I also like clean safe unobstructed sidewalks and parks but along with benches, we've made a decision. We've decided that putting the mentally ill in a facility and arresting people for public drug use is not something we're comfortable with at the expense of those other things. I don't personally ageee with this decision but it is apparently the consensus.
And what a strange consensus it is. The prevailing belief seems to be that preventing people from slowly/quickly killing themselves on the street (or, more accurately, dying from addiction) is somehow not "progressive" and the moral thing to do is to pretend like these people have made the choice of their own volition and that we cannot judge them for this choice.
In reality, the people who are just rotting away on our streets would be better served if they were brought somewhere against their will and kept there until they were better. Society would also be better served if we did this. The government choosing to involuntarily constrain people isn't something that should be done lightly, but sometimes it is the lesser evil. We've completely abandoned these people and somehow done so in the name of compassion. It's really depressing.
What a strange false dichotomy. Either we do absolutely nothing to help people, or we involuntarily incarcerate them?
The actually progressive option is to provide meaningful public support programs, and also make housing affordable (by building enough housing). The US mostly doesn't do either of those, but it should.
These programs exist, but they are underutilized to a significant degree.
From a partner who used to work in one, people:
- didn't trust the program and wouldn't sign up
- didn't actually want to quit using so they avoided it
- wanted to get the benefits from the program without changing anything (i.e. showed up to get free food etc)
- tried but didn't like it and went back to using
Very few people actually went all the way through compared to the population in the city that could have used it.
The real question is: how do you help people who do not want your help. Do you let them waste away and die on the sidewalk, or do you institutionalize them?
The answer to that question in a society that allows (mostly) autonomy of choice is that we let them die on the street.
I'm not convinced that involuntary incarceration will actually fix the problem. I believe it will just take it off of the streets and out of the public consciousness.
I have a very good friend who was an addict, and I tried to help him turn his life around in many ways, but I couldn’t figure out a way. Professionals told me “he has to hit rock bottom.”
Anyhow he wound up getting arrested and spent a couple of weeks in jail where he got clean and decided to turn his life around. He went on to get a couple of masters degrees, get married, have two kids, and has a good job. He credits his time in jail for saving his life.
At the core of this is that your friend came to the realization that he wanted to change his life. He can credit his time in jail for this. However that doesn't mean it will be the same for everyone, or that there's only a single potential trigger to get someone to recover from drug addiction
I knew somebody who turned his life around after surviving an attempted murder. I still don't think that means that trying to murder people whose lives are going awry is a rational solution.
No, I'm saying that both things could have them same effect, so the existence of that effect isn't a proof that the solution makes sense.
If I tell you that covering something in red paint and covering something in tomato sauce will stain them both red, I'm not saying that red paint is tomato sauce.
I also know people who have changed their lives after heart attacks. Am I saying that heart attacks are roughly equivalent to prison stays?
Taking the problem of crazy severely-mentally-ill people off the streets and out of the public consciousness is strictly better than having that problem be on the streets and in the public consciousness because it's happening around the public all the time. If nothing else, it reduces the chances that a random commuter will get randomly stabbed on the subway by a severely crazy person.
>I believe it will just take it off of the streets and out of the public consciousness.
If antisocial people do not exist in the public consciousness, then that means the problem is fixed. Even you never have to worry about locking your front door, then the problem of burglars has been fixed even if technically would be burglars may exist in prison.
Drug addicts and the mentally ill don't have the problem of being "antisocial." They have drug addiction and mental illness. "Antisocial" is the problem that you have when you see them, and is the problem that is solved when you don't see them. It's a completely narcissistic way of looking at things.
For example, putting you in prison would also solve the problem of your objection to them. You would still be surrounded by drug addicts and the mentally ill in prison, but we wouldn't have to listen to you complain about it, so our problems would be solved.
I think you are underestimating how few bad actors it takes to ruin a system, but I do agree with your point that you can also remove the people who think they are negatively impacted. For example in Counter Strike you can either ban the small percentage of cheaters or you could cultivate the community to not care if people are cheating.
This isn't the 1980s anymore. Using drugs is perfectly fine. A ton of people here on HN take drugs regularly, but few think it's worth to rock the boat against this kind of nonsense you're spreading
Have you ever interacted with a heroine or meth user?
Sometimes using drugs is fine, depending on the drug, the reason, and the person. For example, I did cocaine once and immediately knew I needed to cut ties with those friends because if I had access to it regularly, I would ruin my life. Others can do coke recreationally and not have an issue. Others can't form the insight I had until their lives are in shambles, and maybe not even then.
Frankly, I think we need to bring back corporal punishment for specific crimes. The process to arrest, prosecute, and then imprison people for "public space crimes" is basically flawed.
Arresting and prosecuting is slow and expensive, prisons are full. A prison sentence destroys whatever remaining support system a person has and a conviction like that makes getting a job in the future nearly impossible.
We should just have a quick path to short and non-damaging corporal punishment. A quick video recording, an instant review by a judge via zoom, then immediate punishment. This would deter theft, damaging public property, etc. while not costing a lot to taxpayers and not causing long term damage to the individual. Crime is never on the record at all so does not affect background checks. Treatment programs are always offered instead of the corporal punishment.
(Of course mental health conditions complicate this, it's difficult to solve that without forced institutionalizing them).
maybe the problem here is the gate that requires them to quit cold turkey before offering them any help? I know it offends people morally to 'subsidize drug use', but that's a really high barrier for an opioid or crank addict to meet. the other issues are that people complain that its very prison like, in terms of the volume and severity of rules. the other really unfortunate thing is that some fraction of the homeless population is _really nasty_. so no one really wants to get locked up with these people.
but to say that the majority of them don't want any help is just wrong.
Yes, exactly, there's a reason the term is "continuum of care." There is no one-size-fits-all approach to solving addiction because, to quote Ted Lasso, all people are different people. Maybe some people do need to be involuntarily incarcerated, but many, many others would be able to recover with far less intrusive interventions.
Also we are chasing a lagging indicator by focusing exclusively on the homeless population. The vast majority of people who end up homeless because of addiction would have benefited from some far earlier, far milder form of intervention, or from the absence of something that actively drove them into addiction, e.g. some quack pushing oxycontin on them because Purdue Pharma promoted it as non-addictive. Or job loss because of offshoring pushing them into economic despair that then drives addiction, which they are unable to recover from because of the lack of affordable or accessible retraining or educational opportunities.
In many cases over the last 20-30 years, it was the combination of both job loss and careless opioid prescription that pushed people into an unrecoverable spiral, especially in the rust belt, where the opioid crisis hit the hardest. We may not have fixed the job loss side of the problem, but at least doctors aren't pushing pills the same way they were 10-20 years ago after Purdue's corporate downfall, so the number of people driven into addiction-mediated homelessness by that disaster should at least start tapering off soon. But if we don't help people before their lives fall apart with a continuum of support options that are accessible before they are in deep crisis, and are accessible to people who are beginning to spiral but don't yet appear to be in deep crisis, it will cost far more and be far more challenging to help them recover once they are on the street.
I'm not sure if you've had a drug addict in your life at any point, and if not that is a blessing.
Drug addiction is a dark place and it's very common that the availability of free support programs is entirely rejected by the user, and the only hope at a normal life requires forceful intervention by family and friends.
The only way to solve drugs on the street is to look at the cities that have solved them and copy what works. And, at least with what I'm familiar with, arresting people tends to work and alternatives tend to not.
You seem to be equating "homeless" with "drug addict". The article talks about taking away public benches because of homelessness.
There are different programs needed for drug addiction than for homelessness. Not everyone who's homeless has a drug problem, and not everyone with a drug problem is homeless.
We didn't eliminate benches in public spaces because we wanted to reduce the presence of the nice, respectful, and polite homeless. We eliminated benches to reduce the presence of the problematic homeless, which has a much higher rate of drug abuse and mental illness.
>We eliminated benches to reduce the presence of the problematic homeless, which has a much higher rate of drug abuse and mental illness.
We eliminated benches to reduce the rate at which the problematic homeless cross paths with the complainers.
The DPW as an organization doesn't give a shit about how many commuter's asses a bench serves from 6am to 8pm. It just knows that every day when Karen sees a homeless man sleeping on that bench at 5AM she submits a complaint from the web form.
From their stupid "not my job, I just solve tickets" keyhole view of the situation removing the benches makes the problem smaller and they will iterate on that until complaint equilibrium is reached.
When I was in San Francisco, I had a homeless man with one eye (the empty eye socket actively oozing) come up to me unprovoked (quite literally unprovoked, I was just on a walk and not interacting with anybody at all), get within 2 centimeters of my face, and scream at the top of his lungs "I WILL MURDER YOU". He then walked away and nothing else of note happened (aside from me spending the rest of the evening with my pulse at 140).
Suffice to say, I don't think it's fair to categorize me as a Karen for asserting that San Francisco has a large number of problematic homeless people. I could give about 8 other stories (from SF, Boston, NYC, and Chicago) that happened to me, two of which (both SF) include grown men dropping their pants, exposing their genitals, and visibly pooping on public streets where children were present, with no attempt to obtain any degree of privacy.
These aren't stories from my friends, these are things that I personally witnessed and experienced. These aren't 'oh that guy is ugly and smelly' stories, these are 'if I did that myself I would be arrested' stories.
What would the police do about it, arrest the homeless person? Would the local criminal justice system have the capacity to charge and convict them if the cops did so? Many of the cities where visible homelessness is a problem also have shortages of cops that cause them to triage what sorts of incidents they send an officer to respond to?
I probably would not have called the police after this person if this happened to me, because I expect they would do nothing about it.
I assure you that problematic homeless people sleep on benches in public spaces at times during the day when normal people using the public transit system normally would like to use them (also sometimes people, reasonably enough, want to take public transit late at night or in the early morning). That's why the authorities remove the benches.
You use disparaging slurs ("Karen") to refer to a woman who just wants to ride the bus to get to work and earn an living, and you politely call a person who is a public nuisance a "homeless man".
Karen isn't a name in the same way that Boommer isn't an age. It's a state of mind.
We're not talking about the people who have been genuinly victimized. We're talking about the people who wring their hands over some smelly guy in some corner on the subway. Because they dominate the stats.
False, and harmful. US HUD says it's ~16% of homeless people, other sources give different numbers, but it's certainly not a majority, let alone anywhere near 100%.
The biggest problem, unsurprisingly, is housing cost. The US GAO states that a $100 increase in median rent correlates to a 9% rise in homelessness. Rents have gone up a lot more than that.
> US HUD says it's ~16% of homeless people, other sources give different numbers, but it's certainly not a majority
"Homeless people" is a broad category that includes people temporarily living in vehicles, bouncing between family members, or sleeping on a friend's couch. It also includes people who are about to lose their home, young people living alone.
But when everyday people use the term, they usually mean, specifically, visible homeless people - i.e. people who are homeless long-term, sleeping rough on the streets or in parks, etc.
The two groups are pretty different to each other. I would be very surprised if the rate of drug addiction in the second group was the same as the rate of drug addiction in the first group
I personally have close to a dozen friends who have spent between 2 and 6 weeks of their life (but not longer) living out of their car in a state of actual temporary homelessness. Almost always due to financial issues.
Temporarily living in vehicles is absolutely a thing.
> I would be very surprised if the rate of drug addiction in the second group was the same as the rate of drug addiction in the first group
But that's a far far weaker claim than the one above.
If the rate is 90% or higher in the second group, then we get close to the claim being true. (Though still a subset rather than the circles being the same; lots of people with drug problems have homes.)
Walk down the makeshift tents on the sidewalks of downtown San Francisco and tell me with a straight face that only 16% of those people are addicted to drugs.
Sorry. But you're either misinformed or actively malicious here.
> US HUD says it's ~16% of homeless people
It absolutely is close to 100% of _unsheltered_ people. Some social workers helping the unsheltered homeless are now saying that they have not seen anybody who's _not_ on drugs or who is not mentally ill.
> Hundreds of studies - including our own - show economic pressures are the primary drivers of homelessness, that housing people ends homelessness, and that targeted financial assistance helps people at risk of homelessness stay stably housed
Also, the cited study blatantly does not show the numbers ("close to 100%") you claim it has, even leaving that aside. You're also now equivocating between drugs and mental illness, as well as between drugs and alcohol. And you're not taking into account the direction of cause and effect (e.g. which came first, the homelessness or the addiction).
