81–90 of 128 posts
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> free of charge. I think you should understand what this really means. Are you willing to pay 10, 15% extra of your income to sustain 10~25k a month bills for mentally ill people?
Yes
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Same here. I would rather that the disproportionately rich pay for it, however.
You would rather someone else pay for your beliefs? The disproportionately rich already pay a disproportionate share of taxes. The top 1% earn 19% of the income but pay 35% of the taxes in the US. I’m not sure that’s fair. Rich people also create the jobs: if they pay more, they have less incentive to invest more which means fewer businesses being funded and fewer jobs.
Liberty above everything else, and I dont want anyone to suffer any consequence under the veil of "trickle-down econ", which is not what people think it is.
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Counterpoint. I've been traveling to SF pretty regularly for a very long time but for whatever reasons hadn't been there for year +. Was at an event at the Moscone in July. Found the homeless situation around the Moscone, Civic Center, etc. to be pretty shockingly bad. I'm not sure how anyone could think it had improved.
Oh yeah, 6th street - 8th street on market is still the same. I actually walked back from the Mission one night and one of my co-workers was like "You walked me through a crack den." Most of the people down there were strung out and not violent, but he was definitely not comfortable. Gilde[1] is right near the area you're talking about and they provide tons of services for the homeless and mentally ill so there is a…
Another shock to me was that the homeless are very different between SF and where I'm from (Birmingham UK). Here, they are generally just pitied people down on their luck. They don't really cause harm but can be belligerent when drunk. In SF, many of the homeless people were _terrifying_, clearly having severe untreated mental health issues.
I think that the homeless problem in SF isn't that bad when you are a longer term resident because you get used to it, but it's definitely a big shocker for many tourists.
Since the article starts with someone in SF (although he's leaving), I want to proactively dispel the myth that it's common for homeless people to be dropped into SF by other cities because we have good weather and liberal govt. It may happen sometimes, but a recent survey showed that over 70pct of the homeless people in SF previously had homes in SF [0]. So it's mostly a home grown problem. [0]: http://sfist.com/201…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vc7-w4szWoQ
The encampments shown there (which are talking about LA) are exactly like the encampments dotting the coastline in SB and along the onramps in Barrio Logan in SD. I imagine the problem is emdemic to most of the populated California coast.
Since the article starts with someone in SF (although he's leaving), I want to proactively dispel the myth that it's common for homeless people to be dropped into SF by other cities because we have good weather and liberal govt. It may happen sometimes, but a recent survey showed that over 70pct of the homeless people in SF previously had homes in SF [0]. So it's mostly a home grown problem. [0]: http://sfist.com/201…
Just a little nit: while article says they lived in SF and !had homes! survey linked says they were just SF residents prior to becoming homeless (though it mentions that 49% of them were living in SF at least 10 years, but don't forget that ~65% of SF residents are renters). Residency usually just based on any bill with city address within last 30 days. I can easy imagine case when someone moved to SF with hope that…
I am curious about the baselines here for other areas though. Even given the incentive to lie, the reported numbers given still seem quite high to me. The most liberal metric is living in the city for at least 10 years, which applied to just below 50% of the homeless. Even if we take the most conservative metric of 'migratory' patterns, with 30% of individuals having moved to San Francisco after becoming homeless, that still seems very high. But I don't really have a baseline for comparison in other major cities and search is not turning up any particularly great sources.
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> The unemployment rate only counts people who are 'actively looking' for a new job. People who aren't looking at all don't show up in the statistics. That's entirely incorrect. We track all of these layers in fact. We have the labor force participation rate, which is available further separated out into groups, such as by age or race. We track the employment to population ratio. We have the U3, U5, U6 unemployment s…
> That's entirely incorrect. We track all of these layers in fact. No....it is entirely correct. The unemployment rate that was quoted was exactly as I described. I didn't say the other statistics weren't tracked , I said the statistic quoted above, and the thing commonly referred to as "the unemployment rate" does not count it.
The point he was making though can be made even if the OP was referencing U3 which is if the fundamentals are looking better for employees (Which can be inferred from improving U3 numbers) then why are we seeing higher homelessness?
Affordability and skyrocketing rent costs will improve if we work harder to increase the supply of housing near transit points. We need to act on this issue quickly.
>But he maintained the policy was justified to discourage abuse – a point echoed by his former deputy, Mike Tolbert, who said it was the only way to prevent the shelter from being used as a “travel agency”. Why not simply restrict the free travel ticket a second time? Instead of the basic necessities like food and shelter? Writing that out makes even less sense once you think it through, however. If the goal of the c…
So taxpayers just keep paying for tickets until the person figures things out? If they know it’s a one way ticket and returning could result in an arrest for vagrancy, that seems to be a pretty strong incentive to stay away. The Key West man in the story admitted that he didn’t think they were serious. Well, they were. I am not arguing other points of the story, only saying that as a taxpayer, unlimited free bus tick…
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Same here. I would rather that the disproportionately rich pay for it, however.
You would rather someone else pay for your beliefs? The disproportionately rich already pay a disproportionate share of taxes. The top 1% earn 19% of the income but pay 35% of the taxes in the US. I’m not sure that’s fair. Rich people also create the jobs: if they pay more, they have less incentive to invest more which means fewer businesses being funded and fewer jobs.
I think it's more reasonable to compare taxation on disposable income. In my opinion a fair tax would only tax disposable income anyhow. Of course that creates an incentive to have $0 disposable income but it's no different than the problem of corporations aiming to report $0 profit.
Progressive tax schemes aim to achieve this, but in a completely broken and inconsistent fashion. For instance somebody earning $100k in San Francisco is going to be spending a rather different percent of their income on basic living expenses than somebody living in Bodunk earning the same, and so applying the same scheme to both does not make sense. It'd be much easier to just make everything that qualifies as a 'basic living expense' fully deductible, and then you pay e.g. 15% on the rest.
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They seem to just be relocating to other parts of the city as formerly homeless-heavy areas like parts of SOMA and the mission "gentrify." I walk through the loin twice a day on my way to my office on market st near the post-apocalyptic parts of SOMA and see a higher concentration of homeless in those areas than I used to. Perhaps you're revisiting the parts they've left or my un-scientific observations are wrong.
They also seasonally relocate, heading south in the winter and spreading out in the summer. Seattle's transient homeless population is largely gone by mid-December