SF...where the toxic pair of bad policy and bad lifestyle choices dance in unisons while the delusional audience watches in disbelief.
The left in a nutshell....
Never had men considered themselves so intellectual and so completely in possession of the truth as these sufferers, never had they considered their decisions, their scientific conclusions, their moral convictions so infallible. Whole villages, whole towns and peoples went mad from the infection. All were excited and did not understand one another. Each thought that he alone had the truth and was wretched looking at the others, beat himself on the breast, wept, and wrung his hands. They did not know how to judge and could not agree what to consider evil and what good; they did not know whom to blame, whom to justify. - Dostoyevsky
7
I, too, sympathize with the business owners, property owners, workers, pedestrians, tourists and law enforcement.
8
I saw the writing on the wall and left SF years ago. I was not interested in trying to fix anything. SF is now serving as a cautionary tale of how not to run a city. From that perspective the common sense people of America thank you.
11
I never thought my son and his girlfriend would end up homeless, but they did. They worked for a contractor who rented apartments in his many buildings to his employees and other people. He turned out to be a crook and left town to avoid arrest, leaving all of his employees, along with suppliers and subcontractors, unpaid. He sold all his properties to people who evicted everyone.
So now this hardworking couple is jobless and homeless, just when we thought they were doing well. Both are "dual diagnosis," suffering from both mental illness and addiction. Both have been clean for over 3 years.
Now it's a merry-go-round of misery for them. They are on medications but must see the doctor regularly to get prescriptions. That requires bus passes. Same with going to the pharmacy. Without regular jobs, they can't save up money for first and last months' rent and a security deposit. Because they are homeless, they own nothing more than the clothes on their backs.
They will do ANY kind of work and do it well. Both are experienced in renovations and he is a licensed master electrician. They live in an impoverished small city with few social services. They go to church several times a week. Nobody helps them and soon it will be very cold there.
I send them what money I can afford, which isn't much. Their situation is affecting my health, which is already not good. I'm out of answers and I'm afraid of losing them. They did everything right after addiction, right?
5
This is laughable. One reader blames the policies of Ronald Reagan while many others a President that has been in office for three years. Do ‘open minded’ liberal ever look in the mirror? Is it ever possible that the polices that the left supports could be wrong? You can’t self correct when you start from the belief that you are right. Arrogance knows no boundaries.
14
Far too much is made of California's weather as the source of its homeless problem. Impoverished drug addicts in Syracuse do not save up their money for cross country bus tickets or low fare flights. Portland and Seattle, moreover, which have rain (and mist, and drizzle, and dense cloud cover, and very soggy ground 9 1/2 months a year) have huge, aggressive homeless populations.
Weather has a marginal effect, but the largest determinants are California's spectacular inequality of wealth, deterrents (market and otherwise, like NIMBY) to construction of low cost housing and its seemingly pathological inability to be coercive. That means ceasing to minimize the effects of open drug use, public defecation and publicly menacing behavior on quality of life.
California is more concerned, at a public level, with preserving the sacred option of the homeless to die with their rights on, while ignoring the right of other citizens to a clean, non-menacing city. And with Newsom and Breed in charge, that's not going to change.
14
Excellent comment.
4
We need to change the definition homelessness. My definition of homelessness is either a woman and children on hard times due to domestic issues or an able bodied man currently looking for work. What our cities are going through now is not an homeless issue.
6
Yes the situation is sad, but its the reality we live in today. At least some kind of action is being taken into consideration because usually the homeless just go unnoticed. Even though its not any of our faults it's the decisions other make, putting themselves in a negative situation. You would think if one would move to such a popular and EXPENSIVE city they would have the money for it, but i guess not everyone thinks the same. Some say Donald Trump is most likely the cause of this by taking away healthcare, food etc. Overall in some way Trump and his Administration is trying to better the situation. Even if they do improve the situation what about the addiction? This is still going to be a major problem if they do get these homeless people off the street. In that case it will be hard for them to adapt to a new environment and might be hard for them not to go back to their old ways.
1
For years San Francisco has worked on the homeless issue to no avail. Now the problem is the worse I've ever seen it. What makes Trump think they homeless here are illegal immigrants or are from other countries? The majority of the homeless I see on the streets are white and young. Many of them are using opiates whether it be heroin or fentanyl and using it openly on the streets. I've seen drug dealers on many corners of the streets in the Tenderloin waiting to make a sale. SFPD will do a sweep of the area only for them to occupy another corner. It's a joke. There is no magic wand to make the homeless disappear. We as a society must work to take care of them, provide them with drug treatments and some form of shelter over the heads while they are recovering. They are people just like me and you but have had the misfortune to become addicted, got evicted or have an untreated mental illness.
5
White and young non-victims.
1
Oh, how awful for the doorways, alleyways, parks and squats to actually have a purpose beyond a nice facade! What tents? Hundreds of them?
Mr Slum Landlord, that's what happens when people are denied all provision to help then get back on track. only just spotted this? You've eally been asleep at the wheel haven't you?
2
Could you imagine the outcry if a democrat president trampled on states rights in the same way?
3
First, New York City alone manages to house more homeless people in shelters than California, Oregon, and Washington state combined. California has an *unsheltered* homeless problem.
Second, I'm seeing a lot of misconceptions about Bay Area homelessness. The 2019 EveryOne Counts! point-in-time count of homeless people in Alameda County (which includes Oakland and Berkeley) found:
* 79% of Alameda homeless are unsheltered.
* 78% had housing before becoming homeless. (24-37% had been renting their own home, 30-39% had been living with friends or family). 57% had lived in Alameda County for more than 10 years. Only 3% became homeless outside of California.
* 40% stated that they stayed in Alameda because they "grew up here."
* 18% reported eviction, foreclosure, or rent increase as the reason why they became homeless. 13% said losing their job. 12% said mental illness, 10% said substance abuse. There were many other reasons.
* The most useful service that respondents felt might have prevented their homelessness was rental assistance (33-42%). 52% said funding to address homelessness in Alameda should be put towards affordable rental housing.
This suggests California's severe housing shortage is impacting low-income long-time residents who have nowhere to go. If it's already so hard to build residential units that rent is skyrocketing and turning people to the streets, you can bet not enough shelters are getting built. The housing crisis has become a humanitarian crisis.
10
So long as we keep using the term "homeless" and talk about cheap/subsidized housing as the solution, we'll have people living in squalor outside, especially in warmer locales. Drugs and mental illness are the problem, and lenient enforcement of vagrancy and loitering laws is making it worse. No, I don't have an effective, humane solution.
5
"Last year, Mr. Wiener introduced a bill that would essentially seize zoning control from localities and make it harder to stop higher-density projects near rail stations."
Translation - they don't want taller buildings in SF or more density, so they want to turn every suburb into Jersey City or Hoboken.
Surprise - families that chose to live in the suburbs, don't want them turned into small cities.
4
The problems of SF and Seattle are their own. You reap what you sow. You cannot pin this one on Trump.
11
Well that’s a wee bit simplistic. A. Trump doesn’t care about the homeless. He just wants to stick it to California. B. His administration could do something to help, but really has no interest in such action. In fact, HUD funding is down 9-billion dollars, certainly enough money to help ease this problem.
Now it is true that the biggest enemies of the homeless are wealthy liberals who look at the homeless with the same sense of dehumanization as Trump supporters see immigrants.
But it isn’t all self-inflicted. It’s the American way to kick people to the ground and blame them when they can’t get back up.
And one more thing. Much of this can be traced to the wholesale closure of mental health facilities, which put people unable to take care of themselves out on the street, where they often are victims of violence by any number of assailants.
I wish I could say that this country will learn to have compassion for the homeless, but I’m pretty sure that ain’t gonna happen.
6
NYC almost turned into what SF is today but we took a practical approach while SF policy makers make decisions on what ‘feels good’. You reap what you sow.
8
@Anthony
I remember walking through the side waiting rooms at Grand Central in the early 1980s and thinking I was in 19th century Calcutta. Yes, New York was well on its was to San Francisco-ization. Credit one man for standing against what then seemed inexorable: Rudy Giuliani.
9
America should have National Healthcare and shelter.
With Trump doing his rumba to radio loud mouth limbaugh's tune, don't count on either. When I first heard limbaugh, he was making fun of the homeless, mocking them while playing "Ain't got no Home"
3
Like in the film Grapes of Wrath clean regulated work camps need to be built east of LA and San Francisco..
Move these poor derelicts out of the City..
Also reopen the Asylums that many of the crazy homeless actually need to get better and force them to take their meds..
10
If what you are doing isn't working, stop doing it.
5
Although I dislike Trump, I hope his attention to this topic prompts some visible changes to SF, where daily life has become more difficult and the homeless problem seems inescapable. I live and work in downtown SF, and for those who just think citizens are complaining about encampments and hating on the poor, it's more than that and the problem affects us all. The behavior on the street is shocking; it's alarming to be waiting at a crosswalk with someone raving mad, yelling, and mentally/physically out of control. It's stressful to ride on public transit with people that are clearly mentally ill and physically aggressive. It's disgusting to push by people picking dried scabs off their bodies while trying to enter a restaurant. It's disheartening to walk out of your apartment in the morning and find a person with their genitals exposed in a pile of garbage and needles right outside your door. It's shameful to pass by multiple bodies on the street day in and day out that could very well be dead. The feeling here is very grim indeed.
15
You could give every "homeless person", on the streets, first and last month's worth of money for rent and they would not use it for anything other that drugs or beer. They either enjoy the lifestyle of freedom and free services or they are just way to gone to ever want to go back. If we built 10,000 apts., who would pay the rent for them?
10
You are right.
As leftie, I am extremely frustrated by rampant nimbyism including among so-called progressives that has blocked efforts to build dense housing near transit corridors. This selfish political obstructiveness, coupled with the reduction in Federal funding for low income housing and the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill without adequate funding for community-based services, has led to a vast human catastrophe.
4
NIMBYism and rent control....a toxic brew.
3
Trump doesn't care a bit about the homeless; many of whom are veterans who suffer from experiences that Trump's bone spur allowed him to miss.
Our incredible disparity in housing is a reflection of our disparity in opportunity and the resultant disparity in wealth. When there are many people who can afford multi-million dollar digs there will, inevitably, be many more people living on the streets.
As usual, we should check what the Scandinavian countries are doing to house their poorest citizens.
The only thing Trump cares about is that some of his fatcat backers are complaining that their nearly tax exempt properties are being despoiled by those pesky poor people camping near them
3
I doubt that providing free, studio apartments in reasonably safe buildings would stanch the existence and growth of homelessness. First, unless this were a national program, thousands would head for San Francisco. But the crux is: the behavior would continue. Neither drug addiction nor mental illness cease because there is a roof over one's head. Finally, homeless frequently reject all attempts at control.
Social norms and institutions were comparatively easy to undermine over the last 50 years. They were critical to providing structure to even impoverished families. Reinstating them will be a next to impossible task.
7
I live in downtown LA, close to skid row. This is a major problem for everyone, unhoused and housed. Businesses have trouble getting customers to come because the situation is so bad, we live in a city and state with high taxes but don't see a lot of solutions right now, other than some low income housing with built in support facilities, but it's coming way too slow. You have lawyers who live on the toni west side suing the city when they even try to do cleanups of homeless camps and areas while residents often can't walk down the street without being harassed, attacked or seeing things that shouldn't be happening on a modern 1st world street.
In downtown especially it's a toxic mix of mental illness and substance abuse. You have empathy but it wears thin with everything that goes along with this - random attacks, defecation in the middle street, people randomly screaming and throwing things at cars and pedestrians, etc. I've seen crazy things here and have many friends who have been randomly attacked, mostly by drug fueled angry people. We need first and foremost mental health reform reinstated, with facilities to care for these people, who have been left to rot by a mix of policies from across the spectrum. It's bad for everyone. You can't have a functioning city center for tourism, government and business if the situation gets much worse.
There is no solution as long as there's no mental health policy from federal, state and local officials.
12
California wants to be seen as the vanguard of American liberalism. But the reality is that the elites of California seem unwilling to address this issue through any means that would inconvenience them.
5
I read the article and noted that there is almost nothing about how much the cost of living has skyrocketed in the bay area in the past decade.
Most of the homeless in San Francisco once had housing in San Francisco. Its a myth that they're from all across the country and the world and come here to live off of our largesse. Life on the streets is brutal and I wouldn't wish it on anyone. California and SF do have a lot of social programs not found elsewhere, but even with all of that I've only seen the problem get worse.
I think that the finnish model of providing a home to anyone, no questions asked might be the best bet. It might be costly, but they did find that keeping people housed saved thousands per person when they factor in the money not spent on services, such as ER visits.
6
Washington cannot let these cities destroy themselves? Washington knows better than these cities how they need to solve these problems, many of which stem from policies that changed in Washington and drove people onto the streets? And Washington is set to drive more people onto the streets?
Washington [ie, Trump et al] is a two-faced hypocrite.
6
Too funny!
The homeless problem in California was created and has been sustained by 109% pure democrats policy.
The slums in LA and SF make the holding centers on the border look like the Ritz- Carlton .
Trump is correct yet again
13
Gov Ronald Reagan cut mental health funding in the 70’s and flooded the CA streets with suffering former patients. Economic crises and tax cuts only made it worse. Not too funny, huh?
4
@William Rodham Not sure where you're from but guessing somewhere where it snows and is cold 6 months out of the year, California is not. Also guessing you're not in a state with almost 50 million people either. The majority of the homeless people come from other states on their own accord because of the weather. In 2013 Nevada bused and dumped hundreds of mentally ill people in SF and all over the state.
1
Half of the whole US homeless population ( 550 K ) is in California.
11
Sen. Weiner is the one with no credibility on homelessness. Democrats rule CA and have for many years. Sen. Weiner and his cohorts have allowed one of the most beautiful cities in the world to become an open sewer. What gall to blame President Trump for Democratic leadership failure.
14
LA Times had reporters spend a year investigating homelessness and this sums it up (https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-08-15/street-within-homelessness-los-angeles-project):
"But what became even more interesting was to realize that housing doesn’t end the problems associated with homelessness. In fact, housing the homeless — as vexing an issue as that is — is almost easy, compared to helping the homeless stay housed.
As we followed the people who lived on Broadway Place into housing and saw the habits and behaviors of the street follow them indoors, we realized that solving the homeless crisis in Los Angeles will take years, if not decades, of the city’s commitment to the problem. Housing is critical, but housing alone is merely a Band-Aid to the issues that forced these individuals to the streets in the first place."
6
The thing that matters with Trump is not what he says (haven't we figured this out yet?) but its what he does. So far, he's only done things that will make this problem worse. Now the question is what will he DO (if anything) to make it better.
1
For all those concerned about whatever "solutions" Trump is considering re: homelessness, not to worry. In no time at all he'll move on to the next non-issue or Twitter rant and all will be forgotten. Ultimately, the term "the homeless" has become a meaningless catchall. There's a difference between the ones camping out on sidewalks and in parks and those who are working yet unable to afford a home. Each group requires a different solution.
