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I admittedly have not taken the grand tour of each and every neighborhood naturally, and I don't mean to imply that this is representative of the totality of the city. However, I can't think of anywhere in America where such behavior would be tolerated, regardless of the neighborhood in question being in a "bad part of town", let alone one frequented by a large volume of out of town visitors. Name me a city where the cops would not arrest you for smoking crack in public or acting like a lunatic and screaming at passersby?
Do you honestly think it is in the best interests of the city to just twiddle it's thumbs and allow this to happen?
Oh, and ironically enough my buddy that got married out here is originally from Duluth, Minnesota.
Where did I, or anyone, suggest it is in the best interests of the city to twiddle thumbs?
As to other cities where homelessness is rampantly chaotic and you can find areas / encampments where “such behaviors” are “tolerated”? First off, “tolerated” isn’t exactly what’s going on ... “overwhelmed” by the size and scope of the problem and containment logistics is more accurate ... how many cops and jail cells and magistrates and public defenders do you think there are to not only bust thousands of homeless daily - but still keep a presence against all the other crimes from auto theft to burglaries to rapes and murders? Saying nothing of traffic control, accidents, fires, etc.
Anyway, go, as I have, to many of the other major homeless hot spots such as Seattle, San Diego, Los Angeles, Portland, Honolulu, and Washington, D.C. Wander into their homeless jungles ... then come back for more discussion.
Scanning over this thread has been an interesting read. I am in town for a couple more days having just attended a friend/coworkers wedding in town so I figured I would have a look online after spending a couple of days wandering around being a tourist and being verbally accosted by street ferals and junkies at every turn.
For reference, I live in Williston, North Dakota and work at the Bakken Formation. However, prior to that I lived in Houston, and I am originally from Chicago (thus the namesake) so I am certainly no stranger to being exposed to unsavory types and miscreants of all sorts.
That being said, I must admit I was in NO WAY prepared for what I have seen since I got to this place. People smoking crack and shooting up heroin in broad daylight? Raving lunatics on every other street corner and the nearby cops don't seem to care? On my way home I received the official highlight of my trip so far. I heard a strange grunting sound in my general direction coming from a darkened doorway, only to be greeted by a homeless scumbag naked from the waist down masturbating furiously. People were walking by like this is quasi-normal and pretending not to notice. What is the living hell is wrong with this town? How is this OK and accepted? It would appear by the contents of this thread that this is a somewhat normal and expected practice.
Being tolerant and empathetic to your fellow man is an admirable quality, but anything taken to extremes can be harmful, and SF appears to be a case in point. Allowing large swaths of the city to be overrun with junkies and sociopathic criminals operating with impunity does not make you enlightened. It makes you an enabler. If some enterprising journalist with a camera crew gets their hands on some of the things I have seen in my 72 hours here, I would imagine it would be a catastrophe for the cities tourism dollars.
Whatever your elected officials are doing to combat this problem is clearly not working.
It's a complex problem. What would you like the Police to do? Do you think that chasing down someone with a crack pipe is the solution? I've seen a lot but I've never seen a dope fiend use dope with a cop standing next to them and you can't arrest someone for drug possession on the word of a citizen calling the cops to report having seen someone using drugs. And when SFPD arrests people for loitering, or for just being a general nuisance the jail won't book them because the jail is too crowded. You can detain a mentally ill person for 72 hours if they are in danger of harming themself or others but there aren't enough psych beds to even keep them for 72 hours so the ER docs pump them full of psych meds and send them out the door an hour or two after they arrive.
You should have called the police about the guy masturbating in public, if he was still there when the police arrived he definitely would have been arrested, but for some reason you didn't and I can't help but wonder why? That's a criminal offense and if everyone just walks past it and does nothing about it, how can you expect the Police to stop it from happening?
It's easy to observe a situation and criticize law enforcement or local government for the situation, but coming up with viable solutions have eluded pretty much everyone, and easy fixes re nowhere to be found. Rent is extraordinarily high in San Francisco and most of the low rent options, i.e. SROs have been torn down or converted to trendy condos.
