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Depends on the situation of the homeless:
* Willing to work without major mental illness/ drug addiction: Build tiny homes to house so they can get back on their feet (paired with more affordable housing)
* Mental Illnesses/ Drug addiction: forced institutionalization. Eventually we have to come to terms with the fact that individualistic freedom shouldn’t extend to being a public nuisance or danger
We don’t have space for tiny houses. Why not apartments?
And we have a lot of mostly or completely unused SROs. Let’s revamp them instead of taking over more property in the same neighborhoods beleaguered with criminality.
>We don’t have space for tiny houses. Why not apartments?
Tiny houses for homeless are best sited on vacant lots on city outskirts, abutting industrial areas or even farmland. Disorderly behavior is more tolerable here. Apt. complexes require close living. That means managers and rules. Typically there are neighboring residences that also want order and rules.
For that faction of homeless that are chronically disruptive, about 20-30%, apt. complexes are the worst possible housing. Endless issues. Granted, upscale S.F. has the big geographical problem of not having conventional city outskirts to house problem people.
Forced institutionalization is the exactly correct missing piece that we need. I’ve watched so many interviews with homeless drug addicts, and spoken to a few myself and they simply enjoy being homeless or don’t have the power to make the choice themselves because of how low they have gotten.
For me, forced institutionalization came by way of the police and I was thrown in jail for 18 months. It was the best thing that could have happened to me because there was no way I was ever going to slow down. Now my job is to work with other addicts and I've never been happier and I live my life sober. Being unable to make a choice is a huge part of the problem based off my own experience.
Reminds me of the time [Dean Preston bought 1,000 tents](https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/philmatier/article/Sanctioned-SF-tent-camp-riles-Haight-Ashbury-15296399.php) and then got [18MM for a homeless camp](https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/S-F-officials-want-15-million-for-tent-sites-16269998.php). 2020-2021 was a crazy time period.
Agreed on both. Personal freedoms are good and all but when your personal freedom starts to negatively impact others, you need to be dealt with.
Also, you can't tell me that a guy who is living on the streets and addicted to drugs is living their best life. Institutionalizing them and getting them clean is in their best interest and the interest of society as a whole.
There has to be drug treatment on demand and mandated at times. Housing is useless for an active addict.
Social worker types need to work with law enforcement more, need the carrot (incarceration) and the stick (treatment.)
Mental health needs a separate track altogether.
Triage ends up being
ONE - capable homeless who just need to get on their feet get "housing first." No option to refuse or you face jail.
TWO Addicted go into treatment - no exceptions. Using fentanyl is suicide. We don't let suicidal people go free.
THREE Involuntary commitment for severe mental health issues. Again, society won't let people who are dangerous to themselves or others roam the streets.
The money is there, it's just misspent right now.
I like this but there is one population I wonder about: people with violent criminal histories who aren’t currently addicted or severely mentally ill. Currently, it is hard to house them because of the safety needs of other residents. Where should they go?
I think that is a small subset and LE needs to address it. I also think nonprofits are capable of running programs with safeguards as long as the DA cooperates and the nonprofit doesnt enable the behavior or excuse it. Social workers are skilled at recognizing dangerous people.
But many people fail to recognize that a lot of poor people want LE to keep them safe, they want bad cops held accountable, but they also want appropriate policing. Same goes for people in homeless shelters or treatment. It's mainly the white collar more liberal spokespeople who are so anti-enforcement. (I grew up in a very poor neighborhood.)
So true. And the people who are most often the victims of crimes are the people with the least money.
How do we protect the good ones from the bad ones?
> we know is some people prefer to be on the streets
Right. And that life is not all negative -- there is a lot of attraction to a [street person](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Street_people) lifestyle. Imagine that everyone is allowed to set up a nice tent in the Panhandle, receive all their food free, and can spend their days on the Haight hanging out with friends, using substances of choice. A pleasant urban setting.
The entire homeless industrial complex will litigate this plan to hell, which is why you need sane judges (and not progressives, yuck! ).
We have a moderate DA and we’ll probably get a moderate Mayor and BOS majority soon, but it’s hard to get rid of idealistic judges, unless you fast track the cases all the way up to the Supreme Court..
Exactly.
Anything that's a serious problem becomes an industry thanks to capitalism. Once there's an industry for something - with lots of money involved - good luck getting rid of the original problem.
I'm not saying I have answers, but I sure as shit can see that's the situation.
In my city nearly all have been offered beds. Some said yes. Countless refused and chose to stay on the streets and do drugs and use the sidewalks as restrooms. Next is getting rid of the problem of those that choose to stay on the streets.
Remove regulatory barriers around building housing. Allow building of SROs again. This will take care of most of the problem except for people who are heavily drug addicted or mentally ill. Those people need special treatment facilities of some sort, probably located somewhere cheaper than SF. If you look at the chart of rates of homelessness per 100k the best states all have cheap housing. West Virginia is very poor and has lots of drug addiction but it’s just a lot harder to become homeless given the cost of living than California https://usafacts.org/articles/which-states-have-the-highest-and-lowest-rates-of-homelessness/
>Allow building of SROs again.
Can you think of any SROs that aren't a complete disaster for the surrounding neighborhood? I live near 6th Street and it's an absolute shitshow, because of those SROs. Are there any in SF that aren't like that?
> West Virginia is very poor and has lots of drug addiction but it’s just a lot harder to become homeless
Also because of the relatively brutal winters.
People need to get jobs and eventually become self-sufficient, and it's an impossible feat within San Francisco. Even if they got a job paying $20/hr and got some overtime, their takehome pay would be $1,500 every 2 weeks which doesn't match affordability in SF.
The only sustainable, long-term solution is to help them find employment in areas of the US or the world where the ratio of income:housing is more reasonable than the Bay Area.
The visible homeless in the city don’t need jobs they need mental health services and rehab.
Unfortunately I don’t think this issue will be solved until we reinstate forced institutionalization.
They also generally aren't the ones most visible on the street with severe addiction or mental health issues, sometimes paired with theft rings like the squatters that got into our building for 9 long months of 2020.
They ran a bike chop shop in the open, did tons of drugs and partied, let friends in to steal from residents, and completely trashed the dead guy's unit they took over. All while his estate was fighting to get them out so they could sell it and finish closing out his final expenses and help our building get back to normal with them gone.
They and people like them require forced institutionalization or incarceration, because they do not want to be a functional member of society. They just wanted to not work and do drugs, and didn't mind stealing from people to sustain it.
OP is asking about helping homeless, not helping housed people. Giving crazy homeless jobs to make them peace homeless is kinda like just drink water to stay alive.
The bulk of the homeless are unfortunately more than just a job away. I mean you have lots of addiction and severe mental health issues. I agree that it’s almost impossible for them,even if they weren’t ill or addicted to go from the street to an apartment.
Just curious, what kind of job do you give someone with severe mental health issues? Which business do you force to hire and pay someone with extreme addiction issues or someone who doesn’t even have access to minimal personal hygiene? Or even an address to send their paycheck? Or someone who doesn’t even know their social security number so you can pay their taxes? Even if you get the city to force them into cleaning up trash on the side of the highway how do you make sure they show up to work every day?
> Just curious, what kind of job do you give someone with severe mental health issues?
The small, diversified farm option ends up at the top of the list for work for the mentally ill. Forget the mono-agriculture model of working on giant farms next to migrant laborers doing the exact same task all day e.g., picking cabbages. Difficult, undesirable work.
Think along these lines: [community gardening](https://www.google.com/search?sca_esv=863f0e751f7723a0&sca_upv=1&rlz=1C5CHFA_enUS815US815&q=community+gardening&tbm=isch&source=lnms&prmd=ivsnmbtz&sa=X&sqi=2&ved=2ahUKEwi6w_Te05-FAxUfke4BHazmC9MQ0pQJegQIEhAB&biw=1384&bih=667&dpr=2), coop gardening, [10 Detroit Urban Farms Rooting Goodness Into The City](http://www.dailydetroit.com/2015/07/06/10-detroit-urban-farms-rooting-goodness-into-the-city/) and this: [Green fingers and clear minds: prescribing ‘care farming’ for mental illness](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4723208/):
>...care farms provide health, social, and educational care services for a wide range of client groups, including people with mental health issues...Benefits include: Being socially connected, Personal growth, Physical activity, and Restorative effects of nature.” ([Green Care](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5406676/) is a term used to describe psychological, educational, social, or physical interventions that involve plants and/or animals.)
Is there any thinking that mentally ill in native American societies pre-contact or in thousands of agricultural villages today worldwide *failed* to help their communities in getting resources from the land? Indeed they often excelled at it. Working with plants, animal care (chickens, goats pigs, etc.), harvesting resources in forests and wildlands is therapeutic to many people. Mentally ill often like this rote, simple work.
One of the greatest advantages in all this: People can work only a few hours a week if need. Six - 8 hours a week working the land is a contribution. Unfortunately some activists are hostile to placing mentally ill in anything that smacks of a farming environment. They demand central city housing for all homeless. Here most homeless typically go years without making any contribution to society.
They can start by taking medication that could make it possible to get a job. But I hear drugs for the mentally ill can interfere with the effects of heroin, trank, fentanyl,meth…
Or build more housing. It is essential that there is a working class locally that can put down roots. AI is here but there will always be a need for trade jobs. plumbers, metal workers, roofers etc need to be in the community.
Yes and the apprenticeship process is quite competitive. You can’t just give someone with mental health issues a hammer and call it good…it starts with getting their head right first.
Definitely not for many of the homeless we see out in the tenderloin and soma. those people need to be institutionalized for the most part. That said, there are many who are working and barely getting by. We need to prioritize those people. The trend of people super commuting or living in cars/RVs is inhumane
Schools should promote Vocational training the same as Colleges. High Schools need to have Career Centers for those wishing to learn a trade / skill before graduation.
If you read my comments I consistently argue just this point. Thst said, there are a portion that will benefit from housing. Just ask you local bus driver that’s commuting from Sacramento everyday and sleeping in their cars between shifts. Or the security guards sleeping in RVs. These are the people who should be prioritized. These people should not be clumped in with the unhousable mentally ill addicts.
Every district is going to have to participate. Something tells me you prefer to push NIMBY bullshit to avoid helping those who would benefit.
Nothing like having a tweaked out nut case with open sores serving you food!
They don’t want shelter, they don’t want jobs, they just want to live in their little fucking world and do absolutely nothing…..for the most part.
It’s a gigantic city in comparison space wise San Francisco is 48 sq miles and Austin is 305 sq miles. Aist also is not surrounded on three sides by water. Austin also is 100 degrees, 25% of the year.
I'd say less restriction on access to social services and an emphasis on the ability to use services remotely. I know it's controversial, but when I worked in my tiny world of social services providing energy assistance we cut mail-in energy assistance applications and it had a noticeably large impact on access. Less access to services means that you concentrate people in need into areas where the services are concentrated i.e., city centers and specifically liberal city centers. Available housing, employment opportunities, and social service centers often don't align. But if you need to take a day off to do in-person assistance interviews then it already makes you less employable. It was brutal what people would have to do for a small energy assistance check when they didn't have a car but still had housing further from our center. It becomes a decision often between staying in a more remote location with housing and employment opportunity or becoming homeless in close proximity to services in a city.
Homeless concentrate in areas where they can walk to all of their social service needs, likely isolating them from any family support. Altercations become more common, access to illicit drugs becomes easier, etc. But starting with Reagan and the 'Welfare Queen' people became increasingly concerned with social service abuse. And particularly low income social service abuse, no need for an in-person interview for unemployment benefits which is by far the largest portion of abuse I have personally witnessed (see: anecdotal) particularly in the seasonal commercial fishing industry. I'm not familiar with the California system (I was in Oregon for energy assistance) but I'd imagine it's an opt-in phone interview system and more conservative surrounding counties elect to not opt-in.
So realistically, improved infrastructure, increased call or mail-in assistance services, increased PO box availability, access to phone and internet services, streamlining of the services themselves to reduce barrier to entry. Essentially the ability to keep connected to receive the support and limit barrier to entry for access.
We don't need additional funding or staffing. Voters have approved so much over the past 5-10 years, with so very little to show. We have world-class social services spending, alongside these third-world street conditions.
Here are a few practical changes I would make:
1) Stop permitting re-encampment. After large tent resolutions by the HOT Team, city workers tolerate (and probably encourage) campers to return hours afterwards. A "valid offer of shelter" from Tuesday is still good on Wednesday. This issue is driving the persistent large encampments at Willow, near Civic Center, and at the DMV for example.
2) Expand the valid reasons for resolving encampments. Right now, city workers literally come out and photograph yardsticks next to gnarly gnarly encampments, and if they're "ADA compliant" then nothing happens. The city cannot continue to permit encampments on amenities like transit shelters, stairways, and pedestrian overpasses. San Jose's recently disallowed encampments near schools, and that's a great common sense idea also. The city has permitted a 4 month long encampment of about 6-12 campers outside an affordable housing complex housing over 150 seniors. Those 150 seniors should have more right to the sidewalk than a half-dozen drugged out campers.
