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San Francisco, Hostage to the Homeless

city-journal.org

31–40 of 79 posts

Re: San Francisco, Hostage to the Homeless

#31
post #6

Why do we expect that people should live in house or have a home? Maybe we need to design our cities and public places in a way that they would be approachable for people living outside? Why we wouldn't have camping spots in cities with infrastructure that supports living outside?

Why should we expect people to have affordable healthcare? Why should we expect people to have enough to eat? Why should we expect people to have rights? Can't we just let people die outside from the cold or something?

Yeah, why not kill them outright? Humanely of course! Problem solved! Out of sight (in a ditch), out of mind!

/adding to the parent sarcasm

Re: San Francisco, Hostage to the Homeless

#32
post #16
post #7

It is strange that this subject gets so much attention but so little actual investigation. It is asserted that San Francisco simply backed off from enforcement and then this happened, but the reality is far more complex. Heavy ongoing use of incarceration caused both a backlash and extreme expense. Troubled people from all over the globe come to San Francisco. Most homeless only stay in the City for a couple of weeks…

Deciding to enforce crimes would not fix the problem, but move it somewhere else and/or make it less visible - which is what most other cities are doing...

Well the alternative, not enforcing laws, is clearly not working.

Law enforcement everywhere is about moving crime out to the margins. It will never stamp out all crime, but it does tend to reduce the quantity of it.

And I'm not even convinced that "moving it elsewhere" is necessarily a bad thing. I'd rather have most crime concentrated in a small area than distributing it over a large area. Regardless, people should be allowed to feel safe in their communities, and that just isn't the case for embarrassingly large amounts of SF.

Re: San Francisco, Hostage to the Homeless

#33
post #20

Wow, that article's rhetoric is seething with social darwinistic class hatred. All these voluntary homeless seems to be conspicuously absent in western Europe. At least at this scale. Insisting on, which the author clearly does according to a quick googling, firmly supporting and perpetuating an economic system that creates these dystopian features and then calling for their forceful removal, through weasel language,…

Lets do an experiment. Go to a park in the middle of London, and set up a tent, and scatter used needles on the sidewalk. You'll be involuntarily moved out of the park within a couple of hours. Since your governments go ahead and remove people who are trying to live in public spaces, you don't see them, and you assume they don't exist. https://www.citylab.com/equity/2017/10/berlin-has-been-payin... https://www.politi…

where are they moved to? Police station/overnight jail? Or a shelter of sorts?

Re: San Francisco, Hostage to the Homeless

#34
post #26

> ongoing effort to decriminalize attacks on civilized order this article sounds like a drunken conservative rant

Yeap. Blame the "other": migrants, homeless, minorities, Jews, Muslims, gypsies, gays and other such scapegoats for one's current situation and angsty anomie. Fox News, Newsmax and talk radio rebuilt fascism and millions conveniently pretended it didn't happen.

Re: San Francisco, Hostage to the Homeless

#35
post #20

Wow, that article's rhetoric is seething with social darwinistic class hatred. All these voluntary homeless seems to be conspicuously absent in western Europe. At least at this scale. Insisting on, which the author clearly does according to a quick googling, firmly supporting and perpetuating an economic system that creates these dystopian features and then calling for their forceful removal, through weasel language,…

Lets do an experiment. Go to a park in the middle of London, and set up a tent, and scatter used needles on the sidewalk. You'll be involuntarily moved out of the park within a couple of hours. Since your governments go ahead and remove people who are trying to live in public spaces, you don't see them, and you assume they don't exist. https://www.citylab.com/equity/2017/10/berlin-has-been-payin... https://www.politi…

Me knowing that homeless people exist and seeing them every day hasn't really done then much good. They're still homeless, the homeless population is increasing, and for our end of the bargain we get public health hazards on every sidewalk and public park.

Re: San Francisco, Hostage to the Homeless

#36
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever camped in a camping spot somewhere? You get electricity, bathrooms, access to kitchen etc. If we could accept the fact that some people want to live on the streets, we would be able to make their life much easier and better without imposing a certain philosophy on how they should be living.

Civilization is exactly about imposing a philosophy on how people should live. Like it or not, that's how it works. If you don't want to play ball, there are plenty of open spaces in the US where people can live off the land without creating a public health hazard. If people don't want to be homeless, we should do everything in our power to help them get into housing, sustainably. But if they do? No thanks, do that s…

Yeah, most people actually love to be homeless and live in tents. The housing crisis isn't real.

