[mrlambchop]

I was really swept up in this article and the portrait of Amanda Barrows - what a unique and strong person and this city is incredibly lucky to have her.

Unlike some here, I came away with a deep sense of empathy, and today’s HN snark and frustration bounced off me pretty hard. The public order issues - homelessness in parks, the challenges of shared spaces—have certainly impacted me. But more than that, I struggle with how to translate the state of the world to my boys. I always remind them: every unhoused person was once a little boy or girl. We might be older now, but we’re still kids inside, and nobody dreams of growing up in these circumstances.

What struck me most was the balance of compassion and pragmatism that Amanda brings to her work. It’s easy to be frustrated with the policies and bureaucratic inefficiencies that slow down real solutions - but they are, in some ways, understandable.

The biggest frustration for me is the gap between the mental state of many unhoused individuals and the requirements needed to secure housing. The city surely understands the long-term costs of its policies, and it’s run by highly pragmatic people with limited budgets. But rules are rules, and at some point, top-down accommodations (including medical interventions...) are necessary to bridge this gap.

[Aunche]

> What struck me most was the balance of compassion and pragmatism that Amanda brings to her work.

Nothing about this article strikes me as pragmatic. She's spending all her energy attempting to help people with the least likelihood of success and then gets angry at the system when they inevitably fail. The city didn't kick Morrisette out of the hotel because they like zero-tolerance policies, but because other people deserve a chance a chance to live in a free hotel room as well.

[robswc]

This is one of the core problems and I don't think people want to admit it "can't be solved."

When I was naive, out on my own after 18 I found a low-income/income-restricted apartment complex and thought I got a steal. It was $1k a month for a 2 bed when everywhere else was closer to $1.5k.

I soon realized I would _never_ live in a low income place if I could help it. Someone was killed in our building. Fights in the parking lot every other day. People leaving trash in the hall ways. People smoking 24/7. Of course, maybe only 25% of the people were "problematic" but that was more than enough to make you feel totally uncomfortable in your own home. The last straw was potheads causing a fire alarm at 3 AM and having to evacuate into the cold night in a panic.

Some people are simply selfish and will not be able to live close to/with others without causing problems. _Most_ people do not want to live next to them.

[xivzgrev]

I’m not sure what the right answer is, but asking people who are used to rough and tumble life outside to then behave civilly indoors with zero tolerance seems…set for failure?

There are those that do succeed but those are certainly the most motivated to do so. Others are in transition: know they should get indoors but know their difficulties.

Rather than kicking them out, maybe they are required to attend some mandatory psych sessions. Maybe they go maybe they don’t but at least there support to help them work thru their issues of why they blew up at the staff (as in this instance).

[mordae]

I am sorry to hear that the richest country on earth cannot afford tiny private flats for anyone and everyone unhoused.

[tclancy]

There is honor is such a quest. https://blog.granneman.com/2005/09/30/cuchullin-fights-the-o...

[nullc]

That's what the article was written for-- and it's one valid perspective on it.

To those whose lives have been irreparably harmed by the violent mentally ill people inhabiting SF's streets and parks while the police stand idle and billions of their tax dollars are spent annually failing to solve the problem-- it might hit a bit differently. That isn't the story here, but when you see people taking it differently than you it isn't necessarily because are in any way lacking in compassion.

The article paints the person in question as a harmless Garden Hermit ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_hermit ), perhaps he is but many of the support-resistant homeless are certainly not harmless.

[vlovich123]

If a black person attacks you, does that mean that black people are then violent? All the statistics I've ever seen indicate that while the homeless and mentally ill are particularly prone to being victims of violence, they don't seem to actually pose a higher issue of safety than anyone else you encounter in your daily life.

It makes sense that would be the case when you think of it - do the rates of violence decrease as you move up the socioeconomic ladder? By all indications the rate of violence among the very wealthy is not dissimilar from those lower on the socioeconomic ladder. Why would you think homelessness is a cliff through which people suddenly become drastically more violent, especially considering how people like Putin and drug lords are extremely wealthy while paying people lower on the socioeconomic rung to do violence on their behalf to protect their economic interests?

[sweeter]

I think it is an understandable reaction. They're a long history of articles like "man saves multiple orphans from the orphan crushing machine" and people go "ahhh that's so sweet" and nobody stops to ask "why do we have an orphan crushing machine and why can't do anything about that?"

I think it's important to do both.

[optimalsolver]

HN readers might be interested to know that the machine's codebase was recently ported to C++ 17 from Fortran. It was a nightmare to maintain!

[red75prime]

> why can't do anything about that

Maybe because it's not the orphan crushing machine, but the lack of the low functioning orphan saving machine. Or a mix of both.

[rsktaker]

Wonderful analogy

[aprilthird2021]

We don't have anything like a machine that causes homelessness though. Homelessness has existed for thousands of years if not all of human existence and we are probably the closest any society has gotten to eradicating it entirely. We are dealing with probably the hard last 10% of a hard problem. It's just not at all as if we have a terrible system that leads to these outcomes. On the contrary, we've built many systems to successfully prevent these outcomes. They're just not perfect

[username332211]

I get the impression that the reaction right now is more likely to be caused by someone in government turning off a lot of those orphan crushing machines recently.

And the only thing to show for it is gangs of feral orphans raping and pillaging. (If I can stretch the metaphor a bit too much.)

I suspect if someone did a survey, they'd find that most places in the internet have grown consistently less empathetic in terms of social policy since mid 2020.

