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Despite money and effort, homelessness in SF as bad as ever

godhandiscen

godhandiscen

There are millions of whiny 5-year olds on Earth, and I AM THEIR KING.
http://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/...d-work-homelessness-in-SF-as-bad-11242946.php

The city spent $275 million on homelessness and supportive housing in the fiscal year that ends Friday, up from $241 million the year before. Starting Saturday, that annual spending is projected to hit an eye-popping $305 million.
Click to expand...


According to this census, there are ~7500 homesless people in SF.

http://sfist.com/2017/06/26/2017_san_francisco_homeless_census.php

That's about $32k yearly investment per homeless individual and no results... wtf?

I am confident the problem is hard to solve, but it also feels like the resources are not being used properly.
 
M

Maddness

Member
Wow so moving there for work would probably be kinda dire eh? Jesus.

Edit: Finishing up the article this is more about people whom were already homeless and not just the cost of living in general. God damn that sucks even worse. I hope something can be done for people who can't find a place to even sleep.
 
P

pantsmith

Member
SynthFetish said:
Another point in favor of UBI.
Click to expand...

I mean its complicated - even with UBI (which I am in favor of) you aren't directly addressing the systematic problems that lead to poverty and/or homelessness.

One big issue is that a lot of these people are suffering from mental illness and social distress that you can't just throw money at. They need societal reform and genuine help that takes lots of time and hands and effort that money can't just buy.
 
D

danm999

Member
$32,000 per individual, divide by 12, is $2700ish a month enough to rent in San Francisco assuming 100% of the money goes towards rent?
 
F

Fuchsdh

Member
godhandiscen said:
Read the census data. 31% of homeless people are from other states.
Click to expand...

And that's the big problem. All other problems being solved, if San Fran solves its homeless problem more states are going to just bus them over there to deal with it, and the costs will continue to spiral. (Its worth noting the numbers in that link are extremely conservative definitions. There's likely many more than the 7K living in the city.)

The article also points out that the city seems to be focusing on long-term solutions, which is admirable, but doesn't do much to improve the day-to-day quality of life of anyone, homeless or the people who have to tiptoe around the feces and needles.

BreezyLimbo said:
maybe the government should step in and

I dunno

control the rent

it'd probably make the majority of SF republican tho
Click to expand...

Rent controls would only exacerbate SF's housing problems.

And talking about affordable housing when talking about the homeless is talking about a completely separate issue, because the chronic homeless are serial drug users or mentally ill. That's not solved by cheap rent.
 
Sunster

Sunster

Member
Homeless go there because Californian cities have resources for them unlike their home states where they may as well be large rats. This isn't California's problem to solve. We need a nation wide effort.

OrangeGrayBlue said:
Really though, why couldn't housing be provided? It would certainly be more cost effective.
Click to expand...

complete guess here, but space is probably the issue in a city like SF.
 
B

BreezyLimbo

Banned
Fuchsdh said:
Rent controls would only exacerbate SF's housing problems.

And talking about affordable housing when talking about the homeless is talking about a completely separate issue, because the chronic homeless are serial drug users or mentally ill. That's not solved by cheap rent.
Click to expand...

True
True

Hrm.
 
F

Fuchsdh

Member
Probably the GIF they have of 311 responses is the easiest way to see how the problem is escalating;

311_complaints.gif


OrangeGrayBlue said:
Really though, why couldn't housing be provided? It would certainly be more cost effective.
Click to expand...

Without treatment sheltering a bunch of chronically homeless people will only create a different type of money sink. Government housing becoming a crime and drug-infested shithole is a pretty common outcome.
 
L

Lil Marco

Banned
The SF homeless crisis is a complicated, multi-layered issue and can't be explained with just one "because X" statement. It's a system of problems that led to this.

1) NIMBY-ism from grumpy old white lady baby boomer assholes is preventing developers from building cheaper high rise housing to normalize the supply/demand imbalance. So the rents just keep going up, people keep getting priced out, so they either move further out (richmond. stockton, dublin, etc.) or they end up on the streets. These boomer fucks have too much influence in city policy and need to be regulated hard.

2) Other factors include the tech industry which actively gentrifies the shit out of the bay

3) and of course the influx of Asian/Middle Eastern billionares who fly in buy properties in cash and then go back to their country. This is how they avoid taxes, by investing their income. Classic Panama Papers-style protocol.

