321–330 of 375 posts
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Nobody said that. They said incarceration for petty theft is unreasonable.
Would love to have your privilege of considering petty theft to be harmless. For the majority of vulnerable people, it causes extreme emotional and financial distress. Try talking to actual people who are not privileged and see what they think about being victims of petty theft.
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Do you have any links for the homelessness is a solved problem claim? While I’ve seen societies that have reduced the problem, I haven’t seen any that have solved the problem - at least if they are bigger than ‘toy’ populations. Plenty of places pretending they solved the problem by shipping people to jail or similar if they refuse to live somewhere the authorities demand they do. That said, SF is pretty much a poste…
Finland’s recent policies are a good example https://www.cbc.ca/radio/sunday/the-sunday-edition-for-janua...
Homelessness is a solved problem. SF residents don't want the solution. Real estate is the primary wealth building asset class of long-term residents who bought property ages ago or inherited it. In California property taxes as assessed at time of sale, so you hold onto properties realistically valued at multiple millions while paying taxes at rate appropriate to tens of thousands. Bulldozing a single family home to…
As long as California is willing to pay market value for said house, then sure. Otherwise, they have no more right to my property than anyone else. The USA isn't a communist country or a dictatorship, and property rights dominate except in the most dire circumstances. So it really isn't a “solved problem”. What would work is shutting the NIMBY's down and letting housing get rezoned by developers for multi-home units.
"You're posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks."
No, YOU'RE A BUNCH OF USER-ABUSING JAGOFFS, HACKER NEWS. PISS OFF. THANKS.
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I’ll bite, but I think you ought to know that I cannot so far understand you’re reasoning. Who, then, is qualified to speak on these issues? Is only aggregate data through official channels, and not individual experience, relevant to the discussion?
> Who, then, is qualified to speak on these issues? For starters, can we agree that a publicity stunt like spending a week in a tent as a live action roleplay is no way to get any insight on a deep-rooted social and economic problem? Specially given the clear preexisting bias and political motivation to ignore the problem, avoid accountability, and continue doing absolutely nothing? > Is only aggregate data through o…
No, we cannot agree on this. I don't understand how this is walking the walk, and not just talking the talk. If the mayor went on to make grandoise claims about homelessness that were unreasonable, I would start to agree, but I don't see that happening here.
> But no. I this case we're only seeing a former senator turned mayor somehow arriving at the conclusion that homeless people are all drug addicts and/or suffering from mental health problems.
This is strawmanning the mayor's point. He is claiming that we are not addressing the root cause of homelessness. He's not saying "homeless people are all drug addicts." Those are your words.
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True! Not the same homeless population. Chicago homeless begs aggressively, the one in SF are just zombies.
> Chicago homeless begs aggressively, the one in SF are just zombies. Have had many outdoor dining experiences in SF that I would consider aggressive begging...
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Personal responsibility is good though right? Not that a lack is the cause or having more is a cure for every homeless person, but if those who didn’t currently take person responsibility changed and did - would that be a bad thing? I guess it depends on exactly how you interpret his statement, but the core idea that money alone isn’t going to fix the problem seems reasonable. I mean, if someone is out on the street…
Sure, but it's so insufficient that to even bring it up is a red flag. It's like if we were all getting together to try and solve climate change and someone said "I'm super religious, I spent the last week in nature speaking with God, and it's clear to me that while there are other things we can and should do, this will never work without everyone individually praying every day." We would collectively be like "huh, c…
This is the crux of it. Your position disagrees with mine, that's fine, but please don't assume that bringing up an issue based on personal experience with the problem is a "red flag." That's disingenuous and unproductive.
You then go on to strawman a bizarre tale of a religious person being overly evangelical about a deeply individual experience. Homelessness is a problem of society, and people. Yes we cannot address the individual at every point in a conversation, but that shouldn't mean we can't talk about the problems affecting individuals.
I often hear treatment promoted, but it's interesting that I rarely hear a topic right next to this come up in such discussions: a for-profit healthcare system that not-only leaves these people behind, but helps to put many of them there in the first place. I can't find anything in this thread about health insurance, universal access to healthcare, etc. I have excellent health insurance by US standards (the most expe…
My experience of mental healthcare in the UK and China is not what what you imply. Your description of mental care for homeless in USA is close to what is available for the majority of the working class in the UK. I worked in mental health in the UK. In my area an initial mental health consult has a 6 month wait. You are unlikely to receive ongoing care in the first 2 years after the initial consult, but most will ne…
Part of why it took me so long to get treatment (I mentioned that I've been dealing with this for decades) is that 20 years ago I could only afford to get treatment that I knew my insurance company would cover (cover == 80%). I was on two waiting lists... the insurance company's own list and one at Stanford Medical Center. I tried to get on more lists, but I couldn't find any that weren't "full". I checked regularly on the two lists, each time being told I don't have to check as they'll reach out when I'm at the top. I gave up checking after three years and they never reached out. I never got as far as a consult. It's expensive for me now because I didn't go the insurance company's route - I just went straight to a doctor and submitted insurance claims after.
I almost couldn't reach out for treatment this time. I knew I was nearing a point of no return. It felt like reaching out for treatment meant facing potential rejection on my last chance and the added stress made me almost non-functional. That's part of why I describe myself as lucky. I was able to amass the savings needed for treatment before my illness incapacitated me so much that I could neither work nor seek help.
While it's a bad situation that it can take years to get ongoing treatment in a system like the UK's, I still would have had treatment many years earlier. Things need to improve all over if we actually want to make progress on homelessness. We need approaches to get people off the street. But we also need to have better systems in place that reduce the number of people ending up on the street in the first place. I don't believe that remediation without prevention will do much to reverse current trends.
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That seems like a far cry from the exponential growth described where you house one homeless person and 2 appear.
They’re not incompatible statements. The easier it is to be homeless, the more homeless you get. That’s different from where they come from.
Between wages and housing costs, it's unclear to me how ~half of SF isn't homeless.
I'm not sure people whose goal in life is living in a tent under the freeway exist in any significant numbers outside of the imagination of libertarians.
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Desired state seems like a stretch, but the cynical part of me does wonder sometimes whether having visible homelessness around is seen as inevitable proof that the capitalist system is irredeemable and must be replaced. A more likely explanation is the way that paternalistic administration of care is anathema to the current way of thinking. That is to say that one should never presuppose how to solve someone else’s…
> Desired state seems like a stretch, but the cynical part of me does wonder sometimes whether having visible homelessness around is seen as inevitable proof that the capitalist system is irredeemable and must be replaced. I think these are two separate variables and Capitalism when properly regulated works extremely well (it has moved millions from poverty in China and did the same in the US - wages went up by 350%…
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Their policies are demonstrably at fault though, there are large European cities which face this same dynamic and yet they do not have anywhere near the level of problems that we have in this country. This seems to be, in large part, due to their policies. Housing is not their primary goal, addiction and psychiatric treatment are. You get housing when you comply, it's the carrot that is used to motivate people to eng…
> You get housing when you comply, it's the carrot that is used to motivate people to engage with the program. Note that Finland famously has a "Housing First" policy that has practically eliminated homelessness there, so that seems to be a direct counterexample to your comment.
Reference: https://www.ara.fi/download/noname/%7B0D67A61D-7980-467C-834...