[RobertRoberts]

Most people I met when homeless didn't want the help the government offered. There's a direct conflict between people who lead and those that actually want to help.

Unfortunately, a lot of the homeless I knew were very proud, arrogant, angry, bitter and many other emotions that made it nearly impossible to get them to take care of themselves through any intervention.

And if people refuse to take care of themselves, they will always be in a state where they need others to step in. Once they become destructive to society, I don't think any expectation of mercy from leadership should be expected. That leads to the situations we currently see in some places today.

It's not the lack of shelter that's the issue. There's plenty of shelter and housing if you want it.

[ncr100]

It's a good set of points you make.

When programming, when engineering, I often run into these sorts of intractable problems.

Changing the rules, changing the preconditions or some aspect of the problem itself, that's usually how I solve them.

In this article, it looks like the Park Ranger is changing the rules by making the system work for the person who is experiencing homelessness instead of forcing the person to go alone into a system that they don't like and they don't necessarily see the value of.

SO it is possible to fix with the appropriate smart thinking and willingness to maintain multiple simultaneous perspectives, it seems.

[ErigmolCt]

Amanda's work is proof that personal engagement makes a difference, but scaling that kind of approach is incredibly difficult

[throwawaymaths]

what happened to "do things that don't scale"?

[dsign]

Indeed. But I have another point of view: what if our society is utterly broken? To see what I mean, imagine a world where that level of effort would cure any disease, even aging. How would that split us?

[nocoiner]

This comment captured a lot of my thoughts about the article, Amanda and many of the other comments on this thread, except that you put them into words much more capably and eloquently than I was able to do. Well stated.

[throwawaymaths]

> The city surely understands the long-term costs of its policies, and it’s run by highly pragmatic people with limited budgets.

Is that the case? maybe there are highly pragmatic people in the org, but i dont think they are "running" things. and the city's budget for homelessness is astoundingly high (look it up)

[Miraste]

If anyone is wondering, it's ~1 billion dollars per year, for a homeless population of less than 10,000. With this money, they have achieved basically zero change in that number for years. Staggering, incredible levels of waste.

[bagels]

I wish that park rangers didn't have to bear the cost of this problem. Nobody has the appetite to do anything effective about it.

[ninetyninenine]

I mean the article dances around it. I hate to say this, but we have to face reality.

It is empathy that is in great part responsible for for the crime ridden shit show that is much of SF.

How do we balance empathy while making SF not a gigantic pile of shit? I don't think there is an answer here. It's choose one, or choose the other.

[ncr100]

Ah Empathy is not what screwed up these guys' childhoods. Don't blame empathy without acknowledging that both of these people are black in America.

There are so many reasons why this happened and it's way more than just San Francisco being supposedly more empathetic.

Rhetorically speaking, how about the fact that China is quite happy to supply precursor drugs to help make fentanyl cheap? How is that related to San Francisco's perceived empathy? Again, rhetorically.

It makes me angry that this problem is reduced so frequently when it's been proven time and time and time to be a complex problem. It's almost like citizens / voters / taxpayers are willing to play sport with this problem in order to score some kinds of points around being right, or to avoid the sense of blaming oneself, because they know they can do something about it and yet they aren't.

Being honest is a big part of making progress with this, and I think honestly this problem is way more complex than many of us have actually appropriately characterized.

The article goes a long way towards characterizing the problem well, by talking about each individuals, perspectives, situations, and how the system succeeded or fails, knocking them off the path to gaining public support.

[james4k]

Empathy created the housing crisis?

[xivzgrev]

I mean, empathy for a criminal is ensuring they have their day in court. Free counsel if they can’t afford. Innocent until proven guilty.

But their rights can’t trump victims, that’s not justice. Like someone else mentioned prop 47 was a bad idea.

[slantedview]

I thought it was expensive housing.

[archagon]

"We have to face reality" is a thought-terminating cliche. The causes of homelessness are myriad and there's a ton of conservative propaganda denigrating left-leaning politics. Also, many would beg to differ that SF is a "gigantic pile of shit."

[searealist]

This was written by AI.

[mrlambchop]

In the spirit of tech conversations, here was my original input from my history:

---

I was swept up in this article and the portrait for Amanda (barrows) - what a unique and strong person - this city is soo lucky to have her.

I want to respond that unlike some here, I came away with huge empathy and today's HN snark and frustration bounced off me pretty hard accordingly. The public order issues such as homelessness in the park have impacted me, but more so, how to translate the state of the world to my children. I always remind them that this person was once a little boy / girl and we might be older, but we're still kids inside and nobody dreamt to grow up in this environment.

The compassion and my own empathy shown here coupled with the pragmatic approach shown by Amanda washed over me and the policies and bureaucratic inefficiencies that make solutions slow and ineffecient are understandable, but also highly frustrating.

The unhoused individuals and their mental state vs the requirements to find a home are very frustrating - the city surely understands the cost of housing policies and is run by highly pragmatic people, but rules are rules and some top down accommodations and medications are needed to help merge this.

---

I personally don't see my opinions changed here - I think the posted text is a bit better but also agree on the uncanny valley issue. A little less brain swelling and I would have been all over the small signals :)

Personally, I find AI and the derivatives extremely helpful when it comes to communication (a booster for the mind!) and use it all the time when translating into other languages and also removing my northern British dialect from communication over in California.

[dang]

Please don't do this here.

Edit: I called this wrong - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43075184. Sorry!

[II2II]

If it takes an AI to display empathy, perhaps we should surrender to the AI overlords.