I was really swept up in this article and the portrait of Amanda Barrows - what a unique and strong person and this city is incredibly lucky to have her.
Unlike some here, I came away with a deep sense of empathy, and today’s HN snark and frustration bounced off me pretty hard. The public order issues - homelessness in parks, the challenges of shared spaces—have certainly impacted me. But more than that, I struggle with how to translate the state of the world to my boys. I always remind them: every unhoused person was once a little boy or girl. We might be older now, but we’re still kids inside, and nobody dreams of growing up in these circumstances.
What struck me most was the balance of compassion and pragmatism that Amanda brings to her work. It’s easy to be frustrated with the policies and bureaucratic inefficiencies that slow down real solutions - but they are, in some ways, understandable.
The biggest frustration for me is the gap between the mental state of many unhoused individuals and the requirements needed to secure housing. The city surely understands the long-term costs of its policies, and it’s run by highly pragmatic people with limited budgets. But rules are rules, and at some point, top-down accommodations (including medical interventions...) are necessary to bridge this gap.
> What struck me most was the balance of compassion and pragmatism that Amanda brings to her work.
Nothing about this article strikes me as pragmatic. She's spending all her energy attempting to help people with the least likelihood of success and then gets angry at the system when they inevitably fail. The city didn't kick Morrisette out of the hotel because they like zero-tolerance policies, but because other people deserve a chance a chance to live in a free hotel room as well.
This is one of the core problems and I don't think people want to admit it "can't be solved."
When I was naive, out on my own after 18 I found a low-income/income-restricted apartment complex and thought I got a steal. It was $1k a month for a 2 bed when everywhere else was closer to $1.5k.
I soon realized I would _never_ live in a low income place if I could help it. Someone was killed in our building. Fights in the parking lot every other day. People leaving trash in the hall ways. People smoking 24/7. Of course, maybe only 25% of the people were "problematic" but that was more than enough to make you feel totally uncomfortable in your own home. The last straw was potheads causing a fire alarm at 3 AM and having to evacuate into the cold night in a panic.
Some people are simply selfish and will not be able to live close to/with others without causing problems. _Most_ people do not want to live next to them.
I’m not sure what the right answer is, but asking people who are used to rough and tumble life outside to then behave civilly indoors with zero tolerance seems…set for failure?
There are those that do succeed but those are certainly the most motivated to do so. Others are in transition: know they should get indoors but know their difficulties.
Rather than kicking them out, maybe they are required to attend some mandatory psych sessions. Maybe they go maybe they don’t but at least there support to help them work thru their issues of why they blew up at the staff (as in this instance).
That's what the article was written for-- and it's one valid perspective on it.
To those whose lives have been irreparably harmed by the violent mentally ill people inhabiting SF's streets and parks while the police stand idle and billions of their tax dollars are spent annually failing to solve the problem-- it might hit a bit differently. That isn't the story here, but when you see people taking it differently than you it isn't necessarily because are in any way lacking in compassion.
The article paints the person in question as a harmless Garden Hermit ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_hermit ), perhaps he is but many of the support-resistant homeless are certainly not harmless.
If a black person attacks you, does that mean that black people are then violent? All the statistics I've ever seen indicate that while the homeless and mentally ill are particularly prone to being victims of violence, they don't seem to actually pose a higher issue of safety than anyone else you encounter in your daily life.
It makes sense that would be the case when you think of it - do the rates of violence decrease as you move up the socioeconomic ladder? By all indications the rate of violence among the very wealthy is not dissimilar from those lower on the socioeconomic ladder. Why would you think homelessness is a cliff through which people suddenly become drastically more violent, especially considering how people like Putin and drug lords are extremely wealthy while paying people lower on the socioeconomic rung to do violence on their behalf to protect their economic interests?
I think it is an understandable reaction. They're a long history of articles like "man saves multiple orphans from the orphan crushing machine" and people go "ahhh that's so sweet" and nobody stops to ask "why do we have an orphan crushing machine and why can't do anything about that?"
We don't have anything like a machine that causes homelessness though. Homelessness has existed for thousands of years if not all of human existence and we are probably the closest any society has gotten to eradicating it entirely. We are dealing with probably the hard last 10% of a hard problem. It's just not at all as if we have a terrible system that leads to these outcomes. On the contrary, we've built many systems to successfully prevent these outcomes. They're just not perfect
I get the impression that the reaction right now is more likely to be caused by someone in government turning off a lot of those orphan crushing machines recently.
And the only thing to show for it is gangs of feral orphans raping and pillaging. (If I can stretch the metaphor a bit too much.)
I suspect if someone did a survey, they'd find that most places in the internet have grown consistently less empathetic in terms of social policy since mid 2020.
Most people I met when homeless didn't want the help the government offered. There's a direct conflict between people who lead and those that actually want to help.
Unfortunately, a lot of the homeless I knew were very proud, arrogant, angry, bitter and many other emotions that made it nearly impossible to get them to take care of themselves through any intervention.
And if people refuse to take care of themselves, they will always be in a state where they need others to step in. Once they become destructive to society, I don't think any expectation of mercy from leadership should be expected. That leads to the situations we currently see in some places today.
It's not the lack of shelter that's the issue. There's plenty of shelter and housing if you want it.
When programming, when engineering, I often run into these sorts of intractable problems.
Changing the rules, changing the preconditions or some aspect of the problem itself, that's usually how I solve them.
In this article, it looks like the Park Ranger is changing the rules by making the system work for the person who is experiencing homelessness instead of forcing the person to go alone into a system that they don't like and they don't necessarily see the value of.
SO it is possible to fix with the appropriate smart thinking and willingness to maintain multiple simultaneous perspectives, it seems.
Indeed. But I have another point of view: what if our society is utterly broken? To see what I mean, imagine a world where that level of effort would cure any disease, even aging. How would that split us?
This comment captured a lot of my thoughts about the article, Amanda and many of the other comments on this thread, except that you put them into words much more capably and eloquently than I was able to do. Well stated.
> The city surely understands the long-term costs of its policies, and it’s run by highly pragmatic people with limited budgets.
Is that the case? maybe there are highly pragmatic people in the org, but i dont think they are "running" things. and the city's budget for homelessness is astoundingly high (look it up)
If anyone is wondering, it's ~1 billion dollars per year, for a homeless population of less than 10,000. With this money, they have achieved basically zero change in that number for years. Staggering, incredible levels of waste.
Ah Empathy is not what screwed up these guys' childhoods. Don't blame empathy without acknowledging that both of these people are black in America.
There are so many reasons why this happened and it's way more than just San Francisco being supposedly more empathetic.
Rhetorically speaking, how about the fact that China is quite happy to supply precursor drugs to help make fentanyl cheap? How is that related to San Francisco's perceived empathy? Again, rhetorically.
