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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.
Are they trying to do a Montgomery Burns impression?
How about a plan that raises taxes on these ultra profitable companies in order to fund the construction of housing for people who can't afford to back a political campaign themselves?
Oh dear, what a bunch of cheapskates. Surely a billionaire can afford more than $50,000. That's the equivalent of a normal person donating maybe $5 to a cause. They might as well have also said to let the homeless eat cake.
These "tech" billionaires made their billions by exploiting the community-built Linux project. Now they want to destroy communities. The community should strike back by banning use of Linux for commercial purposes. Oh no! The free software license can't be revoked. The free software movement enabled "tech" billionaires, see now how the free software movement has backfired.
With a job, you can rent, or better yet...MOVE THE FUCK AWAY.
How about just take the money and build more damn houses and apartment complexes. Of course, all those people that already have housing in SF don't want their property values to drop or lose the "lifestyle" of living in hip little neighborhoods.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
What is their specific entitlement to live in San Francisco? If someone gave me a free house in the valley, I'd go there too. Until then, I'll keep living and working in the mid-west and putting up with the cold winters.
I live in San Francisco. What I want to ask the Board of Supervisors, and the government entities responsible for this problem is this:
Regardless of how charitable it is as a human duty to take care of displaced and unfortunate people, what is San Francisco's goal and strategy about homeless people? We seem to actively attract homeless people to our city -- because of our policies that seem to say, come one come all, we will take care of you. Or at least we look the other way as they're left to their own devices on the streets, and don't discourage the homeless population. So much so that other states have sent us their homeless in the past.
Is this our strategy? Be the city that actively attracts homeless people to us? Is that our brand, and our role? Are we being deliberate about this problem or just status quo because policymakers in our city are neutered far-left knee-jerk reactionary against anything effective, but which could be perceived as insensitive?
As a result we're flooded with homeless people that you have to step around on your way to work, home, BART, MUNI, etc. And each of us pays a price in the vehicle breakins, stores that have to wash/clean their steps of filth each day, areas of the city that are no-go zones, and higher housing prices in support of people who contribute little to our city. That's a hidden tax that somehow the most liberal sectors of our voting population seems happy to impose on the rest of us, because they don't live close to Civic Center / Tenderloin, SOMA where all this shit happens.
Sometimes, I long for a Rudy Giuliani in the 1990s to clean up our city and take a hard line and be a little insensitive for a change. Not everything should be done through collaboration and feel-good democracy. [/end rant]
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.
SF gets the attention, but the whole BA has homeless. When you look at that larger picture, you realize the arguments about not having enough space aren't up to snuff. Water rights arguments would make more sense--except that it hasn't stopped development during boom times. No, it's really just that the equilibrium price of housing is too much, so you get working homeless/van dwellers, couch surfers, etc. Then of course there are the mentally ill homeless who want help and aren't really getting it, and then finally the hard core of mentally ill and/or obstinate people who are really hard to move off the streets.
Anyway, I digress. The solution needs to involve the whole BA, not just SF, and these guys aren't helping. They claim to be capitalists, but what would they say about getting rid of the restrictions on SROs, aka "flop houses" that you used to see all the time back in the 40s and 50s? Oh NOES! They'd say. That was when we were still living in a somewhat free country. Bring back the cheap flops, that would probably house most of the working homeless. Ditto for RV/trailer parks. That would be an affordable option for most working homeless, and it might even make the non-working homeless realize that it's worth cleaning up and flipping burgers so they can flop.
The mentally ill problem is a whole different ball game, and not enough time to rant here... but hey you big capitalists, until we actually have some REAL CAPITALISM, why don't you just stuff it?
... Proposition Z proposes building a new island in the middle of the Bay to make room for more housing.
-- sigs cause cancer.
I know some countries consider...having a home as a basic human right and therefore give every citizen a 'rent credit' for lets say 40 pts, and each apartment has some point value based on size, amenities, so you can choose if you'd rather have a shower + tub or a bigger kitchen, etc.
Then your rent (up to you making ~75k when the 'rent credit' finally goes completely away) your apartment and pay the part of it with rent credit that you can. ... I'm not saying I'm 100% accurate on the details anymore... because I saw it on a documentary over 5 years ago easily... but the concept is there....
Combine that with http://www.npr.org/2015/12/10/459100751/utah-reduced-chronic-homelessness-by-91-percent-heres-how where they "solved" (not really, but making HUGE impact on it) homelessness.
Whoa... having the idea that "shelter is a human right" kinda just solves a lot of problems that we are facing in the bay area (I don't live there but know people who used to and/or still do)
Are they trying to add insult to injury to those affected? Or are they completely and utterly disconnected from reality?