I understand that you're also referencing anecdata from social workers. In those cases, there's an inherent bias: people with a drug problem are going to be harder and more memorable cases, which makes them feel like a larger proportion than they are. People homeless for economic reasons are likely to loom less large in people's minds than the times they dealt with someone who had a drug problem.
> arresting people tends to work and alternatives tend to not
What I've read many times is that (essentially) the oppposite is widely accepted consensus: Arresting never works. The US tried the 'drug war' for decades and it was ineffective. Do you have evidence otherwise? It's also unjust to criminalize illness and medical problems for poor people (rich people get sympathy, rehab, and lots of second chances).
What does work is overdose prevention, including needle exhanges and safe injection sites, treating addition as the disease it is (which is how it's treated for rich people), and housing (people experiencing the great instability and stress of homelessness are much less likely to make other changes). Maybe some others I'm not thinking of, too.
Any meaningful public support program that actually keeps severely-mentally-ill visibly-homeless people from acting crazy in public will necessarily involve involuntarily incarcerating at least some of them, some of the time. A lot of very dysfunctional people genuinely do not want to cooperate with meaningful public support programs or are simply too out of it to meaningfully consent or not consent to participation in such.
At least in California, there are a lot of public support programs. I mean, a looooot of public support programs. A LOT. Like, to the point where the state is spending tens of thousands of dollars for each homeless person, and probably north of $100k per person per year for a subset. Talk to a firefighter or paramedic in a CA city sometime. They will tell you, there's "regulars" that they have to deal with every single week. The cops and firefighters know all of them by name.
We're paying hours a day in overtime to basically have the cops, firefighters, and EMTs deal with the same small population of mentally ill people on the same street corner every week, for years. These people cannot get better because they choose not to stay in the mental hospital or substance abuse programs offered to them. Someone is 5150'd, placed on a 3-day hold, and 72 hours later they walk out of the hospital and back to the same street corner, where they have a mental breakdown again the following week. You can offer support -- they will basically tell you the same thing, I'm not sick at all, there's nothing wrong with me, I am not a danger to myself or others, and you are shit out of luck.
At the same time, there are way more homeless people who are silently and cleanly living in their cars and showing up to work every day at a low wage job. Most people won't ever see them unless they look closely. Visit /r/urbancarliving sometime to get an idea of what that population looks like. Those people might get a 15 minute "knock" from the cops once a month.
The actually progressive option is to involuntarily incarcerate people who need it, while not criminalizing car/RV living, offering work placement services, housing assistance etc. The most realistic thing would probably be to build subsidized mobile homes and clean, low-rent central places to park an RV.
You correctly identified the biggest thing here though which is making housing affordable. Unfortunately, that will never happen.
I mostly agree with your points, but I think the involuntary incarceration is a major rock and a hard place situation.
There are definitely people for whom it would be a compassionate (and often societally optimal) thing to do. Giving the government the power to decide to take people away indefinitely is just a spectacularly bad precedent. Especially right now.
Yes, you have to be very, very careful. Lots of abuse with involuntary commitment, that's part of why it was abolished so completely.
I mean the reason this is a pipe dream and we all just opt to deal with it is that our state/institutional capacity has been eroded so completely. So, we just take away the public benches and call it a day.
The cruel way to do this is to just criminalize the behavior and then move all these people into the prison system. I think that would be a moral sin, but I see why people go there -- the alternative would be to construct a totally new, parallel mental health system with kinda like a jury/parole board type system, representation, and so on, and make it explicitly not part of the criminal justice system. Since the point is rehabilitation, not justice. All that would probably be insanely expensive, but a society focused on the humanity of its citizens would probably see it as worthwhile. Our society unfortunately, just does not see its citizens that way.
One of the benefits of institutionalizing the problematic homeless (either via incarceration or involuntarily mental health treatment, there's not a whole lot of difference between those two things from the perspective of the person subject to them anyway), is that it would allow the state to relax certain laws about simply being unsheltered without otherwise causing problems for people. Someone who is living silently and cleanly in their car is not a problem for me - I know more than one relatively well-paid, reasonably-intelligent person who is basically living that kind of lifestyle voluntarily - and I would prefer it if they weren't even getting a 15 minute knock from the cops once a month.
I live in a shelter, if you looked at the cost per person, it would probably be north 20k per resident to be housed here. This is the overhead of rent, utilities, salaries for case worker, security, maintenance, etc. When you include other parts of the system, it's easily another 5k; this isn't even taking in account of SNAP, cash assistance, medicaid, etc. There is a whole system and it ain't cheap.
Now, this isn't to say living is great. You are living in a dorm with 20+ felons, you have bedbugs to contend with, and it's dirty. I still have a normal ass job as well. Being homeless fucking sucks.
I didn't create this "false dichotomy", nor did I say that those were the only two options. I'm just observing the fact that the current system that the major cities in the US seem to be employing is to treat homeless as a valid choice, even if much/most of it is a result of addiction and mental illness. The end result of that treating it that way is the death and suffering of people who actually need lots of help and who would be better served by more aggressive tactics.
I don't believe it's a deliberate decision by (most) policymakers. I think it's a structural failure across several axes, including failure to make enough housing for it to be affordable, and attacks on every front by people who treat all social programs and public assistance as evil. Most places have one or the other problem, if not both.
A drug-addicted/mentally ill chronically unsheltered person is not going to be able to afford a home at any price. If they could hold down any kind of regular job and sustain an income they would find someplace to live.
Also most "affordable" housing initiatives attack it by mandating "affordable" for new construction instead of just letting developers build what they can make the most money building. No developer wants to build "affordable" homes if they can build and sell high-end homes. So by imposing "affordability" mandates, they just encourage developers to go elsewhere.
New high-end homes make the older homes more affordable. New "affordable" homes simply don't get built, at least not in anywhere near the numbers that are needed.
To your first point: people don't typically start out that way, things spiral down. And it's much harder to get out of that spiral if homes are completely unaffordable. It also doesn't help that the most temperate places (where you won't die of exposure if unsheltered) are also the least affordable places (because they're prosperous and haven't built nearly enough housing).
> Also most "affordable" housing initiatives attack it by mandating "affordable" for new construction instead of just letting developers build what they can make the most money building. No developer wants to build "affordable" homes if they can build and sell high-end homes. So by imposing "affordability" mandates, they just encourage developers to go elsewhere.
> New high-end homes make the older homes more affordable. New "affordable" homes simply don't get built, at least not in anywhere near the numbers that are needed.
Complete agreement that the current approach is not working, yes. The right approach is to build, and keep building, until everything is affordable. And the political challenge is the existing cohort of people who think a house should be an asset that appreciates rather than a necessity of life that everyone should be able to afford. People who are put in a particularly bad position by that (e.g. difficulty moving or retiring because housing prices went down) may need help.
And once things have spiraled down, they won't recover just by giving them a home. My town tried that and the homes were quickly trashed to the point of being uninhabitable because nothing (or not enough) was done to address the addictions and other self-destructive behaviors or illness.
Any kind of assistance has to be built on a foundation of mandatory rehab/treatment and staying clean or it will fail.
Unfortunately, framing the problem as this kind of dichotomy is something people are inclined to do because then the problem can be reduced to the unwillingness of the opposing side to face reality.
Sometimes the dichotomy is correct, but the bias exists.
Nothing?? What are you talking about? Go look up how much tax money the SF government spends trying to help the unhoused in their current budget. But no amount will fix the problem because if you ask a drug addict if they want help (and it’s not help getting drugs) they usually say “no thanks.” Many addicts are never ready to accept that kind of help. Sadly.
Super strongly agree with you on that. But unfortunately building tons of housing is quite politically unpopular as well, unless it’s wildly stupid housing, like the “affordable housing” that costs more (paid by the city) to build than market rate costs for some reason.
I think a big part of this queasiness comes from the fact that a lot of the institutions we would put addicts and mentally ill people in really were nightmarish.
And ignoring the whole issue of the sanitariums being full of abuse, I don't think you can argue that sticking a drug addict in a regular prison full of criminals is good for them either.
The main reasons those places lost support is they became convenient prisons without due process. Why do you think there are so many horror movies based on the setting of a sane person involuntarily put there?
While not ideal you gotta admit now that those people that need help are in your face rather than conveniently disappeared you are thinking about their plight some.
Maybe try to think of something better than forever prisons and stop becoming a ghoul.
'I think you would be better served by not posting to social media and studying personal liberty and ethics.' Should I be able to enforce it? I think people who make comments like those above are much more dangerous than people on the street - the people on the street can't really do harm.
Thankfully, we do have liberty, and they can do what they want - and I can do what I want - and it's none of your business whether it's healthy or not. People also smoke, are sedentary (lots of people here), eat very poorly, use psilocybin (relatively popular here), drink too much, etc.
The only way to begin to approach it is, rather than making judgments on overused stereotypes (another reason to be banned from online comments), talk to each person and ask what they are doing and what they need. I know, I know - it's outrageous to ask the opinions of people you deem substandard, even about their own lives.
Yes the guy who screamed “I’m going to f*ing kill you!” Out of nowhere at my daughter and then chased us, or set fire to random trees in my neighborhood for fun, or cut the copper wiring off the side of my house, or took sledge hammers to local park statues, these people are definitely not a problem. No the problem is really the people who think it should stop. Those horrible, insensitive people.
They’r being so selfish. Drug addicted should have every right to pull you down screaming by your hair because they’re tweaked out of their mind. And after seeing that, you should be welcoming every one you see to your home.
You’re really the problem for feeling uncomfortable walking by the man jerking off to passerby’s, so intolerant of you.
(Every one of these is a true example I have witnessed, along with too much other insanity to write down, from just the last year in Seattle. so don’t tell me im exaggerating)
My city is deadlocked on doing anything about the literal crimes I’ve described because acting against violent offenders is seen as oppressing the downtrodden. Building new shelter capacity is insanely difficult because no one wants concentrations of this near them, and concentrated homeless services turn the area into a waste land (like pioneer square) due to the amount of criminal and antisocial behavior. Raising enough money in taxes seems out of the question because everyone thinks someone else should pay.
So you get common crime and antisocial behavior in much of the city and no one can do anything about it.
> Every one of these is a true example I have witnessed, along with too much other insanity to write down, from just the last year in Seattle
Now that you bring it up, it looks to me like you're exaggerating or extremely unlucky. It reminds me of the litany of crimes people claim happen with immigrants; weren't they eating the cats in one town?
Somehow in my experience in urban life, in many different neighborhoods, I haven't encountered a fraction of what you claim to have seen in the last year, and all the things you describe are so dramatic, while much of what I do know about, not experienced, is mundane and depressing. And of course, nobody would live in cities if things were that bad.
As someone else said, crimes are crimes; plenty of housed people commit them too. I see unhoused people every day and interact regularly, and I haven't seen a crime (of course, crime happens in any population).
Isn't liberty and human rights more important than whatever you're trying to accomplish? You diminish it for others, yours is diminished too.
What cities? You’re right that I never saw anything like this when I lived in Oslo, nor did I see anything like it living in Sydney.
I’m reacting to a specific environment in two major west coast cities, Seattle which I now live, and San Francisco where I regularly travel for work. What I’m describing is not unlucky in these cities, it’s “I take the light rail to pioneer square for work every day.”
They would be better if they were given support. Locking people away is not a solution to anything. You've been sold a lie about the mentally ill, and the homeless, which isn't true.
Yes but critically none of this money is actually given to the homeless person. So we aren't giving them anything for free we are just dealing with the consequences of them not having a proper support system. Spending money to do that is okay, because it doesn't really directly benefit the homeless person.
Also the essence of ‘San Francisco has a lot of homeless’ isn’t really a logical argument against those policies since homeless will often migrate to where the functional support services are. San Francisco may well be doing amazing things with getting people back on their feet at a relatively lower cost than prison.
You need to go many levels deeper on statistics to understand if it’s working or not.
> since homeless will often migrate to where the functional support services are.
I've heard this a lot but I don't have any reason to believe it's true. Never seen a reputable study that asserts it. I've known a lot of homeless people but none that relocated for this reason. Most who moved were looking for work or trying to get closer to family. Most didn't move at all and were just where they had always been, or in the city they were living in when they became homeless.
when I did homeless outreach in San Diego I was told around 40% of the people we were helping were from out of state that moved there but couldn't stay afloat for various reasons, leaving them homeless in the area
Sorry this is very wrong. SF has so many homeless people because they come to SF to get free things.
