rather than in a forest? That doesn’t involve violence, but it seems to be what is being policed here.
I am personally 100% cool with that lifestyle choice. However, politics is the slow boring of hard boards and normies dont like tent encampments. I don’t want humane politicians thrown out of office because of this prejudice, so I want to find a low harm way of pandering to it.
A tent on a street corner obstructs public movement on the street/sidewalk, which is [a crime](https://law.justia.com/codes/california/code-pen/part-1/title-15/chapter-2/section-647c/). And rightly so, I've had to walk onto fairly high-speed roads to get around long stretches of tents that fully blocked the sidewalk, it's a nuisance and safety hazard for the public.
Most people don't really care about tents that aren't in the way of anything.
Rural areas don't want them, they don't want to be in rural areas, and SF (and some other West Coast cities) have a significant subpopulation that fetishizes having them around.
> Modi noted that a city review found San Francisco spends more than $1 billion a year to fund 25,000-plus beds. By that accounting, adding1,500 would cost at least $60 million.
There’s no way that’s true, right? 25000 beds at $40000/yr per bed? $40,000 per bed per year is literally insane btw. That’s a decent one bedroom apartment!!!
A nice sentiment, but this misunderstands the causes of homelessness, what homelessness people want, and what will happen when things go wrong (harder to solve problems like police, healthcare, jobs, education in rural areas than in cities).
A non-exhaustive and non-exclusive list of homeless archetypes:
1. Had a place before, just can't afford rent now for whatever reason, would like to make money, will become housed once able to afford it. Unlucky in terms of having no family or friends to stay with.
2. People who just want to do a lot of drugs, can't maintain their addiction and afford rent simultaneously, and chose their addiction.
3. People who are too mentally ill to work or organized their lives/make use of ways out of this situation. There are a few subtypes: the psychotic, severe mental disability in the sense of reduced cognitive function, severely depressed, etc.
4. People who became homeless for another reason, kind of settled into it for a long time even after the other cause went away, and are reasonably happy/neutral about it.
5. Runaways
6. People who are physically disabled in some way and for whatever reason (perhaps a combination of one of the others), aren't in a shelter or getting by on benefits.
7. Immigrants who haven't made it yet/aren't making it.
Really only a small minority of 1, 3, 4, 5, and 6 would go to a rural shelter. And few of those would stay for long periods. Most of these archetypes need jobs, mental health services, or drugs and wouldn't voluntarily leave a city. Many actually went to great lengths to get to the city in the first place.
"World's most depressing victory lap." Homelessness in California is a combination of shell game, innumeracy, wishful thinking, and bad faith. The first sin was refusing to create shelters, holding out for permanent housing that never came and never could have come. Despite all the money and effort poured into homelessness it was never actually designed to succeed.
“…the new lower-standards busing program [in SF] only got about 100 people a year - pretty small compared to the scale of the problem.“
Wait, that sounds big compared to the scale of the problem. The chart we’re trying to explain — showing tents on the streets of SF — has been dropping by 200 per year, and we’re assuming the majority of that is just declining visibility. But with the increased busing, we have a mechanism that might explain half of that drop as an actual decline in unhoused San Franciscans. Right?
This is the *new* busing program, so in theory it should be additive to the old higher-standards busing program which still exists.
Clicking through to the underlying news article, though, it turns out that these 100-ish people (actually 92 over 10 months) are drawn from a much larger pool that includes everyone in homeless shelters in SF. Only a small subset of those 100 are people sleeping on the streets.
Scott, you were just wrong. It turns out that the “JUST GET TOUGH” crowd was almost 100% right. You try to hide this fact by lumping all of the “JUST GET TOUGH” people together and focusing on a small subset of them who made the additional argument that getting tough is would be good for the homeless people themselves. The core of the “JUST GET TOUGH” position is that we can prevent the streets of American cities from being covered in filth by cracking-down on the visibly homeless. This position is fully supported by your new analysis.
He literally said that being "arbitrarily draconian" would probably work. He just wanted people to admit that they wanted to lock up homeless people forever.
That’s the new information. It turns out you don’t have to be arbitrarily draconian, you only have to be draconian enough to take their stuff when they’re being a nuisance.
That is arbitrarily draconian. The effect is you lose the right to property because you don't have enough to afford housing. Plus you now have to sleep outside in the rain and cold.
When I read people saying "this would help solve homelessness," I assume they mean "this would reduce the homeless population in a nonfatal way," not "this would keep the homeless population the same but make their suffering less visible to the public."
The public doesn't really care about the suffering of the homeless if it doesn't affect them. To the vast majority of voters, "solving homelessness" means removing or at least reducing the negative impact of homelessness on the public. Whether the homeless population is reduced only matters to a very small number people, either as an intellectual exercise, or because they're part of that population and wish to take themselves out of it.
Now, you might argue that reducing the homeless population is the surest way to actually remove those negative impacts, but after years and billions of dollars it seems to be an intractable problem, so the public will now accept alternative methods of removing those negative impacts.
Re: SF feels safer because we made the lives of the homeless much much worse: Just proof once more that under modern capitalism, the comfort of the wealthy and powerful is secured by obscuring the intense suffering and tyranny inflicted on the poor and disenfranchised to make it possible.
I'm sympathetic to the 'capitalism raises all boats so even the poor are better off' argument in the abstract, but most people making it have no idea what life is like for someone picking crops or working in an amazon warehouse or living on the street... to say nothing of the overseas sweatshops and chemical spills and etc. that pay for prosperity within the first world.
*I* don't have any *real* idea about those things either, to be clear, they are comprehensively hidden from me because they would make me mad at all the brands and politicians perpetrating them on my behalf. But I have heard at least *some* stories, and try to keep them in mind whenever the already-comfortable demand more comfort.
I pay my workers $18/hour to pick crops (disclaimer: I'm not the farmer, but I can read the H2B website same as you can -- and I have a CSA with a specific farm). They have a good life, thank you kindly. I know about the "overseas sweatshops" that I buy my glassware from (they're orphanages, but the kids still get burn scars at the ripe old age of 12).
If you don't know what it's like to work at a hospital cafeteria in Seattle, try sitting on an inter-county bus for a day. You might just learn something.
If you really care about these issues, it is not hard to acquire first-hand knowledge of these people's lives, nor the real-world, medium-term alternatives they face.
>*Just proof once more that under modern capitalism, the comfort of the wealthy and powerful is secured by obscuring the intense suffering and tyranny inflicted on the poor and disenfranchised to make it possible.*
I don’t like this framing as it “unfairly” paints this outcome as largely the wants of the wealthy and powerful when in actuality I’d argue a plurality of the city actually wanted this.
I say this because it makes it more difficult to talk candidly about this situation; normal people suppress their actual grievances for fear of being compared to Elon Musk.
Since the pandemic occurred I’ve had many friends (some even born and raised in the bay) leave the city with safety and homelessness being a major factor. Many of them were women, who were otherwise progressive. I recall one story where one woman remarked that “the people act like animals” which was surprising to me due to the language she used.
If I was to reword your intro to “just proof once more that under modern capitalism the comfort of women is secured by [..]” I think far more people are willing to make that trade off, and you have to ask yourself what does that say about us as a society.
In fact, if you want walkable cities and urban life as a workable option, you pretty much have to have safe, clean streets and public transit. Otherwise, everyone with a choice heads for a suburb that doesn't have any services for the poor and doesn't have any public transit so no poor people can get there.
> under modern capitalism, the comfort of the wealthy and powerful is secured by obscuring the intense suffering and tyranny inflicted on the poor and disenfranchised to make it possible.
What does capitalism have to do with it? Were pre-capitalistic societies filled with wealthy and powerful people constantly exposed to the suffering and tyranny of the people below them and feeling equally comforted?
Also, who is "wealthy and powerful" in this scenario? The average person who hates seeing homeless encampments or random homeless people who ruin the atmosphere with their behavior? That renders "wealthy and powerful" into something incoherent in this context.
> someone picking crops or working in an amazon warehouse or living on the street... to say nothing of the overseas sweatshops and chemical spills and etc. that pay for prosperity within the first world.
Living on the streets is not equivalent to working a factory or a field, you have to have discipline and control over yourself to do the latter. Those who can't or don't will not last long in such positions.
Your comment, like many, seems to presume that those who are poor and suffering are innately productive, disciplined people who could theoretically pick up any kind of work if they were given the chance.
How many mentally unstable homeless people have you traveled with on public transport in the last year (roughly)? I live in Europe with barely any homelessness and see one around 4 times a year. Let's just say it's not a comfortable experience. I can't even imagine what it would be like to live in SF. Post-scarcity, we should definitely help them, but today it's probably better to spend our resources on people who are willing to work and behave in a way that is not harmful to their surroundings.
Also, I doubt that a hunter-gatherer tribe would have handled the people who are harmful to others and do not contribute to the commons any better, so this is not specific to capitalism.
it's amusing that you think the wealthy and powerful are impacted by this change - the wealthy and powerful are living where they never have to think about the homeless population. It is in fact that poor and downtrodden who are still somewhat productive members of society who realize the largest gains from this, the same population that benefits from reductions in crime in general (I certainly don't have to worry about getting shot in a drive by or getting mugged)
I mean the weird thing about San Francisco is that wealthy and powerful people genuinely do still live there. Even if they never go for walks, they'll get driven past the hobos.
The wealthy and powerful are deeply invested in keeping the property values of their many properties high. Since they have properties all over the place, they have a vested interest in seeing homeless people invisible, if not gone altogether.
Which is a funny way of saying they have a vested interest (some may say duty!) in keeping the lives of many poor and middle-class people nice.
Of course, they're also quite often in dereliction of this duty, in favour of getting to feel good about themselves. The problem is, once you're sufficiently rich, a few extra bucks can't ever compare to that moralistic high of denouncing those poorer than you for wanting the commons to be usable.
Co-opting the power of the government to protect your investments, at the expense of a sizable minority (poor people), is corrupt according to any definition of corruption that has any legitimacy.
I'm using the term poor people because it's not just the homeless who are in the crosshairs.
Outside of a few quirky outliers like San Francisco, the rich tend to be isolated from the negative consequences of rampant homelessness. But does this make said rich people blase about homelessness? Not at all. They want to eliminate every factor slowing or reducing their investment returns. It's not about law and order for them, and it's not about public safety. It's about pressuring poors and driving them out of the community, by any means necessary.
I'm all for strictly enforcing laws against public disorder. If I thought that would be enough to satisfy the persecutors of the poor, I would be heartened. But I don't think that can ever be enough. The bar will continue to get raised, and reactionary social engineering will continue to run amok, until somebody stops the process or we turn the country into New Singapore. What a loathsome outcome THAT would be.
I find this take rather amusing nowadays. I've lived among relatively poor people for a decently long time, but upgraded into Good Neighbourhoods once I earned sufficiently.
It's specifically the wealthy and powerful that sound exactly like you. On the other hand, nobody hates destitutes more than the working poor. And once you've lived with them, it's obvious why; The working poor aren't wealthy enough to get away from the destitutes, and destitutes are by far the worst part of cheap accomodation. They steal your shit, they keep you awake at night with noise and inane drama, sometimes they just randomly trash things for no apparent reason ... Consistently, any shared commons will be degraded.
The wealthy and powerful can afford to just stay away. Why can't we let the homeless build an encampment in the middle of the public park? For the working poor, that park may have been the only realistic option to see some green nearby, to picnic, play ball, etc. The rich can just do that in their own backyard, or they just live in a Good Neighbourhood were there are no encampments, or they ca afford to regularly just drive somewhere else ... with enough money, the options are endless.
Exactly, the parent comment screamed champagne socialist to me. Ironic that they correctly identified that they actually have no idea, but still confidently spouted off grandiose ideas about the issue.
I wonder if fentanyl overdoses explain part of (or most of) the drop. I'm not sure about SF, but here in King County we've had about 5,000 deaths from opioid overdoses since the beginning of the pandemic. If even half of these deaths are among the unsheltered homeless, then it would explain the drop.
The solution to homelessness is legalizing flophouses + stringent enforcement of laws against littering/public defecation/aggressive panhandling/etc, with the latter being necessary to allow for public support of the former.
Slightly tangential but (from the POV of someone who was a prosecutor for 20 years) I have a question about drug dealer transaction strategy. Scott suggests the lack of repeat transactions increases dangerous products and OD's, but I don't follow the logic here.
During my time in crimlaw, I regularly got to read all the text communications downloaded from the phones of drug dealers. I also spoke to addict clients as a public defender, heard numerous stories from our drug court participants, and spoke with crime victim addicts. In my experience, it was hard for dealers to move fentanyl, even their usual opiate customers didn't want it. You could see the numerous exchanges where they messaged a dealer for oxy, the dealer's out and offers some fent, and these opiate addicts looking for a fix are all like "uh uh, no way", and this was before the general public panic over it. Fent was sitting around in inventory gathering dust like a box of Fallen Empires at the comic book shop in 1995, even heavily discounted there's few takers.
Now at some point it became common to hear that dealers were cutting other drugs *with* fentanyl. This is where I don't understand either the economics or the decision theory. Let's say you need to stretch out your inventory of some more desirable drug by diluting it, fair enough. You could cut it with something harmless and inert from the grocery store. In an iterative game, that hurts you slightly because the lower potency affects your reputation. Or you could spike it with a relatively cheap undesirable filler like fentanyl, costing you more money (fent isn't literally free and it does gradually sell to a select group who want it), and requiring you to hold stock of a drug that the public, police and prosecutors have demonized. In an iterative game, maybe some customers are happy with the increased potency, but some WILL notice and suspect you cut it with fent, and it's possible you'll get one or more ODs out of that batch. Dead customers aren't very valuable, and there's a chance one of ODs will lead to somebody tracing the batch back to you, this did happen with some product that killed one of my drug court participants and a high school girl in a way that prompted enough investigation I could figure out who the common source was. This seems to come out negative EV on spiking a drug with another drug rather than diluting.
In the non-iterative game, I similarly don't see how you would ever benefit from spiking a drug with another drug, versus just reducing potency. Selling *fake* drugs may get you killed, but simply selling 20% weaker drugs won't, and it's less risk and exposure for an equal or greater profit. So why would there be an incentive to spike the potency in that scenario?
I think there are a few issues here. I do believe it's pretty common in some circles to sell one drug, or a mixture of drugs, as another, especially as a more popular or well known drug. For example, "ecstasy" in some contexts means MDMA, but on the street can mean various drugs or blends intended to achieve a similar effect. At festivals it's sometimes found that other hallucinogens are being sold as "LSD", because people know what LSD is. (Although in one of the ~handful of cases I got the most direct information about, the person claimed it was an accident and cooperated with the investigation.) And my impression (... although this is probably mostly from fiction, to be honest, but it makes sense) is that people do get mad if their drugs are weak. And I get the impression that the vast majority of street drug users are not _that_ picky about purity, if they get the desired result? Like, you would make substitutions in cooking, if you're out of something, and not expect the people eating the food to flip out in most cases.
The other issue I've heard about is accidental contamination. It doesn't take much fentanyl to create a problem, if it gets into some other white powder, especially if it's not mixed evenly (so you get all of the contaminant in one dose.) I don't know how important a problem this is, but it's something I've been told. Given the ptoency of fentanyl, I would believe it, if many dealers/distributors/manufacturers are being less than perfectly careful about it.
I assume it's one of those cases where consumers' stated preferences differ from their revealed preferences.
Pure heroin is expensive. Heroin diluted with water is cheap but the consumers don't like it. Heroin diluted with water and then cut with a little bit of fentanyl is cheap and the consumers love it and keep coming back for more. The dealers understand this.
In related news, an increasing amount of shelf space in the butter section of my local supermarket is being taken up with things that are mostly vegetable oil.
That makes sense, they may still think they're avoiding fent and just don't realize. Although that doesn't really solve the isolated sale versus ongoing customer relationship divide.
I recently got annoyed by that butter thing because I was cooking for a group that has a lactose-intolerant friend and I knew that most of the things called "It's totally not butter I swear no cap frfr" have dairy in them, and so do some of the packages that look like tub margarine. I don't shop anywhere bougie enough to have stuff labeled for vegans. And it matters for kosher too right? Weird that this ambiguity exists on the shelf w/r/t a product that has both medical and cultural dietary implications.
Good question. We didn't talk about that sort of thing. By the time they were encountering me (in either capacity), they were always trying to minimize their culpability, and were cagey about discussing the business. Every dealer insists to their lawyer that they're just the guy who runs the product out to the car, that's why they're on the hidden camera, but some other guy is the one making the money. (In many cases, this is actually true.)
When I was the prosecutor, I would sometimes be able to have candid discussions with them in drug treatment court, but they would still be minimizing and reluctant to discuss things like that for a variety of reasons, and pressing on a point of private curiosity wouldn't have been serving the purposes of treatment court. Additionally, people referred for drug treatment court had to have addiction-related needs higher than or equal to criminogenic ones. The more serious drug dealer would've been classified Quadrant II, high criminogenic needs with low need for recovery services, which drug courts avoid because they don't really "need" it and will sell drugs to participants.
That's too bad. I too am curious about the game theory here. I agree with your analysis and don't understand the incentives for spiking things with fentanyl.
I would argue that removing tent encampments and open air drug markets is not a minor thing! "Making the lives of homeless people worse" is an unnecessarily negative framing; saying "making the lives of regular people better" would be more accurate. Yeah, I guess losing the ability to completely block hundreds of yards of sidewalk, shit in the street, and use drugs openly technically makes it less pleasant to be homeless, but it makes it much better for the rest of the city. I really don't have sympathy for the "[making] the lives of the homeless worse" framing given how all these measures exactly correlate with improving things for the rest of the city.
It makes sense to me that many people are not angry at homeless people themselves, they are just upset about encampments.
“Tent encampments” is a nice phrase for it, in practice these tend to be enormous mounds of disgusting trash. They can turn nice places like downtown SF or Berkeley or Lake Merritt into trash piles.
So yeah, if there’s a policy that you have to clean up after yourself or else the city will throw your junk away, that seems totally reasonable.
A-friggin'-men. Can't believe no one mentioned this yet.
I would add that a lot of these tent encampments are in public thoroughfares and impede pedestrians trying to get from Point A to Point B without tripping over something or getting hit by a car.
I lived in SF 30 years ago. At the time, the vagrant population had a seasonal pattern of variance. Come wintertime, many people would arrive in SF from colder places because they wanted to rough it someplace where they would not freeze to death. In the spring they would move away again. Is this still the case? I can very well believe that the ability to have your tent and other posessions confiscated would make these 'winter people' go somewhere else instead.
The "obvious solution" that is clearly politically infeasible is to set up deliberate tent encampments in a designated field at the edge if the city away from most people, so that the homeless still have their tents but are away from harassing people.
(Of course, if we're imagining doing that we might as well imagine building an actual homeless shelter. The only difference is that this is conceding our inability to build any physical buildings).
The homeless typically beg for money. If you give them encampments or shelters away from most people... either you need to also give them some money, or many of them will choose to stay where most people are.
EDIT: This is similar to the reason why so many homeless are in the expensive cities, where their chances of buying a home are the lowest. In expensive cities, begging is more profitable.
Fair point. You could imagine some kind of alternate income/support but at that point you're requiring actual management of the problem, which is hard to fully do.
The obvious solution to that is to heavily disincentivize staying in the city by aggressively enforcing existing panhandling, public obstruction, etc. laws, and incentivizing setting up camp at the designated location by e.g. providing free meals, running water, public bathrooms and showers, etc. at the site.
> In the end, both sides underestimated how basic the tradeoff was
weird "both sides" moment when directionally the right was absolutely right in that all that was needed to solve the problem was more "common sense" enforcement and less social support crap
As I recall I saw the most tents around San Francisco in 2015, I assume CalTrans did some of the clearances (because the encampments were by I-80), and the Feds did the other significant clearances by putting up some chain link fences, and near permanently parking a “Department of Homeland Security” police patrol car by the Federal Building on 6th Street.
Otherwise this San Franciscan hasn’t noticed many fewer tents compared to four years ago
"not realizing how much people hated tent encampments in particular, as opposed to (for example) weird people wandering the street in rags talking to themselves'
The tent is there all the time. The walking-along-muttering is there and gone again.
"The getting tough is more compassionate" thesis could be salvaged if over the next 5 years or decade the harsher penalty decreases the types of behavior that leads to homelessness. We don't really know the elasticity here.
I’m gonna push back a little bit on this because I live in San Francisco and I don’t think that the problem is better. Lurie is weak as water, hasn’t done dick about the sanctuary city status- which means that there is a revolving door for the hondo fetty dealers. Moreover, he has not yet tackled the homeless NGO complex or reduced benefits or made it compulsory for them to work or to get clean to qualify for housing. Forget treatment beds or mental health facilities. The homeless don’t want them and they are not forced into them. I walk the streets of the city daily and from my point of view the problem is still there. The occasional busts are merely an inconvenience for the drug dealers. https://sfpublicsafety.news/in-brief-honduran-fentanyl-trafficker-deported-after-a-lenient-fast-track-sentence-promptly-returned-to-u-s/
Seems to me, as you say right before this part, like the main political significance of homelessness is not that people care for the homeless, but rather that people don't want to see or deal with them.
And I think it's a reasonable goal for public policy, to not want homeless encampments, homeless people bothering people on the streets, sleeping on subway cars and park benches, etc.
But it was always so obvious to me that a lot of the people who would e.g. criticize San Francisco for having lots of homeless people, insinuating that SF is heartless and hypocritical (unlike themselves of course, the ones who *really* care and aren't just virtue signalling woke libs), really just didn't want to see it and would think "mission accomplished" if they didn't have to see them, even if homeless people's actual conditions hadn't improved.
(I also tend to think *other* examples of "getting tough is the real compassion" - not necessarily all right-wing coded - are often hypocritical)
I don't think practically anyone on the get-tough side actually believes that SF is "heartless and hypocritical", just dangerously naive. I think some people engaged in political persuasion might cynically use rhetoric like that to try to peel off some bleeding heart SF voters. I also think that some people in the political climate of the past several years might have felt unable to voice a get-tough position without the fig leaf of "the primary goal of this whole debate should be improving the lives of the homeless (as opposed to prioritizing the rest of the population)."
Accusing the opposition of malice is almost always more effective than the alternative. Dethroning them would not only be an improvement, but would also be a justice served. Nothing gets the rabble going like an opportunity for justice.
The "homeless" typically have much bigger problems than simply not affording rent. Profound sanity issues, addictions, and other anti social behaviors.
Finding them an indoor bed to sleep in doesn't address their core problems at all, and it comes with rules they often can't tolerate, so they don't stay.
I don't know what would work, but maybe the cities with less of the problem do something right.
I have my personal pet reform I want to see: I want homeless shelters to move away from a waitlist model to a more aggressive time-limit model.
Right now shelters (at least NYC and SF ones, not certain about elsewhere) handle limited beds mostly by establishing a waitlist to get a bed in a shelter, rather than by imposing time limits on how long you can be there. (I imagine this is because it feels mean to throw someone who is already in a shelter out onto the street in a way that it doesn't feel mean to leave someone out on the street and not let them into the shelter?)
This makes shelters nearly-useless at the thing I actually want them doing (helping temporarily-down-on-their-luck people find their footing), because someone who just lost their job and couldn't make rent and walks to a homeless shelter for a bed will be told 'there's a six-month waitlist'.
It simultaneously makes shelters much 'better' at the thing I do not want them doing (fostering a culture of long-term dependents), because once you have a shelter bed you are de facto long-term housed.
The two systems work well in tandem. Most of the shelters work the traditional way, and keep records of how long people have stayed. Another shelter works the way you describe, giving instant help for people who haven't needed a shelter for several years, but for e.g. one week max.
Good idea, but I also don't want to kick out someone who is starting to get their footing, eg already successfully went sober, but haven't yet had luck in job search. So there should be a way to extend the limit in cases the person can prove they are reaching some milestones (eg. drug/alcohol tests, job application, in progress education/training etc...)
Fact/anecdote question for people still in SF: has the amount of non-tent crazy street people noticably changed (either up or down)?
(Some of those people were attached to tents, so curious if (a) the non-tent crazy people number has changed and (b) independently, the tent-related crazy people are still there just without the tents now).
I can’t answer for SF, but in San Diego, all that is needed is to prohibit tents. The problem is immediately transformed. One week, tents everywhere, the next week none (in those areas enforcing the rules).
The vagrants disappear. I assume most go to shelters, some go to friends or family, some hide, and the rest probably go to cities too soft to enforce these common sense bans.
[As I recall I saw the most tents around San Francisco in 2015, I assume CalTrans did some of the clearances (because the encampments were by I-80), and the Feds did the other significant clearances by putting up some chain link fences, and near permanently parking a “Department of Homeland Security” police patrol car by the Federal Building on 6th Street.
