I was there and I did feel shame, but what can really be done? While I agree in spirit, I have to believe the problem is more complicated than "apply money."
Depression, drugs, debt/money based homelessness, abuse derived homelessness, and psychosis are probably a subset of archetypes each with very different solutions. Chronic vs Temporary homelessness are probably entirely different problems, and my understanding is Chronic homelessess surprisingly isn't the main problem in SF. Then you have the questions of creating an institution of some sort to deal with it, which involves staffing it and fighting corruption within it. Then you have the NIMBY's. Then there are DA's willing to tolerate entirely unacceptable behavior. Historic abuses of vulnerable people in homeless addressing systems. Historic underfunding, understaffing, and lack of safety policy for workers in that area. Homeless immigration. We don't like to be around homeless people, but homeless people don't like to be around other homeless people either which makes scalable solutions harder. Then there are entire policies around requiring homeless to "make progress" or not use drugs or other things like that which has shown to fail. Then it's downright unamerican (not to me) to have the government do something rather than contract out to businesses. Then there is how the tax burden falls. Does San Jose pay into SF's homelessness fund? How do you design and execute outreach or policy or funnel people into your "remedy"?
American culture is biased towards "if you don't help yourself, then you don't deserve help." There are probably a significant number of people who need help adopt that mindset and don't believe they deserve help themselves. How do you make cultural progress? Do we even have any idea how many people are homeless and trying vs homeless and hopeless?
So funding, employment, research, policy, culture, laws, and a potential "homeless industry," all have elements that need to be addressed.
Then there are the straight alignment problems: Who wants to work on that problem when they could be studying engineering and making the big bucks? Who wants to get payed government wages for low reward probably unsafe jobs that probably suck?
Where would the ambition to solve, not hide, the problem come from?
Google "why is homelessness still a problem in San Francisco." There isn't even any kind of consensus on where the root of the problem is. There's not even an authoritative or high quality source or organization explaining the problem or explaining policy in the results, it's all news which is beholden to engagement, not problem solving.
I kind of think you need to address the root problem first, once you clear that up, the symptoms, like homelessness, would actually be far more solvable.
We know what the root problem is, housing supply. We know how to make cities far better and reduce total cost of living in them.
There would still be many homeless left, but at that point you might actually have a hope of actually dealing with that specific problem.
>> There isn't even any kind of consensus on where the root of the problem is.
> We know what the root problem is, housing supply.
How do we know that is the root problem?
If we knew the root problem is housing supply, and we haven't been able to address housing supply, then clearly housing supply isn't the root problem and it's something like entrenched interests (NIMBY's) or alignment problems regarding people not wanting to be taxed. Clearly there is some more "5 why's" work to be done.
I think it's hubris to think you have the answer for a problem that's been around for 3 decades+ worth of administrations.
> We know how to make cities far better and reduce total cost of living in them.
This also needs citation. I don't think we do. It's not "build better public transportation" or "build more housing", it's build more under the American legal system, under American culture and American politics.
These problems require systemic thinking. Why is the website down? Because we don't have enough web servers (not enough housing?)? No, because the databases are overloaded slowing down requests, because we haven't increased the number of database shards, because the database team is understaffed, because our hiring pipeline has problems, because recruiting is understaffed... etc.
Depression, drugs, debt/money based homelessness, abuse derived homelessness, and psychosis are probably a subset of archetypes each with very different solutions. Chronic vs Temporary homelessness are probably entirely different problems, and my understanding is Chronic homelessess surprisingly isn't the main problem in SF. Then you have the questions of creating an institution of some sort to deal with it, which involves staffing it and fighting corruption within it. Then you have the NIMBY's. Then there are DA's willing to tolerate entirely unacceptable behavior. Historic abuses of vulnerable people in homeless addressing systems. Historic underfunding, understaffing, and lack of safety policy for workers in that area. Homeless immigration. We don't like to be around homeless people, but homeless people don't like to be around other homeless people either which makes scalable solutions harder. Then there are entire policies around requiring homeless to "make progress" or not use drugs or other things like that which has shown to fail. Then it's downright unamerican (not to me) to have the government do something rather than contract out to businesses. Then there is how the tax burden falls. Does San Jose pay into SF's homelessness fund? How do you design and execute outreach or policy or funnel people into your "remedy"?
American culture is biased towards "if you don't help yourself, then you don't deserve help." There are probably a significant number of people who need help adopt that mindset and don't believe they deserve help themselves. How do you make cultural progress? Do we even have any idea how many people are homeless and trying vs homeless and hopeless?
So funding, employment, research, policy, culture, laws, and a potential "homeless industry," all have elements that need to be addressed.
Then there are the straight alignment problems: Who wants to work on that problem when they could be studying engineering and making the big bucks? Who wants to get payed government wages for low reward probably unsafe jobs that probably suck?
Where would the ambition to solve, not hide, the problem come from?
Google "why is homelessness still a problem in San Francisco." There isn't even any kind of consensus on where the root of the problem is. There's not even an authoritative or high quality source or organization explaining the problem or explaining policy in the results, it's all news which is beholden to engagement, not problem solving.