I was in sf for wwdc a few weeks ago - as a separate notion to humanitarian ideas, the mental ill and homeless in the streets really struck me as having a very adverse effect on the vibe of the city -- worse than my impressions as a visitor during previous experiences in the area.<p>- if you are in the city and need to find a bathroom, good luck -- hearts and minds of the people are closed to you and there is nowhere a restroom accessible as service jobs are constantly under assault from the mentally ill. It's extremely dehumanizing -- I would invite anyone who wants to feel the homeless experience to put on some decent but non fashionable clothes, wait until they urgently need to pee while in an unfamiliar area of the city, and then see how the city feels to you.
- the battery in my phone died and I asked a random passerby if he had the time -- he said "no".<p>Just an isolated sketch -- but the people in that city generally struck me as terrible and generally very close to depressed -- and I attribute at least some of that to the fact that they are constantly barraged by the souls of the crushed masses dwelling all around them.<p>Cities have psyches, and sf strikes me as very sick right now.
The programs that SF puts in place as part of the "non-profit industrial complex" that's risen up worsens the problem in two ways:<p>1) Too many of the programs enable, rather than help the root cause, of homeless folks.<p>2) These enabling programs are very efficiently communicated among the homeless population, drawing them from all over the state and the country.<p>I'm not some asshole who hates homeless people. I was raised by a single father because my mother was a mentally-ill and drug addicted person who was homeless or in and out of shelters for the majority of the last 25 years before she died in 2014.<p>I watched as numerous programs did nothing but enable her addiction and undermine me and my siblings efforts to eliminate her addiction and get her to work.
The reality is that most mid to long term homeless are 100% unemployable. There is no solution for most of these people in our current system. This is not a San Francisco problem but a national problem as it is a direct side effect of our chosen system of resource allocation. We as a country need to either change our current methods of allocating resources or accept it as a price we are willing to pay.
I think "people who are homeless because they can't afford homes" and "people who are homeless because they voluntarily enjoy living on the street" are two different problems and should be addressed differently.<p>In particular, I have no problem criminalizing the latter if we can address the former. Criminal laws are <i>supposed</i> to prevent mass unpleasant behavior in public. Pooping in the street is not a lifestyle choice we should encourage or support. (though "having public toilets" might be a better solution)
I never realized the San Francisco Chronicle has two versions of its site. I always used to go to <a href="http://www.sfgate.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.sfgate.com</a> (which has become like a gossip site). I now realize the more traditional newspaper is at <a href="http://www.sfchronicle.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.sfchronicle.com/</a> (although they have an overlap of articles).<p>Why would they do this?
In one of the most left-leaning states in the union, in one of it's richest cities, all the most well-meaning welfare programs have failed to make a dent in the problem.<p>If that isn't a fantastic argument for Basic Income I don't know what could be more persuasive.<p>Edit: Commenter below summarized my (admittedly poorly phrased) point better than I can:<p>> The current programs are focussed around spending the minimum amount of money possible on as few people as possible, which is an expensive and inefficient proposal. The parent's suggestion is to give people the power in their own lives, which studies have shown can result in huge turnarounds for people in unpleasant situations.<p>> So OP is suggesting that overly complicated, byzantine, and underfunded welfare programs aren't working, so maybe we should give up and do what experts have been suggesting, and studies have shown results from, instead.<p>And no, this does not address the problem of mental illness but if we're going to continue to ignore this problem until we can find a solution that works for all homeless, just shoot them now and limit their suffering because it will never happen.
Can we seriously not have an article that enlarges specific text as you're scrolling? It completely distracts me from reading the article.<p>Please stick with the tired-but-true way of making headlines or pulling text to the side to break-up text.<p>Don't dynamically resize text while you're scrolling. This has to be the dumbest web design I've seen in a while.
Very anecdotally, this was something that I noticed not just in SF, but also LA. The marked difference for me as a Londoner between the huge homelessness problem we have in London and what I saw in SF/LA was the levels of mental illness coupled with dehumanising levels of despair that I saw in the homeless populations of SF/LA.<p>Does anyone have a good idea of why SF/LA (the US in general?) exhibited this characteristic of homelessness more markedly than in London (where I almost never see the sort of extremely obvious health issues that I saw in SF/LA every time I've been there)? Is it because of the US healthcare system, perhaps?<p>Incidentally, there is a good episode of the BBC's "The Inquiry" which asks about one route of dealing with this:<p><a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03rh5my" rel="nofollow">http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03rh5my</a>
The fact is it can't just be SF's problem, because SF is a magnet for homeless people from all over CA and the US. That makes it a US problem, and yes, it is a disgrace.
> <i>The city needs to evaluate and track people in homeless programs</i><p>> <i>San Francisco, which gets an influx of about 450 chronically homeless people a year, needs to shed any perception that it is a sanctuary for people who are unwilling to participate in programs designed to get them off,</i><p>> <i>It is neither inhumane nor “criminalizing poverty” to enforce laws against aggressive panhandling, tent encampments or defecation and urination in public places....are no longer afforded the option to flout the law with impunity. </i><p>So plan is to build a few houses and put everyone who is left into jail.