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 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.
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.
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 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.)
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.
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.
It's a study by a progressive think tank. Of fucking course it's going to say that.
> Also, the cited study blatantly does not show the numbers ("close to 100%")
Care to read it past the preface? Page 5, Figure 4.
Feel free to read the full study report, if you want. I did.
> In those cases, there's an inherent bias
I can send you a nice mirror.
You failed to do a basic search to verify your claims. Instead, you clutched at the first number that popped out in Google Search.
The problem is that you're conflating sheltered and unsheltered homeless. The HUD studies also rely on self-reporting surveys, which have obvious problems with people lying.
> More than one quarter (27%) had been hospitalized for a mental health condition; 56% of these hospitalizations occurred prior to the first instance of
homelessness. Nearly two thirds (65%) reported having had a period in their life in which they regularly used illicit drugs. Almost two thirds (62%) reported having had a period in their life with heavy drinking (defined as drinking at least three times a week to get drunk, or heavy intermittent drinking).
In short, unsheltered homelessness is NOT an affordability or income issue. It's a drug abuse problem. "Building more housing" in SF or LA will NOT help with it.
And moreover, providing free housing without mandatory treatment turns into horror stories every time.
I already read the entire thing. You may stop accusing me of bad faith or insufficient research at any time.
> Page 5, Figure 4.
Thank you for confirming that you cited a chart listing 75% of unsheltered people and called it "close to 100%". I gave exact numbers from the studies I referenced; you exaggerated yours.
A more relevant figure from the study is figure 2: 51% of unsheltered people (and 6% of sheltered) say that substance abuse is a cause of their homelessness. Also see figure 3 for other relevant causes.
That's leaving aside, again, that you are still equivocating between drugs and alcohol. I would suggest looking at statistics for how many people in the general population drink to excess, if you're going to cite statistics on how many homeless people do. But, of course, "drug addict" is the more evocative and stigmatizing phrase, which makes it harder to get people help.
And in any case: yes, of course there's a difference between sheltered and unsheltered, not least of which because we do a poor job of helping people who simultaneously experience drug addiction and homelessness. There's an obvious correlation there, but a major part of it is "drug addiction prevents getting help from shelters". (And I would venture a guess that homelessness makes it harder to get help with drug addiction, though I haven't specifically looked up numbers on that one.)
There are many attempted claims in this thread that people "don't want help", and none of that is supported. How many people refuse help, versus how many people can't get the help they need based on the structure of what we provide?
On top of that, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48057738 for a more nuanced point about lagging indicators: the right interventions happen much earlier in that downward spiral.
That is nowhere near the same as a claim that homelessness, in general, is a problem of drug addiction, or that the Venn diagram is a circle. That claim is actively harmful towards efforts to build systems that actually help people.
> You failed to do a basic search to verify your claims. Instead, you clutched at the first number that popped out in Google Search.
False. Stop assuming that people who come to different conclusions than you have have not done thorough research.
> Thank you for confirming that you cited a chart listing 75% of unsheltered people and called it "close to 100%".
I already said that the study is from pre-COVID time, and puts the lower bound due to its conservative methodology.
And yes, I consider it proving my point, even that conservative estimate shows that for the vast majority of unsheltered homeless the problem is not in housing availability. It's mental health and/or drug abuse.
> A more relevant figure from the study is figure 2: 51% of unsheltered people (and 6% of sheltered) say that substance abuse is a cause of their homelessness. Also see figure 3 for other relevant causes.
Self-reporting, again. It's also kinda beside the point. Right _now_ the unsheltered homelessness is a drug problem however it began earlier.
Unless you just want to wait until all the addicts just die of overdoses?
> There are many attempted claims in this thread that people "don't want help", and none of that is supported.
I cited another study. There is also the experience in Seattle or SF. I guess you live somewhere in a town where the worst substance abuse is someone getting a bit too much booze?
Portland tried to decriminalize drugs and add voluntary treatment options. Their drug treatment hotline apparently helped 17 to enter treatment. Not percent, people.
> On top of that, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48057738 for a more nuanced point about lagging indicators: the right interventions happen much earlier in that downward spiral.
Yes. We need absolutely relentless pressure. If you're caught doing drugs, you need to have only two choices: treatment or jail. You can then get into housing, but with random mandatory drug screening. Constant, unyielding pressure with 100% certainty of consequences.
For people who are NOT on drugs, I fully support emergency housing assistance, job training, and/or help with getting disability status.
> That is nowhere near the same as a claim that homelessness, in general, is a problem of drug addiction, or that the Venn diagram is a circle. That claim is actively harmful towards efforts to build systems that actually help people.