It makes me angry that this problem is reduced so frequently when it's been proven time and time and time to be a complex problem. It's almost like citizens / voters / taxpayers are willing to play sport with this problem in order to score some kinds of points around being right, or to avoid the sense of blaming oneself, because they know they can do something about it and yet they aren't.
Being honest is a big part of making progress with this, and I think honestly this problem is way more complex than many of us have actually appropriately characterized.
The article goes a long way towards characterizing the problem well, by talking about each individuals, perspectives, situations, and how the system succeeded or fails, knocking them off the path to gaining public support.
"We have to face reality" is a thought-terminating cliche. The causes of homelessness are myriad and there's a ton of conservative propaganda denigrating left-leaning politics. Also, many would beg to differ that SF is a "gigantic pile of shit."
In the spirit of tech conversations, here was my original input from my history:
---
I was swept up in this article and the portrait for Amanda (barrows) - what a unique and strong person - this city is soo lucky to have her.
I want to respond that unlike some here, I came away with huge empathy and today's HN snark and frustration bounced off me pretty hard accordingly. The public order issues such as homelessness in the park have impacted me, but more so, how to translate the state of the world to my children. I always remind them that this person was once a little boy / girl and we might be older, but we're still kids inside and nobody dreamt to grow up in this environment.
The compassion and my own empathy shown here coupled with the pragmatic approach shown by Amanda washed over me and the policies and bureaucratic inefficiencies that make solutions slow and ineffecient are understandable, but also highly frustrating.
The unhoused individuals and their mental state vs the requirements to find a home are very frustrating - the city surely understands the cost of housing policies and is run by highly pragmatic people, but rules are rules and some top down accommodations and medications are needed to help merge this.
---
I personally don't see my opinions changed here - I think the posted text is a bit better but also agree on the uncanny valley issue. A little less brain swelling and I would have been all over the small signals :)
Personally, I find AI and the derivatives extremely helpful when it comes to communication (a booster for the mind!) and use it all the time when translating into other languages and also removing my northern British dialect from communication over in California.
It's an incredibly complicated problem, but if there is one message I can share it is this: homeless people are, first and foremost, people. They span the full range of human experience (the main subject of my movie had a masters degree in psychology) and there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Homelessness is not one problem, it is a symptom of at least half a dozen different problems, all of which need different solutions. (And, BTW, some homeless people voluntarily choose the lifestyle. It's definitely a minority, but it's not zero.)
Yea, I'm a regular HN reader and I've been stuck on the street for going on 7 years. Used to be commended for persevering against the odds and the like, as a child and young programmer at 15 onward, home owner at 22.
I've left SF and landed in a college town in Sac Valley last year. Rent is $750/mo here. Been working in a kitchen for a year. Am I housed yet? Nope. Just gotta save a few thousand dollars. I have about the same amount of bills as a housed person, between gym + storage + take out food + car insurance.
But then the social aspect, my old relatives and network need to distance themselves from me. Any kind of old reference or something, non starter.
I will beat this. I only keep posting here on these threads because as you say, we span the full range of human existence. I like to think I'll use my approach as a template to help others. Get out of the big metro and into a peaceful place with cheap rent and lots of opportunity, yadda yadda.
That is really interesting, do you mind sharing more info about how you went from a skilled engineer (skilled enough to get a house at 22) to homeless? If you make it back up you will have a pretty fascinating life story.
Does that mean we need some kind of big brother/sister program but for the homeless? Would having one capable volunteer who met with them for an hour a week or something and could advocate and help them navigate the system make a big change?
I really struggle with this because it feels like helping as much as possible is the only moral stance to have, but I also question what level of responsibility the homeless have for their own situation. If we keep approaching them with these 0 consequence strategies does that encourage failure? Would the second guy who was smoking meth have benefited if he got thrown in jail for two months, forcing him into sobriety and then released into some kind of temporary housing with strict work and curfew rules?
We balk at the idea of limiting someones freedoms, but it seems like a mercy to take someone who is killing themselves and endangering others and putting them through some kind of rehabilitation that forces them to get physically and mentally healthy. It might be a relief to have a schedule and safety and some kind of guiding hand.
The fully honest answer is that I don't know. I have some first-hand data but no actual expertise in this area. But my personal advice is this: one of the best things you can do for a homeless person is simply to talk to them, to make them feel seen. One of the worst things about being homeless is that you become invisible. For many people that's almost as bad as the physical hardship.
I’m 24 (which I think is younger than most people in here) and I live in San Francisco. I’m pretty ashamed to live here and hope to move soon.
The “on the ground” feeling is bad. Every issue we had 5 years ago is worse (except the drought).
Daily life involves walking calculated circles around drug addicts to avoid agroing them (like Dead Island).
I’m seeing more trash on the streets, more graffiti covering highway signs.
People have given up trying to change anything and just tolerate it now. I thought I’d meet high agency tech people when I moved here. The tech scene is way better than Boston but the sprit of SF is really dead. All the money in the world and they can’t run a city half a well as was done before cars…
Where in SF do you live? I'm guessing Soma, or near downtown? Get out of your neighborhood now and then. Most of the city does not have a drug addict or three on every block, and trash everywhere.
You need to get out of SoMa. The rest of SF is pretty nice, there are definite hot zones like near Bayview but generally what you describe is just SF. I left to raise a family and one of the reasons was the homelessness BUT SF has always been like this and if it was not the homeless it was the gangs or other issues in different parts of the city. Try living in a different part of the city, it might change things up a bit.
My experience suggests the opposite; the city was an upwards trajectory until 2018 or so but it's taken a turn for the worse since.
I lived in SF from 2009 to 2024. Every part of the city has gotten worse. When I moved, parts of Mission were definitely rough and they've cleaned up quite a bit. Even SoMa became somewhat interesting, as much as area like that could have before Covid.
It can take time to get to know any city, but SF has the advantage of being relatively dense and walkable.
I moved here in 2015, and I was about the same age when I arrived. It was an adjustment for me back then too. The problems don’t really seem worse to me overall, but I will say that market street and SoMa in general feel worse than I remember but not really because of homeless people or drug use (that was already a highly visible problem); I think it’s important to point out how much commercial real estate has gone fallow since tons of stuff was shuttered during the pandemic. That’s the most noticeable change to me, and it just makes the whole area that much more depressing.
So before writing off the city entirely as has-been or whatever, maybe try a day of walking around the northeast corner when the weather is nicer. Nob Hill into Chinatown, then North Beach. From there you can enjoy a view from Coit Tower before taking one of the semi-famous stairways down to the Embarcadero. Levi plaza is a nice spot to rest your feet. If you need a place to stop and work, and you don’t mind tethering, find your way up into the Embarcadero center. The upper portion is an open air walkway over the streets with really well-kept gardens/trees along the way (at least once winter passes). Below you’ll find shelter from cold or wet weather, with lots of places to sit. It’s kind of the best kept secret of the city if you work remotely.