Most of that is not direct cash transfers but they absolutely receive more in services than in other places, that is why they attract homeless from all over the country.
I'll add that treating the inmates like cattle is actually the most expensive option of all in the long term. The USA has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world largely due to high recidivism due to the system not providing proper rehabilitation.
So it's costing the USA 65k/yr per inmate on average right now with the 5th highest incarceration rate in the world. The 4 countries above it are not nice places to live contrary to the thought that locking even more people up would make the USA just like the other western nations of the world.
No other country is as stupid as the USA when it comes to homeless. They don't spend a lifetime $65k/yr repeatedly locking up such people. Instead they spend a fraction (when amortised over a lifetime of jail costs) on rehabilitation and public health programs.
The cost is not measured in dollars, but rather in the pollution of the pubic space. People feel less safe and more bothered. Stores nearby get less business, and suffer more theft. Passerbys get accosted.
Disagree. When the tax-paying public doesn't feel safe around the people living on the sidewalk, they move and take their tax money with them. That means less money for services, roads, education... everything taxes pay for.
Now I haven't done any scientific polling, but my informal anecdotal experience is so overwhelmingly to the contrary that I'm comfortable believing that consensus isn't determining policy here.
> We've decided that putting the mentally ill in a facility and arresting people for public drug use is not something we're comfortable with at the expense of those other things.
We've decided this about every kind of health care. Instead of providing treatment for people who can't afford its bizarre, artificial prices, we prefer to leave them on the street or warehouse them in prisons. After leaving them in prison for an arbitrary amount of time, we then release them into the streets again, with nothing, more screwed up than when they went in, to murder you.
I have no idea what the "tough love" advocates are advocating for. Locking them up in prison is like hiding rotting meat in a freezer; it only works if you're willing to do it forever. The only answer that seems compatible with the spoiled upper-middle class worldview is to shoot the homeless (which often happened* in a lot of South American countries through semi-official paramilitaries), or to drive them into the wilderness outside of town to hopefully die on their own.
As the layoffs of programmers continue, I predict there will be a lot of changes of heart that won't matter at all, because they will be coming from homeless people. Middle-class culture is all about only being interested in issues that harm you directly, even if that issue is somebody dying too loudly nearby.
This sounds like it's from someone who say a video on the two square blocks in SF or Philly and has let the propaganda make them believe this is common everywhere in every American city.
So basically the problem is that productive members of society and drug dealers are incapable of existing near to each other?
Why is that?
I pass by some drug dealers sometimes on the way to work. I don't see the problem. Occasionally I get asked if I want to buy some drugs. I don't want to buy drugs so nothing else happens.
> [why are] productive members of society and drug dealers incapable of existing near to each other?
Drug dealers are criminals. Criminals commit other crimes and attract other criminals and crime. For example, rival drug dealers who want to take their spot and use violence.
So the problem is that someone who does one crime is a criminal and being a criminal means someone does every crime? For example, someone who removes DRM from a video game is a criminal, and therefore he also shoots people, so we have to put DRM removers in jail to decrease shooting deaths?
I have to admit, I'm not really following the logic there.
Because you made a strawman out of their point. Reasonable people avoid drug markets for good reason.
Drug crimes and non-drug crimes (assault, robbery, x/y/z) commonly cluster[1], and citizens with working risk estimation skills move on and cede the space.
I'd add that we also chose policies that made housing expensive. It used to be much cheaper to live in NYC for example, but housing options included what was essentially a dorm room with shared facilities. Those were outlawedes for various reasons. There are also a lot of other policy factors that push up housing prices.
Cheap housing isn't a panacea, but if there was sub $500 dollar rent in NYC you'd see a lot less homelessness.
Single-room occupancy (SRO) housing was effectively outlawed by tenant protection laws. The only way that housing with shared facilities can possibly work is when the landlord enforces strict rules and immediately evicts tenants who misbehave by making a mess, hassling other tenants, or not paying their rent. But in many cities it can literally take years to evict a tenant, and the city will even pay for legal aid for the tenant to fight it in court. This reduces rental housing availability and increases prices for everyone.
Idk about NYC but the people I see on fent in west coast cities’ homeless encampments couldn’t pay a $500 rent any more than they can the $5,000. They’re strung out all day long and can’t pursue any goal besides getting more drugs.
On the other hand though, a lot of who’s technically homeless at any given time aren’t that chronic, mostly hopeless, and very visible set. It’s people who did lose their apartment just barely after an unexpected job loss or medical expense. Those ones could be helped by cheaper rent! But that group isn’t very visible, doesn’t bother anyone, and often couch surfs, sleeps in their car and showers at the gym for a couple months, etc. and most importantly, they use the many safety net resources to get back on their feet (getting a job usually).
Most homeless people aren't born homeless. Maybe at the point they're at now, yeah, a $500 rent and a $5000 are equally inaccessible.
But for the people on the edge of homelessness, that $500 rent could be the difference that prevents them from going down the death spiral of homelessness, lack of options, drug addiction, etc.
I had a wild conversation with a co-worker who was here as a Ukrainian refugee where he was asking wtf was up with all the homeless people. He was legitimately baffled that they are poor and at war but still didn't have nearly the same level of problem. What was funny is he described what amounted to a soviet version of an SRO being pervasive and I was like "oh those were outlawed and torn down in the 50s"
Urban spaces can be kind or unkind, and benches are a good way to judge.
A week ago I decided to explore a new part of town. I mean, I've only lived in this town for a few years, but I'm not into big cities, and I live in a country where even the capital can feel inordinately leafy and forested if you come from a town in India. I don't come from India, and my dad saw to it that I got acquainted with the ticks and the brambles from a young age, so short of true jungle or a dense mangrove swamp, I consider most places fair game for a leisurely stroll or a rowing. So I was talking with my mom on the phone, relating to her the greens of a small prairie and the reeds demarcating the swampy shore, and counting the many rabbits that were scattering at my passing, when, at a turn of the dirt trail, I found a stark reminder that I was still in town territory: a perfectly normal bench.
America is not known for caring about public infrastructure if they can avoid it once upon a time most cities actually had a public work department that actually tried to keep you know the public places clean they don’t anymore if you want clean public places you have to go someplace else in the world. Japan, China, Taiwan, South Korea.
Most of that stuff has been farmed out to subcontractors in America and that includes what your kids eat in most public schools, the school cafeteria is just one big vending machine these days.
You can tell which countries have and haven't experienced urban bombing terrorism by the style of public refuse receptacles. Before: concrete, rock, metal, and wood; after: minimal material hoops supporting transparent bags.
Also, public drinking fountains I think are better signals of community commonwealth infrastructure than benches because they take more planning, infrastructure, investment, and maintenance to deliver.
Another problem is the privatization of formerly public spaces, often with an essentially mandatory retail consumption component that didn't exist previously. People aren't as free to simply exist in spaces without buying shit than 50 years ago.
Having no public restrooms within a 15 minute walk is worse than having no public benches. Cities shouldn't be allowed to exist without either of them. Also, ground-level restaurants and supermarkets should not be allowed to reject non-customers from using them.
Bulk urine is a good source of urea/ammonia which has commercial value, especially considering the global fertilizer shortage.
> Also, ground-level restaurants and supermarkets should not be allowed to reject non-customers from using them.
The single biggest reason why there are no public restrooms within a 15 minute walk in many American cities is because the visibly homeless fuck them up, through crazy vandalism, deliberately dirtying them with their bodily fluids, doing drugs in them, etc. Businesses being legally compelled to let non-customers use their bathrooms would exacerbate this problem.
> Bulk urine is a good source of urea/ammonia which has commercial value, especially considering the global fertilizer shortage.
It's not cost effective to set up systems to capture the ammonia from the urine of people using public restrooms in urban areas, or else people would be doing that. There are municipal sewage treatment plants that sell some of the byproducts from treating human wastewater as fertilizers, because that is cost-effective at their scale and level of centralization.
Was in a bigger city in the weekend, and they don't have many benches. But it was nice in a way because people just sat anywhere every stair case step, every curb, grass patches, next to a tree, train station floor,...
Where there was a bench 5 people would sit, where there wasn't 15 did
I believe expensive housing is at the root of many societal problems, it's not even funny. We don't have park benches because we've adopted hostile architecture to keep out "undesirables". This mostly means "homeless people". But why are there so many homeless people? The primary reason is housing unaffordability [1].
One of the funny things about China is that there are a lot of "experts" who insist on reading the tea leaves and assign secret, nefarious motives. The truth is that China is pretty open about what they're doing. If you take everything China says at face value you're going to be ahead of 95% of the China talking heads on TV. That's not hyperbole.
Property speculation was a common way for Chinese people to accumulate wealth. This has made property expensive in the Tier 1 cities in particular. The CCP had tried to cool this with various reforms but it turned property into a Ponzi scheme. Basically, developers would have to sell new units and then use those funds to finish a previous project. This is a big factor in the Evergrande default [2].
Xi Jinping took power in 2019 and had some policy priorities that include cracking down on corruption, reforming the housing market and ecological living. In 2019, he famously said "houses are for living, not for speculation" [3]. So the real estate market has been in decline for years. Some might view that as a failure but it was an intentional popping of a real estate bubble for the greater good. China makes it difficult and expensive to own more than one home. Likewise, foreign capital can't be parked in real estate like it can in the West.
One of the good things about the Internet is that people can see for themselves how modern, clean and people-centric Chinese cities are, particularly Tier 1/2 cities.
Instead of investing in society, we militarize and overfund the police, start pointless wars, create homeless people through unaffordability and build our cities around various profit opportunities for mega-corporations (even having to have a card is to the benefit of corporations). And of course we can't forget what role racism played in how our cities evolved and were planned.
You're spreading a common misconception. No one really "owns" a home in China. What they're usually purchasing is a 70-year lease on the land. The hope is that the lease can be renewed on favorable terms but there's no guarantee.
All land in China is state-owned. You own the building. You don't own the land the building is on. In this way, it's really no different to leasehold in the UK or land-lease in NYC. Do we say that all these UK leaseholders don't really "own" a house? Is there the same fearmongering?
And in the UK, it's often the Royal Family or some aristocratic landholder who owns the land (eg the Duke of Westminster owns an awful lot of London land) whereas in China, the lease renewal is essentially automatic and there's no property tax or land lease that gets paid.
It's also worth adding you never really truly own property anywhere. The government is free to change their mind at any time. And they do. All the time eg eminent domain.
It sounds that you spend money and receive a service which cannot be converted into an investment. Are the people housed, in the end? Is the housing market distorted by rampant speculation? Does the system work?
This has little to do with the homeless and everything to do with a society that's shifted from seeking to facilitate positive things (e.g. the comfort of some random person on some random occasion) to one that wouldn't invent fire or sliced bread if it thought that doing so would be good for the wrong kind of people.
This is intensified in spaces administrated by government due to the incentives of government and the type of people who are best retained and fill out the org chart of such organizations and it is obvious because these spaces are most public but it's a thing everywhere, for example your hospital has security that could kick out "bad people" (whatever that means) but it still has a crappy waiting area not because they don't want to make it inviting for people who care about you to stick around lest they be there to raise a stink in the event you are mistreated.
There are comparable examples of this sort of "make things worse for people who are doing fine things" in all sorts of public and private contexts beyond just seating. I wish it was just the benches.
I think the reason most people do not sympathize with this argument is that most HN readers are programmers, and many of them are still in a relatively secure class position.
Traditionally, programming has had a high barrier to entry, but it has also been a profession where compensation has remained relatively strong. As societies become harsher under pressure from high housing costs and economic displacement, they tend to become more aggressive and violent. But many people do not sympathize with this issue because they are not personally in that situation. They mostly experience the visible disorder: aesthetic damage, drug use, and the social harms produced by deeper structural failures.
But if we compare this to HN debates about LLMs, an irony appears. In labor-market terms, LLMs are similar to hostile design.
LLMs are not installing benches for programmers. They are closer to removing the benches.
