That block (corner of 8th and Market) is particularly nasty.
What I find even more perplexing than the city doing nothing is how the large tech companies and their brood that work right next door tolerate it.
For those that work in those offices, do you just get bused in everyday, eat all your meals at the cafeteria, and get bused back out, observing the outside world like a snow globe?
How do you reconcile the money you make with the destitution at your literal doorstep.
Your question could be generalized to “Do members of a community have a responsibility towards that community.”
The answer is obviously yes.
Responsibility assumes that conditions can be changed by those responsible, otherwise the concept of responsibility is void.
I can direct this reflection at myself in various domains and come to the conclusion that I am falling short of my responsibilities in many ways, but it’s also true that people who walk by the worst of SF’s blocks everyday to pick up there 200k+ salaries are telling themselves everyday “not my problem”.
Adding yet more criminalization and prosecution is ineffective, as can be seen across the rest of the US; looking at per-capita numbers instead of absolutes, the diversity of interstate drug laws seems to be well-represented in the rankings: http://www.citymayors.com/society/usa-cities-homelessness.ht...
The largely-untried approach is to assess why people are being afflicted with mental health issues and why people are turning to drugs, and to actually address those underlying factors. Drug abuse and mental illness are symptoms of a larger problem, not the cause. That larger problem is likely the one producing other symptoms, like the majority of adults under 30 living with their parents, or 11% of all Americans being at risk of eviction.
People turn to drugs because they are addictive. Once you start, it's hard to stop, and it can easily lead to drug abuse. Drug abuse and the lifestyle that it leads to will exacerbate mental illness.
The issue is that the US half-asses its drug enforcement policies. Everything is a leaky sieve full of inefficiency. They have a mostly unprotected border with Mexico, that they're too scared to lock down for political reasons. They have drug dealers that they won't arrest, or put in a revolving door policy, because they're afraid of being called evil by the privileged members of NGOs and academia. Investigating, arresting and putting on trial criminals is extremely expensive and inefficient because there's 50 million legal checks to deal with.
Look at Singapore for an example of how an all-out war against drugs can be effective, and produce a safe society. 98% of the citizens of Singapore support those policies because they have some of the safest streets in the world. Their children can safely be out at any time. Why should they let the criminal 0.5% of the population keep them terrified like in America? It should be the other way around. They get criticized by westerners for their use of the death penalty for drug dealers, such as in this short clip with visionary Singaporean PM Lee Kwan Yew https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PXAOZwvv04, who handles it admirably.
The US is violent and dangerous because it tries to give as much freedom as possible to its citizens, and protect their constitutional rights to a high degree, even when this comes at a high expense for the rest of society. I am not saying I want this to change, I like diversity of thought and government, and there's something endearing about how different the average American is compared to other nations. This diversity of thought allows us to learn lessons about the effect of policies and culture. For example this is why I like the USA's 2nd amendment and wish to see it protected, even though I wouldn't want everyone to be armed in my country.
People don’t turn to drugs because they’re addictive (and many aren’t). They turn to them because they’re fun and because they help relieve pain and anxiety as well as other mental issues.
Please don’t turn more countries into police states, it’s really not required to fight drug abuse.
There are many nice places that have liberal drug laws(Netherlands, Switzerland), clearly authoritarian state control is not required.
The US is not violent because it grants a lot of freedoms(which tbh, it really doesn’t). It’s violent because the ruling class don’t give a shit about poor people
> People turn to drugs because they are addictive.
People stay on drugs because those drugs are addictive. That says nothing about why they felt inclined to start using drugs in the first place - that underlying cause being "I'm broke and starving and freezing and can't afford actual treatment for the illnesses/injuries I'm racking up and I need something to take the edge off".
> Look at Singapore for an example of how an all-out war against drugs can be effective, and produce a safe society.
There are all sorts of confounding variables in that equation, chief among them being private land ownership being basically nonexistent; 80% of Singaporeans live in government-subsidized flats. Even this hasn't solved homelessness in Singapore, either.
> The US is violent and dangerous because it tries to give as much freedom as possible to its citizens
The US is violent and dangerous becuase its socioeconomic safety nets and mental healthcare systems are absolute dumpster fires compared to pretty much every other "developed" country.
I still don’t understand your point, destitution is the symptom of the various problems you’ve described, I agree with you. Nowhere do I posit differently.
And it doesn’t matter what the causes are. I’m simply pointing out the most disgusting element of San Francisco’s destitution, namely that it is in cohabitation with some of the greatest wealth ever produced in human history, including the lowest salaried employees of the tech companies who operate downtown.
Your post is like saying "look at all those pedestrians using the wrong door", when the actual issue is that the correct entrance is only accessible by train.
You are basically going on an irrelevant tangent.
> namely that it is in cohabitation with some of the greatest wealth ever produced in human history, including the lowest salaried employees
i.e. you have an axe to grind and you are trying to fit your post to make it work?
you should try living in a big city in a 3rd world country, richer people have to survive too and also feel helpless to do something about this kind of thing
SF voters have repeatedly voted for soft-on-crime candidates like Chesa Boudin (yes, he's been recalled but it's insane they voted him in to begin with).
We shouldn't have to live like this. We need a Lee Kuan Yew or Bukele type of leader to step up in these cities and say enough. This
passive acceptance of crime and disorder under some misguided sense of compassion or that putting criminals in jail is immoral is pathetic and will lead to ruin. This is not how civilization functions.
I don't know California, but this reads like a classic & simple cry to suppress people, to take hard lives & make them worse.
You talk about a misguided sense of compassion. But what have we really tried except liberalism? Except allowing whatever happens to happen to people? What have we tried to help, to build possible lives? Even for those not living in homed, what have we tried to keep them from sliding off the edge?