PS, where's Tabris? He lived in one of those obnoxious $6k/month ivory towers that were sinking in downtown SF.

There won't be any progress until NIMBY's can be regulated and the city has to grow some balls and silence them + establish comprehensive affordable housing programs.

It also doesn't help that most homeless people immigrate from failing red states to CA because the weather is better here and you can actually survive winters outside.
 
E

ezrarh

Member
Unfortunately you can't easily solve a lot of social ills by just throwing money at it. Cities every where continue to be a magnet for those at the bottom because of the resources they provide. The homelessness is just one symptom of a sick society so unless we do more to fix the root cause, throwing money at it might help some but it's not gonna get rid of the problem. Although I don't think I have to rant about SF's inability to build housing - although at this point, it'd really only help those in the upper middle class. It's too far gone to help anybody making middle income or less.
 
godhandiscen

godhandiscen

There are millions of whiny 5-year olds on Earth, and I AM THEIR KING.
Lil Marco said:
NIMBY-ism from grumpy old white lady baby boomer assholes are preventing developers from building cheap high rise housing to normalize the supply/demand imbalance. So the rents just keep going up. These old fucks have too much influence in city policy and need to be regulated hard.

This is external from the tech industry which also is gentrifying the bay in general.
Click to expand...
Expensive housing has hardly anything to do with the rise of homeless individuals.
Look at those numbers. A lot of homeless people require psychiatric treatment. They come to SF because they are taken care of.
 
S

soco

Member
godhandiscen said:
I am confident the problem is hard to solve, but it also feels like the resources are not being used properly.
Click to expand...

Why is this always that such a common reaction? Even with the admission of the difficulty, people look at complex systems and instantly see "waste", especially as others have pointed out it's an insanely expensive city. Homelessness isn't always just a buy-them-a-house-and-the-problem-is-solved kinda problem. So it's an even stranger reaction in this instance, when we pay more just to keep folks in prison, in sometimes rural areas.

It's a similar sentiment that we have in our culture that leads to subpar pay for government and non-profit jobs, and our reliance on transitional volunteers to help with programs like this. It also leads to insanely shitty "value" metrics, where people do stupid shit like replace a 5 cent washer on a water pump so they can "impact" thousands of people in a small village.
 
godhandiscen

godhandiscen

There are millions of whiny 5-year olds on Earth, and I AM THEIR KING.
soco said:
Why is this always that such a common reaction? Even with the admission of the difficulty, people look at complex systems and instantly see "waste", especially as others have pointed out it's an insanely expensive city. Homelessness isn't always just a buy-them-a-house-and-the-problem-is-solved kinda problem. So it's an even stranger reaction in this instance, when we pay more just to keep folks in prison, in sometimes rural areas.

It's a similar sentiment that we have in our culture that leads to subpar pay for government and non-profit jobs, and our reliance on transitional volunteers to help with programs like this. It also leads to insanely shitty "value" metrics, where people do stupid shit like replace a 5 cent washer on a water pump so they can "impact" thousands of people in a small village.
Click to expand...
Read the article. Even those doing the cleaning do not understand where the money is going and question the "long term solution" the city is supposedly working towards.
 
S

Servbot #42

Unconfirmed Member
There was a study awhile back that said that giving homeless people houses and other help actually fucking worked, most people didn't go back, i think i'm gonna track that article now. Why not help people get back on their feet and stop them from being a drain on the system?
 
C

Caddywompus

Member
Sunster said:
Homeless go there because Californian cities have resources for them unlike their home states where they may as well be large rats. This isn't California's problem to solve. We need a nation wide effort.



complete guess here, but space is probably the issue in a city like SF.
Click to expand...


Yeah it's hard to solve a problem when the surrounding cities don't pour the kind of money into the issue SF has, everyone will flock there to receive help.
 
S

sh4mike

Member
Moved out 3 years ago and still smiling. Absolute nightmare getting through that every morning on my walk commute.

I'd set up some huge tent complex outside the city and forcibly transport anyone living on the streets at night to it. Police it for drugs, have centralized staff for assistance.
 
R

RastaMentality

Banned
sh4mike said:
Moved out 3 years ago and still smiling. Absolute nightmare getting through that every morning on my walk commute.

I'd set up some huge tent complex outside the city and forcibly transport anyone living on the streets at night to it. Police it for drugs, have centralized staff for assistance.
Click to expand...
This sounds like a terrible idea. Like could you imagine how awful this would look in the media?
 