In the past, there were lower-level tasks where junior developers, non-traditional developers, non-native English speakers, and small open-source contributors could remain inside the profession. CRUD work, documentation fixes, test writing, small bug fixes, simple UI, repetitive glue code — these were not glamorous tasks, and they were often inefficient. But they functioned like public benches inside the profession. They gave people a place to sit long enough to learn.
LLMs attack exactly that layer.
From a company’s point of view, this is rational. Code that might take a junior developer several days can now be drafted by a model in minutes. Documentation, tests, boilerplate, simple screens, and repetitive API wiring no longer seem worth preserving as training grounds for humans.
As a result, the market may look more efficient. But that efficiency resembles the history of removing benches. It is not only the “problematic” people who disappear. Elderly people, children, travelers, disabled people, and ordinary people who simply needed a place to sit are pushed out as well.
Software has a similar problem. If we remove low-level work, low-quality work may appear to decrease. But at the same time, we also remove the space where beginners can fail, receive correction, observe others, and slowly acquire the instincts of the profession.
So LLMs are not merely productivity tools. They can also function as a force that removes public seating inside the software profession.
That is why I find it difficult to reconcile the logic of people who argue that public benches should be removed, while also arguing that LLMs should not be accepted.
They are already sitting inside the profession. They already have experience, English, networks, code review experience, and existing project history. For them, LLMs look like a faster tool. But for people trying to enter from the edge of the profession, LLMs are not just a tool. They are a change in the structure of entry itself.
The lower seats where people could once sit and learn are disappearing. Newcomers are expected to start from a higher level of abstraction and with stronger verification skills from the beginning.
In cities, the logic for removing benches is usually expressed in the language of order, safety, aesthetics, and maintenance cost. In software, the logic for adopting LLMs is expressed in the language of productivity, efficiency, cost reduction, and quality control.
But behind that language, what disappears is the buffer zone through which a community receives people.
A city without benches may look cleaner, but it does not become more public. Likewise, a software market without entry-level work may look more productive, but it is hard to say that it has become a healthier ecosystem.
When I read HN, I often see this kind of irony. And perhaps we all live inside such ironies. That may also be part of what makes communities interesting.
People do not seem to have a consistent attitude toward publicness itself.
Instead, they show completely different moral intuitions depending on where they are positioned within that public space.
You know oddly enough, if you just put someone up in a real place to live for like a year, that's enough for the majority of people to get back on their feet.
I think there's plenty of evidence of that not being true. Countless examples of immigrants being given free housing in hotels, and they don't end up getting jobs and contributing to the society that's helping them. Instead they mooch off the public goodwill and trash the place.
But it still beats where they came from, and hey... it's free.
The "fix everything" button is abolishing zoning laws, and its aggregate cost is negative. Aggregate cost is not the issue preventing problems from being solved.
Given a construction budget of $125,000 per residence for a particularly nice two bedroom single bathroom house of about 1000ft², that's 80,000. Estimates are that there are currently between 750,000 to 800,000 people that have no home right now. Taking the high number of 800,000 that $10,000,000,000 is 10% of those people housed. You could reasonably go down to $30,000 for a build for a single floor house of the same footprint if you used mass produced prefabs, and get 330,000 people housed, or over 41%. Do you realize how much that would uplift things if we suddenly had a 41% reduction in homelessness? Considering that companies like Google and OpenAI are throwing around hundreds of billions of dollars which never get circulated back into the wider economy, spending $10,000,000,000 to bring 330,000 people back into economic and societal participation sounds amazing. That's assuming a somewhat low yearly income of $45,000 per person, adding up to $14,850,000,000 in circulation, or a gain of almost $5,000,000,000 right there. Even if we only achieve half of any of this that's $7,000,000,000 for one year. Two years in and the cost has already been paid back and more.
This comes with the giant caveat that we exclude the external costs of such a huge project, like social welfare visits, probation or monitoring if needed, or even just placement programs. Likely those all combined would be a third of the total cost.
Homelessness and visible homelessness need to be distinguished here. The large majority of homeless people are not the ones you notice on the streets. Most try to be discreet. Some have jobs. A person who lives in their car is considered homeless.
The best measure to reduce homelessness is to provide timely support for people who are being evicted from their homes before they lose their jobs (which they might still have) and before their mental health deteriorates. This is the point at which assistance is most effective. You have heard the saying, "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure". Such programs have been applied to great effect in e.g. London.
The way to respond to people who have experienced chronic homelessness with complications is different and more difficult.
The Simon Community where I live went around the city one December and counted how many rough sleepers there were. I forget the exact figure but it was less than 100. Meanwhile there were thousands classified as homeless due to being in temporary accomodation. And this is a part of the UK well known for having a homelessness problem.
That wouldn't be enough to do the job but it would be a great start if it was done right. My point was we've flushed $50B (and likely far far more) and what do we get for it? High gas prices. So hurray for the push for renewables and EVs, but there's nicer ways to do it.
> And you need a bunch of social workers too at minimum
Ok, sure. Remember, we're spending the $50B that's been lit on fire so this gives us more jobs and a happier country. And that money circulates in the economy rather than expatriated profits by the defense contractors.
SF spends more per capita than anywhere in the world on homelessness. And it’s barely made a dent. The solution is upstream of money. It’s policy decisions derived from cultural values. In other places in the world, where homelessness is vanishingly rare, these people are made to choose: “you will get treatment or you will go to jail, but we will not tolerate the destruction of the commons.”
Spending money doesn't get results. Spending money is often a prerequisite to getting results, but you have to be results-minded to begin with, or you just spend money without results. Large bureaucracies are especially good at spending money in ways that don't generate results.
SF has a famously broken city government. As does Portland (the metro I now live in). Note they have huge budgets for their police and there's still plenty of crime -- does that mean they should give up on having police?
I think if it were treated as a hybrid program (federal/state/county) there could be synergy that could make it work (more eyeballs on it, more shared resources, etc).
And as far as treatment or jail, we do need the power of involuntary institutionalization but it needs to be wielded with utmost restraint and scrutiny. I have family that could have used this, it's pretty much the only way with some. But it always has to be done in the context of helping rather than punishing.
There's so much we could do: start a kind of CCC for homeless youth as a baseline starting point and give them paths up and out. Heal those you can and those you can't at least put them somewhere where they can't ruin it for others. I imagine the emotional response to that would be "send them to jail", I completely understand but it's a lot cheaper if we do something else.
> SF has a famously broken city government. As does Portland (the metro I now live in). Note they have huge budgets for their police and there's still plenty of crime -- does that mean they should give up on having police?
I don't think the police analogy works. The relevant question is not whether a big police budget solves crime. Not the expected outcome. The real question is whether, when crimes happen, the system is allowed to investigate, arrest, prosecute, punish, deter, and incapacitate criminals.
If you port the SF/PDX homelessness model into criminal justice, the analogy would be something like this: we spend a lot on police, but we also prevent them from arresting people, prevent prosecutors from prosecuting, treat enforcement as inhumane, and then decide that the problem is insufficient “resources” or “coordination.”
Money isn't irrelevant. It's that money cannot overcome a policy framework that refuses to impose obligations on the people causing damage. You can spend billions on outreach, services, navigation centers, nonprofit contracts, and harm-reduction.. etc etc. But if the answer to refusal is always “try again tomorrow,” then the system has no endpoint and fails.
YEs, involuntary institutionalization should be used carefully. Jail should not be the first answer for people whose problem is psychosis, addiction, or incapacity. But that doesn't concedes the central point: for many, voluntary help will not work. The only real solution is compulsory: treatment, supervised placement, or jail. And it can't be after multiple years of attempts while the person languishes on the streets and the commons are destroyed.
A crisis care program for homeless youth might be good upstream, but it doesn't address acute problems: chronically homeless people who are severely mentally ill, addicted, violent, or destructive (usually multiple at the same time), and who refuse help. Those cases require either 1) shelter or treatment (won't work for most), 2) secure care, or 3) jail.
Again, the question isn't “should we give up because spending has not solved homelessness?” The question is whether the current model is even capable of solving it. A system built around voluntary services, weak enforcement, and tolerance of public disorder will predictably produce encampments, addiction zones, and unusable public spaces no matter how much money it receives. The missing piece isn't just funding. It is authority, conditionality, and a cultural choice to protect the commons.
Also, zealously dismantle and prosecute the non-profit homelessness grift complex.
You are talking about a country with one of highest incarceration rates in the world, certainly western world.
A country with so expensive legal defense that most simply cant afford it. And a country that punishes even attempt to go to court to defend oneself with years and years of additional prison time if you loose.
A country where it is near impossible to convince a cop or prosecutor of wrongdoing, a country that goes really out of its way to rationalize what would be a clear murder elsewhere. A country with qualified immunity too.
Oh, and a country willing to incarcerate on any quack pseudo science.
But, somehow ... it is prosecutors and police who need more help.
> But, somehow ... it is prosecutors and police who need more help.
I'm not sure how you get that from what I wrote. My solution is (like many, many places in the world): "treatment or jail, but we will not tolerate a destruction of the commons". PDX/SF could do this with the police they have, and it might even imply force reduction as getting those people off the streets would reduce A LOT of crime.
Yes, the U.S. has many significant problems. I agree. Is your suggestion that we have to address them sequentially, prioritized according to your preferences... or else do nothing?
The way to fix it is to have the right incentives and also the right deterrent. If you simply enable a drug addict lifestyle or corrupt nonprofit grift, that isn’t the right incentive. And yet that’s the reality in west coast cities.
I also like clean safe unobstructed sidewalks and parks but along with benches, we've made a decision. We've decided that putting the mentally ill in a facility and arresting people for public drug use is not something we're comfortable with at the expense of those other things. I don't personally ageee with this decision but it is apparently the consensus.
> it is apparently the consensus
And what a strange consensus it is. The prevailing belief seems to be that preventing people from slowly/quickly killing themselves on the street (or, more accurately, dying from addiction) is somehow not "progressive" and the moral thing to do is to pretend like these people have made the choice of their own volition and that we cannot judge them for this choice.
In reality, the people who are just rotting away on our streets would be better served if they were brought somewhere against their will and kept there until they were better. Society would also be better served if we did this. The government choosing to involuntarily constrain people isn't something that should be done lightly, but sometimes it is the lesser evil. We've completely abandoned these people and somehow done so in the name of compassion. It's really depressing.
What a strange false dichotomy. Either we do absolutely nothing to help people, or we involuntarily incarcerate them?
The actually progressive option is to provide meaningful public support programs, and also make housing affordable (by building enough housing). The US mostly doesn't do either of those, but it should.
These programs exist, but they are underutilized to a significant degree.
From a partner who used to work in one, people:
- didn't trust the program and wouldn't sign up
- didn't actually want to quit using so they avoided it
- wanted to get the benefits from the program without changing anything (i.e. showed up to get free food etc)
- tried but didn't like it and went back to using
Very few people actually went all the way through compared to the population in the city that could have used it.
The real question is: how do you help people who do not want your help. Do you let them waste away and die on the sidewalk, or do you institutionalize them?
The answer to that question in a society that allows (mostly) autonomy of choice is that we let them die on the street.
I'm not convinced that involuntary incarceration will actually fix the problem. I believe it will just take it off of the streets and out of the public consciousness.
I have a very good friend who was an addict, and I tried to help him turn his life around in many ways, but I couldn’t figure out a way. Professionals told me “he has to hit rock bottom.”
Anyhow he wound up getting arrested and spent a couple of weeks in jail where he got clean and decided to turn his life around. He went on to get a couple of masters degrees, get married, have two kids, and has a good job. He credits his time in jail for saving his life.
At the core of this is that your friend came to the realization that he wanted to change his life. He can credit his time in jail for this. However that doesn't mean it will be the same for everyone, or that there's only a single potential trigger to get someone to recover from drug addiction
I have a friend who picked up heroin in jail, came out an addict and died of an OD in his basement. His daughter found him.
If your anecdote can prove your point, then mine can disprove it.
I think I know that family. Didn't the daughter get beat up everyday by that father and that's why he went to jail. Her life is so much better now.
I knew somebody who turned his life around after surviving an attempted murder. I still don't think that means that trying to murder people whose lives are going awry is a rational solution.
You're saying that spending time in jail is roughly equivalent to being a victim of attempted murder.
No, I'm saying that both things could have them same effect, so the existence of that effect isn't a proof that the solution makes sense.
If I tell you that covering something in red paint and covering something in tomato sauce will stain them both red, I'm not saying that red paint is tomato sauce.