Otherwise this San Franciscan hasn’t noticed many fewer tents compared to four years ago]
To expand on that, seeing tents was very much rarer before the 2011 “Occupy” protests (and street beggars were very much rarer before the ‘81 recession), after ‘11 tents very dramatically (and quickly!) increased until around 2015 or ‘16, and have slowly subsiding since (and I haven’t noticed any big difference in the last three years)
I want to emphasize that the tents/beggars/screaming schizophrenics that I’ve encountered have all been in or near the Tenderloin (where relatively cheap tenement housing is), near BART stations, and a few in the Haight-Ashbury, I just don’t see them in the Asian or older wealthier white neighborhoods in the western and northern parts of San Francisco
As far as my encountering less screaming sidewalk psychotics, it’s a little better than 2018 to ‘23, but otherwise about the same as it’s been since around 2013 (FWLIW I was born in Oakland, California - were I lived the plurality of my life, in 1968, I started working in San Francisco in 2011, and I started renting in San Francisco in 2021)
Noticeably down from the covid spike, which was genuinely alarming, living in the sleepy residential southwest corner of SF. The number of visible homeless (of all stripes, not just crazies) used to be near-zero before 2020ish, you had to go out and hunt for them in like the little undeveloped strips of land or forested highway shoulders or whatever. Pandemic comes, and suddenly we got tents showing up in the middle of sidewalks...they didn't stay a super long time, but it was very jarring after several years of associating "homeless" with "out of the way, unless downtown". It was a regular feature of public transit for those years too, even in broad daylight (I think partly cause so many people stopped riding, so a lot less eyes-on-the-street effect).
Things started shaping up during the tail end of Breed's tenure, and that trend's slowly continued during Lurie. There aren't tents anymore...now it's RVs, which is more sanitary, but also means they stick around for the long-term, and that's been detrimental to the neighborhood in different ways. Reduced prosocial public services (like clothing donation bins), shorter business hours, that sort of thing. I feel like there are more transient crazies too, as in, they pass through my neighborhood but don't live near here, cause I don't recognize repeat faces? So perhaps that's some of the "tentless" who are now visible. Public transit has mostly gotten back up to speed though, with IIRC like 70% pre-pandemic ridership, crackdowns on fare evasion, more security, more cleaning, and lower tolerance for (disruptive) homeless riders. I no longer triple-check where I sit out of fear for human waste, and that's an important standard to return to! Dunno if levels will ever get back down to those halcyon days, and the norms on related epiphenomena like shoplifting are probably permanently degraded, but...it's bearable again. Not having recurring thoughts of moving to greener pastures, at any rate.
Key caveat though: I simply don't travel outside my corner of the city anymore if it's at all avoidable, so can't speak to what's happening in the other three quadrants. Castro is as far as I'll head out, and only during the day.
– availability of good mental health and substance abuse treatment (people are always talking about involuntary treatment without realizing that voluntary treatment is also thin on the ground)
But isn't part of the problem also that many in this community do not want treatment at all? Voluntary or involuntary? They don't come from nowhere. Somewhere there is a home and a family that was unable to help them. This is not always true, but it is true in enough cases. Very few people were born on the streets and left here to raise themselves. At least in this country.
I agree. But this country has so many programs and spends so much money on the indigent, how is it possible to do more? I don't think there should be any federal funding. Everything should come from the states and then individual states can come up with their own unique ways of helping.
Is there such a thing as *good* substance abuse treatment? Everything seems to have an incredible failure rate but I haven't studied it in-depth in awhile.
"Emergency rooms are crowded and chaotic. Jails are intended for people who commit crimes, not those having breakdowns. Sobering centers can provide a space to rest, but do not always offer longer-term care. All of those places often send people back to the streets after a few hours, their cycles of despair continuing.
But now, San Francisco is trying something new. In a city known for bureaucracy, it is remarkably straightforward. And if its early success continues, the program may serve as a model for other communities trying to find a middle ground between “live and let live” and “lock them up” as they try to address drug addiction and mental health issues on the street."
Lurie seemed to be happy with their effectiveness in an interview with Bloomberg. A transcript is available for those who prefer reading rather than listening.
This seems to be a bit of a conflict between free wills. The homeless were allowed to have the free will to do whatever they want (almost whatever they want). The people paying the cost of the homeless exercising their free will were *not* allowed the freedom to do something about the crime, filth, and danger the free will homeless had on their neighborhoods.
When laws protect criminal behavior (however sad, pathetic, bathetic, truly tragic, or painfully unjust the results of that behavior might be) then eventually people will seek redress.
The danger is that the cause/effect pendulum can swing in brutal ways. This is why there really need to be answers at the lowest possible level. If a neighborhood doesn't want homelessness, it should have the ability to prevent encampments. If a neighborhood does want it, then let them open their doors.
We all know the outcome of this - those who feel always want someone else to open their doors.
I think you posted something as a top-level comment instead of a reply.
"All you can do is imprison them - but there are too many, it’s too expensive, and the legal justifications are too weak to keep them in for long"
That last thing is easily fixable. And I'd bet people would be willing to pay higher taxes if they thought it would fund more prisons.
I don't think the legal justifications are actually "easily fixable". Remember, until a year or two ago it was illegal to remove tent cities, despite the city of San Francisco fighting hard to get around the restrictions. I think this would require the biggest legal shift in US history.
As for cost, my very preliminary calculations are that the cost of incarcerating all homeless people in California would come out to $30 billion/year, which would require an extra $1,000 per person.
For that price you could do the preliminary environmental surveys for several miles of high speed rail in the middle of nowhere!!!
Yes, but by the same token, once you actually spent the $30 billion on homeless incarceration, you'd probably have just done the preliminary environmental surveys for the new prisons you're building.
(I thought the fairest way to estimate a cost was to apply the cost of the current prison system per inmate, which I'm assuming includes some sort of amortized cost of the prisons themselves, though low confidence in this. But the current prisons were built when it was easier to build things, so the environmental review nightmare process would increase those numbers)
If you wanted to lock up as many homeless people as possible you could increase penalties for minor crimes, drastically increase the penalties for repeat infractions and then put a lot of effort into enforcing them. That's all legally feasible.
The two pillars you've got to avoid are
1. You have to make acts illegal not states of being. You can't criminalize 'has done drugs' or 'is homeless'
2. Punishments for crime can't be 'cruel or unusual'. This is not a category with hard defined boundaries, and states generally have a lot of leeway, but measures which are too draconian could get struck down.
(Note: I do not advocate for this. In fact I'm one of the bleeding hearts who doesn't think the tent encampments should have been broken up)
You can make "staying in the park after 11pm is illegal." This is a ruling that got put into place around Occupy Wall Street (I'm not sure if this is misdemeanor/fine territory). I hate the idea of debtor's prisons, but if someone is racking up a ton of fines, I'm pretty okay with "here is a bed, here is a saw, get to work" (out in the middle of nowhere).
Does your advocacy for tent encampments change if they come with foot amputations? (Very much not a joke around here. Nobody sends homeless here, I pray to god).
That is the type of thing that where locking people up for long for violating it could be struck down as cruel and unusual.
Being in the park after dark and pitching a tent are ALREADY forbidden in my city. It's been that way for a long time, and yet the homeless epidemic continues.
I don't what else we can do to convince the "solving homelessness is actually simple" people. We provide more and more evidence that the only quick fixes to homelessness involve fatally undermining.civil liberties for Americans.
No matter how much evidence we provide, nothing gets through. But no, you CAN'T treat the homeless like helots while treating the non-homeless like Spartans. It's literally impossible. For one thing, there's too much liminal space between the two categories of people.
Murder is simple. State-delivered murder for people stealing out of dumpsters does exist in this country (they may call it something different, but I'm going to call it murder...). It's what generally happens to the Rambo types.
I don't hear you or anyone else howling about the people killed for stealing out of dumpsters either (Probably because NGOs hate the lack of numbers and difficulty of treating said people).
When my city started enforcing (with patrols) "being in the park after dark" -- the homeless left. They went somewhere "less convenient" (still within easy walking distance of the city center). My city has plenty of homes that sit vacant, plenty of places to build houses. You could put all the homeless in Fairywood, and the only cost would be that they'd have difficulty going begging or getting drugs.
Cops understand how to give incentives to the people with marshmallow problems. They're generally "do this or get beat up or spend some time in jail, and probably get beat there." (it's not murder, generally, unless you kill a cop).
I'm not even saying we should treat one group differently than the other. (although I'm upset at the 30time arrestees who wind up committing murder. Maybe we could keep them in prison after their tenth arrest?)
Based on this, I'm guessing you don't know it's generally legal to dumpster dive in public American alleys. Since you don't even know that, and I don't know what else you don't know, I have no confidence that our conversation will bear fruit.
Solving homelessness in general is not simple, but most people don't actually have a problem with homelessness in general. If an ordinary law-abiding citizen doesn't have a home and is not bothering or harassing me, then they're not bothering or harassing me. It's still a problem for them, and should be addressed for their sake, but it doesn't decrease my quality of life.
If somebody is a public menace and is stealing, vandalizing, harassing, and doing other antisocial problems, then they are a problem and decrease the quality of life for everyone around them.
So you simply criminalize antisocial behaviors, and actually enforce these laws, and then the part of the homeless problem that affects millions of people, as opposed to thousands, goes away. And, importantly, this also helps the good homeless people who themselves are victimized by the criminal ones. The shelters and streets and public services would be nicer for homeless people to be in if the criminals were locked up instead of sharing their spaces. And the general public would be more sympathetic to them because they wouldn't have a lived reality of being harassed by antisocial homeless people all the time.
> criminalize antisocial behaviors, and actually enforce these laws
This is the key. It's amazing how many people fail to get it. If the behavior is the problem, punish the behavior, duh.
I think this also applies to other problems, such as drugs. There are sophisticated discussions about the exact number of grams or milligrams when something becomes a legal problem. I don't care about the grams per se; I care about the behavior that happens as a result. If you steal in order to finance your drug habits, the problem is the theft; I don't care about how many grams exactly you bought for the stolen stuff. If you sell drugs to kids at school, again the problem is selling drugs to kids at school, not whether it was 49.9g or 50.1g; I don't care.
EDIT: This seems to be a part of a more general pattern that goes kinda like this -- People hate X. People notice that X is somehow related to Y. Instead of punishing X, people decide to punish Y. That starts a long and complicated debate about Y; how much Y is socially acceptable, whether punishing Y is limiting our freedoms, how big punishment is acceptable, etc. People provide examples how someone has a lot of Y with very little or no X; it is certainly wrong to punish such people. But then you have people who do very little Y but lots of X, perhaps we should be really harsh to make sure that these people won't avoid the punishment. And all this could be avoided if instead of some related Y we simply punished X directly.
Drugs are not the problem. The problems are the related things, such as theft, criminal gang activities, (self-)harm, tax avoidance, etc.
You don't understand. Solving homelessness is easy, at least to most people. "Homeless" means "the ones that I can see and that annoy me". If you move one from that category to the category of ones that hide, or aren't in middle class or above neighborhoods, that counts as one less homeless in the eyes of 90% of citizens, even though it is still officially a homeless person. There could be twice as many, but if they aren't allowed to bother most people in the city, people will consider homelessness solved.
Serious people and policy makers are concerned about ending homelessness, not about merely ending visible homelessness. Ignorant members of the public may have a different view, but many of them also believe that demons are possessing their political opponents. Many of them believe in Bigfoot. Who cares?
Basically, that 90% you mention 'doesn't “matter,” so to speak. What is it that I allegedly “do not understand?”
> you CAN'T treat the homeless like helots while treating the non-homeless like Spartans. It's literally impossible. For one thing, there's too much liminal space between the two categories of people.
How is it “literally impossible”? Even if you made everyone in that liminal space a helot, the Spartiates-to-helots ratio would still be much higher than in actual ancient Sparta. You can just imagine the boundless contempt someone whose entire culture was structured around the need to keep the helots down would feel for a modern citizen afraid of so few of them.
I thought the Spartan reference was a colorful way to evoke a bifurcated, apartheid style society. But I wouldn't dream of suggesting that America has anything to learn from Sparta.
Lycurgical Sparta was a failed experiment that tarnished Greece's legacy among well-informed observers. This shabby concentration camp of a society was lacking some of the key features of civilization and higher culture.
Spartan society had some good points, but overall, it was a dismal place for dismal people.
> can't criminalize 'has done drugs'
Doing drugs is illegal. At the very least possessing them is, and you need to possess them in order to do them.
I've never been sure why the police supposedly need to catch them with drugs on their person rather than just testing them for drugs in their system.
I'm an expert neither on law nor on drug testing, but is it actually that easy? We have the ability to check if someone is currently drunk just by having them breath into a machine, but I don't think this is true for all drugs. For example, I read that enforcing weed-based DUIs is harder because the only tests can't discriminate between "currently high" and "smoked weed sometime in the past month." And I'm not sure if the legal standards different for, say, a blood or hair test than for a breathalyzer, or if tests that you have to send off to a lab are of any use here.
I was going to say that "having done cocaine sometime in the last month" means they've committed a crime sometime in the last month. But now that I think about it, it's still a bit more difficult, because can you prove that they didn't hop over to Nevada to do it there outside the jurisdiction of this Californian court?
There is that possibility, but mostly I was wondering about A) will these test results be available immediately, and if not, what are you doing before that? B) What legal steps do you need to go through to perform the test? Can a cop just stop someone and do it? This only works for breathalyzers because driving is special. I assume you need a warrant or to arrest them first or something.
Drug tests only work for pot. Most drugs have a fairly short half-life.
Americans get furious when, thanks to traffic cameras, they are mailed traffic tickets for violations they thought they had "got away with."
Considering that, I can only imagine the backlash if cops started arresting detainees for having used drugs weeks before. Despite what you may have heard, it's normal for drug users to have non-user loved ones and acquaintances who would be outraged by this. So this policy suggestion is fancifully unrealistic, even if you think it pasts the tyranny smell test. (It doesn't).
Even Red China doesn't routinely arrest currently-sober people for having drugs in their system, although the practice is not unknown..
But it’s perfectly realistic to enforce it selectively against “those other people different from me”, isn’t it?
How could you possibly keep your campaign of drug testing from breaking containment? Wealthy people do drugs too, and how could the police resist the temptation to stop and test prominent figures in society. How could the civilians who oversee the police department resist that temptation?
This is the age of Luigi Mangione and the Trump trials. Catching wealthy crooks is good for your career, or at least it CAN BE. Between that Uncertainty and the Certainty of civil libertarians howling about the Constitution, promiscuous drug testing opens the door to chaos.
Even if you consolidate the edgy, anonymous male poster vote, you might be JUST shy of the number of constituents you need to start this particular motor and keep it running.
> At the very least possessing them is, and you need to possess them in order to do them.
Technically not true, I do not think you could get someone snorting a line of coke for possession. And there is always the chance that someone drugs you unwittingly.
Also, I have philosophical objections to criminalizing the mere consumption of drugs. Basically, possession of drugs has some negative externalties so that society may feel justified in dissuading you. Some addict could kill you for the drugs, which would be a hassle for law enforcement. You might sell them. etc.
By contrast, consumption in itself is the ultimate victimless crime. If you break other laws under influence, then you can be prosecuted for these other laws. If you paid for the drugs with stolen money, you can be prosecuted for theft.
You might argue that there are still medical costs as an externality to drug use, but cynically, the homeless who do not regularly gamble with death from OD will probably end up with higher medical costs than those who do.
> Basically, possession of drugs has some negative externalties so that society may feel justified in dissuading you. Some addict could kill you for the drugs, which would be a hassle for law enforcement.
Possessing _anything_ desirable has that kind of externality. Someone could kill you to rob you, which would be a hassle for law enforcement. And states do, in fact, feel justified in dissuading you from being wealthy and in helping you be poorer.
It isn’t exactly unheard of across human cultures, either, the idea that sexually desirable people—almost always women—have some negative externalities, since some “addict” could rape them and, optionally, kill them, which would be a hassle for law enforcement, or, worse, for their friends and relatives honor-bound to engage in a potentially neverending blood feud. This makes society feel more than justified in dissuading them from showing any hint of their desirability and in victim-blaming them.
> You might sell them. etc.
Once anything has been made illegal, perhaps with the rationale above, the possibility that you might sell it, or otherwise propagate the illegality, can be used as an extra argument to keep it illegal.
> By contrast, consumption in itself is the ultimate victimless crime.
If we criminalize possession because you may be a victim of robbery and murder, judging that this is both your fault and society’s business, why not criminalize consumption, too, regarding you as both the victim and the aggressor?
> If you break other laws under influence, then you can be prosecuted for these other laws. If you paid for the drugs with stolen money, you can be prosecuted for theft.
If you break other laws while possessing, then you can be prosecuted for these other laws. If someone breaks other laws while victimizing you, then maybe _they_ can be prosecuted, rather than you.
> You might argue that there are still medical costs as an externality to drug use, but cynically, the homeless who do not regularly gamble with death from OD will probably end up with higher medical costs than those who do.
But those who possess and don’t consume will probably end up with lower medical costs than those who consume.
The phrase is "cruel AND unusual".
When I was growing up, I assumed the actual law must be something like "cruel punishment and unusual punishment are both forbidden" and that everyone was just being sloppy when quoting it. I was rather shocked when someone told me that the wording was specifically chosen to continue allowing cruel punishments as long as they were already common when the rule went into effect.
It's a bit more complicated than that; see e.g. Trop v. Dulles, a 1958 case where the Supreme Court declared in part that (per Wikipedia) "the Eighth Amendment's meaning of cruel and unusual must change over time and 'must draw its meaning from the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society'." ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trop_v._Dulles )
In high school my friend pointed out that cruelty is subjective and it is only unusual the first few times you do it.
I'm a bleeding heart leftist with typical bleeding heart views on the homeless. But for the reasons you mention and others, I think the entire Eighth Amendment should be withdrawn and replaced with a narrower prohibition against torture.
Thankfully, the 8th Amendment protects against the first few times too.
It sounds to me like, if enough people are determined to normalize a new cruel punishment, all it takes is a few heroes to start dispensing it unconstitutionally and suffering the consequences. Then it’ll be a cruel, but usual punishment, so no more protection against it.
I'm all for not breaking up tent encampments assuming they're off grid in the Nevada desert somewhere. At the very least they should be absolutely nowhere kids exist.
You don’t need to imprison all the homeless. Most of the homeless are not derelicts, but rather capable people who are down on their luck. They need homeless shelters (already funded), and perhaps convenient safe places to park their cars (again easily provided).
The derelicts (a minority) have a choice — go to a shelter, find a friend to live with, or move to a city which chooses to look the other way, or, worst case scenario, go to jail. I respect their choice. Only a tiny slice of these derelicts, and virtually none of the affordable-housing group will need slots in prisons.
Differentiating between the derelicts and non-derelicts is harder than you presuppose. It's not like you can tell by one's appearance. I've met younger, sharply dressed homeless people with brushed teeth, each one of whom was a bigger drain on society than a dozen obviously alcoholic, older homeless.
I don't believe this. Seniors receive considerable state funding. How would you know this?
Oops, I made a mistake. I should have written "obviously alcoholic, older homeless." I was referring to older homeless people with shabby appearances who might be considered "hopeless cases."
Living on the street marks you. Your age becomes manifest a longer younger than those who live more prudent lives.
That contradicts every report I've heard of them. After all, to be homeless is not only be down on your luck, it's to have absolutely no one who will let you sleep on the couch.
On what basis do you say that most are capable and down on their luck?
See below…
If most really are derelicts, then housing first is a scam solution, as mentally insane fentanyl addicts are incapable of maintaining homes. The answer is institutionalizing them as per the appropriate tile of law. I am fine with this too, and again California has set aside billions for doing so.
We have ten billion dollar trains to nowhere and billion dollar programs to foster derelicts.
The problem isn’t a lack of money.
See what below?
I don't have exact numbers, but it seems to me that the homeless population is approximately:
1/3 generally functional people who had bad luck (economically), e.g. lost their homes in divorce, were scammed out of money, had an expensive surgery, had a one-time legal problem with huge financial penalty, etc. In other words, the kind that probably could immediately become productive members of the society again if they e.g. won a new house in a lottery.
1/3 mentally ill people.
1/3 drug addicts.
For the latter 2 groups, nothing other than institutionalization can help.
For the first group, the problem with homeless shelters is that you force them to live with the latter two. So you have a generally functional person who perhaps in long term could find a job, save some money, any maybe buy some cheap home and escape homelessness... but they are forced to live among the drug addicts who keep stealing their stuff, and among the mentally ill people who keep screaming during the entire night so they can't get sleep.
Great comment. I am not sure what the percentages are, and I suspect those who could gather it don’t want to.
Ideas that would help sort the generally functional are individual (recently closed) motel rooms, old RV Trailers, nice full sized tents in approved areas, parking lots for safely living in their cars, and so on. Of course, the other two groups will quickly abuse and destroy these things. So they need to be held accountable. Again, the people in charge don’t want to hold them accountable, so the system breaks down.
There are certain ways of framing a problem that actively prohibits and (perversely) actually promotes the problem. The way progressives frame homelessness is the root barrier to solving the issue.
I suspect there's a continuum with Mr Screaming Back at the Voices on one side, and Mr Sleeping in My Car Because My Wife Threw Me Out on the other. Programs that help people on the bad end of the spectrum will do very little for the good end of the spectrum, and vice-versa.
I agree.
The other side of homeless is "Mr sleeps in his on-campus office for a few days before his new rental unit is open."
And the actual continuum starts with Rambo in the woods slowly starving to death, until he starts raiding dumpsters and gets shot (said person is nearly impossible to catch, let alone help).
Both of these people are nearly untreatable. The former because "He's fine" (in fact, could probably afford a hotel room). The later because "He's very unfine, and is armed and dangerous."
Somewhere in the middle, we have people who "could use a reasonably well run work camp" or "a treatment center for drugs/mental health"
Isn't there some fraction of people who weren't crazy when they became homeless, but were driven crazy by homelessness? Extended lack of sleep and constant fear can do that to people.
That is possible. But there are probably many who got insane the usual way, or perhaps who were previously insane but they had a caretaker, and now the caretaker died or something.
But regardless of etiology, the crazy need medical help, while the homeless for purely economical reasons only need a place to sleep and store their things, so they have a chance to get a job.
Many homeless people have jobs. That's one reason why they tend to have cell phones even though the only way is to buy a new phone once you use up all the hours on the old one.
I knew an older woman once who had a pension/disability that let her keep a roof over her head and food on the table, but who had a life-wrecking mental illness that made her just *barely* able to keep functioning on her own. I suspect that if something had knocked her into homelessness, she would never have made it back out. As it happened, she kept her home until she got sick and died, which was probably the best possible outcome for her.
And why are your impressions reliable?
Do you disagree with any specific part? I don't want to write an entire thesis defending an internet comment, so it would help me to know which part you consider suspicious.
Is it the existence of economically unlucky people? I have talked to one homeless woman about 50 years old, whose story was (skipping complicated details) that she was single and lived in a house that legally belonged to her father. One day her father died, leaving tons of debt, so the debt collectors took the house. The woman had little job experience (because she spent a lot of time taking care of her mentally retarded brother), she could make barely enough money to pay for food, but not for food + rent. So the brother ended up in some institution and she ended up on the street. I also talked to a guy who claimed to be a victim of divorce: his ex-wife got the house they previously owned together, and his little savings were spent on lawyers. Then he got drunk and fired from his job, so he couldn't even rent and ended up homeless.
Do you doubt that the homeless who are "otherwise okay" have a problem reconnecting to the society? The specific problems I mentioned are the ones they told me. They can get sleep in a shelter, but they often won't get much sleep, because there is an insane person in the next room randomly screaming at night. Their possessions are in constant risk of being stolen by other homeless, e.g. while they use the shower. If you don't have clean clothes and didn't sleep well, you won't make a good impression at a job interview.
Do you doubt the existence of the mentally ill who don't have a caretaker. Or of drug addicts?
Plus I have talked to some people who are professionally involved in taking care of the homeless, but that was long ago, so I can misremember or misinterpret what they told me.
The claim was statistical. Argument by anecdote is therefore irrelevant.
At that, by your own admission, of your two examples, the second one falls in your third category: it was his drinking, not his bad luck, that landed him on the street.
The parts about anything but what proportion of the homeless are simply bad luck are -- what? Bad-faith attempts to distract from the statistics?
I also have talked with a person professionally involved with the homeless, and she told me that virtually all the homeless *want* to live on the street, because to be homeless required you to have NO ONE willing to let you sleep on the couch.
Last I checked it was something like 50-60% (although it probably depends on location) who were "merely" homeless, and might be employed or have a car or something like that. This segment of the population tends to only be homeless for a brief period of time, which is where we get the figures about the average time spent homeless being under 6 months. They're basically capable of living a civilized life, but were only scraping by, and then something pushed them over the edge. Our existing systems work pretty well for these people, but they could be better, and cheaper housing would help them. And we should make sure to help them, because the longer they stay homeless, the more likely it is that they'll fall into the other type.
The other 40-50% have some combination of mental illness, drug abuse, or general antisocial behavior. They cause most of the problems for other people (including committing most of the crime), and tend to stay homeless for years at a time. They typically get thrown out of shelters because they are unwilling or unable to follow the (often very strict) rules. Giving them housing just destroys the housing; I know people whose job it is to clean up after them.
The numbers vary from place to place, and also by methodology. If you survey people on a single day, you'll get one figure, but if you're tracking discrete individuals who experience homelessness over a period of time, you'll see larger numbers of the first group, as they cycle in and out.
If you are only focused on the visible homeless in SF which this article is focused on, there are between 2900-8000 estimated by the PIT count of 2024. So maybe 5,000 long-term, chronically homeless max.
And how many of these folks were SF natives/workers who fell into homelessness vs. folks who were drawn into SF streets because of drug addiction and mental illness? I'd guess the majority are of the latter. Again, the focus is on the visual street homeless, not all 'unhoused'.
For this problem, the assumption that these folks need perpetual paid housing is not correct.
These folks can/should be rehabbed. There need to be enough beds to house them for rehab. They don't need to be suddenly released into the most expensive city in the US, with an affordability crisis. They need to be rehabbed, and given transitional services to get them jobs in places with lower cost of housing.
