SF’s appalling street life repels residents – now it’s driven away a convention

[rleigh]

I'm sure it's driving out smaller meetings as well, which might not make big news but might add up to even bigger losses overall.

Some of my team went to a meeting in SF a few years back. They described "running the gauntlet" from the hotel to a Mexican restaurant in an area where the streets were full of homeless people. While none of them ran into direct trouble, they felt uncomfortable and unsafe, and were disgusted at the state of the place (human waste on the streets etc), "like a third-world country".

In subsequent years, when the company asked for volunteers to go, no one wanted to, and no one volunteered. A week long all-expenses-paid trip from the UK to SF is something which would previously have been considered a huge perk, but is now considered to be a dangerous punishment. I certainly had no desire to visit.

[vmarshall23]

Part of the problem, if not a large-ish part of the problem, is that apparently drugs and alcohol are usually restricted from homeless shelters.

And addiction is a large component of homelessness, but if you're still addicted you're obviously not going to spend much time in a place where you have to go cold turkey to enter.

So, my ( probably naive ) suggestion would be to allow drugs and alcohol in the shelters, hopefully giving the residents long enough of a chance to receive some help. No it's just a revolving door that doesn't appear to be helping anyone.

Universal basic income too. :-)

[bryanlarsen]

They give out rationed free wine to alcoholics at a shelter in Ottawa, Canada. The program has been wildly successful: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/apr/26/homeless-she...

[pasabagi]

I think for people working at a shelter, that might be pretty annoying. To be honest, the fundamental problem is obvious: SF has too high rent. Until serious money and resources are devoted to solving that, you will have homelessness.

[jonhendry18]

"So, my ( probably naive ) suggestion would be to allow drugs and alcohol in the shelters"

There'd probably have to be shelters specific to users of a given substance who want to continue using.

At least then non-using homeless would be less likely to suffer from proximity to agitated drunk/high individuals.

And homeless recovering addicts wouldn't be living with actively using addicts.

[Gatsky]

I’ve been to SF once for 3 days, and I have never seen so many frankly mentally ill people wandering the streets. This always seems to be downplayed as a factor in the homelessness problem. Difficult to be a part of any solution when you have untreated chronic schizophrenia.

[lnanek2]

One person told me that area is so bad in particular because that's the area unemployment checks are obtained. So a lot of the poorest people without an address besides a shelter have to go there regularly, and they don't exactly have spare money to travel much. It might be better for them and the rich doctors who want to run their conventions if the city found a better site to disburse the checks.

The city built a transportation center, surely they can dedicate a government building to being a combination shelter and benefits center. Or place it near a place that handles the homeless better like people's park does in Berkeley where, yes there are campers, but they keep it pretty clean and respectful.

[masonic]

Why would the city be disbursing unemployment checks?

[dqpb]

The open drug use, rampant homelessness, and shit on the sidewalks is really sad, and has been that way for at least 10 years.

Given the high gdp and high tax rate, why isn't SF better than it is?

I'm would really like to understand this. Is it politics, economics, cost of living?

[beavisthegenius]

Serious response: where do you propose someone go who's been high or drunk for 30 years?

[beatpanda]

It's hilarious to me that this exact same newspaper ran an article less than a week ago showing that by all available measures, homelessness is improving and there are fewer people on the streets in San Francisco. (https://projects.sfchronicle.com/sf-homeless/2018-state-of-h...)

Just like our current national hysteria around crime or immigration, the notion that homelessness is somehow getting worse, or that San Francisco is doing a bad job handling it, are flatly contradicted by the data. San Francisco is in fact doing a better job handling homelessness than most of its peer cities in the United States.

Readers of Hacker News should go to the data first. Matier & Ross have a long history of this kind of ugly sensationalism and it has no place here.

[captain_perl]

Things have gotten worse in the last decade, with homeless invading hotel lobbies and scaring people checking in.

Market St. is a war zone.

The city spends $300 - $400 million a year on the homeless industry, but virtually none trickles down to the actual homeless.

[ralusek]

The data in the article you linked shows that there has been a continued increase in the amount of human waste, used needles, and encampments. Even the primary positive figure they cite, a drop in population of 8,640 in 2004 to 7,499 in 2017, is not a substantial improvement. Given the impression that many residents have that things have gotten worse, some of it may be accounted for by factors mentioned in the article (i.e. the perception of increase by people who are simply in areas that the homeless have been displaced to), but I'm also inclined to believe that housing the chronically homeless to reduce the official population count might not actually have too much of an impact. For example, what if the entirety of those 7,500 were given a permanent residence, so that the homeless population drops to 0? I'm not so sure it would be easy to distinguish between the severely mentally ill or drug addicted individual who was technically homeless vs technically not. I suspect that much of the day to day activity would remain unchanged.

[rjkennedy98]

Medical association feels uncomfortable around mentally ill people. So much for trying to "get rid of the stigma".

[thatswrong0]

Multiple coworkers of mine have been assaulted in that area. And from the article:

> It didn’t help that one board member had been assaulted near Moscone Center last year.

It's not just a stigma. It's not safe.

[basic1]

Getting stabbed for drugs/money isn't part of their job description.