> All the money in the world and they can’t run a city half a well as was done before cars…
This is hardly unique to SF. Hell, the city is a diamond in the rough among other post-industrial cities anywhere in the world.
If not the northeastern corner, maybe try the mission near 24th and Valencia, or Fillmore near Japan Town. There are other spots too of course but these are all places I walk or take the train to regularly and I will miss them dearly if I leave.
Same with NYC. People just moving here are unaware of the history and think OMG so much homelessness, so much crime! Meanwhile I grew up remembering seeing crack vials all over the street, the mob was ever present actively extorting and murdering people, numerous abandoned buildings creating ghost towns of squatters, and the homeless camps were quite elaborate - I remember a big encampment around the foot of the Manhattan Bridge complete with burning trash barrels and a large teepee. Today's NYC is sterile compared to the 80's I grew up in.
You’re ashamed? I have to be honest with you - I just moved into the city last year after living in the suburbs since 2018. SF is the most beautiful city I’ve ever been in. Do you not have a strong attachment to the communities here? I’m finding the city surprisingly good at cultivating niches.
lol San Franciscans never tried to change anything for the last 50 years, they never gave up since they never tried to begin with - they actually prefer it this way.
Overpaid tech workers like yourself have done much more to destroy the "spirit" of San Fransisco than some homeless people sleeping in a park. You can look all the way back to the 1960s and see the same complaints about "lawlessness" in San Fransisco, there's always a marginalized scapegoat to blame - first the beatniks, then the hippies, then the gays, now the homeless. The homeless are not an aberration or a new phenomenon in San Fransisco. It's the entitled, overpaid tech transplants rampaging through the city that are destroying it.
Lol… yea, definitely the people who’ve moved here to make a better life for themselves and not the native population doing whatever they can to try an preserve a 1970’s nostalgic lifestyle without thinking about how their own children would need a place to live.
The xenophobia of the late-comer San Franciscan is one of the most cliched examples of why the utopian fantasies many leftist have are doomed to fail.
The transplants didn’t cause the housing crisis. That was built piece by piece by San Francisco over the last 50 years all in an effort to grant people with seniority special privileges.
> shepherding him through what one Recreation and Parks Department official described as the “arduous and achingly bureaucratic tasks” necessary just to be eligible for housing.
I'm going to risk a political statement and say that this is why I'm mostly hopeful about DOGE, even if parts of it are a shit show.
Building civilization comes with a hefty dose of institutional entropy, which keeps accumulating, despite (or often because) good intentions and competence. Everybody is improving their piece of the map, but this means you get stuck in a lot of spots of local maxima. Some can be fixed from a level above, but some need a round of creative destruction every 10 years or so.
It's a good read and a good blog for many reasons, but the relevant part to this conversation: Japan managed to keep a very high level of living even through decades of economic stagnation and aging population in large part by having a sane zoning system. Yes, that simple. They have 12, nation-wide, mostly inclusive zoning types. This means the permitted building types carry over as you move up the categories, allowing mixed-use development by default.
And indeed, you can actually go to Japan and buy a house for about the price of a decent car - which coincidently used to be the case in most of the world, before the double pressure of zoning/coding on one hand, and migration towards urban centers on the other squeezed the housing pricing way above what actual costs would have it be.
How in the world is randomly firing people supposed to make anything more efficient? They literally don't even know what the people they're firing do, as seen with the latest mess with the Department of Energy.
Fiery take, but Elon eviscerated twitter and just kept kicking people out seemingly randomly. Anyone who didn't like it was encouraged walk out too on top of that. Twitter was doomed and the internet was rife with how it's collapse was immanent.
But he we are three years later and twitter is still running and still top dog in the message-post space.
I can't help but feel that in the presence of lots of money, organizations just bloat and bloat and bloat, and all that bloat will be sure to have a long winded explanation for why it is _critical_ to stay in existence.
Agreed. Maybe the government is terribly inefficient. I don't know. However, this isn't the most efficient way to make it better. Moreover, efficiency is not just saving money which seems to be all that is going on.
The necessity for delicately traversing the path to a solution that's more long-term sustainable than that which already exists seems to be something that DOGE is entirely incapable of.
Musk seems to want things to scale; fewer people to achieve more productivity. People that already fall through the cracks aren't going to suddenly find themselves better off via a system that scales better, because better scaling actually creates wider cracks.
The median flows better, at the cost of the fringes.
Your comments regarding Japan are interesting. Japan's definitely an interesting example to use due to the odd, unenviable economic situation, but that makes your point stand out more rather than less, I think.
The problem is if you want lower bureaucracy you have to change laws and not fire people.
Most of the time you still need them, they just have no time to do what they are supposed to do.
For instance, would you fire doctors to reduce bureaucracy in medical services?
Great point. And if you fire all the insurance middlemen, but don’t get rid of the legal requirements which spawned those middlemen in the first place, you end up with medical professionals swamped with paperwork they shouldn’t have to deal with it.
The problem is if you want lower bureaucracy you have to change laws and not fire people.
Not every excessive process is the result of legislation. Some of these processes arise gradually and unnecessarily, because, in an organization without competition, there's no pressure to be efficient (i.e. focus on increasing output).
Personally I can get behind the stated intentions of DOGE (although I don't think that's the real intent). I can also see the logic of having to break a few things / start over to really get to a clean state. But the way it's done doesn't seem intentional or calculated, it's just randomly smash things and seeing what breaks.
To put it in software terms, this is like doing a refactor without knowing what the current code base does, what the intended functionalities are and without having a design. Instead, someone just goes in to delete chunks of code based on the file name and see what happens.
With a random CRUD app that might be ok to some extent, but we're talking about people's livelihood, national security matters, environmental and consumer protection and such. The current DOGE approach using the most charitable take is either reckless or hubris.
Despite the hype, DOGE is about replacing government employees with private contractors rather that actually saving money. Therefore it will almost certainly end up costing more in the long run.
At a high level, the current administration is seeking ways to cut tax for the wealthy and pay and conditions for workers. As a property developer, Trump has a literal vested interest in maintaining high property values.
Its really difficult to see how this will translate into more affordable housing for poor people.
Indeed there is administrative bloat everywhere, and I can sympathize with your hope that tearing down the current system will leave room for building anew.
However, it's hubris to assume that everything is bloat. There is the adage of Chesterton's fence, which reads: "...reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood." Many things that appear to be bloat that serves a useful function, and tearing them blindly is going to do irreparable damage.
Cool. The US is the third largest country in the world; not all of us have to live above a restaurant or laundry. Or in apartments or other multi-tenant housing.