And if you have enough beds, then you can shut-down the homeless street drug and social network. There is no tent city to fall into. If you are being a vagrant, you simply get put into a proper rehab program, or you leave, or you go to jail. In my opinion, it's the more ethical way to do it.
Are you American? This conversation gets so muddied by international commenters who have big gaps in their knowledge of American law.
Vagrancy was eliminated as a legal category here 53 years ago. Because it seriously undermines our constitutional right to travel. Sounds like you don't understand or respect that. ANY legal regime that favors long-time residents over new residents must fail in the same way.
All of that is mainstream American jurisprudence. I would go a bit further and argue that
any policies that can be interpreted as the government implicitly telling people, "Don't you dare move to a new community if doing so will put you at risk of homelessness," must also fail to respect the Constitution.
> ANY legal regime that favors long-time residents over new residents must fail in the same way
Not true. Rent control is very prevalent in the US.
Who told you it was prevalent? I would strongly dispute that characterization.
The point is that it is clearly (unfortunately) legal
You just need to enforce rules against camping/sleeping in unapproved areas. Most places do this today, and it is in no way unconstitutional. JP is correct.
Yea, simple broad laws against vagrancy were ruled unconstitutional by the SCOTUS in 1972. SCOTUS rulings though can be reversed by later Courts and the makeup of that body is dramatically different now than it was in 1972.
Just last year the current SCOTUS ruled that, notwithstanding the 1972 ruling, a municipality's banning of people from sleeping or camping outdoors on public property does not violate the Constitution even if there aren't enough (or any) locally-available shelter beds.
Since relocating to a place necessarily involves having someplace to sleep, it is under current US jurisprudence not true that "any policies that can be interpreted as the government implicitly telling people, "Don't you dare move to a new community if doing so will put you at risk of homelessness," must also fail to respect the Constitution."
I SAID in the comment you are replying to that my final statement was going "further than...American mainstream jurisprudence." So you just paraphrased me.
I realize that precedents can be overturned but I see no reason to think that the Supreme Court is going to bring back vagrancy laws. Last year's ruling was certainly not a step on the way to overturning the 1972 ruling. This is not like Roe V. Wade, where there were millions of committed activists constantly pressuring politicians to overturn the precedent.
Laws against camping on the sidewalk apply equally to people with jobs and people with no jobs. They apply equally to people who are migratory and people who have lived in the community all their lives. So I don't agree that this return to the status quo should give anyone hope that vagrancy laws will return.
If you don't mind my asking, are you an American or a Canadian?
Didn't suggest that vagrancy laws will return. They don't need to: the bans on camping overnight now being established (by around 200 US municipalities thus far since the "Grant's Pass" ruling) have the same practical effect, as the Ninth Circuit had made clear and then the SCOTUS majority ruled to be irrelevant.
I'm American, why?
> These folks can/should be rehabbed. There need to be enough beds to house them for rehab.
I haven't seen it come up here yet, but rehab has a 70-80%+ failure rate among those who actively seek it out, and succcess rates are ~5x lower for those coerced into it. So you're recommending a course of action that would be A) extremely expensive, and B) have a 90%+ failure rate. Not a great use of taxpayer money, nor a great use of all the people involved's time and effort.
Cites:
Drug and opiate rehab success rates, for people who *voluntarily self-select* into the programs, is ~30% for alcohol* and <20% for opiates.**
The success rates for heavily coerced "do this or get years of prison" populations is likely to be considerably lower (it's ~5x lower for alcohol in non-self-selected pops).
* White 2012: "An analysis of reported outcomes in 415 Scientific Reports, 1868-2011"
Combined alcohol and drug abstinence rates average 30.3%, "although remission from opioid addiction appears to be less stable and durable than other patterns of remission."
https://imgur.com/a/MwtqFEf
** The best number for long term opiate relapse is Hser 2007, which has findings from 33 year followups. 18% achieve abstinence "for at least 5 years."
Hser, Y (2007) Predicting long-term stable recovery from heroin addiction: Findings from a 33 year follow up study. Journal of Addictive Diseases. 26(1), 51-60.
>Remember, until a year or two ago it was illegal to remove tent cities
But that was because, under controlling Ninth Circuit precedent at the time, laws against camping in public, etc, were de facto cruel and unusual punishment.
It is still cruel and unusual punishment to criminalized the status of being homeless, though. So there are indeed limits on the ability to use criminal law to address the problem.
As a practical matter though how much difference is there between "no camping overnight on public property" and "don't be homeless"? Particularly since in "Grants Pass" (2024) the SCOTUS ruled out questions such as whether adequate shelter is otherwise available in the area or whether the person camping is "involuntarily" homeless.
Seems clear that bans on overnight camping on public property will now gradually spread as voters in places with visible homeless populations learn that the SCOTUS has decided that's not cruel and unusual punishment.
According to the Ninth Circuit, there is no difference. That was the very issue at the center of the Grant's Pass case.
And the SCOTUS ruled that issue to be irrelevant.
I must correct my second paragraph though -- following "Grants Pass" bans on overnight camping have spread rapidly not gradually.
https://www.npr.org/2024/12/26/nx-s1-5199103/homeless-camping-bans-grants-pass
https://stateline.org/2025/01/27/many-more-cities-ban-sleeping-outside-despite-a-lack-of-shelter-space
Right. The Ninth Circuit agreed with you, but the Supreme Court disagreed with you.
Interesting approach. If you must punish behaviors, well, what practical difference is there between “don’t reflect and absorb light following a spectrum too close to this one” and “don’t have this skin color”? Remember, we’ve already established that it doesn’t matter whether the behavior is voluntary.
My brother was a meth addict for several years. He was never homeless but for a while he lived in a motel. One day he set someone's car on fire ("demons told me too") and got arrested. He was never actually convicted, but spent a year in the county jail as his trial got pushed off and eventually they dropped the charges. He couldn't get drugs In jail, so he dried out and got sober. It was the best thing that could have happened to him.
The idea that you can spend a year in jail awaiting a trial for a crime you may or may not have committed is pretty horrifying, though.
What would it take to give everyone a trial within 48 hours of arrest? At least for simple crimes?
I don't know any of the details, but fwiw my mom was very active politically and knew a lot of people in local government. For all I know kept him there as a favor.
......frankly that sounds *worse*.
Worse for whom? The taxpayer? Given the account of his previous existence, I'm open to the idea that a year in prison was not worse for DJ's brother.
As I understand it, you CAN demand an earlier trial, but defense lawyers recommend against it because the odds of conviction typically decrease quickly with time.
Also, very few people take trial instead of the plea deal.
I'm assuming this is "you'll still get convicted, but be freed for "time served"" and jail is preferable to prison.
Not sure about the US, but I have heard that "time served" before conviction even counts as a multiple on your sentence, i.e. 30 days counts as 60 (or something, I don't know if it's double).
If you're likely to be convicted, then time before trial seems an optimization to minimize the total punishment.
This also interacts with plea deals, where the lesser offence you plea to may end up with a maximum sentence less than the time served (possibly in conjunction with the multiplier).
The court systems are *very* far from that capacity.
Only 2% of federal cases, and ~5% of state cases even go to trial. The vast majority is settled by plea deals.
A criminal defendant has a right to a speedy trial. However, this is often not to the benefit of the defendant, because most defendants are guilty, and speeding along the process that will get you convicted is usually percieved negatively. Thus, defendants and their defense attorneys, including public defenders, will often string cases along through multiple continuances - each time waiving their speedy trial rights - for various reasons including (1) plea negotiations with the prosecutor, (2) looking for more evidence, and (3) hoping the state gets tired/bored/disorganized and gives up.
Was this what was happening with the Jan 6th crew?
I don't know; I didn't follow those proceedings closely. Also, my limited experience in criminal law is in CA state misdemeanor courts, not federal. Also also, what I said above is a general trend, not a specific predictor for what happens in any given case. Some defendants and lawyers want to move things quickly.
This is yet another of the long list of things that are broken in much of the US.
Have Larry Ellison pay for it if he keeps his beard, otherwise have Peter Thiel pay for it unless he manages to out of the news, or just make “Silicon Valley” as a whole pay for it until they (and the “grey tribe”) all decamp for Detroit
I don't know what mischief Peter Thiel would get up to if you gave him all of SF's homeless people to experiment on, er I mean, care for, but I am pretty sure I don't want to find out....
The biggest legal shift in US history? Bigger than the end of slavery? Than the reinterpretation of the commerce clause in the 1930s?
Many should be in mental health facilities which aren't cheaper but are a bit nicer and less coercive, while also being helpful and designed for the purpose. I think governments need to bite the bullet and admit that tens of thousands more adults need expensive residential mental health facilities.
My low-confidence understanding (someone please correct me if I am wrong) is that if you are poor/homeless, it is almost impossible to get any kind of mental health treatment other than by being in some kind of crisis that gets you taken to the hospital.
I don't know how the budget would work out, but my intuition is that we could probably save a fair bit on mental institutions if it were at least *possible* for someone who was seriously mentally ill and also poor (perhaps because their serious mental illness makes it very hard for them to hold down a job) to get some kind of treatment outside of being sent to the bughouse.
Even if you had social workers walking around handing out free anti-psychotic medication to people on the sidewalk, you'd still have the issue of getting them to take it. Residential mental health facilities are often the only way to make sure patients keep taking their medication.
It's actually common to treat people in this situation with long-acting injectable antipsychotics (weeks or months in duration). This doesn't fully solve the problem, though, because you need them to stay sane enough, reliably enough, to voluntarily come back every 3 months under their own power, or you need to keep track of them. (But it does help.) And even when they treat the symptoms perfectly, antipsychotics tend to have pretty unpleasant side effects that make people not excited to remember to return for their next dose, even if they agree in principle that they intend to.
It's only fixable if you read 'justification' as 'excuse'.
If you think the word refers to anything like actual *justice*, then no, it's not 'fixable'.
The phrase was "legal justifications." Surely that makes it clear it's just "excuse," and nothing to do with "justice"?
It’s not easily fixable. The kind of law which would let you dump random people into long prison terms is the kind of law which gets preempted by the Bill of Rights.
I suppose I don’t believe in the political will for higher taxes, either. Between the current climate of populism and California’s already eye-watering taxes, who is going to champion that policy?
Not "random people," we're talking about homeless people who commit crimes, see the context of the quote:
"CalMatters presents the cynical view of post-Grant anti-homeless enforcement. The usual problem with enforcing laws against the homeless is that no plausible punishment can make their lives worse: you can’t fine people without money, or suspend the drivers licenses of people without cars. All you can do is imprison them - but there are too many, it’s too expensive, and the legal justifications are too weak to keep them in for long."
The only crime being discussed here is camping in public, and making the case for long prison sentences there is difficult. Like, if you want to imprison a homeless person for a year, you're arguing that public camping should be punished more severely than assault and battery (max sentence 6 months in CA, according to Google), and I think courts would be skeptical of that.
I should also point out that someone who's in prison is unable to acquire a home, so I don't see how this would change the homeless population even if you *could* jail them for as long as you wanted.
Someone who is in prison has acquired a defacto home of "jail" (where at least they do not lose feet to hypothermia) and we do already have programs to house people coming out of jail (halfway houses).
If imprisonment is taken as an imperfect, short-term solution, then reluctantly 'yeah, imprisonment'. The homeless might get a chance to get clean off drugs, or get their mental health problems addressed.
"Just stick 'em in jail and let 'em rot" is not the solution. The problem is with those who are the most visible: the ones rotted on drugs or with severe mental illness. When you're trying to deal with people as in the video below, there comes a point where local government intervention needs to happen, be that taking them off the streets and putting them into treatment centres or hospitals against their will, because otherwise we are saying "let them just decay in public view but not intervene".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QrZLNyYHVw
But the most visible ones are both very bad and also encourage bad behavior from others.
The most visible ones are the ones that, even if you provide them with housing in the morning, are not going to be able to live in it. They'll either turn the place into a health hazard or start ripping it apart to sell stuff so they can buy more drugs. They are the ones who need the most support and are probably the least capable of managing their own lives.
The images of people literally folded in half on the street, their trousers down around their ankles, unable to stand up because this is the side-effect of the particular drug they have consumed - yeah taking people's liberty away from them is a slippery slope, but how can anyone look at that and think "Nope, for the sake of society, much better to let them continue on like this rather than sweep them up and institutionalise them like the bad old days of lunatic asylums".
Turns out you can just care a bit more about the quality of life of, well, the 99% of the population of San Francisco, over the 1% of homeless.
On the other hand, a single person seeing a homeless encampment is 99% of the negative utility of actually being homeless, or getting your stuff stolen, or encampment taken, etc.
Democracy is really good at giving 99% of people what they want at the expense of 1% of people, regardless of the amount of utility at play.
Do you have examples of this happening in modern America?
Besides this one? Here are a few other unanimous laws, that probably qualify.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/59
https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/5887/text
https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7520/text/eh
All sorts of places, they're just not noticeable because nobody ever questions them.
For instance, you're not allowed to land a helicopter in the park, even though helicopter owners would love it if you could.
Tariffs or other trade barriers to protect specific industries
This is actually backwards. A small group who care a lot is incentivized to organize, while the majority who are impacted a little bit each are not so incentivized. This is how we got things like the auto tariffs, regulatory capture, the farm bill, and most other forms of targeted subsidy.
Good point. I guess this only applies to groups that are poorly organized, like homeless people.
I meant to add a point like that, but got distracted. You're right that this doesn't apply to homeless people directly, but I suspect a similar dynamic applies with a small group of ideological "homeless advocates."
Hence the giant buckets of unaccountable money that keep getting shoveled at them.
I would dispute that, the fact that the multi-billionaires successfully lobby politics to protect their class interests does not make the US undemocractic.
(Yes, I know, technically the fraction of people who would vote for higher taxes on Musk is less than 99%.)
You probably mean 1%. But even so, the cost of enforcing public decency is also probably 1% the cost of a “solving” the problem of actually being homeless.
The Utilitarian Case for Densely Tiling the Most Expensive Real Estate in the Country with Homeless Petting Zoos
…new EA cause area?
It does sound like a Bentham's Bulldog or Nicholas Decker article title.
huh, I would've said "1%", and then added that being worried about the possibility of becoming homeless, due to a lack of social safety net, is additional negative utility for everyone who worries about that.
100%. Suicidal empathy leads to death by a thousand cuts. The homeless are not morally superior people.
This strikes me as something that fails the veil of ignorance test pretty badly.
If you thought there was a real chance you could end up homeless, with mental problems or addiction, would you still see not taking away their tents as "suicidal empathy"?
Yea, I dislike the veil of ignorance and after many years of agreeing with it I dismiss it. For generations my family and community worked hard to build something to ensure this would never happen to me or mine. That should be the higher good. I appreciate the concept, but I'm keeping my kidney and asking for lower taxes. I do appreciate the response.
As I see it, there are two main things that we give labels like "morality" or "the higher good" to. There's compassion, and there's solutions to coordination problems.
If you feel for people outside of your family and community- if you feel bad when they feel bad and good when they feel good- that's one reason to try and make their lives decent, but it's not the only one.
Every day, we're presented opportunities to benefit ourselves or something we value like a particular community, but at the expense of causing bigger externalities for other people or other communities. Individually, we're all incentivized to take those opportunities, but when everyone does, everyone is much worse off.
A staggering amount of value is locked away in these coordination problems; to get at that value, we have to be able to trust each other to hold to principles even when doing so doesn't benefit us or the people close to us. In practice, this means things like not stealing or killing even if we're certain we could get away with it, being very honest even when dishonesty would help our political cause or social standing, helping people even when no one would know if we hadn't, etc. Deontological morality, in other words.
The veil of ignorance isn't a perfect proxy for that kind of thing, but it's a good heuristic. If everyone in the world committed to it strongly, we'd be vastly safer and more prosperous. If humanity had always been even just somewhat more willing to hold to it, we'd likely have had so much material surplus that we'd have invented cures for aging and a post-scarcity supply chain generations ago. Your family and community would benefit enormously from broad adoption of this kind of moral commitment, even though individually it would involve giving up things like enjoying improved aesthetics by taking away peoples' shelter.
>Every day, we're presented opportunities to benefit ourselves or something we value like a particular community, but at the expense of causing bigger externalities for other people or other communities. Individually, we're all incentivized to take those opportunities, but when everyone does, everyone is much worse off.
>A staggering amount of value is locked away in these coordination problems
Be curious to know what you mean by this, because I look at my life and don't see it at all. Only arguable case is carbon emissions, but then the case hasn't been made that the costs exceed the benefits.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality#
I do think there's a real chance you or I could end up homeless. A worldwide depression is on our doorstep. In that case, the chronically homeless of NOW are dead.
"Society will have the morality it can afford." -- Niven/Pournelle
And that will occur, and as belts tighten, these people will die, of overdose or lack of homeless shelters, or because we stop letting them waste $5000/night in the Emergency Room when they Aren't Ill.
We can, however, get the "less chronic" on their feet now, invest in places for you and I to live when we become homeless, soon, and make sure that only the worst of the worst cases has to die.
People act as if the Great Depression never happened. They act as if we didn't have a situation where a huge number of hard-working, decent people became homeless despite their best efforts.
Did the Tough on Crime conservatives of the 1930s react to the Depression by giving homeless people the benefit of the doubt, or at least by trying to differentiate between the Worthy Homeless and the Unworthy Drunks?
Not at all! All of them were treated like animals who were dangerous to society. Said conservatives stuck to their article of faith that serious financial hardship MUST be a sign of moral failure.
If more people studied homelessness in the 1930s, perhaps they would understand how the aforementioned injustices could easily be repeated in the future. In fact, they might be getting repeated RIGHT NOW!
Important to note that there are already a huge number of decent, hardworking people who are homeless. Now you can say *relative to the population* it's a tiny number, but it's still a huge number in absolute terms, especially given the stakes.
Also, 'hard working' is a bit of a moving target. Plenty of people with a work ethic within the normal range are homeless, and there's always someone ready to snipe from the sidelines that they deserve no sympathy because if they were *even more hardworking*, prudent etc., they wouldn't be homeless.
If many many people fail the marshmallow test, it doesn't exactly matter how hard working they are, if they are addicts.
What are the "stakes" exactly? Let's talk say, 1000 people in a metro of 3 million. That's not a lot. We lost a lot more than that from covid19 (although covid19 was probably cheaper than any ordinary euthanasia program would be).
Most people who are "homeless" are like my friend, "temporarily unhoused" and crashing in an academic building for a night or two. Or other people who have assets like a car (which provides safety among other things), and are merely "between houses."
> Important to note that there are already a huge number of decent, hardworking people who are homeless.
Are they producing enough value to make up for the costs their existence is incurring? If not, their work ethic is completely irrelevant.
Yeah, they mostly did. They ran CCC work camps. They ran hoovertowns with military efficiency. When it was draft time, everyone got thrown towards that.
How much do you trust your savings in the event of a worldwide depression?
Society can't have better morality than it can afford for long, but it can sure as hell have *worse* morality than it can afford.
Torture is relatively expensive, even for sadists (and a skilled torturer leaves no marks). You still have to feed the unproductive member of society.
(perhaps other forms of "worse morality" like "slow death by starvation" are cheaper on the economy).
The veil of ignorance test does not properly apply to those without proper agency or who fulfill conditions of criminality/making others lives noticeably worse. The thought experiment falls apart when applying to homeless drug addicts who are not part of the general scheme of society. Rawls himself explicitly does not apply it to criminals.
It's probably fair to apply it to mental illness, though.
And if you start asking the question "What would you want, in a society where you have (say) a 1% chance of rerolling as severely schizophrenic" then I don't think the answer is "the right to pitch a tent under a freeway overpass", it's "clean safe pleasant asylums where I can get the treatment I need".
I just don't think either of Rawls' two principles have anything to say about mental illness or homeless policy. The first principle grounds general rights (which perhaps apply to the homeless, but "the right to pitch a tent on the sidewalk" is nowhere to be found), and the difference principle is about how we justify economic inequality. I guess you can say that the mentally ill are the biggest losers after the veil is lifted, but their mental illness is normally unrelated to the economic system.
Rawls' system grounds very broad principles about the basic structure of society and I think people get lost in the sauce applying the veil of ignorance to specific policy issues like homelessness.
> their mental illness is normally unrelated to the economic system.
You don't think personal economic prospects can cause psychological stress to the point of long-lasting breakdown?
Walk a block in a San Franciscan's shoes these last few years. Entire segments of the city were given over to tents and worse. This impacted the city, the economy, jobs, and people who wanted to stay here. That is suicidal empathy for a society.
The veil of ignorance is intellectually vapid. As Scott pointed out in a links post a while ago (IIRC) the only reason it caught on was that it appeared right when Marxism fell out of fashion. It gave intellectual cover to Marxist academics who wanted to continue advocating for the same terrible anti-capitalist ideologies.
The kill shot for the veil is to consider dynamics. The world doesn't consist of a static amount of wealth that must be distributed equitably. Wealth depends heavily on production and incentives matter much more for that. It's the basic grow-the-pie vs slice-the-pie issue that liberals are always terrible at understanding. On a podcast a while back Steve Hsu talked about the time he had dinner with Robert Nozick and asked him how Rawls would have responded to this point. Nozick apparently said that Rawls never even considered it and generally lacked the capacity for solve-for-the-equilibrium type economic thinking.
That's a flat out lie. Rawls was explicitly considering growth in a thought experiment. His point was balancing growth, which often comes with inequality, with maximizing utility for people at the bottom end of the distribution
Growth isn't the same as innovation, which is really the thing that matters. It's been a while since I've read Rawls but my memory is that he didn't consider that. And if he did then he's just flat-out stupid because maximizing the minimum is obviously the wrong way to incentivize productivity growth.
Again, your recollection of a podcast host recalling a decades old (at least) conversation with a moral philosopher’s rival turns out to not be a valid assessment of said moral philosopher’s work.
The entire point of the minimax principle is to understand that growth and economic dynamism come with economic inequality, but also assert there’s a moral imperative to minimize the downside for the losers.
The sheer ignorance you’ve displayed is astounding.
The veil of ignorance makes more sense as (I think) Harsani envisoned it. Not "how would you arrange society if you were going to be its worst-off member" but rather "how would you arrange society if you were going to be its average member" or "how would you arrange society if you were going to be randomly assigned to a position in it?"
In practice, all the decent societies we know how to build are one kind of Omelas or another.
There isn't such a chance though because im not burning bridges with anyone by acting horrible to them
This isn't about moral superiority, this is about empathy and compassion. It is not suicidal to see yourself in others and extend a hand and a net.
Even though you have wealth, you could lose it all, you could have your wealth expropriated, or you could be separated from your wealth through legal means. You are not invincible. I do not know how to convey to you how important it is for society to care about other people. The sociopathic society you seem to want would tear itself apart.
As part of that 99%, I'd rather occasionally drive past some homeless tents than occasionally encounter reporting that makes me worry that we're treating these people with excessive cruelty. Cruelty makes me angry and depressed; homeless people only inspire mild worry.
Granted, I'm sure middle-class people living near homeless encampments feel more strongly about this, but they also represent a very small minority.
Hi! When you have skyscrapers RiGHT BESIDE the littered needles, it turns out there are a LOT of middle-class people living near homeless encampments.
Driving by homeless in tents, you are PROTECTED by your car. You aren't on a bike, in danger of seriously injuring a drunk, or someone having a mental health crisis. You aren't walking, which makes you easy pickings for the more criminally inclined either.
A homeless woman set up a giant cubby/fort on the benches next to my bus stop, filled with junk and rubbish. It smelled terrible. None of that changes that my priority is the welfare of the vulnerable and likely severely mentally ill woman.
The welfare of the homeless and non-homeless alike can be greatly increased by a simple policy of ensuring there are always enough shelter spots available.
Most of the homeless on the streets seem to consistently say that homeless shelters are not safe for them. I attribute this to many mentally ill people being in the shelter, am I wrong about that?
Sounds correct to me. The danger are mentally ill people and drug addicts that live in those shelters next to them.
If the shelter has a system like "two people in the same room", you are screwed. Your roommate will steal your stuff, keep you awake all night, and maybe do something worse.
It seems to be a combination of:
- the shelters don't have sufficient staff to prevent altercations. Though I'm guessing they can shut them down pretty quick
- the shelters have rules about not bringing in your drugs, and not doing them on the premises. Which many will refuse. There is some justification, where would they store them outside?
- I doubt they search the homeless when they do come in. So there's drug use inside I'm guessing. See my first point. Yes, people on drugs can be violent.
- Also I'm guessing they can't ban someone from a shelter unless they've already had multiple serious problems with them on previous stays.
- Ban someone from a shelter due to previous problems. Can a different shelter also ban them? Should they be able to?
We could fix all this by making Swedish style prisons, for the homeless. You'll get searched for drugs, get a mini-room to yourself, and in general be treated better than we treat most prisoners.
This is a LOT less expensive than $5000 per night when the homeless (and not sick) go to the Emergency Room for a warm bed and a meal or two.
https://www.cato.org/books/build-baby-build
Sounds like it didn't help the 99% though. Dispersed homeless in the city cause as much trouble (if not more) than the same amount of homeless focused in tent emcampments.
With this justification being accepted as valid, I would have absolutely zero scruples extracting all wealth from the 1% in San Francisco so we could improve the lot of the 99%. Maybe we shouldn't stop there, though. There are tons of 1% to expropriate and dispossess.
