[spdrun]

They turn it down because it’s conditional. Provide unconditional housing, then focus on the sobriety, treatment, and employment parts.

[spdrun]

You absolutely can’t and shouldn’t, but would people sleeping rough actually turn down the offer of a dry place to sleep with no strings attached for six months? As we learned from quarantine measures – coercion actually reduces interest in compliance. Offer housing, connect them with services IF THEY CHOOSE TO USE THEM and help them voluntarily rebuild their lives.

[spdrun]

$40k is out of the Medicaid/subsidized range for a single person, and most of the homeless people aren’t families. I think the job thing is more “unable to” — someone who’s been sleeping rough for a year or more doesn’t interview well. Connect them to services that will allow them to clean up, have a safe indoor place to shower, and become employable.

Again – how should this be FIXED other than warehousing people in jail, which isn’t a long-term solution?

[spdrun]

Do we have any better ideas? Throwing people in jail repeatedly is generally more expensive than housing and does nothing for their future employment prospects and ability to re-integrate into society.

[spdrun]

They have to be able to get the job. A bit difficult if you look homeless and have mental health issues. The jobs may exist now, but they weren’t available in 2020 when many restaurants had to close, so there may be a significant period of homelessness involved.

$20/hr = $40k/yr or $30000 after taxes. $2500/mo. Hardly living the life. Housing $1000/mo, car + insurance + maintenance $500/mo. Does In-and-Out offer health insurance?

The solution is to house the people first, get them medical care, and get them jobs. Oh, and I grew up lower middle class in a rich town, which was its own special kind of hell. I was one of the few “apartment kids” which parents had recently gotten divorced and lost their home.

[spdrun]

How to fix it? Let housing prices fall, subsidize housing for homeless people who need it at lower prices. I suspect that the current housing frenzy actually forced people whose situations were marginal pre-COVID into homelessness.

Put it this way – a friend was able to rent an apartment in coastal Carlsbad during the bottom of the 2008-9 crisis/correction. Rent was $850 per month, on the west side of I-5 (the only down side was that it was near the rail line, so there was a lot of train horn noise early in the morning). It’s probably $1600-2000 per month now, and incomes haven’t doubled since then for many people.

[spdrun]

I know that the press is exaggerating the supposed “crime wave” in my own city (NY), and I don’t expect SF to be much different. The press seems to have a hate-on for urban areas ever since COVID struck. I’ve been to SF multiple times, though not post-COVID (I haven’t been on a plane since 2020).

I was in SF after the Kate Steinle shooting, and it wasn’t the den of crime and iniquity that the right-wing press and Trumpanzees were painting it as. I’m skeptical that downtown SF looks like Bucha or Mariupol right now.

[spdrun]

The law isn’t always right and certainly isn’t equal to morality. Why is it the state’s fucking business what people put into their own bodies or do in the bedroom? It wasn’t too long ago (within living memory, even) that same-sex and interracial relationships were illegal in many parts of the “land of the free.” Same-sex intercourse was illegal in CA until the 1970s. Pot was illegal even in California until the mid 2010s. Are you saying that the people arrested, jailed, fined, and forced into treatment for those heinous “crimes” got what they deserved?

To your other post: San Francisco used to have a vibrant art and music scene that was largely priced out of the city starting in the late 1990s. If the city ends up a bit more balanced vs being a bedroom community for 20-somethings working in Cupertino and San Jose, maybe it will be a better place for it.

[spdrun]

Hook. Line. Sinker.

[spdrun]

What the fuck do you know about my musical tastes?

[spdrun]

Gentrification isn’t only about race. In many cases, it’s creating a monoculture that pushes everything else that’s interesting out.

[spdrun]

Glad to see gentrification go in reverse for once.

[spdrun]

The shitty policy was mass incarceration and the War on Some Drugs. Cops and jailers got too fucking uppity in the US and needed to be told their proper place. Create an unemployable class with criminal records due to victimless crimes that never should have been crimes, and you get more poverty, more rage, and more crime. The US fucked itself starting with Reagan.

[spdrun]

Or maybe property was just insanely overvalued in SF, to the point that only the wealthy could afford it. Maybe it’s a good thing that pricing is reverting to mean.

Policing in this country was largely crap from the 1990s to 2010s — too many people in prison for victimless crimes and psych/medical issues. I’m GLAD there’s been a reckoning. If business owners and stockholders get slightly less rich because of it, so be it.

Bail and pre-trial remand should only be used in the most serious of crimes. Keeping people locked up for years awaiting trial is fucking inhumane and unconstitutional. The system should be set up not to force people into pleading out to crimes they may not even have committed in order to get out of jail. Possible prison time should (if anything) be reduced to levels similar to what’s seen in Europe.

Also, “bombed out wasteland” is a bit of hyperbole. The yellow press really has it in for NYC, calling it a crime-riddled wasteland. Yet life goes on, mostly normally, for people who actually live here and don’t read the Murdoch (pronounced Merde-dog) media.

Besides, shouldn’t you see this as an opportunity? If prices crash to early 2010s levels, you could buy and rent out to your heart’s content.

[spdrun]

“Don’t like it? Take a hike. Gooood luuuuucckk.”

Also, “No.” is a complete sentence.

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