271–280 of 404 posts
Todd said she had gone to the overpass to distribute sandwiches, potato chips and water to people living at the freeway encampment. Todd’s lawsuit accuses the city of allowing the encampment at the 101 overpass on Gower to remain for a “substantial amount of time,” Why is she distributing supplies to a group of people she wants the city to throw out?
This is becoming such a frustrating issue. As an advocate of public spaces and parks, it's kind of heartbreaking that maybe 1/3 of public spaces in our town are no longer usable for all - they have more or less become private spaces for the homeless. I don't have much respect for communities that solve the issue by just "kicking them out" and passing the problem onto others, but it is almost becoming unacceptably com…
IMO the city should provide enough homeless shelters for everyone and then just make homelessness illegal. So if you are found sleeping in a tent you get referred to the nearest shelter and if you refuse you get arrested. We can not allow homelessness to exist because it makes public spaces unsafe like you mention. Homeless shelters can also help by making it hard for them to continue their drug addictions.
Theft and assaults happen at shelters, so maybe there's a bed available but do people feel safe? If you were assaulted at a shelter would you want to return the next night? Forcing people to chose between two unsafe options (shelter or jail) feels cruel.
Addiction also complicates things. Should a shelter allow substance abuse? If so it can be a really bad place for recovering addicts. If shelters do not allow substance abuse, then addicts have no place to legally exist. If locking them up actually helped their addiction that might be ok, but it does not.
There are other problems with shelters. Many of them have weird hours and capacity limits. Many are gender segregated. What people need is a space where they feel safe, they can store their belongings, they can come and go as needed to get to appointments and services, they can live with a partner or on their own. These are the things that will help people get back on their feet, overcome addiction, etc, and "shelters" are totally inadequate.
This is becoming such a frustrating issue. As an advocate of public spaces and parks, it's kind of heartbreaking that maybe 1/3 of public spaces in our town are no longer usable for all - they have more or less become private spaces for the homeless. I don't have much respect for communities that solve the issue by just "kicking them out" and passing the problem onto others, but it is almost becoming unacceptably com…
some small cities literally buy their homeless bus tickets to get rid of them, and their politicians point to the places they send them as liberalism run amok… how do you even undo such callousness
A huge, huge number of your local homeless population is just that, local. A plurality of them are homeless due to unaddressed mental health issues. Solving homelessness completely may be impossible, but better mental health treatment infrastructure would get us a lot closer.
This is becoming such a frustrating issue. As an advocate of public spaces and parks, it's kind of heartbreaking that maybe 1/3 of public spaces in our town are no longer usable for all - they have more or less become private spaces for the homeless. I don't have much respect for communities that solve the issue by just "kicking them out" and passing the problem onto others, but it is almost becoming unacceptably com…
This has specifically been a huge problem in cities with expensive real estate like Los Angeles and San Francisco. It is why the free market approach to fixing the housing crisis doesn't work. The land is so expensive that it doesn't make financial sense to waste it on low margin affordable housing. Developers realize this, snatch up the current options for housing of last resort like SRO buildings, knock them down, and build luxury condos. Supply of the bottom of the market is decreased in favor of supply at the top of the market and this new construction often is less dense than the housing it replaces. People argue that the new supply will eventually trickle down, but that new supply is always snatched up by people moving into the city leaving the people who used live there with no place to go.
There needs to be regulation to force the construction of affordable housing in these markets as the free market has shown it won't be built otherwise.
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This is just a personal take but * House the ones that are functional/capable of taking care of themselves to an extent * Mandatory rehab for the ones are strung out pm debilitating opiates * Asylum for the ones are mentally disabled.
> * Mandatory rehab for the ones are strung out pm debilitating opiates > * Asylum for the ones are mentally disabled. Wow. You've got some opinions about homeless people, don't you?
Drug addiction runs in my family and we had to do the same for my uncle. Several weeks of keeping him on a short leash impacted the rest of his life and he was able to take care of his family unlike before. It's not pleasant and it requires a tremendous amount of willpower and people under that spell need every bit of help that can get.
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IMO the city should provide enough homeless shelters for everyone and then just make homelessness illegal. So if you are found sleeping in a tent you get referred to the nearest shelter and if you refuse you get arrested. We can not allow homelessness to exist because it makes public spaces unsafe like you mention. Homeless shelters can also help by making it hard for them to continue their drug addictions.
> Homeless shelters can also help by making it hard for them to continue their drug addictions. They do, and this is sometimes why homeless people avoid the shelters. You cannot hold someone in a shelter against their will.
Governments in California are immune from liability for failure to enact or enforce any law, so good luck.
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What's the incentive to get a job if you're still going to be homeless? If you stay homeless you're eventually going to get fired too.
I don't know, maybe being able to buy food is an incentive?
— Simone de Beauvoir, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (1958)
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In some cities there are large concentrations of homeless people while in other parts of the country they are rare to encounter. Those large concentrations are regularly talked about by activists and the news media.
I think this is probably correct. The last time I've even seen an obviously homeless person was in SF, and I haven't been there in 2 years.