2
It may be convenient to bash California but homelessness is not a problem just in California. The problem exists in just about every state. You can see the problem in Republican states such as Georgia, Texas, and Florida. You will see the problem in Democratic states such as California, New York, and Washington. It is an American problem. Unfortunately, it can not be solved because of nasty partisan state of our politics. Until we elect people who can work collaboratively with various stakeholders, this problem will continue to exist.
6
One really distinguish between those who are homeless because they "lost" a home and can't afford a new one, and the "bums" who because of drug addiction, mental illness or just their life choice, have no interest in being productive members of society and are takers looking for handouts.
As to the latter class, the true bums, there is no wonder why they choose California for there "homeless" home. Great climate and lots of easy touches. No reason to even think about working.
For those in the first category, homelessness is mostly the result of government policies that make inexpensive housing arrangements illegal. Think of the old boarding houses, or just the practice, formalized in the floor plan of the standard urban apartment of 100 years ago which provided for a room with direct access the outside which could be readily rented to a stranger without giving them unrestricted access to the rest of the apartment.
Instead, government regulations mandate housing units with amenities that those at the bottom This is coupled with restrictive zoning policies that hold down the total number of housing units.
Homelessness is not a problem of poverty in the U.S. It is not akin to the shanty towns that prevail around cities in the third world. It is a consequence of poor government policies impairing the private sector's ability to provide what people want and can afford.
3
Nobody wants to knowingly rent a room in their home to someone who is severely mentally ill, an alcoholic or drug addict. These folks with behavioral issues, who make up over half the homeless population, drift toward the warm, dry California climate and its urban centers with social services where living outdoors on a pittance is more survivable. The solution is to provide carrots and sticks: Housing with required participation in treatment, and law enforcement. For other down-on-their-luck homeless folks without behavioral issues, the solution is income support and housing.
3
I can't help but think this is nothing more than Trump trying to find a new wedge issue to split off suburban voters. He doesn't care about homelessness, but sees a target in the homeless that he can demonize.
4
All of this is the result of the breakdown in family structures in America over the decades. Too many "unqualified" people having children and not knowing how to raise them and then setting them off into the cruel world. It is getting worse and will only get worse. Republicans blame laziness of people for such problems and Democrats play the victim card (housing, corporations, etc.).
It is us. We birth these children that turn into broken adults. It isnt the politicians but the American people. Wake up!.
10
Republican Mayor of San Diego has an aggressive approach to solving the city's homeless issue. Bridge Housing (tents that are clean, have sanitation facilities, and staffed by health professionals and social workers) has been part of the solution. Enforcement of anti-camping policies is another part of the strategy.
This approach, while by no means a permanent cure, begins to make the lives better for the homeless people (they can start getting treatment and a more socially beneficial routine) and the community (no waste in the street, garbage piles next to encampments, no disease vectors from rodents and fleas).
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/06/san-diego-homelessness-bridge-housing-tents/
5
Americans don't read.
The majority of Americans are completely ignorant about the concepts and data of the US economy.
How the wealth is distributed. Who owns it. How money circulates or not and within which social strata.
There is also a taboo about knowledge of the economy because it is considered as marxist thinking.
Americans are completely alienated in the narrative of mercantilism.
There are still ignorant Americans who think that homelessness is caused by drugs or mental illness .
1/2 million homeless people in the USA .
1 % of the US population in jail.
2
Despite what the Jesus they pretend to follow said, caring for your fellow man isn’t something Republicans have any interest in.
6
@Sterling Salt Lake City, arguably the most religious large city in the US, has done a lot to end homelessness in the city.
Republican mayor of San Diego has taken an aggressive approach, providing Bridge Housing and social/mental health support while more long term solutions are built out.
Seems like Gavin Newsom could learn from his nearby Republican colleagues.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/06/san-diego-homelessness-bridge-housing-tents/
https://www.npr.org/2015/12/10/459100751/utah-reduced-chronic-homelessness-by-91-percent-heres-how
3
What do republicans have to do with decisions made locally in S.F.?
3
“Donald Trump is a slumlord who has spent his presidency pushing people into homelessness by taking away health care, food assistance and affordable housing funds,” said Scott Wiener, a Democratic state senator from San Francisco. “He has no credibility on housing and homelessness.”
1
These politicians are predominantly Democrats who live in cushy neighborhoods who do not have to see this homeless problem on a daily basis. It is the residents who have to put up with the day to day homeliness that is destroying their neighborhoods.
Nancy Pelosi and Gavin Newsom live in gated comminuted far from this problem. They should travel around these neighborhoods and see for themselves what actually exists. Better yet, maybe they should reside here for a week or two to see what the residents are dealing with. They might have a better idea of what is really happening.
8
We should all thank Reagan for this mess. He was as bad a President as Trump and GWB. By closing all the mental institutions, he put the most helpless folks out on the street. Yet folks look at him like he was some kind of saint!! More like the devil.
3
Homelessness is not a partisan problem - it’s existed in SF for decades, and even Democrats have failed to make an impact. With California’s mild climate it’s no surprise that we shelter a large proportion of homeless - that statistic is misused and misinterpreted in this article. Considering the national epidemic of opioid addiction, it’s also no surprise that many of our homeless are heroin addicts. What IS accurate, is the description of drug addiction, mental illness, and unhygienic squalor; in true Silicon Valley ingenuity, we have a local human excrement app that guides clean-up teams to feces via GPS. But rather than debate who or what caused this, and who genuinely cares, why can’t anyone offer viable solutions? Building more low income housing is a short-term strategy that will get this problem off the streets and out of sight, but will not solve the addiction and illness nor help the homeless develop self-sustainability.
37
@City Girl Building more low-income housing would actually be a long-term strategy. It typically takes two years from the start of construction for a building to be ready for occupancy (not to mention years required for pre-development). Models such as permanent supportive housing provide low income housing together with social services to help people struggling with addiction, mental health, etc. But we cannot simply build our way out of this crisis, even though building is an important element of the strategy.
What's needed now is more effective rapid response measures that help prevent homelessness in the first place (see NYC and Boston for examples of programs that provide emergency rental assistance, legal assistance, etc.) and rapidly rehouse people who have lost their homes. The solutions are there. It's a matter of finding the political will and the funding to put them into place.
6
@City Girl, Actually, the modern era of homelessness came about in the 1980's. When Ronald Reagan took away federal funding for mental institutions, thousands of people unable to care for themselves became homeless. Since then, there have been other contributing factors. But partisan politics have played a factor. Granted, Democratic politicians in CA and elsewhere have failed to resolve the problem.
11
@City Girl
There is a direct correlation in homelessness and the dismantling of California's Department of Mental Health Hospital System brought to residents by Messrs. Lantermann, Petris and Scott of the state legislature.
It is further compounded by the immense increase in the availability of narcotics of the sort that could not have been imagined when this state law passed.
The first giant leap came when SF General was the first hospital in the nation decided to treat HIV/AIDS patients and suddenly the streets of SF Financial District were flooded with beggars from out of state. Before then, there were at most a half dozen beggars, almost all older blind men who sold pencils from tin cups while accompanied by their harnessed Guide Dogs. These men were deposited and picked up each morning and evening by a van.
4
I was born and raised in the city, moved to the South Bay Area for about 20 years and moved back with my husband about 10 years ago. I’ve watched the homelessness increase over the last two-three years. I live in a nice neighborhood with good, responsible neighbors. In the last year I’ve seen someone defecate in front of my house, my dog attacked by a homeless person’s dog, myself almost bitten on another occasion, among many other things. With the opioid epidemic, I’ve also seen a huge increase of people stumbling down the street high on drugs.
In observing my city, I see the homeless problem as being so difficult to solve because there’s not a one size fits all solution. Where I live the homeless are mostly what people call transients, young people who choose to live on the streets as a life style. Also many people addicted to drugs who come and go in and out of rehab, choosing to be on the streets rather than be in a facility where there’s rules. Other parts of the city the streets are full of mentally ill, drug addicted people living in tents. Helping these people is completely different than helping a family that’s homeless because they can’t afford to make a living wage despite working hard.
16
It's the weather, stupid.
California is basically hospitable to outdoor living. If you look at the cars and campers homeless are using, many, many have out of state license plates. Some states are even guilty of putting their mentally ill patients on buses and shipping them to SF. And the introduction of foreign real estate investors (from Asia) has put the market out of reach for many.
2
@Eleanor Kilroy
No it's not. Seattle and Portland have terrible climates.
3
@Eleanor, the homeless issue is complicated and multi-faceted, no doubt. Investors who buy up real estate like it is share of stock to put away in a drawer are contributors to the problem.
2
@Wine Country Dude I am not sure what you mean by the statement: "No it's not." As far as the statement that "Seattle and Portland have terrible climates", they have much nicer climates than Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Duluth, etc., etc.
3
I have been to San Fransico twice in the past 25 years. The second time I had my two grammar school age sons with me and remembered why I hadn't been back in years; pan handling, corrupt taxi drivers, rude trolly conductors, etc. SF politicians talk equality but there is no better example of the uber rich running the show and raising taxes while their city becomes a slum. Trump is a sad joke we have to ride out and hopefully bring us to our senses. Is there not one moderate politician who can rise above the crowd with some real ideas on how to put us back on the right track? The homeless camps on the streets of Los Angeles are not the families who have lost jobs, been over-whelmed with medical bills, etc. They are men and women who are alcoholics and drug addicts, period. Not a judgement just fact. Wether it started with mental illness or mental illness is a symptom of their addiction doesn't matter. Affordable housing won't help this segment. Sobriety is the answer, it's free. But unfortunately with most people not having an in tact family to raise them those with these problems are left on their own with zero support system to encourage them (and not give up in a way a loved one would do) and so they are trapped by their addiction.
7
Instead of congratulating Trump for recognizing a real problem like homelessness-- rather than his imagined threats like rampant democratic voter fraud-- the media should hold him and his administration accountable for coming up with real solutions. I sure Trump would claim "nobody knows more about affordable housing than I do", so what are his solutions? Trump attacked Baltimore and other cities as "rat infested dumps", yet offered no solutions to improve the problem and never will. The same with homelessness expecting some meaning answers from Trump and his band of liars, to any problem is wishful thinking.
5
I have a friend in Florida, in her fifties, who has been homeless for at least five years. I have never met her; she is the descendent of a historic figure I published a book about. She is a prolific writer of emails, sent from public libraries. The whole system is stacked against her. She lost her apartment when her mother died and her mom's Social Security stopped. She lost her own disability check because she has no permanent address. She has serious health issues, but with bad credit and no way to pay even a small co-pay, she suffers without medical care with horribly painful cluster headaches and rotting teeth while living in shelters (when she can) and on the street. I send her money when I can, but I can't afford to take care of her. Twice over the years good Samaritans have helped her find an apartment, but each time, in six months or so, the rent goes way up, she's evicted again and back on the street. People treat the homeless appallingly. She's verbally abused every day. She says in Florida that people pelt the homeless with pennies and laugh. She tells me she just wants to die. This is what America has become.
10
Orrr... government could do its job and actually try to solve the issue rather than the politicians trying to just earn points for elections.
8
I work in an urban jungle, where I pass homeless every day, several times per day. The majority of these individuals have mental problems and/or drug addiction issues. These individuals need mental help first and foremost.
5
These pictures don't do it justice. On Wood street in Oakland, there is an encampment of proportions that people don't believe when they see it. I understand that maybe we don't trust the federal government, but by any measure, the state and local government has completely failed both the housed and unsheltered.
7
@MikeGoogle Proposition 47 and you will see what happened.
1
Next time NYT do a historical article including a timeline, both state and national, of all the laws that were changed or enacted that create social chaos...from not supporting of military men and women when they return from combat with actual counselling and programs to closing down mental health institutions to local city councils housing rules to getting rid of labor unions who helped create the middle of class of the 50's and 60's to medical bankruptcy due to our insurance coverage not health care coverage. THIS LIST COULD GO ON FOR EVER.
This is not a simple problem and it won't be a simple solution. Heck even just identifying the groups who tend to be our homeless is difficult let alone to reasons they are homeless today.
We need big thinkers and doers in government at all levels who come to voters with solutions including how to pay for them. VOTE for better candidates.
3
To all of the commentators trying to make political hay against Trump. The homeless problem hurts the homeless population itself (obviously) but adjacent to that is the misery imposed upon the working poor.
The permissive attitudes on drugs and encampments makes the lives of those who live in the neighborhood miserable. Imagine having to rake a field of needles before having your kids play soccer or rat infestations moving into your house from the waste piled up next to the encampment.
The article below is about Philly, but similar issues in the CA cities. Growing up poor is bad enough, but being poor and feeling trapped inside your home is worse. Local government indifference to the problem is even more insulting.
"Like Campos, many residents had come to Kensington simply because they couldn’t afford housing anywhere else, and though many expressed empathy for the users, they also wanted them to leave. People cleared needles off their lawns, their front steps and the sidewalks where their children played. Some wouldn’t go anywhere unless they were in a car, but a lot of families were too poor to afford a car."
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/10/magazine/kensington-heroin-opioid-philadelphia.html
5
"To be sure, the main mission for Mr. Trump’s two days in Northern and Southern California was the $15 million he expected to raise at private events behind gates in enclaves like Portola Valley and Beverly Hills.
The homeless were not holding that against him."
I am.
I have been discussing with a friend the waste of $ billions in the attenuated presidential campaign.
This $15 million could go a long way, along with the other billions collected and spent elsewhere in these campaigns.
3
There is the homeless, and then there is the homeless. One is a problem that can be alienated by affordable housing and even emergency shelters however fraught with issues those are. For the other, which is the kind being referenced, they really need to bring back the mental institutions that they had before deciding that these people can live on their own on the outside with maybe just a little out-patient meds.
4
When I lived in Singapore I was amazed to discover that when luxury condo buildings are built, there must be subsidized housing in that neighborhood as well, solving the NIMBY issue. Cities in the US could do the same.
4
Seattle also has a significant homeless problem, with many little shantytowns dotting the landscape. Like SF and LA and other west coast cities, this is a direct result of the influx of highly compensated professionals who flood our cities with money, driving up real estate prices beyond the grasp of a widening group of citizens. Add to this stagnant wages at the middle and lower ends, geographic and regulatory dynamics that constrain the building of new housing, and growing psychiatric problems caused by our dog eat dog economy and weak safety net, then you have a prescription for homelessness.
6
Amazingly, this NYT article completely misses the most important reason for the sudden epidemic of drug addicts and mentally ill people camping on our sidewalks in Los Angeles: rulings by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals prohibiting cities from enforcing laws against living on the street unless the city has vacant shelter beds available, the rationale being that to do so violates the Constitutional provisions against cruel or unusual punishment.
In response, the Mayor and City Council rushed to draw up very loose rules about where people will be allowed to camp in public. The police are now instructed not to enforce the laws against camping on the street in huge swathes of the city. Their hands are tied. Encampments in the heart of our neighborhoods followed directly from this decision.
The City could have, but did not, appealed the court ruling. The city could have drawn up rules that would have confined encampments to limited areas that could be provided with sanitation and law enforcement. Today’s encampments are the fault of city government. Now the situation is ripe for a demagogue like Trump to come in and stir up a political conflagration.