No. They are people who are actually not blinded by the ideology and CAN SEE THE FUCKING PROBLEM in the first place.
> False. Stop assuming that people who come to different conclusions than you have have not done thorough research.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is objectively false. There are many funded and underutilized programs that people actively choose to avoid, per a partner I had that worked in one. They'd literally get you off the street, free public transportation vouchers, job training and financial education (getting bank accounts, etc).
When you can panhandle and use drugs, or get clean and go to work, it turns out a significant portion choose to panhandle and use drugs.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
Any article like this that I read that dismisses anti-social behavior as some kind of normative cultural trait I think misses the point.
In most places street furniture serves a function, and a function that cost a significant amount of resources. The anti-social use of these features harms the social services those features are meant to serve.
Anti-social behavior can be trivially defined by a kind of categorical imperative. That is: does this behavior, if universalized, render the public service non-functional. It is increasingly naive to consider these concerns simply in a cultural context or some power dynamic.
I’m saying sleeping on a bench that is meant for transit users to wait for a train is, indeed, anti-social.
This is fairly trivial to demonstrate using a categorical imperative. If everyone used the transit system to sleep in, then that transit system would likely cease to exist, and the benches would not be maintained.
We very much ought to have places for people to sleep. That those resources are rarely provided to many folks satisfaction is shameful. Still when public services are make less functional this can interfere with the literal viability of expensive transportation systems. They can rapidly become insolvent if transit consumers prefer alternatives due to the misuse of spaces.
The idea that need trumps all other factors leads us to inefficiency public services that collapse.
Homeless people have no moral obligation to stay away from benches due to "solvency of transportation systems", if society doesn't care about them in return.
You seem to think need trumps all duty to your fellow citizen. I do not. By suggesting need trumps everything, you are demonstrating why the benches have disappeared.
If we live in a would where we accept that we allow some folks to disrupt complicated social programs, then those aspects of the social programs will disappear or the programs themselves will disappear.
This is exactly what the essay describes as happening. When someone on a bench disrupts the service and we will not remove the person creating the disruption, then we will end up removing the bench.
We can clutch our pearls all we like here, but people will stop using a social service they are uncomfortable using. And when they don't want to use it, they will stop funding it. As long as we live in a democracy, this will be in issue.
I believe in duty as much as the next guy. But duty goes both ways.
The Earth has lots of resources that are privately owned. The process by which these resources become privately owned has no satisfactory libertarian justification ("land and oil become yours when you mix them with your labor", really?) If the profit from these resources was divided equally, everyone would have enough for food and shelter. The people who have less than that are essentially victims of theft. Society should first pay these people the fair share that was stolen from them, and only then start telling them about their duties to society.
Why do some people litter when they are steps away from a garbage can? Why do some people play their phones at high volume on public transit? Anti-social behavior comes in all shapes and sizes.
There is a distinction between pro- and anti-social behaviors beyond capitalist and socialist systems. You can have anti-social behavior in both systems. You can have pro-social behaviors in both systems. This should be fairly straight forward.
Not accommodating someone disrupting a service does not mean we need to be absolute pricks about it. This happens every day in public libraries, public parks, public toilets, and public transit systems. Simple because a need exists, doesn't mean the library or transit system does not also exist to meet needs.
If you think that socialism -- alone -- will end homelessness, I would ask you to check your history books. There was homelessness and vagrancy in the USSR. There are plenty of folks in San Francisco who refuse shelter when offered: https://x.com/LondonBreed/status/1734350588899717423 ... we are currently experiencing a move in large parts of the west from high-trust to low-trust societies. Much of the issues around homelessness, lack of housing, and refusal to provide adequate shelter space stem from folks engaging in low-trust behaviors, treating property as a zero-sum good, and cities as places that should exist in a type of stasis... rather than as communities that must continuously grow and change to meet needs. These low-trust issues certainly can persist in low-trust socialist societies as well.
Firstly, I agree with you. I just don't think it's a contest, and I don't think "ranking something as worse" means the other thing should be considered permissible.
>Anti-social behavior can be trivially defined by a kind of categorical imperative. That is: does this behavior, if universalized, render the public service non-functional. It is increasingly naive to consider these concerns simply in a cultural context or some power dynamic.
Your own policy is anti-social then.
If we universalized your suggested policy of having strict(er?) prevention and/or (probably and) enforcement against "anti-social" (whatever that dog whistle means) behavior we would have the war on drugs but for every issue and policy area. We'd be living in more of a dystopia than we already are. The government would be subjugating us (more than it already is) rather than serving us (not that it does this much already). I think any honest assessment based on any degree of standard western/liberal (small L) assumptions about society and government would consider that "non functional".