I also know people who have changed their lives after heart attacks. Am I saying that heart attacks are roughly equivalent to prison stays?
Taking the problem of crazy severely-mentally-ill people off the streets and out of the public consciousness is strictly better than having that problem be on the streets and in the public consciousness because it's happening around the public all the time. If nothing else, it reduces the chances that a random commuter will get randomly stabbed on the subway by a severely crazy person.
>I believe it will just take it off of the streets and out of the public consciousness.
If antisocial people do not exist in the public consciousness, then that means the problem is fixed. Even you never have to worry about locking your front door, then the problem of burglars has been fixed even if technically would be burglars may exist in prison.
Drug addicts and the mentally ill don't have the problem of being "antisocial." They have drug addiction and mental illness. "Antisocial" is the problem that you have when you see them, and is the problem that is solved when you don't see them. It's a completely narcissistic way of looking at things.
For example, putting you in prison would also solve the problem of your objection to them. You would still be surrounded by drug addicts and the mentally ill in prison, but we wouldn't have to listen to you complain about it, so our problems would be solved.
But that's also not a good solution.
I think you are underestimating how few bad actors it takes to ruin a system, but I do agree with your point that you can also remove the people who think they are negatively impacted. For example in Counter Strike you can either ban the small percentage of cheaters or you could cultivate the community to not care if people are cheating.
Not a great solution, honestly. Long term drug abuse is almost never a victimless habit. I'm tempted to say never.
This isn't the 1980s anymore. Using drugs is perfectly fine. A ton of people here on HN take drugs regularly, but few think it's worth to rock the boat against this kind of nonsense you're spreading
Have you ever interacted with a heroine or meth user?
Sometimes using drugs is fine, depending on the drug, the reason, and the person. For example, I did cocaine once and immediately knew I needed to cut ties with those friends because if I had access to it regularly, I would ruin my life. Others can do coke recreationally and not have an issue. Others can't form the insight I had until their lives are in shambles, and maybe not even then.
You actually changed what I said then declared it nonsense. I said abuse, not use.
Frankly, I think we need to bring back corporal punishment for specific crimes. The process to arrest, prosecute, and then imprison people for "public space crimes" is basically flawed.
Arresting and prosecuting is slow and expensive, prisons are full. A prison sentence destroys whatever remaining support system a person has and a conviction like that makes getting a job in the future nearly impossible.
We should just have a quick path to short and non-damaging corporal punishment. A quick video recording, an instant review by a judge via zoom, then immediate punishment. This would deter theft, damaging public property, etc. while not costing a lot to taxpayers and not causing long term damage to the individual. Crime is never on the record at all so does not affect background checks. Treatment programs are always offered instead of the corporal punishment.
(Of course mental health conditions complicate this, it's difficult to solve that without forced institutionalizing them).
I suppose you really enjoyed Leviathan…
Too bad about that pesky “cruel and unusual” clause in the constitution for the bloodthirsty like you…
maybe the problem here is the gate that requires them to quit cold turkey before offering them any help? I know it offends people morally to 'subsidize drug use', but that's a really high barrier for an opioid or crank addict to meet. the other issues are that people complain that its very prison like, in terms of the volume and severity of rules. the other really unfortunate thing is that some fraction of the homeless population is _really nasty_. so no one really wants to get locked up with these people.
but to say that the majority of them don't want any help is just wrong.
Yes, exactly, there's a reason the term is "continuum of care." There is no one-size-fits-all approach to solving addiction because, to quote Ted Lasso, all people are different people. Maybe some people do need to be involuntarily incarcerated, but many, many others would be able to recover with far less intrusive interventions.
Also we are chasing a lagging indicator by focusing exclusively on the homeless population. The vast majority of people who end up homeless because of addiction would have benefited from some far earlier, far milder form of intervention, or from the absence of something that actively drove them into addiction, e.g. some quack pushing oxycontin on them because Purdue Pharma promoted it as non-addictive. Or job loss because of offshoring pushing them into economic despair that then drives addiction, which they are unable to recover from because of the lack of affordable or accessible retraining or educational opportunities.
In many cases over the last 20-30 years, it was the combination of both job loss and careless opioid prescription that pushed people into an unrecoverable spiral, especially in the rust belt, where the opioid crisis hit the hardest. We may not have fixed the job loss side of the problem, but at least doctors aren't pushing pills the same way they were 10-20 years ago after Purdue's corporate downfall, so the number of people driven into addiction-mediated homelessness by that disaster should at least start tapering off soon. But if we don't help people before their lives fall apart with a continuum of support options that are accessible before they are in deep crisis, and are accessible to people who are beginning to spiral but don't yet appear to be in deep crisis, it will cost far more and be far more challenging to help them recover once they are on the street.
I'm not sure if you've had a drug addict in your life at any point, and if not that is a blessing.
Drug addiction is a dark place and it's very common that the availability of free support programs is entirely rejected by the user, and the only hope at a normal life requires forceful intervention by family and friends.
The only way to solve drugs on the street is to look at the cities that have solved them and copy what works. And, at least with what I'm familiar with, arresting people tends to work and alternatives tend to not.
You seem to be equating "homeless" with "drug addict". The article talks about taking away public benches because of homelessness.
There are different programs needed for drug addiction than for homelessness. Not everyone who's homeless has a drug problem, and not everyone with a drug problem is homeless.
We didn't eliminate benches in public spaces because we wanted to reduce the presence of the nice, respectful, and polite homeless. We eliminated benches to reduce the presence of the problematic homeless, which has a much higher rate of drug abuse and mental illness.
>We eliminated benches to reduce the presence of the problematic homeless, which has a much higher rate of drug abuse and mental illness.
We eliminated benches to reduce the rate at which the problematic homeless cross paths with the complainers.
The DPW as an organization doesn't give a shit about how many commuter's asses a bench serves from 6am to 8pm. It just knows that every day when Karen sees a homeless man sleeping on that bench at 5AM she submits a complaint from the web form.
From their stupid "not my job, I just solve tickets" keyhole view of the situation removing the benches makes the problem smaller and they will iterate on that until complaint equilibrium is reached.
When I was in San Francisco, I had a homeless man with one eye (the empty eye socket actively oozing) come up to me unprovoked (quite literally unprovoked, I was just on a walk and not interacting with anybody at all), get within 2 centimeters of my face, and scream at the top of his lungs "I WILL MURDER YOU". He then walked away and nothing else of note happened (aside from me spending the rest of the evening with my pulse at 140).
Suffice to say, I don't think it's fair to categorize me as a Karen for asserting that San Francisco has a large number of problematic homeless people. I could give about 8 other stories (from SF, Boston, NYC, and Chicago) that happened to me, two of which (both SF) include grown men dropping their pants, exposing their genitals, and visibly pooping on public streets where children were present, with no attempt to obtain any degree of privacy.
These aren't stories from my friends, these are things that I personally witnessed and experienced. These aren't 'oh that guy is ugly and smelly' stories, these are 'if I did that myself I would be arrested' stories.
> He then walked away and nothing else of note happened (aside from me spending the rest of the evening with my pulse at 140).
Did you call the police after this person made a threat on your life?
What would the police do about it, arrest the homeless person? Would the local criminal justice system have the capacity to charge and convict them if the cops did so? Many of the cities where visible homelessness is a problem also have shortages of cops that cause them to triage what sorts of incidents they send an officer to respond to?
I probably would not have called the police after this person if this happened to me, because I expect they would do nothing about it.
I assure you that problematic homeless people sleep on benches in public spaces at times during the day when normal people using the public transit system normally would like to use them (also sometimes people, reasonably enough, want to take public transit late at night or in the early morning). That's why the authorities remove the benches.
You use disparaging slurs ("Karen") to refer to a woman who just wants to ride the bus to get to work and earn an living, and you politely call a person who is a public nuisance a "homeless man".
Karen isn't a name in the same way that Boommer isn't an age. It's a state of mind.
We're not talking about the people who have been genuinly victimized. We're talking about the people who wring their hands over some smelly guy in some corner on the subway. Because they dominate the stats.
That Venn diagram is pretty close to a circle, at least when talking about homeless people that don’t have a friend/relative they can stay with.
> That Venn diagram is pretty close to a circle
False, and harmful. US HUD says it's ~16% of homeless people, other sources give different numbers, but it's certainly not a majority, let alone anywhere near 100%.
The biggest problem, unsurprisingly, is housing cost. The US GAO states that a $100 increase in median rent correlates to a 9% rise in homelessness. Rents have gone up a lot more than that.
> US HUD says it's ~16% of homeless people, other sources give different numbers, but it's certainly not a majority
"Homeless people" is a broad category that includes people temporarily living in vehicles, bouncing between family members, or sleeping on a friend's couch. It also includes people who are about to lose their home, young people living alone.
But when everyday people use the term, they usually mean, specifically, visible homeless people - i.e. people who are homeless long-term, sleeping rough on the streets or in parks, etc.
The two groups are pretty different to each other. I would be very surprised if the rate of drug addiction in the second group was the same as the rate of drug addiction in the first group
The people you think are "temporarily" living in vehicles are not doing so temporarily.
I personally have close to a dozen friends who have spent between 2 and 6 weeks of their life (but not longer) living out of their car in a state of actual temporary homelessness. Almost always due to financial issues.
Temporarily living in vehicles is absolutely a thing.
> I would be very surprised if the rate of drug addiction in the second group was the same as the rate of drug addiction in the first group
But that's a far far weaker claim than the one above.
If the rate is 90% or higher in the second group, then we get close to the claim being true. (Though still a subset rather than the circles being the same; lots of people with drug problems have homes.)
Walk down the makeshift tents on the sidewalks of downtown San Francisco and tell me with a straight face that only 16% of those people are addicted to drugs.
> False, and harmful.
Sorry. But you're either misinformed or actively malicious here.
> US HUD says it's ~16% of homeless people
It absolutely is close to 100% of _unsheltered_ people. Some social workers helping the unsheltered homeless are now saying that they have not seen anybody who's _not_ on drugs or who is not mentally ill.
If you want authoritative source, here's UCLA study from the blessed pre-COVID era: https://capolicylab.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/Health-Co...
> The biggest problem, unsurprisingly, is housing cost.
No, it's really really not.
> The US GAO states that a $100 increase in median rent correlates to a 9% rise in homelessness.
And the correlation disappears when you look at the states with cold climate.
> If you want authoritative source, here's UCLA study from the blessed pre-COVID era: https://capolicylab.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/Health-Co...
Which specifically leads with a page saying:
> Hundreds of studies - including our own - show economic pressures are the primary drivers of homelessness, that housing people ends homelessness, and that targeted financial assistance helps people at risk of homelessness stay stably housed
Also, the cited study blatantly does not show the numbers ("close to 100%") you claim it has, even leaving that aside. You're also now equivocating between drugs and mental illness, as well as between drugs and alcohol. And you're not taking into account the direction of cause and effect (e.g. which came first, the homelessness or the addiction).
I understand that you're also referencing anecdata from social workers. In those cases, there's an inherent bias: people with a drug problem are going to be harder and more memorable cases, which makes them feel like a larger proportion than they are. People homeless for economic reasons are likely to loom less large in people's minds than the times they dealt with someone who had a drug problem.
Oh yeah, 60 years of arresting people in the US for drug crimes has gone so well. Couldn't be better! Cities that decriminalized have better outcomes.
I hope people like you lose every election for the rest of time.
Which specific cities are you referring to that have better outcomes and which ones have worse outcomes?
> arresting people tends to work and alternatives tend to not
What I've read many times is that (essentially) the oppposite is widely accepted consensus: Arresting never works. The US tried the 'drug war' for decades and it was ineffective. Do you have evidence otherwise? It's also unjust to criminalize illness and medical problems for poor people (rich people get sympathy, rehab, and lots of second chances).
What does work is overdose prevention, including needle exhanges and safe injection sites, treating addition as the disease it is (which is how it's treated for rich people), and housing (people experiencing the great instability and stress of homelessness are much less likely to make other changes). Maybe some others I'm not thinking of, too.
Any meaningful public support program that actually keeps severely-mentally-ill visibly-homeless people from acting crazy in public will necessarily involve involuntarily incarcerating at least some of them, some of the time. A lot of very dysfunctional people genuinely do not want to cooperate with meaningful public support programs or are simply too out of it to meaningfully consent or not consent to participation in such.