Many of the people living in their cars or in shelters, unlike most of the ones living in tents on the sidewalk, are not drug addicts or mentally ill, and can benefit from more affordable housing and social services. But few if any of the people living on the street have jobs or would be in housing if rents were lower.
7
Some thoughts, in no order of priority:
- Panhandling is protected free speech. Let that sink in.
How many of us have seen those who enjoy this protection self-medicating with booze or whatever else?
- These people are suffering and the social safety net has failed. Ours is a 20 trillion dollar economy. Clearly, we have the resources. And I'm not talking about better tents for all.
- It should be unacceptable -- to society writ large -- to have people living rough inside cities. Walk the earth if you must, but camping on sidewalks and underpasses isn't fair to anyone.
- Trump may come at it from the wrong perspective, as he does most things, but he is right on one thing: solving this is largely a matter of will.
1
The USA have a population of about 600 000 homeless people .
For a scale idea, the US military has 750 000 soldiers and employs a total of 1. 5 million people.
The US prison population is about 2.5 million , the highest in the world per capita by far.
if you look at data per nations by homelessness it is one of the highest percentage ( o.17 % ) . Europe has about half that rate in average. ( 0. 8 ) or less.
But the surprise is the UK which has an astounding number of homeless people 335 000 or 0.46 % of the population.
The UK has also an incarceration rate of double than the European average . (because of a similar capitalist economy with no social benefits like in the USA )
The USA = 8 times more.
2
Don't worry, Obama is making a Netflix Documentary and Trump will build a stupendous condo development to revitalize the Skid Row.
Two sides of the same political coin that promised Change.
4
Once, I gave an apparently homeless person $5 and the person with me said, oh, you know, he's probably just going to spend that on drugs or alcohol. I said, so? It's not like he can take my $5 and go rent an apartment, or buy a car, or get job training, or mental health counseling or any of the other things that might get him out of the mess he's in. I do hope he went and bought some food, but if he didn't, that was okay with me. I might like to drink or drug myself into oblivion, too, if I was in his worn-out shoes.
7
One factor in growing homeless population is methamphetamine addiction. This needs attention.
2
First of all, homelessness is a complex issue. Some of the contributing factors include non-livable wage, breakdown of family structure, income inequality, " trickle down economic ", healthcare ( many personal bankruptcies are from major medical illness ), closure of mental facility from Reagan era, return veteran with PTSD, and rapid technology/societal changes ( directly or indirectly contribute to gentrification ) etc. Since Trump's policy has a negative impact on the above issues, even with opening of Federal facilities or more public housing for the homeless so as to improve the image/prestige of LA or SF, is not going to make a dent to the homeless crisis.
Second, I am not blaming the current administration for the current crisis since homelessness has been with us for past decades. Where is Mr. Trump or Ben Carlson for the past 3 years not tackling this issue until it is close to election time ?
Third, what has Mr. Trump done to the " PRESTIGE " of the Oval Office ?
4
I'd like to hear from those in the know the relationship between lack of affordable housing and creation of unaffordable, expensive housing -- especially condominiums -- that's used for investment purposes by people who don't actually live in those places. Also, what is the contribution of tax laws that make it desirable to build expensive housing even if it's unoccupied vs. affordable but highly occupied housing?
11
@Larry
I think it is a complex issue. My city has a lot of new, very expensive housing and it is basically mostly occupied (maybe 96% occupied). If it had not been built, the housing supply would be even tighter.
As for very high end condos that are bought by investors, chances are those developers would not have built anything else. Urban land prices are such that if a developer tries to build affordable housing, the land plus construction costs make it impossible. My market is more moderate than San Fran, but even here, it is impossible to build for people at/around 80% of the median income without some form of subsidy due to construction and land costs. So if you have a developer and they can't break even, they won't build. You are better off letting them add to the supply with something, vs building nothing and pushing wealthier people into "affordable" housing.
So of all the things causing this issue, people building high end condos are not to blame. Air BNB does take units off the market at affordable levels, but that is the fault of the owner, not the developer.
Strong arming developers, forcing them to build affordable housing will just push them into bankruptcy or to opt out of building all together.
2
The complexities of homelessness are without doubt beyond the capacity of li'l Donald's cognitive breadth, but his focus on homelessness as a state problem boggles my mind. Exhaust regulations are a federal problem worthy of going to court over in order to relax emission standards, reproductive rights are up to the state to decide, forest fires on federal land are a states problems, and homelessness is a states problem. People cross state lines, they are not inanimate objects, and they suffer in a variety of ways all of which might lead to homelessness. There is no logical way to make this the problem of state or to expect a state to have the solution independent of national public policy.
2
As a Bay Area native, I have never witnessed an era where homelessness was absent either here or the rest of California.
When I lived in San Diego, we had homeless people camped out behind our building on Ivy Street.
Here in SF, many years have passed since Gavin Newsom's Care Not Cash initiative, and the problem has only gotten worse.
This is a societal problem that will slowly spread to the rest of America within a generation or two.
9
Unfortunately, the states and local municipalities are all wet on this issue.
They can change zoning laws, subsidize new construction and get more affordable housing and homeless shelters. None of this requires federal approval.
Ben Carson, who is never right, mentioned the NIMBY effect. He is right. NIMBY also brings along its cousin “The Limousine Liberal”. A person who advocates for all sorts of issues but is reticent to implement them on his/her own backyard.
You can make zoning changes to create room for $2million townhomes and new office towers but you can’t make room to construction $100k - 200k housing and more homeless shelters. California and other states and cities should put up or shut up on this topic
Both political parties should try implementing ideas at the local and state level before going national.
4
I don't think it's Trump's job to solve CA's homeless crisis. It's of their own making, as the article points out.
There are some facts about homelessness that are ignored by the media because it doesn't fit their narrative that it's 'evil corporations and capitalism' that has pushed people out of their homes. That is not the case. It's the cost of living and housing, in part, that drives this problem. But techies living in cars are not what we're talking about. We're talking about people that are drug addicts, some with mental illness released to the streets thanks to the ACLU in the late 80s, and many that choose the 'lifestyle.' Yes, there are many that will not go to public housing if you had it given today. Why? It's a lifestyle that some actually choose - no responsibilities, effort or sacrifice required to live within societal norms. Many actually make a pretty good living panhandling as has been reported many times over the years.
Liberal ideals are actually exacerbating the problems. Opening parks, allowing defecation and drug use on the streets, along with panhandling and harassment. Police efforts are hamstrung because the state government basically attacks them for upholding any laws; and is not actively changing the laws so there are no laws. And then there is the unreal regulations and fees and fines passed constantly that makes any attempt towards a free market impossible.
When the plague breaks out, what is CA going to do?
17
Homelessness. The end of many different roads of long ignores problems in our mighty nation. I remember these same arguments during the Reagan era when mental hospitals closed due to neglect and abuse at those institutions. I ask the readers to search an article in the 1980s on “homeless” on NYT website and you will find similar recommendations as you find today, the difference are the numbers and the emphasis on mental illness and drug abuse. The numbers are higher because we are a much populous nation for one (330 million versus 230 million in 1985), and we have yet to truly address the issues. We just keep sweeping these problems under the rug. Well, now it has become hard to walk on that bulky rug and we trip on it just as we trip and dodge the homeless person on the crowded streets of our large cities. The rug is big and we will continue to sweep because we are a a nation divided. The truth never rots and I am sadly confident we will have this same conversation in another generation. Meanwhile, so many people will continue to suffer. So, what is the solution? It’s actually pretty simple. The solution is for our nation to listen to each other and work together, not fight, and maybe just maybe, we can get rid of the rug and clean the street and help these suffering souls. Unfortunately, I just see more rugs
2
Salt Lake City reduced its homeless population by 90% over a 15 year period by implementing a housing first strategy. In that same period SF spent much more money on the problem and didn't improve it at all. Do what it takes California and stop being so corrupted by wealthy property owners! Do something like SB50 for example.
4
@Daniel
Salt Lake City had about 300 homeless people and rent is about 1/10th what it is in SF. It cost the average SLC household about $10 per year to pay for housing for those indigents. In our city it would cost every household $1,000 per year on top of existing property taxes to pay for housing for the current crop of indigents. Do you think that would attract more indigents from all over the country? Heck, it would cause people to move out of their existing apartments to get free rent.
4
Does the following ring true?
Trump learns about homelessness on FOX News, who uses it to bludgeon the policies of liberal states.
Trump needs a new bludgeon for liberal states. He also needs his trip to Silicon Valley to not be considered a campaign expense so he starts talking about homelessness, even though he has no intention of learning about it, lifting a finger to do anything about it, etc.
He gets Ben Carson to go to SF to put more lipstick on his campaign trip subterfuge.
He gets some footage for his campaign, making it appear he's doing something about homelessness.
Since he hasn't bothered learning about the issue, his comments and proposed solutions make no sense. But, he never intended to do anything so that's not a problem.
His whole foray into homelessness was a charade and means of making liberal areas look bad.
Not any more complicated than that.
5
Given that Los Angeles and San Francisco have absorbed several hundred thousand undocumented workers (using the PC term to avoid an argument about immigration), how can anyone say that the cause of homelessness is housing and low wages?
What do you think undocumented workers earn? $200k/year coding at Google? No, probably in the range of $15 to $20/hr cash working under the table. This population is not showing up on the streets, so they are living somewhere. It is probably cramped and uncomfortable, but mind you the same population is also sending a lot of the cash back to family in Central and South America.
Those who live on the street are not potential workers willing and able to work, if only they had a place to sleep, shower and shave. They have untreated addiction and mental illness. They don't fit the legal definition of competent people, able to complete the daily tasks of living, yet we allow them to languish in plain sight.
Allowing people to sleep in the parks, streets, etc is not a sign of compassion (let people choose what they want to do, its their right), it is cruel.
Also, for all the talk of straw bans and California air emissions standards, the untreated sewage from 60,000 homeless people in Los Angeles is entering the water everyday. This is the population of a small city, emitting waste directly into sea. Wildlife are dying in the sea next to LA.
Emergency measures are needed, allowing people to stay on the streets should not be allowd
12
@James Spot on. Let's not forget that many of these are ex-convicts released under 2014's Proposition 47, and who have virtually no skills with which to make a living. What did we think was going to happen to them?
4
@James blaming immigrants is a straw man argument. If all undocumented people in the USA left tomorrow, the homeless problem would be the same problem with no change.
2
@Eric You missed my point. We are in agreement. I am not blaming immigrants. I clearly state "This population (meaning the immigrants) is not showing up on the streets..."
Rather, I am saying that High Cost Housing is not a root cause of homelessness. If it were, we would see a lot more undocumented workers living on the street.
Non-mentally ill people would rather live in a cramped apartment with 5 roommates than live on the street. A $2000/month rent expense split between 6 people is $333/person; or 22 hours of labor at $15/hr.
Yes, this living situation would technically violate a lease and probably some building/fire codes. But it happens all of the time, college kids cram or 3 people per bedroom in an off-campus apartment.
But the story of a hardworking person working 40 hr/week at Target unable to afford an apartment and living on the street is not the majority of homeless people. Yes, it may happen, but it is rare. Most people, including recent arrivals who have no English language skills and are without a family network can find a way to stay off the streets.
My point is simply that homelessness is not caused by high rent. Therefore we need to address the root cause (mental illness and addiction) to solve the health and environmental problems of homelessness.
2
Speaking from family and nursing experience, there are many many mentally ill (and physically ill) people who WANT to stay on their meds but face incredible barriers in obtaining them. People often assume that patients don't want to stay on them but more often that is not the case. If a patient can find the doctor who will take them on Medicaid, (good luck finding a psychiatrist who will) then they are expected to get frequent follow up visits and labs. Without healthcare or transportation, or a phone to make the appointments, this can be very difficult.
Our country needs more psychiatrists, more mental health clinics, lower barriers to obtaining needed medications, and it needs mental health emergency rooms/crisis respite. When the person is more stabilized, THEN they become more capable of steady employment.
The cycle I have seen over and over again is they lose their ability to refill meds, then lose their jobs, or they get dropped from Medicaid because they have difficulty filling out the complex forms and making appointments to renew coverage. One relative was told by a worker that in Illinois the DHS is seriously understaffed and this causes the workers to miss the pre-established phone appointments that the patients desperately need to keep access to care.
7
San Francisco has had a homeless problem since I graduated from Berkeley in 1982 (and no doubt before then as well). Current homeless census has 8,200 people living on the street in the city.
The policies and programs of San Francisco Mayors has done little to change or improve upon this situation. The current Mayor has promised to change this problem but she is working against decades of an entrenched issue. I wish her well but history suggests San Francisco leaders are not up to the task and will require 'new thinking' rather than the same old bromides.
10
The problem with liberals as I see it in regards to the homeless is that they misdiagnose the issue. Meanwhile Trump intuitively gets it right. The issue for those on the street is not one of housing affordability. It's one of drug and/or alcohol abuse and mental illness. So liberals are droning on about housing affordability, which is a real issue, but aren't doing anything to actually address the people on the street, whose lives are in such disarray that they wouldn't be able to pay $100 for rent.
18
The homeless prefer Los Angeles, mostly, and San Francisco, not so much, because the climate is mild. Who would want to sleep rough in Chicago, Boston, or New York in the winter?
Reagan closed the asylums. Successive Republican administrations have sustained the social economic injustice that drives destitute people into the streets.
Homelessness is a national problem in need of a federal solution. California should not have to bear the cost alone.
10
@AynRant
Is constant rain in Portland and Seattle really a comfortable climate when living outside? Yet those cities have, proportionally, huge and aggressive homeless populations.
I don't think it's all about the weather.
3
“...people living in our best highways, our best streets, our best entrances to buildings.”
Ever- the compassionate Conservative. Perhaps Ken Burns will be alive long enough to do a 10-part documentary of the man who loved Concrete more than humanity.
12
Homelessness solutions should have as their primary concern the homeless, not the opportunities for the 1%.
6
We have the problems. Where are the solutions?
3
The situation in San Francisco is sad and difficult. It is also spreading to other places in the Bay Area. Growing up here, it is difficult to reconcile the memories I have as a child going into the city during the holidays to shop, see the ballet and enjoy the city with what is there now.
The very same area that we would spend time when I was young, is very scary now. Watching people shoot up drugs or defecating out in the open, without any fear, shame or thought about what people think. It’s a problem that is overdue to be solved.
When I was growing up, homelessness was a shocking, sad situation to be solved for those without a place to live. It’s gone from bad to worse. It has become so commonplace in the last 30 years that people just don’t seem moved by seeing people shuffling along the sidewalk with all their belongings anymore. Our politicians don’t talk about how to get people in housing, but about how to get rid of the encampments. People are uncomfortable facing what we as a society have created.
I do not know what the answers are, but I know it is upside down when we have people camping on the sidewalks at the same time others have multiple mansions all over the world/country and more money than they could spend in a lifetime, we have to change something.
