This is a great lie, since homelessness is - often and especially in San Francisco - not the result of lack of a home, rather the result of mental illness and drug addiction. This is also reinforced by the great amount of non-native homeless people that travel cross-state to cities like San Francisco.
Give your typical SF homeless a home, and they will rip the sink out the next day to raise enough money for more drugs.
It is not always lack of housing. Sometimes it is, very often it is not.
No, it's what I said. The reason I said "not West Virginia" is because I knew you'd reply this way ;)
Homelessness in the US does not correlate with drug use, or else the homeless would be in Appalachia with meth and opioid users. It's in SF because housing is expensive there. And they're locals[1]. Now, they might be getting into drugs, but that's because there's nothing better to do when you're homeless and the police keep taking your stuff.
NYC does better because they build more shelters, but more importantly because New Jersey is next to them and is good at building affordable housing to make up for New York's NIMBYism.
[1] Santa Cruz also has a big homeless problem, and they aren't locals - but they're not druggies either, they're literally university students. The city just hates that it has a UC and refuses to build student housing for it.
> Santa Cruz also has a big homeless problem, and they aren't locals - but they're not druggies either, they're literally university students.
That's quite a generalization and simplication of Santa Cruz situation.
A non-trivial percentage of UCSC students are homeless, yes.
That doesn't mean the homeless are literally all students, far from it. Most of them are well past university age and have no association with UCSC.
> The city just hates that it has a UC and refuses to build student housing for it.
Again it's complex. Santa Cruz is a very small slice of land between the ocean and unbuildable steep mountains (a lot of it protected forest land, state parks and so on). It can't expand to the north nor to the south.
The only direction to build is east (towards Watsonville) but transportation there and back is a huge problem so building to the east without addressing transportation won't solve anything.
UCSC itself isn't helping, since they keep driving aggressive student population growths without any regard to where any of them are going to be able to live.
I think people need to sit down a bit. Why do _all_ places need to have affordable housing? It’s not as simple a question as you might think.
I am actually asking: why shouldn’t the San Francisco’s of the world spend $12 on a banana to ensure that their grocery baggers make $60k a year? This is how we actually fight the problem rather than having arbitrary amounts of low income housing courtesy of Title IX.
If you want to live in an expensive place, be prepared to spend some goddamn money. Or let’s hurry up and get to a post scarcity world. I don’t honestly care how it happens. Just pick and stick.
The great lie is that there's greater mental illness or addiction in San Francisco than other places. There's not.
What SF does have is very expensive housing, which directly causes homelessness. And homelessness also leads to addiction and mental illness, due to the extreme situation of not having a home.
And if the first-principles logical argument doesn't convince, go look at the data. Every $100 increase in average rent is associated with an increase in homelessness.
'What SF does have is very expensive housing, which directly causes homelessness'.
This is completely illogical. The upper east side side and Beverley Hills have very expensive housing which hasn't 'directly caused homelessness'. SF is a tiny densely populated 49 sq mile peninsula with people like politician Nancy Pelosi owning vast hill top homes they rarely visit and an ultra permissive approach to drug use in some districts which has resulted in a catastrophic influx of addicts who have often also developed serious mental illnesses.
You can be sure there are no tent/RV encampments outside the Pelosi's or other wealthy estates yet those same people are selling completely unrealistic YIYBY utopianism, which is cruel and wildly impractical.
You don't think that high housing prices cause homelessness?
People don't become homeless because they can't afford the most expensive homes, they become homeless because the least expensive homes are still priced too high. This is not a hard concept to understand.
When I say "SF has expensive housing" I'm not talking about mansions, I'm talking about the crappiest, worst possible studio or bedroom under a staircase being rented for exorbitant amounts of money.
'You don't think that high housing prices cause homelessness?'
It's a factor but not a fundamental as I previously said. SF has always had a large transient population - great climate, dumpster diving, permissive culture - which has now exploded due to the Fentanyl & meth disaster. There are lots of generational blue collar renter families really struggling to survive in the bay area and an acute shortage of housing primarily due to tech and over capacity of residents until recently.
What we now have is a mass exodus of tax paying residents and a huge influx of non contributing drug and smi casualties which is really tarting to hurt the tourism that pays the blue collar families rent via their jobs.
I don't know any YIMBYs who live in Pac Heights. They'd love to put apartments there of course, but transit-oriented development means we have to start where the BART stations are. Housing is something, but it's easier to get back into society if you can commute to your job.
I know plenty of YIYBY advocates who live in wealthy parts of SF that have clean streets, no homeless and own large properties. a good example would be 'democratic socialist' district 5 supervisor Dean Preston https://twitter.com/DeanPreston
Preston talks all about progressive housing on Twitter all the time, so does heroin Haney. Neither of them can get it together to practice what they preach so it's all useless YIYBY performative posturing anyway. In the past SF has wound up building disasters like Geneva Towers based on somewhat similar utopian ideals
The language he uses makes him a left-NIMBY, but that’s just what they look like in cities. Found in NYC too. In suburbs the same people switch to talking about property values and 50s rural neighborhood character.
Dean Preston is one of the most virulently anti-YIMBY politicians out there. He is constantly lying about YIMBY positions and starting fights over nonsense on Twitter.
You and he agree 100% on building new apartments, Preston hates them, and as a rich man living in a very expensive single family home in one of the most expensive cities in the world, he fits right into the NIMBY mould.
However, Preston also believes that homeless people should still be treated like people, a position he shares with YIMBYs. Due to that commonality, but also having irrational hate for YIMBYs, he is sometimes called anti-YIMBY rather than NIMBY.
To be more exact: homeless are people priced out of their home.
I've been a month in WV. Huntington and Charleston are plagued by visible users, but not by homelessness. Even daily users there haven't been priced out yet.
'Pandering' to who?! local residents who are sick of the city getting wrecked? Like so many people these days Shellenberger thinks the two dominant political organizations who control everything are morally and ideologically bankrupt.
It's only fantasists who believe the slow motion SF disaster is a good thing, and they also appear to think they have some sway with the DNC.
Give your typical SF homeless a home, and they will rip the sink out the next day to raise enough money for more drugs.
It is not always lack of housing. Sometimes it is, very often it is not.