I find it eerie that you're excluding from the equation the tens of thousands of homeless people in those cities. The right question is "to what lengths should we go to give people the ability to live with a roof over their heads?" The bay area has answered with "very little", where most people are barely offering human empathy to the homeless.
I do believe that we should support the homeless populations of our cities; but if you're familiar with Seattle's homelessness problems in particular, you'll know that the city has essentially thrown literally hundreds of millions of dollars at the problem to little effect.
I don't believe Seattle should follow a path of growth-at-all-costs and ignore the social problems the city has; but the city council here is staunchly anti-business, and that carries a risk-too, like the original commenter said—take growth for granted and you can end up like Detroit. In that situation, no one prospers, and everyone suffers; which we definitely don't want. It's a fine line to walk. That's all I'm saying.
I think this is about as useful as saying "homelessness is caused by loitering". We're confusing cause and effect. Try living on the streets for a few years where people treat you worse than shit without developing some mental illness or abusing drugs to deal with the stress and loneliness. If you think that the cause is mental illness and drugs and throwing money at it mostly does nothing, why do you think San Francisco has by a long shot the highest rate of homelessness in America?
Please do not spread lies. SF does not have the highest homelessness rate in America. Eugene Oregon has the most homeless: https://www.security.org/resources/homeless-statistics/ , followed by LA and NY.
Enough with patronizing. They are not children or robots with no freewill. They have made decisions in their own lives and they need to own up to them. Not holding people accountable makes them more like children, and they are more likely to stay where they are FOREVER. They will all stay on the streets until old age and die there if you think it's not their own fault.
If you can't a afford a city, then MOVE. Guess what though, in cities like SF, they didn't.
They stayed, destroyed SF for decades, and now it is very clear... SF has made its choice... to become the home for the homeless, as a mass exodus occurs.
People are tired of shit and used needles on the sidewalk, dangerous insane people roaming everywhere, extremely expensive food and living, all while the leadership pats itself on the back for being woke. Enjoy your post-apocalyptic shitty.
I can answer this, I lived there since 2005 until this month.
The problem is once you stop enforcing the law it creates incentives for all kinds of people to try it out. This created a diverse population of people who are living outside, from mentally ill, to seemingly normal young people fixing bikes in their tents, to dangerous drug addicts that won't hesitate to stab you.
The problem is there is a law and it is not being enforced. People take advantage of this. Thinking everybody is a poor soul that would buy housing if it existed is an extremely naive view. The homeless population is very diverse in terms of reasons they are out there. SF leadership treats all of them as if it had one solution, so of course that will not work. Some people out there want to be there. You can see they are young and don't mind sleeping in a tent. Others are just out of their minds and need intervention ASAP.
RIP SF