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Outlawing poverty doesn't make it cease to exist. This is not the only example of this, but it is curious that San Fran has so many similar issues. A major reason that there are homeless people in San Fran to start with is the insane cost of living which is made by having the minimum mandatory apartment size be high. In general, in the US there has been in the last 100 years a trend for stricter and stricter zoning laws and related laws. And now cities are actively fighting attempts to come up with workable solutions within the legal codes such as microapartments where shared kitchens and other shared spaces http://www.sightline.org/2016/09/06/how-seattle-killed-micro-housing/. Do you want to actually make homeless people go away? Then you need to make cheap housing affordable. How do you do that? By getting rid of the unnecessary zoning rules about height, massive number of parking spaces, large yards, etc.
You know, it's been a long time since I worked in SF, so things may have changed. But while working there, I was astounded at how bad the homeless problem was, and started looking into what sorts of things might contribute. There's no simple answer, not by a long shot, but you know one thing I found very interesting?
Those wonderful places in the mid-west you speak of often get rid of undesirables (and "undesirable" usually—not always—translated to poor and black) by arresting them for vagrancy and offering them a free bus ticket to the west coast in lieu of jail time. So, 'bout the second or third time that happened, what would you do?
Yeah, I know, you have no idea what you're talking about but you just know you'd be different. People like you who are sure they have it all figured out and it's just them damn useless lazy unskilled poor folk getting what they deserve constitute about 90% of the problem. "Pull yourself up by your bootstraps" is pretty good advice, but what happens when mom and dad didn't buy you any boots?
Or you could, you know, simply allow some developers to come in and build some decent high rises in this city, thus loosening the market for quality real estate and in tandem causing rents across the board to drop. But no, that is too easy.
Blame Zoning, Not Tech, for San Francisco's Housing Crisis
http://www.citylab.com/housing...
http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/...
Entitled? What if you grew up there; lived there all your damn life. People who like moving can go -- and if they have family somewhere they often do. But there are a lot of people who don't like moving. They want to be near their family and their home.
At one time they could live out on a BART line and afford a single one bedroom for under $1k like so many other cities in the US. But that was decades ago. The tech market emerged and created a totally different social environment. Housing sky rocketed and people in normal jobs struggled to make ends meat.
Who are you to say who should and shouldn't live there. And if all the people who couldn't afford to live there left, who exactly is going to work in your coffee shops, your corner stores, drive your buses and man the rail stations? Just because you don't have a fancy-ass tech job means you should have to commute over an hour each day to work shit wages in live in shit overpriced housing?
George Carlin said it best: they call it the America dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.
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.”
Anyone homeless needs to be offered reliable shelter, food, medicine, clothes and a plan to get out of their predicament towards a productive lifestyle. The places where these things are offered does not have to be in San Francisco. However, they should be close enough for an individual to be able to stay in touch with their friends and family.
But, this does not entitle one to sleep in a tent on a sidewalk and create obvious problems for the residents. Not that this is a great lifestyle for the homeless person either.
Liberals spend too much time on band aids for people in a bad situation, without providing a way out to a good situation. Doing something about that is good.
I think it's only fair that, though we may not be billionaires, we should give an equal percentage of our income. Putting my money where my mouth is, I am willing to give $1.26 to house the homeless.
...omphaloskepsis often...
Geography limits development in San Francisco. Major buildings are heavy, and are stupid to build in areas subject to both frequent earthquakes and widespread liquefaction of the ground during them. Policy limits on development are aimed at safety due to known physics. See the very clear map here.
> 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.
According to the Tech Crunch link, the demand for spaces in homeless shelters is outstripping the supply. I think steve here is pointing out that there are lots of other cities around, some of which are probably better able to absorb homeless people.
Simpler and more effective to just vote out the "no" republicans who failed to do anything to actually earn their salaries.
Update: 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."
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 sheltersâ¦The encampments are unsafe and inhumane, and frankly, I hope that this is not our solution to homelessness in the city."
Speaking on behalf of Moritz, Nathan Ballard, spokesman for the campaign to support Proposition Q said it was, âoeinhumane 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."
nonsense. would you expect to be able to afford an appartment in Beverly Hills, or the upper west side? or how about renting a room at the Connaught?
why not? because those places are fucking expensive.
guess what? San Francisco is fucking expensive too. want somewhere cheap to live? find somewhere else.
or sleep in your own shit on the streets in San Francisco and shoot heroin all day long.
They vandalize, generate crime and are a blight.
Funny, I thought you were describing middle-class suburban kids aged 12-19. Of course, they get kicked out, too ... only it's to university.
Breakfast served all day!
loosening the market for quality real estate
It's all about ROI. "quality real estate", as defined by the developers are units that rent for $5000 or more a month. Or sell for a couple of million minimum. So the homeless are out of that market. And that empty lot they were camping on is now a pricey high rise.
In Seattle, the building regulations have persuaded developers to provide a percentage of 'affordable' units in their plans. But some loopholes have allowed them to bundle development projects. One expensive high rise in town with one cheap rent building out in the sticks.
