Katliamom,SF has a lot of that infrastructure in place, far more than in the past, and far more than in most cities. Depending upon which news source one prefers, the city will spend upwards of 370 million dollars this year alone on the issue, but vagrants are everywhere there. The city has impressive programs of all types of care, options and opportunities already
@roycroftmom We shouldn’t expect one city to solve this problem. The homeless in SF come from all over the country. Addressing poverty should be a national priority, and only when it IS a national priority will cities with mild climates and tolerant residents not be inundated.
Recently I attended a community meeting in my area. Rumors had circulated that a vacant school property was going to be turned into a homeless shelter. The city denied it but so many people showed up that the fire marshal was called in; capacity of the hall was overflowing. Homeowners simply will not stand for having our rights pushed aside in favor of the drug addicted and mentally ill. Our children deserve clean streets, with no needles in the park. Our children should be safe walking the sidewalks and not be accosted by raving mentally ill, potentially dangerous people. Customers of businesses should not have to step over vagrants sleeping in doorways.
City leaders seem more concerned with the drug addicts than with their tax base, which in the long term is really self-defeating. People will move, the tax base will crumble and then who will city leaders dun for money for their failed homeless housing projects.
@TatinG So what’s your solution? Ship all the homeless to some remote area?
Some are being shipped! One way Greyhound ticket is way cheaper than a spot in a shelter.
@BunsenBurner Where are they being shipped off to? And how long is it before they’re back?
Seattle. They stay. Just google “one way Greyhound ticket,” and lots of articles pop up. The claim is that the shippers do not have resources or infrastructure to help, so they are being sent to places that have them.
@BunsenBurner Considering the apparently large number of homeless still in Seattle, clearly the “shipping off” hasn’t solved the city’s problem. And of course it wouldn’t. Like I said, the homeless in Western cities with mild climates and accepting residents is a reflection of a larger, national problem. These cities by themselves can’t address it. Local communities up in arms about homeless shelters in their back yards aren’t helping. But of course, they shouldn’t have to bear the brunt of the solution either.
Coralbrook writes that her southern California beach town is newly plagued by people who live in RVs and hang around. Inadequate sanitation means they’re causing unpleasant and unhealthy sanitation messes, and some are aggressive.
It’s worthwhile considering why this is a new problem. Why weren’t people like this trying to live in her town in RVs or vans ten or twenty or thirty years ago? The beach was just as nice then; old cheap vans existed then. I suggest that in part, these people are making a virtue of necessity. In California, rent prices are so stratospherically high that many young people in their 20s and 30s couldn’t begin to afford housing.
We could allow developers to build more dense housing. We could allow SROs. But we don’t.
SF is one of the largest cities which ship homeless OUT on one-way tickets-there is even a city office for it, called Homeward Bound, which states it has given more than 10K one way tickets in recent years. The Guardian (UK) did a comprehensive 18 month investigation of cities shipping off homeless.
Here’s an article from the Guardian about cities giving homeless people one-way trips elsewhere: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/dec/20/bussed-out-america-moves-homeless-people-country-study
In general, the cities claim they are shipping the homeless people to a place where they have support services, like family or a job waiting. This is not always the case.
And what do you do with people like Rose Thompson? An addict, she was shipped out of Key West to live with her daughter in West Virginia after the daughter committed to offering her mother a place to live. But the place to live was a trailer already occupied by her daughter and six other people. After two weeks, her daughter ended up driving her mother to a homeless shelter. Whether or not Ms. Thompson returned to Key West (she did) the problem was not solved. But how should it be solved?
“The homeless in SF come from all over the country. Addressing poverty should be a national priority, and only when it IS a national priority will cities with mild climates and tolerant residents not be inundated.”
I just don’t think this is about poverty. If you subsidize something you get more of it. If you tax something you get less of it. One could argue that in many ways these west coast cities are subsidizing the homeless by enabling them. You don’t go to SF to get out of poverty. We could give everyone of them $50k per year and they’d still be homeless in SF. It seems they refuse to deal with the causes. They won’t put them in psychiatric centers, they won’t arrest the drug users they simply make it a haven for the most disturbed to live. No wonder if people can get to SF they go. In many other cities they will move them somewhere. We can argue whether they get the help they need but they aren’t welcomed.
Yeah so maybe we should subsidize affordable housing. Maybe we should subsidize single room occupancy (SRO) housing.
So what is YOUR solution, Ivvcsf?
@roycroftmom “SF is one of the largest cities which ship homeless OUT on one-way tickets-there is” – So? It clearly doesn’t work!
“They” (the authorities) won’t put “them” (homeless mentally ill people) in psychiatric centers, because involuntary commitment is mostly illegal and because the psychiatric centers mostly don’t exist. It’s not that the San Francisco police are gaily saying, “We could arrest this homeless dude and throw him in that large empty psychiatric center in Fremont, but no, we’re not going to do that.”
@katliamom - Seattle is the destination for other “shippers.” Out of staters as well as some of our local cities that are doing this. I am not saying this is a solution; it actually compounds the problem in the destination cities. This is just kicking the can down the road into the neighbors’ yard so to speak.
One solution would be to raise penalties for drug possession and dealing.
@BunsenBurner – I figured that out after I posted. And it’s an outrageous thing for other cities and states to ship their homeless to Seattle. I wonder how many of them come from San Francisco?
Don’t ship them out. Arrest the drug offenders and enforce vagrancy laws. Don’t give them a choice about sleeping on the streets require that they go to a shelter or somewhere else. I would also ID them so you know who they are. You could put the able bodied to work in the shelters and cleaning the streets. If someone is mentally ill have a place to send them. It could be outside of the city but get them help. If someone does need financial help then it might be a good idea to counsel them and have them go somewhere they can use the skills they have and housing is affordable. Either way don’t simply welcome them and ignore them.
If SF and other west coast cities were willing to do things that discouraged rather than encouraged the homeless population then I could see making this a federal issue. As long as they don’t it’s a SF issue.