Hasn’t the US prison population been shrinking pretty quickly? It seems like it’s ~20% lower than a decade or so ago, so where are all these beds that were formerly occupied by prisoners and now are empty? Maybe the prisons were just at over capacity so fewer prisoners doesn’t mean more beds, but it seems like there’s a solution for where to put people if the declining prison population continues.
A prison isn’t necessarily a very nice place to live (neither is a mental institution), but there must be some point where decreasing prison populations frees up a lot of beds all of a sudden.
https://www.sentencingproject.org/reports/mass-incarceration-trends/
Scott mentioned that in a previous Links thread: a lot of people who's been put in on long sentences in previous decades were getting out, with not many coming in to replace them.
California prisons were massively overcrowded for quite a while. Their overcrowding reached the Supreme Court multiple times.
I wonder if this is why there's so much more crime. People get arrested then let go without trial because there's nowhere to put them when they've convicted.
It's certainly part of why people get arrested 30 times, yes.
Seems like team "be as tough as possible for the benefit of the vast majority of society" got our way, and it immediately had a big payoff. I hope other cities can learn from this
It's not even being tough. It's about doing something at all. For years in San Francisco, law enforcement would not even confront vagrants on the street, no matter what they were doing.
Hopefully we can apply this principle to white collar crime and corruption as well as stomping on people without anything.
My experience of talking to a good number of street homeless in SF is that the main thing keeping them out of shelters is mental health issues or unwillingness to make reasonable tradeoffs, and that their drug use is comparatively unproblematic.
Some examples of unwillingness to make tradeoffs are having an unallowed pet, not leaving an explosive partner who keeps getting expelled, being unwilling to accept single-gender housing in order to stay with said partner. Some examples of mental health issues are extreme paranoid anxiety, having memory issues that cause serious executive dysfunction, or having uncontrollable outbursts.
So creating more housing and clearing encampments doesn’t necessarily qualify such people for housing or make them more willing to take the housing.
How do you differentiate between inborn mental health issues and those caused or exacerbated by long-term drug use? Unfortunately, many drug users are dishonest or even delusional about it, so just talking to them and taking it at face value seems rather unreliable.
Where I'm from it was mostly just alcoholism, but even those would often swear up and down that they don't drink that much, and anyway it's not causing any issues anyway. But they suspiciously do have a lot of issues, which just-so happen to be typical symptoms of alcoholism... The symptoms you mention definitely fall into the bucket of rather typical for long-term drug abuse (though admittedly depending on which drugs that category can be so large as to be not very meaningful).
Self medicating with any substance is usually in response to an underlying(not unusually undiagnosed due to the obvious issue of money) mental illness/disability.
Not to say that's the case with all, but a great deal of the homeless people who use turn to drug use looking for some kind of relief from their symptoms.
Including Doritos? : - P
Does "self medicating" mean taken to treat an underlying mental illness or disability? Wouldn't 100% of people self medicating with drugs have an underlying condition by definition?
Long-term use of cocaine, meth, and several other drugs are strongly associated with paranoia and anxiety. MDMA, alcohol and others can cause memory problems. I don't think this answers how severe someone's paranoid anxiety was before taking drugs vs how much worse it became after long-term drug use.
You're not getting it. Drug addiction ITSELF is LITERALLY listed as a mental illness in the DSM5. Each addiction is listed individually and collectively they are called Substance Abuse Disorders. Right alongside schizophrenia. I'm not saying we have to take every word from the DSM5 as true, but "drug addiction is a mental illness" is such a well-established, evidence-based and foundational part of modern psychiatry. That if you are going to reject this, you might as well throw the whole book out and start blaming evil spirits for mental illness.
Like any number of mental illnesses, addiction is biopsychosocial. One may argue that addiction is more socially modulated than say, schizophrenia. But physiology always plays a role in addiction, just like social factors play a role in modulating paranoid schizophrenia.
This doesn't really relate to anything I said.
Yes, my comment directly related to this:
"I don't think this answers how severe someone's paranoid anxiety was before taking drugs vs how much worse it became after long-term drug use."
My comment argued that this question is not especially relevant to the broader topic of how we should think about and address the crisis of homelessness.
Our colloquial separation of "drug addiction" and "mental health problems" is not supported by the psychiatric community. Psychiatrists insist that drug addiction IS a mental health problem. Really for Real. And this isn't a weird artifact of ideology that can be easily corrected by overruling bleeding heart liberals. On the contrary, psychiatrists were FORCED to call drug addiction a Real Mental Illness; in the face of an implacable chain of logical reasoning.
Sure, which is why I separate between inborn vs those caused/exacerbated by drugs, not between drugs and mental illness.
I think the practical difference is that with drug addicts, you need to take special care to isolate them from dealers. Compare to e.g. a non-violent mentally retarded person who can take a walk around the town without that having any negative impact on their condition.
Psychiatrists were perhaps driven by logic to give a certain answer, but they were asked a wrong question.
Does it really matter if the mental health issue is inborn or caused by long-term drug use as long as they keep using and won't stop?
It really doesn't matter. The reason laypeople argue about this is because they think the argument can be used to justify their personal preferences, whether it is for harsher punishment or more compassionate treatment.
But psychiatrists have wisely stopped focusing on this. There are plenty of neurologists working on the issue, and even though they are trying their best, we aren't even close to finding an answer. We don't even know how much humans can consciously overcome their unconscious impulses.
In the meantime, the question of how much "guilt" to assign to an addict is pointless. Assigning and punishing guilt is the age-old method of dealing with criminals and addicts. That method has clearly failed. Or at least it only works in a brutal police state where you're willing to destroy all freedoms to maintain order.
Do the people who run the homeless shelters think you can't change your gender?
The people themselves don’t want to lie about their gender and act like a gender they don’t identify with just to get these benefits. Maybe you think they’re unreasonable for that.
I suspect the reason most of them don't do it is instead a lack of knowledge of the latest advances in the Science.
I don’t think you know what you’re talking about. Being trans isn’t just a card one plays in a game for strategic purposes. It’s an actual commitment to a lifestyle, even if it’s one you disapprove of.
Uh huh. You're telling me that if you tell a homeless couple who're suffering outside on the streets to be together that all it takes is if one of them to check a different box on the intake form for them to get shelter, no questions asked (ex hypothesi; I don't know that it's actually true that one can do this), you think they share your ideological commitment not to do that?
I doubt there will really be "no questions asked". Just because people are willing to trust trans people about their gender identity doesn't mean they treat gender as a game where someone who makes no effort to present as a particular gender will get no questions asked when in a single-gender facility.
For some people, it's just a card. E.g. https://www.dw.com/en/germany-extremist-trans-neo-nazi-gender-law-v2/a-73779265
But I have no idea how homeless shelters determine gender.
>It’s an actual commitment to a lifestyle
I was under the impression the truscum/transmedicalist position lost, hard, and anyone that says they were trans was trans. It requires no commitment.
You may think it's *rare* that people will take advantage of this clear loophole and lack of gatekeeping, but that doesn't change that there is virtually no gatekeeping.
This appears to be a flippant comment stirring up culture war topics for the sake of it, rather than a sincere question about housing policies. This is pointlessly inflammatory and less than the standard of discourse I prefer to see in ACX comments.
No, it was a sincere question, wanted to know if the issue had come up.
Having threads be derailed is bad, but so is declaring entire topics off-limits.
Fair, sorry for misjudging you. I would suggest adding more elaboration in your original comment so it's easier to distinguish sincere efforts to discuss culture war topics from trolling. It's very annoying to try to have a discussion about any topic and end up with several comment threads of predictable "what about the transgenders" back-and-forth.
Up to you, of course.
You can't, in fact, change your gender.
Abandoning one's pet doesn't seem like a "reasonable" trade-off to me. I could hardly think of a more children's-cartoon-villain sadistic choice to present a person with than "either abandon your pet or risk going to jail".
You're assuming the pet is actually "being taken care of properly" ain'tcha? I'm okay with finding facilities that will let someone have a pet... but I wouldn't assume that letting a dog walk around unshod on probably glass-strewn streets is "actually taking care of the dog properly."
This is a complete non-sequitur. Whether some people are capable of properly caring for a pet is completely unrelated to their emotional attachment to said pet.
> You're assuming the pet is actually "being taken care of properly" ain'tcha?
Not necessarily, but putting myself in a homeless person's shoes, in a world where I know things like kill shelters exist, *even if I'm aware that I'm not a very good caregiver* I still might not take my chances with an underfunded facility telling me "if you want access to one of our ratty beds, please give us your beloved dog. no we probably won't give it back". And them adding "anyway it's this or prison" would not increase my confidence in their overall trustworthiness.
Besides, I'm not *just* looking at the welfare of the dog here. "Emotional support animals" are a meme, but they're a meme for a reason. Taking care of her two mangy, ill-tempered mutts (maybe not very well!) might be the only thing that keeps a homeless woman going, not to mention providing her with a modicum of safety against less-well-behaved bums when she's walking the streets. Suppose I'm her. Am I going to give them up forever, just for a shot at mediocre accommodations for a few months? Is that rational? At best it's a gamble.
I'm not saying it's never the right choice (whether morally or practically) for a homeless person to give up a pet. But picking the pet over the shelter doesn't seem "unreasonable" in the same sense as "but I just can't walk out on Sam who beats me up every other Sunday, he needs me".
Excuse me. You've never been abandoned at summer camp by your parents. A child of less than about 15 years of age can probably not make enough money to afford a house, and is probably in trouble with the law for not going to school regardless.
You've never had to live under a bush (or car) for days, not knowing when food (or parents) would arrive. Without a car or other transportation, I could easily see this form of homelessness as being "terminal."
And all that takes is having dumbdumbs as parents.
> And all that takes is having dumbdumbs as parents.
Yes, we didn't have sociopathic morons as parents, and that's why we're better than them. Do you think that isn't hereditary?
Forgive me for asking a very stupid question, but... where are the summer camp organizers in all this?
Like, if I were running a summer camp for 15-year-olds, and one of the kids was just abandoned/the parents never showed up for him at the end of the camp, I sure as hell wouldn't just shrug and say, "Nice knowing ya, kid, camp's over, byyyyeeee!"
I would either attempt to contact the parents (don't they have to list their phone number and address on the summer camp registration form?) or if that proved impossible, I would call Child Protective Services and say, "Here's a kid who's been abandoned at my camp by his parents, he needs a place to stay, can you either track down his family or find a foster family for him?" This seems really really blindingly obvious to me, were all the personnel at that particular summer camp completely oblivious/lazy/callous/stupid? What am I missing?
>A child of less than about 15 years of age can probably not make enough money to afford a house
Foster care already exists to solve this problem.
This is a really good example. But... I gotta say, this is highlighting an issue that someone could actually solve. "I don't trust the animal shelter" could be solved with "here is this person, who is willing to sign a contract to take your dog for 6 months." (we're assuming there aren't that many dogs, versus "people who want dogs" -- less than 1% of a city's population is homeless, and they probably don't all have dogs).
I do not think a homeless person choosing "living outside" when that may mean having your foot amputated is a rational choice, even if it's the only way you get to stay with poochie, but yeah, it's a different sort of "unreasonable"...
The percentage of homeless people who lose feet because of sleeping outdoors is vanishingly small. I'm not sure why you brought up amputation or what it adds to the conversation.
Are you sure that there's a "wool socks charity" in every city? Because I"m not. And we HAVE a wool socks charity in my city because a single doctor got tired of unnecessary foot amputations.
"Vanishingly small" -- are you sure? I'm just going to say that hypothermia at 40 degrees is quite a possible thing, and we don't open the "dayum it's cold" shelters until 25 degrees or so.
>I gotta say, this is highlighting an issue that someone could actually solve. "I don't trust the animal shelter" could be solved with "here is this person, who is willing to sign a contract to take your dog for 6 months."
If you try to set up a system where you can reliably find people to offer this sort of personalized support, I think you end up circling right back to "we need to invest a whole lot more in social services."
I don't think this is very necessary, honestly. You put up flyers (or you ambush people at the vets or the shelter). There are a lot of people already who take in pets, the only difference here is "where the pet goes" after you're done with it.
These people do it out of the kindness of their heart, already, and I think if they knew this was an issue, they'd be trying to help.
How exactly are governments supposed to house people communally if those people can't be compelled to give up a dog that they keep specifically because it's aggressive towards strangers?
As November said in this comment https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/what-happened-to-sf-homelessness/comment/176528265 , there would be ways of alleviating their concerns (i.e. a transparent system by which homeless people's pets are cared for, with a clear path to getting the pet back once they leave the shelter), it's just that none have been set up.
I'm sorry, but the number of people willing to volunteer to take in someone else's poorly socialized pit bull (it is usually a pit bull, but sometimes it's a chihuahua) on zero notice, care for it for an indefinite period of time, and return it, is basically zero.
The few who would sign up for this will probably drop out once the poorly socialized pit bull that was raised outdoors by a person with poor executive function destroys their house, or bites someone, or the owner shows up to their door at 3 AM, high on meth, to demand the dog back after being bounced from the shelter due to behavioral problems.
If your solution is to pay professionals in an organized way to care for poorly socialized pit bulls, you have just reinvented "animal shelters", which November found unacceptable.
The fact is, having a dog is not a human right, and people every day are forced to make the difficult choice to surrender a pet because a change in life circumstances leaves them unable to care for it. The homeless should not be relieved of this responsibility so that they can continue living outdoors.
This is ridiculous and bigoted. It is a fact long-established that dogs, left to their own devices, will live outside and not wear shoes. If the presence of glass means that this is now harming the dog, I ask you apply the same standard to every person who takes their dog on a walk without shoes.
Glass on the streets is just as dangerous to children as it is to dogs. I consider it to be just as abusive to let children run around without shoes in such situations. I know where the glass, or potential glass, is around my house. There are places I do not walk without shoes.
If most people taking their dogs on a walk came home and the dog routinely had glass embedded in their paw, they'd put paw-covers on the dogs' feet (debatably, this really should be done in the winter, anyhow, if there's a lot of snow and you go on long walks).
Is it just me, or do most people when they break a glass, manage to find that last little sliver and get it embedded in their foot?
Get over yourself. I ran around the street and in the woods around my house all the time when I was a kid, and not because I didn't have shoes. It's hardly abuse.
Specific instance of: "there is broken glass on the street" entails "child with frequent cuts/embedded shards of glass in their feet."
If that's not the instance you're talking about, it's not child abuse, of course it's damn well not!
(Neither is it child abuse if the parents take their children to pick berries, and the child gets a dozen thorns embedded in their skin. That's "doing something useful" -- dare I say it? fun AND economically productive).
We know that, if left alone, ownerless dogs can survive tolerably well on their own, as plucky entrepreneurs on the margins of human society. Their tough little paws seem to be up to the task. Knowing this, I am convinced that dogs are not unduly jeopardized when their owners become homeless.
One might retort, "Ownerless dogs don't do tolerably well. No dog should be exposed to hunger and misery like that." True or not, that objection is stems from a strong cultural value about canine welfare. Homeless people also share this value, confirming their ability to own dogs responsibly.
I'm especially bothered by "homeless people can't be responsible dog owners," because I know this argument is used by some to justify straight up stealing dogs from the homeless.
I'm not PETA -- peta stole dogs from responsible owners.
I'm willing to say that anyone homeless living with their dog in a decent park is probably taking good care of the dog. That's a decent place for a dog to live, owner or not. Sitting on 100 degree pavement or sidewalk is not a good place for a dog to live.
(In short: sure, have the dog and be homeless, but don't live with the dog in "Skyscraper Downtown.")
Is your position that ownerless cats also survive "tolerably well"? Because we know that most of those cats are dead within two years (that's... not a good life, but one that is brutal and short). Googling for this, stray dogs have a lifespan of about 5 years on the high side, and 2 on the low. I wouldn't say that this makes them "plucky entrepreneurs"... (this sounds like "desperate enough to eat cats")
Definitely something brain-hurting about "these conditions we let homeless people live in are too inhumane to leave a dog in."
The pet is probably being taken care of somewhat and is having a better life than if it were abandoned.
Her perspective is exactly what it has gotten us here. Nobody is willing to do anything over the smallest so-called rights of the homeless that inhabit the streets of San Francisco. This even pertains to drug use.
Okay Rachel, what about the significant number who are stark raving mad drug addicts that you can't even talk to. Please don't tell me this is a small minority, and some areas of the city. There are several on every block.
I genuinely think most of them aren’t drug-addicted, just insane. The drug addicted ones are the ones slumped comatose on the next block over. Or just having a mostly normal ass time with a few hits of heroin a day! Plenty of functioning addicts.
I appreciate hearing your observations. However, I think it's worth noting that the sample of people who are very visibly homeless (i.e. pan handlers) is not an unskewed sample of the homeless population. My understanding, is a large chunk of the homeless population who are much more functional, some of whom even hold jobs, but can't afford rent and are forced to sleep in a cars or tents. I agree that reducing rents probably won't have much effect on the folks you're describing, but I think it could help this second group a lot and thus hopefully reduce the overall problem.
I don't disagree, but I feel like the missing statistic "how many homeless people are actually in SF compared to last year" is a really important missing statistic. Citing other numbers that don't include SF feels not really relevant to the question.
Sorry, I hoped I made it clear - there is no such statistic, because SF hasn't done its point-in-time count this year. That statistic will exist next year. That's why I'm trying to estimate based on other regions and data.
It was clear that no SF statistic exists. : )
If you're attempting to evaluate the effect of SF-specific actions such as electing a new mayor of SF, saying "we'll just extrapolate what happened in SF using this data from some nearby area" feels to me like you're baking in an assumption that the SF-specific policy had zero effect.
I respect the argument elsewhere in the essay that probably none of the SF-specific policies did have an effect, but I don't feel that citing non-SF statistics helps that argument at all.
Point-in-time counts are also a very imperfect proxy for how many homeless people there are. For example: Was it a rainy day when the PIT count was done in year X and a sunny day in year X-2? You may measure what seems like a double-digit drop in homelessness, when what you're really measuring is homeless people hunkering down out of site, and census works slogging around discouragedly in the mud trying to find them. Methodological changes in surveying from year to year, how many people volunteer to do the surveying, and whether the localities are incentivized to find more or find fewer homeless people for political reasons, all also come into play.
Looks like the next count is pretty soon, in January 2026. The outcome of that count would be a great prediction market question, rather than relying on comparison cities to estimate -9%.
Has anyone checked the death rates?
How did this article miss the CARE Act and SB43?
What do you think it should have said about these? IIUC, only 500 people were enrolled in the CARE Act - even if they were all homeless (not true) and it rescued every single one of them from homelessness (not true), it could only explain less than a tenth of the true homelessness decline, which itself is less than a sixth of the encampment decline. Pretty sure SB 43 is equally small scale.
I was surprised given (a) you tackled programs like HHAP, Project Homekey, Breaking the Cycle, etc. despite limited results, and (b) the outsized impact CARE/SB43 had on county HCAs. I’m unclear to what extent they’ve actually succeeded (either by directly putting people in conservatorships or more indirectly, by e.g. giving enforcement a stick) since they’re not my team’s primary client population, but every DHCS quarterly meeting, SUD/MH conference, or stakeholder group I’ve attended / County HCA or nonprofit meeting I’ve taken for the past couple of years (before they were even signed) has been dominated by concerns, debates, and updates about CARE Courts and SB43.
If nothing else, they’ve had an outsized impact on the operations and focus of many HCAs, Health departments, and CA exec agencies. Which seems like it’d be worth mentioning even if only to argue that they too are failures.
BHSA and “Mental Health for All” also significantly disrupted county funding in ways purportedly meant to assist the homeless. Again, I have no clue how effective or worthless their actual results have been (if any), but if nothing else they’re a significant part of the .gov conversation about homelessness over the past few years.
"But I think it speaks against the argument, common during the height of the crisis, that there was no tradeoff and actually enforcement was the truly compassionate option."
Huh, it doesn't seem likely that many people could have truly believed that. A more likely option is that few people understand what the word "tradeoff" means.
The motte is that people respond to incentives, and therefore, anything which makes homelessness less unpleasant has to increase homelessness.
I’ve definitely encountered this argument in the wild, but it is usually paired with a bailey that happily accepts the “tradeoff,” since it’s happening to the outgroup.
The counter to this is that some people don't understand the incentives very well. It's not like most people INTEND to have their feet amputated, even though that's a probable outcome of unsupported homeless populations in the Northeast.
I think those are separable.
There is some level of desperation which causes someone to go homeless in the Northeast, even knowing that they risk frostbite.
There is some lower level which causes the same decision *if* they don’t know the true risks.
In either situation, the presence of a safety net is only going to make the level lower. Therefore, by removing safety nets, we should be able to prevent some number of people from deciding to go homeless. Since those people would almost certainly be miserable, shifting the incentives is actually compassionate.
I kind of hate that I’m defending this position; I don’t believe homelessness is generally a “decision” as this implies. But it’s definitely one of the ways people justify tougher enforcement.
We'll note that (aside from pets), it's not that expensive to get out of the Northeast by bus. So while it's possible to "go homeless" in the Northeast, one is making a choice by not leaving when it gets brutally cold.
Removing safety nets isn't the only way to change preferences, of course. Simply by moving the homeless into "out of the way" encampments, you disincentivize being homeless (it's more of a schlep to beg, to get drugs from your favorite dealer, etc).
I'm also unsure how much homelessness is a "decision" versus "people too scatterbrained/incapable of making decisions."
Worldwide depression is coming soon to a theater near you. The people currently chronically on the streets are not likely to make it in the necessarily harsher environment. From that perspective, giving them money now is counterproductive.
Cash cost of a bus ticket might still be nontrivial for someone in a desperate situation, and then there's the less visible cost of needing to learn your way around a new area.
I'll note that there's often someone willing to pay for bus tickets out of the Northeast (sometimes cities, sometimes states, sometimes a gullible schmuck). This isn't something that we need to depend on the homeless to be able to do (so long as we recognize that "Yes, it is actually preferable for these people to leave before winter hits hard").
I mean the problem of this kind of naive incentive theory is that 1. it's never general equilibrium, or dynamic (eg in static equilibrium, free healthcare necessarily increases demand for healthcare. In a dynamic one, it might well reduce it bc of prevention). 2. Even if it gets the sign right, the elasticity is still an empirical question. If it's -0.001, than what are we even talking about.
As a SoCal surfer who spends every single day at the beach, I can tell immediately if control of the tent-living-homelessness (aka derelicts) is working or not. What really seems to matter is that the cops forbid tents, criminal activity or obvious vagrancy. That’s it.
This drives them somewhere. Hopefully to all the tens of billions in shelters we have funded over the last few years. If not there, then at least to those cities that choose to display their endless compassion. I consider this a win/win, as the homeless get to live in their tents, progressives get to feel good about themselves every time they see their cities filled with addicts, and the rest of us get to enjoy our communities safe from these criminals.
I think it is important to separate the two types of homeless though. Most homeless in California are not the tent/shopping cart derelicts, but rather people who were kicked out of or can’t afford their home. Shelters and organized parking lots (many own cars) can work for these.
You mean win/win ironic of course, but there is some validity in this line of thought. You're implicitly referring to the Tiebout model & a Tiebout equilibrium, named after the economist Charles Tiebout.
Tiebout suggests that individuals "vote with their feet" by moving to communities that best match their preferences for public goods and services. This model posits that competition among local jurisdictions leads to an efficient allocation of resources, as people can choose to reside in areas that provide the desired level of taxation and public services.
The problem with Tiebout's idea is that the most desired level of taxation and public services is "low taxes and high services," which rich people can get by forming their own community and excluding poor people through zoning. Rich exclusionary suburbs free-ride off the economic growth provided by the central city, and import cheap labor from adjacent municipalities with cheaper housing, without paying into those other jurisdictions' accrued debt and pension obligations.
Tiebout just explains NIMBYism really well.
I am of course familiar with Tiebout, but the argument is broader than that. I believe institutions are complex adaptive systems which evolve over time. It is important to have a diversity of differing and competing institutions and local systems that can learn from and benchmark each other, and which compete not just for residents, but ideas, investments and flourishing. A side benefit Is that people with different goals and values can choose the one best suited for their preferences.
I am serious that I believe a substantial number of people want to live in cities where derelicts are allowed to run amok. I want to live in (and visit) cities where this behavior is strictly prohibited. Win/win. Over time, we will see which cities thrive, which ones learn from their neighbors, and which don’t.
Ignores other jurisdictions free riding on yours.
"progressives get to feel good about themselves every time they see their cities filled with addicts"
Do you think progressives who think this are being hypocritical, and/or are causing the problem in the first place?
I think they are feeding the problem, not the solution. No reasonable person tries to solve a squirrel infestation by building more squirrel feeders.
When you say "the problem", to be clear, do you mean homelessness, or visible homelessness?
They are feeding the problem of derelicts setting up tents in parks and sidewalks, public defecation, constant theft and open drug use.
The key distinction is not visibility vs invisibility. It is between derelicts and homeless people. These are not in any way the same groups.
Most of the stats on homeless measure people who got kicked out of their rental or their household for various reasons, often economic. These people don’t want to sleep in tents, steal from your car or defecate in public. Shelters and places where they can park work great for this majority. Shelters and food and toilets make their lives better.
The other issue is mentally disturbed derelicts. These are small in number, but extremely destructive in behavior. And yes, as you suggest, more visible.
