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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

#181

Post by phpisthebest »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #152
phpisthebest wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>Finland is part of the EU and has a national strategy. While migration is easier between member countries, it isn’t unrestricted. You have to live in an EU country for some time before qualifying for welfare there, which means poor people can’t easily shop for the best social welfare. Finland doesn’t put its homeless in institutions, just in semi assisted living situations. you have completely missed the Point, Fin…

You can easily move from Texas to California (greyhound flows are still vastly biased that way). You can’t easily move from Greece to Finland. It isn’t comparable at all, in fact, the fallacious premises you hold are why we can’t make any progress on this problem despite dumping billions of dollars of resources into it (LA alone has a $1.3b/year budget for the problem).

You believe migration from Texas to California is the reason LA has wasted 1.3 Billion on failed homeless programs?

What evidence do you have to support that claim...

Re: Downtown San Francisco is at a tipping-point

#182

Post by ProfessorLayton »

onetimeusename wrote: post #180
ProfessorLayton wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I think SF should be able to function on a much leaner budget (There's so much waste and corruption in the city), this isn't a great take. Investing in one of the most important cities in one of the most important states in the USA is in everyone's interest. SF contributes 6.5% of California's GDP, a state that alone would rank as the world's 5th largest economy. SF's economy is higher than several other states…

It's not investing. The city has gotten worse in spite of a larger budget over time. The waste and corruption need a way to be corrected and budgets need to be managed; there's no incentive if bailouts have a well established path. If you want more of something, subsidize it.

Not letting one of the US's crown jewel cities with a 236B economy spiral into decay over a ~.7B shortfall is financially prudent. Not doing so would certainly cost the taxpayers more than that, so it definitely meets the literal definition of investment!

Again, I agree that there's plenty of corruption to stamp out, but letting one of the most important cities in the USA decay over a relatively meager amount of money is not the way to go.

Re: Downtown San Francisco is at a tipping-point

#183

Post by onetimeusename »

ProfessorLayton wrote: post #182
onetimeusename wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not investing. The city has gotten worse in spite of a larger budget over time. The waste and corruption need a way to be corrected and budgets need to be managed; there's no incentive if bailouts have a well established path. If you want more of something, subsidize it.

Not letting one of the US's crown jewel cities with a 236B economy spiral into decay over a ~.7B shortfall is financially prudent. Not doing so would certainly cost the taxpayers more than that, so it definitely meets the literal definition of investment ! Again, I agree that there's plenty of corruption to stamp out, but letting one of the most important cities in the USA decay over a relatively meager amount of mon…

This is a reasonable point.

Re: Downtown San Francisco is at a tipping-point

#184

Post by inferiorhuman »

kakapo88 wrote: post #97
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 "price…

  But somehow, this is "inhumane" to the extreme left that runs SF.
It's inhumane to the voters of California, nothing to do with San Francisco.

Re: Downtown San Francisco is at a tipping-point

#185

Post by twelve40 »

carapace wrote: post #146
ajross wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 agre…

I've lived in SF for about half a century. I've also read up on the history of SF. What you're saying about "Urban homelessness is ... not even a new phenomenon to San Francisco!" is very much true, at least since the Gold Rush. I believe our Emperor Norton III was, technically, by modern standards, homeless, although the city was his palace. What changed was the influx of more-or-less normal people. San Francisco ha…

> Civic Center and the Tenderloin should be condemned and razed

maybe the loin, but how does razing the Civic Center help? that area by itself is one of the nicest areas you can think of: a wide-open park-like place to walk around and enjoy the city. What would you even replace it with? and how would it help the problem of those people still around, who would shift to soma or elsewhere nearby.

Re: Downtown San Francisco is at a tipping-point

#186

Post by twelve40 »

Mistletoe wrote: post #21

I feel bad for the poor people that moved there for the service industry that supported the startup zero interest rate gold rush. They can’t leave. They didn’t use their stock options to buy a house in the Hamptons or Aspen. They are waiting tables in an empty restaurant and have to make rent and can’t afford to move. The home prices look like this- https://paragonpublic.blob.core.windows.net/dash-v2-blog-ima...

I'm not saying they should, but why can't they leave? even Sacramento a little over an hour's drive away is already much more affordable, let alone other cities and towns in the Central Valley and it only gets cheaper the further you go East. https://www.epi.org/resources/budget/budget-map/

Re: Downtown San Francisco is at a tipping-point

#188

Post by arp242 »

zmnd wrote: post #166
arp242 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are certainly homeless people with serious mental illnesses, but from my experience with talking to homeless people on the street this is not most homeless people. They just fell by the wayside for one reason or the other, and once you're in that position it can be hard to get out – hard to plan for the future if you're worried about getting enough food for today (and/or enough drugs or alcohol) and the situati…

If there were a few studies, and it's overwhelmingly successful, why do you think it's difficult to find the results? SF spends something like 90k per homeless person, conducting an experiment with 3k per person sounds like a drop in a bucket. I bet, showing great results on a group of 100 people, would get more investments into this experiment.

> If there were a few studies, and it's overwhelmingly successful, why do you think it's difficult to find the results?

The internet is big and I just didn't look for it very long.

> I bet, showing great results on a group of 100 people, would get more investments into this experiment.

You'd think so, but policy is often penny wise and pound foolish. I think the biggest obstacle is that "free money" just doesn't fit in our culture very well (or maybe it just doesn't fit human nature).

Re: Downtown San Francisco is at a tipping-point

#189

Post by arp242 »

robbomacrae wrote: post #170
arp242 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are certainly homeless people with serious mental illnesses, but from my experience with talking to homeless people on the street this is not most homeless people. They just fell by the wayside for one reason or the other, and once you're in that position it can be hard to get out – hard to plan for the future if you're worried about getting enough food for today (and/or enough drugs or alcohol) and the situati…

“but from my experience with talking to homeless people on the street“ - you are not going to get a good sense of someone’s mental state by taking to them once. Crazy people can present themselves as completely normal for quite long periods of time. It’s one of the many blockers for family members trying to get them help.

Sure, but the idea that the overwhelming majority of people are homeless purely due to mental illness related issues just doesn't bear out. It's the same as "most homeless people are addicted to something", which also just isn't true.

Re: Downtown San Francisco is at a tipping-point

#190

Post by mattigames »

truckerbill wrote: post #177
mattigames wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

burning houses = less houses. Start by doing real politics not a junta

Burning houses = affordable empty lot.

> Start by doing real politics not a junta

Because doing that has worked great so far right? You keep ignoring the problem and pretending that billionaires will allow any change to happen and people just need to go and get into politics.

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