101
@Jane K
One half the world lives in much worse conditions than people living on the street in the U.S. You want to see real poverty... visit Brazil... or most other countries. Stop blaming rich people. There are not enough resources to go around and it's those rich people that are growing the middle class to bring more and more people out of poverty. Don't kill the golden goose by thinking that taking it from the productive ones is going to solve this problem. It will send us back to the middle ages. Do you think there were fewer poor people then?
4
@Jane K
My personnel experience with this is as follows: I have a business partner, his son is part of the homeless crowd. In the past 3 years I have learned a lot about this group. First I felt sorry, went out to help, then I learned that most of the homeless are drug addicts and/or mentally ill. I no longer have any pity on them, because my partners son taught me much. He explained who everyone was downtown panhandling on the corners. He told us how he gets SNAP benefits and cashes out, co-mingling money with his group to rent a flea bag hotel to sleep in and charge other to shower. He receives health care, support from a not for profit, new clothes when ever. He get methadone to manage when he can't get heroin. His father has taken him off the streets and put him through rehab 12 times. Last year, he was cleaned up and attended a party where my grans were at. He got angry and quitely spit in food and in drinks that people put down. Guess what happen my 14 year old gran got hep C, had to go threw treatment. When he was confronted with this, he just laughed said how does it feel, when you refuse to take care of us. he is a total loser, so is his crew. In the record cold of winter, they broke into the office and trashed it, stealing what they could to fence. As my gran stated, we need to put them in an abandon prison and let them play "Hunger Games" they are a waste of life. An addict has to want to change
8
@Jane K As a group, tech industries and people are not known for their empathy. People at Twitter are not "old school San Francisco." Period. Most of these new professionals are young, hard, and NOT interested in the kind of things that used to make San Francisco great. They are the most selfish upwardly mobile we've seen, and the City serves as merely a real estate backdrop for their tech playpen. Sorry, times have changed...
7
I don't view the president as the one responsible for the housing crises, since they r extant in many major cities , not just in S.F.and is the implementation of a long range plan,with the complicity of chambers of commerce, to drive middle and working classes from the nation's large cities, to be replaced by immigrants, legal or illegal,"peu importe,"whom elites regard as better,harder working,more virtuous.They r also a source of cheap labor, flatten wages all around,and big business, in cahoots with the Dem. Party and the media, to which it lays down the law,is going all out on this demographic, sociological shift. 1 sees the antipathy towards the native born in op ed pieces of Times,phrases like "native born whites are screwing America up," or writing that we(the native born) are contributing to economic stagnation!"Nothing impartial about folks writing such hateful words and in the "cathedral of journalism"no less!
1 sees a similar phenomenon in France, where the wealthy have taken over the large cities, relegated working classes to dreary h.l,m's en banlieue!" That is the master plan in the U.S. which will also result in Dem.Party's becoming the majority party in the country by enfranchising a permanent underclass which will vote the straight Dem.ticket! Does anyone doubt this?ABH does not want to play a "gloomy Gus,("Gus le tenebreux" or a "mauvaise Cassandra,"but in words of Dylan,"You don't need a weatherman to see which way the wind blows!"
5
The entire blue wall of the west coast has horrible squalor and homelessness. Make the connection, folks.
16
Trump after speaking extensively about California's homeless problem, leaves California with approximately $15 million in contributions and is silent about homelessness solutions. Trump neither issues a directive to Carson at HUD, or allocates any part of the money being reallocated to build the wall to the help with homelessness. Trump is the president and individually he purports to be a multi- billionaire, yet he offers nothing from either role to this problem, a problem that he would have us believe is of concern to him as the president and individually. Trump has missed a Golden opportunity to make a terrific statement about himself as the president and as an individual - the fact that he passed up this opportunity says that he is insincere.
6
Let's speak the truth. Only reason California did not allow new housing development permit is money. Unless there was enough bribe to politicians, they did not allow new housing developments. Supply and Demand made the housing price to skyrocket.
2
As much as I abhor Trump and what he stands for, he has hit upon a weakness common to many large cities in this country and especially San Diego, LA, and San Francisco. This is a local, state, and national problem that needs attention now. Get out of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran, that makes money for corporate interests and lobbyists. Focus on the real problems today which include the homelessness, drugs, and healthcare.
This all started when Reagan was governor of Calfornia in the early 70's and he closed down mental institutions thinking it would be better for mentally challenged people to be on the streets. Fast forward to today...it's a disaster out there all along the west coast due to the good weather, availability of drugs, and outrageous costs of housing.
Of course, we all know this is just a political ploy at the moment. Trump and company haven't a clue of what to do about the problem. But he has drawn attention to homelessness. Even in small towns we have to have clean-ups along the rivers and hidden areas where it's dangerous to walk for one reason or another.
Solutions: 1) separate the mental cases and give them needed treatment, 2) build affordable housing for those in good health and needing a helping hand to get back on track, 3) jail those who refuse help, put them to work to pay for their jail time cleaning the streets and areas around the city on a daily basis. Teach them a trade. Do something!
5
Glad there's an agreement between left and right regarding the homeless situation in California, but since Trump is involved, one must be skeptical. This is someone who does not care about California let alone California's homeless population. How can anyone think that Trump is in this for the state when he just rolled back our initiative to set our own emissions standards? No folks, this is simply a PR stunt for his CA fundraising machine. Homelessness needs to be addressed at the social level - healthcare, mental healthcare, housing, domestic violence, gun violence, etc - none of which Trump and his administration is actually capable of comprehending.
10
Can we admit that American style capitalism creates huge amounts of pain and fails huge and growing numbers of people and then set about fixing it. Putting profit and privilege over people is not a Democratic or Republican problem. It is an American problem.
3
You mentioned the regulation change the Trump administration is working on but you failed to mention they also want to decrease the budget for housing support. So typical of Trump.
Pay little or no attention to what they say. Watch what they do.
6
A stopped clock and all that. St.Ronnie closed state mental hospitals and threw the insane onto the streets in the phony name of their dignity. Drug addicts with shattered lives have no place to go. The feds shipped young people to hellholes all over the world to fight senseless not-wars, then did almost nothing for them when they returned home damaged and unable to manage their lives. And, yes, the cost of housing is very high, but especially so if you work in a job or a serfdom “gig” that doesn’t pay enough to keep a roof over your head. And the economics of home building push toward high end accommodations where there’s profit to be made, rather than basic housing which is so sorely needed but so hard to create - partly due to hurdles such as zoning, but mainly because nobody has figured out how to make it pay.
7
trumpster folks that we meet, who characteristically channel rush and fox, often engage in trash talking California as a talking point about problems with liberals. trump could care less about homeless people in CA, or anywhere else, beyond his own political self-interests. He is a walking and talking sham who could also care less about his supporters beyond the ballot box.
5
If the Catholics and evangelicals feel the way Trump does about the homeless people Ca they need to close down . Jesus said in the Bible there will always be homeless people and we need to help them any way you can not be a bully to them like Trump and the GOP . I want to see the churches speak up do they support Trumps lies ? If they do shame on you all you are no Christians.
2
Trump is a liar. He has directed the largest cuts in social services of any president, including HUD housing and food stamps. Income inequality is the other factor and until people assert their right to vote and end the Republican’s stranglehold on our country’s conscience, these inhumane practices will continue, including a minimum wage that is realistic.
6
Gavin Newsom has conceded that most of the homeless in San Francisco (where he was Mayor) are not from San Francisco. How long will it take for these cities and states to recognize that it is their policies and laws (including case decisions of the 9th Circuit) that are attracting all these people?
51
@Garth - When Democrtacic leadership doesn't seem to be concerned about the international migration of the indigent to their state, but instead points out that the homeless, who are U.S. citizens, actually 'aren't state residents' what does that say about cognitive dissonance?
13
Most of the homeless people are legal resident
4
@Garth
It is not only policies, it is also climate. Canada has the same problem. Homeless people drift to the west coast because the climate is milder. The solution, therefore, is to be found at the federal level, because homelessness is to be found in more than one State. California is simply collecting a concentration of its effects.
4
While a high percentage of the homeless are mentally ill, there are others whose earnings are below what is needed to pay first and last months' rent and a security deposit. Rents are high due to demand. There is not enough housing for all of the people who want to live in California.
One way to reduce demand would be to stop welcoming and providing sanctuary to unauthorized immigrants. California has always been their primary destination, and even though many unauthorized families may crowd into one apartment, that is still an apartment that is no longer available to working class Americans. In addition to pushing up the demand and hence the cost of housing, unauthorized immigrants reduce the wages that employers have to pay for unskilled and low skilled labor by increasing the size of the labor pool. Hence the working class is left with lower wages and higher rents.
Homelessness has increased 75% in 6 years in Los Angeles. This coincides with the years of the surge in Central American families requesting asylum. Immigration judges have been finding that only 10 - 15% qualify for asylum, but once they have entered our country, few of them leave. Many have them live in the sanctuary state of California.
California’s attorney general is busy suing the federal government for trying to restrict unauthorized migration even though his state does not have enough housing or other services for everyone who wants to live there. (It is the same in my state.)
6
This isn't new; but the magnitude is. As a child, in the early 80s, a woman in her 20s who had mental illness lived in her car on our street for about a year. My mother, and other neighbors, reached out to her, learned her name, tried to figure out how to help her--this was a totally new situation for everyone. We brought her food, blankets, toiletries. Somebody called a pastor to come visit her. As a last resort someone called the police. All they did was ask her to move along, even gave her car a jump as the battery had died. She moved around the block, around the neighborhood, and she refused all help. Some years later, she started taking medicine, got off the streets, and my mother last saw her several years ago--working at a local drugstore.
Now there are hundreds, thousands, of people like this woman living on the streets, and the social safety net--which was barely there in the 80s, to be frank--is completely shredded. Compassion has largely shredded as well. People don't "age-out" of mental illness either--the number of people in their 60s and older on the streets of Oakland is heartbreaking. (How can we let this happen to our elders?) As our cities and state look for the solution, at the individual level, remember: have compassion. These are humans, like us, only living in the direst circumstances.
12
Why do the Democrats keep voting against their own self interests if this is the result?
7
@Cho They believe they are wonderful in every way.
1
The opening paragraph is a literal description of what I see on the way to work every day. At least the far left and far right can agree on calling a spade a spade, whereas the learned author is too high-brow to actually acknowledge the human suffering in our streets.
7
Every city in every state has a church on nearly every corner, spires reaching toward heaven to let the community know where God can be found. In this beautiful Christian nation, those churches stand empty 99% of the time, reserved for self-serving worship services for the congregation only. At thousands of evangelical houses of worship, the 'business hours' are posted on the door.
I speak as the wife of a pastor; churches find ALL KINDS of excuses why they/we cannot serve the poor! And every. single. excuse. has to do with judging the worth of those Jesus commanded us to help.
We can't administer unless the poor already have a job.
We can't warm those who shiver; only veterans' groups are worthy of our blankets.
We can't give a family a place to rest for a few days while their job opens; those who live in cars are too strange.
We can't use the cavernous church kitchen to feed anyone; we'd need a permit, and yawn.
We can't counsel anyone who's desperate for hope, cuz someone took a roll of toilet paper from (our!!) bathroom.
We can't offer daycare for job seekers; their children are unruly and might pollute our little ones. We can't offer our laundry or showers to wash; better to cage them somewhere else where we don't have to look at them. It's America. They'll be OK, right?
As a follower of Jesus, I know our country, blessed with so much, has much to answer for.
Our Christian nation
18
The incredible large scale stupidity of the United States on social services is not amazing any more, but it is quite old. The majority of these problems regarding homelessness got their biggest causation three decades ago.
The Reagan years started the majority of this, period. Most people who were honest about it knew it then. The social abuses of the GOP in the 1980's have come home to roost permanently on this country. Don't like it ? What did you think when you pulled the voting lever in 1980? And where did you think it would lead long term?
10
When the nation decided to move the mentally ill into community based mental health services, it was hailed as a progressive move. I was around at the time, thought it was a good move. However, we never fulfilled the promise of those community-based mental health services. And we probably underestimated the ability of those mental health ideas to cure illness. Lots of little failures. Add the wonderful climate of California and the hatred of Trump by too many Americans, and you have the perfect storm. More anger and hostility adding to the plight of the ill and infirm homeless...and the merely addicted.
18
@Monty Brown I don't see how California's climate and the disdain of many citizens for their president add up to a "perfect storm." Homelessness is a problem in California but also in other states. It doesn't affect merely the mentally ill. The Trump administration is completely unserious about addressing the problem. Trump regrettably is bringing up the problem just to taunt his political rivals. The article states that NIMBYism is a problem that both the Trump administration and state and local officials agree on. The federal government has resources through HUD and HHS that could be allocated to California to address the problem, but it seems unlikely that the Trump administration will do so. The problem is not intractable. Some efforts to resettle homeless persons in their own homes have been successful. Affordable housing can be built near transit hubs so that people can work in high-rent areas like San Francisco without spending four hours a day commuting. We can fix it, but we need a federal government that is not working at cross purposes with the state and local governments.
7
@Monty Brown. So hating trump is contributing to homelessness? If that was the case I would have been homeless three years ago.
4
Democrat politicians in California have done little to reduce homelessness in my 25 years here. They are more interested in banning plastic straws and handing out free plastic syringes which are then discarded on the streets and sidewalks.
13
@Rich The far left is perfect in every way. Dont you get it? All problems start with Trump to them. Hence, why he was elected.
1
Trump rails mindlessly about homelessness as it affects HIS WEALTHY SUPPORTERS in places like Beverly Hills and many other WEALTHY NEIGHBORHOODS. I'm sure it's because these feckless Republicans are DOING NOTHING to solve the problem; they just don't want anything "sullying" their privileged properties.
This is what YOUR government has become - a cabal of the rich and corrupt, the feckless and toothless. Trump is one of the leading causes of homelessness as he "promotes" his uber-expensive rip-off properties and money laundering. HE is the last person who would be qualified to comment on a problem of which he has absolutely no knowledge - and Carson is an idiot who probably can't even work his garage door opener to get to his cars that cost more than most houses.
7
"the state’s left wing actually recognizes a problem that the president feels strongly about."
please stop. the "president" feels nothing for the homeless. he feels for his political future and for when he no longer has the protection of the presidency. to write that he feels strongly about the homeless problem or any other problem not involving his own care and feeding? is a lie. a lie that promotes a false narrative about who he is and how he thinks. please stop. editor? do your job.
9
Homeless has many causes.
Some people have mental illness, addiction or disabilities and won't ever really be able to support themselves. Others are able-bodied young men who could find a job in a cheaper town than SF or NY and live fine.
It's true that crazy high housing prices doesn't help--but you don't have to live in SF or NY. There are plenty of $500/mo rentals in "flyover" country.
The CA high density development plan is probably a good idea, but needs more local control. I don't think we need low income housing in every single community in America.
I think we can all agree that letting people just camp out wherever and defecate on the streets isn't a long term solution.
10
Sadly, the only thing trump worries about are real estate values because of the presence of homeless people. He does not give a damn about their plight, the causes and the real solutions. trump is totally without empathy or morality. There are no easy answers, but certainly any real solutions are not going to come from him.
6
@Agnes Nice projection there...
"Sadly, the only thing elite Democrats worry about are real estate values because of the presence of homeless people."
