zlacker

In that case, why not move all the homeless from a park in a metropolis to a park in a cheaper/remote area? Then you can actually employ cheaper custodians in those areas to look after these homeless.

>>galima+(OP)
See, thats why I don't like the reductive reasoning. After all, when you're moving them why bother with seat belts and comfy chairs? Just use a flatbed truck and they can hold their pathetic possessions on with string, if they have any. And you also neatly assume the resources in the remote location can cope with the burden rather than already being behind the cost curve, compared to rangers in the SF metro area with direct access to the agencies.

Wait a minute, isn't this why it "paid" for the Texan and Floridan governors to ship their problems to the sanctuary cities?

>>ggm+X
you might have misunderstood; if the homeless is now in a cheaper COL park, then more park custodians can be hired to take care of the homeless. And why should we assume that SF metro agencies are more apt to take care of these downtrodden than small town Nevada City? They haven't exactly done a stellar job so far for decades.

>>galima+(OP)
Then they'll have much further distances to commute on foot to their jobs.

>>galima+(OP)
It's a lot hard to re-enter society if you're separated from everyone and everyplace you know. Sure, it could be cheaper in some ways to ship the homeless out to bumfuck nowhere, but might be less cost-effective than you think, and certainly less humane.

>>galima+(OP)
Park Ranges and Social Services Workers are much cheaper than Police, Paramedics, and Emergency Room Staff.

Your reductive suggestion could be implemented by busing the homeless to prisons. That's probably not what you were proposing, but it's one interpretation.

>>anadem+33
Yes it is harder, but it's also harder for society to offer you the services like free room and board, help getting a job, and the thousand other services we offer in a high cost of living area.

Since society is taking up the bulk of the work in helping you re-enter, you have to make some compromises, and potentially moving to a new place seems like a reasonable one to make. If we want a robust and strong social safety net, we cannot commit to providing all these services in the most expensive place to do so.

>>galima+S1
> custodians can be hired

SF has one of the largest city budgets in the country — >$15billion — and struggles to staff park workers making $70-90k.

If the park workers only make $60k, but the city budget is 1/10th, 1/20th, 1/100th of SF’s, how does the math here ever work?

>>ketzo+r9
SF budget is city and county services, fwiw. It is good to make apples to apples comparison.

>>ketzo+r9
Park rangers make $30k-40k in small cities/towns. Not to mention big cities can help pay for some of the transition costs for these homeless, with their 15 billion budget. Also, it would be way cheaper to house these homeless once they choose to transition from park to an apartment.

>>ketzo+r9
>In fiscal year 2023–2024, San Francisco spent $690 million on homelessness, notes the San Francisco Chronicle. This is a 142% increase from five years ago.

Spending $700M/year on homelessness crisis is straight up insane. There has to be a better way that doesnt cost as much. SF is kinda fucked.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/homeless-questions-an...

>>anadem+33
If drugs are strongly intertwined I wonder if an opportunity to voluntarily seperate from familiar drug triggers and sources might provide some balancing to the downsides.

>>Ogsyed+j2
If they could have a job they wouldn't be homeless.

>>ketzo+r9
SF park workers are closer to 120K from those I know. A lot of labor intensive hand weeding because the city shuns herbicide. However, this is less than the median SF city employee, which makes 150k

https://opengovpay.com/employer/ca/san-francisco

>>edm0nd+pd
When there is an enormous budget somehow used up but with barely any noticeable effect (and frankly, without much of an expectation that there’s noticeable effect), you can bet there’s someone or a lot of someones siphoning from it.

Btw even $690m isn’t the full picture:

> While that amount does not include what the Department of Public Health or SF Public Works or many other departments spend related to the crisis

>>WillPo+Pd
My understanding is that there are plenty of homeless folks with jobs.

>>ty6853+Ed
Drugs & alcohol is the majority of why they are homeless from San Francisco to Grand Junction, CO (drove through & saw they have an unofficial homeless park) to Portland to Seattle to Calgary, etc, etc.

>>aprilt+k5
Why?

>>tomrod+Qk
Are you asking why things have costs?

>>edmund+Sb
It’s also services for less than a million people

>>paul79+3i
No, it isn’t. If that was true you’d see a much stronger correlation between drug and alcohol use and homelessness.

>>oefrha+6h
They could just take that $700M and divide it up among the ~8000 homeless in the city. That $87,500 per year would be enough to help get someone on their feet pretty quickly. Probably more effective than whatever the hell they’re spending it on today. Salaries for administrators administrating other administrators?

>>ketzo+r9
The point would be to still use SF's money to do this, I assume. The point was that SF's money would be better spent on park rangers in a smaller city than in SF itself.

Now, I think there are otherajor issues with this idea (mostly that having a 0.1% population of assisted people is much more workable than a 10% population, as would happen if SF moved every homeless person to a smaller city).