That is going right back to false dichotomy. Something can be meaningful and not clean up the streets of all things uncomfortable.
At least in California, there are a lot of public support programs. I mean, a looooot of public support programs. A LOT. Like, to the point where the state is spending tens of thousands of dollars for each homeless person, and probably north of $100k per person per year for a subset. Talk to a firefighter or paramedic in a CA city sometime. They will tell you, there's "regulars" that they have to deal with every single week. The cops and firefighters know all of them by name.
We're paying hours a day in overtime to basically have the cops, firefighters, and EMTs deal with the same small population of mentally ill people on the same street corner every week, for years. These people cannot get better because they choose not to stay in the mental hospital or substance abuse programs offered to them. Someone is 5150'd, placed on a 3-day hold, and 72 hours later they walk out of the hospital and back to the same street corner, where they have a mental breakdown again the following week. You can offer support -- they will basically tell you the same thing, I'm not sick at all, there's nothing wrong with me, I am not a danger to myself or others, and you are shit out of luck.
At the same time, there are way more homeless people who are silently and cleanly living in their cars and showing up to work every day at a low wage job. Most people won't ever see them unless they look closely. Visit /r/urbancarliving sometime to get an idea of what that population looks like. Those people might get a 15 minute "knock" from the cops once a month.
The actually progressive option is to involuntarily incarcerate people who need it, while not criminalizing car/RV living, offering work placement services, housing assistance etc. The most realistic thing would probably be to build subsidized mobile homes and clean, low-rent central places to park an RV.
You correctly identified the biggest thing here though which is making housing affordable. Unfortunately, that will never happen.
I mostly agree with your points, but I think the involuntary incarceration is a major rock and a hard place situation.
There are definitely people for whom it would be a compassionate (and often societally optimal) thing to do. Giving the government the power to decide to take people away indefinitely is just a spectacularly bad precedent. Especially right now.
Yes, you have to be very, very careful. Lots of abuse with involuntary commitment, that's part of why it was abolished so completely.
I mean the reason this is a pipe dream and we all just opt to deal with it is that our state/institutional capacity has been eroded so completely. So, we just take away the public benches and call it a day.
The cruel way to do this is to just criminalize the behavior and then move all these people into the prison system. I think that would be a moral sin, but I see why people go there -- the alternative would be to construct a totally new, parallel mental health system with kinda like a jury/parole board type system, representation, and so on, and make it explicitly not part of the criminal justice system. Since the point is rehabilitation, not justice. All that would probably be insanely expensive, but a society focused on the humanity of its citizens would probably see it as worthwhile. Our society unfortunately, just does not see its citizens that way.
One of the benefits of institutionalizing the problematic homeless (either via incarceration or involuntarily mental health treatment, there's not a whole lot of difference between those two things from the perspective of the person subject to them anyway), is that it would allow the state to relax certain laws about simply being unsheltered without otherwise causing problems for people. Someone who is living silently and cleanly in their car is not a problem for me - I know more than one relatively well-paid, reasonably-intelligent person who is basically living that kind of lifestyle voluntarily - and I would prefer it if they weren't even getting a 15 minute knock from the cops once a month.
I live in a shelter, if you looked at the cost per person, it would probably be north 20k per resident to be housed here. This is the overhead of rent, utilities, salaries for case worker, security, maintenance, etc. When you include other parts of the system, it's easily another 5k; this isn't even taking in account of SNAP, cash assistance, medicaid, etc. There is a whole system and it ain't cheap.
Now, this isn't to say living is great. You are living in a dorm with 20+ felons, you have bedbugs to contend with, and it's dirty. I still have a normal ass job as well. Being homeless fucking sucks.
I didn't create this "false dichotomy", nor did I say that those were the only two options. I'm just observing the fact that the current system that the major cities in the US seem to be employing is to treat homeless as a valid choice, even if much/most of it is a result of addiction and mental illness. The end result of that treating it that way is the death and suffering of people who actually need lots of help and who would be better served by more aggressive tactics.
I don't believe it's a deliberate decision by (most) policymakers. I think it's a structural failure across several axes, including failure to make enough housing for it to be affordable, and attacks on every front by people who treat all social programs and public assistance as evil. Most places have one or the other problem, if not both.
A drug-addicted/mentally ill chronically unsheltered person is not going to be able to afford a home at any price. If they could hold down any kind of regular job and sustain an income they would find someplace to live.
Also most "affordable" housing initiatives attack it by mandating "affordable" for new construction instead of just letting developers build what they can make the most money building. No developer wants to build "affordable" homes if they can build and sell high-end homes. So by imposing "affordability" mandates, they just encourage developers to go elsewhere.
New high-end homes make the older homes more affordable. New "affordable" homes simply don't get built, at least not in anywhere near the numbers that are needed.
To your first point: people don't typically start out that way, things spiral down. And it's much harder to get out of that spiral if homes are completely unaffordable. It also doesn't help that the most temperate places (where you won't die of exposure if unsheltered) are also the least affordable places (because they're prosperous and haven't built nearly enough housing).
> Also most "affordable" housing initiatives attack it by mandating "affordable" for new construction instead of just letting developers build what they can make the most money building. No developer wants to build "affordable" homes if they can build and sell high-end homes. So by imposing "affordability" mandates, they just encourage developers to go elsewhere.
> New high-end homes make the older homes more affordable. New "affordable" homes simply don't get built, at least not in anywhere near the numbers that are needed.
Complete agreement that the current approach is not working, yes. The right approach is to build, and keep building, until everything is affordable. And the political challenge is the existing cohort of people who think a house should be an asset that appreciates rather than a necessity of life that everyone should be able to afford. People who are put in a particularly bad position by that (e.g. difficulty moving or retiring because housing prices went down) may need help.
And once things have spiraled down, they won't recover just by giving them a home. My town tried that and the homes were quickly trashed to the point of being uninhabitable because nothing (or not enough) was done to address the addictions and other self-destructive behaviors or illness.
Any kind of assistance has to be built on a foundation of mandatory rehab/treatment and staying clean or it will fail.
Unfortunately, framing the problem as this kind of dichotomy is something people are inclined to do because then the problem can be reduced to the unwillingness of the opposing side to face reality.
Sometimes the dichotomy is correct, but the bias exists.
You should read a little book called Games People Play. Focus particular attention on the section on the game "Indigent."
This isn't a resource allocation problem, or rather, it isn't a resource allocation problem the way you seem to think it is.
Nothing?? What are you talking about? Go look up how much tax money the SF government spends trying to help the unhoused in their current budget. But no amount will fix the problem because if you ask a drug addict if they want help (and it’s not help getting drugs) they usually say “no thanks.” Many addicts are never ready to accept that kind of help. Sadly.
No amount of help will solve a housing problem in a city where people can't afford to live. Build more housing.
Super strongly agree with you on that. But unfortunately building tons of housing is quite politically unpopular as well, unless it’s wildly stupid housing, like the “affordable housing” that costs more (paid by the city) to build than market rate costs for some reason.
I think a big part of this queasiness comes from the fact that a lot of the institutions we would put addicts and mentally ill people in really were nightmarish.
And ignoring the whole issue of the sanitariums being full of abuse, I don't think you can argue that sticking a drug addict in a regular prison full of criminals is good for them either.
The main reasons those places lost support is they became convenient prisons without due process. Why do you think there are so many horror movies based on the setting of a sane person involuntarily put there?
While not ideal you gotta admit now that those people that need help are in your face rather than conveniently disappeared you are thinking about their plight some.
Maybe try to think of something better than forever prisons and stop becoming a ghoul.
'I think you would be better served by not posting to social media and studying personal liberty and ethics.' Should I be able to enforce it? I think people who make comments like those above are much more dangerous than people on the street - the people on the street can't really do harm.
Thankfully, we do have liberty, and they can do what they want - and I can do what I want - and it's none of your business whether it's healthy or not. People also smoke, are sedentary (lots of people here), eat very poorly, use psilocybin (relatively popular here), drink too much, etc.
The only way to begin to approach it is, rather than making judgments on overused stereotypes (another reason to be banned from online comments), talk to each person and ask what they are doing and what they need. I know, I know - it's outrageous to ask the opinions of people you deem substandard, even about their own lives.
Yes the guy who screamed “I’m going to f*ing kill you!” Out of nowhere at my daughter and then chased us, or set fire to random trees in my neighborhood for fun, or cut the copper wiring off the side of my house, or took sledge hammers to local park statues, these people are definitely not a problem. No the problem is really the people who think it should stop. Those horrible, insensitive people.
They’r being so selfish. Drug addicted should have every right to pull you down screaming by your hair because they’re tweaked out of their mind. And after seeing that, you should be welcoming every one you see to your home.
You’re really the problem for feeling uncomfortable walking by the man jerking off to passerby’s, so intolerant of you.
(Every one of these is a true example I have witnessed, along with too much other insanity to write down, from just the last year in Seattle. so don’t tell me im exaggerating)
You are describing actual crimes, not homelessness. Nobody is saying that people who are violent should just be left to their own devices.
And no one is saying eat the homeless.
My city is deadlocked on doing anything about the literal crimes I’ve described because acting against violent offenders is seen as oppressing the downtrodden. Building new shelter capacity is insanely difficult because no one wants concentrations of this near them, and concentrated homeless services turn the area into a waste land (like pioneer square) due to the amount of criminal and antisocial behavior. Raising enough money in taxes seems out of the question because everyone thinks someone else should pay.
So you get common crime and antisocial behavior in much of the city and no one can do anything about it.
> Every one of these is a true example I have witnessed, along with too much other insanity to write down, from just the last year in Seattle
Now that you bring it up, it looks to me like you're exaggerating or extremely unlucky. It reminds me of the litany of crimes people claim happen with immigrants; weren't they eating the cats in one town?
Somehow in my experience in urban life, in many different neighborhoods, I haven't encountered a fraction of what you claim to have seen in the last year, and all the things you describe are so dramatic, while much of what I do know about, not experienced, is mundane and depressing. And of course, nobody would live in cities if things were that bad.
As someone else said, crimes are crimes; plenty of housed people commit them too. I see unhoused people every day and interact regularly, and I haven't seen a crime (of course, crime happens in any population).
Isn't liberty and human rights more important than whatever you're trying to accomplish? You diminish it for others, yours is diminished too.
What cities? You’re right that I never saw anything like this when I lived in Oslo, nor did I see anything like it living in Sydney.
I’m reacting to a specific environment in two major west coast cities, Seattle which I now live, and San Francisco where I regularly travel for work. What I’m describing is not unlucky in these cities, it’s “I take the light rail to pioneer square for work every day.”
They would be better if they were given support. Locking people away is not a solution to anything. You've been sold a lie about the mentally ill, and the homeless, which isn't true.
Yes, I don't think that arresting people for the crime of not having money is a good idea.
We also cannot seem to fund any actual drug programs, because US citizens hate the idea of anyone getting something for free.
SF spends ~$100k per homeless person.
Yes but critically none of this money is actually given to the homeless person. So we aren't giving them anything for free we are just dealing with the consequences of them not having a proper support system. Spending money to do that is okay, because it doesn't really directly benefit the homeless person.
Also the essence of ‘San Francisco has a lot of homeless’ isn’t really a logical argument against those policies since homeless will often migrate to where the functional support services are. San Francisco may well be doing amazing things with getting people back on their feet at a relatively lower cost than prison.
You need to go many levels deeper on statistics to understand if it’s working or not.
> since homeless will often migrate to where the functional support services are.
I've heard this a lot but I don't have any reason to believe it's true. Never seen a reputable study that asserts it. I've known a lot of homeless people but none that relocated for this reason. Most who moved were looking for work or trying to get closer to family. Most didn't move at all and were just where they had always been, or in the city they were living in when they became homeless.
when I did homeless outreach in San Diego I was told around 40% of the people we were helping were from out of state that moved there but couldn't stay afloat for various reasons, leaving them homeless in the area
Drug tourists migrate to San Francisco because they can get free money to buy drugs.
Sorry this is very wrong. SF has so many homeless people because they come to SF to get free things.
Most of that is not direct cash transfers but they absolutely receive more in services than in other places, that is why they attract homeless from all over the country.
> arresting people for the crime of not having money
Such people are not arrested for not having money, but instead for being a pox upon the public by virtue of their behavior.