I live in a Huffman-Six-Pack style apartment in San Diego.
Ray L. Huffman, a west coast version of Donald Trump, built during the 1960's-early 1980's, but instead of expensive properties, he put up affordable apartment units.
Like Trump, Huffman went bankrupt, but his apartments remain and house many Californians today. However, over the last decade, those apartments that were “Simple boxlike structures with decorative facades, designed for maximum efficiency and relatively low rents, ..." are either being replaced by or remodeled into luxury town homes and condos for sale. Huffman didn't find it easy to make affordable housing in the past, and it is worse today:
https://www.sandiegoreader.com/news/1982/aug/12/cover-the-muffled-roar-of-ray-huffman/#
This is one example of why we have so many homeless. We've lost so much that used to support Americans: affordable housing, guaranteed pension plans, stable jobs, generation-owned family homes taken by banks during the housing bubble collapse, and mental health group homes/hospitals.
As I see the Huffman-Six-Packs around me vanish to be replaced by expensive units that go straight onto AirBnB and aren't even available as regular rentals, I wonder where are regular citizens supposed to live?
Homelessness is the most visible manifestation of the problem, but many people across this nation are struggling with housing. We need a comprehension plan that maintains a broad cost range of housing options.
90
@Heather Huffman couldn't afford to stay in business then; he certainly couldn't do so now. Blame the cities and the counties and their restrictive zoning laws and building codes. It's all designed to maximize the home values of incumbent homeowners and to keep out density.
Housing is just like anything else in a free market. Price is determined by the balance of supply and demand. However, the housing market in California has not been free since zoning laws came in.
Building codes and mandates (solar, energy saving, etc.) also add to housing costs.
4
Donald Trump is a slumlord who has spent his presidency pushing people into homelessness by taking away health care, food assistance and affordable housing funds,” said Scott Wiener, a Democratic state senator from San Francisco. “He has no credibility on housing and homelessness.”
Not a word of this is true...
7
Homeless and mental patients wandering around, housing beyond reach, the idea of not punishing petty crime, brawling in the streets and schools, gangs attacking people are all symbols of our ongoing social collapse. I suppose race/ethnic wars are next. The elites probably think they can indefinitely isolate themselves. The Dems have no ideas about ameliorating any of this.
Trump is a sign of the Revolution, just as the Duc d'Orleans was. He's a gross member of the upper class, giving voice to the plebs. There is a rebellion going on against the various ideas that brought us to this pretty pass we're in.
The Dems had better come up with something better than this. Soon.
10
California needs more affordable housing and job opportunities; Trump wants to send homeless to concentration camps to get them off HIS streets, out of HIS lobbies and away from HIS high-rise towers.
If Trump had his way, anyone not uber-rich would be banished to some mythical place in the desert, behind fences, just as he has done with desperate asylum seekers. He could then "develop" what is now affordable housing into many "Trump Towers" and make more money on the backs of the poor.
Trump is a dystopian mutant, a soulless, clueless, entitled prig who can only destroy. With all of his lies, incompetence and bravado he has done nothing to REALLY help this country. The Obama post-recession curve has carried us so far and Trump's "tax cut" for the rich has thrown us into untenable debt. His messing with the Fed will tank us. He needs to go anywhere but here.
7
@RealTRUTH The problem in California has nothing to do with Trump. It is the ultra-liberal policies of our Dem legislators that have created this problem, period. Stupidly, the people of this state keep electing the same people over and over again and it keeps getting worse. Under Newsom, it’s becoming a sad joke. He’s up there issuing executive orders about vaping while homeless are camped out all over the state. We are having disease outbreaks related to rats and vermin infesting these areas adjacent to housing and commercial areas. Homeowners are fed up but nobody listens; just more rights and freebies for the homeless. California can blame itself.
1
@Nancy
If indeed the homeless problem in California has nothing to do with Trump, why does he shoot off his rabid infantile mouth, criticizing everything and doing NOTHING.
That ignorant, destructive child should recuse himself from everything human and stop insulting and tart helping CA. THAT will never happen because CA is modern, progressive and BLUE. Trump is OLD. DEMENTED AND A LIAR.
1
Irresponsible journalism.
"Trump and California See Same Homeless Problem, but Not the Same Solutions"
If you write that headline then you must at minimum put forth the "trump" solutions. You can not because they have given none.
9
"And they want to leave (their tents)."
- Nobel Prize Laureate In Waiting
I wish the mayors of California would co-sign a letter of recommendation to the Nobel Committee for an award .. For the guy collecting A-Billion-U.S to flood our phones WITH ADS sporting his smirking mug and a Trojan survey to beg for more spare change.
GET OUT of my phone's doorway, Trump 2020.
3
The very first step to reducing homelessness is raising the minimum wage. Anyone who works should be able to afford food, healthcare, and shelter.
3
And what about those who cannot work, who are too damaged and destroyed to even take care of their own bodily needs? Take a walk with President Trump (ok, he’ll ride along in a golf cart) through the areas in our CA cities thronged by homeless people: you will not see many of the able bodied and mentally healthy people who could work and support themselves if only they would move to cheaper (and largely jobless) depressed places farther from any ocean as is so often suggested. That’s blaming people for being lazy and feckless, the age old battle cry of the prejudiced. You will see the halt and the lame, the insane, the addled, and the terminally depressed - all those who just cannot make it in our dog eat dog capitalist society that is mainly about chasing money. Not everybody is up to that caucus race so we throw them on the sidewalk like fast food wrappers and then blame them.
4
@Csig "The very first step to reducing homelessness is raising the minimum wage. "
By saying this, you clearly do not understand the problem. Full stop.
1
We must spend the necessary money to build both decent temporary shelters (not prisons in the desert) and affordable permanent housing, and to hire an army of aides, social workers, and mental health professionals to manage the shelters and provide the care and guidance these desperate people need. We are a rich society that wastes untold millions. Just one example: Elon Musk spent over $10 million to build a ridiculous prototype tunnel under LA, for a transit system for private cars that nobody wants or would ever use, just because he thinks it’s a cool idea. (It is beyond me why the city even allowed it.) That money could have sheltered a lot of people. He should pay more taxes.
12
Whether or not you support Mr. Trump, it is not very difficult to be negative about what it is like to have to travel to San Francisco and navigate around and through the utter despair and disgrace of these so-called "encampments." It is sickening to experience the squalor up close.
You wonder how things have got to this point?
You begin to think about priorities. A sparkling new basketball arena in San Francisco goes up named after a company that makes billions on hosting business software. A massive, glittering football stadium gets built in southern California by a global real estate and sports tycoon. Billions are spent on these things because they are claimed to be part of the appeal of living in these cities. Whilst, directly in the shadows cast by such lavish projects, humans are defecating in the streets.
Here we are in the age of wondrous technology everywhere and there appears to be no solution to this problem of how to shelter everyone among us.
In fact, it is only going to get worse as many jobs will be taken away by the advance of technology and people who are struggling at the margins, barely staying sheltered and fed, fall into homelessness.
I note that one "solution" for some people is particularly obvious in California: the gated community. Build walls and let those who can't afford to hide behind them deal with all of this.
That's what it has come to in many areas. Or, you can move away from this budding dystopia.
It's madness uncurbed.
12
No surprise that trump sees the homeless as trash on the street needing to be swept away so that the rich can enjoy the view - as if they ever see the homeless anyway. I was walking on 5th Ave. when I first came to NYC and I saw a woman in a fur coat actually step over a man sleeping on a heated grate not far from trump tower. Surprised she didn't step right on him. Maybe I'm wrong - maybe they do see them.
3
Bottom line is for many who are homeless due to substance abuse or mental illness it’s delusional to think a 30 days in rehab, a job, a shelter, section 8 housing or a rental in the suburbs is enough. These are very sick people. The lure of the street will be present still. There does need to be facilities where they can be cared for at least a year in order to fully recover from the trauma experienced. The problem will only get worse if isn’t kept in the spotlight and some serious action isn’t taken.
6
We have become a cruel society that refuses to address the needs of the least among us, from the homeless and mentally ill to dilapitated inner city schools that can't give helpless children a chance.
I don't think its hard. Just need some intelligent policy paid for with smaller pentagon budget and hefty taxes on our billionaires.
Don't even get me started on the million dollar endowments to Harvard
7
This article shares with Mr. Trump one thing: New Yorkers, like the NYTimes and Donald Trump, can talk so easily about the problems of California, but are less sanguine in writing about their own city.
At least part of the reason for why we have a disproportionate share of the nation's "unsheltered homeless" is because in California, the weather isn't a ruthless killer of unsheltered people for months of the year, as it is in New York.
Next time you use a statistic that requires explanation, please bother to explain it. I got much more from the meeting we had with our city housing coordinator. She at least knew what she was talking about, and wasn't doing parachute journalism.
The only useful thing I got from your article was that his right wing supporters here include Scott McNealy and fundraisers at Stanford. The latter is the biggest NIMBY incubator in the state.
7
The statement that HUD regulations will be forcing legal immigrants & children from public housing is disingenuous. The regulations say that illegal immigrants are not allowed in public housing so tenants have a choice...don’t allow illegals to live with you or if you do, you’ll lose you lease. And that is fair to all the legal immigrants & citizens who are on waiting lists for housing all around this country!
4
I read this article and agree with the observations. I thought the leftists in charge of san francisco and los angeles are pretty daft if they believe that the reason for tents is that the government housing isn't nice enough. Seems to me beggars can't be choosers. also one said we need to plant these people close to train, bus and metro stations. Huh? They travel with shopping carts. They don't work, and they tend to harass people. What is this man thinking? Not only don't they need transportation (except to get out of town) The people who do use the public transportation neither need nor want them. Sure it is unfortunate But that is the way it is. LA has many mountain canyons where camps can be safe and controlled. I vote to pick up the people, trash their tents and belongings that have no value or are not personal mementos, and move them to the farm where treatment can be had. No taxpayer deserves a camper in their doorway or their street. It is too bad our government has policy that attracts these lost souls.
5
I don’t like Trump. I do appreciate that he’s focused on the ordinary citizens who have to put up with camps in their streets and parks. It’s going to take some real tough politicians to close down the camps. Trump just might be able to do it. I don’t care about his motives if he can get the job done.
The camps are a disgrace and unfair both to the folks who live in them and to those who live and work around them.
46
@Mary Ann Trump cannot do anything of the sort. He is a temporary figure who also happens to be a casino grifter/
31
@Mary Ann you are correct. If the we don't start taking care of the people who live and work in our cities then they will move and just make LA and San Francisco into another Detroit or Newark; a place no decent working person or family wants to live.
4
@Mary Ann I sometimes take clothing and blankets to a local homeless camp. The people there appear to be doing the best they can to look out for each other. I would consider them "ordinary citizens" and would hate to see them ousted because some people don't want to "put up" with them. As many other posters have said, not all homeless people are in the same struggle. Some are mentally ill, some are addicted, some are merely "ordinary citizens" down on their luck. Those different segments of the population have different needs. I expect nothing from Trump because he lacks compassion.
27
The overwhelming majority of the homeless populations suffers from either profound mental health issues or addiction issues and in many cases both. Both state and federal governments must re-institute long term mental health facilities, the 72 hour treat and street approach has proven to be a disastrous failure. As an additional benefit once these facilities are reestablished there will also be places to house these psychopathic shooters before they slaughter so many innocent people. Now California- the article points out half of the nation's unsheltered homeless live in California. Shockingly the article actually concedes that California's harsh environmental regulations create an immense obstacle to new housing for the homeless. Until California stops being a one party state and allow some political diversity there is zero chance this problem can be ameliorated.
6
I can only think that Trump's solution to homelessness would be very similar to immigrant detention centers, and just as opaque. The homeless would just disappear. I think this happens in other functionally-non-democratic countries, but no one really knows.
(I don't think the federal government has the authority to do anything with the homeless, but I'm no longer comforted by the idea that our State and Federal legal infrastructure can prevent this administration from acting any way it likes.)
3
If half the homeless in the country would rather live on the streets of LA and SF than deal with whatever systems the other states have to "help them", surely that's a greater indictment of those states than it is of California.
4
@Kevin. You are quite right, the great scheme has been to drive low and middle class people out of the city. As a former resident of the Mission District, I saw first hand the cruel and callous gentrification of a traditional family neighborhood by real estate speculators catering to rich people who demanded to live in the city. And the local liberal democrat administrations have been historically in cahoots with the monied interests, regardless of what they say to the gullible citizens who cling to the idea of a liberal and tolerant San Francisco. Part of the problem is the high tech industry that drives up prices of real estate. Not surprisingly the Silicon Valley moguls want four more Trump years. If you don't like the new look of the city, wait until he gets reelected with the help of those who feed lies to the people in the city.
2
Every thing said about the homeless (they are mentally ill, they are drug addicts, they are grifters who don’t want to work or they work but don’t or can’t make enough money to pay for rent, they are isolated people without friends or family who are just plain out of luck, and so on) is true for some segment of the homeless. No one set of solutions is going to solve the problems of such a diverse set.
There are specialized courts in some localities called drug courts, set up to deal with drug convictions alone. A similar system could work for homeless people. If you are found sleeping on a sidewalk you are sent to homeless court. A judge assigns you an appropriate treatment. This could be forced treatment for drug addiction or mental illness. This could prison for common law crime or just for refusing to look for housing. This could be a court ordered assignment to public housing, with local, state or federal government bearing the burden for finding this housing or face penalties. This could be deportation for illegal immigrants.
There would be many cases that defy explanation, treatment or punishment, however. There was a homeless ex-convict who moved to the small town I live in. His crime was letting his mother die, burying her dead body in a vat of cat litter and then stealing her social security checks for a couple of years. When released from prison, he moved to my town, and lived for 10 years in a public park the county owned.
1
We used to have public housing programs in this country but the Republicans destroyed them. There have always been people who could afford to buy or rent housing and people who need help to be housed. But, under Reagan, the poor began to be ignored and we are now seeing the results of ending housing programs over several decades.
California has survivable weather, good social services and a tolerant culture. And half the nations unhoused for those reasons.
2
The LA Times had a good series of articles while I was living there a few years ago. It stated that fifty percent of the homeless were temporarily out of employment. If they had resources for two month's income they would not have been homeless. Shelters mainly serve families with children. Seventy-five percent of the homeless have always lived in the area. Fifty percent have severe mental and addiction problems. This is a terrible problem and needs immediate attention. Example. A women was panhandling with a toddler in a stroller. When the police were called they were not able to identify the child, except that the woman said it was not hers. This is just so sad.
1
The opioid addiction crisis seems to be rarely discussed in the same breath as the homeless crisis. It's not solely caused by houses shortages/costs. There's another agenda at work when that is the only issues politicians mention in conjunction with homelesness. They also fail to mention how undocumented persons factor in, in CA we have so many as a sanctuary state.
Perhaps CA can establish some sort of residency requirement for state services? People simply cannot move to LA or SF with dreams, $100 in their pocket and an opioid habit. That will not work.
We definitely need more state, county and federal help, the crisis is beyond the ability of city governments alone to solve!