The solution is shelters and enforcement against crime and vagrancy. This is an extremely easy solution and it works overnight at eliminating the problem with derelicts. Either they go to the shelters, they leave town, or they go to the pokey. I do not know if this makes their Lives better or worse. I am willing to live with worse though.
I think this might be downstream from the general reluctance of the left to accept that some people are different than others.
Because once you accept that "people who had a one-time crippling economic problem" are not the same as "mentally ill people" which are not the same as "drug addicts", the solutions seem kinda obvious.
* cheap housing for the economically unlucky (perhaps just enough place so that you can get some sleep and put your stuff somewhere, so that you can get a job, and then save money for something better)
* free health care for the mentally ill
* mandatory treatment for the drug addicts (in a guarded place where they can't easily buy more drugs)
This would work much better that e.g. building shelters for everyone, where the economically unlucky get their stuff stolen by the drug addicts, and cannot sleep at night because the mentally ill are screaming all night long. (And then, obviously, if they can't get solid sleep and can barely keep their own clothes, they have a problem getting a job.)
But the style of thinking "there are different kinds of people, and we need different solutions for them" is kinda taboo for the left, which prefers to attribute all human suffering to the same generic underlying reason (patriarchy, capitalism, whatever) and treats all details as attempts to make excuses for the system.
Brilliant comment. The best I have read through this entire thread. Thanks for putting this into words.
We've been trying to separate the deserving poor from the undeserving poor since government policy on this started. It's not been successful yet, and every ten years of so we have a commission to figure out why and how to do it better. Then people ignore the commissions because they always say that trying to separate deserving from undeserving isn't effective.
I think mounihan from the 1960s is the best known one.
OK so to be clear your answer is visible homelessness. The fact that the visible homeless are mostly what you'd call derelicts doesn't change the fact that you think the problem is visible homelessness.
To get back to what I had in mind from my original comment ... you say progressives are doing things to "feel good about themselves", seems like the implication is supposed to be that they aren't trying to solve the problem. But they also might have a different definition of what "the problem" is.
I think affordable housing is a relevant issue, and is very important to the non-visible homeless problem. I see very little being done on this front, and much waste and featherbedding. The billions are spent and cheap housing and even temporary shelters are never really built.
On the visible tent city derelict problem, the progressive response in places like SF has been actively counterproductive. You don’t solve this issue by opposing rules against sidewalk camping, or by supporting open air drug markets or by reducing penalties for indecency or theft.
I actually agree with you that progressives have a different definition from the average person on what the problem is and they also have different from common sense ideas on how to solve issues. That is the problem.
If by "causing the problem" you mean actively fighting over the homeless, trying to incentivize them coming to their town and not others... yeah.
"We love all immigrants, especially the homeless, who should receive free health care, foodstamps etc."
Have you not heard of San Francisco Jack?
This isn't going to work unless the justice system stops putting homeless people on probation, which makes it difficult or impossible for them to move
I really can't think of any of you celebrating this as a win as anything but sociopaths. The articles and especially comment sections on homelessness on ACX are perhaps the primary factor in my disinterest in personally identifying as a rationalist or engaging with the rationalist community beyond reading blog posts. Rest assured that the poor are as disgusted by the rich as vice versa.
I’m not really sure where you got the idea that Scott is celebrating this given that this post is pretty agnostic as to weather the trade of that San Francisco is making is good or evil. The only other post Scott has written on the topic was pretty sympathetic to homeless people. I suppose it’s possible, you think that it’s sociopathic not to care about the preferences of the people who dislike seeing homelessness, but that’s a pretty unusual View so I think you are probably talking about lack of concern for the homeless.
If you need to see the problem, a neutral discussion of the Holocaust would not be okay "because it is neutral."
The complaint here is that the rationalist community has the wrong tone on certain topics
What do you mean, exactly? Is it wrong of me to say "Roughly 6 million jewish people were executed by the Nazis" without also adding "and I think that sucks!"? Surely not that, but some number of statements where this requirement to announce a non-neutral position kicks in maybe? Or perhaps the neutral statements need to have a Nazi-adjacent perspective- is it wrong to say, "The Nazis sought a Germany without jewish people and, through their policies of terror and extermination, accomplished over 90% of this goal during their tenure" without slipping the word "evil" in there?
The latter bit overlooks that the overwhelming majority of Jews killed in the Holocaust were not German but instead from further east (though there were also a large chunk of Jews from countries west of Germany).
And also they were talking about annexing a lot of that further-east region into Germany.
Dave Barry in Cyberspace. page 145-146:
Before emoticons:
Over 7000 men died at Gettysburg
After emoticons
Over 7000 men died at Gettysburg :(
See the difference? The readers of the second sentence will immediately recognize that it's talking about a bad thing.l
Suggesting that someone’s attitude towards a situation is sociopathic generally implies a lot more than only suggesting that their tone is not one that you approve of. To me it appears obvious from what Scott has written that he does care about homeless people, and frankly if you look at the ACX pole results The policy positions of his readers don’t seem that unreasonable or cruel either.
I’m not really sure why a neutral discussion of the Holocaust would be objectionable as long as by neutral, you mean that it takes no normative policy position as opposed to thinking the holocaust was morally neutral. This is especially true if some of your readers are nazis who are unlikely to change their minds. No point compromising readability by making them emotionally defensive, especially when they act like reasonable people on other topics. I also think it’s standard practice even in academia for papers on positive topics to try to be professionally neutral, although it’s not a hard and fast rule.
What's wrong with neutral discussions of the Holocaust? I would want to point to a just-the-facts summary in any encounter with a Holocaust denier.
I think Scott’s tone in this article is highly skeptical of the idea that removing encampments has been a good or especially a compassionate action.
This is an odd take. The scholarly literature is filled with neutral takes on the Holocaust, and re genocide in general.
Do you feel a specific tone? Or by "tone" do you mean that they attempt to be "tone-less", and you find that distasteful?
Genuine question, I'm not trying to set you up or anything, but do you think discussing object level facts is impossible? Like, human beings don't have the ability to talk about the world as it is without implicitly signaling how we would like it to be?
Isn't the whole point of the rationalist community prioritizing rational analyses over tone and optics? It sounds like the complainer values the opposite and so rightly does not identify with the rationalist community.
Scott is not celebrating it. But he is bending over backwards to be neutral precisely because a lot of his audience wants to celebrate this sort of cruelty.
Only in the same way that criticism is violence.
Hmm there seems to be a lot of background in your comment that escapes me. There was no discussion of socialism in this thread, and no one said homeless people were morally superior beings, just that they are in fact people, and are worthy of some moral concern in the same way all people are.
I agree with that, but as I mentioned in a later comment, I’m just not sure why that is objectionable because to me it appears like the common sense thing to do if that is the attitude of a good portion of your readers and you don’t think that you are likely to change most of their minds if you tried, although in fact, in his previous post on the topic, Scott absolutely tried. In any case, I think there is great value in morally neutral discussion on policy topics, even where you think one side is horrendous. Honestly, we have literal neutral discussions of the Holocaust in the scholarly literature and I don’t think anyone considers that a bad thing, so I’m really not sure what the problem is with Scott having a neutral tone on this topic. And he’s not even all that neutral in this post, since he frequently goes out of his way to mention how these policies weren’t compassionate, but does not make any comparable shots in the opposite direction.
I agree that Scott’s largely neutral tone here is appropriate. I took the main complaint of the earlier comment to be about the audience.
Definitely nothing cruel about letting drug-addled psychos destroy the commons and attack passers-by with minimal consequences for years on end, either. Nope. Nothing wrong with that. Only the least of these have sentient value.
It's unbecoming to treat a desire to curtail someone's undesirable behavior as an endorsement or acceptance of whatever motivated said behavior.
Kenny shows no desire to curtail anyone's undesirable behavior, and some comments that approach acceptance if not not explicit endorsement of that behavior.
And given that we're talking about San Francisco, can we agree that there is a substantial subpopulation that is explicitly in favor of, or at minimum resistant to any treatment of, such anti-social, self-destructive behaviors?
Maybe I'm missing your point?
My point is that your comment is an accusation of "You condemn some behavior but not the other. Thus, you are blind to, or support, said other." I don't think that's charitable.
Kenny supports Scott's willingness to try and curtail any feeding of people who see the homeless as irritations at best and civilizational liabilities at worst. That should not be treated as support for the behavior or existence of the homeless.
Or, for that matter, accepting a status quo that entails a marginal, precarious, and humiliating existence for its supposed beneficiaries, at the same time it destroys the capacity of their host cities to provide services - or even a facsimile of consistency and safety.
Perhaps that sounds unfair, but advocates haven't found politically viable solutions to root causes after at least three decades of tireless work, and it's clear that many of them consider visibility to be an indispensable motivational tool.
Much better said than my own feckless comment, thank you.
I find the "slow, repetitive suicide" approach San Francisco has adopted for many years and at incredible cost to be horribly inhumane, both to the visible and unlikely to be resolved homeless, and everyone that has to deal with them.
You assume that "advocates" actually want to find solutions, rather than get praised on the cocktail circuit and feel good for "donating" time and effort.
"Feed the homeless" makes a lot of people feel good about their wasteful spending, after all. Creating channels that commercial entities can use to offer "lower price leftovers" doesn't make Sue Ann the Housewife feel very good, even if it's overall more efficient and a better use of everyone's resources.
Do you think that changed? Are people being arrested for violence that they weren’t arrested for before? All I see is that the non-violent as well as the violent have had their personal property stolen and destroyed because it is on public property.
Yes, and if they keep having their personal property stolen and destroyed, they will understand that it's not safe to be here.
So the goal is to decrease public safety and increase theft and property destruction, as long as it happens to people too poor to have a place to live? I would have thought the goal was to *increase* public safety and *decrease* theft and property destruction, but now it seems like you just wish there was more of it happening to the people you disapprove of.
It is not clear to me what changed, and it's not clear to Scott who's much closer and much more invested in the problem.
Public property is, as the name suggests, for the public. Privatizing it because some people think they have a right to colonize some of the most expensive land in the country is absurd.
If everything is owned already, how does one exist without violating someone else's property rights?
Subset of the larger problem that there's no real philosophical grounding to where legitimate property rights arise from.
Conveniently eliding that the homeless are far more likely to be victims of assaults than perps.
Perhaps in some limited sense, like gang members are also more likely to be victims of other gang members. As the saying go, the worst thing about being poor is being around other poor people.
I think you underestimate the ability of normal people to just fuck with homeless and not suffer any consequences for things that would land them in court with assault charges if done to people with an address.
Scott is nigh-infinitely more sympathetic to the homeless and more willing to put up with them than a substantial part of his commentariat, so calling us out is unsurprising but lumping in Scott is suggestive of someone that doesn't really pay much attention.
A charitable reader of the original comment might assume that the commenter doesn't believe that Scott is cruel to the homeless, but she looks askance at Scott for providing a forum where people feel comfortable expressing contempt or hatred of the homeless.
Alas, it is difficult to choose one's fans, and to disabuse the principles of free speech to protect the feelings of people committing slow public suicide is a strange tradeoff to me.
But indeed, thank you for providing a charitable alternative reading.
The stakes are much higher than the feelings of the homeless. You seem to want to to isolate the homeless in word as well as deed, people who are already relatively isolated. But only relatively.
Despite what you may think, homeless people have friends, family and loved ones who care about their welfare. We will not be dissuaded and we our influence has grown in society for 40 years. I have no reason to think this trend will not continue. Tolerance of tent encampments in obvious places was a relatively new thing, and I don't think a return to the norm on that represents a sea change in overall attitudes towards homelessness.
Nor is our mission to protect the homeless from petty tyrants incompatible with a commitment to public order.
Taxonomize them, anyway; conflating crazy with unlucky seems disingenuous.
Or maybe the people in this conversation each are expressing their own views, and Scott is ultimately responsible only for his own words, not for having a discussion where offensive-to-you views are sometimes aired.
I would gather most people commenting are empathetic, largely because they don't deal with this firsthand face to face. Empathy has its limits, when your car gets broken into over and over, when your children volunteer for used needle pickup at the playground, when you find human feces in your driveway.
I'm commenting because I'm empathetic, and have seen these people from 12 stories up. Yes, the human feces is real (and in hospitals, contaminating the air supply to vulnerable populations). Yes, the used needles are real.
In a city that's insolvent, I'm first for "get the businesses running again" so we can afford a bit for the homeless (kept someplace in Fairywood, preferably. We have plenty of abandoned dwellings).
I believe in creating cities that make money (and we can discuss "helping the helpless" after the budget is solvent again). I also believe that sending homeless to hospitals for $5,000 a night care is ridiculous. We could throw all these people into forestry camps (with somewhat okay mental health care), and save money -- and solve depression while we're at it, most likely. Let these "mostly ablebodied" people pay for their own care, if possible. It'll be a lot more possible if we put them someplace that doesn't cost $2000/month for housing (is that low? I didn't pull the numbers.)
I think we should be concerned about the implications of throwing people into labor camps against their will.
Both America and Australia have been throwing children into detention camps against their will (granted in America the children were kidnapped -- and not by our government).
Camel's standing right in front of you, I think it's past time to complain about it's nose.
Well, cheap labor could restore the viability of producing goods here in the states... That's going to be important if we're serious about removing illegal immigrants from the country.
Indeed, we should.
And we shouldn't ignore the implications of the alternatives, like letting them commit slow suicide in the streets, or harass passers-by with minimal consequence, or end up in a Jordan Neely/Daniel Penny situation thanks to the state playing catch-and-release with an unstable, violent person incapable of caring for or controlling themselves.
The whole thing where we let people commit multiple violent crimes and still leave them on the streets is very bad, but it does seem pretty distinct from the problem that we have many people living on the streets. Most homeless people, even most crazy homeless people, are not attacking anyone. And for the ones who do attack people, they need to be locked up for everyone else's safety.
Productive aka forestry camp > unproductive aka tent camp, right?
Like public schools, yeah; separation of education and state.
> especially comment sections on homelessness on ACX are perhaps the primary factor in my disinterest in personally identifying as a rationalist
Have you ever read comment sections on news websites and social media?
Everywhere you go online, you can see hundreds of examples of people being dumb-asses. But it's important to remember that those hundreds of people actually represent less than 1% of any community.
My point being, don't shy away from rationalism or any community because of a hyper-minority of people that write on comment sections
Mencius Moldbug once referred to angry commenters on the SF Chronicle's website as the "Ku Klux Chron" https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2008/07/olxiii-tactics-and-structures-of-any/
+1
Yeah, I think Scott's article is high-quality, but then it's telling that the first comment immediately jumps to "But couldn't we do even better if the law let us imprison anybody we don't like for the crime of being poor?"
I advocate imprisoning them for all the crimes they are committing, not for being poor.
Like the crime of sleeping outside, for example!
“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.”
The world has changed a lot since that quote. The homeless today are homeless because of their own poor decisions.
So, which poor decisions are you planning to make illegal? Be specific.
Non-delegation problems in the ACX comments!
* Theft
* Harassment
* Assault
* Stalking
* Public defecation
* Public nudity
* Creating a public nuisance
* Obstructing public movement
* Panhandling
* Public drug use/intoxication
* Littering
Note - these are all already illegal. If they're actually enforced with rigor, most people would probably consider the "homeless problem" solved.
I mean, a lot of them are just crazy. Nobody *decides* to be schizophrenic. Nobody really *decides* to become a fentanyl addict, either, though at least that involves a sequence of increasingly bad decisions.
>Rest assured that the poor are as disgusted by the rich as vice versa.
People who've actually interacted with the poor know that isn't true.
I've spent a lot of time with the poor and it's complicated. It's hard for me to easily sum up their views on the rich.
>Rest assured that the poor are as disgusted by the rich as vice versa.
So do the poor avoid the rich like the rich avoid the poor? https://helena-pedrotti.github.io/assets/docs/jmp.pdf
>I really can't think of any of you celebrating this as a win as anything but sociopaths.
Suppose the public park nearest to you was turned into a liquor store or a strip club or something. Do you think you have a right to be upset about it? Most liberal people would say "of course I do."
Well then we have a right to be upset about the nearest public park becoming unusable for us because of homeless encampments.
> Do you think you have a right to be upset about it?
Yes, but that doesn't give you a right to celebrate a "solution" which involves utterly ruining the liquor store owner or strippers' lives, particularly if (for whatever thought-experiment reason) they had no other option than to exercise those careers at that particular place. Homeless people are a nuisance, but being homeless is a tragedy. Both are problems, but prioritising the first thing over the second is like thinking that medicine is the art of stopping the wounded from staining healthy people's carpets with all their leaking bodily fluids, by any means necessary.
I think it's fair to close down the strip club, even though that would require the strippers to move or find new jobs.
If we think about a real-world strip club, yes. But homeless people are homeless because they don't have any other realistic options. As Scott points out in the post, cracking down on campers typically only results in them having even *even worse* living conditions. I think it would be immoral to forcibly close down the strip club if, say, the strippers' only fall-back option was full on sex-slavery.
I don't think that's the right analogy. Mostly they're going off to live in tents somewhere else (the credible threat of tent confiscation exists, but it's unclear how often it's actually carried out vs just used to convince them to move the tent, or how hard it is to obtain a new tent). I don't think the real negatives here are comparable to the stripper to slave jump you describe.
(conversely, in the real strip club case if the strippers decided that instead of going to work somewhere else they'd rather stick around and do private dances in the shut down club they'd eventually get arrested for trespassing)
Well, that's a factual question. The impression I get from Scott's post is that they're sleeping on sidewalks instead of tents. If in fact the vast majority manage to keep their tents and are setting them up somewhere else, that'd be a very different matter.
>But homeless people are homeless because they don't have any other realistic options.
California has 48 million acres of government-owned land according to the internet. Surely they could spare a few acres for some hinterland shantytown to store away all those people that have no interest in treatment and no interest in participating in civilization.
Begging money from rich(er) people is a form of participation in civilization. It's probably not one you approve of, but if it's something you want to prevent people from doing then you have to own up to the fact that you're planning to prevent them from doing the non-violent thing that they want to do, and can't pretend you're just giving them what they want.
>Both are problems, but prioritising the first thing over the second is like thinking that medicine is the art of stopping the wounded from staining healthy people's carpets with all their leaking bodily fluids, by any means necessary.
It depends on WHY they're leaking bodily fluids all over the place. Whether you consider the homeless to be victims of circumstance, victims of society, or responsible for their own condition. I think it's the latter.
ERs do not, in point of fact, refuse to patch up a bleeding patient just because they injured themselves deliberately, let alone because they got themselves injured "by their own fault" out of stupidity or clumsiness. They just restore anyone up to a baseline standard of health, no questions asked — responsibility doesn't come into it. Call it morality, call it a provision of the social contract, call it just plain supererogatory charity — but that's how it works.
I regard homelessness as another state that is abject enough that a civilised society ought to try and rescue *anyone* it feasibly can from it, on principle, whoever they are and however they got there.
How do you intend to rescue Rambo? Do you intend to have a cross-country manhunt to find the special ops guy who has "gone rogue"? I can assure you that spending more than ten days trying to find a guy like that (before he starves and starts hunting dumpsters) is going to cost a mint.
Should I assume that your denialism about mental illness extends even to cases of severe paranoid schizophrenia?
Should I assume that you think paranoid schizophrenics could stop hearing voices and seeing people who aren't there, if they just TRIED harder? Schizophrenia among the homeless is greatly disproportionate.
> Whether you consider the homeless to be victims of circumstance, victims of society, or responsible for their own condition.
I think it's different causes for different people, and everyone who insists that it must be the same reason for everyone is contributing to our inability to solve the problem.
Some people choose to experiment with drugs (hey, even many "rationalists" will insist that this is perfectly safe, because they did their "research" on the internet), then they get addicted, then they lose the ability to function like normal adults.
Some people lose their house in a divorce, or need to sell it to pay their medical bills.
Any solution that suggests the same treatment for both groups is stupid, no matter whether the treatment is harsh or kind. The people who take drugs need to get the drugs taken away from them. The people with huge medical bills need cheap housing, preferably not with the drug addicts in the same room.
Every law we have gets enforced in ways that are (or can get) mean and violent and life-wrecking. Keep violating even a pretty minor law and you'll find yourself hauled off to jail for it, and maybe losing your job when you don't come in for a few days because you're in jail, and then losing your apartment for nonpayment of rent, and....
I think a lot of the people who agree with you (like me!) just don't engage with the sociopaths. Some of the names here are common posters but a lot I think only show up for homelessness posts and in any event I don't know that most of them identify with rationalists.
Turok's not acting like a sociopath. He's acting like an idealogue who has a decent solution (legalize flophouses). Not only is the solution he's proposing "something that will work" -- it's something we've already seen work.
Im all for legalize flophouses / boarding houses. Society used to have a place where down-and-outs lived but we removed them because landowning became the most important asset class and so everyone needs to keep their land prices high.
In the meantime, until those places exist, criminalizing being poor or homeless, or being so concerned about how tents are an "eyesore" or "kill the vibe" that you want to make the lives of homeless people worse is extremely unempathetic and wrong.
Actual violence is a different story, violence should result in prosecution. But the amount of people who want to tear up tent camps because they just generally dislike having crazy homeless people around is saddening.
Okay, can I ask a simple question? Do you feel people have the right to litter needles and deal drugs Wherever They Please? Because that's what you're saying to me, when you say "tents are an eyesore" is Not Allowed As An Opinion.
I say this because that's what we had. We also had tent sites causing collisions with bicycles and otherwise making walking paths unsafe -- please note: this is a problem that can be caused by the mentally ill, without them trying to be criminals. (Also imagine dogs that want to chase bikes).
We, for that matter, are a city with low cost of living, and a relatively brutal climate (unsupported, homeless lose feet in the winter).
My city is bankrupt, by the way. And we lost a lot of business downtown due to COVID. I'd like to get downtown rolling again, and that's a LOT HARDER with tent encampments scaring "suburban white flight boomers" whenever they come down for a baseball game.
Then maybe you should be advocating for legal flophouses. That’s going to be in your city’s zoning codes, not a state or federal law.
Meh. I'd do so if I thought it would work. As it is, we have a ton of abandoned houses, that we could put homeless in, if we wanted. Of course, to some, this is "concealing the problem."
There are a dozen different ways to square "take care of the homeless" and "don't scare off the money-spilling white flight boomers". But not if we say "homeless have Super Big Priority, and cannot be forced to move 5 blocks from where they set up, right in front of a large convention hotel."
I’m not sure that today’s down-and-outs are in the same boat as those of the Gilded Age. But then, I’m not really familiar with the history of flophouses. If you’ve got any more on the subject, I’d be interested.
My naive model is that America used to have much more demand for unskilled, intermittent, fungible labor. This gave down-and-outs a credible source of income. Automation and the pivot to a service economy have reduced that demand, squeezing the bottom of the housing market out of economic viability. There’s still some demand, but it gets handled by fitting half a dozen day laborers into a bedsit.
I don’t know if this model holds up to the realities of economics or regulation.
I'm on nextdoor (I know, I know). People have a lot of demand for unskilled intermittent labor. They're generally not willing to hire the homeless to come into their house and clean, though, or chop trees or mow the lawn. This may be because the Gilded Age indigents were more mentally stable and less criminal (or because we had other protections that led to "letting this possible weirdo into my house" is less of a problem).
In the Gilded age, we had six people living in a two room apartment. That was tenement life. People didn't complain much.
I don't know that it survives economically, I just know that they weren't pushed out for economic reasons - they were pushed out by government policy at the local level by interests that did not want there to be boarding houses for land value reasons. This took the form of zoning restrictions, minimum parking lot sizes minimum bathroom numbers minimum space requirements etc.
I don't know that removing those restrictions (bad for all building and all housing generally) would mean boarding houses make a come back (though I expect the number the market demands is definitely not _zero_) but it would at least make it possible. The reality is since they weren't removed for economic reasons, we just don't know.
Easing the kinds of rules that make boarding houses possible also just makes building anything easier generally so it's really more about "make it possible to build anything in SF"
There's far too much law. Freedom > democracy.
Credentialism's problematic, sure.
It’s in there somewhere, but that’s like blaming regulation for the unpopularity of coal.
There’s just not as much demand for unskilled, transient labor. Employers would rather automate or outsource. Even if you removed all degree or cert requirements, I don’t think you’d have the critical mass needed to make flophouses profitable.
I follow these comment sections fairly closely, and don't recall ever seeing your name before you showed up in this post about homelessness.
Ive been commenting irregularly since it was SSC. There's probably a way on my profile to see my comment history. I mostly argue with Deiseach or get pulled in against my better judgement on trans issues comment threads
>I mostly argue with Deiseach
A commenter of good taste!
Assuming Scott is right here:
> In the end, both sides underestimated how basic the tradeoff was, and the system gave the voters what they wanted regardless.
Your issue is not with Rationalists, it's with the majority voting population of *California*
I think the same logic which dictates that solving visible homelessness is a solution to homelessness, also implies that the solving rationalists commenting on bad policy is a solution to bad policy.
I don't.
Visible homelessness and homelessness are *both* problems. Different people put different weights on which one is more important, but both are real problems.
Rationalists commenting on bad policy is not a problem. At least no one sane would put that in the same level of actual bad policy.
The desire to curtail the obnoxious effects of segments of the homeless population is popular in most circles, it's certainly not a rationalist specific thing. I think only certain very progressive groups have the opinions that you're looking for.
This comment and its concurring replies are rather Bay Area filter bubbled. You're referring to a sentiment something like "we are happy that the homeless affliction is receding from our lives, and it's acceptable for that to entail a moderate regression of homeless people's experiences", right? Considering the country outside the Bay Area, to say nothing of the rest of the world, practically nobody is going to call that sociopathic.