They have tried to force the integration of low cost housing in among the expensive units. But that has failed. Rich people don't like living next door to bums. Heck, even bums don't like living next door to bums. The wino who quietly vomits in the common hallway doesn't like listening to the heroin addict who couldn't get a fix screaming next door. That's why they live in tents.
Have gnu, will travel.
What I see is that most of San Francisco is not at risk of liquefaction. Cool map, btw.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Most of SF and Oakland, and all surrounding areas all have significant liquefaction risk. http://geomaps.wr.usgs.gov/sfg...
Idealism and sheltered intellectual fantasies don't fix anything. The fantasy of "third party" is just that because in every country with "third parties" actual governance requires alliance with one of the largest, usually two with each on opposing sides of the political spectrum; see UK liberal, labour, and conservatives.
How many of the homeless people they want to hide are homeless because one of these people had to keep a share price up and made a bunch of cuts?
It's called capitalism. Supply and demand. That's America. Normal people move when they can't find work where they are. It happened in a massive way in the 2008 recession. There are 1 bedroom apartments starting at $700/mo in Detroit's city center - within walking distance from startup incubators, #20 on the Global Fortune 500, General Motors, and the nations 3rd largest mortgage originator, Quicken Loans just to name a few. Maybe try Dearborn, MI I think Ford employs a few people too. There is even cheaper housing in suburban (2br home for $875/mo) and rural areas ($550/mo). Take your pick. There are lots of places with cheap real estate and good jobs. It's unfortunate that homeless people are spoiled with the beautiful climate and endless handouts in California.
Does SF have a sewer system? Old subway tunnels? Underground ANYTHING?
Makes the resident yuppies happy, they don't have to see their greed personified
Makes homeless happy, They don't have to sneak onto rooftops to sleep.
Makes police happy, homeless have "moved on", as they say. Out of sight out of mind.
Why is this not a thing? Its no less in-humane than say.... not allowing humans to live in piece on account of the rich finding them...distasteful.
Demolition man.
Rent free living with a catch. No grid, no emergency services or "safety" inspections/regulations. You receive nothing publicly funded and if you fuck up the infrastructure you get cops in riot gear with rubber bullets. Drug your heart out, and/or rape and pillage each other all you want, just do it underground so the money machine can not feel guilty about fucking you over. Seems like a perfect solution to me.
Lets try it. What have we got to lose?
In a rich locale such as SF, surely we can eek out someplace underground thats not being used anymore with clear no bullshit rules that are strictly enforced. It does not have to be nice. Cold, dark, wet... better than nothing.
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
Offer a free valley home to homeless people in SF and almost all of them will move. If you're going to be homeless wherever you are, though, it makes a lot of sense to go to SF where you don't have to worry about extreme heat or cold and everything is close enough to walk to. Being homeless in the valley where you need a car to get anywhere and will be uncomfortable outside most of the year doesn't make much sense.
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Except of course, if you are on the receiving end of that insensitivity, to what, your continued existence.
I'm posting AC because I'm going to post what most people are really thinking. Who cares what the homeless think or feel? Their lives, either through chance or bad choices, have ended in failure and what good does it do anyone to maintain them?
As it stands they make life horrible for everyone. I was in SF last year and saw a man literally taking a shit against the side of a (brick) building. Why honestly should I or anyone care if he dies? Why is he even still considered human. Even animals know enough to poop on the ground and try to cover it up.
There needs to be a lot more focus on ways to keep people from sliding beyond recovery, the people just one hundred dollars away from hopelessness. But once they are there nothing can really be done for them, and I think we should all stop trying so hard... SF already spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year supposedly on the homeless, to zero effect. Why will more money help do anything except employ more government workers? It's not even like they will hire the poor homeless bastards that live around SF.
Keeping it real...
You seem to suggest some kind of "culling" would be evil, you are the one who wants to keep them around (for your amusement) to live as I said literally worse than animals. Do you feed them a little bread every now and again and clap as you watch them dance for your amusement?
This isn't a rich thing. Nobody, not the rich nor the poor, want the homeless around.
There are no homeless in san fransicsco.
Problem is that the valley is every bit as expensive as the city, moreso in some cases. According to city-data.com, the median home price in San Francisco in 2013 was $778,000. The median in Palo Alto and Cupertino were over $1 million. San Mateo was $765,300. And even San Jose's median is a hefty $599,700.
So it'll be no easier to find and subsidize space for the homeless down there than up here. What really just needs to happen is for people to get it through their skulls that you can't build *out* on the tip of a peninsula any more than you can on an island in New York harbor; so in both cases you have to build UP as the city grows.
Imagine all the people...
That already happened near the end of the Roman Empire. Many times SciFi is just projecting past events into a future scenario.