L

Lil Marco

Banned
sh4mike said:
I'd set up some huge tent complex outside the city and forcibly transport anyone living on the streets at night to it. Police it for drugs, have centralized staff for assistance.
Click to expand...

I don't think establishing what would effectively be a favela slum is going to be a good look for the city or the state. We're not Brazil.

The housing industry needs to be regulated to allow better accessibility and mobility, and not have it be the way it is now where a privileged few own everything and everybody else fights for scraps of grossly overpriced tenancy.
 
M

Makonero

Member
Mental health treatment in this country is absurd. Free mental healthcare for all would be a damn good start, campaigns to normalize seeing a mental health doctor would be a good next step and the re-establishment of mental hospitals would be a good end goal.

Solving homelessness is about drugs and healthcare.
 
Woo-Fu

Woo-Fu

Banned
sh4mike said:
Moved out 3 years ago and still smiling. Absolute nightmare getting through that every morning on my walk commute.

I'd set up some huge tent complex outside the city and forcibly transport anyone living on the streets at night to it. Police it for drugs, have centralized staff for assistance.
Click to expand...

A concentration camp? Because that is what most people who hear your idea are going to immediately think.

I think the biggest issue is the practically non-existent mental health care options for people without means.
 
M

MattKeil

BIGTIME TV MOGUL #2
Makonero said:
Mental health treatment in this country is absurd. Free mental healthcare for all would be a damn good start, campaigns to normalize seeing a mental health doctor would be a good next step and the re-establishment of mental hospitals would be a good end goal.

Solving homelessness is about drugs and healthcare.
Click to expand...

Yup. This has been a consistent problem for over 40 years, since Reagan dismantled the state's mental health care system as governor in the '70s, before doing the same nationally as president. A shocking number of SF's homeless are mentally ill or simply terminally ill people who have no money left and are kicked into the street to die.
 
M

MegaManTrigger

Banned
Servbot #42 said:
There was a study awhile back that said that giving homeless people houses and other help actually fucking worked, most people didn't go back, i think i'm gonna track that article now. Why not help people get back on their feet and stop them from being a drain on the system?
Click to expand...

That just set off a light bulb: I'm so confident that giving these people the basic necessities for housing would end up much cheaper than them dragging the system. If it's true, then lol @ the inefficiency and waste of money.

Also, in regards to the thread, the problem is people don't want to look at the fundamental aspects of the system that contributes to the homeless problem (real estate being treated as a game of who can make the most money when it should be a human right being one of them). That's why we end up wasting time and money chasing banal solutions that ultimately never solve the problem (instead of taking advice from professionals that researched and conceptualized better policies that would actually help).
 
L

Lil Marco

Banned
The general American cultural stigmatization of mental health (and the subsequent lack of care by the medical field for it) is definitely a problem that contributes to this, but IMO it's just one piece of the puzzle along with an out-of-control SF housing market and the mass exodus of red-state vagrants to CA because of the survivable weather.

The sad reality is that nobody in the current executive branch or congress is going to give a shit about this enough to do anything about it. "get a job" kellyanne says.

And to those clamoring for a UBI- how do you stop someone from blowing all of it on drugs?
 
E

Eye for an Eye

Member
Makonero said:
Mental health treatment in this country is absurd. Free mental healthcare for all would be a damn good start, campaigns to normalize seeing a mental health doctor would be a good next step and the re-establishment of mental hospitals would be a good end goal.

Solving homelessness is about drugs and healthcare.
Click to expand...
California does provide mental health treatment. But getting doctors to take on new patients and new doctors to accept medi-cal are also an issue. I'm in the process of trying to get a new doctor and being told off the bat that there are no psychiatrists in my vacinity taking new patients. I tried to go through the school's health center first, but I'm apparently beyond her ability to help. I don't live anywhere near a city as big as San Fran.

It'll be really amazing to see a single payer health care system go into effect so everyone can receive treatment when and how they need it.
 
W

wenis

Registered for GAF on September 11, 2001.
Other cities should stop sending their homeless here, first and foremost. Especially out of state cities. Handle your shit, we got our own mess to deal with :pacspit:
 
S

soco

Member
godhandiscen said:
Read the article. Even those doing the cleaning do not understand where the money is going and question the "long term solution" the city is supposedly working towards.
Click to expand...