It's going to be so interesting to see how people like them react when their bubble pops. When they see what humanity is capable of when they truly just want something gone.
I hope your weird fantasies about harming society's sickest and poorest bring you sufficient satisfaction in and of themselves. Because the American Constitution ensures that your fantasies will not be translated into reality.
The Constitution was never meant to be treated as scripture, but even if it is, if people stop believing that it's useful, it's little more than a rotting piece of paper. Thankfully, the Supreme Court can be very... creative with their interpretation of words, so it isn't even necessary for legislature to modify it in the first place.
What an incredibly hateful thing to say
Have you read the comments? There’s several out and out psychological fascists who fit the profile to a T in the comments demonstrating evident psychosexual glee that the people they think deserve the boot are getting the boot.
Did you read the post I was responding to? "I really can't think of any of you celebrating this as a win as anything but sociopaths"
Though I will grant you that there are some authoritarian tendencies on display. For too long there has been a preening moral crusade against enforcing laws that has destroyed public areas. That really brings out the fascist in people as for years the more reasonable requests for public safety are mocked and derided. And when the progressive view is that the tent people are blameless victims with no personal responsibility or free will who are entitled to behave however they want wherever they want, and anyone who says otherwise is a fascist and a sociopath, don't be surprised when the pushback goes from reasonable to angry and frustrated to extreme.
The progressive policy has been tyrannical, in that they have enforced extreme policy without any regard for other voices. They are finding out that doing so makes people angry. Anti-racism was always just racism, and has created enormous numbers of out-right racists. Open borders has led to a cruel backlash. And allowing tent cities and drug markets in the public parks has led many to dehumanize the tent people. This was entirely predictable but they were getting high on their own supply and didn't care.
Second time I see a comment here conflating the poor with the homeless. Why? Do people here think the two are similar? I have very different attitudes toward them, but maybe I'm the weird one.
Yeah this is an intentional straw man, no one except very fringe commenters said anything about locking people up because they don't have money. 99% of people don't believe in that. But that doesn't mean they think you can break any law you like when poor.
This is a non-sequitur because in this type of comments section, we see plenty of tough guys suggesting vigilantism or police brutality as solutions to homelessness.
Clearly, respect for the law clearly isn't the sole motivation for these homeless harassers.
No one here has suggested that the law should be broken. What is being suggested is that the law be changed to make these common sense solutions legal.
I agree. I think about hell, an idea I've always opposed as a moral good. I don't wish it on anybody, but the closest I've come to viscerally supporting it in a while is reading these comments. I really get where those Old Testament prophets were coming from when they railed against those who oppressed the widow, the orphan, the foreigner, the slave, and the destitute. Many readers here may not care about religious scriptures, but scriptures from most major traditions since the dawn of time are full of terrible curses upon those who write comments like those here, and I think that says something about the moral heritage of humanity- how we found ourselves here, and how posterity will likely think of it.
Essentially, the proposition in question is that we should do terrible things - not just allow terrible things to happen, but actually do terrible things - to people who are unable to take care of themselves [or in a handful of extreme cases, may even just be unlucky]. We should do this because those people's inability to take care of themselves makes us feel awkward when we walk past the evidence of their destitution.
This is combined with wholly unpersuasive appeals to utilitarianism. A utilitarian would certainly *at the very least* ensure an adequate number of shelter spots before going ahead with any measure like destroying tents.
To me, it's actually worse for someone to advocate these measures, in cold blood, with malice aforethought behind a computer monitor than to commit many sorts of very serious crimes. Of course, I believe in free speech, so I don't think it should be *banned*, but that does not make advocating such any less objectively grave. I regard many of the comments here as similar in wickedness to, for example, assaulting someone on the street.
>to people who are unable to take care of themselves
That's the thing, we don't agree they're unable to take care of themselves.
So you keep saying. Why?
Are we really doing the "speech is violence" thing unironically now? All we are doing is proposing solutions. It is ultimately up to the will of the people to decide the measures the state should take.
If you argue for an unjust war recklessly, you have a measure of that war’s blood on your hands. That's the case at its highest, but much the same applies in principle, though not to the same degree, to supporting any other immoral policy through recklessness or immorality.
Of course political speech in favour of violence in a democracy participates- whether justly or unjustly - in that violence. That we have decided to exempt it from prosecution for good reason doesn't change that. If a gang is deciding whether or not to whack Johnny, and you speak in favour of yes, you bear a portion of the guilt, a very large portion, for whacking Johnny, and the same is true of the political arena.
What if you do it carefully? Thoughtfully? What if you disagree that self-defense is unjust?
I do not agree with this. If you argue for an "unjust war" and it just so happens to include nuclear armageddon, something you were not expecting -- and could not have reasonably expected, you are not particularly responsible for the increase in tentacle porn consumption.
Experiences with Neocons inform this comment. Do not hire neocons, even if they come under the "Joe Biden" mantle.
"people's inability to take care of themselves makes us feel awkward when we walk past the evidence of their destitution"
But for this, I could probably stomach your moral preening, but you're minimizing the problem and you're smart enough to know it.
If by "terrible things" you mean crucifying people or boiling them in oil, I agree we should not do that stuff. If by "terrible things" you mean arresting people who are violating the written law by camping in a public park and throwing away the stuff they are illegally keeping in the public park, I don't think that is especially terrible as normal uses of police powers go.
If we are going to have public spaces, then it has to be possible for the public (working via law/elections) to determine how those spaces may or may not be used. And the tools we have for enforcing those decisions are police and courts and jails and the like. The alternative is that those public spaces become no longer available to the public in general, but instead owned by whichever people happen to be the hardest to dislodge.
It's probably worth noting that people do routinely have their car impounded when they're arrested (and if they can't come up with the fine + impound fee, they don't get their car back). Plenty of people lose their jobs when they end up in jail for awhile and can't make it to work. And so on. The police doing normal law enforcement--stuff we have to have done to keep a functional society--regularly will mess up the lives of the people who are being arrested.
Well put. I 100% agree.
I think the article is not as bad as you think, it shows the situation is cruel, even if it says it in a somewhat neutral tone.
But yes a lot of the comments are quite frustrating. But is it really the "rationalist community", I am really unsure, to me it feels like there is a lot of far right/trumpist who are here since a long time without being that much interested by epistemology (except when it is used as a weapon against who they don't like, which is why they are here).
Your graph and trend line for accidental overdose deaths is sloppy and way below your usual standard.
The Six-Month Average for the first month immediately after Lurie took office was higher than the month prior to him taking office. But the Six-Month Average fell in subsequent months. Your trend line is completely misleading.
It's a six-month average, so as each new month is added, the 7-month-prior month is removed. If you look to the immediate left of the Lurie elected line, you can see the prior months were lower than the later ones. Replacing a low month with a higher month raises the average, even if the new month is lower than the average.
So all the data seems correct, the Six-Month Average has indeed increased every month of Mayor Lurie's tenure. That appears to largely be due to a drop in the 6 months prior reverting to the more typical values over the prior few years, but it's not sloppy.
Yes this is immediately obvious to anyone who has done a rolling average on time series data, it's completely misleading and in this case is glaringly obvious on the actual chart!
As anecdotal evidence on the "Homeless encampments have a much bigger impact on perception than raw numbers" I have lost count of the number of Europeans I've spoken to who have offered shock or sympathy at 'America's homeless problem' while residing in countries that have higher per capita homeless numbers than America. Several times I had people literally not believe me even while being showed numbers online because it was so askew from their perception.
Tbf there is a big problem of definitions. At the extreme end, somebody indefinitely couch-surfing from friend to friend on amicable terms isn't usually what people think about when they say homeless, and it's not even clear whether this is a problem where the state ought to jump in and solve it.
But even in less extreme cases, it can be unclear; Surfer guys who just earn barely enough through occasional day-labor or teaching and might not even have a van or other place are in many ways much closer to "traditional" homeless, but they often just like the lifestyle and don't bother anyone much.
I definitely get the impression that the US has more disorderly, disruptive homeless which is driving the impression, and of which encampments are just a symptom. But that's actually not that easy to measure.
On a previous thread I looked into homelessness statistics in Australia.
It turned out that they were counting people living in overcrowded accommodations as homeless, and that these accounted for about 70% of the problem. Another big slice were people living in short term crisis accommodations (ie the thing we use to solve homelessness). Then there were a bunch of couch surfers and car sleepers, and finally the central-example rough sleepers who were just one thousand out of the headline number of 200,000.
So yes, I recommend not comparing homelessness statistics across different countries which may use different definitions, because some countries will say that three people sharing a two bedroom apartment can all be homeless.
TIL that I was homeless for a year or two. Even while, for part of that, literally owning real estate.
(My two apartmentmates were brothers; they were fine with sharing a room.)
Harvard's busy claiming (I cited upthread) that a single human being "not able to afford a two bedroom apartment on minimum wage" is a violation of the human right to housing.
I disagree. Efficiencies (or one-bedrooms) are much cheaper than 2 bedroom accommodations.
And saying "you can't live on minimum wage" is different from saying "a mom and three kids can't live on minimum wage" (please note: many moms would sleep in the same room as their kids, particularly if young).
lol since when is there a human right to housing?
I wasn't the one putting that up. That was Harvard. It's probably a pretty standard "right" from the "positive rights" people, though, alongside the "right to healthcare" (Here's a hint: it takes well upwards of ten million dollars to do a sex change properly (some people pour a lot of money into passing, I guess). We're not going to pay that, even if it does actually make one person's life easier.)
Oh I know you weren't saying that, I just wanted to make fun of it.
>to do a sex change properly
That's a contradiction in terms. There's no such thing as a properly done sex change. There is such a thing as therapy for body dysmorphia, however.
Could you share further info on this claim?
"overcrowded accommodations as homeless, and that these accounted for about 70% of the problem."
Turns out I misremembered the numbers, here's the actual numbers:
https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/people/housing/estimating-homelessness-census/latest-release
Of the 122,494 people experiencing homelessness in Australia in 2021:
Two in five (39.1%) were living in 'severely' crowded dwellings
One in five (19.8%) were in supported accommodation for the homeless
One in six (18.1%) living in boarding houses
Then about another 13.5% temporarily staying with other households.
Overall, 94% of people classified as homeless were in fact sleeping indoors, and only six percent were "living in improvised dwellings, tents or sleeping out", of whom the majority are sleeping in cars.
I also exaggerated about the three people in a two-bedroom apartment being classified as homeless, actually the criterion is "residents in dwellings needing 4 or more extra bedrooms under the Canadian National Occupancy Standard". So that would be six unrelated people in a two-bedroom apartment, which is genuinely pretty crowded... but still not homeless!
And this is in Australia, where they have PSAs saying "don't sleep on the road." (I'm... assuming we can believe that these are substance abusers... if they aren't homeless).
Honest question: how is “teaching” listed beside “day labourer” for someone on the edge of homelessness? How bad are teachers treated in Europe?
Teaching surfing. It seemed obvious from context to me, so I kept it short.
Interesting writeup, thanks for the info! Time will tell but I am glad to have some answers earlier
You don't seem to consider the possibility that "getting tough" and removing encampments might have encouraged some homeless people to move in with relatives.
"Moved in with friends and relatives" is explicitly noted under falling housing prices.
I don't see that and Ctrl-F for "relative" didn't find it. I accept that I may have missed it, but can you show me where?
"Second, rents fell in most big California cities. Although unsheltered homeless usually can’t afford apartments at any rent, low rents still make it easier for friends and family members to house them."
Sorry. Thanks for the correction.
As a newly admitted UCSD student, my reading comprehension skills aren't very good.
That strikes me as really unlikely. What kind of homeless encampment is better than relatives in the first place? And if the relatives are managing to be worse, it's not a win to make people live with them.
That strikes me as a little naive. Isn't it likely that some people have relatives that are willing to take them in under certain conditions? "You can stay here but no drugs (and/or drinking and/or smoking) in the house"; "You can stay here but you have to wash your clothes weekly (or yourself daily)"; "You can stay here but you have to go to an AA (or NA, etc.) meeting daily." Or maybe the homeless person just hates the relative, but will tolerate him/her when a tent is no longer an option. There are dozens of possibilities.
You're talking about people who have chosen a life without heat or plumbing, over what their relatives have already offered. I don't think taking their tent away will send them home, I think it will send them into a dark alley, or a hole in the ground, for the same reason they didn't go home the first time.
About 50% of homeless people refuse shelter beds when offered.
"Fewer than half the people referred to shelter by the city’s (Seattle) HOPE team last year actually showed up to shelter and stayed there for at least one night, according to data released by the city’s Human Services Department during a meeting of the city council’s homelessness committee this week.
The city’s HOPE Team, which provides shelter referrals to people living in encampments the city is about to remove, referred 1,072 people to shelter in 2021; of those, 512 enrolled in shelter, meaning that they showed up and slept in a shelter for at least one night within 48 hours of receiving a referral." -- https://publicola.com/2022/03/18/most-city-shelter-referrals-dont-lead-to-shelter-police-preemptively-barricade-encampment-against-protests-city-says-it-cant-risk-handing-hope-team-to-county/
If you are intellectually honest, you will now and forever abandon the idea that every homeless person will take a shelter bed if offered.
Until we acknowledge the reality that many homeless actually DO prefer to live on the street "without heat or plumbing", we aren't going to offer realistic solutions to the problem.
Actually, if some homeless will take an offered shelter bed, then it is, in fact, a solution, albeit a partial solution.
Huh. How about, tent > relative > dark alley/hole in ground?
https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/addressing-the-u-s-homelessness-crisis/
First note: the homelessness may very well have been affected by the decrease in illegal immigrants.
Second note: 2 bedroom Apartment? We are no longer in "There is an efficiency, that people can live in." We are in "human rights include having a spare bedroom" territory. College students live worse than we are discussing as "human rights."
We could solve the homelessness problem very simply: "Double Up" (sans mental health issues). If every family that lives with one bedroom per person (let alone one bathroom per household), was instead willing to put two people in there, we'd be golden. [My neighborhood has half the number of people as at peak, and we have tons of space in these "mansions" designed for a full family, including uncle and grandma]
I'm afraid that traditional solutions for "homelessness" are now considered inhumane. Such as a hotel with one bathroom per floor, and, say, living in rooms the size of the Roosevelt Hotel's (sans bathroom -- and actual clothesline).
I think first generation immigrants are a small percentage of the homeless population.
This is not what Harvard is saying. Read the link.
The link doesn’t say anything about whether first generation immigrants are a small percentage of the population. They cite someone from a Chicago homeless organisation, and when I Googled them they were asking for funding after a political stunt where migrants were bused to Chicago - I didn’t find any actual numbers.
Asheville had immigrants dropped on them by the federal government, without anyone bothering to tell them they were coming. Said immigrants were the last plane in before a hurricane, which, needless to say, they were homeless throughout.
The Biden Administration was rather intentionally stuffing immigrants wherever people would let them, or at least not complain so much.
Also, Texas was sending a lot of immigrants to Chicago and New York (sanctuary cities, the Texans said "well, we got too many, how about you stand by your word, and take the extra off our hands")
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/migration-usa-bus/
Tens of thousands? Whatever stupid AI skimmer said 80,000 immigrants bused out of Texas. We're just going to say that a lot of them are homeless. There's a reason why Democrats are fighting so hard for free healthcare for immigrants.
I'm not sure I agree with the "trade-off" framing. It's like saying, there's a "trade-off" between putting a murderer in prison (bad for murderer) and keeping society safe (bad for society if he's on the loose). You *shouldn't* have a right to just set up a tent in a public place and live in it! This is a basic civilizational tenant.
I liked occupy wall street. You shouldn't have a right to litter in order to say "this is my space" and "non-homeless" keep out. We should be careful about instituting "rights" that compromise fiscal stability of government.
But that *is* a trade-off. Maybe you consider it an obvious one to take, but you shouldn't ignore the cost side for the murderer.
Like, if we tortured criminals horribly, and someone suggested we could do prison instead, which would equally well keep society safe, but be more humane, the fact that the prison would be more humane than the torture (i.e. less cost to the criminals) would mean that this is a better tradeoff, and we should take it. And you'd miss it if you didn't want to consider the cost side of our cost-benefit analysis for crime.
Everything in the entire world is a trade-off of some kind, but it doesn't mean that's the best framing for every issue.
+1
I actually think it is. Otherwise you wind up locked in absolutist thought patterns. When you think of something as a trade-off then compromise is automatically baked in. That lends itself to a more functional political process.
Take "No child left behind" as an example. *NO* child, really? Don't you think it's more realistic to recognize that SOME children actually can't keep up and we shouldn't spend arbitrarily large amounts of money to make sure we perfectly adhere to an unreasonable principle?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost%E2%80%93benefit_analysis#Criticisms
It's not obvious that prison is more humane https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/in-favor-of-flogginghtml https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/bias-against-tohtml https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/torture-kids-insteadhtml
Sure, I'll just concede that. I think the point stands that ignoring the cost side will prevent you from looking for or noticing more humane options, since they only affect the criminal cost side.
Your example is only true if the suffering of criminals is not inherently good. Many people strongly disagree with that view. They would say revenge is a legitimate goal of punishment, and murderers should be made to suffer for their crimes, not live in a 5 star hotel at government expense for the rest of their lives.
Many people also believe in demonic possession, which seems to allow for revenge without punishing humans.
I'm just going to stand up now and take a position against using demonic possession to punish criminals. This sounds both inhumane and extremely unwise....
Generally, the punishment is expulsion for the demon via exorcism.
(Are you genuinely not aware of demonic possession as an explanatory principle for criminal activity?)
Few things.
I don't know if people believe this as much as you think. I expect most people would consider *some* amount or kind of punishment to be "inhumane". If they actually thought that the suffering of criminals was inherently good, there would not be such a point, since more good, would be more good. After this point, under this worldview, the suffering of criminals once again becomes a cost.
Second, I personally think this is an evil point of view. Pain and suffering is bad, and you should only do it insofar as it produces more good than it causes in harm (e.g. through deterrence). I understand this is personal opinion.
Finally, there are still costs to consider (how much does it cost to create the suffering, for instance), and thinking of things in terms of trades or trade-offs is generally a correct thing, even if you want to put the suffering of criminals on the benefits side. I understand this is a utilitarian point of view, so perhaps controversial, but I still wish to defend thinking of things as tradeoffs.
Damn, this comment was a fine piece of writing.
Hum... tit-for-tat anyone? A system with no punishment i.e. suffering for criminals will have a higher equilibrium crime rate than one with punishment. Imposing suffering on criminals to reduce suffering on the non-criminals is a win in my book. Finding the optimum balance when everyone is using a learning strategy is dynamic in time problem.
Even within this (evil) framing, surely there has to be a sense of proportion to it. Eye for an eye and all that. Homeless people's lives already suck far more than they ever inconvenience honest people.
I don't think that counts unless the sucking is causally related to the inconveniencing.
Well, sure, I meant more that "if homeless people start out that badly, any attempt to make homeless people's lives noticeably *worse* than they already are, as punishment, will land at disproportionate punishment".
Just to clarify, we're talking about punishing homeless people who commit crimes that inconvenience others, such as illegal camping, right? And you're saying that they should not be punished at all for these crimes, as they are already suffering because of various other reasons?
+1
What's the alternative? What will they do instead of camping? The homeless person has to sleep *somewhere,* and "they should sleep in prison" is not necessarily a better choice. Not for the homeless person, who is in prison, and not for society, which now has to pay for additional police, courts, and prisons to punish them.
Like, in an ideal situation, nobody would set up camps in public because they all have nice homes to sleep in. But we are not in an ideal situation, and so we have to choose between multiple non-ideal possibilities, and *all* of them impose a cost on society.
(And this isn't an unusual framing for crimes, either. Have you ever driven over the speed limit? Well, lucky for you, society has decided that the trade-offs required to strictly enforce the rules of the road are unacceptable, so they will let you continue to drive at 70 mph even though by doing so you are making everyone else on the road less safe.)
I fear if we can’t agree that pitching a tent and living on the sidewalk should be illegal, there isn’t much of a discussion to be had.
The alternative is to require a modicum of participation in one’s own survival.
I'm not making an argument for what should be legal, I'm just pointing out that there are logical constraints on the situation. A homeless person has to sleep somewhere. By definition, they don't have anywhere private to sleep, so they must sleep on public property. Where do you think that should that be?
In a shelter? That costs society money.
In prison? That costs society money.
On a sidewalk? That costs no money to society, but imposes a cost in aesthetics and convenience.
Somewhere else? I'm open to suggestions, but I can be 100% confident that no matter where you pick *someone* will pay a cost for it.
"Trade-off" is exactly the right way to describe this situation. There is no magic Safe And Invisible Place Where Homeless People Can Sleep For Free waiting to be found.
When I've gone wild camping, I've typically done so somewhere people cannot see me, like in a forest. But surely setting up a camping ground somewhere secluded would not have to be terribly expensive.
I wonder if cracking down on drug dealing in general caused a decline in the number of people who became homeless because they did fewer drugs?
My impression of the RV homeless is they're mostly the type of guy who likes a little too much to get stoned, and as a result can't keep a job. In a low CoL area, they get a cheap apartment or trailer and the landlord puts up with it because he usually gets paid most of the rent, eventually. In expensive areas, the landlord has better choices for tenants, so this type of guy can't keep an apartment, either. So he buys a used RV and moves into that. But that life sucks more, so he smokes more pot and maybe gets into other drugs. If the city cracks down on drug dealing, it's easier to just stick with pot and alcohol, and it takes longer to go from RV to tent.
I think California/SF has a law which prohibits them arresting or detaining for vagrancy unless there are beds to put the homeless in, right?
And SF land is super expensive and there are no beds I believe, so they can't generally arrest.
But they do have a huge harbor and bay. So, why not convert a ship to a floating homeless housing and rehabilitation facility?
https://shipselector.com/offers/sale/passenger-vessel/cruise-vessel/17045-luxury-cruise-ship
This ship is 40m. It holds 2,767 guests and 912 crew.
I'm sure it would take another 40m to refit it to work as a medical/rehab facility and make rooms bigger. So maybe 2000-2500 beds at the end of the day, assuming most crew do not live on the boat. It does not need to actually go anywhere, so the mechanics probably don't need to be updated much.
There are huge dining/casino/theatre spaces that could be converted to the group spaces for rehab/medical/social/health spaces. On deck there are great outdoor spaces/pool, etc. Nicer than any rehab facility in the world. And of course you could build-up the railing to be safer from suicide risk.
I know 2500 is not enough to 'house' all the homeless. But, those are 2500 rehab beds, so you could have the top rehab missions, etc. from SF run them. So, ideally, these folks are rehabbed after x number of months, and they can return to life via half-way houses, etc. in SF or elsewhere. And opening this number of beds in rehab could enable to missions to convert the current rehab spaces into more transition/half-way housing in the city.
So, for 100m (which is really investing in a depreciating asset which could be sold if it fails), you could make a major dent in the problem.
Never heard anyone even mention this approach. Why?
Aside:
Yeah, after they leave half-way, where do they live then? No, this does not solve the affordability issue which is often blamed for the homeless situation. But, IMO, that's not the tightest correlation. I think that most of the homeless do not have tight ties to the city. Rather, they were drawn to city and downtown areas because SF permitted it, and people in addiction were drawn into these areas because of drug access and the fact that they could do whatever they wanted. The vast majority did not come for jobs, and got addicted because they did not have affordable housing.
And yeah, there are lots of people and families which are 'working homeless' but this is a different problem, which is directly correlated to the affordability issue. This is not focused on that problem.
The primary actual problems the city is dealing with:
- even when they achieve funding (and they have!) process fetish makes it almost impossible to actually _build_ anything with it. The government hasn't literally run out of parcels of lands to put shelters on, it has multiple shelter projects and then can't complete them for less than an exorbitant amount of money per bed because of had governance
- even when they achieve beds the 'problem' homeless don't actually want to go them and resist using them.
HomelessButOnBoats doesn't solve either of these and probably makes them both worse.
Separately you've also just unbelievably glossed over what a technical nightmare it would be to actually do that retrofit and then keep the boat maintained. Not a chance it could be done that cheaply and then wouldn't have horrific upkeep costs and besides as mentioned the problem isn't that there are literally no parcels, it would certainly be less dollar efficient than a traditional building. Plus wherever that boat was parked would suffer heavily. Centralizing that would be a disaster. And finally it would be an optics nightmare as well.
So this approach hasn't been mentioned because it provides literally nothing of utility to the problem (not trying to be mean just realistic)
I don't understand how you can say 'government has run out of parcels' and then say that adding 2500 beds on 'free' land (water) doesn't solve that exact problem.
And if you did this, you could convert a lot of the current spaces into transitional housing, which is needed just as much, and impossible to build because of land costs.
RE: "even when they achieve beds the 'problem' homeless don't actually want to go them and resist using them".. Yeah, well, this is not relevant to the argument, since any solution would face this same problem.
But, if you actually had enough beds, and rehabilitation services, and transitional housing, which the boat could solve, then you could shut-down the homeless via existing vagrancy laws, so the drug and social network of the street would no longer exist. It's no longer acceptable to live on the street, period. You don't want to take your meds, well, that's fine, but not on the street.
I literally said the government _has not_ run out of parcels. The problem isn't the land it's the building. They can't spend the money they do have (billions!) to effectively create shelters on land they already have.