3
@Eaglearts well you are very brave to mention the overload of illegal immigrants flooding our state. Not supposed to talk about that, it makes people feel bad. We only want to feel good in California, that solves everything.
3
Native Californian here.
Myriad of issues contribute to rising homelessness as fellow commenters have noted.
The biggest factor is rising income inequality. Unfortunately, this will continue to get worse -- much worse if this administration makes good on more of it's draconian policy ideas (ie cut SNAP benefits, par down social security & medicare...)
Vilify the poor, reward the rich = increased homelessness.
For those who say "they're drug addicts" "be responsible/get a job" etc, it's much more complicated than that.
Solutions are needed in housing, mental health access, addiction treatment, childcare etc etc. Sadly, as a country (not so much as a state), priorities do not lie in helping the needy. Just more tax breaks for those who don't need them and no will to solve the tough problems. Poor folks don't contribute to super pacs.
3
There are homeless around the world. I have seen them in Japan, France for instance. But not the numbers I see in LA. Question: what do other countries do with their mentally ill—> (and answer) they are treated in hospitals. So the homeless who are sick need treatment. Period. It’s not a question of rights it’s a question of medical treatments. Some hospitals around the country are closed. Let’s re-open them and use them. That would clear the streets from a few thousands.
@Hana U. "Question: what do other countries do with their mentally ill—> (and answer) they are treated in hospitals."
Quick answer: Not true. I lived in Japan and the homeless slept all year round in a nearby park outside my window and there was a tent they lived in in the winter. This was in Osaka Japan.
The passage of California's Proposition 47 in November, 2014 freed many thousands of prisoners--around 13,000 in 2015 alone--who then wandered the streets, having no trade or skills other than what landed them in prison in the first place. They constitute a large proportion of the homeless population in California.
Not many people talk about this--least of all, Kamala Harrris, who, as attorney general at the time supported it vociferously.
The rampant property crime that accompanies homeless encampments also results, in part, from Proposition 47, which effectively decriminalized non-violent theft, embezzlement , etc., with a valuation under $950. So the encampments are piled high with stolen bikes and about everything else you can think of. Smash and grab car thefts make parking your car in San Francisco an expensive risk . There is no penalty for any of this. There is no penalty for drug use, either, even the hard drugs.
What were we liberals thinking? We made our bed, now we lie in it.
7
Trump can’t connect the dots that capitalism creates inequality. Even still, what’s most telling about Trump and his utter lack of basic, human decency, is that he wants to solve the homelessness problem in this country for the business community’s sake and not b/c he is concerned at all about the lives of the thousands of houseless individuals who end up living on the streets.
7
My sister is mentally ill and has lived on the streets intermittently. What she really needs is to be committed to a humane type of campus for the mentally ill. She needs to be “locked up”. No one in our family can control her. She can’t handle money as she is also an alcoholic and drug addict (self medicated). She truly needs to be taken care of by the state in a compassionate way with mental health monitoring, medication control, and some type of job to give her something to do. We (as a society) made a huge mistake by getting rid of mental hospitals. The outpatient replacement community based care is fractured and useless. She has been out of control for 30 years, bore 3 children who were taken by the state, and averages at least one hospital admission a month. The amount that has been spent on her without any positive outcome is unbelievable. There has to be a better way.
325
@Celeste I am so sorry for all the stress this situation has caused your family. I have also been down this road. When the big state mental hospitals were closed down, they were supposed to be replaced by a local system, but that was never created. It is so sad that your family has had to deal with a system that has not dealt with the realities of the probem
36
@Celeste
"One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" probably did more singlehandedly to close down mental health hospitals than anything else. Bad "optics" and bleeding hearts cannot handle the unpleasantness behind the walls of such places. The goal of perfection will prevent the good (warts and all) in public mental health facilities.
32
@Celeste I have a family member that is in the same situation, who we’ve also dealt with for years. He has a mental breakdown, goes on drugs, is eventually arrested and then put in the hospital for two weeks and given anti psychotic meds and released. This happens about every three months. I too wish there was a facility where he could stay permanently and be taken care of with compassion.
47
The way trump sees it, the problem is not the homeless but where they decide to be homeless.
7
Homelessness is a capitalism problem not a California problem.
The right wing media is on a anti-California push, as they cannot bare that the nations undisputed strongest economy is run by the Dems.
And there is evidence of red states sending their homeless to CA to amplify the message and to not deal with the issue.
5
@caljn Being run by the Dems is exactly the problem here. It is disingenuous to ignore that fact. We have one-party rule here, for a long time. The blame is at their feet.
4
@Nancy
Blame for what exactly? That the safety net has been eviscerated, starting with Reagan, the bane of the middle and lower classes?
Homelessness and poverty are collateral damage of capitalism.
The bay area, where I'm from and went to college, does have a huge homeless problem, exacerbated by the spike in housing costs throughout the region due to tech and yes, NIMBY-ism and an anti-development spirit. It's extraordinarily intense, affronting, and sad, and in my mind the biggest failing of the state, which overall is immensely successful and a leader in equity, climate policy, and business, among other sectors. However, I'd have to agree with those cited in the article that not only does Trump not care, but his policies have made homelessness easier to slip into and harder to get out of.
3
A report on the homeless of NYC
A trip up Broadway, especially between 53 street and central park and you will see homeless people sleeping in the nook and crannies of closed store fronts, shopping carts hold all their junk wrapped up in garbage bags, the shopping carts chained to light poles or traffic signs so no one can steal them as they sleep. some of these homeless people have cell phones, and I have witnessed them having conversations as they lay on the sidewalk. Others plug into nearby internet kiosks and watch porn on their phones, this is NYC 3000 miles away from la la land. When the weather gets cold ( something the homeless do not have to worry about on the left coast) they pile their belonging into their shopping carts and head underground. Where they go to the bathroom I do not know, where they wash up I do not know, both are serious health issues, and disease spreads this way.
In the Times square area, you see two types of homeless, the fakers and the mental cases. The fakers sit, with signs declaring their conditions ( homeless vet, cancer victim, etc) while the crazies move about in filthy clothes with wild eyes, screaming at imaginary assailants.
I witnessed all this on Sunday as I walked around in the heart of the 'greatest city in the world'. Tourists took pictures of them. This is now.
17
"Mr. Trump’s sudden fixation with California’s homelessness problem is the rarest of cases where the state’s left wing actually recognizes a problem that the president feels strongly about."
You write as though this president feels strongly about anything other than himself. You even contradict that he feels strongly about this by characterizing his attitude as a "sudden fixation."
The president doesn't care about homelessness in San Francisco, nor anywhere else.
He is a shameless grifter. Period. Stop giving him press that gives people the impression otherwise.
Your paper is a shadow of its former self.
1
@Why
The casual duplicity and hypocrisy is truly alarming and disgusting.
Just blocks from Capital Hill in Washington DC, sidewalks have human feces, toilet paper, sleeping bags, bags with clothes, tarps, and the people who live on the sidewalks and alleys. (I haven't seen needles.)
The city government can't touch it. There are no facilities to move them into: if there was a government facility, there would be law suits because of the facilities weren't nice enough (after all, they have carpet and tv in prison), or somebody assaulted somebody else and the government didn't prevent the assault. If the city government relocates them to a "homeless park" with bathrooms, it's racism, or some sort of unfair mean-spirited predatory action.
There must be political acceptance of:
1) an affordable minimum-service facility (bathrooms, water fountain, and a covered place to lay out a sleeping bag).
2) the relocation of indigents, by force if necessary, to the facility.
3) no liability or legal repercussions .
It would not be perfect. There would be tear-jerking photos and "optics." But it would be a start.
7
If Trump were to walk three or four blocks from the White House, he would find a homeless problem right at his doorstep.
6
The systemic changes pushed by the GOP cause some of the less fortunate or capable off the bottom run of the ladder.
A more cruel society produces more homeless. I contrast what I saw in Tokyo or Scotland in major areas. Much less, with much more outreach. Lack of medical bankruptcy, health care before it hits ER levels, and better access to housing and worker protections.
Trump is as credible on homelessness as he is everywhere else. Meanwhile, Lewandowski basically turned a middle finger to the House....
3
On the whole the homeless are not victims of society. There perpetrators crimes against society. They occupy and block public spaces with tents, collect and gather garbage, urinate and defecate on the ground, creating conditions that spawn diseases such as typhus. Why do they do it? Because the can. The government refuses to enforce public safety measures that would compel the homeless to make choices that do not threaten the public health. Plenty of alternative choices are available but are not as convenient.
8
Get your headline straight. Trump only cares about " our best highways, our best streets, our best entrances to buildings".
As for the people living in them......anyone here thinks it's possible he could care less?
3
Rescue people, not dogs.
3
@Johnny Woodfin
No.
2
I like George Carlin’s solution to homelessness. Namely, converting golf courses to housing. Let’s start with Trump’s golf courses...
9
@Dersh yes! our best golf courses!
2
California allows the squalor, Trump would not.
5
@M Really? Like he did in NYC and Washington DC?
@Zoenzo Trump was not mayor of NYC, that is typically a Democrat...
1
My take on petty Trump's fixation with stepping all over CA is the governor of CA is the ex-husband of Don Jr's current girlfriend. Small small small.
4
Anyone who thinks California homelessness is California's problem is simply wrong.
California's homelessness is the nation's problem. A giant chunk of those homeless folks are from your home state, moved to California because the weather allows homelessness to more easily manage.
If Calif comes up with a solution alone, more homeless will move there. Homelessness is a Federal problem needing a Federal solution.
300
@SB
And in Vermont we are getting homeless transplants from other states that have told them we will take care of them here and it's safer. We do have shelters, some even open in the winter months only, food shelves, "soup kitchens" etc but we are a small state and watching the influx is scary. Knowing that some actually try to live in a tent in the woods during the winter is also scary; we regularly experience 20-30 below temps WITHOUT wind chill.
10
@SB Sorry., You are wrong. The people in Boise neither are bothered by LA tents nor do they pay a dime. It is not america's problem. We in California brought it on ourselves by encouraging the migration.
17
@SB
You could mention Portland Oregon. In recent years this city proclaimed its willingness to house any homeless family in its borders.
Word of this went out state and nation wide, proclaimed by every social worker. Not only did every homeless family from other parts of Oregon show up in Portland, families from as far away as Georgia arrived in Portland. The City budget for this program was exhausted almost instantly (and the program was shut down) .
24
The solution to the homeless situation is very simple: if they are disabled they should get disability. They may need help doing this but help is available. Next, they move into a group home which will cost them 70% of their income. Then they skip doses of their meds and go to the hospital, get better, and then back to the group home. If they use- they do 30 days in rehab-then back to the group home. Well, being court ordered for all of this helps but I guess that’s up to a judge.
@Wolfman. I like your ideas, but the problem is out here the lawmakers have fallen over themselves passing laws that guarantee the freedom of individuals to do whatever they want, when they want and as often as they want. People have the right to be mentally ill and refuse treatment. They have been given the right to camp literally on anybody’s doorstep, defecate at their leisure, shoot up anytime (we’ll give them some nice clean needles), block access to public areas and foul whatever environment they choose without any consequence. It’s a California problem, self-created. Our liberal overlords lack the fortitude to do anything about it, ya know, like enforcing the laws such as they are.
2
“He’s not my favorite,” said Alan Catoe, a homeless man asking drivers for money at an intersection on the edge of Palo Alto, a 20-minute drive from the luncheon for the president at the mansion of Scott McNealy, a Silicon Valley titan. “But I don’t mind that he’s here. There’s a lot of rich people who want to give him money.” By nytimes.
Seems like the homeless guy sees Trump as a kindred spirit in pan handling.
It sure would be nice if we hadn’t closed all those mental health institutions so many years ago! It also sure would be smart if we actually provide health services. Building homes won’t change the situation of mental health and drug abuse.
Drug abuse is often related to mental health and poverty. Obviously republicans don’t provide solutions and exasperate such issues. So yes Trump and republicans are disingenuous and simply scoring attack points. They actually help caused the problem yet take no responsibility and now profit from the attacks.
6
This is THE RUNNING MAN come true.
Remember the Schwarzenegger movie where the villain is "Killian" the game show celebrity become national leader of a society where the 0.1% live in Trump Resort opulence, while the 99.9% live in homeless poverty in decimated cities, while they cheer on Killian's game show theatrics.
That is where we are heading if Trump wins again in 2020.
Who is the Schwarzenegger hero who is going to save us from the 45+% of us who will give him the Presidency again through our Constitutionally Gerrymandered Electoral College.
6
Why homeless people exist? It's much cheaper to keep people living in the street than to provide shelter. Mental patients instead of getting inpatient care are homeless not because of idealistic reasons but it cost barely anything. Most cities prefer a bus ticket to housing and treatment. Some people actually prefer to live that way. They have no hope and the only thing they have to look forward to is their next high. There also are people and families that wind up on the street through economic hardship but how many blame them. They could learn to write code, can't they?
Is it late stage capitalism or early stage socialism? We have our wealth and don't want pay taxes. The State of California spends billions on renewable energy and high speed trains. Could the money be spent on other things? Texas is very close to California as far as wind and solar power and is building a high speed train but the government gives the usual taxes breaks they left it to the market to build.
I see California as a macrocosm of what the world is to become where the government builds a palace for the wealthy too thrive and most of the rest lose. They do like to play lip service for social justice, don't they.
5
Here in portland, the "unhoused" are everywhere. Their garbage piles up, the city "cleans up" only occasionally, and their "clean-up" consists essentially of picking up around the tents.
However, there is no way Trump wading into this issue is nothing more than show, and the opportunity for a political battle and points with his base.
This will obviously thrill some, but maybe it will spur some to compassion.
The man (trump) is despicable. I see no redeeming value in anything he does, or represents, but hopefully those who oppose him will find a way to improve services for the homeless to get them off the streets and out of the woods.
5
Housing costs in California are some of the highest in the nation. In order to live in San Francisco, a person needs to make $276,000 per year. (Stat from 2 years ago). Who is surprised that there's a homeless problem, so stop looking at the mentally ill as the root cause of it.
8
That statistic is simply not true. Medical residents make less than half as much and till live in the city and pay their bills. They may be renting a room in a shared apartment, or a studio efficiency, but still.
5
@Lucy S. Then those people should move to a place where they can afford the rent. There's no right to live in the country's most expensive cities.
A few weeks ago when one of this newspaper’s editorial writers wrote a story generally praising Seattle’s hands-off approach to its homeless/drug addict/petty criminal problem, the normally very liberal commenters disagreed vociferously and with passion and even anger. In short, they were sick and tired of seeing their cities become 3rd world cities. No doubt the liberal politicians in California took note and, in their own self-interest, are considering new approaches. But they have not had a change of heart or suddenly become competent leaders—they are just doing what too many of our politicians do.
7
Its clear Trump doesn't see homeless people as people. Just an inconvenience.
6
Headline should read: “Californians aren’t fooled by Trumps sudden and disingenuous interest in homelessness given his administrations clearly counterproductive and cruel policies”
#NYTimesHeadlineFail
4
This country has a million tryants in the form of HOAs that strangle both individuality and public housing. HOAs are breathtaking in their audacity and feudal in their outcomes-- we sell you the land but we retain rights over it that can never be wrested away.