The article does a pretty good job of explaining that. Maybe read it again?
 
godhandiscen

godhandiscen

There are millions of whiny 5-year olds on Earth, and I AM THEIR KING.
soco said:
The article does a pretty good job of explaining that. Maybe read it again?
Click to expand...
Dude, when the director of the long term solution talks about the fact that his team is distributed between six buildings as an obstacle and says it will take 9 months to put them in the same room, it sounds like mismanagement.

I live in SF. I am not saying "don't do anything for the homeless" but it feels the project is mismanaged.
 
Boogie9IGN

Boogie9IGN

Member
Fuchsdh said:
Probably the GIF they have of 311 responses is the easiest way to see how the problem is escalating;

http://projects.sfchronicle.com/2017/homeless/311_complaints.gif[IMG].[/QUOTE]

I was walking to a bar in the Mission a few months and saw heeeella needles up and down a sketchy looking street. Shit is trippy and scary to say the least. Nevermind the human dumps/piss streams one sees when walking around the Tenderloin [I]shudder[/I]
Click to expand...
 
L

Laiza

Member
pantsmith said:
I mean its complicated - even with UBI (which I am in favor of) you aren't directly addressing the systematic problems that lead to poverty and/or homelessness.

One big issue is that a lot of these people are suffering from mental illness and social distress that you can't just throw money at. They need societal reform and genuine help that takes lots of time and hands and effort that money can't just buy.
Click to expand...
Funny thing is that money is often the root cause of that distress. Get people into a secure position and a lot of that "mental illness" goes away.

Obviously, it doesn't teach people money management skills or anything, but then, most folks that are homeless aren't homeless because of poor money management skills, but rather some other confluence of events that led them there. Often enough, those explanations are after-the-fact justifications for why people "deserve" to be homeless rather than factual explanations of the causality that led to that state.

We have to be careful not to fall into that trap. That kind of thinking is toxic and attributes more to individual agency than is usually the case in our present-day economy.

Lil Marco said:
And to those clamoring for a UBI- how do you stop someone from blowing all of it on drugs?
Click to expand...
Stop criminalizing drugs and start putting up more programs for drug rehabilitation and safe dosing centers where people can get doped without the risk of ODing.
 
O

OrangeGrayBlue

Member
Dalek said:
Ever been to San Francisco? Where will you build these homes?
Click to expand...

Yes, I've been. I don't think the housing needs to be in SF specifically. It could be elsewhere in the area. It's hard to treat these underlying issues that caused their homelessness in the first place when they continue to live under such harsh conditions.
 
P

Paz

Member
I've been to SF a handful of times for various events like GDC and this is totally anecdotal but it seemed to me the homeless problem was much more of a health care problem in disguise, all my interactions with the rather large groups of homeless people left me feeling like these people were well on their way to insanity :(

Doesn't really matter if you give people a home if they are physically and mentally broken, the cycle will still persist.

Totally just anecdotal thoughts though.
 
K

kirblar

Member
Servbot #42 said:
There was a study awhile back that said that giving homeless people houses and other help actually fucking worked, most people didn't go back, i think i'm gonna track that article now. Why not help people get back on their feet and stop them from being a drain on the system?
Click to expand...
IIRC that may have been Utah or SLC, and Utah's sort of a special case because there's a shit-ton of extra stuff the Mormon Church tends to be helping out w/. (This is a good thing, but it makes it really hard to replicate in places that aren't Utah.)
Laiza said:
Funny thing is that money is often the root cause of that distress. Get people into a secure position and a lot of that "mental illness" goes away.

Obviously, it doesn't teach people money management skills or anything, but then, most folks that are homeless aren't homeless because of poor money management skills, but rather some other confluence of events that led them there. Often enough, those explanations are after-the-fact justifications for why people "deserve" to be homeless rather than factual explanations of the causality that led to that state.

We have to be careful not to fall into that trap. That kind of thinking is toxic and attributes more to individual agency than is usually the case in our present-day economy.
Click to expand...
The chronically homeless are not chronically homeless because of the way poverty has warped their decisionmaking. That's a very different and separate thing.
 
Sinfamy

Sinfamy

Member
Portland is bad too.
I feel like they're constantly putting band aids on a tumor hoping it goes away.
It won't, but I don't know how to fix it either.
 
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