Those of us that want to can move to San Francisco or New York.
The state i live in has fewer people than metro Los Angeles. What works for them for housing is unnecessary for us.
Really not seeing the forest through the trees on this one. The president is not supposed to have unilateral authority to axe written law. He's trimming the legislative branch, not the budget.
But DOGE, Elon Musk and Donald Trump don't have zoning on the agenda.
Trump's campaign platform was verbatim in favor of single family zoning according to his website. Harris's official platform was to ease permitting restrictions and provide incentives to states to reduce these regulations, according to their website and the multiple times they discussed this on the campaign trail.
Look past the marketing hype of DOGE and see that it's not actually deregulating anything that matters. The regulations that are blocking housing and energy are only going to be accelerated under this administration -- wilfully so.
The technocratic center-right have at times embraced deregulations like this, but not the new populist-right. The populist-right, if anything, see these regulations as useful because it empowers the immigrant scapegoat tactic as an explanation for housing costs.
I mean, the other conclusion from that article is a negative, namely: constant GDP growth is not a great measure of success. Who cares if GDP goes up or down? What matters is quality of life.
DOGE comes from the political machine that believes more restrictions on eligibility for government assistance are a GOOD thing and that spending on such assistance should be dramatically cut.
So good luck with that.
Zoning as a silver bullet? When you have a huge economic difference as a conflating factor? If the US had had decades of economic stagnation the housing price pressure caused by the beneficiaries of many sectors of the economy NOT stagnating, but instead of booming at more-than-anywhere-else-in-the-world-levels, seen in SF in particular, would be far less.) Look at housing prices in hollowing-out former industrial towns in the Midwest. Economic stagnation and lower cost of living go hand in hand. Japan stagnated at a pretty high level, quality-of-living-wise. That doesn't seem like a bad thing. It's certainly not comparable to Nigeria, Pakistan, or Chile. It's also not comparable to the US. And do you know who else doesn't want the US to stagnate like that for the elite professional class? Elon Musk. (And Japan's economic situation has more than a few darker aspects to it.)
(Republicans also fucking love zoning, so..... again... wtf)
> If the US had had decades of economic stagnation the housing price pressure caused by the beneficiaries of many sectors of the economy NOT stagnating, but instead of booming at more-than-anywhere-else-in-the-world-levels, seen in SF in particular, would be far less.) Look at housing prices in hollowing-out former industrial towns in the Midwest.
But the article isn't wrong though. Zoning things like Tokyo in San Francisco would be a silver bullet to the woes there and it would go a long way to making people feel prosperous. If you live in the bay area, you'll be shocked to see people with quite large net worths, feel like they have nothing because the only place they can afford near their workplace is $1M or more and we're talking about condos here.
Elon Musk is a liar with zero credibility. All his claims about government "inefficiency" are lies used to make people like you OK with him shutting down agencies he doesn't like.
You think conservatives care about actually helping the unhoused? Their ultimate goal is to funnel money from public services into private hands; and their "solution" to homelessness involves prison, concentration camps[1], or exile[2] — because they see the problem as undesirables reducing quality of life for the worthy rich, not abject human misery. (Indeed, Musk considers recipients of federal aid to be part of the "parasite class."[3])
For those who live in San Francisco and witness homelessness and drug addiction across the city, this article feels deeply out of touch and even insulting.
We need to acknowledge that San Francisco has spent billions over decades on homelessness programs, yet the crisis persists, leaving us to ask: Is this truly the best we can do? Are we investing efficiently, or are we simply maintaining a broken system?
The core problem imo is there is simply not good enough treatments for addiction (yet?). For opioid addiction there is methadone and buprenorphine etc. But I suspect these have became even less effective with so much fentanyl around now, requiring much higher doses. But these all really work (simplifying massively) by replacing the addiction with something that is easier to eventually titrate down.
For meth, crack, etc there are effectively no pharmacological interventions available. And many (most?) of the street homeless have dual addictions to a stimulant and an opioid, so even if they did manage to switch from fentanyl to buprenorphine they would almost certainly be extremely unstable with their stimulant addiction.
Obviously there are psychological interventions and peer support groups, but these require quite a lot of stability to stick to and get to, which I think is extremely difficult for someone in a very chaotic addiction cycle.
To me, it seems some of the billions that cities spent on social services for homeless should be diverted (or in addition to) to pharmacological research. There is so little funding available for this - I read Prof David Nutt was doing an interesting PET study for kappa opioid response in addiction but ran out of funding. The funding requirements were low-medium hundreds of thousands of dollars and couldn't find it to continue the research.
The current status quo seems a bit like trying to treat TB without antibiotics. The treatment back then was basically similar to current 'rehab' programs - send them to a quiet place and give them care and help. Obviously not a bad thing to do; but once you had antibiotics the prognosis improved by many orders of magnitude almost overnight (and a lot less costly to provide).
> The core problem imo is there is simply not good enough treatments for addiction (yet?).
Isn't that still treating a symptom, rather than the core problem? If homelessness is caused by drug addiction, what causes drug addiction? Underlying mental health? Lack of opportunity? Government welfare dependence?
The problem is that money cannot solve homelessness, because you cannot live in it or eat it or be treated by it. It's just money - numbers in a computer.
Things that might help would be housing, food or treatments. But those real-world things are often very hard to come by, and often encumbered by the very people who profess to want to help.
For example, maybe building more homes would help - but developers are often hamstrung in their ability to do so - and often by exactly the same people that want to fund homeless programs.
So what happens when we give people a lot of money to "solve" a problem, but then prevent them from taking the actions that might help? Well, they still will always find a way to "use" the money (I'm not necessarily implying fraud here), but the results will never materialize. What this looks like in practice is funding studies, working groups, paper-pushing bureaucracies, etc.
So the money is gone, any we don't have anything to show for it.
Please try to speak only for yourself, not all SF residents.
I’ve lived here for a decade, in 6 different neighborhoods (including 6th street). I now live near Golden Gate Park where this article is mostly set. I found it inspiring, not insulting.
I can't speak for SF, but LA had judges recently come down very hard on housing organizations for having basicslly zero data on where 20 billion dollars went. The judge forced actual audits and homelessness is actually slightly improving as of late 2024.
I would nlt he shocked if similar issues are happening in SF. at best very inefficient spending on minor factors, at medium they may be "fixing homelessness" by paying for more security than actual homes (this was one of the LA factors). Or at the damndest it's hurt outright Embezzlement.
Viewed from 10,000ft it could even be cheaper in the long term, as an overall outcome. Personal attention, guidance through the system, vs constant background EMT interventions, more costly health outcomes, Policing and ultimately incarceration risks.