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 not a question however of finding some accommodation literally anywhere, because that doesn't work. You actually need a town or city with infrastructure and jobs, otherwise how are those people going to afford to eat after you've housed them?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
So let's see. You want to build taller buildings on flood plains in a quake zone. How's about they just start mandating that businesses provide a certain amount of parking? That would be the actual free market solution — not permitting people to create dangerous situations for others, which is not freedom, but slavery. You get to live in danger for my profit.
The fact is that you can't make more San Francisco without making it worse. The focus should be on reducing the population there. Most businesses are just fucking themselves over by trying to be there anyway.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Entitled? What if you grew up there; lived there all your damn life.
Tell the natives, asshole.
People who like moving can go -- and if they have family somewhere they often do. But there are a lot of people who don't like moving. They want to be near their family and their home.
I want a pony. So what? It's been firmly established that money is power, might makes right, and you don't have a right to live somewhere just because you got there first. Everything from getting away with murder because you're rich to eminent domain suggests that any such notional right is purely fantasy.
And if all the people who couldn't afford to live there left, who exactly is going to work in your coffee shops, your corner stores, drive your buses and man the rail stations? Just because you don't have a fancy-ass tech job means you should have to commute over an hour each day to work shit wages in live in shit overpriced housing?
No. That you're willing to do it for the privilege of working in and living near San Francisco means that. There's still plenty of America out there, and virtually all of it is cheaper than SF. If you don't like it, go away. When they make more SF, they make it shit. Increasing population means increasing gentrification. Remember when San Francisco was full of awesome clubs that had awesome shows? Pepperidge Farms remembers.
George Carlin said it best: they call it the America dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.
And there you are, madly slamming the snooze button instead of waking the up and realizing that what you believe is deliberate propaganda perpetrated upon you by those who would take advantage of your naivete. This nation was founded on the idea that you don't get to keep living somewhere just because you've been doing that for generations — we ignored over ten thousand years of continuous occupation by the residents of this land. We're supposed to be impressed by a couple of hundred?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Every tiny bit helps but even with more public housing projects there will be more and more homeless people on the streets. The basic reason for all technology is the lessening of human effort. We have reached the toggle point. That lessening of human effort is now the lessening of human employment in that employment is simply a catch all word for human effort. Putting good pay checks in people's hands whether they work or not will enable people to have housing. I am aware that to most people that sounds idiotic but in truth it is what we really must do for society to survive. And in a political season may i point out that Hillary's plan to install 1.5 million solar panels per year will create quite few few thousands of jobs. We can also employ many thousands in the forestry trade to clean out our forests of dead trees and leaves and the like to help with the firestorms caused by global warming. The creation of numerous lakes in the mountain areas of California, Oregon and Washington state could provide quite a bit of work and give fire crews a water supply when fires break out as well as the lakes being a natural fire brake. Meanwhile my small town is now forced to lose 1.5 billion gallons of fresh water a day due to having too much fresh water at hand for public safety while our sub surface fresh water is no longer adequate to support our local population. Maybe instead of pipelines for oil we should be building pipe lines for water so that dumping fresh water into our oceans is no longer needed. There is real work to be done and if we must pump water to the drier states we should do that with solar and wind powered pumps.
A world where entitlement is the deciding factor, you will be evicted from your home the moment someone else offers to pay more.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
"men" "Men", "men", found the feminist!
How's about they just start mandating that businesses provide a certain amount of parking?
How does that at all relate to housing?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
IDK, maybe we could take the money we pay people not to farm and use it to feed the homeless internment camps in the desert?
I know, crazy idea...
If they had jobs, they wouldn't be bums living on the streets.
The main problem is 'the homeless' relocate themselves to relatively warm places with stupid, over generous, homeless policies (e.g. SF, Seattle).
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I'm pretty sure he meant central valley, not SI valley.
Stockton is dirt cheap. But it's too close, the bums will just hitchhike back to SF in a day.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Kids grow out of having a mental age of 12, the chronic homeless will not. If anything the drugs they take makes them regress into even more self centered, one dimensional thinkers/consumers. More like 6 year olds, but with adult strength.
That's before you consider the long term effects of schizophrenia. About 1 IQ point lost per episode. Long term, they remember being smart, but are now really really dim. Too dim to realize it. There are a few /.ers I could point to.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
When my grandparents were young they couldn't make a living in Kansas farming so they packed all their belongings into their truck and drove to a place where they could earn a living. Like them, I did the same thing when I was young. The idea that someone is entitled to a job where they wish to live makes no sense. You move where the work is.
Obviously you're mistaken. San Fran took care of that with the likes of Feinstein, Boxer, and the favorite whacko of SFC - Nancy Peloesi. They're all democrats so any problems you see, it's politically incorrect to say so. It's your imagination.
Should vote them all out. California would be far better off without them.