Aka "the behavior of having no money in public" i.e. laying on benches or sitting on trains etc
Them staying in the sidewalk is free. Or the cost is so indirect that nobody is responsible for it.
Facilities like asylums and jails are super costly though. And extra expensive to operate if you don't want to treat the inmates as cattle.
I'll add that treating the inmates like cattle is actually the most expensive option of all in the long term. The USA has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world largely due to high recidivism due to the system not providing proper rehabilitation.
So it's costing the USA 65k/yr per inmate on average right now with the 5th highest incarceration rate in the world. The 4 countries above it are not nice places to live contrary to the thought that locking even more people up would make the USA just like the other western nations of the world.
No other country is as stupid as the USA when it comes to homeless. They don't spend a lifetime $65k/yr repeatedly locking up such people. Instead they spend a fraction (when amortised over a lifetime of jail costs) on rehabilitation and public health programs.
The cost is not measured in dollars, but rather in the pollution of the pubic space. People feel less safe and more bothered. Stores nearby get less business, and suffer more theft. Passerbys get accosted.
> Them staying in the sidewalk is free.
Disagree. When the tax-paying public doesn't feel safe around the people living on the sidewalk, they move and take their tax money with them. That means less money for services, roads, education... everything taxes pay for.
That's the cost.
This.
Even an extremely small population of homeless/junkies is enough to "taint" benches.
The same with parks.
but it is apparently the consensus.
Not everywhere, fortunately.
This postulates that policy is set by consensus.
Now I haven't done any scientific polling, but my informal anecdotal experience is so overwhelmingly to the contrary that I'm comfortable believing that consensus isn't determining policy here.
> We've decided that putting the mentally ill in a facility and arresting people for public drug use is not something we're comfortable with at the expense of those other things.
We've decided this about every kind of health care. Instead of providing treatment for people who can't afford its bizarre, artificial prices, we prefer to leave them on the street or warehouse them in prisons. After leaving them in prison for an arbitrary amount of time, we then release them into the streets again, with nothing, more screwed up than when they went in, to murder you.
I have no idea what the "tough love" advocates are advocating for. Locking them up in prison is like hiding rotting meat in a freezer; it only works if you're willing to do it forever. The only answer that seems compatible with the spoiled upper-middle class worldview is to shoot the homeless (which often happened* in a lot of South American countries through semi-official paramilitaries), or to drive them into the wilderness outside of town to hopefully die on their own.
As the layoffs of programmers continue, I predict there will be a lot of changes of heart that won't matter at all, because they will be coming from homeless people. Middle-class culture is all about only being interested in issues that harm you directly, even if that issue is somebody dying too loudly nearby.
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[*] Happens? My info is out of date.
This sounds like it's from someone who say a video on the two square blocks in SF or Philly and has let the propaganda make them believe this is common everywhere in every American city.
What's wrong with both? Why can't we have public benches, and also not arrest drug users if they are sitting on the benches and smoking?
Because sitting on benches quickly turns into living on benches. Then the drug dealers move in, because there's a ready customer base of drug users.
Then the productive members of society move out.
So basically the problem is that productive members of society and drug dealers are incapable of existing near to each other?
Why is that?
I pass by some drug dealers sometimes on the way to work. I don't see the problem. Occasionally I get asked if I want to buy some drugs. I don't want to buy drugs so nothing else happens.
> [why are] productive members of society and drug dealers incapable of existing near to each other?
Drug dealers are criminals. Criminals commit other crimes and attract other criminals and crime. For example, rival drug dealers who want to take their spot and use violence.
So the problem is that someone who does one crime is a criminal and being a criminal means someone does every crime? For example, someone who removes DRM from a video game is a criminal, and therefore he also shoots people, so we have to put DRM removers in jail to decrease shooting deaths?
I have to admit, I'm not really following the logic there.
Because you made a strawman out of their point. Reasonable people avoid drug markets for good reason.
Drug crimes and non-drug crimes (assault, robbery, x/y/z) commonly cluster[1], and citizens with working risk estimation skills move on and cede the space.
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2719901/
Seems like something decriminalizing drugs would solve then.
I'd add that we also chose policies that made housing expensive. It used to be much cheaper to live in NYC for example, but housing options included what was essentially a dorm room with shared facilities. Those were outlawedes for various reasons. There are also a lot of other policy factors that push up housing prices.
Cheap housing isn't a panacea, but if there was sub $500 dollar rent in NYC you'd see a lot less homelessness.
Single-room occupancy (SRO) housing was effectively outlawed by tenant protection laws. The only way that housing with shared facilities can possibly work is when the landlord enforces strict rules and immediately evicts tenants who misbehave by making a mess, hassling other tenants, or not paying their rent. But in many cities it can literally take years to evict a tenant, and the city will even pay for legal aid for the tenant to fight it in court. This reduces rental housing availability and increases prices for everyone.
Idk about NYC but the people I see on fent in west coast cities’ homeless encampments couldn’t pay a $500 rent any more than they can the $5,000. They’re strung out all day long and can’t pursue any goal besides getting more drugs.
On the other hand though, a lot of who’s technically homeless at any given time aren’t that chronic, mostly hopeless, and very visible set. It’s people who did lose their apartment just barely after an unexpected job loss or medical expense. Those ones could be helped by cheaper rent! But that group isn’t very visible, doesn’t bother anyone, and often couch surfs, sleeps in their car and showers at the gym for a couple months, etc. and most importantly, they use the many safety net resources to get back on their feet (getting a job usually).
Most homeless people aren't born homeless. Maybe at the point they're at now, yeah, a $500 rent and a $5000 are equally inaccessible.
But for the people on the edge of homelessness, that $500 rent could be the difference that prevents them from going down the death spiral of homelessness, lack of options, drug addiction, etc.
I had a wild conversation with a co-worker who was here as a Ukrainian refugee where he was asking wtf was up with all the homeless people. He was legitimately baffled that they are poor and at war but still didn't have nearly the same level of problem. What was funny is he described what amounted to a soviet version of an SRO being pervasive and I was like "oh those were outlawed and torn down in the 50s"
Urban spaces can be kind or unkind, and benches are a good way to judge.
A week ago I decided to explore a new part of town. I mean, I've only lived in this town for a few years, but I'm not into big cities, and I live in a country where even the capital can feel inordinately leafy and forested if you come from a town in India. I don't come from India, and my dad saw to it that I got acquainted with the ticks and the brambles from a young age, so short of true jungle or a dense mangrove swamp, I consider most places fair game for a leisurely stroll or a rowing. So I was talking with my mom on the phone, relating to her the greens of a small prairie and the reeds demarcating the swampy shore, and counting the many rabbits that were scattering at my passing, when, at a turn of the dirt trail, I found a stark reminder that I was still in town territory: a perfectly normal bench.
America is not known for caring about public infrastructure if they can avoid it once upon a time most cities actually had a public work department that actually tried to keep you know the public places clean they don’t anymore if you want clean public places you have to go someplace else in the world. Japan, China, Taiwan, South Korea.
Most of that stuff has been farmed out to subcontractors in America and that includes what your kids eat in most public schools, the school cafeteria is just one big vending machine these days.
Can’t say it’s a problem in Chicago, we still have benches just about everywhere I can think of
Yup. Public trash cans too.
You can tell which countries have and haven't experienced urban bombing terrorism by the style of public refuse receptacles. Before: concrete, rock, metal, and wood; after: minimal material hoops supporting transparent bags.
Also, public drinking fountains I think are better signals of community commonwealth infrastructure than benches because they take more planning, infrastructure, investment, and maintenance to deliver.
Another problem is the privatization of formerly public spaces, often with an essentially mandatory retail consumption component that didn't exist previously. People aren't as free to simply exist in spaces without buying shit than 50 years ago.
It's becoming harder to find a place to sit down in London (UK), too, especially one without hostile features like bench partitions or spikes.
Having no public restrooms within a 15 minute walk is worse than having no public benches. Cities shouldn't be allowed to exist without either of them. Also, ground-level restaurants and supermarkets should not be allowed to reject non-customers from using them.
Bulk urine is a good source of urea/ammonia which has commercial value, especially considering the global fertilizer shortage.
> Also, ground-level restaurants and supermarkets should not be allowed to reject non-customers from using them.
The single biggest reason why there are no public restrooms within a 15 minute walk in many American cities is because the visibly homeless fuck them up, through crazy vandalism, deliberately dirtying them with their bodily fluids, doing drugs in them, etc. Businesses being legally compelled to let non-customers use their bathrooms would exacerbate this problem.
> Bulk urine is a good source of urea/ammonia which has commercial value, especially considering the global fertilizer shortage.
It's not cost effective to set up systems to capture the ammonia from the urine of people using public restrooms in urban areas, or else people would be doing that. There are municipal sewage treatment plants that sell some of the byproducts from treating human wastewater as fertilizers, because that is cost-effective at their scale and level of centralization.
These are likely good litmus tests for the distinction between a city and "people storage".
This is one of the cases in point of Hostile Architecture.
Or, you get benches that are horribly uncomfortable. Or with awkward bars (prevents sleeping). Or spikes.
In this case, there is nowhere to sit. That's 100% intentional.
Was in a bigger city in the weekend, and they don't have many benches. But it was nice in a way because people just sat anywhere every stair case step, every curb, grass patches, next to a tree, train station floor,...
Where there was a bench 5 people would sit, where there wasn't 15 did
Of course it was a pleasant weather otherwise...
I believe expensive housing is at the root of many societal problems, it's not even funny. We don't have park benches because we've adopted hostile architecture to keep out "undesirables". This mostly means "homeless people". But why are there so many homeless people? The primary reason is housing unaffordability [1].
One of the funny things about China is that there are a lot of "experts" who insist on reading the tea leaves and assign secret, nefarious motives. The truth is that China is pretty open about what they're doing. If you take everything China says at face value you're going to be ahead of 95% of the China talking heads on TV. That's not hyperbole.
Property speculation was a common way for Chinese people to accumulate wealth. This has made property expensive in the Tier 1 cities in particular. The CCP had tried to cool this with various reforms but it turned property into a Ponzi scheme. Basically, developers would have to sell new units and then use those funds to finish a previous project. This is a big factor in the Evergrande default [2].
Xi Jinping took power in 2019 and had some policy priorities that include cracking down on corruption, reforming the housing market and ecological living. In 2019, he famously said "houses are for living, not for speculation" [3]. So the real estate market has been in decline for years. Some might view that as a failure but it was an intentional popping of a real estate bubble for the greater good. China makes it difficult and expensive to own more than one home. Likewise, foreign capital can't be parked in real estate like it can in the West.
One of the good things about the Internet is that people can see for themselves how modern, clean and people-centric Chinese cities are, particularly Tier 1/2 cities.
Instead of investing in society, we militarize and overfund the police, start pointless wars, create homeless people through unaffordability and build our cities around various profit opportunities for mega-corporations (even having to have a card is to the benefit of corporations). And of course we can't forget what role racism played in how our cities evolved and were planned.
[1]: https://endhomelessness.org/state-of-homelessness/
[2]: https://www.reuters.com/world/china/default-delisting-evergr...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houses_are_for_living,_not_for...
You're spreading a common misconception. No one really "owns" a home in China. What they're usually purchasing is a 70-year lease on the land. The hope is that the lease can be renewed on favorable terms but there's no guarantee.
This is misleading, arguably false.
All land in China is state-owned. You own the building. You don't own the land the building is on. In this way, it's really no different to leasehold in the UK or land-lease in NYC. Do we say that all these UK leaseholders don't really "own" a house? Is there the same fearmongering?
And in the UK, it's often the Royal Family or some aristocratic landholder who owns the land (eg the Duke of Westminster owns an awful lot of London land) whereas in China, the lease renewal is essentially automatic and there's no property tax or land lease that gets paid.
It's also worth adding you never really truly own property anywhere. The government is free to change their mind at any time. And they do. All the time eg eminent domain.
not in the US. We have the takings clause
It sounds that you spend money and receive a service which cannot be converted into an investment. Are the people housed, in the end? Is the housing market distorted by rampant speculation? Does the system work?
This has little to do with the homeless and everything to do with a society that's shifted from seeking to facilitate positive things (e.g. the comfort of some random person on some random occasion) to one that wouldn't invent fire or sliced bread if it thought that doing so would be good for the wrong kind of people.