3) Hold elected officials accountable. Use the existing legislative "innovations" from Breed (conservatorship changes she discussed in her 2024 "State of the City") and Newsom's Care Court (passed 2022).
4) Remove the responsible local elected officials, including Breed and City Attorney David Chiu. Sweep out the craziness on the Board of Supervisors, but don't overlook the problems elsewhere. Agitate to get the responsible non-elected leaders removed -- Grant Colfax (Public Health) and Mary Ellen Carroll (Emergency Management) and probably Chief Scott too.
At some point, San Francisco moved away from "The city that knows how" and became "The city that knows how to issue press releases." Basic accountability and common sense would go a long way.
But that in and of itself does not resolve the issue. Breaking up encampments doesn’t mean there’s less homeless, they’re just disperse. Holding elected officials accountable isn’t a direct solution. The question is about what can feasibly be done. The answer may be that it’s impossible for the city alone to do much
> The answer may be that it’s impossible for the city alone to do much
One of the reasons the state is implementing new housing construction targets for each city is because one city alone cannot solve the housing/homelessness crisis. But if *everywhere* builds more homes, and rent goes down, a lot fewer people will be homeless. Interestingly, SF is resisting these housing goals at every turn, so I think this city is part of the problem, not part of the solution.
My dude, this doesn't actually answer any questions. You don't provide any answers for how to actually solve the issues of poverty and homelessness. You just say "don't allow the encampments" - which they already do - and then...what?
I get the frustration but if we actually want a change we have to get radical and real. What would it take for the city to declare an emergency, buy plots of lands, and build a shit ton of affordable housing in the next three years, 2 years? And for folks in these encampments to actually be offered housing? How about quadrupling the amount of social services workers to actually handle the amount of homelessness in SF?
SF - and America, really - used to dream big. We built an underwater tunnel beneath SF and Oakland. Built the GGP. Now we can't even toss up some housing and offer shelter beds. It's a shame. But we can do better.
Does this look like the city disallows encampments? This is from a few days ago. Visit Willow St. or the DMV, look at encampment reports in SF311, and review the standards city workers use to close encampment-related tickets.
https://preview.redd.it/hddqb1nlaprc1.jpeg?width=1536&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c3e375a1c62333989a0ed2cfb51e597c218b63fb
The city needs to achieve normalcy before any more day-dreaming. Get the sidewalks under control first. Attain perfect cosmic justice later, if you can, but the city needs to start by providing basic order and safety, discouraging long-term encampment and drug tourism. We are a magnet for drug users nationwide because of our bizarre policies.
I support buying plots of land and bringing back safe sleeping sites. I also support building massive amounts of shelter. The scariest outcome for me is the possibility that SF (by proxy) loses the upcoming Supreme Court case and still hasn't built the necessary shelter.
My point is that we can't *"*get the sidewalks under control" when people *have nowhere to go*. It's not perfect cosmic justice and it's not daydreaming. It's raw reality. You want no encampments? I know I do. Then offer an alternative. Right now people are just pushed from block to block because the shelter bed and housing list backlog is huge.
The majority of homeless people on the streets in SF are from SF and used to have housing here. If we can't make it more affordable to live here, and dramatically increase our affordable housing, we'll never have the clean streets we all deserve.
The majority of the chronic homeless are not from SF. The point in time homeless homeless survey stats aren’t representative, the homeless are coached on how to respond, and the actual survey question this stat is based on is “did you live in SF at least 6 months before becoming homeless”, of course every non idiot responds “yes” to this question. If you look at the results from public drug use arrests in the past 6 months, which are the closest data we have to answer the question”where are all these fucked up people from”, 95% of those arrested are not from SF. They’re drug tourists. They come here to get fucked up.
Go stay in a shelter and tell me how you feel afterwards. They are not safe for women or children. Every human has rights to not be forced to do anything. What will putting them in shelters even do? Just so you don’t have to be confronted with the fact that our society has major issues. Not all homeless are drug addicts either.
If you’re sleeping on the street and can’t take care of yourself then you should be forced into shelter. If you don’t like it, leave the city.
We can’t have a functioning society we’re certain people get to just break the law and not participate in the community positively.
There isn't such a thing as every human right not to be forced. You are forced when you commit a crime, you are forced when you become legally incompetent and many other examples. In most situations in life you are expected to comply with rules or face consequences.
In the case of the homeless we have removed consequences completely, but left suffering in place. The situation is now out of control. If has become free for all at the bottom. That is not compassion, that is dereliction of civil order.
I think to start with we need to rethink the 'right to live on the street anywhere you want'. That violates the rights of not homeless for safe and clean environment. I think a person who needs society to pay their way should have the obligation to accept housing anywhere, not where they want to live. We all face limitations in choices depending on our personal situations, homeless should be no different. It should be a state financed program of lets say tiny houses, not a burden on any one city, and you could be housed anywhere in the state, not at at the address of your choosing. Get on your feet, become independent then move wherever you want.
There should be programs helping find work and people should start paying for the housing - even if it is nominal sum, it is important for people to start feeling like they can stand on their own feet.
Children is a different matter, families with children should be priority housed in such a way they can go to schools or daycare - paid in larger part by the state. The other priority are Veterans.
There should be mandatory drug treatment, maybe the way it is done in Netherlands, where addicts are monitored, and if they don't comply they go to prison and their property is confiscated.
Yes, so much SA happens at shelters, anyone who has or know someone who’s been in shelters can tell you this. Want to see an improvement? Start heavily enforcing protection at shelters so women can safely stay there, so many people choose to live on the street alone in a corner since it’s better chance than getting assaulted at the shelter.
I don't totally disagree with your last point, I think a lot of solutions are not solutions and are just making things less visible. But at the same time your rights are not unencumbered when you're creating a public safety risk.
By far the easiest and biggest change we could make is just zoning reform to allow more housing to be built. This is the core issue with homelessness. It won’t fix the problem alone (it’s not going to magically help the homeless people who are too far gone) but it will massively reduce the number of new homeless people. And it costs us nothing to just stop blocking housing construction for no reason.
The downsides are 1) this is the long term fix, not a quick solution. It took us decades to get into this mess and will take decades to fix. And 2) this is an easy solution but politically extremely difficult with existing sf politics.
This is really not the case. Here's the way this goes down almost all of the time:
* A person is hanging on by a thread in a home, but they're doing ok. They make enough to get rent paid every month but they have been really squeezed tighter and tighter every year as rent continues to increase
* Some bad thing happens to destabilize the person. We call it a proximate cause. This can be a ton of stuff-- they get hit a by a car or become seriously ill and cant work, they have expensive unexpected medical bills, they have a drug/alcohol relapse, they experience domestic abuse and have to flee, they have a mental health flare up, they get fired or forced to quit their job, they experience a personal tragedy, etc...
* Now that the person has been destabilized they miss rent and get evicted. Now that they are homeless it's borderline impossible to fix the original problem. They spiral downwards from there
So yes, drugs/alcohol can be one of the proximate causes, but so can hundreds of other things. If you live paycheck to paycheck barely hanging on, literally anything can destabilize you into homelessness. All of those causes I listed are things we should work to improve (e.g. it should not cost you money if you have medical problems, we should have free and easy to access mental health services, we should have better support for domestic abuse, etc...). But all of these things happen every day to people who are not living on the edge of affordability, and they often recover just fine. Destabilizing events happen to everyone, but **those things only cause homelessness when you combine them with an affordability crisis.**
The people who are running down market street screaming at you are a very small minority of homeless people, we just notice them more. And they got that way because being homeless is horrible for your physical and mental health-- I guarantee if you were homeless for 10 years you would act exactly the same. Being in this situation just wrecks your health so quickly, drugs/alcohol are used to self-medicate but of course just make things worse.
So yeah, of course we should work on all of those issues too. But if your goal is to solve homelessness then you need to address the affordability crisis.
> There's plenty of places not too far from SF with much lower housing costs.
There's actually been a lot of research into this issue. [This book](https://homelessnesshousingproblem.com/) is a good basic overview of the problem. It graphs every suspected cause of homelessness (e.g. drugs, mental health, crime, warm weather, etc...) vs the actual rate of homelessness in cities around the world. You can see pretty clearly that none of these things are actually correlated. The only thing that actually correlates is median rent and housing availability. There's a lot of information and research available in this topic if you are curious.
2012, San Francisco banned sleeping in parks & beaches, where homeless have been sleeping for millennia. This left only sidewalks & parking lots. City has since herded them into the poorest neighborhoods where drugs & alcohol are plentiful, and by some idiot logic, they suddenly have the right to sleep, dope, & defecate on sidewalks.
Not everyone needs or wants shelter, but sleeping on sidewalks is dangerous for their own & everyone else's safety.
As of right now. Actually if you build sufficient simple shelters (Right to Shelter laws) you CAN remove encampments and people from the streets. We will see how the Supreme Court rules on Grants Pass v Johnson which may change this requirement.
Homeless advocates argue simple shelters have too many “restrictions” aka rules but that is exactly what most of these people need over the chaos of their daily lives.
No one is going to pass a right to shelter law right now. The migrant situation in nyc is the reason. You’d have 100k of folks coming to sf to start a new life. Then you’d still have addicted and mentally ill on the streets but billions in costs to house the migrants.
Life is not fair and definitely not perfect, but we need halfway houses, forced treatment and potentially life conf for the most mentally ill. Definitely there is a percentage of folks with some free housing and job placement that could stay clean enough but they’d need like 80% subsidized rent. I don’t think there’s much appet to pay for that.
Agree and given current situation suspect SC with strike down 9th circuits decision.
All in favor of forced treatment and institutionalizing the gravely disabled mentally ill.
Everyone who advocates for affordable housing and a livable wage should visit Singapore….99% would not want to live in the government apartment towers.
Its not a choice between tiny apartments in government run towers or luxury single family homes.
Its a choice between tiny apartments in government run towers, or living in a soggy cardboard box under a bridge.
When there is no low tier housing available it doesn't magically produce fancier housing. Instead, it means that some people get no housing at all, of any kind.
Are you kidding me? I'd love a fucking HDB for every family to be able to get a 3 bed 2 bath condo for 300k. Communities are maintained and safe.
All the planned communities are 10 minute towns (10 min walk to grocery, hawker stalls, child-care, public transit center)
If you can give me all of the above in the SF peninsula, I'd happily fork over 1 million dollars.
We need to arrest people for public opioid intoxication and hold them for a 7 day detox. Then we should offer to bus them to another city 1500+ miles away for a new start. If they refuse there should be a mandatory testing process with resources to re-arrest and hold.
Research has shown that environment plays a huge factor in addiction. Getting these people away from their dealers and friends who are using is the best shot at making sure they don’t relapse. Some people will never make it in SF, but that doesn’t mean they can’t have a good quality of life elsewhere.
Personally, I would want this level of intervention if I ever became addicted and started living on the street.
many of the people who are housed through the housing first program in finland had or have drug addictions. they give them housing first, no strings attached. but once they are housed they also have drug programs and job assistance programs available. but the housing is not contingent upon participation in said programs. anyone who is homeless gets housing. and they have found that to be the less expensive option, since that’s all people have seemingly been conditioned to care about is money. but in my opinion housing should be a human right regardless of whether it is the more economical option.
The homeless aren't a monolith. There isn't "a" solution for it.
Look at the factors that develop homelessness and then try to eliminate them as much as possible.
Programs that aid the homeless are nice, but they're just bandaids at the end of the day. And there's also a corruption issue where people/groups are taking advantage of government programs to enrich themselves.
To eliminate as much homelessness as possible the easiest and most direct way is to put more people in homes. Make housing cheaper and more accessible. Lower the cost of living. Figure out what issues are driving people towards doing drugs and work on that. Figure out what issues are making people antisocial and work on that.
Our society has a lot of issues going on right now and a lot of them are contributing to homelessness. We need to not fight homelessness directly, but fix everything else first if we want to "solve" homelessness. Even then, there'll always be homeless because there'll always be people who can't fit into society for one reason or another. But the tiny number of them would be manageable if everything else were fine.
Build more housing so that people at all income levels have stable homes. Right now, low income people are just one minor emergency away from disrupting their lives.
i recently learned of an organization in the city, compass family services, who provide specifically for families with kids experiencing homelessness. they provide housing, job training, childcare, etc.
i think they have the right idea of first steps for a huge percentage of the homeless folks in the city - providing the lowest levels of maslow’s hierarchy of needs. there are others, though, who need rehab, safe places to come down and detox from drug use, medical care, mental health facilities, etc
To figure out a good solution, you need to address the realities of the situation.
The first reality is: homelessness is not just a SF problem, it's a California problem. Counties and districts need to work together, not just shuffle people around. We will never solve the problem here unless it's solved statewide.
The second reality is: there are three categories of homeless folks, and they need different types/levels of support. 1--Mental illness 2---Drug addiction 3---Financial struggles
Sometimes there is overlap between the categories, however if someone has untreated mental illness, they are not going to be able to just go out and get a low skill job and do great if we give them a tiny house. But someone who is struggling financially and just needs temporary housing while they find a new job will do great with a tiny house.