>>tomrod+Qk
Because you either make it where you grew up or we'll ship you to the Midwest where you're cheaper to deal with, ya fuckin' bum.

>>WillPo+Pd
Why would a job automatically mean housing? This is America, a job only means enough money for housing in some markets.

>>amanap+Rh
Identifying and assisting these people first would seem to be the thing to do.

But reducing those homeless to 0% would likely not move the needle at all on the “problematic homeless” - the type everyone complains about.

Nobody cares about Steve Wallis sleeping in a bush.

>>ryandr+OF
There’s got to be some Appalachian town that would love to get paid $700m/yr to house and care for 8,000 people.

>>genewi+nc1
Genuine question: is a social darwinist society something folks (perhaps you?) feel like they would survive in? Suppose your community decide it hates people who post online and wanted to ship them to Alaska. You cool with that?

>>lazyas+VE
You do when you subset the homeless population from couch surfers and people living in their car to the people actually finding a wink of sleep under some tarps under a noisy overpass

>>Redoub+4w
No, but I could see why that is where your mind started.

You have a deep, implicit assumption of a social contract in your statement here:

> Since society is taking up the bulk of the work in helping you re-enter, you have to make some compromises, and potentially moving to a new place seems like a reasonable one to make. If we want a robust and strong social safety net, we cannot commit to providing all these services in the most expensive place to do so.

Some people can't. I know several schizophrenia sufferers who would never be able to hit an expected checklist. Some are brilliant. Some think they talk to an esoteric God and babble prophecy. None are functional.

We used to lock those folks up in sanitoriums for their safety, but due to systemic abuse this ended. Go back further, and the folks were tribal shamans, village jesters, and other elements of society which were supported by others until their (often untimely) deaths.

The latter support more or less ended when we as a species started settling down out of nomadic lives.

As a society, we dramatically underfund infrastructure (crumbling bridges and suburbs), healthcare (exploding costs without quality improvement), education (teachers salary is uncompetitive), government action (court systems aren't expedient, legislators xna be bought).

If we don't want these things, we should have the society decide so. This would be through legislation. But we haven't. We ignore these friction instead of addressing them.

Resolving friction takes effort, and effort has costs.

>>kjkjad+mL1
Then maybe the easy solution to this whole issue is to just give the homeless free cars.

>>lazyas+VE
"A survey by the United States Conference of Mayors found that 68 percent of cities reported that substance abuse was the largest cause of homelessness for single adults."

https://endhomelessness.org/resource/opioid-abuse-and-homele...

i do not have any idea how to solve housed people turning to drugs/alcohol to try and solve internal emotional pain...maybe more & more education.

>>bombca+Ck1
Maybe its facetious, but I also do not understand why they have to be accommodated in a top 5 most expensive place in the world to live in.

>>bagels+Mj2
It's half facetious but also half serious, as the amounts of money are simply staggering.

There has to be some middle ground between "homeless in a park" and "living their own life with a job" and "locked up in prison at great cost" that would be satisfactory to everyone.

>>tomrod+wL1
You have a deep implicit assumption that throwing money at the problem solves it. That's rarely true. In the case of schizophrenics, we have solved it a long time ago, but they refuse to take their meds. No amount of money in social programs will change that. It just shifts the "systemic abuse" (which I agree with you on) from (asylums abusing the ill) to the (the mentally ill abusing the general public). I think abuse is a great way to phrase it. We all get abused by the public excrement, petty crime, needles and trash, loss of use of common areas, etc. We all are being abused by that population.

>>bombca+5m2
I think it's impossible for everyone to be satisfied no matter what the solution is.

>>paul79+K42
That’s not actually what you want to ask: Drug use is an additional risk factor for becoming homeless, which tells you that the people who are homeless are likely to be drug users - but that really just sorts out who is likely to become homeless, not how many people. If drug use caused homelessness then places with higher substance abuse rates would have higher homelessness rates. But they don’t! The rate of homelessness is driven most clearly by the difference between area income and area housing cost, and does not correlate well to any measures of drug use in the area.

A nice pair of contrasting data points here is WA and West Virginia. Drug usage and addiction, as well as mental health problems, in West Virginia far outstrips Washington - see https://www.kff.org/statedata/mental-health-and-substance-us... However homelessness in Washington is far, far worse than in West Virginia. West Virginia had almost the lowest rate of homelessness in the country.

https://mountainstatespotlight.org/2024/07/16/wv-new-data-ho...

https://247wallst.com/state/how-the-homelessness-problem-in-...

>>kjkjad+mL1
No you don’t. If 50% of society uses drugs, 5% of society is homeless, and 100% of homeless people uses drugs - then you’d see that all homeless people use drugs, but most drug users are not homeless, so it’s not well correlated at all.