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Downtown San Francisco is at a tipping-point

economist.com

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Re: Downtown San Francisco is at a tipping-point

#91

Post by quickthrower2 »

bombcar wrote: post #43
papito wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course not, I was going to say that, actually - they live on protected, isolated compounds. Logically they should not care about what is happening elsewhere, right? But they do, just not the stuff in their backyard. There are woke people in New York, you see! And they are the real concern.

You can see where it's headed by looking at some of the cities in Brazil or Johannesburg. When you have money for security and the ability to travel in what are effectively armored cars, the rest of the city can go to hell.

Don’t you then lose out on something. Feels akin to living in a covid lockdown for life. And a monoculture. What I like about Sydney for example is you can go anywhere and feel safe and do stuff.

Re: Downtown San Francisco is at a tipping-point

#92

Post by mschuster91 »

PaulHoule wrote: post #76

As anathema as it may seem to some people I think the real answer has to involve dispersing the homeless population in SF. The SF chronicle did a series on the efforts to house people in shelters and one major problems was that a person who wanted to get clean from opioids is just surrounded by temptation and is just one dose of Fentanyl away from death. Thus these people are more dangerous to each other than they ar…

The problem is that the entire US has zero idea what to do with homeless and mentally ill people, other than "dispersing" them or locking them up. As a result, some (particulary Republican) regions give them one way bus tickets to other (particularly Democrat) regions or deport them outright in sometimes very public stunts - out of sight, out of mind and if it deters others all the better, seems to be the general consensus. Others go where the survival chances are the best on their own, which means somewhere sunny with low rain and snow.

The problem is, the very few regions where both conditions match end up overrun - even though no one can seriously expect these regions to solve the homeless problem of an entire continent-spanning country with 330-340M people.

Re: Downtown San Francisco is at a tipping-point

#93

Post by shrimp_emoji »

throwawaaarrgh wrote: post #78
shafyy wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well. There's capitalism, and then there's whatever the fuck the US is doing.

Super duper capitalism? Honestly we have a fair bit more regulation than we had in the past, and other capitalist nations don't have the problems we do. It's a lot more than just economic policy. Mostly I think the problem is our death cult of individualism and exceptionalism. Half the country thinks everyone should either pull themselves up by their bootstraps or die.

I think it's the giganticness of the country and how that leads to a low degree of education for the average person (among other things, like safety nets). In a developing New World nation, you need individualism because that's how you settle a frontier, even if the individuals eventually become towns and states. The problem is that it's difficult to eventually coalesce that into a system that supports people the way Western European or Asian nations have. It takes loads of resources and hence loads of political will. If the Swiss single-handedly colonized North America, they wouldn't be able to replicate their system across the continent either. It takes a long time. Things are improving, though, I think! It's just a slow-moving process.

Re: Downtown San Francisco is at a tipping-point

#94

Post by inferiorhuman »

riffraff wrote: post #71
truckerbill wrote: post #42

Housing shouldn't be an investment vehicle. It seems pretty obvious but no-one wants to give up their imaginary number. (Imaginary because most people have 1 or fewer houses and will always need to live somewhere, so they can't spend the paper value of their home). The cost of rent feeds into everything, its such a clear drain on everyone's resources (apart from landlords). If you have time to give, please think abou…

The number is not imaginary if you have kids, the idea of leaving your children some of your wealth is dear to many people, and most often they will have acquired their own place by the time you die. It is arguable that inheritance taxes should prevent accumulation of wealth, but point is, real estate survives you.

  real estate survives you
In California the real estate value survives you. Your children inherit your Prop 13 tax assessment which means your children inherit a tax bill that's a fraction of what it would otherwise be. That's a pretty strong incentive to drive values up and not sell.

Re: Downtown San Francisco is at a tipping-point

#95

Post by mattigames »

truckerbill wrote: post #42

Housing shouldn't be an investment vehicle. It seems pretty obvious but no-one wants to give up their imaginary number. (Imaginary because most people have 1 or fewer houses and will always need to live somewhere, so they can't spend the paper value of their home). The cost of rent feeds into everything, its such a clear drain on everyone's resources (apart from landlords). If you have time to give, please think abou…

Wealth concentration has only increased and everyone else just have less and less, at some point the situation will be dire enough that the only resource left for the majority will be violence, nothing makes a house affordable like burning it down and located in a neighborhood known for its need of firemen; landlords will say the attacks are a work of savages, but when you make it hard for people to barely survive in your civilization (aka City) it's is you and only you who are making your civilization less civilized.