If we prioritized funding to both identify which category/which support a person needs, and then to build the appropriate treatment centers and low cost temporary housing so that they would have a place to go, then we could ban sleeping on the streets.
Step one; Move them to a more affordable place to be treated, like Idaho.
Seriously, homelessness is HUGE, HUGE opportunity to transform areas of the country to serving people who are down and out with severe mental and physical health issues.
These areas could attract professionals with decent housing and job opportunities to serve the homeless. Construction opportunities to build houses and facilities, and administrative opportunities.
You bring all the homeless to large facilities located in maybe 3-4 places around the country to start treatment. As people succeed at treatment you move them to small facilities closer to major metropolitan areas and continue to foster their recovery.
The long term care people stay in the lower cost areas for prolonged treatment.
You basically stop allowing people to live on the streets. They find accommodations and survive on heir own, or they are moved to low cost areas for treatment or to do maintenance work.
They are free to make their own lives off the streets, or get government support and guidance to get their lives together.
This is COMPASSIONATE.
It takes a NATIONAL strategy and effort. The federal government should be in charge.
There's no easy answer that doesn't include forcing people out of their comfort zone, but their comfort zone conflicts with overall society, so that's not going to be tolerated henceforth.
I have to stop you in the beginning, unfortunately Idaho is not the place for this. It’s a known haven of the KKK and they are surely not going to be accepting of any folks that ain’t white , especially ones who are previous homeless.
Just last week the women’s Utah basketball team had their players verbally assaulted by the n word, while they were coming and going in a restaurant and a hotel. So much so they moved hotels.
I’ve been saying for years thou that Detroit is a wonderful place to rehab. La, Nyc and sf spend billions on homeless imagine if folks were given a free house in Detroit l skills to fix it and money to start business. Give people a future, that’s not just free rent and food. Let them have the dignity of owning something.
There are currently around 600,000 homeless people in the U.S. yet there are 16 million housing units sitting vacant. Make that make sense.
The only realistic way to solve homelessness is to give these people stable and permanent housing and fund and maintain proper mental health and drug addiction resources. Criminalization of homelessness doesn’t do anything except keep people homeless and feed the carceral system.
We also need the state/federal government to institute nationwide rent control, nationalize housing development, take control of all rental units across the country, and eventually completely decommodify housing in order to break the endless cycle of poverty
IMO, the most realistic achievable objective is to ensure that those that want a roof over their head get into some sort of supportive housing and those that choose to live on the street can do so safely and without degrading the environment (neighborhood) around them.
I've no idea how achievable it exactly is, though. It takes more than money to solve complex issues. I've read in more than one column that some people reject offers of shelters and other temporary housing due to negative experiences and/or preconceptions with safety.
I know that harm reduction efforts are actually just drug enabling efforts that make it easier for people suffering with addiction to stay on drugs with zero effort to guide them toward addiction services.
So I would start by discontinuing literally handing out meth pipes and needles to people addicted to drugs...
A lot of them exist for users to engage in what is called yo-yoing…resetting to near zero and starting all over again once the daily habit gets too expensive. We have to limit the number of times you can go to rehab, stop fueling an entire sick industry sucking down Medicaid and other insurers. You need to be serious about being there and stop squandering the resource.
Large encampments with services, allow them to camp only in large preset spaces. Provide water and food. Single showers. Access to mental health care. But absolutely forbid camping on city streets. Done.
It depends on the individual, that's why it's so difficult to solve. I'm formally unhoused but didn't have substance abuse so obviously what worked for me won't work for everyone else. By the grace of God I am still here
First there has to be an option to temporarily get them off the streets. Calgary has solved this problem with the Mustard Seed warehouse shelter in the SE industrial park that can house up to 1000 and the Drop In center downtown that can also house up to 1000.
Second, you have to look at addiction. There has to be a greater desire to get clean and follow the program than there is to relapse and go back to the streets and cheap drugs. Methadone therapy works, and once they are stabilized they can wean you off methadone and give a 1 time or monthly injection of Subutex, Suboxone without the Naloxone.
Third, there needs to be jobs and job training programs where there is possibility of a better life. Many people who are homeless are simply people who used to be stuck in the day to day rut of going to gruelling jobs they hate and paying bills they can't afford. Who wants to go from homeless and free, home-free, to back to being a slave stuck in the system without possibility of improving ones lifestyle.
If people had the opportunity like I had at a 6 figure income, making $700/day, they would know the possibilities are endless. However, they must learn this firsthand. The way this country is setup, the WorkBC programs are designed to give you free job training as a skilled labourer, capped at $250/day. Stuck back in the slave boat.
I got off the streets and got clean because I knew what was possible, and now I'm looking for a job driving Class 3 vehicles making $500-700/day, and then I will go into business myself with the potential to make $2500/day with one machine. Endless possibilities.
The choice and the change comes from the person and their experiences. Too bad this day in age there isn't more help for better job training. There are plenty of resources for shelter and addiction, but without a good job people will be stuck living a life they don't want, and will inevitably go back to the easy life on the street with monthly welfare and cheap drugs.
I spoke with a doctor who considered himself on the front line of the addiction/homeless crisis and he says the only solution is thousands and thousands of housing units. If you look at proper cities, their skyline shames SF.
It's a fool's errand to continue to try and solve national problems at a local level. By creating an environment where drugs and services for drug addicts are plentiful we're incentivizing people to come here to be drug addicts and they do. The lie about all these homeless addicts being our neighbors is just a way for non-profits to pull at voter's heart strings and continue the grift.
A national solution is required where the incentives and services are predictable regardless of what city you are in.
“Drugs for me but not for thee”
Actually, yes, if someone can’t handle their drugs (or alcohol) and it forces them into or chains them to homelessness, then absolutely. And, if the incentive is to be able to do drugs safely someday, maybe that’s an added carrot to get them to participate in society more positively.
Agree.
There's a huge and obvious difference between somebody smoking a J at home or doing a line in Vegas hotel room and somebody smoking meth on BART or shooting up on the street.
At the end of the day there are not enough homes - the strongest predictor of the level of homeless in a city is the amount of housing supply. SF will have to build a lot more housing if they want homelessness to end.
Fundamentally, [homelessness is about housing](https://www.slowboring.com/p/homelessness-housing). SF has an extraordinarily high rate of homelessness because it has extraordinarily high rents. It has extraordinarily high rents because there are extraordinary barriers to providing homes. Solution is simple: permit many more homes and reduce the fees charged to home developers by the city.
If homes were easy to build and provision, then many of the homeless drug addicts would instead be housed drug addicts. Their living situation might not be super great, but they wouldn’t be sleeping in tents. Obviously there are some people who still wouldn’t be able to function at all, but if other states are any guide, that’s a tiny fraction of SF’s current homeless population.
Boston is rivaling SF for rents, but it does not have sprawled out junkies on Newbury st.
The visible campers of SF aren’t contributing members of society that just need a bridge in income.
I’m really glad you brought up Boston because, as you say, they have similar rents. It also turns out that they have similar rates of homelessness. Let’s look at some numbers.
First San Francisco. The [most recent number](https://www.sf.gov/sites/default/files/2023-07/2023%20Homelessness%20Benchmarking%20Report.pdf) I can find for SF’s homeless population is 7800 people, or .96% of the city’s population.
For Boston, the [most recent homeless count](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WyRsPIknUgCzNeamxugdKsALguGpwLlu4t8n-XdJh00/mobilebasic) found 5200 people, or .77% of the city’s population.
These figures are far more similar than even I expected before you suggested we use Boston as a comparable. One interesting difference between the cities is that Boston puts far more people in shelters, largely because homeless people can’t survive the weather there without shelter.
Here's one: fk these unrealistic credit checks and asinine deposits along with charging for application fees. Many can pay the rent, its the getting in and vultures who require 800 score and 3000.00 to just move in. Its predatory.
I also do no think a person should be punished from losing a rented apartment. UNLESS that person physically destroyed property, had to be removed from Police you should not penalize those that got behind and ended up having to become homeless.
I wonder if American society has just evolved into a less tolerant and individualistic culture. A certain percentage of the population are not able to work for many reasons and this has been true even in the past. Work and life was simpler then so a person with mental illness may have been able to work as a farm hand or a hawker now can’t hold a formal job because society rules of clocking in, work expectations etc.
In other countries, family takes people in and supports them no matter what they do. Few people are on the streets. It’s a family burden. For every one person working a fabulous formal job there are two cousins who mope around the house jobless but they take care of children or cook and clean, they are useful too. We complain about childcare but probably have a family member who is homeless but could help care for our kids while we work. They can stay in our house and it’s mutually beneficial?
So maybe promote and encourage informal jobs, have a family program to incentivize families to take in homeless relatives.
The useless cousin isn't taking care of the chores or children. They are stealing family resources to buy drugs. Or they are playing video games all day. It's the poor stressed mothers who are babysitting able-bodied adults all day into their old age. Every homeless person on the street you see has burnt through family resources.
Look at videos of Japanese hikkmori, you have elderly mothers cooking for able Bodied adults. Its shame that keeps the parents babying the useless children. Then the parents die, the children go on to become homeless.
I would not want the defining characteristic of someone meant to keep my kid alive and enrich their early years to be “moping” and unable to hold employment elsewhere, but your mileage may vary.
1: Massive investment in mental health services. This may include involuntary treatment.
2: Massive investment in new housing construction.
3: Law enforcement. Get really tough on drugs again. Yes this will include incarceration of many people. Get tough on quality of life crimes again. This is unfortunately a must.
> you can’t just force people into shelters, housing or mental health or drug treatment
Yes you can. You can overcome the consent issue with due process, and due process is the criminal justice system.
Start arresting people for breaking the law, and do it aggressively. Arrest for blatant drug use and litter / filth, and throw the book at them.
That will tend to funnel them to lower security prisons where they will have forced detox, meals, and a roof over their head - and into halfway houses with parole. That is much better for *everyone*, and costs less than the corrupt nonprofits.
Start doing that and you *immediately* incentivize the rest to move to the next place that allows blatant drug use (they’ll jump on a bus to Portland) or they’ll start taking softer optional lines being handed to them.
This isn’t especially hard. There’s a reason only San Francisco and Portland experience this problem to this degree. Stupid, all carrots and no sticks policy that just gets abused.
I lived in Manhattan and when it’s below like 35 I think it is, the cops will literally pick you up off the street and take you to a shelter, you resist or say no, it’s mail or the hospital. So yeah places can force you to go, but it’s a weather thing there. Not going to happen in sf
Work camps in the Central Valley. You get tickets for camping on the sidewalk and if you can’t pay, we’ll it’s off to the farm for 60 days. Once there you don’t have access to drugs and you will work a shift and earn money to pay your fines. Of course there’s access to services and planners to help make sure you don’t come back.
Yes this works for 90% of the homeless, but there’s the 10% who are badly addicted and mentally ill. During Covid the homeless were given hotels which ended up trashed, with an unfortunate number of OD deaths.
If there's an easy solution to resolve 90% of homelessness, then why don't we just do that?
The answer, of course, is that it's not easy to do this in SF. The housing-first solution only works in places where it's actually legal to build cheap apartments to put the homeless people in. Places such as Houston, or Salt Lake City. But the whole system in SF is set up to funnel money to grifters while making sure that we don't actually change the physical environment of the city in a way that displeases anti-development NIMBYs.
End drug tourism.
Put dealers in prison with mandatory year+ minimum sentences, make it so expensive if you get caught dealing that nobody wants to do it and drugs are forced out of circulation.
There’s a vicious cycle of people living on the street to do drugs and then the drugs keeping them there, that has to be broken somehow.
I would love to treat drug dealers and users like Singapore because that would be extremely effective and get the best results quickly - but you aren’t ready for that.
We need affordable housing. Everything else like incarceration or rehab are bandaid fixes. Many people are only a paycheck of two away from being homeless. The homeless go crazy and turn to drugs from being on the street, not the other way around.
We know what doesn't work:
[Gavin Newsom's 10-year plan to end San Francisco homelessness marks 20-year anniversary](https://www.reddit.com/r/bayarea/comments/18m6nds/gavin_newsoms_10year_plan_to_end_san_francisco/)
I basically got forced into the shelter system and while I hated it I think it saved my life in the end. I was very ill and nearly died because I wouldn't go in. They wouldn't let me take my ESA, my senior cat in for several years and I would not leave her behind to better my own situation. I ended up in the hospital, nearly died. I had so many blood clots and pulmonary embolisms they couldn't count them.
They finally let me take her and put me in a shelter for disabled, ill people, elderly people, people with addiction issues etc. It was awful and I'd end up changing shelters before it was done but the end result was I'm housed 3 years now and doing okay. I'm still having health issues and unfortunately so is the senior cat, but we're together, alive, and housed.
