SF tech bro: ‘I shouldn’t have to see the pain, struggle, despair of homeless’

The solution to homelessness is compassion. Frankly, it's outright disturbing how complacent we have become with homelessness in our culture. The problem isn't that these people abuse drugs or alcohol, or that their mental health goes untreated -- the problem is that they don't have homes. And that is a very bad thing for anyone to endure. People should not let that happen to other people.

The other issues also need to be treated. Those are comparatively complex issues... Homelessness is, by comparison, not complex. Put people in houses. As evidenced by examples in Utah (and apparently Canada too, about which I was unaware until this thread), this is the fiscally smart move. The smart move and the right move aren't always in alignment, so this should be a no-brainer.

There are likely no homeless people who actually prefer to be homeless. There are people whose lives have been so massively changed by their circumstances that adjusting to a more comfortable housing situation might take some adjustment, and probably some therapy, assistance, and monitoring.

The sticker shock of doing this is what seems to keep it from getting fixed at once, as it's apparently much easier to periodically ask for money to develop ineffective piecemeal solutions.

The letter to Ed Lee reads like a parody. It will doubtless be forgotten, but I hope that's not the case. It should be one of a few artifacts used to encapsulate the historic moment we're living in.

'Worst of all, it is unsafe.' Sure, it sucks that it's a safety hazard to area residents. Is that really the worst part though? If you think the worst part of the homeless crisis is that it makes you and your well-to-do neighbors unsafe, you should probably ask yourself what exactly makes you so important.

'My girlfriend was terrified and myself and many people ran out of the theater.' I can't judge anyone for what scares them, and sure, the incident sounds like it would have been a surprise... But this guy makes it sound like an actual monster came into the theater and ran everyone out. A homeless person came in and did something that interrupted the film. Things like this will occasionally happen in a city that has a terrible homeless problem. Justin Keller's reaction is everything you need to know that he doesn't have the emotional or psychological maturity necessary to process homelessness as an issue separate from the effect it has on himself.

San Francisco is a city rich with ideas and capital, but I don't know how you can incentivize tech-community participation in solving this crisis. I keep thinking that we've reached peak obliviousness, and then something like this letter comes along, and frankly I didn't expect to find so many people here basically affirming the sentiments. I really worry that this is how a sizable portion of SF's tech community feels, whether they admit to it or not.

I'm 35 and my wife is 30. I was born in 1980 which means some people would say gen-x and some would say millenial. I'm also the younger child, with my older sister being squarely in gen x.

My wife definitely has more of the typical millenial characteristics then I, and talking of our high-school experiences it almost seems like we were decades apart rather than just 5 years, though perhaps some of that is that we grew up on opposite coasts.

Obviously because you'd rather have the housing that you could obtain by working and paying rent, which would be better.

You know why I created [citation needed] on Wikipedia? Because the amount of ill-informed, badly thought out, ridiculous claims on Wikipedia articles were getting out hand. I started removing them to the talk page, but then that same person not only refused to explain where they got their information from, but would put the "fact" back into the article. This would then perpetuate incorrect information.

One day I had an epiphany. I realised that you can't just argue with these people, you need to have a reverse citation system - you need to clearly mark out information that is dubious, ill-informed, the result of ingrained prejudice (often unconsciously so) and almost always inaccurate.

At the same time, there needed to be a way of allowing controversial views and sometimes accurate but controversial facts be detailed on the encyclopaedia.

There was only one way I could see to do it - use the same citation system that referenced sources but invert it to highlight information that needed a source. Hence I created citation needed (originally without the square brackets, whoever added them was a genius in their own right).

Guess what? It worked. 11 years later, despite the many issues on Wikipedia, finding out the source of assumptions is no longer a problem. People can go to the citations and see where the factoid is documented, or whose opinion is being expressed. It allows ordinary people to judge the view being expressed more accurately, or to look at how the data was extrapolated, to understand how the academic study was conducted, or to verify that what is claimed is actually what the original claimant was indeed claiming.

On Wikipedia, there was no way of allowing people to say that you are full of shit without destroying the project. Yet people needed a mechanism to dispute what was written. Talk pages weren't enough - bad actors could keep conversations going indefinitely without really bring challenged, whilst most readers wouldn't see the controversy of their contributions. By marking up text with [citation needed] it allowed people to think "hang on, this is disputed, where did they get this idea/information from?".

If my one contribution to society all those years ago was to have helped people improve their critical faculties and question the information given to them, then I'm satisfied I've made a positive impact on society. I certainly didn't expect it to take off like it did. I'm also not arrogant enough to think I started this questioning, merely helped start a meme that was actually useful.

If Hacker News now has its own culture of asking "where did you get that information from?" then it's a [citation needed]. You should applaud it. You should cherish that people have found a way of politely questioning the views of others and make them justify what they say without resort to personal abuse. You should be happy that people are using their critical faculties when they question implicit assumptions and claims.

You say it casts doubts on the truthfulness or provenance of the original poster's claims. Good! If the claims are of good provenance, then the poster can show that provenance. If the original poster is being truthful, then they can prove it by showing their sources.

The political argument against HF comes down to the fact that it may not actually work very well. People opposed to HF tend to argue:

1.) HF is not effective at keeping recipients out of the criminal justice system. (This finding is controversial as, especially in Canada, 2-3 years often go by between arrest and subsequent criminal punishment.)

2.) HF creates 'slums'. (This finding is controversial as the solution is to attract a wider array of potential landlords. From a landlord's perspective, getting involved with HF is difficult as they feel that having one HF unit in a building will depress rents for the entire building.)

3.) HF is built around low quality data collection tools. HF programs always start with something called a point in time (PIT) count in which a city's homeless population is counted. PIT counts always show that homelessness is both older and whiter than frontline activists have found. This problem is highly complex and could easily turn this into a 250 page essay...:)

4.) HF is a one size fits all approach to a very complex problem. People who believe this fall into the narrative that a homeless woman with three children who lives from couch to couch is dramatically different from a homeless man who suffers from schizophrenia and pushes all of his worldly possessions in a cart. I'd argue that this is not so much a criticism as an example of ignorance - HF by its very nature recognizes that every community is different and each community must build its own program. Second, HF is built around personal relationships between recipients and advocates. The advocates are responsible for getting a particular recipient the type of help that he/she needs.

I mostly support Housing First, so I don't believe these, though #2 and #3 are definitely problems.

(source - I am an anti-poverty activist and have studied HF extensively.)