I'm really baffled by the amount of anti-social behavior. Case in point: trash. Where I live it's so common to litter that most people simply don't consider littering something wrong. The idea "if people didn't litter we wouldn't be living in a garbage dump" isn't even a part of the social discourse, and the solution is to keep raising taxes to fund more cleaning services. When I see this, it's very hard for me not to think that my tax money is wasted on people who will never respect it, and there's very little wrong with elitism. My second favorite is people having big-ass pavements but bravely deciding to walk on the cycling path because why not. Bonus points if it's a parent with a stroller.
On the benches specifically, I've noticed something interesting. I don't mind sitting on the ground, and when I cannot find a bench, I do exactly that. People often assume I must be homeless.
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.
Nope. The correlation absolutely disappears when you look at drug policies. Turns out, that places with permissive drug use policies correlate well with rising prices.
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.
There's nothing wrong with not wanting drug-addled vagrants or any other kind of antisocial behavior near you. That's not a society "that wouldn't invent fire or sliced bread if it thought that doing so would be good for the wrong kind of people". Ridiculous.
Public spaces are made possible only through the maintenance of common standards. When those standards are not maintained out of "equity" concerns or "libertarian" reasons or whatever and antisocial behavior starts to crowd out ordinary people, well, you're going to lose those public spaces.
You can't have nice public spaces without the ability to remove the not-nice parts from it. You just can't.
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.
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.
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 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.
Not a great solution, honestly. Long term drug abuse is almost never a victimless habit. I'm tempted to say never.
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.
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
> 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.)
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.
> 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.
> Which specifically leads with a page saying
It's a study by a progressive think tank. Of fucking course it's going to say that.
> Also, the cited study blatantly does not show the numbers ("close to 100%")
Care to read it past the preface? Page 5, Figure 4.
Feel free to read the full study report, if you want. I did.
> In those cases, there's an inherent bias
I can send you a nice mirror.
You failed to do a basic search to verify your claims. Instead, you clutched at the first number that popped out in Google Search.
The problem is that you're conflating sheltered and unsheltered homeless. The HUD studies also rely on self-reporting surveys, which have obvious problems with people lying.
And UCLA study is far from the only study with similar results: https://homelessness.ucsf.edu/sites/default/files/2023-06/CA... - it relied on self-reporting, so the numbers are lower.
> More than one quarter (27%) had been hospitalized for a mental health condition; 56% of these hospitalizations occurred prior to the first instance of homelessness. Nearly two thirds (65%) reported having had a period in their life in which they regularly used illicit drugs. Almost two thirds (62%) reported having had a period in their life with heavy drinking (defined as drinking at least three times a week to get drunk, or heavy intermittent drinking).
In short, unsheltered homelessness is NOT an affordability or income issue. It's a drug abuse problem. "Building more housing" in SF or LA will NOT help with it.
And moreover, providing free housing without mandatory treatment turns into horror stories every time.
> Care to read it past the preface?
I already read the entire thing. You may stop accusing me of bad faith or insufficient research at any time.
> Page 5, Figure 4.
Thank you for confirming that you cited a chart listing 75% of unsheltered people and called it "close to 100%". I gave exact numbers from the studies I referenced; you exaggerated yours.
A more relevant figure from the study is figure 2: 51% of unsheltered people (and 6% of sheltered) say that substance abuse is a cause of their homelessness. Also see figure 3 for other relevant causes.
That's leaving aside, again, that you are still equivocating between drugs and alcohol. I would suggest looking at statistics for how many people in the general population drink to excess, if you're going to cite statistics on how many homeless people do. But, of course, "drug addict" is the more evocative and stigmatizing phrase, which makes it harder to get people help.
And in any case: yes, of course there's a difference between sheltered and unsheltered, not least of which because we do a poor job of helping people who simultaneously experience drug addiction and homelessness. There's an obvious correlation there, but a major part of it is "drug addiction prevents getting help from shelters". (And I would venture a guess that homelessness makes it harder to get help with drug addiction, though I haven't specifically looked up numbers on that one.)
There are many attempted claims in this thread that people "don't want help", and none of that is supported. How many people refuse help, versus how many people can't get the help they need based on the structure of what we provide?
On top of that, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48057738 for a more nuanced point about lagging indicators: the right interventions happen much earlier in that downward spiral.
That is nowhere near the same as a claim that homelessness, in general, is a problem of drug addiction, or that the Venn diagram is a circle. That claim is actively harmful towards efforts to build systems that actually help people.
> You failed to do a basic search to verify your claims. Instead, you clutched at the first number that popped out in Google Search.
False. Stop assuming that people who come to different conclusions than you have have not done thorough research.
> Thank you for confirming that you cited a chart listing 75% of unsheltered people and called it "close to 100%".
I already said that the study is from pre-COVID time, and puts the lower bound due to its conservative methodology.
And yes, I consider it proving my point, even that conservative estimate shows that for the vast majority of unsheltered homeless the problem is not in housing availability. It's mental health and/or drug abuse.
> A more relevant figure from the study is figure 2: 51% of unsheltered people (and 6% of sheltered) say that substance abuse is a cause of their homelessness. Also see figure 3 for other relevant causes.
Self-reporting, again. It's also kinda beside the point. Right _now_ the unsheltered homelessness is a drug problem however it began earlier.
Unless you just want to wait until all the addicts just die of overdoses?
> There are many attempted claims in this thread that people "don't want help", and none of that is supported.
I cited another study. There is also the experience in Seattle or SF. I guess you live somewhere in a town where the worst substance abuse is someone getting a bit too much booze?
Portland tried to decriminalize drugs and add voluntary treatment options. Their drug treatment hotline apparently helped 17 to enter treatment. Not percent, people.
> On top of that, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48057738 for a more nuanced point about lagging indicators: the right interventions happen much earlier in that downward spiral.
Yes. We need absolutely relentless pressure. If you're caught doing drugs, you need to have only two choices: treatment or jail. You can then get into housing, but with random mandatory drug screening. Constant, unyielding pressure with 100% certainty of consequences.
For people who are NOT on drugs, I fully support emergency housing assistance, job training, and/or help with getting disability status.
> That is nowhere near the same as a claim that homelessness, in general, is a problem of drug addiction, or that the Venn diagram is a circle. That claim is actively harmful towards efforts to build systems that actually help people.
No. They are people who are actually not blinded by the ideology and CAN SEE THE FUCKING PROBLEM in the first place.
> False. Stop assuming that people who come to different conclusions than you have have not done thorough research.
Sorry. But not buying it.
Utterly and completely untrue and you should be embarrassed for saying so
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
What about just proving housing to people?
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.
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.
> 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
This is objectively false. There are many funded and underutilized programs that people actively choose to avoid, per a partner I had that worked in one. They'd literally get you off the street, free public transportation vouchers, job training and financial education (getting bank accounts, etc).
When you can panhandle and use drugs, or get clean and go to work, it turns out a significant portion choose to panhandle and use drugs.
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.
but it is apparently the consensus.
Not everywhere, fortunately.
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.
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.
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"
> It used to be much cheaper to live in NYC for example
And it'll only keep getting worse, because the brainless "just build more" people won.
Well, all else being equal, building more means cheaper housing than not building more.
Yup. Public trash cans too.
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.
“Why can’t we have nice things?”
Any article like this that I read that dismisses anti-social behavior as some kind of normative cultural trait I think misses the point.
In most places street furniture serves a function, and a function that cost a significant amount of resources. The anti-social use of these features harms the social services those features are meant to serve.
Anti-social behavior can be trivially defined by a kind of categorical imperative. That is: does this behavior, if universalized, render the public service non-functional. It is increasingly naive to consider these concerns simply in a cultural context or some power dynamic.
Are you saying that sleeping on a bench, if you don't have anywhere else to sleep, is antisocial?
I’m saying sleeping on a bench that is meant for transit users to wait for a train is, indeed, anti-social.
This is fairly trivial to demonstrate using a categorical imperative. If everyone used the transit system to sleep in, then that transit system would likely cease to exist, and the benches would not be maintained.
We very much ought to have places for people to sleep. That those resources are rarely provided to many folks satisfaction is shameful. Still when public services are make less functional this can interfere with the literal viability of expensive transportation systems. They can rapidly become insolvent if transit consumers prefer alternatives due to the misuse of spaces.
The idea that need trumps all other factors leads us to inefficiency public services that collapse.
Homeless people have no moral obligation to stay away from benches due to "solvency of transportation systems", if society doesn't care about them in return.
You seem to think need trumps all duty to your fellow citizen. I do not. By suggesting need trumps everything, you are demonstrating why the benches have disappeared.
If we live in a would where we accept that we allow some folks to disrupt complicated social programs, then those aspects of the social programs will disappear or the programs themselves will disappear.
This is exactly what the essay describes as happening. When someone on a bench disrupts the service and we will not remove the person creating the disruption, then we will end up removing the bench.
We can clutch our pearls all we like here, but people will stop using a social service they are uncomfortable using. And when they don't want to use it, they will stop funding it. As long as we live in a democracy, this will be in issue.