I don't like reductive economics logic over what is a humane response, but I do like that it may not only be nicer, but actually financially sensible.
What you're describing is universal healthcare being cheaper in the long term, which I would agree with. What is described in this article absolutely does not sound like a productive use of taxpayer money at all. Any one of the ranger's clients that gets semi-permanent shelter is someone else who doesn't. At best, we're pay a full-time salary for someone to play a zero sum game. IMO, it's actually worse than that because such housing is more efficiently allocated to those who are able and willing to navigate the bureaucracy of public housing themselves are more likely to rebound successfully.
Nitpick, but $1M in unpaid bills is nowhere near $1M in costs. Obviously this is still a troubling result but in all likelihood it was less than 10% of that in actual costs and the costs weren’t in fact borne by “the taxpayer” but rather by slightly inflated fees for everyone else, since US hospitals must bill according to an assumption that some percentage of bills will go unpaid, due to the relationship between themselves, the insurers, and uninsured patients.
In that case, why not move all the homeless from a park in a metropolis to a park in a cheaper/remote area? Then you can actually employ cheaper custodians in those areas to look after these homeless.
It's a lot hard to re-enter society if you're separated from everyone and everyplace you know. Sure, it could be cheaper in some ways to ship the homeless out to bumfuck nowhere, but might be less cost-effective than you think, and certainly less humane.
Park Ranges and Social Services Workers are much cheaper than Police, Paramedics, and Emergency Room Staff.
Your reductive suggestion could be implemented by busing the homeless to prisons.
That's probably not what you were proposing, but it's one interpretation.
See, thats why I don't like the reductive reasoning. After all, when you're moving them why bother with seat belts and comfy chairs? Just use a flatbed truck and they can hold their pathetic possessions on with string, if they have any. And you also neatly assume the resources in the remote location can cope with the burden rather than already being behind the cost curve, compared to rangers in the SF metro area with direct access to the agencies.
Wait a minute, isn't this why it "paid" for the Texan and Floridan governors to ship their problems to the sanctuary cities?
If they could get the guy with asthma regularly seeing a PCP, the money the public is spending on his constant ER trips would more than pay for housing and the time the ranger has to spend on helping him.
(Also note that if that's your general policy then you effectively allow anyone to blackmail you to get whatever they want, just by making it slightly more expensive to not give them what they want)
Exactly. The economic argument shouldn't be the only reason to push for better solutions, but it's a compelling one (especially in a system that often prioritizes cost over compassion)
I have a pet theory that love is a basic human need (and a requirement for good mental health), and governments are notoriously bad at providing love no matter how much money you throw at mental health therapy, treatment programs, UBI, etc. Barrows is setting a good example here, but how to get more citizens involved so the burden isn't all on a few rangers?
I suspect that few people want to be involved. It is difficult and dangerous work. It requires a personality that both cares for others, while being resilient enough to face the challenges of those in their care. By in large, it is also a thankless job. Just look at many of the responses here. The public don't care about the time and effort involved. Many think that it is best to just lock them up. Quite often the recipients don't care. They are too busy battling their own demons.
It's probably best to have safety nets in place so that people don't reach these depths in the first place.
> It requires a personality that both cares for others, while being resilient enough to face the challenges of those in their care.
Not only resilience to the challenges, but resilience to the fact that some people you will just fail to help. The more you care about those in your care, the more it will generally consume you when they don't succeed.
This is a hugely difficult thing to overcome, and it's a big reason why, for example, hospital doctors typically end up with relatively little empathy for patients: it's very hard to maintain your mental health while empathizing with people hurting and dying every day. You really have to build some kind of wall between you and them to cope with the inevitable losses.
We have social safety nets in the US. We just don't have one robust enough that you can live in housing and have enough income without working in San Francisco permanently.
The safety net for everyone is your friends and family. Drug addiction destroys that, so you are left alone. They kind of don't have anyone else. People see homelessness, but all I see is a slow trek to a suicide for many. They are dying slowly - and do not make any mistake about that. It's fatal.
Overall, there are many drugs addicts and homeless people in the world. It only bothers us when it obstructs our vision, very disgusting sentences like I cant even visit the beach anymore. I think that's fine, there are many beaches and many other places. You can visit the beach somewhere else, these people are dying.
Millionaire Rogan found the sight of homeless people unbearable so he had to leave the state (could be the taxes, but he's also filthy rich. I don't want to say he's just rotten, that's mean. I'll say a few other things instead).
Your society creates an inordinate amount of homeless people, that's first. Worry about the view later. You are lucky that you even get to see poverty up close, most just move the living fuck away from it.
Wait.
Edit:
I bring Rogan up because if you go through his entire catalog, you will see he has hours and hours of content that just bullies homeless people. He has done that to a few other groups, literal hours if you stack them side by side in a compilation. So there was already a lot of damage done in terms of mindshare by this media-arm.
There's this thing called religion where we chant hymns and sing songs in an attempt to reorient our psyche to suppress our innate selfishness. By raising our oxytocin levels amongst our community via shared belief and communal celebration, we leave the room in an exuberant mood to serve others.
I know people think the prayer meetings et al are corny, but when you realize what comes afterwards (or should) then it really all makes sense.
And it's not just about helping strangers it's about helping others who are maybe not your best friend but still in your circle.
Congregational religion is one of the most tragically trampled upon secular fences.
It's no surprised that the same methodology was arrived at by the world's great religions. Buddhist and Christian mendicant and service-based monastic orders come to mind
Get more folks involved in local volunteering opportunities, especially ones with direct outreach to people in need.
I'm heavily involved with Austin Bicycle Meals [1]. When a homeless person already knows you are there to help, it creates an entirely different social dynamic than normal. You get opportunities to make conversation and connections, which humanizes how we view these issues.
That's a total reversal to how most people interact with the homeless: in an entirely avoidant manner either randomly on the street or through a car window. That's why so much of the general public is numb to their plight.
The change in mindset that happens is really powerful, can take only a couple of hours of volunteering to happen, and something I hope more people seek out.
Readit News
Unlike some here, I came away with a deep sense of empathy, and today’s HN snark and frustration bounced off me pretty hard. The public order issues - homelessness in parks, the challenges of shared spaces—have certainly impacted me. But more than that, I struggle with how to translate the state of the world to my boys. I always remind them: every unhoused person was once a little boy or girl. We might be older now, but we’re still kids inside, and nobody dreams of growing up in these circumstances.
What struck me most was the balance of compassion and pragmatism that Amanda brings to her work. It’s easy to be frustrated with the policies and bureaucratic inefficiencies that slow down real solutions - but they are, in some ways, understandable.
The biggest frustration for me is the gap between the mental state of many unhoused individuals and the requirements needed to secure housing. The city surely understands the long-term costs of its policies, and it’s run by highly pragmatic people with limited budgets. But rules are rules, and at some point, top-down accommodations (including medical interventions...) are necessary to bridge this gap.
