Slashdot Mirror
How San Francisco Hazed a Tech Bro (backchannel.com)
An anonymous reader writes: In December 2013 San Francisco's tension with its surging tech class reached a breaking point. Protesters swarmed Google buses. They stood in front of Twitter carrying a coffin labeled "Affordable Housing." Google glassholes were on the rise. In the midst of this, the CEO and founder of AngelHack posted a rant about the homeless. "In downtown SF the degenerates gather like hyenas, spit, urinate, taunt you, sell drugs, get rowdy, they act like they own the center of the city," Greg Gopman wrote. He thought he was becoming a thought leader. Instead, the entire city turned against him. Reviled and suddenly unemployable, Gopman spent a quixotic year spinning up businesses to solve homelessness. His journey is weirdly emblematic of today's startup-fueled San Francisco.
The situation in SF really is, pretty bad.
I'm not even sure what the solution is anymore now that I lived here for a while and see it every day first hand.
I've lived in large Australian and New Zealand cities, but the homeless epidemic here is just on a level you couldn't believe or imagine without being here and seeing it for yourself.
Prices and rents won't ever go down again imo, and the homeless refuse to leave and only increase in number every ear... shit will get to a real breaking point before long.
Not sure I want to be here when that happens.
You can tell how powerful someone is by the magnitude of the crime they can commit and be able to get away with.
Send them to the middle of nowhere 100 miles east where they won't be bothering anyone.
Send them back to Las Vegas!
For years, the Las Vegas Rawson-Neal Psychiatric Hospital, Nevada's primary state mental facility, gave discharged patients a bus ticket out of town. Poor and mentally ill, they ended up homeless in cities around the country—especially in California, where more than 500 psychiatric patients were sent over a five year period.
http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2015/10/nevada-settles-busing-homeless-lawsuit-san-francisco/
It's been tried in SF. If my memory is correct, the city spends around $60,000 per homeless person per year trying to help them (the current year's homeless budget is $241 million http://www.sfchronicle.com/bay...). In many cases, when they were simply given homes they then proceeded to trash them and make them uninhabitable (ie condemned). They were then back on the street again, and more money had to be spent making the home liveable again.
The issue is that the homeless in SF are either mentally ill, addicts, or both. You can give them homes, but if you don't treat the underlying issue you're just throwing the money (and homes) away. But when treatment is a requirement for housing, they walk away and go back to living on the street. So what's the solution?
Many of the people simply don't want help and would rather live on the street. Just the other week, one homeless guy who camps in the doorway of my building drank all day until he passed out. An ambulance was called, he fought them, but they ended up restraining him and taking him to the hospital. Two days later he was back again. The following day he was again passed out and unresponsive in the street, and the ambulance came again. Repeat a few days later. It happens a few times a week with several people, and this is just in front of my building across the bridge in the Oakland/Berkeley area. San Francisco is worse. I can't count the number of times I've seen people shooting up. So do you force these people into rehab? Arrest them? What's the solution? Simply giving them a home won't work.
San Francisco has done just that, moving nearly 12,000 into free housing. Problem is, they still have the same number of homeless. And now the expense and burden of free housing for 12,000 people.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
No, it was Regan.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant