Slashdot Mirror
Billionaire Tech Investors Support Divisive Plan To Ban San Francisco's Homeless Camps (techcrunch.com)
An anonymous reader shares a USA Today report: The images are startling: Homeless men, women and children huddled on the streets of the San Francisco Bay Area -- often in the shadows of start-ups and high-tech behemoths generating billions of dollars in wealth. It's a stark contrast that has gripped the region, and prompted four county measures on the Nov. 8 ballot to generate $3 billion over the next 25 years for affordable housing and services. Under the most-ambitious measure, San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee has proposed a 0.75% increase in the sales tax, to 9.5%, to raise $50 million a year. Propositions J and K would generate $1.2 billion for the next quarter-century via a simple majority. "There is clearly not enough affordable housing, or housing at any level," says Kevin Zwick, CEO of Housing Trust Silicon Valley.TechCrunch adds: The debate over what to do about San Francisco's homeless population has been building for awhile among the many startups and residents here. But now tech billionaires Ron Conway, Michael Moritz and well-to-do hedge fund manager William Oberndorf have each thrown about $50,000 behind a measure to rid San Francisco of its homeless tent cities. Other notable investors, including Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer's husband and venture capitalist Zach Bogue, have also donated. Bogue reportedly gave about $2,500 to support it.
The summary could mean two quite distinct things (I had to click the article to find out which).
1) Rich people don't like seeing homeless people and want to help them (unlikely).
or
2) Rich people don't like seeing homeless people and don't want to have to see them (more likely)
Unfortunately, it's number 2. They want to move the problem away from them so that it becomes someone else's problem.
That obviously does not help anything other than furthering class divides.
(I live in the next most similar place to SF in terms of ridiculous high housing costs, class divides, and lots and lots of homeless people - that is, Vancouver BC, Canada).
Moving homeless people around helps nothing at all, and only makes things worse.
Thank god. On Seattle's subreddit, it's nothing but homeless hate. They do nothing but complain about the homeless and want all the tent cities gone.
Seattle's homeless problem is a total crisis. When it's this many people camped out on the street and in parks, they don't chose it. Even people I know with normal/non-tech jobs are in a constant struggle to just make ends meat.
The billionaires respond:
[Ron] Conway initially declined to comment but wrote back pointing out he’d been involved in projects to help the city’s homeless before and telling TechCrunch, “Prop Q only allows for encampment removal when real housing or shelter is offered and that’s why I support it. It’s not healthy or compassionate to let human beings suffer in tent cities and we shouldn’t allow it when there’s real housing, shelter and supportive services we can provide for people instead.”
[Zach] Bogue, who served on the board of the Bay Area homeless outreach organization the Tipping Point for the last several years, said he supported the proposition “because it would provide more resources to help get the homeless off the street and into sheltersThe encampments are unsafe and inhumane, and frankly, I hope that this is not our solution to homelessness in the city.”
Speaking on behalf of [Michael] Moritz, Nathan Ballard, spokesman for the campaign to support Proposition Q said it was, “inhumane to allow people to live on the street when shelter is available. Mr. Mortiz and Mr. Conway have joined San Franciscans from all walks of life who support Prop Q because they urgently want to see an end to the human suffering on our streets.”
Dude, the homeless are only in SF becaue every other city and state SENDS THEM HERE.
San Francisco has turned into the homeless dumping ground of America, and we're drowning in it and don't know what to do.
And you call us callous and insensitive? What about all the other states that just put their homeless on a bus to California? :/
> Entitled? What if you grew up there; lived there all
> your damn life.
Actually, what's going on is that other states are "dumping" their homeless on California in general, and San Francisco and San Diego in particular (LA used to be a popular one too, but they engaged in their own anti-dumping battle a while back when "skid row" became unmanageable.). Most recently, Nevada was caught red-handed shuffling their mental patients off to California with one-way Greyhound tickets:
http://www.motherjones.com/moj...
https://thinkprogress.org/neva...
http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/...
http://www.nbcsandiego.com/new...
Im not sure what the solution is. But the reality is that there really is a metric crapton of unpopulated land in the US where people could be housed cheaply. It's hard to believe until you do a decent amount of cross-country travel. But I've flown from SF to Kansas a number of times for work these last few years. And, aside from Denver, there's very little in-between. And, for that matter, Kansas has all of one city of any note; and they share that one with Missouri. The rest is a whole lot of nothing. It's kind of ironic that it's Nevada that was caught doing the most recent round of bussing; because they're one of the states with the most empty land.
Anyone homeless needs to be offered reliable shelter, food, medicine, clothes
It's been tried. And with the food, shelter, etc. usually come rules of conduct. No thanks say the heroin addicts and people with mental problems. They live under the freeway off-ramps because the rules most closely match their lifestyle. To be precise: none.
and a plan to get out of their predicament towards a productive lifestyle.
They are happy with the lifestyle that they have. Want to give them some handouts? Fine, thanks. But that isn't going towards a better lifestyle. Sometimes it isn't even going toward food. Gotta have that meth or cheap booze.
We had a program in Seattle some years ago that involved participating businesses to accept meal coupons which the public could buy and hand to the cardboard sign guys. It didn't work, unless you actually liked being screamed at by winos for not handing out cash.
Have gnu, will travel.