Nothing about this article strikes me as pragmatic. She's spending all her energy attempting to help people with the least likelihood of success and then gets angry at the system when they inevitably fail. The city didn't kick Morrisette out of the hotel because they like zero-tolerance policies, but because other people deserve a chance a chance to live in a free hotel room as well.
When I was naive, out on my own after 18 I found a low-income/income-restricted apartment complex and thought I got a steal. It was $1k a month for a 2 bed when everywhere else was closer to $1.5k.
I soon realized I would _never_ live in a low income place if I could help it. Someone was killed in our building. Fights in the parking lot every other day. People leaving trash in the hall ways. People smoking 24/7. Of course, maybe only 25% of the people were "problematic" but that was more than enough to make you feel totally uncomfortable in your own home. The last straw was potheads causing a fire alarm at 3 AM and having to evacuate into the cold night in a panic.
Some people are simply selfish and will not be able to live close to/with others without causing problems. _Most_ people do not want to live next to them.
There are those that do succeed but those are certainly the most motivated to do so. Others are in transition: know they should get indoors but know their difficulties.
Rather than kicking them out, maybe they are required to attend some mandatory psych sessions. Maybe they go maybe they don’t but at least there support to help them work thru their issues of why they blew up at the staff (as in this instance).
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To those whose lives have been irreparably harmed by the violent mentally ill people inhabiting SF's streets and parks while the police stand idle and billions of their tax dollars are spent annually failing to solve the problem-- it might hit a bit differently. That isn't the story here, but when you see people taking it differently than you it isn't necessarily because are in any way lacking in compassion.
The article paints the person in question as a harmless Garden Hermit ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_hermit ), perhaps he is but many of the support-resistant homeless are certainly not harmless.
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It makes sense that would be the case when you think of it - do the rates of violence decrease as you move up the socioeconomic ladder? By all indications the rate of violence among the very wealthy is not dissimilar from those lower on the socioeconomic ladder. Why would you think homelessness is a cliff through which people suddenly become drastically more violent, especially considering how people like Putin and drug lords are extremely wealthy while paying people lower on the socioeconomic rung to do violence on their behalf to protect their economic interests?
I think it's important to do both.
Maybe because it's not the orphan crushing machine, but the lack of the low functioning orphan saving machine. Or a mix of both.
And the only thing to show for it is gangs of feral orphans raping and pillaging. (If I can stretch the metaphor a bit too much.)
I suspect if someone did a survey, they'd find that most places in the internet have grown consistently less empathetic in terms of social policy since mid 2020.
Unfortunately, a lot of the homeless I knew were very proud, arrogant, angry, bitter and many other emotions that made it nearly impossible to get them to take care of themselves through any intervention.
And if people refuse to take care of themselves, they will always be in a state where they need others to step in. Once they become destructive to society, I don't think any expectation of mercy from leadership should be expected. That leads to the situations we currently see in some places today.
It's not the lack of shelter that's the issue. There's plenty of shelter and housing if you want it.
When programming, when engineering, I often run into these sorts of intractable problems.
Changing the rules, changing the preconditions or some aspect of the problem itself, that's usually how I solve them.
In this article, it looks like the Park Ranger is changing the rules by making the system work for the person who is experiencing homelessness instead of forcing the person to go alone into a system that they don't like and they don't necessarily see the value of.
SO it is possible to fix with the appropriate smart thinking and willingness to maintain multiple simultaneous perspectives, it seems.
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Is that the case? maybe there are highly pragmatic people in the org, but i dont think they are "running" things. and the city's budget for homelessness is astoundingly high (look it up)
It is empathy that is in great part responsible for for the crime ridden shit show that is much of SF.
How do we balance empathy while making SF not a gigantic pile of shit? I don't think there is an answer here. It's choose one, or choose the other.
There are so many reasons why this happened and it's way more than just San Francisco being supposedly more empathetic.
Rhetorically speaking, how about the fact that China is quite happy to supply precursor drugs to help make fentanyl cheap? How is that related to San Francisco's perceived empathy? Again, rhetorically.
It makes me angry that this problem is reduced so frequently when it's been proven time and time and time to be a complex problem. It's almost like citizens / voters / taxpayers are willing to play sport with this problem in order to score some kinds of points around being right, or to avoid the sense of blaming oneself, because they know they can do something about it and yet they aren't.
Being honest is a big part of making progress with this, and I think honestly this problem is way more complex than many of us have actually appropriately characterized.
The article goes a long way towards characterizing the problem well, by talking about each individuals, perspectives, situations, and how the system succeeded or fails, knocking them off the path to gaining public support.
But their rights can’t trump victims, that’s not justice. Like someone else mentioned prop 47 was a bad idea.
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I was swept up in this article and the portrait for Amanda (barrows) - what a unique and strong person - this city is soo lucky to have her.
I want to respond that unlike some here, I came away with huge empathy and today's HN snark and frustration bounced off me pretty hard accordingly. The public order issues such as homelessness in the park have impacted me, but more so, how to translate the state of the world to my children. I always remind them that this person was once a little boy / girl and we might be older, but we're still kids inside and nobody dreamt to grow up in this environment.
The compassion and my own empathy shown here coupled with the pragmatic approach shown by Amanda washed over me and the policies and bureaucratic inefficiencies that make solutions slow and ineffecient are understandable, but also highly frustrating.
The unhoused individuals and their mental state vs the requirements to find a home are very frustrating - the city surely understands the cost of housing policies and is run by highly pragmatic people, but rules are rules and some top down accommodations and medications are needed to help merge this.
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I personally don't see my opinions changed here - I think the posted text is a bit better but also agree on the uncanny valley issue. A little less brain swelling and I would have been all over the small signals :)
Personally, I find AI and the derivatives extremely helpful when it comes to communication (a booster for the mind!) and use it all the time when translating into other languages and also removing my northern British dialect from communication over in California.
Edit: I called this wrong - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43075184. Sorry!
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https://graceofgodmovie.com/
It's an incredibly complicated problem, but if there is one message I can share it is this: homeless people are, first and foremost, people. They span the full range of human experience (the main subject of my movie had a masters degree in psychology) and there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Homelessness is not one problem, it is a symptom of at least half a dozen different problems, all of which need different solutions. (And, BTW, some homeless people voluntarily choose the lifestyle. It's definitely a minority, but it's not zero.)
I've left SF and landed in a college town in Sac Valley last year. Rent is $750/mo here. Been working in a kitchen for a year. Am I housed yet? Nope. Just gotta save a few thousand dollars. I have about the same amount of bills as a housed person, between gym + storage + take out food + car insurance.