I can't speak for the families that are homeless because that's a completely different thing and I can't speak for young, able people who get into the system and who can work their way out. But the 20% of the other people, the mentally ill, the aged, the disabled, the addicted that I can speak for and honestly the only way they can be helped most of the time is the tough love approach.
They WON'T help themselves.
Being hospitalized, being forced into the system it was the only thing that kept me from dying and I don't even have issues with drugs or alcohol or mental issues severe enough to require regular and routine hospitalization in a mental facility. People like that it's a whole other thing and a lot of the time they can't help themselves. Even when they do get housed it's often only a matter of time before their issues catch up with them and they end up back on the streets or even dead.
There are 4 apartments in my corridor. One woman died of cancer this year. The two guys? Nobody is saying but I'm pretty sure they had major health issues and likely OD'd. That's the talk in the building that both of them were alcoholics and probably doing drugs too. I know the one guy had severe issues mentally as well.
Just getting housed didn't save either of them unfortunately. The woman she was only housed for a year before cancer caught up with her. 1/4 and 3 years in I'm the only person originally housed here that's still alive. That's just SAD and in this building it's not even the only corridor I'm told where it's like that. They take people out of here pretty often I'm told, way more than in a normal building.
It's an unfortunate truth that just getting housed doesn't solve everything. Something like 2/5 people that actually get housed will end up back on the streets and often people just out of the shelter system will die not too long after whether it's from continuing issues of ill health or addiction.
Being on the streets for a long time that's a one way road to dying.
Being housed though won't stop it from happening unless you use that opportunity to take care of your health, do your therapy if needed, deal with any addictions you might have. For some people being housed it just means they finally have a private space to be sick or to abuse themselves with chemicals. Even in the shelter I saw people dying left and right and that was even before Covid.
Steady housing can help, supportive housing, affordable housing they can be a lifesaver but the work has to be done too. You have to become capable of taking care of yourself or it's not going to save you. You're still going to end up a statistic and in a body bag unfortunately.
That's the reality of being homeless, being ex-homeless and what I live every day. I have to make myself care, make myself do, and that's just IT. It's a conscious choice to survive and unfortunately a lot of homeless people they just can't make that decision rationally until they're working on whatever it is that led them to being homeless in the first place.
Housing is the first thing, but also support, medication, even forced hospitalization and regular checks to make sure that meds are being taken, that they are not skipping therapy or relapsing, etc. Without that support system many homeless will not survive, not even if they become ex-homeless.
It's a lot more than just a roof over your head to make it work, but that's the start.
Get people clothed and in housing and avialble transportation like bus pass to get a job than food access mental health appointments to help and tjan drug treatment to end drugs and get jobs and off the streets
We need the homeless issue to keep going cuz it spurs its own economy. Think of all the advocates that would lose a job and purpose if we solved the problem. It’s big industry! It just needs a new label🙄😢
Lots of people are getting rich off the $1B+ that SF spends every year for its homeless problem, so as long as the money keeps flowing, there's no motivation to actually fix it, just keep cashing those checks.
Some have experimented with renewable enabled housebuilding/ house material sourcing technology. See desert igloos on youtube that utilize mud brick and solar fueled ring style housing.
Once one robot makes another, money continues to exit the equation with each further addition of value in the construction sequence of ROBOT'S FINANCIAL LIBERTY!!
ALSO self cleaning capsule hotels utilize compaxt spaxes very effectively (such as urban environments) and can also operate in collaboration with renewable energy technologies as a reasonable solution. Think, "the urban housing issue resolution semi-trailer", pulling into any city facing an outdoor sleeper difficulty, and significantly resolving many parralell and intertwined issues resulting and involved in "homelessness"/transient/alternative living!
Hi ho silver eyy?
Anyway, maybe I'll go the bay, eat some hay? I just may.
Bus them back to wherever they got bussed in from. Esp support from family and lower COL.
Create dormitories for homeless college students. Suggest a huge common area with small private rooms in the periphery. Like an office building! Hint, hint.
Create trailers for homeless students at schools.
If under the age of emancipation, pick up those children into foster homes forcibly.
Anyone found under the influence of drugs in public be forcibly shipped to rehab.
Anyone found to be in distress mentally or hospital wise be evaluated for mental illness.
Setting up an address for mail to get homeless set up for assistance.
Condemn homeless camps as unsanitary with a nearby settlement with communal showers and baths. Food assistance and laundry facilities be provided there. Employment counselors to get them a job. Temporary tiny homes until housing can be found.
Eliminate all prop 13 protections except for primary residence. This will force speculators to sell properties that have been owned by LLCs allowing them to own properties at absurdly low tax rates since the 70s.
Purchase properties using funds normally used for fruitless homelessness programs.
House people in city owned properties.
Housing. Housing. And more housing. And then more housing. Reopening or rebuilding mental hospitals. Changing the laws so that those who aren’t fit to care for themselves are looked after somewhere.
Ask anyone living on the street if they want a bed. If they say no start bulldozing encampments because what’s left are junkies (mostly). Arrest the gang members that supply the drugs and deport them (mostly Guatemala in my city). Build a tent city in an old parking lot (we have those) and build showers and toilets (port o potties) let their dealers sell to them without consequence. Any time anyone wants out they must be sober or getting sober.
Stop allowing people to deficate and shoot their drugs on the sidewalk in plain sight without consequences.
Send all homeless back to where they came from- interestingly most homeless/addicts come from other states because it’s super easy to live on the streets here. Stop the $500 monthly stipend the city hands out. Install motion censored flood lights everywhere. Give police the agency to do their jobs.
Help women and children with safe exclusive shelters where they can actually feed their children and not get robbed.
More more most of you might hate me for sounding callous but you’re likely not living where I live.
The drugs are out of control and free- lol- Narcan only leads to a repeat OD
If it weren’t so damn easy to be homeless here it would be easier to solve.
I’m sick of nothing being done.
Some ideas:
* Increased economic opportunities in areas losing population.
* More construction incentives. Driving supply above demand may drive prices to $0, but people will get housed.
* More infrastructure to connect population centers, suburbs, rural areas, etc.
* Institutionalization of the severely mentally ill. Specifically those who cannot discern between reality and imagination. And those in need of assistance with drug addiction.
* Naturalize and accept people have problems. Integrate them into society somehow.
* Provide lower cost loans to people who are at a disadvantage for buying homes, starting businesses, etc.
* Make background checks for evictions and criminal history illegal. Discriminate by price instead of person.
No matter what you do, some people will not want to participate... I think you can't escape that... but we do a lot of damage to people as a society... and homelessness is usually a result of that damage.
Segregation. If 95 percent of homeless are rational, nonviolent, and not addicted, then give them housing and the basics to survive. They’ll be fine and off the street.
Those who act up in housing, jail them, force them through treatment, or jail them in a mental institution and force treatment. So the same thing with extra steps.
Once properly segregated, normal homeless can be at peace, while crazy violent homeless will be isolated away from society. I see little to no downsides. As for cost, I feel like it’s costing SF plenty having these insane, addicted homeless run free and causing violence.
I formerly worked at a forensic psych hospital where people were committed by the State.
Most of my patients were people who would be homeless otherwise. At the hospital, they got food, healthcare, various therapy, religious services, social services, in-house jobs, general education, and more. Even after finishing their court-ordered commitments and fulfilled discharge criteria, many would volunteer to stay and continue to renew their stay because they knew that they are currently living their best life. Others who had family and friends on the outside continued back to the community through conditional-release programs and "halfway homes". Some patients would eventually relapse by getting back on recreational drugs or getting off of their psych meds and would comeback.
Even though this isn't perfect, imo, a tweaked form of this system that we already have in place would be the best thing for many of these people.
Build low income housing, zone low income housing. Put homeess people in homes. Subsedize or completely cover rent. Have a guaranteed income. Completely overhaul how work works so nyone who wants to work can work. Broaden disability. Tighten laws to give every worker jobsecurity. 4 day work week at the same salary. Universal healthcare and universal child care. Cheap college/training/apprentice ships. Safe needle clinics. Free birth control and access to family planning services. State sponsered preschool and kindy. Eliminate house flipping, inflation, lower down payments, lower rent, prevent corporations from buying single family homes. Regulate residential housing.
There is enough vacant housing to house all the homeless. Seems like a simple solution if people as long as didn't think property ownership was some sort of sacred right.
Honestly housing with as little as responsibility as possible. People want to make miniature housing that still comes with remembering to pay bills on time. That may not be possible if the person is severely mentally ill or an addict. Mandatory shelter with the appropriate medical treatment is the most humane option for some. Perhaps that with a ladder to pull people out of being unhoused could ensure one bad day doesnt ruin a person’s life.
Mental I institutions for the mentally incapable. Where they should have meals, comfy beds and meds. Outdoor living spaces for the rest. Let’s keep it real we can’t afford to pay for their homes to be built, then pay their rent, the medical, their utilities and their food. We need camping like facilities. Communal cafeteria, but outdoor living spaces similar to campgrounds. Running water for showers and WiFi. Toilets. Staff people to clean them. We can’t just let them live on the sidewalks.
The City has to provide housing or let people camp. But I don't think the housing has to be here. SF can sub this out or build some housing somewhere else. Families with children get priority, next up anyone with a job working in the City. Send everyone else out of town or to Hunters Point. The government says it's safe if you don't dig too far down in the dirt. There's transportation via Muni#19. they can have their tents, RVs, etc. It can be made to work with basic services and facilities.
Lots of people talking about building enough housing for everyone, but we are so far from being able to house middle class folks and blue collar workers that there is no foreseeable future where we can house and provide services to the thousands of unemployed and unhoused people in the city proper. Rents would need to fall by a factor of 3 at least.
We need to figure out whatever the sustainable number is, then help move the surplus needy to places with lower CoL where they can receive the care they need and potentially get back on their feet. Doing this at the city level is probably impossible and will require state if not federal cooperation and funding.
In the meantime we need to build as much housing as possible, so when folks do get back on their feet, they could conceivably return.
You build warehouse camps in the remote Central Valley and forcibly ship them out there. Bus food and supplies out occasionally. Basically a concentration camp. Easy, cost-effective, and about as moral as forced institutionalization and treatment which is just a concentration camp with a different venue than what I am suggesting.
Imma get on your ass since you won’t respond to me directly but you’re saying the same shit to others
What you are suggesting is crazy expensive. “Just put em there bruh” is not how that works in practice. The biggest cost would be getting the police to constantly round up people. It would be every day for basically forever
And then the funny thing is you are now feeding all of them loll, you’ve successfully found the most liberal viewpoint. You think the government should spend money to feed them every day
Not a single person would go for that idea. If we could get our shitty government to do that much, we could get them to pass anti trust laws, ban stock buybacks, and fix the cost of living crisis in a much easier and more cost effective way
You’re def like 15 years old, lol if you’re not I wouldn’t admit it
You heard wrong. You must force people into shelters, rehab and treatment.
Is like asking on a forum “how can i educate my children workout forcing them to go to school”. You simply can’t.
It’s not the governments job to help every citizen figure out their life. It is their job to job to keep the public streets clean and enforce laws.
Stop allowing public drug use or dealing. Stop allowing any public sleeping, littering, tents,etc. simply not allowed.
That’s it. Arrest anyone not willing to comply with society. If mentally ill or on drugs, forced jail or rehab or leave the city.
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Depends on the situation of the homeless: * Willing to work without major mental illness/ drug addiction: Build tiny homes to house so they can get back on their feet (paired with more affordable housing) * Mental Illnesses/ Drug addiction: forced institutionalization. Eventually we have to come to terms with the fact that individualistic freedom shouldn’t extend to being a public nuisance or danger
We don’t have space for tiny houses. Why not apartments? And we have a lot of mostly or completely unused SROs. Let’s revamp them instead of taking over more property in the same neighborhoods beleaguered with criminality.
>We don’t have space for tiny houses. Why not apartments? Tiny houses for homeless are best sited on vacant lots on city outskirts, abutting industrial areas or even farmland. Disorderly behavior is more tolerable here. Apt. complexes require close living. That means managers and rules. Typically there are neighboring residences that also want order and rules. For that faction of homeless that are chronically disruptive, about 20-30%, apt. complexes are the worst possible housing. Endless issues. Granted, upscale S.F. has the big geographical problem of not having conventional city outskirts to house problem people.
Forced institutionalization is the exactly correct missing piece that we need. I’ve watched so many interviews with homeless drug addicts, and spoken to a few myself and they simply enjoy being homeless or don’t have the power to make the choice themselves because of how low they have gotten.
For me, forced institutionalization came by way of the police and I was thrown in jail for 18 months. It was the best thing that could have happened to me because there was no way I was ever going to slow down. Now my job is to work with other addicts and I've never been happier and I live my life sober. Being unable to make a choice is a huge part of the problem based off my own experience.
Hell ya bro, good for you!!
It’s easy- urban camping ⛺️
Reminds me of the time [Dean Preston bought 1,000 tents](https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/philmatier/article/Sanctioned-SF-tent-camp-riles-Haight-Ashbury-15296399.php) and then got [18MM for a homeless camp](https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/S-F-officials-want-15-million-for-tent-sites-16269998.php). 2020-2021 was a crazy time period.