Outlaw all HOAs and nullify their agreements for every development except those like condos or townhouses where coexistence is not optional.
1
Trump is a useful foil for Gov. Newsome but if you look at Democrat run cities and states same problems exist. The rich sit in their glass houses and preach all liberal doctrine while their fellow citizens sleep in cardboard boxes.
I've been to Portland, LA and San Francisco plenty of times. They all look like an episode of the Walking Dead with zombies walking around. Meanwhile mayors like Ted Wheeler keeps flies to climate change conferences like the good left wing virtue signaler he is.
7
This is California’s problem, period.
5
@Florence
Actually, it's not. There's an excellent chance many CA homeless came from NY.
2
Solve homelessness? In San Francisco? Try solving sanitation first. Let the homeless live with a modicum of dignity while “affordable housing” is thought out. People live on the streets here, and have for decades—clean it.
4
It's shocking to live near these homeless encampments in the Bay Area. They are nothing like the shanty towns of the Third World, which are poor but functional.
These encampments are packed with drug addicts, mentally ill, and others unable to care for themselves. Many live literally knee-deep in garbage, or in a tent in the center of an island of trash dug from dumpsters. Fires regularly start in these wastelands, from kerosene heaters and campfires being operated by people with severely compromised judgment or sobriety.
It's obvious that we have abandoned people who need our help.
Building low-income housing will assist the top-functioning stratum, and thank god: the folk who couch-surf, who live in their cars, who live a nomadic life in RVs on the highways, who renovate vans into tiny houses and are expert at finding perches that don't raise the attention of the neighbors or constabulary. Clearly they deserve affordable housing.
The others turn whole stretches of the East Bay and SF into the Dark Ages revisited: no sanitation, no plumbing, no health care, no gendarmes, no representation. And like the Dark Ages, the fire of London and the Plague may well result.
What will it take for us to care for these fellow citizens who are unequivocally unable to care for themselves? Freedom to starve, litter, catch fire and overdose is not liberty.
302
@Bohemian Sarah We used to. They were charged with vagrancy, jailed and if found mentally deficient, were incarcerated in psychological facilities where they were treated. The ACLU stopped that process back when Reagan was Governor. They said it destroyed the dignity of the person and the courts bought it. Now there is no recourse. We lose.
33
@Bohemian Sarah Unable to care, or, unwilling to receive that care?
14
@JABUSSE
This is so true! Where is the ACLU now? Not on the streets of SFO I suspect.
11
Expecting lots of comments here dissing Trump but really, whatever did Obama do to help solve this problem in his two full terms as President? What has anyone done to help solve this problem?
I imagine that CA has it particularly bad due to the confluence of high housing costs and weather more conducive to survive outside. But even here in Vermont we are seeing an uptick in homeless people. Housing costs are high here, especially relative to low salaries. And for whatever reason, many homeless people are coming here, often at the suggestion of those in other states. Evidently from what I've heard they are being told that we in VT will help them, that we've got shelters and all sorts of "soup kitchens" etc.
In downtown Montpelier this summer there has been a regular presence of homeless people sitting on the sidewalks downtown with cardboard signs asking for money. Many camp out in local parks at night. Burlington has been dismantling homeless encampments built on public and private land. And this is in VT where temps go down to 30 below or worse in winter. We have a major problem in this country and we're not dealing with it.
Many(most) of of the homeless have problems such as mental illness and/or substance abuse that would prevent them from taking jobs even if they could find one.
182
They’ll move on when it gets cold.
1
@Brenda Snow Unfortunately, people as cold as you don't move on.
24
@Greenie Moscow Mitch blocked everything. Obama care tried to increase funding for mental health. You know, Medicaid expansion. But it was a drop in the bucket. Do you know any vets with PTSD that will never function in our society again? I do. Conservatives defunded mental health, they closed the inpatient institutions, they claimed it would be cheaper to treat the mentally ill with meds on an outpatient basis. I remember Michigans Republican governor Engler shuttered our state psych hospitals, homelessness exploded. No one cares.
28
The latest idea seems to be Make the Homeless Invisible Again. Maybe even Lock ‘Em Up. The main consequence, I fear, in the event that any part of this idea is actually implemented, is that it will simply detract from legitimate efforts to help our neighbors find a safe and sustainable path for their lives. Without abundant empathy, no solution will be possible.
1
You may have noticed that empathy alone doesn't work. Not in California, not elsewhere. Some locking up is going to be required to solve this problem in addition to more pleasant forms of intervention.
5
@Casey
So spend hundreds of dollars a day to private prisons to lock people up for homelessness or mental health?
Homeless problem exists because of the people like Donald Trump. Those filthy rich folks who rip off little guys and not pay the taxes. When the national wealth gets concentrated to the few at the top, the ones at the bottom of food chain will starve and live in the street.
Donald Trump is the symbol of US homeless problem.
42
@Ryan- Homelessness in SF is unrelated the Trump. These are people with drug or mental issues. Most have no interest in working, only their next high. Others need assistance but there is no current law allowing for treating mental illness if the impaired person wants to remain on the streets.
14
Try being homeless and see how long you remain mentally stable and free from drugs or alcohol. Your solution? Continue to do nothing?
5
@Ryan. Baloney. Trump has nothing to do with it. California has ruined itself, without any outside assistance. If we cannot even have that conversation, nothing will ever change.
5
NYC is a homeless haven in the summer. Dogs are adopted free off of Craigslist. Last week I walked past a few young kids deep in the throws of a heroin haze. These dogs are used for protection, companionships and to beg for money. This bothers me. We also have a large older homeless population who are mentally ill and refuse money, food, socks or any help. These folks need our help too. DeBlasio is busy in Iowa and South Carolina. Local orgs are at their max. It’s getting bad. So you have a drug epidemic and a lack of facilities for those with mental illness. And it’s hard to look away.
147
@Lola
I think we need a return to custodial care, as well as mending the social safety net. We could have reformed the mental hospitals, but Reagan closed them and dumped everyone on the streets instead. Obviously these people are a danger to themselves, as well as to the surrounding neighborhood. I hope we return to providing adequate food stamps, disability payments, welfare, long-term mental health beds, sanitation (how basic can we get) and needle exchanges, rehab and a host of other programs that WORKED.
When a city is slow to put port-a-potties, garbage dumpsters and sanitation workers near an encampment, or fund adequate shelter beds, we have failed the most basic function of government.
17
@Bohemian Sarah. Yes, many shelters were closed during the Regan era but after the civil libertarians had brought many lawsuits arguing that the government including the states had no right to keep adults in care. The theory was that people would continue to voluntarily continue to take their meds and live in their own communities, preferably with family or in group homes. Guess what, nice in theory but didn’t work. People in the throes of mental illness don’t take their meds, families can’t handle them and no neighborhood wants a group home. So here we are today with a homeless disaster exacerbated by recreational drugs and the disappearance of SROs
8
@Bohemian Sarah
Again with the "Reagan closed all the mental hospitals" trope. It's totally untrue and the product of court decisions, mental health "advocates" who wanted half-way houses and "community" solutions rather than hospitalization, and even pressure from the ACLU to end the "warehousing" of the mentally ill. Reagan was president at the time, but he didn't just wave his evil magic wand and kick everyone to the street.
9
The White House residents are happy to take full credit for the improved economy; as to the rising homeless population, not so much.
Looks a lot like cherry picking, I can tell you that. Believe me.
Consider that Ben Carson (a black surgeon with no other significant experience, and an early strawman for Trump during the 2016 GOP candidate debates) was cynically appointed as leader of HUD, with a huge huge huge budget. Look it up, and explain it, it sure ain't brain surgery.
46
@Samm, and then Mr Carson proceeded to do things that are diametrically opposed to the stated mission of HUD. Despicable people.
4
ok so Trump can, sometimes, see the obvious. happy to know it.
14
Trump wants to take the homeless people and put them all in a camp just the way other people did starting in the year 1939...One this astonished that he has not come out and said this or tweeted it yet but surely that indiscretion is on its way.
23
The homeless problem is complex, the problem is that people should not have the choice to be on the street.
Some people are affected by rents, but most have psychological issues and won't stay on their meds, are drug addicts, or just came to CA to hang out and never bothered to check if they would have work, and now are on the streets.
Veterans should have families contacted or be taken in by the VA.
As cold as it sounds, just putting housing up and expecting people who are defecating on the street, will take care of a home is ridiculous.
They have to be separated out as to who is just on the streets due to losing homes but still have work and could possibly maintain an apt., and those people could be offered housing.
The mentally ill should not have choice to be on the street, first step is contacting relatives if possible, if not then they should be warehoused somewhere. Also drug addicts should have the opportunity to go back to the state they came from or be forced into a building.
No one has the right to be on the street and make it into their toilet.
88
@marie The problem is there are only two ways to detain someone. We can’t just warehouse someone without meeting those criteria. This isn’t China.
One is for a crime, like public defecation, which happens, but they get released right back into the street after their sentence. And since they are usually on post release supervision they are prohibited from leaving the area where they are released.
Two is institutionalization. But the standard for that is immediate danger to self or others, which is a high bar to reach. Since most of these people are fine once medicated, they release them. The bar for institutionalization didn’t really change, we just came up with better drugs in the 1960’s and most patients met the criteria for release.
Perhaps we need some kind of third way, like forced outpatient care which was originally planned when mental institutions were closed, but never funded. Essentially force people to take medication.
As for what state someone “came from”, we don’t have an internal passport system, someone could have drifted from state to state, and for legal purposes anyone is a resident of the state they reside in and plan to stay on. So legally these addicts are California residents, so the best we can do is offer them a bus ticket.
Obviously just giving someone wither addiction and mental health issues an apartment without supervision is a horrible idea. Perhaps we should have something like a halfway house, supervised housing.
10
@marie
"Also drug addicts should have the opportunity to go back to the state they came from or be forced into a building."
What "building" do you speak of? Halfway and supportive housing would be great, but go to any urban area and try to find a piece of zoned land that will allow you to build that type of housing. Very good luck with that. You can barely build the most innocuous affordable housing without existing homeowners flipping out, let alone housing for the mentally ill or drug addicts.
California can't even house people who are making close to 6 figures. Their homeowners don't even want housing for Google employees in their communities.
For the good people who do work and live on the streets, there is LITERALLY no housing for them. If there was housing they could afford accessible, THEY WOULD LIVE IN IT ALREADY.
The places they came from most likely do not have jobs. Most of the job growth is coming in high cost urban areas.
People do "choose" to be on the streets, but given that the infrastructure to get them off the streets, no matter what the cause, is non-existent (beyond jail, which is overcrowded) and is not going to be built without a very big change on behalf of NIMBY's, you can't really blame the homeless for choosing the only choice they have.
4
@marie Speaking from family and nursing experience, there are many many mentally ill (and physically ill) people who WANT to stay on their meds but face incredible barriers in obtaining them. You assume people don't want to stay on them but more often that is not the case. If a patient can find the doctor who will take them on Medicaid, (good luck finding a psychiatrist who will) then they are expected to get frequent follow up visits and labs. Without healthcare or transportation, or a phone to make the appointments, this can be very difficult. Our country needs more psychiatrists, more mental health clinics, lower barriers to obtaining needed medications, and it needs mental health emergency rooms/crisis respite. When the person is more stabilized, THEN they become more capable of steady employment.
The cycle I have seen over and over again is they lose their ability to refill meds, then lose their jobs, or they get dropped from Medicaid because they have difficulty filling out the complex forms and making appointments to renew coverage. One relative was told by a worker that in Illinois the DHS is seriously understaffed and this causes the workers to miss the pre-established phone appointments that the patients desperately need to keep access to care.
11
I have been a researcher in the field of homelessness for more than 25 years. My colleagues in California have told me that Trump started this interest in homeless people in California when the for profit private prison companies came to him and told them that they have a huge vacancy rate in California. Could Trump help them by moving homeless people into the prisons and having HUD pay them as if they were shelters. Why is the NY Times not investigating this? This entire movement by the Trump administration is a way to help the for profit prison companies profit. And if we put homeless people in prisons, what does that say about our society? We cannot let this happen.
7
The homeless situation is national, although severe in certain parts of the country. During the Labor Day weekend, I was jogging very early in the morning (but after sunrise) all three days in NYC. It seemed all the residents were away, and all I saw on the streets were what appeared to be the walking dead - mentally ill and drug infused people meandering about and talking to themselves. It was eerie to say the least.
Most of the homeless are mentally ill who have been in treatment facilities, but fail to take their medication upon release, and/or drug addicts who spend more a month on drugs than I pay in rent. Again, they receive treatment, but relapse once out on their own.
Perhaps it is time to realize that these people cannot and will not ever rise above their health issues, so after (hopefully) mandatory treatment, they can be put in group homes where they will have freedom, but will have supervision so that they take their medication and/or are drug tested regularly.
Sad to say, but MANY of these people will not rehabilitate on their own ever.
6
This looks like a housing problem. It looks like a drug problem. It looks like a mental illness problem. It is none of those things, and all of those things. Holistically, it is a rampant SOCIO-POLITICAL-ECONOMIC problem. When people run out of options, when normal people have to work 2 or 3 jobs just to pay the rent, when there are no social supports in place, when it's easier to just give up in despair, this is the result. When laws are tailored to benefit the rich and powerful at the expense of the poor and middle classes, this is the result. When pop culture glorifies the wrong things, this is the result. When our educational systems are neglected and our children suffer from neglect because of overburdened parents struggling to make ends meet, this is the result. When we would forgo wealth to allow greedy corporations to ship jobs overseas and pay no taxes rather than use tax dollars for things like free health care and college, this is the result. When our leaders point the fingers at immigrants as the cause of our malaise so we'll look the other way while they pick our pockets, this is the result. It's tempting to think there's an easy fix to this, but there isn't. America needs wise leaders now more than ever.
6
Which comes down to us caring more about protecting the wealth of the extremely wealthy instead of maintaining society. We have a party that nukes solutions, science and evidence to protect the wealthy at all costs.
I recommend the wealthy get on our team. In the long run it will benefit everyone and likely even them. We need them to participate in society honestly instead of supporting a party that undermines maintaining society and community.
2
It is all about the foreign investors complaining about the homeless sleeping in front of their buildings. It is not about the homelessness of Americans because they can't afford housing, don't have access to healthcare & mental health care. Many are veterans suffering from PTSD & other mental problems after fighting for the flag trump likes to hug. Yes there is a drug problem (not all drugs are coming in from Mexico) but it rises from the other problems or exacerbates the lack of help from society. Dealers of drugs prey on the homeless by letting them have drugs at cheap prices at first but once addicted it causes stealing in order to pay for the drugs. How is trump going to address these problems? He has never come up with a plan for anything. And only noticed this problem once wealthy foreigners started complaining or was it when the homeless started squatting in front of one of his properties? It would really be wonderful if all the 1% donated a couple of million each to help the homeless.
