Homeless, living in a tent and employed: The changing face of homelessness • Hacker News Board

Re: Homeless, living in a tent and employed: The changing face of homelessness

#151

Post by chrissnell » Sat, Mar 23, 2019, 11:23 PM UTC

dgzl wrote: post #67

I'm from a small town in Oregon that sees a lot of nomadic traveling folk, either homeless or lifestyle (the PCT comes through the area, for instance), and the town is generally pretty receptive of these people. Growing up I would hang out and spend time with them, just chatting and playing music and enjoying the area. I carried that to adulthood and I now live in Portland, where the homeless problem is quite severe.…

I think your homeless BSD guy could have worked for me. I had a guy on my team in the mid 00's. Ended up getting fired for repeated creepy and bad behavior towards people in the office. I heard that he later he did some time in jail. He has a connection to the Portland area and was a brilliant guy but had serious mental health issues. Did you get this guy's first name?

Re: Homeless, living in a tent and employed: The changing face of homelessness

#152

Post by dgzl » Sat, Mar 23, 2019, 11:23 PM UTC

fiblye wrote: post #148

dgzl wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you send someone half way across the country, it will be difficult to return. Nevada is actually very close to Oregon, and transportation to LV is quite cheap.

The distance between Portland and Las Vegas is roughly the same as the distance between Atlanta and Boston. Not very close, and the ones sending homeless out of Las Vegas know that.

I suppose you're right, however there are much less interesting stops between PDX and LV. So if you're say, hitchhiking, the chances of finding someone going your direction might be better than someone traveling on the East Coast. On the other hand, the overall population on the Western half of the states is nearly logarithmic of the Eastern side.

Re: Homeless, living in a tent and employed: The changing face of homelessness

#153

Post by jorblumesea » Sat, Mar 23, 2019, 11:29 PM UTC

As someone who deals with this every day in Seattle, the core issue is that the US doesn't have a cheap and effective healthcare system that can deal with addiction and mental healthcare issues.

So cities are forced to try and patch holes where they can. But the reality is that without coordination at the federal level there's little chance of success.

It's a national problem that requires a national solution, but our response is only at local levels.

Re: Homeless, living in a tent and employed: The changing face of homelessness

#154

Post by dgzl » Sat, Mar 23, 2019, 11:29 PM UTC

chrissnell wrote: post #151

dgzl wrote: post #67

I'm from a small town in Oregon that sees a lot of nomadic traveling folk, either homeless or lifestyle (the PCT comes through the area, for instance), and the town is generally pretty receptive of these people. Growing up I would hang out and spend time with them, just chatting and playing music and enjoying the area. I carried that to adulthood and I now live in Portland, where the homeless problem is quite severe.…

I think your homeless BSD guy could have worked for me. I had a guy on my team in the mid 00's. Ended up getting fired for repeated creepy and bad behavior towards people in the office. I heard that he later he did some time in jail. He has a connection to the Portland area and was a brilliant guy but had serious mental health issues. Did you get this guy's first name?

I can't remember, but he says he grew up in Beaverton. He looked maybe 40-50 years old. In fact he did say his SSI was given due to some kind of illness he has.

Re: Homeless, living in a tent and employed: The changing face of homelessness

#155

Post by dTal » Sat, Mar 23, 2019, 11:30 PM UTC

jdavis703 wrote: post #106

justboxing wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct. This was literally nuts. Nevada bused in and dumped over 50 mentally ill patients onto the streets of San Francisco, and the consequence was that you couldn't walk in downtown San Francisco without encountering 1 of these patients acting crazy on the streets. It's somewhat lame that the City settled for a measly compensation of 400K. They should've all been rounded up and send back to Nevada, to the hospital…

Sorry, but rounding up American citizens who didn’t commit any crime and shipping them somewhere else seems extremely un-American. This is the kind of thinking that has lead to some of the worst human rights abuses in the 20th century in countries like Germany with concentration camps, and in the US with internment camps.

Not that two wrongs make a right, but isn't that what happened to begin with? Or did they go to SF voluntarily?

In any case, the legal argument was that Nevada had a duty of care. It's not about "rounding them up", it's about the state of Nevada providing them with shelter and psychiatric care. Which presumably, they would do in Nevada.

Re: Homeless, living in a tent and employed: The changing face of homelessness

#156

Post by alex_young » Sat, Mar 23, 2019, 11:37 PM UTC

throwawaysea wrote: post #48

I echo others' sentiments here, that these problems will not be fixed unless people from all sides stop trying to 'win' on ideological grounds, stop trying to gaslight each other, stop trying to demonize, and simply evaluate the situation for what it really is. This requires making hard decisions, selecting the right incentives/disincentives, accepting that no solution is perfect, and instituting transparent well-aud…

> No one is entitled to live wherever they want, doing whatever job they want, at whatever pay they are able to demand.