But then the social aspect, my old relatives and network need to distance themselves from me. Any kind of old reference or something, non starter.
I will beat this. I only keep posting here on these threads because as you say, we span the full range of human existence. I like to think I'll use my approach as a template to help others. Get out of the big metro and into a peaceful place with cheap rent and lots of opportunity, yadda yadda.
Cheers.
This always comes to mind when I see folks on the street here in NYC/Brooklyn. Is it too simple a solution? Is a dense metro better in some ways?
I really struggle with this because it feels like helping as much as possible is the only moral stance to have, but I also question what level of responsibility the homeless have for their own situation. If we keep approaching them with these 0 consequence strategies does that encourage failure? Would the second guy who was smoking meth have benefited if he got thrown in jail for two months, forcing him into sobriety and then released into some kind of temporary housing with strict work and curfew rules?
We balk at the idea of limiting someones freedoms, but it seems like a mercy to take someone who is killing themselves and endangering others and putting them through some kind of rehabilitation that forces them to get physically and mentally healthy. It might be a relief to have a schedule and safety and some kind of guiding hand.
The “on the ground” feeling is bad. Every issue we had 5 years ago is worse (except the drought).
Daily life involves walking calculated circles around drug addicts to avoid agroing them (like Dead Island).
I’m seeing more trash on the streets, more graffiti covering highway signs.
People have given up trying to change anything and just tolerate it now. I thought I’d meet high agency tech people when I moved here. The tech scene is way better than Boston but the sprit of SF is really dead. All the money in the world and they can’t run a city half a well as was done before cars…
I lived in SF from 2009 to 2024. Every part of the city has gotten worse. When I moved, parts of Mission were definitely rough and they've cleaned up quite a bit. Even SoMa became somewhat interesting, as much as area like that could have before Covid.
I moved here in 2015, and I was about the same age when I arrived. It was an adjustment for me back then too. The problems don’t really seem worse to me overall, but I will say that market street and SoMa in general feel worse than I remember but not really because of homeless people or drug use (that was already a highly visible problem); I think it’s important to point out how much commercial real estate has gone fallow since tons of stuff was shuttered during the pandemic. That’s the most noticeable change to me, and it just makes the whole area that much more depressing.
So before writing off the city entirely as has-been or whatever, maybe try a day of walking around the northeast corner when the weather is nicer. Nob Hill into Chinatown, then North Beach. From there you can enjoy a view from Coit Tower before taking one of the semi-famous stairways down to the Embarcadero. Levi plaza is a nice spot to rest your feet. If you need a place to stop and work, and you don’t mind tethering, find your way up into the Embarcadero center. The upper portion is an open air walkway over the streets with really well-kept gardens/trees along the way (at least once winter passes). Below you’ll find shelter from cold or wet weather, with lots of places to sit. It’s kind of the best kept secret of the city if you work remotely.
> All the money in the world and they can’t run a city half a well as was done before cars…
This is hardly unique to SF. Hell, the city is a diamond in the rough among other post-industrial cities anywhere in the world.
If not the northeastern corner, maybe try the mission near 24th and Valencia, or Fillmore near Japan Town. There are other spots too of course but these are all places I walk or take the train to regularly and I will miss them dearly if I leave.
The xenophobia of the late-comer San Franciscan is one of the most cliched examples of why the utopian fantasies many leftist have are doomed to fail.
The transplants didn’t cause the housing crisis. That was built piece by piece by San Francisco over the last 50 years all in an effort to grant people with seniority special privileges.
I'm going to risk a political statement and say that this is why I'm mostly hopeful about DOGE, even if parts of it are a shit show.
Building civilization comes with a hefty dose of institutional entropy, which keeps accumulating, despite (or often because) good intentions and competence. Everybody is improving their piece of the map, but this means you get stuck in a lot of spots of local maxima. Some can be fixed from a level above, but some need a round of creative destruction every 10 years or so.
I've read this yesterday: https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/why-japan-succ...
It's a good read and a good blog for many reasons, but the relevant part to this conversation: Japan managed to keep a very high level of living even through decades of economic stagnation and aging population in large part by having a sane zoning system. Yes, that simple. They have 12, nation-wide, mostly inclusive zoning types. This means the permitted building types carry over as you move up the categories, allowing mixed-use development by default.
And indeed, you can actually go to Japan and buy a house for about the price of a decent car - which coincidently used to be the case in most of the world, before the double pressure of zoning/coding on one hand, and migration towards urban centers on the other squeezed the housing pricing way above what actual costs would have it be.
But he we are three years later and twitter is still running and still top dog in the message-post space.
I can't help but feel that in the presence of lots of money, organizations just bloat and bloat and bloat, and all that bloat will be sure to have a long winded explanation for why it is _critical_ to stay in existence.
Musk seems to want things to scale; fewer people to achieve more productivity. People that already fall through the cracks aren't going to suddenly find themselves better off via a system that scales better, because better scaling actually creates wider cracks.
The median flows better, at the cost of the fringes.
Your comments regarding Japan are interesting. Japan's definitely an interesting example to use due to the odd, unenviable economic situation, but that makes your point stand out more rather than less, I think.
For instance, would you fire doctors to reduce bureaucracy in medical services?
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But how does fixing our zoning issues translate to, for example, firing thousands of IRS workers?
To put it in software terms, this is like doing a refactor without knowing what the current code base does, what the intended functionalities are and without having a design. Instead, someone just goes in to delete chunks of code based on the file name and see what happens.
With a random CRUD app that might be ok to some extent, but we're talking about people's livelihood, national security matters, environmental and consumer protection and such. The current DOGE approach using the most charitable take is either reckless or hubris.
At a high level, the current administration is seeking ways to cut tax for the wealthy and pay and conditions for workers. As a property developer, Trump has a literal vested interest in maintaining high property values.
Its really difficult to see how this will translate into more affordable housing for poor people.
However, it's hubris to assume that everything is bloat. There is the adage of Chesterton's fence, which reads: "...reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood." Many things that appear to be bloat that serves a useful function, and tearing them blindly is going to do irreparable damage.
[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Chesterton%27s_fence
That is more or less how it works all around the world except the US. Or rather: mixed use is the default, outside of specific cases
Those of us that want to can move to San Francisco or New York.
The state i live in has fewer people than metro Los Angeles. What works for them for housing is unnecessary for us.
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Trump's campaign platform was verbatim in favor of single family zoning according to his website. Harris's official platform was to ease permitting restrictions and provide incentives to states to reduce these regulations, according to their website and the multiple times they discussed this on the campaign trail.
Look past the marketing hype of DOGE and see that it's not actually deregulating anything that matters. The regulations that are blocking housing and energy are only going to be accelerated under this administration -- wilfully so.