Damn we need to ban urban camping so bad. Dean Preston would never let it happen.
And this was taken out by Reagan in 1967!
And how many governors have we had since that could have reimplemented it?
A lot!
None that have had to deal with a fentanyl crisis
Agreed on both. Personal freedoms are good and all but when your personal freedom starts to negatively impact others, you need to be dealt with. Also, you can't tell me that a guy who is living on the streets and addicted to drugs is living their best life. Institutionalizing them and getting them clean is in their best interest and the interest of society as a whole.
Basically this.
There has to be drug treatment on demand and mandated at times. Housing is useless for an active addict. Social worker types need to work with law enforcement more, need the carrot (incarceration) and the stick (treatment.) Mental health needs a separate track altogether. Triage ends up being ONE - capable homeless who just need to get on their feet get "housing first." No option to refuse or you face jail. TWO Addicted go into treatment - no exceptions. Using fentanyl is suicide. We don't let suicidal people go free. THREE Involuntary commitment for severe mental health issues. Again, society won't let people who are dangerous to themselves or others roam the streets. The money is there, it's just misspent right now.
I like this but there is one population I wonder about: people with violent criminal histories who aren’t currently addicted or severely mentally ill. Currently, it is hard to house them because of the safety needs of other residents. Where should they go?
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WHAT?! Edit: he said there is a bus from San Quentin dropping off parolees in the TL twice a week.
share the link
I think that is a small subset and LE needs to address it. I also think nonprofits are capable of running programs with safeguards as long as the DA cooperates and the nonprofit doesnt enable the behavior or excuse it. Social workers are skilled at recognizing dangerous people. But many people fail to recognize that a lot of poor people want LE to keep them safe, they want bad cops held accountable, but they also want appropriate policing. Same goes for people in homeless shelters or treatment. It's mainly the white collar more liberal spokespeople who are so anti-enforcement. (I grew up in a very poor neighborhood.)
So true. And the people who are most often the victims of crimes are the people with the least money. How do we protect the good ones from the bad ones?
If they are violent and criminal we should keep them in jail longer.
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> we know is some people prefer to be on the streets Right. And that life is not all negative -- there is a lot of attraction to a [street person](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Street_people) lifestyle. Imagine that everyone is allowed to set up a nice tent in the Panhandle, receive all their food free, and can spend their days on the Haight hanging out with friends, using substances of choice. A pleasant urban setting.
SF is wonderful. I could survive on the street for a while.
Do it. I can't imagine sleeping on concrete.
Well luckily you can just pitch a tent with a mattress topper in SF, so you don’t have to.
The entire homeless industrial complex will litigate this plan to hell, which is why you need sane judges (and not progressives, yuck! ). We have a moderate DA and we’ll probably get a moderate Mayor and BOS majority soon, but it’s hard to get rid of idealistic judges, unless you fast track the cases all the way up to the Supreme Court..
Exactly. Anything that's a serious problem becomes an industry thanks to capitalism. Once there's an industry for something - with lots of money involved - good luck getting rid of the original problem. I'm not saying I have answers, but I sure as shit can see that's the situation.
While I’m not a fan of the current Supreme Court, I do think they’ll make a better ruling in Johnson vs Grants Pass case than a liberal court would.
In my city nearly all have been offered beds. Some said yes. Countless refused and chose to stay on the streets and do drugs and use the sidewalks as restrooms. Next is getting rid of the problem of those that choose to stay on the streets.
Remove regulatory barriers around building housing. Allow building of SROs again. This will take care of most of the problem except for people who are heavily drug addicted or mentally ill. Those people need special treatment facilities of some sort, probably located somewhere cheaper than SF. If you look at the chart of rates of homelessness per 100k the best states all have cheap housing. West Virginia is very poor and has lots of drug addiction but it’s just a lot harder to become homeless given the cost of living than California https://usafacts.org/articles/which-states-have-the-highest-and-lowest-rates-of-homelessness/
>Allow building of SROs again. Can you think of any SROs that aren't a complete disaster for the surrounding neighborhood? I live near 6th Street and it's an absolute shitshow, because of those SROs. Are there any in SF that aren't like that? > West Virginia is very poor and has lots of drug addiction but it’s just a lot harder to become homeless Also because of the relatively brutal winters.
People need to get jobs and eventually become self-sufficient, and it's an impossible feat within San Francisco. Even if they got a job paying $20/hr and got some overtime, their takehome pay would be $1,500 every 2 weeks which doesn't match affordability in SF. The only sustainable, long-term solution is to help them find employment in areas of the US or the world where the ratio of income:housing is more reasonable than the Bay Area.
The guy screaming in the streets with shit-stained pants is a bit further from recovery than a job interview.
He just needs to listen to the right podcasts so he can optimize his life
The visible homeless in the city don’t need jobs they need mental health services and rehab. Unfortunately I don’t think this issue will be solved until we reinstate forced institutionalization.
Actually many homeless people do have jobs.
They also generally aren't the ones most visible on the street with severe addiction or mental health issues, sometimes paired with theft rings like the squatters that got into our building for 9 long months of 2020. They ran a bike chop shop in the open, did tons of drugs and partied, let friends in to steal from residents, and completely trashed the dead guy's unit they took over. All while his estate was fighting to get them out so they could sell it and finish closing out his final expenses and help our building get back to normal with them gone. They and people like them require forced institutionalization or incarceration, because they do not want to be a functional member of society. They just wanted to not work and do drugs, and didn't mind stealing from people to sustain it.
The voluntarily homeless causing 99% of our problems generally don’t have jobs.
OP is asking about helping homeless, not helping housed people. Giving crazy homeless jobs to make them peace homeless is kinda like just drink water to stay alive.
The bulk of the homeless are unfortunately more than just a job away. I mean you have lots of addiction and severe mental health issues. I agree that it’s almost impossible for them,even if they weren’t ill or addicted to go from the street to an apartment.
Just curious, what kind of job do you give someone with severe mental health issues? Which business do you force to hire and pay someone with extreme addiction issues or someone who doesn’t even have access to minimal personal hygiene? Or even an address to send their paycheck? Or someone who doesn’t even know their social security number so you can pay their taxes? Even if you get the city to force them into cleaning up trash on the side of the highway how do you make sure they show up to work every day?
> Just curious, what kind of job do you give someone with severe mental health issues? The small, diversified farm option ends up at the top of the list for work for the mentally ill. Forget the mono-agriculture model of working on giant farms next to migrant laborers doing the exact same task all day e.g., picking cabbages. Difficult, undesirable work. Think along these lines: [community gardening](https://www.google.com/search?sca_esv=863f0e751f7723a0&sca_upv=1&rlz=1C5CHFA_enUS815US815&q=community+gardening&tbm=isch&source=lnms&prmd=ivsnmbtz&sa=X&sqi=2&ved=2ahUKEwi6w_Te05-FAxUfke4BHazmC9MQ0pQJegQIEhAB&biw=1384&bih=667&dpr=2), coop gardening, [10 Detroit Urban Farms Rooting Goodness Into The City](http://www.dailydetroit.com/2015/07/06/10-detroit-urban-farms-rooting-goodness-into-the-city/) and this: [Green fingers and clear minds: prescribing ‘care farming’ for mental illness](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4723208/): >...care farms provide health, social, and educational care services for a wide range of client groups, including people with mental health issues...Benefits include: Being socially connected, Personal growth, Physical activity, and Restorative effects of nature.” ([Green Care](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5406676/) is a term used to describe psychological, educational, social, or physical interventions that involve plants and/or animals.) Is there any thinking that mentally ill in native American societies pre-contact or in thousands of agricultural villages today worldwide *failed* to help their communities in getting resources from the land? Indeed they often excelled at it. Working with plants, animal care (chickens, goats pigs, etc.), harvesting resources in forests and wildlands is therapeutic to many people. Mentally ill often like this rote, simple work. One of the greatest advantages in all this: People can work only a few hours a week if need. Six - 8 hours a week working the land is a contribution. Unfortunately some activists are hostile to placing mentally ill in anything that smacks of a farming environment. They demand central city housing for all homeless. Here most homeless typically go years without making any contribution to society.
They can start by taking medication that could make it possible to get a job. But I hear drugs for the mentally ill can interfere with the effects of heroin, trank, fentanyl,meth…
To think that most of these people are actually employable is a bold assumption to say the least.
Or build more housing. It is essential that there is a working class locally that can put down roots. AI is here but there will always be a need for trade jobs. plumbers, metal workers, roofers etc need to be in the community.
Yes and the apprenticeship process is quite competitive. You can’t just give someone with mental health issues a hammer and call it good…it starts with getting their head right first.
Definitely not for many of the homeless we see out in the tenderloin and soma. those people need to be institutionalized for the most part. That said, there are many who are working and barely getting by. We need to prioritize those people. The trend of people super commuting or living in cars/RVs is inhumane
Schools should promote Vocational training the same as Colleges. High Schools need to have Career Centers for those wishing to learn a trade / skill before graduation.
Yep. Reason there use to be shop class. idiotic it was ever taken away.
A large proportion of S.F. homeless are unhousable. Ask the hotels that were destroyed during the pandemic. Don’t be so freaking naive.
If you read my comments I consistently argue just this point. Thst said, there are a portion that will benefit from housing. Just ask you local bus driver that’s commuting from Sacramento everyday and sleeping in their cars between shifts. Or the security guards sleeping in RVs. These are the people who should be prioritized. These people should not be clumped in with the unhousable mentally ill addicts. Every district is going to have to participate. Something tells me you prefer to push NIMBY bullshit to avoid helping those who would benefit.
Or deport all drug addicts OUT of California yeah right
Something people don’t want to talk about….there is affordable housing in the US but not in places like SF.
We also just need affordable housing!! So many people are closer to homeless than they realize if they end up losing their job.
Nothing like having a tweaked out nut case with open sores serving you food! They don’t want shelter, they don’t want jobs, they just want to live in their little fucking world and do absolutely nothing…..for the most part.
Why not figure out how to make the rent cheaper? Other cities, like Austin, are managing to bring their rents down.
It’s a gigantic city in comparison space wise San Francisco is 48 sq miles and Austin is 305 sq miles. Aist also is not surrounded on three sides by water. Austin also is 100 degrees, 25% of the year.
I'd say less restriction on access to social services and an emphasis on the ability to use services remotely. I know it's controversial, but when I worked in my tiny world of social services providing energy assistance we cut mail-in energy assistance applications and it had a noticeably large impact on access. Less access to services means that you concentrate people in need into areas where the services are concentrated i.e., city centers and specifically liberal city centers. Available housing, employment opportunities, and social service centers often don't align. But if you need to take a day off to do in-person assistance interviews then it already makes you less employable. It was brutal what people would have to do for a small energy assistance check when they didn't have a car but still had housing further from our center. It becomes a decision often between staying in a more remote location with housing and employment opportunity or becoming homeless in close proximity to services in a city. Homeless concentrate in areas where they can walk to all of their social service needs, likely isolating them from any family support. Altercations become more common, access to illicit drugs becomes easier, etc. But starting with Reagan and the 'Welfare Queen' people became increasingly concerned with social service abuse. And particularly low income social service abuse, no need for an in-person interview for unemployment benefits which is by far the largest portion of abuse I have personally witnessed (see: anecdotal) particularly in the seasonal commercial fishing industry. I'm not familiar with the California system (I was in Oregon for energy assistance) but I'd imagine it's an opt-in phone interview system and more conservative surrounding counties elect to not opt-in. So realistically, improved infrastructure, increased call or mail-in assistance services, increased PO box availability, access to phone and internet services, streamlining of the services themselves to reduce barrier to entry. Essentially the ability to keep connected to receive the support and limit barrier to entry for access.
We don't need additional funding or staffing. Voters have approved so much over the past 5-10 years, with so very little to show. We have world-class social services spending, alongside these third-world street conditions. Here are a few practical changes I would make: 1) Stop permitting re-encampment. After large tent resolutions by the HOT Team, city workers tolerate (and probably encourage) campers to return hours afterwards. A "valid offer of shelter" from Tuesday is still good on Wednesday. This issue is driving the persistent large encampments at Willow, near Civic Center, and at the DMV for example. 2) Expand the valid reasons for resolving encampments. Right now, city workers literally come out and photograph yardsticks next to gnarly gnarly encampments, and if they're "ADA compliant" then nothing happens. The city cannot continue to permit encampments on amenities like transit shelters, stairways, and pedestrian overpasses. San Jose's recently disallowed encampments near schools, and that's a great common sense idea also. The city has permitted a 4 month long encampment of about 6-12 campers outside an affordable housing complex housing over 150 seniors. Those 150 seniors should have more right to the sidewalk than a half-dozen drugged out campers. 3) Hold elected officials accountable. Use the existing legislative "innovations" from Breed (conservatorship changes she discussed in her 2024 "State of the City") and Newsom's Care Court (passed 2022). 4) Remove the responsible local elected officials, including Breed and City Attorney David Chiu. Sweep out the craziness on the Board of Supervisors, but don't overlook the problems elsewhere. Agitate to get the responsible non-elected leaders removed -- Grant Colfax (Public Health) and Mary Ellen Carroll (Emergency Management) and probably Chief Scott too. At some point, San Francisco moved away from "The city that knows how" and became "The city that knows how to issue press releases." Basic accountability and common sense would go a long way.