Re: Downtown San Francisco is at a tipping-point

#96

Post by ajross »

PaulHoule wrote: post #76

As anathema as it may seem to some people I think the real answer has to involve dispersing the homeless population in SF. The SF chronicle did a series on the efforts to house people in shelters and one major problems was that a person who wanted to get clean from opioids is just surrounded by temptation and is just one dose of Fentanyl away from death. Thus these people are more dangerous to each other than they ar…

> I think the real answer has to involve dispersing the homeless population in SF.

Does it? As the article points out, the homeless population is actually down since 2019. Homelessness is bad, and a hard problem to solve[1], but it's not The Reason Everything Is Wrong, because if it was (1) everything would have been wrong before, when we agree everything was great and (2) other places would be worse, and we all agree they aren't.

Really this article is just like all the others on this subject. It's completely innumerate. It takes crisis and calamity as a prior and writes about it, while having to nod repeatedly that the actual measurements don't hold up the hypothesis.

It's just shocking to me the extent to which this meme has permeated the tech community. Urban homelessness is just not a new phenomenon, it's not a changed phenomenon, and it's not even a new phenomenon to San Francisco!

[1] Largely because it's unsolvable inherently. We've always had a homeless population in our cities going back to the invention of the city. Some people won't/can't/don't-wanna live within the rules of typical society and view street living as acceptable vs. the alternatives. So to that population, attempts to assist them just have the marginal effect of making homelessness more desirable. And... that's just not something that public policy[2] is going to fix.

[2] Well, tolerable public policy. Some of our ancestors deployed asylums and other kinds of para-prisons to control this. But even that works only poorly.

Re: Downtown San Francisco is at a tipping-point

#97

Post by kakapo88 »

naillo wrote: post #44

[deleted]

SF Techie here. Lived and worked here, for many years.

Every day I literally step over bodies to get to work. Drugs are openly dealt and consumed. Mentally ill people roam the streets, screaming. People openly use the sidewalks as a toilet. Crime is rampant. And if anyone doubts it's that bad, I invite you to come and look for yourself.

Almost all of these people come from elsewhere in the country. They aren't "priced out" local citizens, they're junkies and mentally unwell who come here because they know they will get services and be tolerated.

By its own accounting, the city spends over $1b per year on homeless services, for supposedly Meanwhile these people suffer. Even if they have city housing, they are on the streets anyway, because they need drugs, plus they are driven by their mental issues. It's horrific and uncivilized, and it's a creation of a culture that says "all they need is housing", and then enables them in their drug addiction and psychosis. That's go on for years and years, steadily getting worse. Every year more of them come to SF. And every year more of them die, and the city declines further.

The solution is obvious: mandatory treatment for drug addiction and mental illness. No more tolerance for crime and drugs. Enforce basic city codes.

But somehow, this is "inhumane" to the extreme left that runs SF. They'd rather keep the status quo, and let people suffer and die, while the city falls further into ruin.

Re: Downtown San Francisco is at a tipping-point

#100

Post by spaniard89277 »

phpisthebest wrote: post #88
spaniard89277 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Were you born addicted to drugs? People needs treatment and a path to become useful members of society again. Affordable housing makes a lot of poor people able to save money and help their peers.

anyone that has any depth of knowelege of the homeless knows there are generally 2 types of homeless population. Transitory economic homeless, these homeless can be assisted by affordable housing, housing first, and other programs. Often these homeless of covered pretty well by current homeless programs, as they are the type of homeless people most easily identify with, and engineer programs to solve. Then there are…

So why other big cities in other continents have so few homeless compard to SF and LA?

We do have people with mental problems here in Spain, but most don't roam the streets and end up living under a bridge.

And I can assure you the Spanish institutions are not precisely brilliant dealing with problems.

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