And this is downstream of the structural housing issue in the first place. Houston doesn't have less homelessness than SF because they throw them all in prison or have more shelter beds, they have less homelessness because the median house price is one third that of SF and critically they actually _keep building more housing_ (country leading rate many years!).
Houston is also kinda hellish in the summer without Air Conditioning. And I doubt Houston actually bids for illegal immigrant homeless (if they did, I suspect the Texas State Government would do something about it).
Ha - that's what I said. Nobody wants to be in Houston - it's brutal. ;)
That's not a direct causation, it is loosely correlated. Houston/Texas is more aggressive with prosecuting drugs and crimes, so they are much less inviting for homeless in general. SF chronic drug/mental illness have a social network which includes drug access and lots of help from clinics, etc. Houston is the opposite, they make it very inhospitable. Also, ever been in Houston in the summer? Yuk! ;)
What is stopping SF from doing the same? Why can't we elect a politician who just runs on changing that?
ah - sorry I mis-read. Got it.
There’s plenty of empty land in San Francisco, most of it’s owned by the Navy
Yeah, just get trump to give it to you ;)
The second thing the boat concept does it allow you to do the modification/construction outside of SF, so you don't have to deal with city/planning/state bs. You could have it fitted anywhere, very quicly and cheaply relative to building in SF.
Putting people on boats would circumvent a lot of the process obstacles to building shelters. There would be no locals who could complain, and much less accretion of past tedious city regulations.
Is there spare space in the bay? It’s a major working harbor, with gigantic container ships and others coming in and out all the time. I don’t know what kind of maneuvering space these ships actually need, do you?
Yeah if you look around the piers that take cruise ships in the bay, there are many piers which could take a ship that size. It would also probably stay docked, and it would not need mass boarding/customs etc like an actual cruise ship dock.
So, if they wanted to, the city could do it. There are various gov levels which control some of the docks/piers so they might get the access for free.
Around here: https://maps.app.goo.gl/nCNrndrjpex22mDa8
Are you saying that there are unused cruise piers, or that the city should buy, rent, or confiscate one of the cruise piers for this purpose?
There seems to be unused, and capacity.
Check this map: https://maps.app.goo.gl/nCNrndrjpex22mDa8
Generally: I think maybe 10% actually have boats docked at the point of the sat photos.
If you look at them one-by-one, there seem to be several that could function as a pier, but are not actually being used as a pier. There are also a few which seem muni/fed/etc piers which are probably not used for much.
Specifically: check out this one, as an example:
https://maps.app.goo.gl/PHE7sWAAKQLgNW956
I'm not sure what it's used for - but maybe for raw materials for major city projects? The buildings look derelict
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Gusto/@37.7605794,-122.3838101,3a,75y,44.15h,88.38t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sQ3eIe4hxU2yhpENLodAZ6Q!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fcb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile%26w%3D900%26h%3D600%26pitch%3D1.6200440495121171%26panoid%3DQ3eIe4hxU2yhpENLodAZ6Q%26yaw%3D44.15437357137162!7i16384!8i8192!4m14!1m7!3m6!1s0x808580793eebb1c7:0x45e872d938f1088a!2sGusto!8m2!3d37.7605675!4d-122.3856275!16s%2Fg%2F12hkhcr_x!3m5!1s0x808580793eebb1c7:0x45e872d938f1088a!8m2!3d37.7605675!4d-122.3856275!16s%2Fg%2F12hkhcr_x?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI1MTExMS4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D
It looks like they were actually used as a dry-dock at some point.
The existing residents and businesses would (quite rightly) object to having a literal boatload of psychotics dumped on them, and the conditions on the ship would be Hellish for those on it (because of all the psychotics)
Yeah there are many (maybe 20 piers) which seem like they could accommodate, and several of those seem to have some kind of muni/state/fed building on them, which may be under-utilized.
Map: https://maps.app.goo.gl/nCNrndrjpex22mDa8
So they would be set-off onto a pier, likely without any businesses to disrupt. This is my main point really; this gets by the 'I'm liberal but i don't want a rehab facility on my block' argument.
RE: "Hellish" These boats are huge, and have huge open spaces and a huge deck/recreation area (which would need to be modified for safety). I suggested 1/2 potential capacity to +double the room size, and then you also would have group spaces which become twice the size that they were designed for (because half the people). So it would require some modification, but it could be a very nice solution from a design/functional perspective.
Manoeuvring space isn't a big problem for cargo ships, there's far tighter harbours than San Francisco Bay which take far more cargo ships. Take a look at the Port of Rotterdam on the map, for instance.
Plonking a few extra ships in San Francisco Bay is not a problem. The prison hulk idea is bad for other reasons, but not for this one.
A big part of the problem here (actually it causes quite a few other problems) is that the US is divided into tiny local governments with too much autonomy. The problems of San Francisco should not need to all be solved within the arbitrary tiny city limits of San Francisco, they require a more statewide approach, and to the extent that facilities need to be built there's far more suitable locations than SF itself (or the middle of the bay).
>I think California/SF has a law which prohibits them arresting or detaining for vagrancy unless there are beds to put the homeless in, right?
You are thinking of the Ninth Circuit caselaw that was overturned in the Grant's Pass case. But that was re laws against sleeping overnight in public. Vagrancy laws per se are still legally iffy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papachristou_v._City_of_Jacksonville
Yeah I think this case gave them more lee-way if they wanted it: https://calmatters.org/housing/2024/06/california-homeless-camps-grants-pass-ruling/
This seems like the standard US response of "make the visible symptoms of poverty illegal." This is an extension of the common plan of "if we make bad things illegal, only good things will be left."
Health care isn't affordable? Mandate buying health insurance. Problem solved. Jobs don't pay enough? Make it illegal to have low-paying jobs. Problem solved. Poor people can only afford bad option X? Make X illegal. Problem solved.
Unsightly homeless camps? Make it illegal to be visibly homeless. Problem solved.
The most likely alternative to "bad thing" is usually "even worse thing" rather than "good thing." If "good thing" was already a viable option, people would probably not have been going with "bad thing."
You are not engaging with the argument. The solution in California is to go to a homeless shelter. California has spent enough on this issue to pay for a hundred beds for every homeless person.
Sleeping in a tent on the sidewalk is not a sanitary or safe practice. It is a terrible idea, whether you like it or not. No government officials who would allow such a thing have any place running any city I live in. If you disagree, please consider including your address, so we can let the mentally disturbed junkies set up a tent on your sidewalk and crap in your yard.
Our preferred solution is easy to describe and infinitely more compassionate than what you suggest.
1) Create shelters and parking lots to safely house those hard on their luck.
2) Require those who do not want to go to shelters (primarily mentally disturbed) to either go to a shelter or get arrested (warnings can compassionately build to enforcement)
3) Criminalize drug trafficking, prostitution, theft public indecency and using the streets as toilets.
In the real world, what actually happens is that cities that do enforce these common sense solutions clean up. They still have homeless, but they are not out destroying the community. Those cities which refuse to adopt tough love will keep their initial problem and attract any leaving the other cities.
I think the article has been quite clear that homeless shelters are not in fact generally available. If that were not so, the Grant's Pass decision would not have been such a big deal.
If those in charge decided to spend the billions (or was it tens of billions?) on wasted crap, then it is on them. It is obvious that the people in charge of the problem don’t want to solve it, they never wanted to solve it and they probably thrive by making it worse. This isn’t incompetence, it is evil.
I could solve the “shelter problem” in ten minutes of thinking with one one hundredth of what we collected to address the issue. Send me a billion dollars and I will share my ideas with you. In California, this is called a bargain.
So, based on your feedback, I will revise my steps.
1) Fire anyone involved in the current homeless industrial complex and investigate them for fraud and cronyism
2-4) See above steps 1 through 3.
"I could solve the “shelter problem” in ten minutes of thinking with one one hundredth of what we collected to address the issue. Send me a billion dollars and I will share my ideas with you. "
How about you share your ideas first, and if enough people are convinced, they'll give you the billion dollars? I am highly, highly skeptical that you have a magical solution that successive governments all over the country haven't thought of.
San Francisco spends $57,000 per homeless person per year, according to this article: https://www.hoover.org/research/despite-spending-11-billion-san-francisco-sees-its-homelessness-problems-spiral-out
They could ship them all to Missouri, pay market rate rent *for each person*, and still have $40K left over for their other living expenses. Over $3K a month for food, entertainment, clothes, drugs, whatever. And that's not even assuming cost-saving measures like *sharing apartments*.
For some reason they don't do this! Reasons include: Missouri doesn't want them, they'd rather stay in SF for cultural reasons, SF has a network of NGOs that don't want to lose the profits or the aesthetics of having a permanent supply of crazy drug addicts and other indigents.
I don't think this is magical, I think it's common-sense. The problem is that common-sense breaks down in San Francisco's craziness field (and rampant corruption).
Yep. They either don’t want to fix the problem, or they have framed it so poorly that every step they take moves them backward. (See my comment immediately below to Gres).
You've already listed two good reasons that scheme won't work, and no ways to get around those obstacles. Are you proposing that California should enslave homeless people and force them to live in Missouri, and then go to war with Missouri to force them to take crazy drug addicts?
See the comment streams below to germ and gres.
I was being facetious, but for pennies on the dollar they could…
1) Set up parking lots with really nice tents, security guards and outhouses
2) Buy 250 used dirt cheap RV trailers and set them up for everyone
3) Find a recently closing motel or two and convert these to shelters
4) Pay some of them to get on a bus and go somewhere else.
5) Buy some army surplus Quonset huts and add cots and porta potties
6) Safe parking lots for those living out of their cars
7) Convert an old warehouse or industrial building to a temporary shelter
8) Arrest anyone committing a crime
9) Some mixture of the above
But no. We are dealing with cities run by dysfunctional progressives who can’t do anything without three years of environmental reviews, five years of community outreach meetings, union featherbedding, million dollar grants to community organizers, and so on.
They either don’t want to solve the problem or they are fundamentally incapable of doing so. Maybe both.
As my initial comment days ago stated, I live in SoCal and spend every day at the beach (I surf), and I can tell if the homeless situation is under control or not. Most communities solve it and do so quickly and easily. All it takes is cops prohibiting open sleeping and crime. This drives the homeless to shelters (which have been funded with billions), or to friends, or to those cities which don’t want to get tough.
They can have them if they want them. And if they don’t get tough, I am reading this as “wanting them”, as they will certainly get them.
It reminds me of the old joke about hikers and the bear. You don’t have to outrun the bear, just the other hiker. In California these other hikers have been feeding the bears and covering themselves in lard. They are going to get the bear (or the bear is gonna get them!).
The article cited someone who ran for mayor on a platform of building shelters. They weren’t able to. Do you think he didn’t want to solve it?
Building 250 shelters with the budget available should have been quick and easy. So, yes, either he did not want to solve it, or he wasn’t really in charge.
I will add though that it is possible that most people think they want to solve the problem, but that the way they frame the problem makes solving it impossible. Similar to how some Muslims want their societies to become rich and powerful like they were a thousand years ago, so their solution is to become more fundamentalist. Poor framing, can make problems worse, even if they actually do want to solve it.
Turns out no one's ever really in charge in the face of a massive bureaucracy.
The article has actually been quite clear that from September 2023 up to Grant's Pass, a decent number of beds were available when the encampments were cleared, but the homeless from the encampments mostly didn't take them anyway. If you look at the trajectory, Grant's Pass wasn't actually the big deal.
In places with nice weather such as SF, it really isn't a lack of shelters that's the issue.
Yet another person who's not spent a minute in San Francisco. We've had raving drug addicts running amok on our streets for years. It's fentanyl, not poverty.
The "problem", for most people, isn't the plight of the unhoused, it's how the behaviours of the unhoused affects them. So if the effects of said behaviours are removed from their lives, it is indeed problem solved for them.
In concrete terms, the vast majority of people care about their vehicles not getting broken into, not stepping on used needles and/or feces on the sidewalk, etc. This is "the problem" for them. Very few people think of making sure that the homeless are living their best lives as "the problem", that one is mostly a thought exercise for those who typically don't have to deal with the more concrete problems above, used as a form of virtue signaling.
Or...bear with me now - incentives have real world effects
This is very interesting! Around the same time, there was a similar debate in Lisbon, but the data didn’t actually support the idea that homelessness had skyrocketed. The numbers showed only about a 20–30% increase, while public perception suggested a five- to tenfold rise.
That actually helps explain what happened: before, there were no tents in Lisbon, but during and after COVID some areas became more lenient, and small clusters of tents began to appear.
I feel this vindicates both sides of my earlier arguments! Mine, because there likely wasn’t a massive rise in homelessness overall; and theirs, because there clearly is a homelessness problem in Lisbon, which I already acknowledged, though the people I debated didn’t.
It's kind of amazing that one marginal change (the post-Grant enforcement changes you describe) can make such a massive impact on the perception of what was considered an unsolvable issue a few years ago. Makes you wonder about other marginal policy changes and the incredible ramifications they can have.
Nu. We solved government shutdown by making private jets land at podunk airports (and making executives have to "drive into town"). 8 senators changed votes in a single day.
Some threats are more powerful than death threats, apparently.
Wait, really? That's pretty funny if true. Have you got a link?
https://thehill.com/policy/transportation/5598754-faa-restricts-private-flights/
Hm. It seems I do (I hear this from the people putting the policy together, not news websites).
Incredible ramifications for perception, anyway.
This. What's the real problem, homeless people or seeing them?
The revealed preference of politicians in clearly seeing them, otherwise they wouldn't spend money bussing them somewhere else
if I have children it's actually nice to be able to go to a park without them seeing people defecating, injecting drugs, are otherwise occupying the park that I would otherwise use.
the fact that myself and my children contribute literally infinite percent more to the functioning of society than the homeless person injecting drugs/defecating seems like it should influence the thrust of our governance.
I’m not sure what you mean by “the functioning of society” if your children contribute to it but other human beings do not.
What, *exactly*, does the homeless person slowly killing themselves in the street contribute to society? "Character"? Local flavor? A Jack Chick tract warning of why you shouldn't do drugs?
A person is a part of society, and if that person finds life worth living, that is a good thing. Even if you think their life is not worth living and you think the world would be better if that person were killed.
That's a distinction without a difference. It's like saying: what's the real problem, criminals or people who realize they're being robbed.
The preference of the voters is to not be affected by the bad behaviours of the homeless. The preference of the politicians should be to enact the preference of the voters, which their revealed preference seems to match. That's a good thing.
Just as you do not really care about my problems as long as they don't affect you (and rightly so), the voters do not really care about the problems of the homeless, if those problems do not or can be made to not affect them.
Suppose you’re riding the train and a homeless person in the seat in front of you takes off his pants and starts jacking-off.
In some sense, the only difference between him jacking-off on the train and him jacking off under a tree into a ditch is the visibility. In another sense, the difference is that jacking-off on the train is sexual assault, and jacking-off into a ditch doesn’t bother anyone.
The visibility is a real aspect of the harms being done. Removing the visibility reduces the harm.
It reduces the harm of that behavior to third parties for sure. But when it comes to homelessness, the impact on third parties is only a tiny fraction of its impact.
Impact on third parties is the only aspect that can warrant government involvement.
Impact on first parties is their own problem.
> But when it comes to homelessness, the impact on third parties is only a tiny fraction of its impact
That's where we disagree, I think that the impact on third parties is the vast majority of its impact.
That seems like a shocking conclusion to me, to say that having a home is only about 99 times as good as not walking past homeless people. It sounds like an entrepreneur should be able to make a large amount of money figuring out how to monetize this!
Tent encampments, open drug use, and mentally ill people who may commit violent acts are a considerable negative externality on the 99% of the population who have homes.
And while the size of the externality is small compared with the large negative effect of being homeless, the fact 99% are suffering the negative externality may be a greater total effect than the negative effect of being homeless on the 1%.
I would like to see someone work out that calculation in earnest! What fraction of that 99% actually walk by the relevant streets on any given day? How much impact does it actually have on their day?
When an area of the city becomes known for large homeless encampments/tent cities, normie people won't go there anymore. So, in that sense, a lot fewer normies get exposed to tent cities than one might think, but "this area of the city is so unpleasant to walk through that normies have pretty much given up on" is a big cost to society, relative to the counterfactual.
Example: Vancouver's Downtown East Side (DTES) is located right next to downtown Vancouver, it could be a thriving area with great condos and retail and tourism, but it's completely overrun by homeless drug addicts and their tents, so nobody goes there unless they have to.
Key comment!
+1
I disagree, only because "Out of sight, out of mind" is a common phrase in English that encapsulates this precise phenomenon.
As a foreign correspondent, over the years I’ve seen multiple countries with multiple problems that seemed impossible to fix and then a new government shows up aaaaaand the problem is fixed. Above all, we need to be optimistic.
Are you referring to Bukele?
No, I never worked there.
Except here it’s not an issue of a problem being fixed - it’s just a problem being hidden.
There's two separate problems -- the problem as experienced by the homeless person and the problem as experienced by everybody else.
Even if you don't solve the first problem, solving the second is huge.
Consider the iteration: we are much more likely to allocate money for the homeless if they aren't troublemakers.
Here in Santa Monica we've been enforcing encampment bans forever because we've always had sufficient shelter capacity to be able to under Grant's Pass. So definitely here for a while the primary compaint has been the mentally ill just being around (and being aggressive/violent sounding/actually committing violence sometimes.)
> as opposed to (for example) weird people wandering the street in rags talking to themselves
Has that subjectively stayed the same?
Why can’t we create high quality homeless encampments in rural areas. The cost of providing yurts and food is trivial. Make it nicer to be homeless in an out of the way place, don’t police lifestyle choices that don’t involve violence, and let them be.
What if the homeless want to leave?
Why would they get to leave? That would defeat the entire point.
Yes. But then it's a prison, which involves more effort, more cost, more legal justification, more everything.
No it's not. It's an accountability center. Utah is in the process of building one. https://archive.ph/TBPMQ
If you can't leave, it's a camp or a prison (or some similar word). This strikes me as misleading terminology analogous to, for example, "diversity, equity, and inclusion" as a term for legalized racial discrimination.
The point is that they're technically not prisons, and are thus theoretically not subject to the same legal and moral standards. Prisons are for punishment. Accountability centers are for containment, similarly to mental asylums.
+1 to this. As a bonus, make them into forestry camps -- then folks who can work, can make money to get out of them.
I'm imagining the main issue with this is drug abuse (with a secondary issue of "safety is a problem when there's a lot of homeless around -- it's still a problem even if their neighbors are also homeless.")
Well, that and NIMBY.
Even the cost of an entire youth forestry camp (with education/mental health/etc.) is $100,000 per year, per person. That's quite a lot less than $130,000 that California is paying per prisoner.
What about the lifestyle choice of sleeping in a tent on a street corner rather than in a forest? That doesn’t involve violence, but it seems to be what is being policed here.
I am personally 100% cool with that lifestyle choice. However, politics is the slow boring of hard boards and normies dont like tent encampments. I don’t want humane politicians thrown out of office because of this prejudice, so I want to find a low harm way of pandering to it.
We shoot the homeless in the forest too (once they starve and start raiding dumpsters).
Some people are ... less kindly than others.
A tent on a street corner obstructs public movement on the street/sidewalk, which is [a crime](https://law.justia.com/codes/california/code-pen/part-1/title-15/chapter-2/section-647c/). And rightly so, I've had to walk onto fairly high-speed roads to get around long stretches of tents that fully blocked the sidewalk, it's a nuisance and safety hazard for the public.
Most people don't really care about tents that aren't in the way of anything.
Rural areas don't want them, they don't want to be in rural areas, and SF (and some other West Coast cities) have a significant subpopulation that fetishizes having them around.
In one of the sf standard articles I found this:
> Modi noted that a city review found San Francisco spends more than $1 billion a year to fund 25,000-plus beds. By that accounting, adding1,500 would cost at least $60 million.
There’s no way that’s true, right? 25000 beds at $40000/yr per bed? $40,000 per bed per year is literally insane btw. That’s a decent one bedroom apartment!!!
It's 100,000 a year per spot in a youth forestry camp (and $130,000 per spot in Cali prison). Mental health and education means staff.
A nice sentiment, but this misunderstands the causes of homelessness, what homelessness people want, and what will happen when things go wrong (harder to solve problems like police, healthcare, jobs, education in rural areas than in cities).
A non-exhaustive and non-exclusive list of homeless archetypes:
1. Had a place before, just can't afford rent now for whatever reason, would like to make money, will become housed once able to afford it. Unlucky in terms of having no family or friends to stay with.
2. People who just want to do a lot of drugs, can't maintain their addiction and afford rent simultaneously, and chose their addiction.
3. People who are too mentally ill to work or organized their lives/make use of ways out of this situation. There are a few subtypes: the psychotic, severe mental disability in the sense of reduced cognitive function, severely depressed, etc.
4. People who became homeless for another reason, kind of settled into it for a long time even after the other cause went away, and are reasonably happy/neutral about it.
5. Runaways
6. People who are physically disabled in some way and for whatever reason (perhaps a combination of one of the others), aren't in a shelter or getting by on benefits.
7. Immigrants who haven't made it yet/aren't making it.
Really only a small minority of 1, 3, 4, 5, and 6 would go to a rural shelter. And few of those would stay for long periods. Most of these archetypes need jobs, mental health services, or drugs and wouldn't voluntarily leave a city. Many actually went to great lengths to get to the city in the first place.
"World's most depressing victory lap." Homelessness in California is a combination of shell game, innumeracy, wishful thinking, and bad faith. The first sin was refusing to create shelters, holding out for permanent housing that never came and never could have come. Despite all the money and effort poured into homelessness it was never actually designed to succeed.
“…the new lower-standards busing program [in SF] only got about 100 people a year - pretty small compared to the scale of the problem.“
Wait, that sounds big compared to the scale of the problem. The chart we’re trying to explain — showing tents on the streets of SF — has been dropping by 200 per year, and we’re assuming the majority of that is just declining visibility. But with the increased busing, we have a mechanism that might explain half of that drop as an actual decline in unhoused San Franciscans. Right?
Only if the previous number was 0.
This is the *new* busing program, so in theory it should be additive to the old higher-standards busing program which still exists.
Clicking through to the underlying news article, though, it turns out that these 100-ish people (actually 92 over 10 months) are drawn from a much larger pool that includes everyone in homeless shelters in SF. Only a small subset of those 100 are people sleeping on the streets.
Scott, you were just wrong. It turns out that the “JUST GET TOUGH” crowd was almost 100% right. You try to hide this fact by lumping all of the “JUST GET TOUGH” people together and focusing on a small subset of them who made the additional argument that getting tough is would be good for the homeless people themselves. The core of the “JUST GET TOUGH” position is that we can prevent the streets of American cities from being covered in filth by cracking-down on the visibly homeless. This position is fully supported by your new analysis.
But they are not really getting tough. Lurie is weak sauce
But even weak sauce is having an effect, isn't it? Imagine if they used some stronger sauce!
He literally said that being "arbitrarily draconian" would probably work. He just wanted people to admit that they wanted to lock up homeless people forever.
That’s the new information. It turns out you don’t have to be arbitrarily draconian, you only have to be draconian enough to take their stuff when they’re being a nuisance.
That is arbitrarily draconian. The effect is you lose the right to property because you don't have enough to afford housing. Plus you now have to sleep outside in the rain and cold.
When I read people saying "this would help solve homelessness," I assume they mean "this would reduce the homeless population in a nonfatal way," not "this would keep the homeless population the same but make their suffering less visible to the public."
The public doesn't really care about the suffering of the homeless if it doesn't affect them. To the vast majority of voters, "solving homelessness" means removing or at least reducing the negative impact of homelessness on the public. Whether the homeless population is reduced only matters to a very small number people, either as an intellectual exercise, or because they're part of that population and wish to take themselves out of it.
Now, you might argue that reducing the homeless population is the surest way to actually remove those negative impacts, but after years and billions of dollars it seems to be an intractable problem, so the public will now accept alternative methods of removing those negative impacts.
Re: SF feels safer because we made the lives of the homeless much much worse: Just proof once more that under modern capitalism, the comfort of the wealthy and powerful is secured by obscuring the intense suffering and tyranny inflicted on the poor and disenfranchised to make it possible.
I'm sympathetic to the 'capitalism raises all boats so even the poor are better off' argument in the abstract, but most people making it have no idea what life is like for someone picking crops or working in an amazon warehouse or living on the street... to say nothing of the overseas sweatshops and chemical spills and etc. that pay for prosperity within the first world.
*I* don't have any *real* idea about those things either, to be clear, they are comprehensively hidden from me because they would make me mad at all the brands and politicians perpetrating them on my behalf. But I have heard at least *some* stories, and try to keep them in mind whenever the already-comfortable demand more comfort.
I pay my workers $18/hour to pick crops (disclaimer: I'm not the farmer, but I can read the H2B website same as you can -- and I have a CSA with a specific farm). They have a good life, thank you kindly. I know about the "overseas sweatshops" that I buy my glassware from (they're orphanages, but the kids still get burn scars at the ripe old age of 12).
If you don't know what it's like to work at a hospital cafeteria in Seattle, try sitting on an inter-county bus for a day. You might just learn something.
If you really care about these issues, it is not hard to acquire first-hand knowledge of these people's lives, nor the real-world, medium-term alternatives they face.
>*Just proof once more that under modern capitalism, the comfort of the wealthy and powerful is secured by obscuring the intense suffering and tyranny inflicted on the poor and disenfranchised to make it possible.*
I don’t like this framing as it “unfairly” paints this outcome as largely the wants of the wealthy and powerful when in actuality I’d argue a plurality of the city actually wanted this.