I believe in duty as much as the next guy. But duty goes both ways.
The Earth has lots of resources that are privately owned. The process by which these resources become privately owned has no satisfactory libertarian justification ("land and oil become yours when you mix them with your labor", really?) If the profit from these resources was divided equally, everyone would have enough for food and shelter. The people who have less than that are essentially victims of theft. Society should first pay these people the fair share that was stolen from them, and only then start telling them about their duties to society.
Why do some people litter when they are steps away from a garbage can? Why do some people play their phones at high volume on public transit? Anti-social behavior comes in all shapes and sizes.
There is a distinction between pro- and anti-social behaviors beyond capitalist and socialist systems. You can have anti-social behavior in both systems. You can have pro-social behaviors in both systems. This should be fairly straight forward.
Not accommodating someone disrupting a service does not mean we need to be absolute pricks about it. This happens every day in public libraries, public parks, public toilets, and public transit systems. Simple because a need exists, doesn't mean the library or transit system does not also exist to meet needs.
If you think that socialism -- alone -- will end homelessness, I would ask you to check your history books. There was homelessness and vagrancy in the USSR. There are plenty of folks in San Francisco who refuse shelter when offered: https://x.com/LondonBreed/status/1734350588899717423 ... we are currently experiencing a move in large parts of the west from high-trust to low-trust societies. Much of the issues around homelessness, lack of housing, and refusal to provide adequate shelter space stem from folks engaging in low-trust behaviors, treating property as a zero-sum good, and cities as places that should exist in a type of stasis... rather than as communities that must continuously grow and change to meet needs. These low-trust issues certainly can persist in low-trust socialist societies as well.
Here's an even more anti-social behavior: not providing enough housing so that there exists homeless people.
Firstly, I agree with you. I just don't think it's a contest, and I don't think "ranking something as worse" means the other thing should be considered permissible.
>Anti-social behavior can be trivially defined by a kind of categorical imperative. That is: does this behavior, if universalized, render the public service non-functional. It is increasingly naive to consider these concerns simply in a cultural context or some power dynamic.
Your own policy is anti-social then.
If we universalized your suggested policy of having strict(er?) prevention and/or (probably and) enforcement against "anti-social" (whatever that dog whistle means) behavior we would have the war on drugs but for every issue and policy area. We'd be living in more of a dystopia than we already are. The government would be subjugating us (more than it already is) rather than serving us (not that it does this much already). I think any honest assessment based on any degree of standard western/liberal (small L) assumptions about society and government would consider that "non functional".
I'm really baffled by the amount of anti-social behavior. Case in point: trash. Where I live it's so common to litter that most people simply don't consider littering something wrong. The idea "if people didn't litter we wouldn't be living in a garbage dump" isn't even a part of the social discourse, and the solution is to keep raising taxes to fund more cleaning services. When I see this, it's very hard for me not to think that my tax money is wasted on people who will never respect it, and there's very little wrong with elitism. My second favorite is people having big-ass pavements but bravely deciding to walk on the cycling path because why not. Bonus points if it's a parent with a stroller.
On the benches specifically, I've noticed something interesting. I don't mind sitting on the ground, and when I cannot find a bench, I do exactly that. People often assume I must be homeless.
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.
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...
> The primary reason is housing unaffordability
Nope. The correlation absolutely disappears when you look at drug policies. Turns out, that places with permissive drug use policies correlate well with rising prices.
Actually it stays present! [1] When controlled for any number of factors homelessness is clearly a housing issue.
> [1] https://homelessnesshousingproblem.com/
Sounds like people are willing to pay more to live in places that aren't a police state.
I'm about to blow your mind with a simple phrase: correlation is not causation.
Seriously though, you have an unsupported belief and you're looking to cherry-pick ways to support it. It's not rational.
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.
There's nothing wrong with not wanting drug-addled vagrants or any other kind of antisocial behavior near you. That's not a society "that wouldn't invent fire or sliced bread if it thought that doing so would be good for the wrong kind of people". Ridiculous.
Public spaces are made possible only through the maintenance of common standards. When those standards are not maintained out of "equity" concerns or "libertarian" reasons or whatever and antisocial behavior starts to crowd out ordinary people, well, you're going to lose those public spaces.
You can't have nice public spaces without the ability to remove the not-nice parts from it. You just can't.
What is a drug-addled vagrant?
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
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.
how many homes can you buy for $10 billion? especially if you don't care too much about size, extra niceties, or location?
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.
Another factor in other places in the world is much lower economic inequality.
The US has chosen to divide its population in this way.
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.
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.