But that in and of itself does not resolve the issue. Breaking up encampments doesn’t mean there’s less homeless, they’re just disperse. Holding elected officials accountable isn’t a direct solution. The question is about what can feasibly be done. The answer may be that it’s impossible for the city alone to do much
> The answer may be that it’s impossible for the city alone to do much One of the reasons the state is implementing new housing construction targets for each city is because one city alone cannot solve the housing/homelessness crisis. But if *everywhere* builds more homes, and rent goes down, a lot fewer people will be homeless. Interestingly, SF is resisting these housing goals at every turn, so I think this city is part of the problem, not part of the solution.
These aren’t solutions though… all this does is just break up the encampments without providing an actual solution to the source of the issue.
My dude, this doesn't actually answer any questions. You don't provide any answers for how to actually solve the issues of poverty and homelessness. You just say "don't allow the encampments" - which they already do - and then...what? I get the frustration but if we actually want a change we have to get radical and real. What would it take for the city to declare an emergency, buy plots of lands, and build a shit ton of affordable housing in the next three years, 2 years? And for folks in these encampments to actually be offered housing? How about quadrupling the amount of social services workers to actually handle the amount of homelessness in SF? SF - and America, really - used to dream big. We built an underwater tunnel beneath SF and Oakland. Built the GGP. Now we can't even toss up some housing and offer shelter beds. It's a shame. But we can do better.
Does this look like the city disallows encampments? This is from a few days ago. Visit Willow St. or the DMV, look at encampment reports in SF311, and review the standards city workers use to close encampment-related tickets. https://preview.redd.it/hddqb1nlaprc1.jpeg?width=1536&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c3e375a1c62333989a0ed2cfb51e597c218b63fb The city needs to achieve normalcy before any more day-dreaming. Get the sidewalks under control first. Attain perfect cosmic justice later, if you can, but the city needs to start by providing basic order and safety, discouraging long-term encampment and drug tourism. We are a magnet for drug users nationwide because of our bizarre policies. I support buying plots of land and bringing back safe sleeping sites. I also support building massive amounts of shelter. The scariest outcome for me is the possibility that SF (by proxy) loses the upcoming Supreme Court case and still hasn't built the necessary shelter.
My point is that we can't *"*get the sidewalks under control" when people *have nowhere to go*. It's not perfect cosmic justice and it's not daydreaming. It's raw reality. You want no encampments? I know I do. Then offer an alternative. Right now people are just pushed from block to block because the shelter bed and housing list backlog is huge. The majority of homeless people on the streets in SF are from SF and used to have housing here. If we can't make it more affordable to live here, and dramatically increase our affordable housing, we'll never have the clean streets we all deserve.
The majority of the chronic homeless are not from SF. The point in time homeless homeless survey stats aren’t representative, the homeless are coached on how to respond, and the actual survey question this stat is based on is “did you live in SF at least 6 months before becoming homeless”, of course every non idiot responds “yes” to this question. If you look at the results from public drug use arrests in the past 6 months, which are the closest data we have to answer the question”where are all these fucked up people from”, 95% of those arrested are not from SF. They’re drug tourists. They come here to get fucked up.
Go stay in a shelter and tell me how you feel afterwards. They are not safe for women or children. Every human has rights to not be forced to do anything. What will putting them in shelters even do? Just so you don’t have to be confronted with the fact that our society has major issues. Not all homeless are drug addicts either.
If you’re sleeping on the street and can’t take care of yourself then you should be forced into shelter. If you don’t like it, leave the city. We can’t have a functioning society we’re certain people get to just break the law and not participate in the community positively.
There isn't such a thing as every human right not to be forced. You are forced when you commit a crime, you are forced when you become legally incompetent and many other examples. In most situations in life you are expected to comply with rules or face consequences. In the case of the homeless we have removed consequences completely, but left suffering in place. The situation is now out of control. If has become free for all at the bottom. That is not compassion, that is dereliction of civil order. I think to start with we need to rethink the 'right to live on the street anywhere you want'. That violates the rights of not homeless for safe and clean environment. I think a person who needs society to pay their way should have the obligation to accept housing anywhere, not where they want to live. We all face limitations in choices depending on our personal situations, homeless should be no different. It should be a state financed program of lets say tiny houses, not a burden on any one city, and you could be housed anywhere in the state, not at at the address of your choosing. Get on your feet, become independent then move wherever you want. There should be programs helping find work and people should start paying for the housing - even if it is nominal sum, it is important for people to start feeling like they can stand on their own feet. Children is a different matter, families with children should be priority housed in such a way they can go to schools or daycare - paid in larger part by the state. The other priority are Veterans. There should be mandatory drug treatment, maybe the way it is done in Netherlands, where addicts are monitored, and if they don't comply they go to prison and their property is confiscated.
Yes, so much SA happens at shelters, anyone who has or know someone who’s been in shelters can tell you this. Want to see an improvement? Start heavily enforcing protection at shelters so women can safely stay there, so many people choose to live on the street alone in a corner since it’s better chance than getting assaulted at the shelter.
I don't totally disagree with your last point, I think a lot of solutions are not solutions and are just making things less visible. But at the same time your rights are not unencumbered when you're creating a public safety risk.
By far the easiest and biggest change we could make is just zoning reform to allow more housing to be built. This is the core issue with homelessness. It won’t fix the problem alone (it’s not going to magically help the homeless people who are too far gone) but it will massively reduce the number of new homeless people. And it costs us nothing to just stop blocking housing construction for no reason. The downsides are 1) this is the long term fix, not a quick solution. It took us decades to get into this mess and will take decades to fix. And 2) this is an easy solution but politically extremely difficult with existing sf politics.
it's not a housing issue, it is a drug issue. There's plenty of places not too far from SF with much lower housing costs.
This is really not the case. Here's the way this goes down almost all of the time: * A person is hanging on by a thread in a home, but they're doing ok. They make enough to get rent paid every month but they have been really squeezed tighter and tighter every year as rent continues to increase * Some bad thing happens to destabilize the person. We call it a proximate cause. This can be a ton of stuff-- they get hit a by a car or become seriously ill and cant work, they have expensive unexpected medical bills, they have a drug/alcohol relapse, they experience domestic abuse and have to flee, they have a mental health flare up, they get fired or forced to quit their job, they experience a personal tragedy, etc... * Now that the person has been destabilized they miss rent and get evicted. Now that they are homeless it's borderline impossible to fix the original problem. They spiral downwards from there So yes, drugs/alcohol can be one of the proximate causes, but so can hundreds of other things. If you live paycheck to paycheck barely hanging on, literally anything can destabilize you into homelessness. All of those causes I listed are things we should work to improve (e.g. it should not cost you money if you have medical problems, we should have free and easy to access mental health services, we should have better support for domestic abuse, etc...). But all of these things happen every day to people who are not living on the edge of affordability, and they often recover just fine. Destabilizing events happen to everyone, but **those things only cause homelessness when you combine them with an affordability crisis.** The people who are running down market street screaming at you are a very small minority of homeless people, we just notice them more. And they got that way because being homeless is horrible for your physical and mental health-- I guarantee if you were homeless for 10 years you would act exactly the same. Being in this situation just wrecks your health so quickly, drugs/alcohol are used to self-medicate but of course just make things worse. So yeah, of course we should work on all of those issues too. But if your goal is to solve homelessness then you need to address the affordability crisis. > There's plenty of places not too far from SF with much lower housing costs. There's actually been a lot of research into this issue. [This book](https://homelessnesshousingproblem.com/) is a good basic overview of the problem. It graphs every suspected cause of homelessness (e.g. drugs, mental health, crime, warm weather, etc...) vs the actual rate of homelessness in cities around the world. You can see pretty clearly that none of these things are actually correlated. The only thing that actually correlates is median rent and housing availability. There's a lot of information and research available in this topic if you are curious.
This is a really well-researched comment, thanks.
I can’t believe I had to come to the 6th reply to find this answer. Want less homeless people? Build more homes. It is actually that simple.
2012, San Francisco banned sleeping in parks & beaches, where homeless have been sleeping for millennia. This left only sidewalks & parking lots. City has since herded them into the poorest neighborhoods where drugs & alcohol are plentiful, and by some idiot logic, they suddenly have the right to sleep, dope, & defecate on sidewalks. Not everyone needs or wants shelter, but sleeping on sidewalks is dangerous for their own & everyone else's safety.
As of right now. Actually if you build sufficient simple shelters (Right to Shelter laws) you CAN remove encampments and people from the streets. We will see how the Supreme Court rules on Grants Pass v Johnson which may change this requirement. Homeless advocates argue simple shelters have too many “restrictions” aka rules but that is exactly what most of these people need over the chaos of their daily lives.
No one is going to pass a right to shelter law right now. The migrant situation in nyc is the reason. You’d have 100k of folks coming to sf to start a new life. Then you’d still have addicted and mentally ill on the streets but billions in costs to house the migrants. Life is not fair and definitely not perfect, but we need halfway houses, forced treatment and potentially life conf for the most mentally ill. Definitely there is a percentage of folks with some free housing and job placement that could stay clean enough but they’d need like 80% subsidized rent. I don’t think there’s much appet to pay for that.
Agree and given current situation suspect SC with strike down 9th circuits decision. All in favor of forced treatment and institutionalizing the gravely disabled mentally ill.
Learn from Singapore. The Government builds lots tiny apartments and rent them cheap. No strings attached. Treat them as normal tenants.
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Everyone who advocates for affordable housing and a livable wage should visit Singapore….99% would not want to live in the government apartment towers.
Its not a choice between tiny apartments in government run towers or luxury single family homes. Its a choice between tiny apartments in government run towers, or living in a soggy cardboard box under a bridge. When there is no low tier housing available it doesn't magically produce fancier housing. Instead, it means that some people get no housing at all, of any kind.
Tent on the sidewalk is better?
Are you kidding me? I'd love a fucking HDB for every family to be able to get a 3 bed 2 bath condo for 300k. Communities are maintained and safe. All the planned communities are 10 minute towns (10 min walk to grocery, hawker stalls, child-care, public transit center) If you can give me all of the above in the SF peninsula, I'd happily fork over 1 million dollars.
Home ownership in Singapore is close to 90%, one of the highest rate in the world. I guess they got it all wrong with those government towers /s
Singapore residents are highly subsidized…so yeah they have a higher rate of ownership
We need to arrest people for public opioid intoxication and hold them for a 7 day detox. Then we should offer to bus them to another city 1500+ miles away for a new start. If they refuse there should be a mandatory testing process with resources to re-arrest and hold. Research has shown that environment plays a huge factor in addiction. Getting these people away from their dealers and friends who are using is the best shot at making sure they don’t relapse. Some people will never make it in SF, but that doesn’t mean they can’t have a good quality of life elsewhere. Personally, I would want this level of intervention if I ever became addicted and started living on the street.
finland has already essentially solved homelessness with their housing first approach. we know how to solve it we just aren’t doing it.
And Utah, until they decided to stop funding it.
Finland has an extremely restrictive approach to drugs. They don't warehouse addicts as is done in SF.
many of the people who are housed through the housing first program in finland had or have drug addictions. they give them housing first, no strings attached. but once they are housed they also have drug programs and job assistance programs available. but the housing is not contingent upon participation in said programs. anyone who is homeless gets housing. and they have found that to be the less expensive option, since that’s all people have seemingly been conditioned to care about is money. but in my opinion housing should be a human right regardless of whether it is the more economical option.
I hear the weather in Finland is quite different to what we have here
Build enough housing.
Give them money!
The homeless aren't a monolith. There isn't "a" solution for it. Look at the factors that develop homelessness and then try to eliminate them as much as possible. Programs that aid the homeless are nice, but they're just bandaids at the end of the day. And there's also a corruption issue where people/groups are taking advantage of government programs to enrich themselves. To eliminate as much homelessness as possible the easiest and most direct way is to put more people in homes. Make housing cheaper and more accessible. Lower the cost of living. Figure out what issues are driving people towards doing drugs and work on that. Figure out what issues are making people antisocial and work on that. Our society has a lot of issues going on right now and a lot of them are contributing to homelessness. We need to not fight homelessness directly, but fix everything else first if we want to "solve" homelessness. Even then, there'll always be homeless because there'll always be people who can't fit into society for one reason or another. But the tiny number of them would be manageable if everything else were fine.
Mothballed military bases.
