I lived next to the park for several years and grew to loathe the dynamic where the lives of people sleeping rough in Golden Gate Park or Civic Center merit months of one-on-on outreach, while the lives of all of those who can't walk through the park in safety, can't send their kids there to play, and can't sit on the grass for fear of stepping on a used needle or a pile of human excrement, don't seem to matter.
I would like to see the city adopt a compassionate approach that doesn't at the same time enable years of lawbreaking by people who make nominally public spaces off-limits to the law-abiding. I'd like to see a San Francisco where there can be at least one clean, safe, working public toilet.
I've ben homeless. It's not fun. Nobody does it because they want to. Ending up on the street trying to make the most basic of normality work is really hard work. I didn't end up on meth or anything (I stuck to alcohol), but I understand why some people facing this do. When your life is utter shite, drugs help.
Without any kind of social safety net the people who fall out of the bottom of society have nowhere to go except this. Build a decent safety net and they won't be living in the park and the park becomes the better place you'd like it to be.
So, on behalf of the unhoused: sorry your kids can't play in the park but we're facing bigger problems. Helping us with our problems will help you with yours.
It is the case that we have difficulty placing public toilets because of the risks their abuse will pose to unsuspecting users. I don't think it does anybody any good to pretend that these aren't real problems, or that we can moralize past them.
I think, at least in most major metros, we're past the point of it being a live issue whether to fund services to transition homeless people off the streets. Residents will fund those services simply because the alternatives are so disruptive. With that in mind, I feel like any response to this problem that centers on "well we should fund more services" is basically stalling.
First big wave of it (when you started to see tents appear under the highways and such) was 2008. Second big wave where that seemed to metastasize were Rahm Emmanuel's budget cuts. In particular, he shut down all the mental health clinics, and you ended up with a lot of people getting forced off their meds.
EDIT: Another thing, when I moved here there were still quite a few housing projects. I am not going to pretend they weren't rough. I walked through the ABLA homes most days and watched them get torn down. I had a kid hit me with a rock while biking through Cabrini. But there was a place where people could be off the streets back then. Now where do you go? What's waitlist for section 8 up to?
Section 8 has long wait lists. It seems kinda unbelievable to argue that destruction of thousands of units of low income housing didn't cause people to not have housing.
I don't doubt that many people are mentally ill. Before Rahm's cuts, we had a taxpayer-ran system of caring for the mentally ill.
(I've been a renter and a homeowner in Chicago; I grew up here).