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The Disappearance of the Public Bench

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Re: The Disappearance of the Public Bench

#131

Post by cyberax »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #59
cyberax wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> Care to read it past the preface? I already read the entire thing. You may stop accusing me of bad faith or insufficient research at any time. > Page 5, Figure 4. Thank you for confirming that you cited a chart listing 75% of unsheltered people and called it "close to 100%". I gave exact numbers from the studies I referenced; you exaggerated yours. A more relevant figure from the study is figure 2: 51% of unshelter…

And also to add to this: OK, assume that you won the point. 75-80% is totally not "almost 100%" and only 65% of people become homeless because of drugs.

So what next? Building more housing won't help drug addicts that are _already_ addicts. Even if you believe that it might prevent future homelessness (spoiler: it won't), we _already_ have hundreds of thousand of hard-drug addicts.

Re: The Disappearance of the Public Bench

#132

Post by cyberax »

antonvs wrote: post #66
cyberax wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I'm about to blow your mind with a simple phrase: correlation is not causation. Seriously though, you have an unsupported belief and you're looking to cherry-pick ways to support it. It's not rational.

That was exactly my point.

How do you prove that housing supply linked to homelessness is NOT just a correlation?

Re: The Disappearance of the Public Bench

#133

Post by cyberax »

pocksuppet wrote: post #84
cyberax wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Sounds like people are willing to pay more to live in places that aren't a police state.

Yes, and? If you're a drug addict, Seattle or Portland that have de-facto legalized drugs, and that have generous local programs, are surely a much better place to be than Texas or Missouri.

Re: The Disappearance of the Public Bench

#134

Post by throwaway-11-1 »

giraffe_lady wrote: post #115
AnotherGoodName wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also the essence of ‘San Francisco has a lot of homeless’ isn’t really a logical argument against those policies since homeless will often migrate to where the functional support services are. San Francisco may well be doing amazing things with getting people back on their feet at a relatively lower cost than prison. You need to go many levels deeper on statistics to understand if it’s working or not.

> since homeless will often migrate to where the functional support services are. I've heard this a lot but I don't have any reason to believe it's true. Never seen a reputable study that asserts it. I've known a lot of homeless people but none that relocated for this reason. Most who moved were looking for work or trying to get closer to family. Most didn't move at all and were just where they had always been, or in…

when I did homeless outreach in San Diego I was told around 40% of the people we were helping were from out of state that moved there but couldn't stay afloat for various reasons, leaving them homeless in the area

Re: The Disappearance of the Public Bench

#135

Post by jancsika »

Taek wrote: post #102
cucumber3732842 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>We eliminated benches to reduce the presence of the problematic homeless, which has a much higher rate of drug abuse and mental illness. We eliminated benches to reduce the rate at which the problematic homeless cross paths with the complainers. The DPW as an organization doesn't give a shit about how many commuter's asses a bench serves from 6am to 8pm. It just knows that every day when Karen sees a homeless man sl…

When I was in San Francisco, I had a homeless man with one eye (the empty eye socket actively oozing) come up to me unprovoked (quite literally unprovoked, I was just on a walk and not interacting with anybody at all), get within 2 centimeters of my face, and scream at the top of his lungs "I WILL MURDER YOU". He then walked away and nothing else of note happened (aside from me spending the rest of the evening with m…

> He then walked away and nothing else of note happened (aside from me spending the rest of the evening with my pulse at 140).

Did you call the police after this person made a threat on your life?

Re: The Disappearance of the Public Bench

#136

Post by fourseventy »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #26
Auracle wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That Venn diagram is pretty close to a circle, at least when talking about homeless people that don’t have a friend/relative they can stay with.

> That Venn diagram is pretty close to a circle False, and harmful. US HUD says it's ~16% of homeless people, other sources give different numbers, but it's certainly not a majority, let alone anywhere near 100%. The biggest problem, unsurprisingly, is housing cost . The US GAO states that a $100 increase in median rent correlates to a 9% rise in homelessness. Rents have gone up a lot more than that.

Walk down the makeshift tents on the sidewalks of downtown San Francisco and tell me with a straight face that only 16% of those people are addicted to drugs.

Re: The Disappearance of the Public Bench

#137

Post by Tanoc »

pocksuppet wrote: post #82
canjobear wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a $10 billion "fix everything easily" button you have in mind for homelessness?

how many homes can you buy for $10 billion? especially if you don't care too much about size, extra niceties, or location?

