Hundreds of unsheltered people living in tent encampments in the blocks surrounding the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco have been forced to leave by city outreach workers and police as part of an attempted “clean up the house” ahead of this week’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation’s annual free trade conference.
The action, which housing advocates allege violated a court injunction, was celebrated by right-wing figures and the tech crowd, who have long been convinced that the city is in terminal decline because of an increase in encampments in the downtown area.
The X account End Wokness wrote that the displacement was proof the “government can easily fix our cities overnight. It just doesn’t want to” (the post received 77,000 likes). “Queer Eye but it’s just Xi visiting troubled US cities then they get a makeover,” joked Packy McCormick, the founder of Not Boring Capital and advisor to Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto VC team. The New York Post celebrated the action, saying that residents had “miraculously disappeared.”
The San Francisco Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing had a 2022-2023 budget of $672 million dollars. This does not include EMT and police services. It’s just what they earmark for homelessness.
In 2022, there were 7,754 unhoused people in San Francisco.
That’s roughly $86,000 per person they spend on getting them housing, and still failing at it. The average rent for an apartment in SF is $3500 a month, or $42,000 per year. They’re spending twice as much as they would if they just got apartments for people.
Where is that money going, I wonder
Housing is just one aspect. Food, medicine, paying for employees (social workers, security, medical staff) etc. But even if say 75% of that was for housing it’s not easy to just say rent them apartments; first off not enough apartment buildings are willing to take them in. It’s difficult to even find cheap motels that will work with cities to temporarily house the homeless even though it’s guaranteed money. Cities are looking at building shelters but then it’s NIMBY time. Without dedicated facilities with mental health, addiction, etc treatment which the US doesn’t have homelessness will be a forever problem.
Two recommendations from me: Podcast limited series According to Need, which is about homelessness in the Bay Area. Book The End of Policing, has a great chapter on homelessness and costs (though I endorse the whole book).
BUT BUT BUT WE CAN’T JUST SOLVE PROBLEMS, WE VAVE TO MANAGE THEM.
Most long-term homeless people can’t just be given free apartments - they have serious, often untreatable problems that would make such a solution unsustainable.
A quick google shows that most homelessness advocacy groups can cite numerous studies that show housing-first solutions are not only more effective, but also cheaper.
Are these studies specifically of the long-term homeless population?
Maybe you should read them and report back
You brought them up but didn’t provide a link.
Yeah because they’re so easy to find it’s literally the first five links on Google.
I didn’t realize I was dealing with someone so content to be misinformed.
There’s no such thing as non-personalized google search anymore, you won’t necessarily see the same results as others
And here are some examples:
Look up the groups behind projects like these and you’re sure to find documentation for their effectiveness. I’d much rather fund these than shelters where nobody feels safe.
Shut the fuck up, there are so many empty, insured buildings rotting away or even sitting in great condition but if we had to build new ones that CAN be done cheaply. No matter how bad they are, their problems would undoubtedly be VASTLY improved by the roof over their heads, and it could be sustained easily by the government taxing the rich even obscenely slightly. But no, instead we pass that burden onto the middle class so they get brainwashed into hating the poor too. Or stigmatizing, looking down on them, writing them all off as lesser beings who don’t deserve a shred of hope. But realistically? Even if you have a million dollars today you could end up like them tomorrow. I remember somebody new starting at pizza hut who had just lost his house and was selling his Ferrari- it can happen to you. So many people are right around the corner from being homeless themselves and don’t know it. Don’t ever let anybody downplay that reality.
I have multiple layers of safety nets between me and long-term homelessness. These include my own personal resources, my family and friends, and access to government assistance. (My family has been on government assistance in the past; we struggled but we were housed and fed.) I can only see myself exhausting (or failing to utilize) all these safety nets if I develop severe addiction or mental illness, and in fact most long-term homeless people do have addictions or mental illnesses.
What do you think happens when someone with out-of-control addiction or mental illness is given a place to live? In the absence of strictly enforced rules (and such rules are one reason many long-term homeless people don’t want to be in shelters) that place will soon be a wrecked crime scene. No matter how many empty buildings there are, almost no one would want that happening to a building he owns, or to a building near where he lives. This is why San Francisco (and many other cities) spend so much per homeless person without success - if simply giving them a place to live worked, cities would have more money and fewer homeless people.
You make it sound like homeless people or drug addicts are animals- learn some fucking empathy, please. Also none of this would be a issue if we had universal healthcare, too. They don’t do either of these things or provide meaningful support to the lower class at all, really because then the police would be even more redundant and people would have additional opportunities to organize. It’s that simple.
Ok putting all this aside for a moment. If you just give someone a place to live you solve many immediate problems. The social worker knows where they are, the food stamps can be delivered right there, you get them out of the elements, any type of medication and you know where it is supposed to go, sanitation is also taken care of if nothing else they can shower.
So right it isn’t an end all be all solution. You can easily have a whole bunch of underlying issues my point is you already got them housed you rid them of a whole mess of problems at once.
Just a fyi. I had a month from hell once and ended up homeless. It was amazing how fast I lost everything. Ended up living in my car until I could I could rebuild. The thing I wanted the most was a clean shower and a change of clothing.
What a fucking lie. They still need housing regardless of their problems so you need to learn to accept them as they are and let them have a roof over their head. Give them a small house and isolate them from others that way if they’re such a problem.
This comment is insane. You realize that a home / apartment needs to be maintained right? It’s not a magical cave that functions on its own. There’s plumbing, there’s electrical, sewage, a person suffering from mental issues cannot be safely just put into a building and left to their own devices.
I’m all for helping the homeless but just saying give them a free apartment is bonkers and completely misses the point why a lot of people are homeless.
It’s also why things will never change. You have the right who say fuck em, let them pull themselves up by the bootstraps and then you have lefties calling for free apartments… Both solutions are insane and basically assure we’ll never come to an agreement and people will continue to suffer.
It would be insane to your classist bigoted NIMBY ass, but that’s the reason why no one on the left listens to worthless Karens like you anymore.
Being a drug addict or severely mentally ill doesn’t mean you can’t or shouldn’t have a house. Actually, the opposite: people like that need to just be given housing more than a normal person because they can’t take care of themselves, and that means even if they destroy the house, they should have it.
Drug addicts and mentally ill people have rights.
They have rights, and there’s nothing you can do to change that fact. Nothing.
And that means they have the right to housing just like the rest of us do.
You’ll have to live among them whether you want to or not, and you best get over it.
I think (s)he meant it more like prison but more spacious
Why is “give people houses” insane? Other countries have done it and virtually eradicated homelessness, Cities and organizations here in the US have tried it. In most cases, even the ones with “serious mental illnesses” are able to seek treatment and manage their illnesses FAR better when they have a stable platform to build upon - meaning a house and food, which eliminates the rather more pressing needs of “I need to figure out where to pitch a tent so the police don’t drag me in” and “I need to eat some time this week or I’ll starve to death” and allows you to start saying “I really want to talk to someone about this PTSD and the drug addiction I developed because of it” or “that social worker was right, I should see about getting on medication for my schizophrenia”. Contrary to what people love to believe, most people with severe mental illnesses DO have touch with reality, and a lot of them simply don’t have the framework necessary to start building a long-term care plan because their meds are expensive, or the meds they’re on have terrible side effects, or they simply don’t have health insurance to be diagnosed and treated properly in the first place.
7754 is the PIT count of people homeless at one given point in time. Many, many more cycle through homelessness in any year.