This is intensified in spaces administrated by government due to the incentives of government and the type of people who are best retained and fill out the org chart of such organizations and it is obvious because these spaces are most public but it's a thing everywhere, for example your hospital has security that could kick out "bad people" (whatever that means) but it still has a crappy waiting area not because they don't want to make it inviting for people who care about you to stick around lest they be there to raise a stink in the event you are mistreated.
There are comparable examples of this sort of "make things worse for people who are doing fine things" in all sorts of public and private contexts beyond just seating. I wish it was just the benches.
My best friend built two public benches for his eagle scout project in the late 90s.
Here's one of them, can't remember where the other is (in the same park): https://maps.app.goo.gl/kSFyikeerp7i77oZ8
I think the reason most people do not sympathize with this argument is that most HN readers are programmers, and many of them are still in a relatively secure class position.
Traditionally, programming has had a high barrier to entry, but it has also been a profession where compensation has remained relatively strong. As societies become harsher under pressure from high housing costs and economic displacement, they tend to become more aggressive and violent. But many people do not sympathize with this issue because they are not personally in that situation. They mostly experience the visible disorder: aesthetic damage, drug use, and the social harms produced by deeper structural failures.
But if we compare this to HN debates about LLMs, an irony appears. In labor-market terms, LLMs are similar to hostile design.
LLMs are not installing benches for programmers. They are closer to removing the benches.
In the past, there were lower-level tasks where junior developers, non-traditional developers, non-native English speakers, and small open-source contributors could remain inside the profession. CRUD work, documentation fixes, test writing, small bug fixes, simple UI, repetitive glue code — these were not glamorous tasks, and they were often inefficient. But they functioned like public benches inside the profession. They gave people a place to sit long enough to learn.
LLMs attack exactly that layer.
From a company’s point of view, this is rational. Code that might take a junior developer several days can now be drafted by a model in minutes. Documentation, tests, boilerplate, simple screens, and repetitive API wiring no longer seem worth preserving as training grounds for humans.
As a result, the market may look more efficient. But that efficiency resembles the history of removing benches. It is not only the “problematic” people who disappear. Elderly people, children, travelers, disabled people, and ordinary people who simply needed a place to sit are pushed out as well.
Software has a similar problem. If we remove low-level work, low-quality work may appear to decrease. But at the same time, we also remove the space where beginners can fail, receive correction, observe others, and slowly acquire the instincts of the profession.
So LLMs are not merely productivity tools. They can also function as a force that removes public seating inside the software profession.
That is why I find it difficult to reconcile the logic of people who argue that public benches should be removed, while also arguing that LLMs should not be accepted.
They are already sitting inside the profession. They already have experience, English, networks, code review experience, and existing project history. For them, LLMs look like a faster tool. But for people trying to enter from the edge of the profession, LLMs are not just a tool. They are a change in the structure of entry itself.
The lower seats where people could once sit and learn are disappearing. Newcomers are expected to start from a higher level of abstraction and with stronger verification skills from the beginning.
In cities, the logic for removing benches is usually expressed in the language of order, safety, aesthetics, and maintenance cost. In software, the logic for adopting LLMs is expressed in the language of productivity, efficiency, cost reduction, and quality control.
But behind that language, what disappears is the buffer zone through which a community receives people.
A city without benches may look cleaner, but it does not become more public. Likewise, a software market without entry-level work may look more productive, but it is hard to say that it has become a healthier ecosystem.
When I read HN, I often see this kind of irony. And perhaps we all live inside such ironies. That may also be part of what makes communities interesting.
People do not seem to have a consistent attitude toward publicness itself.
Instead, they show completely different moral intuitions depending on where they are positioned within that public space.
I always find that interesting to watch.
Your comment sounds like half LLM slop, half confusion
English is not my native language.
Gosh, if only there was some way we could solve homelessness!
Don't worry about it, as at least we can drop tens of billions of dollars to show the Iranians how big and powerful we are.
Is there a $10 billion "fix everything easily" button you have in mind for homelessness?
You know oddly enough, if you just put someone up in a real place to live for like a year, that's enough for the majority of people to get back on their feet.
I'd like to believe that! Can you link to any research to back up your claim?
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/14/headway/houston-homeless-...
I think there's plenty of evidence of that not being true. Countless examples of immigrants being given free housing in hotels, and they don't end up getting jobs and contributing to the society that's helping them. Instead they mooch off the public goodwill and trash the place.
But it still beats where they came from, and hey... it's free.
Why are you singling out immigrants? The homeless in our metro area are very much domestically produced.
But you do help illustrate a concern: homelessness is ultimately a federal issue, as some states dump theirs on other more "accepting" states.
The "fix everything" button is abolishing zoning laws, and its aggregate cost is negative. Aggregate cost is not the issue preventing problems from being solved.
how many homes can you buy for $10 billion? especially if you don't care too much about size, extra niceties, or location?
Given a construction budget of $125,000 per residence for a particularly nice two bedroom single bathroom house of about 1000ft², that's 80,000. Estimates are that there are currently between 750,000 to 800,000 people that have no home right now. Taking the high number of 800,000 that $10,000,000,000 is 10% of those people housed. You could reasonably go down to $30,000 for a build for a single floor house of the same footprint if you used mass produced prefabs, and get 330,000 people housed, or over 41%. Do you realize how much that would uplift things if we suddenly had a 41% reduction in homelessness? Considering that companies like Google and OpenAI are throwing around hundreds of billions of dollars which never get circulated back into the wider economy, spending $10,000,000,000 to bring 330,000 people back into economic and societal participation sounds amazing. That's assuming a somewhat low yearly income of $45,000 per person, adding up to $14,850,000,000 in circulation, or a gain of almost $5,000,000,000 right there. Even if we only achieve half of any of this that's $7,000,000,000 for one year. Two years in and the cost has already been paid back and more.
This comes with the giant caveat that we exclude the external costs of such a huge project, like social welfare visits, probation or monitoring if needed, or even just placement programs. Likely those all combined would be a third of the total cost.
Homelessness and visible homelessness need to be distinguished here. The large majority of homeless people are not the ones you notice on the streets. Most try to be discreet. Some have jobs. A person who lives in their car is considered homeless.
The best measure to reduce homelessness is to provide timely support for people who are being evicted from their homes before they lose their jobs (which they might still have) and before their mental health deteriorates. This is the point at which assistance is most effective. You have heard the saying, "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure". Such programs have been applied to great effect in e.g. London.
The way to respond to people who have experienced chronic homelessness with complications is different and more difficult.
The Simon Community where I live went around the city one December and counted how many rough sleepers there were. I forget the exact figure but it was less than 100. Meanwhile there were thousands classified as homeless due to being in temporary accomodation. And this is a part of the UK well known for having a homelessness problem.
$10 billion would build a lot of homes. If you give homeless people homes, they're not homeless anymore.
The problem is also political, unfortunately. $10 billion isn't going to change zoning laws and a NIMBY attitude of freezing things in time.
If they like that point in time so much, they should build a museum, sheesh!
> $10 billion would build a lot of homes. If you give homeless people homes, they're not homeless anymore.
But that doesn't answer the question. It's "a lot" of homes, but less than a tenth of what would be needed.
And you need a bunch of social workers too at minimum.
That wouldn't be enough to do the job but it would be a great start if it was done right. My point was we've flushed $50B (and likely far far more) and what do we get for it? High gas prices. So hurray for the push for renewables and EVs, but there's nicer ways to do it.
> And you need a bunch of social workers too at minimum
Ok, sure. Remember, we're spending the $50B that's been lit on fire so this gives us more jobs and a happier country. And that money circulates in the economy rather than expatriated profits by the defense contractors.
SF spends more per capita than anywhere in the world on homelessness. And it’s barely made a dent. The solution is upstream of money. It’s policy decisions derived from cultural values. In other places in the world, where homelessness is vanishingly rare, these people are made to choose: “you will get treatment or you will go to jail, but we will not tolerate the destruction of the commons.”
Spending money doesn't get results. Spending money is often a prerequisite to getting results, but you have to be results-minded to begin with, or you just spend money without results. Large bureaucracies are especially good at spending money in ways that don't generate results.
SF has a famously broken city government. As does Portland (the metro I now live in). Note they have huge budgets for their police and there's still plenty of crime -- does that mean they should give up on having police?
I think if it were treated as a hybrid program (federal/state/county) there could be synergy that could make it work (more eyeballs on it, more shared resources, etc).
And as far as treatment or jail, we do need the power of involuntary institutionalization but it needs to be wielded with utmost restraint and scrutiny. I have family that could have used this, it's pretty much the only way with some. But it always has to be done in the context of helping rather than punishing.
There's so much we could do: start a kind of CCC for homeless youth as a baseline starting point and give them paths up and out. Heal those you can and those you can't at least put them somewhere where they can't ruin it for others. I imagine the emotional response to that would be "send them to jail", I completely understand but it's a lot cheaper if we do something else.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/14/headway/houston-homeless-... https://community.solutions/what-cities-with-successful-home...
> SF has a famously broken city government. As does Portland (the metro I now live in). Note they have huge budgets for their police and there's still plenty of crime -- does that mean they should give up on having police?
I don't think the police analogy works. The relevant question is not whether a big police budget solves crime. Not the expected outcome. The real question is whether, when crimes happen, the system is allowed to investigate, arrest, prosecute, punish, deter, and incapacitate criminals.
If you port the SF/PDX homelessness model into criminal justice, the analogy would be something like this: we spend a lot on police, but we also prevent them from arresting people, prevent prosecutors from prosecuting, treat enforcement as inhumane, and then decide that the problem is insufficient “resources” or “coordination.”
Money isn't irrelevant. It's that money cannot overcome a policy framework that refuses to impose obligations on the people causing damage. You can spend billions on outreach, services, navigation centers, nonprofit contracts, and harm-reduction.. etc etc. But if the answer to refusal is always “try again tomorrow,” then the system has no endpoint and fails.
YEs, involuntary institutionalization should be used carefully. Jail should not be the first answer for people whose problem is psychosis, addiction, or incapacity. But that doesn't concedes the central point: for many, voluntary help will not work. The only real solution is compulsory: treatment, supervised placement, or jail. And it can't be after multiple years of attempts while the person languishes on the streets and the commons are destroyed.
A crisis care program for homeless youth might be good upstream, but it doesn't address acute problems: chronically homeless people who are severely mentally ill, addicted, violent, or destructive (usually multiple at the same time), and who refuse help. Those cases require either 1) shelter or treatment (won't work for most), 2) secure care, or 3) jail.
Again, the question isn't “should we give up because spending has not solved homelessness?” The question is whether the current model is even capable of solving it. A system built around voluntary services, weak enforcement, and tolerance of public disorder will predictably produce encampments, addiction zones, and unusable public spaces no matter how much money it receives. The missing piece isn't just funding. It is authority, conditionality, and a cultural choice to protect the commons.
Also, zealously dismantle and prosecute the non-profit homelessness grift complex.
You are talking about a country with one of highest incarceration rates in the world, certainly western world.
A country with so expensive legal defense that most simply cant afford it. And a country that punishes even attempt to go to court to defend oneself with years and years of additional prison time if you loose.
A country where it is near impossible to convince a cop or prosecutor of wrongdoing, a country that goes really out of its way to rationalize what would be a clear murder elsewhere. A country with qualified immunity too.
Oh, and a country willing to incarcerate on any quack pseudo science.
But, somehow ... it is prosecutors and police who need more help.
> But, somehow ... it is prosecutors and police who need more help.
I'm not sure how you get that from what I wrote. My solution is (like many, many places in the world): "treatment or jail, but we will not tolerate a destruction of the commons". PDX/SF could do this with the police they have, and it might even imply force reduction as getting those people off the streets would reduce A LOT of crime.
Yes, the U.S. has many significant problems. I agree. Is your suggestion that we have to address them sequentially, prioritized according to your preferences... or else do nothing?
Another factor in other places in the world is much lower economic inequality.
The US has chosen to divide its population in this way.
The way to fix it is to have the right incentives and also the right deterrent. If you simply enable a drug addict lifestyle or corrupt nonprofit grift, that isn’t the right incentive. And yet that’s the reality in west coast cities.
Our society is sick and it's not getting better anytime soon. We're past the golden era of civilization and barreling towards dystopia now.