Re: San Francisco, Hostage to the Homeless

#37
post #2

City Journal is pretty weird. It used to be a mainstream magazine of urban planning, but now it seems to have been infected with the far-right brain virus. Edit: I also can't believe that an article on San Francisco homelessness never once mentions zoning laws.

How is talking about an obvious problem a far-right brain virus?

The brain-worms comes in at the otherizing rhetoric. They're "homeless", not people without homes; they're besieging us, making us hostages.

I love this quote: > The city enables the entire homeless lifestyle, not just drug use. Free food is everywhere.

It's clear the author is happy with their hierarchical position and thinks that those below them ought to die in the streets.

Re: San Francisco, Hostage to the Homeless

#38
post #20

Wow, that article's rhetoric is seething with social darwinistic class hatred. All these voluntary homeless seems to be conspicuously absent in western Europe. At least at this scale. Insisting on, which the author clearly does according to a quick googling, firmly supporting and perpetuating an economic system that creates these dystopian features and then calling for their forceful removal, through weasel language,…

Your point side-steps the social responsibility of lifting drug-addicted and mentally-disadvantaged victims of so-called “social Darwinism” out of their state of despair. The case made by the article for social change is rock solid and borne out by a quick walk through the TL.

Re: San Francisco, Hostage to the Homeless

#39
post #16
post #7

It is strange that this subject gets so much attention but so little actual investigation. It is asserted that San Francisco simply backed off from enforcement and then this happened, but the reality is far more complex. Heavy ongoing use of incarceration caused both a backlash and extreme expense. Troubled people from all over the globe come to San Francisco. Most homeless only stay in the City for a couple of weeks…

Deciding to enforce crimes would not fix the problem, but move it somewhere else and/or make it less visible - which is what most other cities are doing...

Moving the problem is the same as fixing the problem. People are choosing to live outside, or they economically can't afford a place to live, or they have mental illness that prevents them from taking care of themselves, or they have addiction that prevents them from taking care of themselves.

For people choosing to live outside, well it's ok for society to demand they follow the rules like everyone else.

For people who can't afford a place to live, displacing them to somewhere else is the best thing you could do, living in SF requires an absurdly high income, if they move to Montana (or Idaho or honestly throw a dart at a map, the US is cheap if you don't try to live in the top 20 most expensive zipcodes) they could rent an apartment for $500/month, which is $250 if you have a roomate. That's less than one week of work at minimum wage. Lots of my friends are software engineers, and are moving to Oakland because SF is too expensive. So my friends with high paying jobs are expected to move, but someone can set up a tent and they have a human right to stay right where they are? It's ludicrous.

For the people with mental illness or an addiction, which is more than 95% of the people living on the street, what fixes the problem? They can't function in their current state, and it's illegal to force them to take medication, and impossible to make them stop doing drugs. Fine, lets provide them with shelter at least. Lets build the shelter somewhere really cheap, and provide them with free transportation to get there. Maybe the same places I mentioned above, where it would be very inexpensive to provide them with food and shelter, which is basically everywhere besides SF. Of course this is again a non-starter, since no matter what you do, literally anything you do at all to help them, unless they are homeless and living on the sidewalk in San Francisco, people are going to claim it's a violation of their human rights.

Re: San Francisco, Hostage to the Homeless

#40
post #20

Wow, that article's rhetoric is seething with social darwinistic class hatred. All these voluntary homeless seems to be conspicuously absent in western Europe. At least at this scale. Insisting on, which the author clearly does according to a quick googling, firmly supporting and perpetuating an economic system that creates these dystopian features and then calling for their forceful removal, through weasel language,…

Lets do an experiment. Go to a park in the middle of London, and set up a tent, and scatter used needles on the sidewalk. You'll be involuntarily moved out of the park within a couple of hours. Since your governments go ahead and remove people who are trying to live in public spaces, you don't see them, and you assume they don't exist. https://www.citylab.com/equity/2017/10/berlin-has-been-payin... https://www.politi…

I used to live next to Hyde Park, and one of the subways leading towards the Marble Arch had a group of homeless that stayed there for at least a couple of years without being disturbed by the police. This is not unusual.

In the royal parks, on the other hand, you'd be right - in the Royal parks putting up tents and the like will get the attention of the police very quickly. There are parts of London outside the parts where the police likes to try to make the problem "disappear" by moving people on, but London's homeless problem is overall very visible.

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