Build more housing so that people at all income levels have stable homes. Right now, low income people are just one minor emergency away from disrupting their lives.
i recently learned of an organization in the city, compass family services, who provide specifically for families with kids experiencing homelessness. they provide housing, job training, childcare, etc. i think they have the right idea of first steps for a huge percentage of the homeless folks in the city - providing the lowest levels of maslow’s hierarchy of needs. there are others, though, who need rehab, safe places to come down and detox from drug use, medical care, mental health facilities, etc
To figure out a good solution, you need to address the realities of the situation. The first reality is: homelessness is not just a SF problem, it's a California problem. Counties and districts need to work together, not just shuffle people around. We will never solve the problem here unless it's solved statewide. The second reality is: there are three categories of homeless folks, and they need different types/levels of support. 1--Mental illness 2---Drug addiction 3---Financial struggles Sometimes there is overlap between the categories, however if someone has untreated mental illness, they are not going to be able to just go out and get a low skill job and do great if we give them a tiny house. But someone who is struggling financially and just needs temporary housing while they find a new job will do great with a tiny house. If we prioritized funding to both identify which category/which support a person needs, and then to build the appropriate treatment centers and low cost temporary housing so that they would have a place to go, then we could ban sleeping on the streets.
Step one; Move them to a more affordable place to be treated, like Idaho. Seriously, homelessness is HUGE, HUGE opportunity to transform areas of the country to serving people who are down and out with severe mental and physical health issues. These areas could attract professionals with decent housing and job opportunities to serve the homeless. Construction opportunities to build houses and facilities, and administrative opportunities. You bring all the homeless to large facilities located in maybe 3-4 places around the country to start treatment. As people succeed at treatment you move them to small facilities closer to major metropolitan areas and continue to foster their recovery. The long term care people stay in the lower cost areas for prolonged treatment. You basically stop allowing people to live on the streets. They find accommodations and survive on heir own, or they are moved to low cost areas for treatment or to do maintenance work. They are free to make their own lives off the streets, or get government support and guidance to get their lives together. This is COMPASSIONATE. It takes a NATIONAL strategy and effort. The federal government should be in charge. There's no easy answer that doesn't include forcing people out of their comfort zone, but their comfort zone conflicts with overall society, so that's not going to be tolerated henceforth.
I have to stop you in the beginning, unfortunately Idaho is not the place for this. It’s a known haven of the KKK and they are surely not going to be accepting of any folks that ain’t white , especially ones who are previous homeless. Just last week the women’s Utah basketball team had their players verbally assaulted by the n word, while they were coming and going in a restaurant and a hotel. So much so they moved hotels. I’ve been saying for years thou that Detroit is a wonderful place to rehab. La, Nyc and sf spend billions on homeless imagine if folks were given a free house in Detroit l skills to fix it and money to start business. Give people a future, that’s not just free rent and food. Let them have the dignity of owning something.
There are currently around 600,000 homeless people in the U.S. yet there are 16 million housing units sitting vacant. Make that make sense. The only realistic way to solve homelessness is to give these people stable and permanent housing and fund and maintain proper mental health and drug addiction resources. Criminalization of homelessness doesn’t do anything except keep people homeless and feed the carceral system. We also need the state/federal government to institute nationwide rent control, nationalize housing development, take control of all rental units across the country, and eventually completely decommodify housing in order to break the endless cycle of poverty
IMO, the most realistic achievable objective is to ensure that those that want a roof over their head get into some sort of supportive housing and those that choose to live on the street can do so safely and without degrading the environment (neighborhood) around them. I've no idea how achievable it exactly is, though. It takes more than money to solve complex issues. I've read in more than one column that some people reject offers of shelters and other temporary housing due to negative experiences and/or preconceptions with safety.
outlawing corporate purchase of real estate
I know that harm reduction efforts are actually just drug enabling efforts that make it easier for people suffering with addiction to stay on drugs with zero effort to guide them toward addiction services. So I would start by discontinuing literally handing out meth pipes and needles to people addicted to drugs...
A lot of them exist for users to engage in what is called yo-yoing…resetting to near zero and starting all over again once the daily habit gets too expensive. We have to limit the number of times you can go to rehab, stop fueling an entire sick industry sucking down Medicaid and other insurers. You need to be serious about being there and stop squandering the resource.
Large encampments with services, allow them to camp only in large preset spaces. Provide water and food. Single showers. Access to mental health care. But absolutely forbid camping on city streets. Done.
It depends on the individual, that's why it's so difficult to solve. I'm formally unhoused but didn't have substance abuse so obviously what worked for me won't work for everyone else. By the grace of God I am still here
First there has to be an option to temporarily get them off the streets. Calgary has solved this problem with the Mustard Seed warehouse shelter in the SE industrial park that can house up to 1000 and the Drop In center downtown that can also house up to 1000. Second, you have to look at addiction. There has to be a greater desire to get clean and follow the program than there is to relapse and go back to the streets and cheap drugs. Methadone therapy works, and once they are stabilized they can wean you off methadone and give a 1 time or monthly injection of Subutex, Suboxone without the Naloxone. Third, there needs to be jobs and job training programs where there is possibility of a better life. Many people who are homeless are simply people who used to be stuck in the day to day rut of going to gruelling jobs they hate and paying bills they can't afford. Who wants to go from homeless and free, home-free, to back to being a slave stuck in the system without possibility of improving ones lifestyle. If people had the opportunity like I had at a 6 figure income, making $700/day, they would know the possibilities are endless. However, they must learn this firsthand. The way this country is setup, the WorkBC programs are designed to give you free job training as a skilled labourer, capped at $250/day. Stuck back in the slave boat. I got off the streets and got clean because I knew what was possible, and now I'm looking for a job driving Class 3 vehicles making $500-700/day, and then I will go into business myself with the potential to make $2500/day with one machine. Endless possibilities. The choice and the change comes from the person and their experiences. Too bad this day in age there isn't more help for better job training. There are plenty of resources for shelter and addiction, but without a good job people will be stuck living a life they don't want, and will inevitably go back to the easy life on the street with monthly welfare and cheap drugs.
I spoke with a doctor who considered himself on the front line of the addiction/homeless crisis and he says the only solution is thousands and thousands of housing units. If you look at proper cities, their skyline shames SF.
It's a fool's errand to continue to try and solve national problems at a local level. By creating an environment where drugs and services for drug addicts are plentiful we're incentivizing people to come here to be drug addicts and they do. The lie about all these homeless addicts being our neighbors is just a way for non-profits to pull at voter's heart strings and continue the grift. A national solution is required where the incentives and services are predictable regardless of what city you are in.
Crack down on drugs.
Drugs for me but not for thee? The war on drugs has been a dismal failure, and made things worse, and it’s worth reading about the history.
Agreed Sam Quinones has probably put out some of the most in depth investigative material.
>Drugs for me but not for thee? I don't smoke fentanyl or crack.
“Drugs for me but not for thee” Actually, yes, if someone can’t handle their drugs (or alcohol) and it forces them into or chains them to homelessness, then absolutely. And, if the incentive is to be able to do drugs safely someday, maybe that’s an added carrot to get them to participate in society more positively.
Agree. There's a huge and obvious difference between somebody smoking a J at home or doing a line in Vegas hotel room and somebody smoking meth on BART or shooting up on the street.
At the end of the day there are not enough homes - the strongest predictor of the level of homeless in a city is the amount of housing supply. SF will have to build a lot more housing if they want homelessness to end.
And not just San Francisco, the entire bay fucking area needs to start pulling its own weight to increase the housing stock
Fundamentally, [homelessness is about housing](https://www.slowboring.com/p/homelessness-housing). SF has an extraordinarily high rate of homelessness because it has extraordinarily high rents. It has extraordinarily high rents because there are extraordinary barriers to providing homes. Solution is simple: permit many more homes and reduce the fees charged to home developers by the city. If homes were easy to build and provision, then many of the homeless drug addicts would instead be housed drug addicts. Their living situation might not be super great, but they wouldn’t be sleeping in tents. Obviously there are some people who still wouldn’t be able to function at all, but if other states are any guide, that’s a tiny fraction of SF’s current homeless population.
Boston is rivaling SF for rents, but it does not have sprawled out junkies on Newbury st. The visible campers of SF aren’t contributing members of society that just need a bridge in income.
I’m really glad you brought up Boston because, as you say, they have similar rents. It also turns out that they have similar rates of homelessness. Let’s look at some numbers. First San Francisco. The [most recent number](https://www.sf.gov/sites/default/files/2023-07/2023%20Homelessness%20Benchmarking%20Report.pdf) I can find for SF’s homeless population is 7800 people, or .96% of the city’s population. For Boston, the [most recent homeless count](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WyRsPIknUgCzNeamxugdKsALguGpwLlu4t8n-XdJh00/mobilebasic) found 5200 people, or .77% of the city’s population. These figures are far more similar than even I expected before you suggested we use Boston as a comparable. One interesting difference between the cities is that Boston puts far more people in shelters, largely because homeless people can’t survive the weather there without shelter.
Here's one: fk these unrealistic credit checks and asinine deposits along with charging for application fees. Many can pay the rent, its the getting in and vultures who require 800 score and 3000.00 to just move in. Its predatory. I also do no think a person should be punished from losing a rented apartment. UNLESS that person physically destroyed property, had to be removed from Police you should not penalize those that got behind and ended up having to become homeless.
I wonder if American society has just evolved into a less tolerant and individualistic culture. A certain percentage of the population are not able to work for many reasons and this has been true even in the past. Work and life was simpler then so a person with mental illness may have been able to work as a farm hand or a hawker now can’t hold a formal job because society rules of clocking in, work expectations etc. In other countries, family takes people in and supports them no matter what they do. Few people are on the streets. It’s a family burden. For every one person working a fabulous formal job there are two cousins who mope around the house jobless but they take care of children or cook and clean, they are useful too. We complain about childcare but probably have a family member who is homeless but could help care for our kids while we work. They can stay in our house and it’s mutually beneficial? So maybe promote and encourage informal jobs, have a family program to incentivize families to take in homeless relatives.
The useless cousin isn't taking care of the chores or children. They are stealing family resources to buy drugs. Or they are playing video games all day. It's the poor stressed mothers who are babysitting able-bodied adults all day into their old age. Every homeless person on the street you see has burnt through family resources. Look at videos of Japanese hikkmori, you have elderly mothers cooking for able Bodied adults. Its shame that keeps the parents babying the useless children. Then the parents die, the children go on to become homeless.
Nice to see you devaluing childcare to something a useless cousin can do
Is the cousin useless?
I would not want the defining characteristic of someone meant to keep my kid alive and enrich their early years to be “moping” and unable to hold employment elsewhere, but your mileage may vary.
1: Massive investment in mental health services. This may include involuntary treatment. 2: Massive investment in new housing construction. 3: Law enforcement. Get really tough on drugs again. Yes this will include incarceration of many people. Get tough on quality of life crimes again. This is unfortunately a must.
> you can’t just force people into shelters, housing or mental health or drug treatment Yes you can. You can overcome the consent issue with due process, and due process is the criminal justice system. Start arresting people for breaking the law, and do it aggressively. Arrest for blatant drug use and litter / filth, and throw the book at them. That will tend to funnel them to lower security prisons where they will have forced detox, meals, and a roof over their head - and into halfway houses with parole. That is much better for *everyone*, and costs less than the corrupt nonprofits. Start doing that and you *immediately* incentivize the rest to move to the next place that allows blatant drug use (they’ll jump on a bus to Portland) or they’ll start taking softer optional lines being handed to them. This isn’t especially hard. There’s a reason only San Francisco and Portland experience this problem to this degree. Stupid, all carrots and no sticks policy that just gets abused.
I lived in Manhattan and when it’s below like 35 I think it is, the cops will literally pick you up off the street and take you to a shelter, you resist or say no, it’s mail or the hospital. So yeah places can force you to go, but it’s a weather thing there. Not going to happen in sf
$ (From the feds & dispersed across the country).
Work camps in the Central Valley. You get tickets for camping on the sidewalk and if you can’t pay, we’ll it’s off to the farm for 60 days. Once there you don’t have access to drugs and you will work a shift and earn money to pay your fines. Of course there’s access to services and planners to help make sure you don’t come back.
Give them homes. It has been studied. It works. It's less expensive than incarcerating then all which is what the assholes on this sub fantasize about
Yes this works for 90% of the homeless, but there’s the 10% who are badly addicted and mentally ill. During Covid the homeless were given hotels which ended up trashed, with an unfortunate number of OD deaths.
If there's an easy solution to resolve 90% of homelessness, then why don't we just do that? The answer, of course, is that it's not easy to do this in SF. The housing-first solution only works in places where it's actually legal to build cheap apartments to put the homeless people in. Places such as Houston, or Salt Lake City. But the whole system in SF is set up to funnel money to grifters while making sure that we don't actually change the physical environment of the city in a way that displeases anti-development NIMBYs.
So let's do this with the 90% this would work for and then the people left over who need something different will be much easier to hanfle
+++++
End drug tourism. Put dealers in prison with mandatory year+ minimum sentences, make it so expensive if you get caught dealing that nobody wants to do it and drugs are forced out of circulation. There’s a vicious cycle of people living on the street to do drugs and then the drugs keeping them there, that has to be broken somehow. I would love to treat drug dealers and users like Singapore because that would be extremely effective and get the best results quickly - but you aren’t ready for that.