I say this because it makes it more difficult to talk candidly about this situation; normal people suppress their actual grievances for fear of being compared to Elon Musk.
Since the pandemic occurred I’ve had many friends (some even born and raised in the bay) leave the city with safety and homelessness being a major factor. Many of them were women, who were otherwise progressive. I recall one story where one woman remarked that “the people act like animals” which was surprising to me due to the language she used.
If I was to reword your intro to “just proof once more that under modern capitalism the comfort of women is secured by [..]” I think far more people are willing to make that trade off, and you have to ask yourself what does that say about us as a society.
In fact, if you want walkable cities and urban life as a workable option, you pretty much have to have safe, clean streets and public transit. Otherwise, everyone with a choice heads for a suburb that doesn't have any services for the poor and doesn't have any public transit so no poor people can get there.
> under modern capitalism, the comfort of the wealthy and powerful is secured by obscuring the intense suffering and tyranny inflicted on the poor and disenfranchised to make it possible.
What does capitalism have to do with it? Were pre-capitalistic societies filled with wealthy and powerful people constantly exposed to the suffering and tyranny of the people below them and feeling equally comforted?
Also, who is "wealthy and powerful" in this scenario? The average person who hates seeing homeless encampments or random homeless people who ruin the atmosphere with their behavior? That renders "wealthy and powerful" into something incoherent in this context.
> someone picking crops or working in an amazon warehouse or living on the street... to say nothing of the overseas sweatshops and chemical spills and etc. that pay for prosperity within the first world.
Living on the streets is not equivalent to working a factory or a field, you have to have discipline and control over yourself to do the latter. Those who can't or don't will not last long in such positions.
Your comment, like many, seems to presume that those who are poor and suffering are innately productive, disciplined people who could theoretically pick up any kind of work if they were given the chance.
I was also bothered by the conflation of the poor and the homeless in the parent comment.
How many mentally unstable homeless people have you traveled with on public transport in the last year (roughly)? I live in Europe with barely any homelessness and see one around 4 times a year. Let's just say it's not a comfortable experience. I can't even imagine what it would be like to live in SF. Post-scarcity, we should definitely help them, but today it's probably better to spend our resources on people who are willing to work and behave in a way that is not harmful to their surroundings.
Also, I doubt that a hunter-gatherer tribe would have handled the people who are harmful to others and do not contribute to the commons any better, so this is not specific to capitalism.
it's amusing that you think the wealthy and powerful are impacted by this change - the wealthy and powerful are living where they never have to think about the homeless population. It is in fact that poor and downtrodden who are still somewhat productive members of society who realize the largest gains from this, the same population that benefits from reductions in crime in general (I certainly don't have to worry about getting shot in a drive by or getting mugged)
I mean the weird thing about San Francisco is that wealthy and powerful people genuinely do still live there. Even if they never go for walks, they'll get driven past the hobos.
The wealthy and powerful are deeply invested in keeping the property values of their many properties high. Since they have properties all over the place, they have a vested interest in seeing homeless people invisible, if not gone altogether.
Which is a funny way of saying they have a vested interest (some may say duty!) in keeping the lives of many poor and middle-class people nice.
Of course, they're also quite often in dereliction of this duty, in favour of getting to feel good about themselves. The problem is, once you're sufficiently rich, a few extra bucks can't ever compare to that moralistic high of denouncing those poorer than you for wanting the commons to be usable.
Co-opting the power of the government to protect your investments, at the expense of a sizable minority (poor people), is corrupt according to any definition of corruption that has any legitimacy.
I'm using the term poor people because it's not just the homeless who are in the crosshairs.
Outside of a few quirky outliers like San Francisco, the rich tend to be isolated from the negative consequences of rampant homelessness. But does this make said rich people blase about homelessness? Not at all. They want to eliminate every factor slowing or reducing their investment returns. It's not about law and order for them, and it's not about public safety. It's about pressuring poors and driving them out of the community, by any means necessary.
I'm all for strictly enforcing laws against public disorder. If I thought that would be enough to satisfy the persecutors of the poor, I would be heartened. But I don't think that can ever be enough. The bar will continue to get raised, and reactionary social engineering will continue to run amok, until somebody stops the process or we turn the country into New Singapore. What a loathsome outcome THAT would be.
>*I* don't have any *real* idea about those things either, to be clear
It isn't like you have to go far to encounter the type of people who work at Amazon warehouses. Go to a cheap bar or sporting event, they'll be there.
I find this take rather amusing nowadays. I've lived among relatively poor people for a decently long time, but upgraded into Good Neighbourhoods once I earned sufficiently.
It's specifically the wealthy and powerful that sound exactly like you. On the other hand, nobody hates destitutes more than the working poor. And once you've lived with them, it's obvious why; The working poor aren't wealthy enough to get away from the destitutes, and destitutes are by far the worst part of cheap accomodation. They steal your shit, they keep you awake at night with noise and inane drama, sometimes they just randomly trash things for no apparent reason ... Consistently, any shared commons will be degraded.
The wealthy and powerful can afford to just stay away. Why can't we let the homeless build an encampment in the middle of the public park? For the working poor, that park may have been the only realistic option to see some green nearby, to picnic, play ball, etc. The rich can just do that in their own backyard, or they just live in a Good Neighbourhood were there are no encampments, or they ca afford to regularly just drive somewhere else ... with enough money, the options are endless.
Exactly, the parent comment screamed champagne socialist to me. Ironic that they correctly identified that they actually have no idea, but still confidently spouted off grandiose ideas about the issue.
Yes, capitalism is so terrible that the poor from all over the world try desperately to get here.
I wonder if fentanyl overdoses explain part of (or most of) the drop. I'm not sure about SF, but here in King County we've had about 5,000 deaths from opioid overdoses since the beginning of the pandemic. If even half of these deaths are among the unsheltered homeless, then it would explain the drop.
https://kingcounty.gov/en/dept/dph/health-safety/medical-examiner/reports-dashboards/overdose-deaths-dashboard
I would expect those deaths to be evenly distributed among drug users. I doubt that 50% of the drug users in the country are homeless.
The solution to homelessness is legalizing flophouses + stringent enforcement of laws against littering/public defecation/aggressive panhandling/etc, with the latter being necessary to allow for public support of the former.
+1 to legalizing "smaller dwellings" such as older hotels had, with communal bathrooms. All you really need private is a dresser and a bed.
This doesn't solve joblessness, but...
“… driving them to a miserable nomadic existence? The qualitative interviews in the CalMatters article suggest mostly the latter…”
So since you’re being judgmental here (where most of the rest you are not), what is *your* better solution, Scott?
Not all-encompassing, merely better. Because you are implying that it was the previous status quo.
Slightly tangential but (from the POV of someone who was a prosecutor for 20 years) I have a question about drug dealer transaction strategy. Scott suggests the lack of repeat transactions increases dangerous products and OD's, but I don't follow the logic here.
During my time in crimlaw, I regularly got to read all the text communications downloaded from the phones of drug dealers. I also spoke to addict clients as a public defender, heard numerous stories from our drug court participants, and spoke with crime victim addicts. In my experience, it was hard for dealers to move fentanyl, even their usual opiate customers didn't want it. You could see the numerous exchanges where they messaged a dealer for oxy, the dealer's out and offers some fent, and these opiate addicts looking for a fix are all like "uh uh, no way", and this was before the general public panic over it. Fent was sitting around in inventory gathering dust like a box of Fallen Empires at the comic book shop in 1995, even heavily discounted there's few takers.
Now at some point it became common to hear that dealers were cutting other drugs *with* fentanyl. This is where I don't understand either the economics or the decision theory. Let's say you need to stretch out your inventory of some more desirable drug by diluting it, fair enough. You could cut it with something harmless and inert from the grocery store. In an iterative game, that hurts you slightly because the lower potency affects your reputation. Or you could spike it with a relatively cheap undesirable filler like fentanyl, costing you more money (fent isn't literally free and it does gradually sell to a select group who want it), and requiring you to hold stock of a drug that the public, police and prosecutors have demonized. In an iterative game, maybe some customers are happy with the increased potency, but some WILL notice and suspect you cut it with fent, and it's possible you'll get one or more ODs out of that batch. Dead customers aren't very valuable, and there's a chance one of ODs will lead to somebody tracing the batch back to you, this did happen with some product that killed one of my drug court participants and a high school girl in a way that prompted enough investigation I could figure out who the common source was. This seems to come out negative EV on spiking a drug with another drug rather than diluting.
In the non-iterative game, I similarly don't see how you would ever benefit from spiking a drug with another drug, versus just reducing potency. Selling *fake* drugs may get you killed, but simply selling 20% weaker drugs won't, and it's less risk and exposure for an equal or greater profit. So why would there be an incentive to spike the potency in that scenario?
I think there are a few issues here. I do believe it's pretty common in some circles to sell one drug, or a mixture of drugs, as another, especially as a more popular or well known drug. For example, "ecstasy" in some contexts means MDMA, but on the street can mean various drugs or blends intended to achieve a similar effect. At festivals it's sometimes found that other hallucinogens are being sold as "LSD", because people know what LSD is. (Although in one of the ~handful of cases I got the most direct information about, the person claimed it was an accident and cooperated with the investigation.) And my impression (... although this is probably mostly from fiction, to be honest, but it makes sense) is that people do get mad if their drugs are weak. And I get the impression that the vast majority of street drug users are not _that_ picky about purity, if they get the desired result? Like, you would make substitutions in cooking, if you're out of something, and not expect the people eating the food to flip out in most cases.
The other issue I've heard about is accidental contamination. It doesn't take much fentanyl to create a problem, if it gets into some other white powder, especially if it's not mixed evenly (so you get all of the contaminant in one dose.) I don't know how important a problem this is, but it's something I've been told. Given the ptoency of fentanyl, I would believe it, if many dealers/distributors/manufacturers are being less than perfectly careful about it.
I assume it's one of those cases where consumers' stated preferences differ from their revealed preferences.
Pure heroin is expensive. Heroin diluted with water is cheap but the consumers don't like it. Heroin diluted with water and then cut with a little bit of fentanyl is cheap and the consumers love it and keep coming back for more. The dealers understand this.
In related news, an increasing amount of shelf space in the butter section of my local supermarket is being taken up with things that are mostly vegetable oil.
That makes sense, they may still think they're avoiding fent and just don't realize. Although that doesn't really solve the isolated sale versus ongoing customer relationship divide.
I recently got annoyed by that butter thing because I was cooking for a group that has a lactose-intolerant friend and I knew that most of the things called "It's totally not butter I swear no cap frfr" have dairy in them, and so do some of the packages that look like tub margarine. I don't shop anywhere bougie enough to have stuff labeled for vegans. And it matters for kosher too right? Weird that this ambiguity exists on the shelf w/r/t a product that has both medical and cultural dietary implications.
So the butter has non-butter and the non-butter has butter? Sheesh.
I can't believe it's not just either butter or not-butter.
Did you ever just ask the dealers that you prosecuted or defended?
Good question. We didn't talk about that sort of thing. By the time they were encountering me (in either capacity), they were always trying to minimize their culpability, and were cagey about discussing the business. Every dealer insists to their lawyer that they're just the guy who runs the product out to the car, that's why they're on the hidden camera, but some other guy is the one making the money. (In many cases, this is actually true.)
When I was the prosecutor, I would sometimes be able to have candid discussions with them in drug treatment court, but they would still be minimizing and reluctant to discuss things like that for a variety of reasons, and pressing on a point of private curiosity wouldn't have been serving the purposes of treatment court. Additionally, people referred for drug treatment court had to have addiction-related needs higher than or equal to criminogenic ones. The more serious drug dealer would've been classified Quadrant II, high criminogenic needs with low need for recovery services, which drug courts avoid because they don't really "need" it and will sell drugs to participants.
That's too bad. I too am curious about the game theory here. I agree with your analysis and don't understand the incentives for spiking things with fentanyl.
I would argue that removing tent encampments and open air drug markets is not a minor thing! "Making the lives of homeless people worse" is an unnecessarily negative framing; saying "making the lives of regular people better" would be more accurate. Yeah, I guess losing the ability to completely block hundreds of yards of sidewalk, shit in the street, and use drugs openly technically makes it less pleasant to be homeless, but it makes it much better for the rest of the city. I really don't have sympathy for the "[making] the lives of the homeless worse" framing given how all these measures exactly correlate with improving things for the rest of the city.
It makes sense to me that many people are not angry at homeless people themselves, they are just upset about encampments.
“Tent encampments” is a nice phrase for it, in practice these tend to be enormous mounds of disgusting trash. They can turn nice places like downtown SF or Berkeley or Lake Merritt into trash piles.
So yeah, if there’s a policy that you have to clean up after yourself or else the city will throw your junk away, that seems totally reasonable.
A-friggin'-men. Can't believe no one mentioned this yet.
I would add that a lot of these tent encampments are in public thoroughfares and impede pedestrians trying to get from Point A to Point B without tripping over something or getting hit by a car.
I lived in SF 30 years ago. At the time, the vagrant population had a seasonal pattern of variance. Come wintertime, many people would arrive in SF from colder places because they wanted to rough it someplace where they would not freeze to death. In the spring they would move away again. Is this still the case? I can very well believe that the ability to have your tent and other posessions confiscated would make these 'winter people' go somewhere else instead.
The "obvious solution" that is clearly politically infeasible is to set up deliberate tent encampments in a designated field at the edge if the city away from most people, so that the homeless still have their tents but are away from harassing people.
(Of course, if we're imagining doing that we might as well imagine building an actual homeless shelter. The only difference is that this is conceding our inability to build any physical buildings).
The homeless typically beg for money. If you give them encampments or shelters away from most people... either you need to also give them some money, or many of them will choose to stay where most people are.
EDIT: This is similar to the reason why so many homeless are in the expensive cities, where their chances of buying a home are the lowest. In expensive cities, begging is more profitable.
Fair point. You could imagine some kind of alternate income/support but at that point you're requiring actual management of the problem, which is hard to fully do.
The obvious solution to that is to heavily disincentivize staying in the city by aggressively enforcing existing panhandling, public obstruction, etc. laws, and incentivizing setting up camp at the designated location by e.g. providing free meals, running water, public bathrooms and showers, etc. at the site.
Yes, exactly. But why is it politically infeasible?
> In the end, both sides underestimated how basic the tradeoff was
weird "both sides" moment when directionally the right was absolutely right in that all that was needed to solve the problem was more "common sense" enforcement and less social support crap
We need a hobo forest they can abscond to. My vote to whoever runs on the Hobo Forest platform
You mean Plank Town? It already exists.
Full forest, Robin Hood style!
https://deathisbad.substack.com/p/ttt-hobo-forest
As I recall I saw the most tents around San Francisco in 2015, I assume CalTrans did some of the clearances (because the encampments were by I-80), and the Feds did the other significant clearances by putting up some chain link fences, and near permanently parking a “Department of Homeland Security” police patrol car by the Federal Building on 6th Street.
Otherwise this San Franciscan hasn’t noticed many fewer tents compared to four years ago
"not realizing how much people hated tent encampments in particular, as opposed to (for example) weird people wandering the street in rags talking to themselves'
The tent is there all the time. The walking-along-muttering is there and gone again.
"The getting tough is more compassionate" thesis could be salvaged if over the next 5 years or decade the harsher penalty decreases the types of behavior that leads to homelessness. We don't really know the elasticity here.
Or if it increases productivity/economic growth enough that the standard of living is better for the homeless in future
I’m gonna push back a little bit on this because I live in San Francisco and I don’t think that the problem is better. Lurie is weak as water, hasn’t done dick about the sanctuary city status- which means that there is a revolving door for the hondo fetty dealers. Moreover, he has not yet tackled the homeless NGO complex or reduced benefits or made it compulsory for them to work or to get clean to qualify for housing. Forget treatment beds or mental health facilities. The homeless don’t want them and they are not forced into them. I walk the streets of the city daily and from my point of view the problem is still there. The occasional busts are merely an inconvenience for the drug dealers. https://sfpublicsafety.news/in-brief-honduran-fentanyl-trafficker-deported-after-a-lenient-fast-track-sentence-promptly-returned-to-u-s/
Something more tech folks should definitely be thinking about:
Was this comment perhaps intended for the recent post about Buddhism?
Re "getting tough is the real compassion"
Seems to me, as you say right before this part, like the main political significance of homelessness is not that people care for the homeless, but rather that people don't want to see or deal with them.
And I think it's a reasonable goal for public policy, to not want homeless encampments, homeless people bothering people on the streets, sleeping on subway cars and park benches, etc.
But it was always so obvious to me that a lot of the people who would e.g. criticize San Francisco for having lots of homeless people, insinuating that SF is heartless and hypocritical (unlike themselves of course, the ones who *really* care and aren't just virtue signalling woke libs), really just didn't want to see it and would think "mission accomplished" if they didn't have to see them, even if homeless people's actual conditions hadn't improved.
(I also tend to think *other* examples of "getting tough is the real compassion" - not necessarily all right-wing coded - are often hypocritical)
I don't think practically anyone on the get-tough side actually believes that SF is "heartless and hypocritical", just dangerously naive. I think some people engaged in political persuasion might cynically use rhetoric like that to try to peel off some bleeding heart SF voters. I also think that some people in the political climate of the past several years might have felt unable to voice a get-tough position without the fig leaf of "the primary goal of this whole debate should be improving the lives of the homeless (as opposed to prioritizing the rest of the population)."
> I think some people engaged in political persuasion might cynically use rhetoric like that to try to peel off some bleeding heart SF voters.
Yeah this is what I'm getting at. Seems to me like it's more than "some" though I can't really quantify it of course.
Accusing the opposition of malice is almost always more effective than the alternative. Dethroning them would not only be an improvement, but would also be a justice served. Nothing gets the rabble going like an opportunity for justice.
The "homeless" typically have much bigger problems than simply not affording rent. Profound sanity issues, addictions, and other anti social behaviors.
Finding them an indoor bed to sleep in doesn't address their core problems at all, and it comes with rules they often can't tolerate, so they don't stay.
I don't know what would work, but maybe the cities with less of the problem do something right.
I have my personal pet reform I want to see: I want homeless shelters to move away from a waitlist model to a more aggressive time-limit model.
Right now shelters (at least NYC and SF ones, not certain about elsewhere) handle limited beds mostly by establishing a waitlist to get a bed in a shelter, rather than by imposing time limits on how long you can be there. (I imagine this is because it feels mean to throw someone who is already in a shelter out onto the street in a way that it doesn't feel mean to leave someone out on the street and not let them into the shelter?)
This makes shelters nearly-useless at the thing I actually want them doing (helping temporarily-down-on-their-luck people find their footing), because someone who just lost their job and couldn't make rent and walks to a homeless shelter for a bed will be told 'there's a six-month waitlist'.
It simultaneously makes shelters much 'better' at the thing I do not want them doing (fostering a culture of long-term dependents), because once you have a shelter bed you are de facto long-term housed.
The two systems work well in tandem. Most of the shelters work the traditional way, and keep records of how long people have stayed. Another shelter works the way you describe, giving instant help for people who haven't needed a shelter for several years, but for e.g. one week max.
Good idea, but I also don't want to kick out someone who is starting to get their footing, eg already successfully went sober, but haven't yet had luck in job search. So there should be a way to extend the limit in cases the person can prove they are reaching some milestones (eg. drug/alcohol tests, job application, in progress education/training etc...)
Fact/anecdote question for people still in SF: has the amount of non-tent crazy street people noticably changed (either up or down)?
(Some of those people were attached to tents, so curious if (a) the non-tent crazy people number has changed and (b) independently, the tent-related crazy people are still there just without the tents now).
I can’t answer for SF, but in San Diego, all that is needed is to prohibit tents. The problem is immediately transformed. One week, tents everywhere, the next week none (in those areas enforcing the rules).
The vagrants disappear. I assume most go to shelters, some go to friends or family, some hide, and the rest probably go to cities too soft to enforce these common sense bans.
I answered a bit on this upthread:
[As I recall I saw the most tents around San Francisco in 2015, I assume CalTrans did some of the clearances (because the encampments were by I-80), and the Feds did the other significant clearances by putting up some chain link fences, and near permanently parking a “Department of Homeland Security” police patrol car by the Federal Building on 6th Street.
Otherwise this San Franciscan hasn’t noticed many fewer tents compared to four years ago]
To expand on that, seeing tents was very much rarer before the 2011 “Occupy” protests (and street beggars were very much rarer before the ‘81 recession), after ‘11 tents very dramatically (and quickly!) increased until around 2015 or ‘16, and have slowly subsiding since (and I haven’t noticed any big difference in the last three years)
I want to emphasize that the tents/beggars/screaming schizophrenics that I’ve encountered have all been in or near the Tenderloin (where relatively cheap tenement housing is), near BART stations, and a few in the Haight-Ashbury, I just don’t see them in the Asian or older wealthier white neighborhoods in the western and northern parts of San Francisco
As far as my encountering less screaming sidewalk psychotics, it’s a little better than 2018 to ‘23, but otherwise about the same as it’s been since around 2013 (FWLIW I was born in Oakland, California - were I lived the plurality of my life, in 1968, I started working in San Francisco in 2011, and I started renting in San Francisco in 2021)
Noticeably down from the covid spike, which was genuinely alarming, living in the sleepy residential southwest corner of SF. The number of visible homeless (of all stripes, not just crazies) used to be near-zero before 2020ish, you had to go out and hunt for them in like the little undeveloped strips of land or forested highway shoulders or whatever. Pandemic comes, and suddenly we got tents showing up in the middle of sidewalks...they didn't stay a super long time, but it was very jarring after several years of associating "homeless" with "out of the way, unless downtown". It was a regular feature of public transit for those years too, even in broad daylight (I think partly cause so many people stopped riding, so a lot less eyes-on-the-street effect).
Things started shaping up during the tail end of Breed's tenure, and that trend's slowly continued during Lurie. There aren't tents anymore...now it's RVs, which is more sanitary, but also means they stick around for the long-term, and that's been detrimental to the neighborhood in different ways. Reduced prosocial public services (like clothing donation bins), shorter business hours, that sort of thing. I feel like there are more transient crazies too, as in, they pass through my neighborhood but don't live near here, cause I don't recognize repeat faces? So perhaps that's some of the "tentless" who are now visible. Public transit has mostly gotten back up to speed though, with IIRC like 70% pre-pandemic ridership, crackdowns on fare evasion, more security, more cleaning, and lower tolerance for (disruptive) homeless riders. I no longer triple-check where I sit out of fear for human waste, and that's an important standard to return to! Dunno if levels will ever get back down to those halcyon days, and the norms on related epiphenomena like shoplifting are probably permanently degraded, but...it's bearable again. Not having recurring thoughts of moving to greener pastures, at any rate.
Key caveat though: I simply don't travel outside my corner of the city anymore if it's at all avoidable, so can't speak to what's happening in the other three quadrants. Castro is as far as I'll head out, and only during the day.
There are a bunch of overlapping issues here:
-visibility of homelessness
– tolerance of disorderly behavior
– availability of housing
– availability of good mental health and substance abuse treatment (people are always talking about involuntary treatment without realizing that voluntary treatment is also thin on the ground)
But isn't part of the problem also that many in this community do not want treatment at all? Voluntary or involuntary? They don't come from nowhere. Somewhere there is a home and a family that was unable to help them. This is not always true, but it is true in enough cases. Very few people were born on the streets and left here to raise themselves. At least in this country.
I’m not denying that.
I’m saying that not every homeless person is like that.
I agree. But this country has so many programs and spends so much money on the indigent, how is it possible to do more? I don't think there should be any federal funding. Everything should come from the states and then individual states can come up with their own unique ways of helping.
Although this does seem ripe for "50 different experiments" I somehow doubt Wyoming or South Dakota has much of a homelessness problem.
Is there such a thing as *good* substance abuse treatment? Everything seems to have an incredible failure rate but I haven't studied it in-depth in awhile.
Is the stabilization center at 822 Geary doing anything useful?
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/09/us/san-francisco-drug-mental-health-clinic-lurie.html
"Emergency rooms are crowded and chaotic. Jails are intended for people who commit crimes, not those having breakdowns. Sobering centers can provide a space to rest, but do not always offer longer-term care. All of those places often send people back to the streets after a few hours, their cycles of despair continuing.
But now, San Francisco is trying something new. In a city known for bureaucracy, it is remarkably straightforward. And if its early success continues, the program may serve as a model for other communities trying to find a middle ground between “live and let live” and “lock them up” as they try to address drug addiction and mental health issues on the street."
Lurie seemed to be happy with their effectiveness in an interview with Bloomberg. A transcript is available for those who prefer reading rather than listening.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJD2IEKFP0E
This seems to be a bit of a conflict between free wills. The homeless were allowed to have the free will to do whatever they want (almost whatever they want). The people paying the cost of the homeless exercising their free will were *not* allowed the freedom to do something about the crime, filth, and danger the free will homeless had on their neighborhoods.
When laws protect criminal behavior (however sad, pathetic, bathetic, truly tragic, or painfully unjust the results of that behavior might be) then eventually people will seek redress.
The danger is that the cause/effect pendulum can swing in brutal ways. This is why there really need to be answers at the lowest possible level. If a neighborhood doesn't want homelessness, it should have the ability to prevent encampments. If a neighborhood does want it, then let them open their doors.
We all know the outcome of this - those who feel always want someone else to open their doors.