The reason that housing is “unpossible” in the local media and amongst elite opinion is that they want to keep things horrible until San Francisco voters can be convinced to criminalize homelessness, at which point it will cost them nothing.
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Most of the money that the city throws at the homelessness problem goes to administrators & security. Take a look at the rules on this list & ask yourself if you would want to enter the SF shelter system.
http://www.freeprintshop.org/download/shelter_english.pdf
That list, by the way, is published by a non -profit that gets no city finding. The first shelter on the list is run by churches who volunteer their space in the winter. The city system, CHANGES, is run by highly-paid administrators who rarely/never visit the site itself, where the atmosphere is extremely unpleasant. There is a whole industry of people who profit from homelessness. They are not in it to make life better for homeless people; they’re running a warehouse system.
I have slept in a San Francisco family shelter & hope never ever to do it again. The moment the doors opened for the night, little kids of 4 years old run to a plastic trash barrel to pull out blankets, yelling “Get one that doesn’t have pee on it!” One blanket per adult, & the blankets were stiff, synthetic, & unwashed. The sleeping area was a gym mat on the floor. Lights on all night for the sake of security. Security people learn to be hostile & unfriendly because it’s easier to enforce the rules that way. Leave in the dark at 7am to wander the streets all day. No storage; carry all your posessions with you.
Meanwhile there’s a waiting list to sleep on a shared gym mat on the floor. It’s like being on the waiting list for hell. I am not surprised that many people prefer the street, & since there are no free public toilets or washing facilities, & in many neighborhoods no public trash cans, things get filthy.
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Which is? For the vast majority of the population that do not live in California?
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The homeless budget in SF is so stupidly allocated (to a million competing organizations), and has been for so long that it can only be intentional. But there are really two homelessness problems in SF, not one, and they are completely different.
There is the major homelessness problem, which is caused by insane housing costs meeting an insistence of having lots of low wage serfs. That’s where you get most of the numbers and statistics about how many SF homeless actually have jobs.
Then there is the visible homeless problem, which is largely a mental health problem, and dates to Reagan shutting down all the state mental health hospitals (with the help of stupid liberals who saw One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest one time and made all their decisions about mental health based on that!). That one is certainly more expensive to fix, but also doable.
The big concern, warranted or not, is that the more successful SF is in dealing with the homelessness problem, the more homeless will flow from unsuccessful places into SF. This excuse always finally comes up when it looks like homeless advocates might actually accomplish something.
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That the weather’s so nice that a) you’re a magnet for the homeless but b) that’s fine because you don’t have to provide homeless shelters. It attains the stature of myth because they will spend any sum of money on a myriad of proposed solutions–streetcleaning, portapotties, affordable housing schemes, drug programs, crime crackdowns–so long as they do not challenge (a) or (b).
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Hahahaha!
<sigh>
I can’t find the Boing Boing article that had this originally, and with a quote about the mayor saying that she was sure that Tech companies could find “some other way to provided skills and knowledge to help”, and the obligatory app quip.
Ah! That’s because it was Atrios:
Tech companies such as Amazon opposed Seattle’s short-lived head tax on large businesses to pay for homeless services and housing, but Mayor Jenny Durkan now says they can assist the city in other ways.
Rather than tap the companies’ bank accounts, she wants Seattle to tap their know-how. For example, they could help the city design apps for social services, Durkan says.
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I took this beauty last Friday night on Pine St in SF. I recoiled about a mile when I almost stepped in it.
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“Vagrant” has judgemental, moralizing, victim-blaming overtones. “Homeless” has a similar taint, if to a lesser degree.
I don’t see anything wrong with seeking a more neutral, descriptive term. One can imagine being “unsheltered” without being either a vagrant or homeless. Conversely, it could be possible to live as a homeless vagrant without being unsheltered.
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That’s a lot of needles.
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Mispent? If two previous posters had their numbers right, there is a $300,000,000 budget chasing 4,400 homeless, or over $60,000/year per homeless person. If there is a rapid turnover in the homeless population, that doesn’t represent a per-person amount, but it is still pretty staggering to think that the amount of money being spent can’t put a bigger dent in the outcomes.
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Yeah, those are the ‘rules’ I was referring to that make the existing shelters have a limited effect.
The $300,000,000 figure is for homelessness and housing assistance (to prevent homelessness). I think many tens of millions are spent directly on the 7000 or so homeless residents.
Pretty sure the streets were filthier during the Art Agnos era, before “broken windows” became fashionable
The percentage of Seattle residential land where multi-family housing is legal is minuscule. Without fixing that, no amount of money will decrease homelessness.
Security people learn to be hostile & unfriendly because it’s easier to enforce the rules that way.
Is Steinbeckian a word yet ?
It can be zero degrees Fahrenheit in NYC for multiple days in a row in the winter. Comparing the San Fran homeless situation NYC’s is apples and oranges.
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The value of real estate rises because the supply of housing is either naturally finite due to geography or intentionally finite because the people through their elected officials want it that way. Try proposing a high rise housing development in SF. Count the laughs of the zoning board.
The value of real estate rises because housing has transformed from “shelter” to an “asset class.” We have a housing bubble. Prices are high because of speculation. Building more housing will do nothing to solve homelessness because the market will NEVER support the quantity of housing necessary to “trickle down” to low income levels. In fact, new market rate condos and apartments are experiencing high vacancy because few people can actually afford to live in them.
Real Estate is more and more, a place for the super wealthy to store money.
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Good point. Buying real estate to park cash is a problem in other major cities, thanks in some part by third-world millionaires who can’t trust their own country.
But if there is a bubble as you say, wouldn’t investors stop parking their assets there and move to bonds or other more stable investments? They’re not stupid. If they’re still buying, they are saying that they don’t think there’s a bubble or that they can get out before it bursts. (The latter of which is naive, if recent history is any indication.)
Hmm.
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