Why is it the case that one is entitled to pay someone less than a living wage to do work needed in a city?

I've recently observed a society full of ridiculously unimaginable wealth, with zero homeless people.

How is this possible? This wealthy society decided that any person who lives in it should be able to exist with a minimum standard of living which includes housing, no matter their situation. I believe this actually makes society more wealthy due to network effects.

Why can't the US do the same? I bet it would cost a lot less than the mess we have now.

Before anyone asks, I'm talking about Switzerland. Not without its faults, but in this area it's quite refreshing.

Re: Homeless, living in a tent and employed: The changing face of homelessness

#157

Post by chrissnell » Sat, Mar 23, 2019, 11:38 PM UTC

dgzl wrote: post #154

chrissnell wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think your homeless BSD guy could have worked for me. I had a guy on my team in the mid 00's. Ended up getting fired for repeated creepy and bad behavior towards people in the office. I heard that he later he did some time in jail. He has a connection to the Portland area and was a brilliant guy but had serious mental health issues. Did you get this guy's first name?

I can't remember, but he says he grew up in Beaverton. He looked maybe 40-50 years old. In fact he did say his SSI was given due to some kind of illness he has.

I just googled my guy. He is homeless but he's in Salt Lake and apparently in jail, unable to post the $200 he'd need for a $2000 bail for assault on a police officer and illegal camping in a public park.

Crazy to think that this guy was tuning PF firewall rules thirteen years ago. Mental illness is a bitch. We need to make it easier to get conservatorships.

Re: Homeless, living in a tent and employed: The changing face of homelessness

#158

Post by newnewpdro » Sat, Mar 23, 2019, 11:39 PM UTC

diogenescynic wrote: post #64

newnewpdro wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just rich assholes, a surprising majority of the population want all evidence of poverty out of sight in their lives. Santa Cruz made it illegal just to sleep visibly in public in an attempt to criminalize homelessness so they could hide the problem.

It's not about criminalizing poverty. It's about trespassing and having campers at your house 24/7/365 who are criminals. It's an awful drain to your quality of life. Stop demonizing people for not thinking it's "progressive" to let people crap on the streets and shoot up in public. I voted for Bernie, but I live in SF and I see how much money we waste by not addressing the problem directly and in more common sense w…

San Francisco is neglecting to enforce existing laws regularly broken in the open by folks largely overlapping with the homeless population.

I've mentioned this before on this forum. At one point when I worked in the mission we watched daily a homeless encampment operate a bicycle chop shop in broad daylight from our second-floor lunch room. The police did absolutely nothing until it had been operating for well over a month. They would drive by occasionally, doing nothing more than slowing down, while a pile of stolen bicycles and bicycle parts sat next to the tents covered by nothing more than a tarp. We saw a constant flow of people coming with newly stolen bicycles and leaving with rebuilt permutations presumably to be sold on craigslist. They didn't even try to hide it.

Apparently the police stopped bothering to arrest people for petty crimes because nothing would come of it. The criminals would be immediately released back on the streets.

That has nothing to do with tolerating homelessness and some people living on the streets. We don't need to make homelessness illegal to arrest people operating a bicycle chop shop in broad daylight.

Sometimes I wonder if the city is deliberately neglecting to police crimes being committed in broad daylight independent of homelessness to further an agenda interested in criminalizing homelessness. If they can let things get so bad that everyone conflates homelessness with rampant uncrontrolled crime and destruction of the city, then it becomes much easier to garner support for such laws in a panic.

The police should do their jobs in at least enforcing the existing laws and we should be punishing criminals.

You could clean up the homeless problem in San Francisco pretty easily by simply enforcing laws and incarcerating criminals who happen to also be homeless. It's exceptionally easy when they're operating out in the oppen without even a roof and walls to hide behind.

Re: Homeless, living in a tent and employed: The changing face of homelessness

#159

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Mar 23, 2019, 11:41 PM UTC

dgzl wrote: post #67

I'm from a small town in Oregon that sees a lot of nomadic traveling folk, either homeless or lifestyle (the PCT comes through the area, for instance), and the town is generally pretty receptive of these people. Growing up I would hang out and spend time with them, just chatting and playing music and enjoying the area. I carried that to adulthood and I now live in Portland, where the homeless problem is quite severe.…

[deleted]

Re: Homeless, living in a tent and employed: The changing face of homelessness

#160

Post by c22 » Sat, Mar 23, 2019, 11:41 PM UTC

trashcan wrote: post #109

chillwaves wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the advantage in cycling addicts in and out of prison?

Did you watch the video? Removing access to drugs and providing them with I assume subsidized medication that is used to treat addiction.

I was in jail once. Apart from weed it seemed like illegal drugs were readily available and much cheaper than they were on the street. I've also been in a mental hospital where unprescribed drugs were impossible to get, they put me on some crazy stuff though. I met addicts in both of these places and honestly neither of them seemed to offer much help for that condition.