That being said, I must admit I was in NO WAY prepared for what I have seen since I got to this place. People smoking crack and shooting up heroin in broad daylight? Raving lunatics on every other street corner and the nearby cops don't seem to care? On my way home I received the official highlight of my trip so far. I heard a strange grunting sound in my general direction coming from a darkened doorway, only to be greeted by a homeless scumbag naked from the waist down masturbating furiously. People were walking by like this is quasi-normal and pretending not to notice. What is the living hell is wrong with this town? How is this OK and accepted? It would appear by the contents of this thread that this is a somewhat normal and expected practice.
Welcome to the sickest society in the US! No one in their right mind would find this OK or acceptable. No one!
Welcome to the sickest society in the US! No one in their right mind would find this OK or acceptable. No one!
Right. No one does find it acceptable or ok. But people who understand the multi-faceted complexities of the homeless problems know that simplistic rant solutions aren’t feasible answers.
Right. No one does find it acceptable or ok. But people who understand the multi-faceted complexities of the homeless problems know that simplistic rant solutions aren’t feasible answers.
Right. Though if I had to guess in an area like San Francisco they have probably thrown every social program ever conceived by mankind at the problem over time, and probably spent hundreds of billions of dollars in the process. If I am wrong in that assumption feel free to correct me. In any event, none of this seems to be working. If anything it is making the problem worse.
Could it be that there are workable solutions out there which do not conform with the prevailing political dogma of the city? There are certainly many problems in the world that can't be solved by trying to liberal it to death. There are many parts of the country, both those that are predominately liberal and conservative alike, that are so awash with political fanaticism that it makes problem solving far more difficult than it needs to be.
Right. Though if I had to guess in an area like San Francisco they have probably thrown every social program ever conceived by mankind at the problem over time, and probably spent hundreds of billions of dollars in the process. If I am wrong in that assumption feel free to correct me. In any event, none of this seems to be working. If anything it is making the problem worse.
Could it be that there are workable solutions out there which do not conform with the prevailing political dogma of the city? There are certainly many problems in the world that can't be solved by trying to liberal it to death. There are many parts of the country, both those that are predominately liberal and conservative alike, that are so awash with political fanaticism that it makes problem solving far more difficult than it needs to be.
The solution is to provide more shelter space. Most shelters are emergency shelters, i.e you wait in line sometimes for hours for a bed that you can only use for one night, then the next day you start the process all over again. Most emergency shelters don't allow you to bring your belongings inside and forbid pets so unless it's very cold or rainy most homeless people reject emergency shelters.
San Francisco has fewer shelter beds now than they did in 2004. The city started opening navigation centers a few years ago which offer a bed for 30-60 days but after that they are out on the street again. What is needed is long term supportive housing, even if it's in barrack type facilities but you can't just give people a place to sleep for a month and somehow think they are going to be able to manage on their own after that.
San Francisco is also in desperate need of mental health beds. People are taken to the hospital for psych evaluations and released the same day, not because they are ok but because there are no psych beds for them.
The new mayor plans on opening 1,000 more shelter beds this year, and if she accomplishes that it might put the City in a position where they can at least order the homeless who are living on the street to accept shelter or go to jail. The courts have ruled that if you can't give them a place to sleep you can't arrest them or prohibit them from sleeping on the street.
When you try to put SF's homeless problem into perspective, keep this figure in mind. In San Francisco a family of four earning $117,000 is considered low income.
The solution is to provide more shelter space. Most shelters are emergency shelters, i.e you wait in line sometimes for hours for a bed that you can only use for one night, then the next day you start the process all over again. Most emergency shelters don't allow you to bring your belongings inside and forbid pets so unless it's very cold or rainy most homeless people reject emergency shelters.
San Francisco has fewer shelter beds now than they did in 2004. The city started opening navigation centers a few years ago which offer a bed for 30-60 days but after that they are out on the street again. What is needed is long term supportive housing, even if it's in barrack type facilities but you can't just give people a place to sleep for a month and somehow think they are going to be able to manage on their own after that.
