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.
Portugal (as an example) treats drug use as a health problem and has much better results.
Addiction is a disease, a health problem, not something you can beat out of people by imprisoning them or being "really aggressive". That just makes the problem worse.
The core problem is that there are a large contingent of homeless drug users who just want to be left alone so that they can continue to be homeless drug users. Any services given to them will just be redirected by them towards enabling continued drug use. It's like an inbuilt self-sabotage that is totally alien to regular folks, but the choice way of living for those with it.
This isn't talk about much at all, because the story book tale is that homeless people are just regular people who are down on the luck, and if we could just show them some respect, compassion, and spare a few resources, they'd be right back on their feet again. But that story is just a fairy tale used to sell a feel good idea, reality is way more fucked up than that.
They're refusing treatment because they're addicted. They're refusing shelter because the shelters have policies (like not using drugs, or from the article; no pets) that they can't meet.
A lot of them have been abused by the institutions that were supposed to help them in the past, so understandably don't trust that they will be helped by similar institutions now.
Any of us, put in the same situation, would find it impossibly hard to deal with. I was lucky; I had friends who could help and I got lucky with some work that allowed me to get out of that situation. If I'd not had that luck, I could easily have gone down the same road.