Given a construction budget of $125,000 per residence for a particularly nice two bedroom single bathroom house of about 1000ft², that's 80,000. Estimates are that there are currently between 750,000 to 800,000 people that have no home right now. Taking the high number of 800,000 that $10,000,000,000 is 10% of those people housed. You could reasonably go down to $30,000 for a build for a single floor house of the same footprint if you used mass produced prefabs, and get 330,000 people housed, or over 41%. Do you realize how much that would uplift things if we suddenly had a 41% reduction in homelessness? Considering that companies like Google and OpenAI are throwing around hundreds of billions of dollars which never get circulated back into the wider economy, spending $10,000,000,000 to bring 330,000 people back into economic and societal participation sounds amazing. That's assuming a somewhat low yearly income of $45,000 per person, adding up to $14,850,000,000 in circulation, or a gain of almost $5,000,000,000 right there. Even if we only achieve half of any of this that's $7,000,000,000 for one year. Two years in and the cost has already been paid back and more.

This comes with the giant caveat that we exclude the external costs of such a huge project, like social welfare visits, probation or monitoring if needed, or even just placement programs. Likely those all combined would be a third of the total cost.

Re: The Disappearance of the Public Bench

#138

Post by SoftTalker »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #114
SoftTalker wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A drug-addicted/mentally ill chronically unsheltered person is not going to be able to afford a home at any price. If they could hold down any kind of regular job and sustain an income they would find someplace to live. Also most "affordable" housing initiatives attack it by mandating "affordable" for new construction instead of just letting developers build what they can make the most money building. No developer wa…

To your first point: people don't typically start out that way, things spiral down. And it's much harder to get out of that spiral if homes are completely unaffordable. It also doesn't help that the most temperate places (where you won't die of exposure if unsheltered) are also the least affordable places (because they're prosperous and haven't built nearly enough housing). > Also most "affordable" housing initiative…

And once things have spiraled down, they won't recover just by giving them a home. My town tried that and the homes were quickly trashed to the point of being uninhabitable because nothing (or not enough) was done to address the addictions and other self-destructive behaviors or illness.

Any kind of assistance has to be built on a foundation of mandatory rehab/treatment and staying clean or it will fail.

Re: The Disappearance of the Public Bench

#139

Post by 0xBA5ED »

pessimizer wrote: post #128
cameldrv wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a very good friend who was an addict, and I tried to help him turn his life around in many ways, but I couldn’t figure out a way. Professionals told me “he has to hit rock bottom.” Anyhow he wound up getting arrested and spent a couple of weeks in jail where he got clean and decided to turn his life around. He went on to get a couple of masters degrees, get married, have two kids, and has a good job. He credit…

I knew somebody who turned his life around after surviving an attempted murder. I still don't think that means that trying to murder people whose lives are going awry is a rational solution.

You're saying that spending time in jail is roughly equivalent to being a victim of attempted murder.

Re: The Disappearance of the Public Bench

#140

Post by pessimizer »

TheBlight wrote: post #3

I also like clean safe unobstructed sidewalks and parks but along with benches, we've made a decision. We've decided that putting the mentally ill in a facility and arresting people for public drug use is not something we're comfortable with at the expense of those other things. I don't personally ageee with this decision but it is apparently the consensus.

> We've decided that putting the mentally ill in a facility and arresting people for public drug use is not something we're comfortable with at the expense of those other things.

We've decided this about every kind of health care. Instead of providing treatment for people who can't afford its bizarre, artificial prices, we prefer to leave them on the street or warehouse them in prisons. After leaving them in prison for an arbitrary amount of time, we then release them into the streets again, with nothing, more screwed up than when they went in, to murder you.

I have no idea what the "tough love" advocates are advocating for. Locking them up in prison is like hiding rotting meat in a freezer; it only works if you're willing to do it forever. The only answer that seems compatible with the spoiled upper-middle class worldview is to shoot the homeless (which often happened* in a lot of South American countries through semi-official paramilitaries), or to drive them into the wilderness outside of town to hopefully die on their own.

As the layoffs of programmers continue, I predict there will be a lot of changes of heart that won't matter at all, because they will be coming from homeless people. Middle-class culture is all about only being interested in issues that harm you directly, even if that issue is somebody dying too loudly nearby.

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[*] Happens? My info is out of date.

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