It's incredible that reporting on crime and poverty has been so captured as to sound delusional. The article even goes so far as to link this rise in piracy to an increase in homeless encampments, but somehow declares the latter a "catalyst" as though it just came from nowhere and caused the piracy, instead of even bothering with lip service to the obvious third variable causing both. Noting that the police have been more active in removing people who can't pay what is no doubt an ever-inflating rent just to anchor their boats, I can basically just model the "pirates" as an obvious consequence of this sort of approach, directly parallelling the dynamics of homelessness on land<p>We know where the homeless people came from: they were mostly displaced from homes in the area they now camp in by policy that has inflated cost of living while also harming renters and anyone working for a living's ability to remain in their home, as is true of most homeless people in the US, and the pirates are likely of similar origin<p>It is an incredible testament to how civil we have managed to make people in the last fifty or so years that the present situation the poor of the bay area are in has resulted in mostly property crime so far, and a testament to the absurd, fearful, propagandized bubbles the wealthy live in that the small but locally-unprecedented rise in actual violent crime isn't serving as a long-needed wakeup call to more of them