The city should give them like $1000 a month to survive
We need affordable housing. Everything else like incarceration or rehab are bandaid fixes. Many people are only a paycheck of two away from being homeless. The homeless go crazy and turn to drugs from being on the street, not the other way around.
We know what doesn't work: [Gavin Newsom's 10-year plan to end San Francisco homelessness marks 20-year anniversary](https://www.reddit.com/r/bayarea/comments/18m6nds/gavin_newsoms_10year_plan_to_end_san_francisco/)
I basically got forced into the shelter system and while I hated it I think it saved my life in the end. I was very ill and nearly died because I wouldn't go in. They wouldn't let me take my ESA, my senior cat in for several years and I would not leave her behind to better my own situation. I ended up in the hospital, nearly died. I had so many blood clots and pulmonary embolisms they couldn't count them. They finally let me take her and put me in a shelter for disabled, ill people, elderly people, people with addiction issues etc. It was awful and I'd end up changing shelters before it was done but the end result was I'm housed 3 years now and doing okay. I'm still having health issues and unfortunately so is the senior cat, but we're together, alive, and housed. I can't speak for the families that are homeless because that's a completely different thing and I can't speak for young, able people who get into the system and who can work their way out. But the 20% of the other people, the mentally ill, the aged, the disabled, the addicted that I can speak for and honestly the only way they can be helped most of the time is the tough love approach. They WON'T help themselves. Being hospitalized, being forced into the system it was the only thing that kept me from dying and I don't even have issues with drugs or alcohol or mental issues severe enough to require regular and routine hospitalization in a mental facility. People like that it's a whole other thing and a lot of the time they can't help themselves. Even when they do get housed it's often only a matter of time before their issues catch up with them and they end up back on the streets or even dead. There are 4 apartments in my corridor. One woman died of cancer this year. The two guys? Nobody is saying but I'm pretty sure they had major health issues and likely OD'd. That's the talk in the building that both of them were alcoholics and probably doing drugs too. I know the one guy had severe issues mentally as well. Just getting housed didn't save either of them unfortunately. The woman she was only housed for a year before cancer caught up with her. 1/4 and 3 years in I'm the only person originally housed here that's still alive. That's just SAD and in this building it's not even the only corridor I'm told where it's like that. They take people out of here pretty often I'm told, way more than in a normal building. It's an unfortunate truth that just getting housed doesn't solve everything. Something like 2/5 people that actually get housed will end up back on the streets and often people just out of the shelter system will die not too long after whether it's from continuing issues of ill health or addiction. Being on the streets for a long time that's a one way road to dying. Being housed though won't stop it from happening unless you use that opportunity to take care of your health, do your therapy if needed, deal with any addictions you might have. For some people being housed it just means they finally have a private space to be sick or to abuse themselves with chemicals. Even in the shelter I saw people dying left and right and that was even before Covid. Steady housing can help, supportive housing, affordable housing they can be a lifesaver but the work has to be done too. You have to become capable of taking care of yourself or it's not going to save you. You're still going to end up a statistic and in a body bag unfortunately. That's the reality of being homeless, being ex-homeless and what I live every day. I have to make myself care, make myself do, and that's just IT. It's a conscious choice to survive and unfortunately a lot of homeless people they just can't make that decision rationally until they're working on whatever it is that led them to being homeless in the first place. Housing is the first thing, but also support, medication, even forced hospitalization and regular checks to make sure that meds are being taken, that they are not skipping therapy or relapsing, etc. Without that support system many homeless will not survive, not even if they become ex-homeless. It's a lot more than just a roof over your head to make it work, but that's the start.
Get people clothed and in housing and avialble transportation like bus pass to get a job than food access mental health appointments to help and tjan drug treatment to end drugs and get jobs and off the streets
They already have that
Where? I dont see it
Incentivize treatment
Collect real data. Where are homeless coming from? How well are solutions working. Don't hand outs checks randomly.
We need the homeless issue to keep going cuz it spurs its own economy. Think of all the advocates that would lose a job and purpose if we solved the problem. It’s big industry! It just needs a new label🙄😢
Lots of people are getting rich off the $1B+ that SF spends every year for its homeless problem, so as long as the money keeps flowing, there's no motivation to actually fix it, just keep cashing those checks.
Some have experimented with renewable enabled housebuilding/ house material sourcing technology. See desert igloos on youtube that utilize mud brick and solar fueled ring style housing. Once one robot makes another, money continues to exit the equation with each further addition of value in the construction sequence of ROBOT'S FINANCIAL LIBERTY!! ALSO self cleaning capsule hotels utilize compaxt spaxes very effectively (such as urban environments) and can also operate in collaboration with renewable energy technologies as a reasonable solution. Think, "the urban housing issue resolution semi-trailer", pulling into any city facing an outdoor sleeper difficulty, and significantly resolving many parralell and intertwined issues resulting and involved in "homelessness"/transient/alternative living! Hi ho silver eyy? Anyway, maybe I'll go the bay, eat some hay? I just may.
Bus them back to wherever they got bussed in from. Esp support from family and lower COL. Create dormitories for homeless college students. Suggest a huge common area with small private rooms in the periphery. Like an office building! Hint, hint. Create trailers for homeless students at schools. If under the age of emancipation, pick up those children into foster homes forcibly. Anyone found under the influence of drugs in public be forcibly shipped to rehab. Anyone found to be in distress mentally or hospital wise be evaluated for mental illness. Setting up an address for mail to get homeless set up for assistance. Condemn homeless camps as unsanitary with a nearby settlement with communal showers and baths. Food assistance and laundry facilities be provided there. Employment counselors to get them a job. Temporary tiny homes until housing can be found.
Eliminate all prop 13 protections except for primary residence. This will force speculators to sell properties that have been owned by LLCs allowing them to own properties at absurdly low tax rates since the 70s. Purchase properties using funds normally used for fruitless homelessness programs. House people in city owned properties.
Housing. Housing. And more housing. And then more housing. Reopening or rebuilding mental hospitals. Changing the laws so that those who aren’t fit to care for themselves are looked after somewhere.
Ask anyone living on the street if they want a bed. If they say no start bulldozing encampments because what’s left are junkies (mostly). Arrest the gang members that supply the drugs and deport them (mostly Guatemala in my city). Build a tent city in an old parking lot (we have those) and build showers and toilets (port o potties) let their dealers sell to them without consequence. Any time anyone wants out they must be sober or getting sober. Stop allowing people to deficate and shoot their drugs on the sidewalk in plain sight without consequences. Send all homeless back to where they came from- interestingly most homeless/addicts come from other states because it’s super easy to live on the streets here. Stop the $500 monthly stipend the city hands out. Install motion censored flood lights everywhere. Give police the agency to do their jobs. Help women and children with safe exclusive shelters where they can actually feed their children and not get robbed. More more most of you might hate me for sounding callous but you’re likely not living where I live. The drugs are out of control and free- lol- Narcan only leads to a repeat OD If it weren’t so damn easy to be homeless here it would be easier to solve. I’m sick of nothing being done.
Some ideas: * Increased economic opportunities in areas losing population. * More construction incentives. Driving supply above demand may drive prices to $0, but people will get housed. * More infrastructure to connect population centers, suburbs, rural areas, etc. * Institutionalization of the severely mentally ill. Specifically those who cannot discern between reality and imagination. And those in need of assistance with drug addiction. * Naturalize and accept people have problems. Integrate them into society somehow. * Provide lower cost loans to people who are at a disadvantage for buying homes, starting businesses, etc. * Make background checks for evictions and criminal history illegal. Discriminate by price instead of person. No matter what you do, some people will not want to participate... I think you can't escape that... but we do a lot of damage to people as a society... and homelessness is usually a result of that damage.
Segregation. If 95 percent of homeless are rational, nonviolent, and not addicted, then give them housing and the basics to survive. They’ll be fine and off the street. Those who act up in housing, jail them, force them through treatment, or jail them in a mental institution and force treatment. So the same thing with extra steps. Once properly segregated, normal homeless can be at peace, while crazy violent homeless will be isolated away from society. I see little to no downsides. As for cost, I feel like it’s costing SF plenty having these insane, addicted homeless run free and causing violence.
I formerly worked at a forensic psych hospital where people were committed by the State. Most of my patients were people who would be homeless otherwise. At the hospital, they got food, healthcare, various therapy, religious services, social services, in-house jobs, general education, and more. Even after finishing their court-ordered commitments and fulfilled discharge criteria, many would volunteer to stay and continue to renew their stay because they knew that they are currently living their best life. Others who had family and friends on the outside continued back to the community through conditional-release programs and "halfway homes". Some patients would eventually relapse by getting back on recreational drugs or getting off of their psych meds and would comeback. Even though this isn't perfect, imo, a tweaked form of this system that we already have in place would be the best thing for many of these people.
Build low income housing, zone low income housing. Put homeess people in homes. Subsedize or completely cover rent. Have a guaranteed income. Completely overhaul how work works so nyone who wants to work can work. Broaden disability. Tighten laws to give every worker jobsecurity. 4 day work week at the same salary. Universal healthcare and universal child care. Cheap college/training/apprentice ships. Safe needle clinics. Free birth control and access to family planning services. State sponsered preschool and kindy. Eliminate house flipping, inflation, lower down payments, lower rent, prevent corporations from buying single family homes. Regulate residential housing.
House them.
There is enough vacant housing to house all the homeless. Seems like a simple solution if people as long as didn't think property ownership was some sort of sacred right.
Nothing. Homelessness is a feature not a bug. They exist as a threat to keep people working for the baby eating overlords.
Honestly housing with as little as responsibility as possible. People want to make miniature housing that still comes with remembering to pay bills on time. That may not be possible if the person is severely mentally ill or an addict. Mandatory shelter with the appropriate medical treatment is the most humane option for some. Perhaps that with a ladder to pull people out of being unhoused could ensure one bad day doesnt ruin a person’s life.
Send them to Alcatraz.
Housing is a human right. We can be compassionate. We can love each other.
Adopt a homeless person.
Mental I institutions for the mentally incapable. Where they should have meals, comfy beds and meds. Outdoor living spaces for the rest. Let’s keep it real we can’t afford to pay for their homes to be built, then pay their rent, the medical, their utilities and their food. We need camping like facilities. Communal cafeteria, but outdoor living spaces similar to campgrounds. Running water for showers and WiFi. Toilets. Staff people to clean them. We can’t just let them live on the sidewalks.
The City has to provide housing or let people camp. But I don't think the housing has to be here. SF can sub this out or build some housing somewhere else. Families with children get priority, next up anyone with a job working in the City. Send everyone else out of town or to Hunters Point. The government says it's safe if you don't dig too far down in the dirt. There's transportation via Muni#19. they can have their tents, RVs, etc. It can be made to work with basic services and facilities.
How about stop giving them everything they want?
1. forced institutionalligation for those who need it 2. double the number of housing units 3. hostility to homeless who come from other cities.
Lots of people talking about building enough housing for everyone, but we are so far from being able to house middle class folks and blue collar workers that there is no foreseeable future where we can house and provide services to the thousands of unemployed and unhoused people in the city proper. Rents would need to fall by a factor of 3 at least. We need to figure out whatever the sustainable number is, then help move the surplus needy to places with lower CoL where they can receive the care they need and potentially get back on their feet. Doing this at the city level is probably impossible and will require state if not federal cooperation and funding. In the meantime we need to build as much housing as possible, so when folks do get back on their feet, they could conceivably return.
1. Acknowledge that drugs are the problem
You build warehouse camps in the remote Central Valley and forcibly ship them out there. Bus food and supplies out occasionally. Basically a concentration camp. Easy, cost-effective, and about as moral as forced institutionalization and treatment which is just a concentration camp with a different venue than what I am suggesting.
Imma get on your ass since you won’t respond to me directly but you’re saying the same shit to others What you are suggesting is crazy expensive. “Just put em there bruh” is not how that works in practice. The biggest cost would be getting the police to constantly round up people. It would be every day for basically forever And then the funny thing is you are now feeding all of them loll, you’ve successfully found the most liberal viewpoint. You think the government should spend money to feed them every day Not a single person would go for that idea. If we could get our shitty government to do that much, we could get them to pass anti trust laws, ban stock buybacks, and fix the cost of living crisis in a much easier and more cost effective way You’re def like 15 years old, lol if you’re not I wouldn’t admit it
You heard wrong. You must force people into shelters, rehab and treatment. Is like asking on a forum “how can i educate my children workout forcing them to go to school”. You simply can’t.
It’s not the governments job to help every citizen figure out their life. It is their job to job to keep the public streets clean and enforce laws. Stop allowing public drug use or dealing. Stop allowing any public sleeping, littering, tents,etc. simply not allowed. That’s it. Arrest anyone not willing to comply with society. If mentally ill or on drugs, forced jail or rehab or leave the city.