The technocratic center-right have at times embraced deregulations like this, but not the new populist-right. The populist-right, if anything, see these regulations as useful because it empowers the immigrant scapegoat tactic as an explanation for housing costs.
So good luck with that.
Zoning as a silver bullet? When you have a huge economic difference as a conflating factor? If the US had had decades of economic stagnation the housing price pressure caused by the beneficiaries of many sectors of the economy NOT stagnating, but instead of booming at more-than-anywhere-else-in-the-world-levels, seen in SF in particular, would be far less.) Look at housing prices in hollowing-out former industrial towns in the Midwest. Economic stagnation and lower cost of living go hand in hand. Japan stagnated at a pretty high level, quality-of-living-wise. That doesn't seem like a bad thing. It's certainly not comparable to Nigeria, Pakistan, or Chile. It's also not comparable to the US. And do you know who else doesn't want the US to stagnate like that for the elite professional class? Elon Musk. (And Japan's economic situation has more than a few darker aspects to it.)
(Republicans also fucking love zoning, so..... again... wtf)
But the article isn't wrong though. Zoning things like Tokyo in San Francisco would be a silver bullet to the woes there and it would go a long way to making people feel prosperous. If you live in the bay area, you'll be shocked to see people with quite large net worths, feel like they have nothing because the only place they can afford near their workplace is $1M or more and we're talking about condos here.
[1]: https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-polit...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_homeless_relocation_pr...
[3]: https://atlantablackstar.com/2025/02/14/elon-musk-faces-back...
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We need to acknowledge that San Francisco has spent billions over decades on homelessness programs, yet the crisis persists, leaving us to ask: Is this truly the best we can do? Are we investing efficiently, or are we simply maintaining a broken system?
For meth, crack, etc there are effectively no pharmacological interventions available. And many (most?) of the street homeless have dual addictions to a stimulant and an opioid, so even if they did manage to switch from fentanyl to buprenorphine they would almost certainly be extremely unstable with their stimulant addiction.
Obviously there are psychological interventions and peer support groups, but these require quite a lot of stability to stick to and get to, which I think is extremely difficult for someone in a very chaotic addiction cycle.
To me, it seems some of the billions that cities spent on social services for homeless should be diverted (or in addition to) to pharmacological research. There is so little funding available for this - I read Prof David Nutt was doing an interesting PET study for kappa opioid response in addiction but ran out of funding. The funding requirements were low-medium hundreds of thousands of dollars and couldn't find it to continue the research.
The current status quo seems a bit like trying to treat TB without antibiotics. The treatment back then was basically similar to current 'rehab' programs - send them to a quiet place and give them care and help. Obviously not a bad thing to do; but once you had antibiotics the prognosis improved by many orders of magnitude almost overnight (and a lot less costly to provide).
Isn't that still treating a symptom, rather than the core problem? If homelessness is caused by drug addiction, what causes drug addiction? Underlying mental health? Lack of opportunity? Government welfare dependence?
Things that might help would be housing, food or treatments. But those real-world things are often very hard to come by, and often encumbered by the very people who profess to want to help.
For example, maybe building more homes would help - but developers are often hamstrung in their ability to do so - and often by exactly the same people that want to fund homeless programs.
So what happens when we give people a lot of money to "solve" a problem, but then prevent them from taking the actions that might help? Well, they still will always find a way to "use" the money (I'm not necessarily implying fraud here), but the results will never materialize. What this looks like in practice is funding studies, working groups, paper-pushing bureaucracies, etc.
So the money is gone, any we don't have anything to show for it.
I’ve lived here for a decade, in 6 different neighborhoods (including 6th street). I now live near Golden Gate Park where this article is mostly set. I found it inspiring, not insulting.
I would nlt he shocked if similar issues are happening in SF. at best very inefficient spending on minor factors, at medium they may be "fixing homelessness" by paying for more security than actual homes (this was one of the LA factors). Or at the damndest it's hurt outright Embezzlement.
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I don't like reductive economics logic over what is a humane response, but I do like that it may not only be nicer, but actually financially sensible.
https://centerforhealthjournalism.org/our-work/insights/mill...
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Your reductive suggestion could be implemented by busing the homeless to prisons. That's probably not what you were proposing, but it's one interpretation.
Wait a minute, isn't this why it "paid" for the Texan and Floridan governors to ship their problems to the sanctuary cities?
(Also note that if that's your general policy then you effectively allow anyone to blackmail you to get whatever they want, just by making it slightly more expensive to not give them what they want)
It's probably best to have safety nets in place so that people don't reach these depths in the first place.
Not only resilience to the challenges, but resilience to the fact that some people you will just fail to help. The more you care about those in your care, the more it will generally consume you when they don't succeed.
This is a hugely difficult thing to overcome, and it's a big reason why, for example, hospital doctors typically end up with relatively little empathy for patients: it's very hard to maintain your mental health while empathizing with people hurting and dying every day. You really have to build some kind of wall between you and them to cope with the inevitable losses.
Overall, there are many drugs addicts and homeless people in the world. It only bothers us when it obstructs our vision, very disgusting sentences like I cant even visit the beach anymore. I think that's fine, there are many beaches and many other places. You can visit the beach somewhere else, these people are dying.
Millionaire Rogan found the sight of homeless people unbearable so he had to leave the state (could be the taxes, but he's also filthy rich. I don't want to say he's just rotten, that's mean. I'll say a few other things instead).
Your society creates an inordinate amount of homeless people, that's first. Worry about the view later. You are lucky that you even get to see poverty up close, most just move the living fuck away from it.
Wait.
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I bring Rogan up because if you go through his entire catalog, you will see he has hours and hours of content that just bullies homeless people. He has done that to a few other groups, literal hours if you stack them side by side in a compilation. So there was already a lot of damage done in terms of mindshare by this media-arm.
I know people think the prayer meetings et al are corny, but when you realize what comes afterwards (or should) then it really all makes sense.
And it's not just about helping strangers it's about helping others who are maybe not your best friend but still in your circle.
Congregational religion is one of the most tragically trampled upon secular fences.
It's no surprised that the same methodology was arrived at by the world's great religions. Buddhist and Christian mendicant and service-based monastic orders come to mind
I'm heavily involved with Austin Bicycle Meals [1]. When a homeless person already knows you are there to help, it creates an entirely different social dynamic than normal. You get opportunities to make conversation and connections, which humanizes how we view these issues.
That's a total reversal to how most people interact with the homeless: in an entirely avoidant manner either randomly on the street or through a car window. That's why so much of the general public is numb to their plight.
The change in mindset that happens is really powerful, can take only a couple of hours of volunteering to happen, and something I hope more people seek out.
https://linktr.ee/austinbicyclemeals
I've read a lot around this, happy to provide some suggestions if you choose to dive into this.