San Francisco is also in desperate need of mental health beds. People are taken to the hospital for psych evaluations and released the same day, not because they are ok but because there are no psych beds for them.
The new mayor plans on opening 1,000 more shelter beds this year, and if she accomplishes that it might put the City in a position where they can at least order the homeless who are living on the street to accept shelter or go to jail. The courts have ruled that if you can't give them a place to sleep you can't arrest them or prohibit them from sleeping on the street.
When you try to put SF's homeless problem into perspective, keep this figure in mind. In San Francisco a family of four earning $117,000 is considered low income.
What 2sleepy said ...
... and add for further thought that: SF is a very dense city on an isthmus. Super expensive real estate. There is NO affordable free space to create new shelter spaces.
Welcome to the sickest society in the US! No one in their right mind would find this OK or acceptable. No one!
The citizens of San Francisco and the San Francisco area voted overwhelmingly for politicians and policies that released and continually releases criminals ( most life-long) and mentally ill to fend for themselves outside. they do awful things so nobody wants to live with them or give them a place to stay anywhere near them.
The citizens of San Francisco and the San Francisco area OBVIOUSLY like and want the the vagrants to increase in number and to the behavior to get worse- the November election punctuated that. The citizens of San Francisco and the San Francisco area voted for it and OBVIOUSLY are willing to pay a LOT to make sure the problems and violence against innocent citizens exacerbates and indeed that will happen.
Breaking into cars is about tapped out (the low hanging fruit to the vagrants), the competition for crime opportunities to get drug money is increasing with the increase in criminal and mentally ill vagrants; the vagrants know that law enforcement does nothing to prevent crime by vagrants and don't really seem to care about pursuing criminals after they do what they do ( its difficult and expensive not to mention dangerous). What will the vagrants do for money? They have only been trained to be criminals......
Putting them into any kind of unsupervised, unsecured facility will not make them nice , stable people- look at what a mess New York is- The citizens of San Francisco and the San Francisco area will get what they voted and pay for... and then some. The increase in feces piles, urine puddle,needles, and mess .... they will wish it was only that!
The solution is to provide more shelter space. Most shelters are emergency shelters, i.e you wait in line sometimes for hours for a bed that you can only use for one night, then the next day you start the process all over again. Most emergency shelters don't allow you to bring your belongings inside and forbid pets so unless it's very cold or rainy most homeless people reject emergency shelters.
San Francisco has fewer shelter beds now than they did in 2004. The city started opening navigation centers a few years ago which offer a bed for 30-60 days but after that they are out on the street again. What is needed is long term supportive housing, even if it's in barrack type facilities but you can't just give people a place to sleep for a month and somehow think they are going to be able to manage on their own after that.
San Francisco is also in desperate need of mental health beds. People are taken to the hospital for psych evaluations and released the same day, not because they are ok but because there are no psych beds for them.
The new mayor plans on opening 1,000 more shelter beds this year, and if she accomplishes that it might put the City in a position where they can at least order the homeless who are living on the street to accept shelter or go to jail. The courts have ruled that if you can't give them a place to sleep you can't arrest them or prohibit them from sleeping on the street.
When you try to put SF's homeless problem into perspective, keep this figure in mind. In San Francisco a family of four earning $117,000 is considered low income.
If you need a 6 figure plus income just to be poor then I would say the long term prospects of just about all of SF's homeless population ever being able to "get on their feet" is just about zero. Even if they were mentally stable, not crackheads, and did not have a long criminal rap sheet, the level of means required to go from the streets to a stable living situation seems insurmountable. It sounds like about their only option if being self sufficient is their goal is to eventually flee the city entirely. I would wager that many of the homeless there have no such desires however. Just less harassment from law enforcement than they would receive elsewhere, a steady supply of street drugs, and more robust services and freebees.
Perhaps San Francisco should coordinate with some other communities in California or even other states that are not ridiculously expensive and have more open geography. Keeping addicts in the city where the supply of drugs is plentiful can't be helpful to recovery.
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