It's May Day. This cry for dispassion & accusation & intolerance, for jailing each other, should not be the go to plan for when situations get bad. Maybe doing nothing hasn't worked, but rather than resort to striking out against those we are afraid of, we should be trying to make possible paths forwards.
You talk about a misguided sense of compassion. But what have we really tried except liberalism?
The city of San Francisco spends $70,000 annually per homeless person! <https://abc7news.com/sf-homeless-plan-housing-all-san-franci...> The homeless there are homeless because severe mental and addiction issues cause them to reject help, not because resources aren't available.
Because normal funcitoning people want to conduct commerce and experience a crime free life visiting these corporations, or any other place, within the cities that they live.
We should put criminals in jail and mercilessly shame and make fun of people like you that construct some nonsense rationalization for all of us accepting allowing our homes, our towns our streets to turn into shitholes. You are a LOSER and the rest of us are getting real sick of putting up with your type.
I was going to mention in my original post, but I'll add here.. that the misguided moralisms are only part of the problem. There is a not insiginificant portion of the voting (or non voting) population, and political activists, that support and enable this nonsense not out of a misguided sense of compassion but similar to parent comment here, because they have a bitterness and ressentiment towards this or that other part of society and want to see orderly civilization destroyed.
In some ways this may even be a subconcious motivation, but it is there. There's been way too much explicit crime and degredation for many to just be fooled by good intentions for this to continue unabated..no, it's something else as well. Many are thrilled with these trends.
So..
>You think people are shoplifting from Whole Foods for fun?
Yes, absolutely this is a part of it. They do it because they want to and they can. Some may want to stick it to the man like you want them to do. But it doesn't matter, because some sob-story claim of being poor "therefore crime" is untenable even if true and should be rejected out of hand. It's bullshit.
Nice places are expensive. The whole world cannot nor should they assume some right to live anywhere just because. Politicial dysfunction does play a part of economic pain, but some people will not be able to make it in expensive places. They do not have a claim to tear down these places just because they can't afford to live there. They deserve jail for that. I want to have nice clean orderly crime-free streets. And this is entirely achievable and has been achieved in many times and places throughout history, in the US as well. The moral position is to take anyone trying to destroy this or inflict crime on people and businesses and put them in prison.
The personal attack in this post is totally unacceptable and clearly a bannable offense on HN. Moreover, this has been a problem for years (see links below).
Also, it looks like you've been using HN primarily for ideological battle and that's also a line at which we ban accounts (regardless of the ideology they're battling for). Past explanation about that: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme....
I'm not going to ban you right now, but it's a close call; if you keep abusing HN in these ways, we're going to have to. If you'd therefore please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
We need your type of work ethic and desire to maintain a healthy community, along with discipline to be a stickler for enforcement of law and order in public office in some of these cities... they'd be maintained well like Hacker News is maintained well...
And yea, if only we all could just keep our heads down and just code & do software, not worry about politics crime and social issues and be left alone & unaffected by their consequences.. Those were the days not long ago huh dang. I miss them too.
I'll heed your warning and back off the politics posting going forward
> if only we all could just keep our heads down and just code & do software, not worry about politics crime and social issues [...] Those were the days
Rich and powerful no longer fear prosecution and jail. You can destroy economy, do wage theft in billions, war criminals go free without even a tap on the wrist. People see this and such disregard for law trickle down on them. Including law enforcement. And some said that trickle down economy doesn't work. There are only two rules, don't steal from the rich and obey my authority. From this perspective poor stealing from each other is not a problem, as no real law was broken(see above). And in the end poor will eat each other not the rich.
Coat of living, dominated by housing costs, is being driven you by owner occupiers and mom & pop time landlords like the self avowed socialist on the board of supervisors more than any other factor.
I don’t believe the problem can be solved, at least in full, but instead we have to pick our poison. We must either choose the current dystopian solution, or instead criminalize / institutionalize these people against their will.
One hurts the full population. Is the liberal
solution honestly any better for the addicts?
It absolutely can be solved. The problem is that SF's landowners have its politics by the balls, which means that policies which could solve homelessness and broader poverty/destitution overnight - like land value taxation with a citizens' dividend - have zero hope of seeing the light of day.
SF ain't the only one, either; this is a statewide, regionwide, and nationwide issue. Only reason it's more pronounced on the West Coast is because of the more temperate weather; rough sleepers end up surviving for another year instead of freezing to death in winter.
The one where they can insulate themselves from said cyberpunk bedlam by fleeing to the 'burbs (or forcing the poors out instead via gentrification), building gated communities/complexes, hiring private security, receiving preferential treatment from law enforcement, etc. That worked for a century-ish, but it was never sustainable - and the landed class has a vested interest in doubling-down on that strategy instead of admitting that maybe - just maybe - private exclusive ownership of a natural resource with inelastic supply might be the primary driver of socioeconomic inequality (and with it, crime).
So you think the liberalism in sf is helping these people and we need more of it? Or do you think the liberalism in sf we have now is not the right variant?
It's not the voters, it's the local political machine. You guys are hackers and you can't even be bothered to scope out the problem before you start opining. Anti-humanism is THE San Francisco Value. https://aaronlee.substack.com/p/anti-humanism-is-the-san-fra...
What I find even more perplexing than the city doing nothing is how the large tech companies and their brood that work right next door tolerate it.
For those that work in those offices, do you just get bused in everyday, eat all your meals at the cafeteria, and get bused back out, observing the outside world like a snow globe?
How do you reconcile the money you make with the destitution at your literal doorstep.