5
The tragedy of homelessness may be the only possible response to severe poverty in an economic system that allows prices to creep up to the point of simply being too expensive. If you cannot afford housing, you are not entitled to housing. Increasing Section 8 vouchers and other such government interventions for people who work full time or are too disabled to work might cut down on the homeless, but I think Trump's thinking goes in the other direction. More likely his approach is "why spend more money on these misfits?"----especially since California is the home of Democratic liberals and sanctuary cities. I get the impression that Trump takes great delight in pointing out problems which can be blamed on political opponents and would like these problem to fester and grow. He would rather have more homelessness than less in areas which didn't vote for him.
Similarly, with the tragic flow of desperate immigrants at the southern border, he finds them a basis to rally his base and his supporters to support him---as he is the "only one who can fix these problems." In actuality he does little. ( The Wall is a waste of money,ineffective, and unnecessary. Technology exists which can better defend our borders at lower cost.) I see Trump as a scam charlatan who would rather use a serious problem as a rallying cry than make any attempt to solve the problem.
4
Clearing the streets of the homeless? Well, Trump does have recent experience in rounding up and relocating 'undesirable' people to holding facilities.
3
I live within 1/2 mile of a homeless encampment, how many (?), I dont know, maybe 50, 60 people. But from my decidedly unscientific survey, the great majority are 20s-40s white males, that appear able bodied, they certainly put a lot of effort into panhandling and NOT working. Petty theft abounds, don't leave a bicycle sitting anywhere, panhandling, littering, assaults on each other, and they want everything for free. Don't give them anything.
88
@BorisRoberts When they moved the rivercamp people out of the Santa Ana river there were 3 bikes per person.
7
@BorisRoberts I think of the contrast of the guys outside of Home Depot, available for work. But their extended families provide them a home at the end of the day. All of this controversy over Hispanic people coming to our country, but they do not seem to be part of the homeless problem in LA.
23
@Kuhlsue Yes but they have certainly taken up a great deal of housing. Which may contribute to the problem.
7
In SF, much of the homeless problem is related to a health concern— either addiction or mental health concerns. The nature of both conditions, often times, creates individuals who have very low ability to function in life beyond child-like capacities. Therefore, the grown adult acting out from meth or schizophrenia in the middle of Market Street must be viewed as a lost child. Caring for these people should not be mistaken as taking away their civil liberties (as some in SF believe) but instead— liberally and aggressively creating safe contexts for such to live each day. Does it have to be in the middle of the city? Maybe not. What if UCSF created a residency program for doctors treating displaced persons/ refugees (psychiatry, addictions, infectious disease, etc) ? What if Bay Area tech companies offered biometric tech to keep track of homeless populations receiving services? What if pharmaceutical companies developed long-term — perhaps implanted devices— that alleviated the affects of opioids, meth, alcohol and other psychiatric illnesses? We need industry leaders to step up— the government can’t solve this alone.
4
If the left and right agree there’s a problem, then maybe there’s hope for a solution.
It’s at least three problems in one—housing people who’ve slid into hard times, caring for people who are mentally ill, and treating people with drug and alcohol dependencies.
Trump points out two inconvenient truths.
First, most voters don’t want our cities’ best real estate turned into homeless camps.
Second, unrestricted immigration brings down wages for unskilled workers, which makes it harder to hang onto the bottom rungs of the housing ladder.
A real solution would require the left to more heavily weigh the value of clean and orderly cities, and the right to endorse and fund compassionate programs that can help people who are in obvious need.
12
@MR
You need to realize the republicans have no desire for solutions. There is no hope that they will agree on a solution. There only purpose is to delegitimization their opponents and exasperate the problems while profiting from blaming others.
They have no desire to solve the problem and only seek to profit fro it politically. Their past behaviors nationally have exasperated and caused these issues with zero self reflection and massive pats on their backs.
Where are the unions? Destroyed.
Where is the mental health? Destroyed.
Where is the prison for profit? Massive.
Corporate democrats and republicans did this. You’re wasting your time working with these ultra wealthy pan handlers like Trump.
1
Homelessness is the biggest public safety and public health issue in the U.S. today. I have some sympathy for some of them, but the priority should be providing them a place to go with bathing and sleeping facilities - large, vacant spaces where they can camp and hopefully figure things out, or just stop being a huge problem.
1
Before solutions, we need information on the demographics of the homeless population. How many of them are financially displaced? How many are serious drug addicts? How many have mental issues that have not been dealt with. How many come from generations of very poor people, who neither have education nor exposure to a better life. And of course illegal immigrants with no other recourse. We also need age demographics. How one deals with an aged homeless person would be quite different from a very young one. I feel that opening villages for rehabilitation far from metropolises is the best hope. Cities are expensive and a pointless exercise to try and live in. Why not open spaces and better housing where land is not a problem. This is not about equalizing the rich, this is about trying to effect a change in the needy. Let us not choose a group to hate, instead lets focus on how we can help people.
SF is crazy as a home base, not even well paid people can afford it, especially when you combine rent with the cruel Cali taxes. So affordable housing in this little space.....might as well buy a plot on the moon.
4
One thing Mr trump and homeless folk have in common - they go where the money is. If you can afford a million dollar condo to be close to your job, or a $10,000 chicken dinner with you favorite candidate, a fiver to the homeless guy at the front door is not going to hurt you. The quality and quantity of dumpster food is much higher in the city, also. True about the suburbs to some extent, and porch thievery is rampant, and the park police have their hands full in areas bordering the rivers in Sacramento - that’s where you can get free water and a chilly bath, and, yes, you can drink river water here. But blue collar and working class communities may be more tolerant in some respects as of late, as the slide from barely making ends meet to living in a van is not such a huge slope. “There but for the Grace of God...” Having really great weather is a major attraction, just as it was during the dust bowl years. Fruit trees go unpicked in many back yards, and we grow so much food, people don’t starve easily here.
The people that you see laying around and misbehaving are the face of homelessness. They are what I call the dysfunctional homeless, and they clearly have psychological problems including drug and alcohol abuse.
There is another homeless population that you almost never see. They are the homeless who don't have such problems. I call them the functional homeless, and they do whatever they can to avoid their plight being seen. They are simply people who have slipped through the cracks in the housing market.
The dysfunctional homeless need services and support, including halfway houses and in some cases, institutionalization.
The functional homeless need affordable housing. The government can subsidize housing for some of them, but it can't subsidize enough. The only hope for that population is for the low end housing market to soften enough so that prices drop significantly. But that could put millions of mortgages underwater; the way it is designed now, our economy is only "healthy" if the cost of housing goes up.
The functional homeless are the flip side of that so-called healthy economy. For them, the economy is sick, not healthy.
14
@mlbex and they outnumber the visible (your “dysfunctional”) homeless by at least three to one at the point in time — and over time, are an infinitely larger group of individuals.
2
@Jason: I suspected as much but haven't looked up any studies.
1
I recognize the futility of trying to cooperate with Trump on any matter of public policy, and I see the obvious political expediency of his recent, but no doubt fleeting interest in homelessness. But where's the shame in agreeing with the other side once in a while? In my observation, that's the single biggest failure of our hyper-politicized culture. (I apply the criticism to all sides.)
I was homeless off and on for a couple of years in New York City in my youth. Now I own one of those extravagantly expensive homes in San Francisco. I'll take my home any day; it was no fun to be homeless.
But I will say that, in my opinion, no one is proposing any realistic solution to homelessness, if for no other reason than that there are so many contributing factors. I was homeless because I chose to pursue my college degree full-time. Others lose their jobs, then lose their apartments or houses, and, once on the street, find new employment enormously hard to secure. Some are mentally ill, abusing drugs, and/or simply do not want permanent shelter.
California is a beacon of hope for many. But once they arrive here, many find that they can only afford the good weather.
7
Homelessness is a complex problem with multiple causes such as natural disasters, unlivable wages, mental illness, drug abuse, climate, and sky high housing costs. It has numerous special interests involved such as developers, property owners, advocacy groups, and businesses large and small. No one agrees on how to fix it and it continues to worsen despite all the money thrown at it.
Trump doesn’t recognize the problem. He’s incapable of doing so. He’s even quoted in this article as blaming immigrants. If it were an easy problem to solve it would be solved by now. He just wants us to cut our housing regulations. It’s the greedy developer solution and it’s a bad idea. We have such strict regulations because of first hand experience with the effects of pollution, earthquakes, and global warming. You think homelessness is bad now? How will it be after an earthquake levels multiple communities or a wildfire burns down a major city? I have little doubt our regulations could be made smarter and balance these issues better, but Trump’s ideal is total deregulation and we cannot afford that.
What we need is a set of policies that lower home prices and rents, drive up wages, and effectively deal with mental health and drug abuse. We need to somehow do all of this without generating unacceptable unintended consequences in other areas of our society and against resistance from many moneyed interests.
5
California was settled by people that came in cover wagons only a few generations back. They didn't have homes waiting for them. A massive migrant wave of homeless people and families arrived in the 1930's. Many of today's "native" Californians are descendants.
California doesn't lack the wealth to accommodate successive waves of people who are down on their luck and just seeking opportunity or simply to survive.
Compassion and imagination are lacking.
Hey California. You have a lot of smart millionaires and billionaires who are excellent problem solvers. Where's the app for this?
4
It is so distressing to me to realize the immense difference between rich and poor in this country. President Trump is disingenuous regarding the homeless. No one should live on the streets of this country. Most of the homeless have mental and or physical problems and in a country of wealth, should be able to find help.
1
Homelessness seems to get spun and blurred, even by nytimes pieces such as this one. Those homeless populations swelling in LA, SF and Seattle are incredibly diverse in that those folks come from all over the country. In a sense, America is saddling individual cities or states with solving a national issue. Homelessness is not the problem. It is a symptom of an underlying societal failure. A society which places individual rights and prosperity ahead of collective concerns will produce 'losers'. Until your average person feels a sense of responsibility for another person they do not know, this crisis will persist and continue to grow.
5
California is a bastion of liberalism but, optically, is also the bastion of the increasing divide between the rich and the poor. It is hard to vote for any politician in a national contest that hails from CA. It’s mind boggling how the people of CA elected the former mayor of San Francisco when that city is such a mess. One cannot go to a beach in Santa Monica nor downtown LA nor downtown San Fran and feel safe. CA is our Dubai, our Saudi Arabia and our Greece all combined. The weather and the poor side by side. Tax and spending is not working. We need a 1992 Rudy Giuliani to clean it up and a 2000 Bloomberg to bring businesses back.
6
@Cosmo Brown. Could not agree more. Our “bastion of liberalism” is a dismal failure.
1
Trump regularly twitter rants ugly comments about California yet suddenly he wants to try and solve homelessness in that state.
His words, as they often do, ring hollow. Trump's focus is always narcissistic, his actions are never for social welfare or the good of American society.
Employers need to pay a living wage so workers can afford housing. Republicans and Trump always object to raising the minimum wage to the standard of a living wage (e.g. $15/hour) plus they loathe affordable housing efforts supported by government.
If Trump truly cared about low and middle income workers, the $1.5 Trillion Tax Cut legislation would have targeted that economic sector. Instead the vast majority of benefits went to the wealthy and corporations while adding Trillions to the national debt since it didn't pay for itself as promised.
Raise tax rates on the wealthy and corporations who can afford to pay more. Reduce taxes for low and middle income workers that helps them afford housing. There is no chance of Trump and the Republicans doing this. Instead they create talking points that places the blame of homelessness on "liberalism".
2
The US never had a severe homelessness problem till 1982. If you want to understand why we have one now, just Google "homelessness" and "Reagan". It's a national problem that requires a national solution. Cities and counties with consciences, that try to solve the problem locally, draw more homeless people from outside their borders.
The gun violence problem throughout the US is clear evidence of a lack of leadership at the national level. The same is true of the national scourge of homelessness.
2
Of course Trump sees homelessness differently; a realtor without an empathetic bone in his body only sees himself and others like him as its victims. That said, unaffordable housing is a growing problem in many large cities because our mercantile society caters only to the wealthy while ignoring the poor, the sick, the unemployed and those with mental health problems.
3
Trump couldn't care less about people who are homeless. What he'd like to do is bring California to its knees because he understands that the great majority of people here despise him. For every dollar CA sends to the federal government we see about seventy cents in services. The balance goes to shore up red states where people believe in their own fierce independence while we pay the tab. California ought to secede and leave those people and their president to work out their own problems. As the fourth largest economy in the world, I bet we could work out ours.
3
California has spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to addtess the homeless. From year to year, the numbers go up and down.
It's vets and immigrants. People who've lost their jobs. People with mental problems. Drug users. 25% are called the "intractible homeless."
More money won't fix this if there is an endless supply of people--and it appears there is.
The only thing that used to help was the SROs and "flophouses"--places in cities where you could rent a room cheap, for a night or a month or a year. Those places are gone.
6
@Talbot that’s the only solution but there is more political power to be gained by maintaining the problem.
1
This is a large country. I don't want to warehouse anyone. We need to figure a way to use the great unused land of this country and build homes for people (homes, not housing). From these homes will come workers who will build communities through the establishment of shops and businesses, and schools and internet-based commerce. A planned community of sorts.
4
@newyorkerva
As someone who works in this field, I can tell you we know what works and what it takes to accomplish it. But we need $$ to do it. There is not political will to spend the $$ on what works. This is the problem. Isolating people who have been homeless in their own communities may seem appealing to you but it is a form of segregation.
1
US tech firms pay no taxes . 1 % of the US population owns 50 % of the wealth . 90 % of Americans live on the 25 % rest of the wealth .The housing market has raised by 300 % in 30 years, but income only by 14 % .
It is mathematics, not drugs . It is bad economy .
34
Didn't California just vote down a proposal to change zoning? In this case, Trump isn't the issue; Californians themselves are. They're the ones preventing affordable housing.
20
@kas Yes, the measure was voted down, but that was because it was poorly written. For example, it would have turned the entire city of San Francisco into a high density zone. Also, the language stipulating what should be designated as affordable housing was very weak. It appeared to be a giant giveaway to developers who would have continued to build luxury housing in cities like SF. There was little regulation or incentive to do otherwise. Basically all of those cute neighborhoods that tourists come to see would have been up for grabs by big developers. It took away most local power for zoning for high density housing. I think that if it had been a better proposition with strong measures to build truly affordable housing and not completely destroy the integrity of cities, it might have passed.
Regarding the homeless issue, it has been a constant in California. But the rapid gentrification of the cities has made it much more visible and urgent. I think that it should be addressed at a regional level, not the local level. There's no way a city can manage it on its own without criminalizing homelessness, and most California cities will never do that because it is unethical.
1
To what exact proposal are you referring?
@Artemis It was SB 827. "Under SB 827, cities in California would have been required to permit residential buildings of up to 45 to 55 feet (14 to 17 m) in "transit rich" areas near train stations and bus stops.[2] The bill would have also eliminated minimum requirements for parking and prohibit local design requirements that would lower the amount of space in a new development.[3] The bill would have affected roughly 50 percent of single-family homes in Los Angeles and 96 percent of land in San Francisco."
Basically the only areas of the city that would not be subject to rezoning would have been the Presidio and Golden Gate Park. It would have removed much local control over zoning and the provisions for affordable housing were weak. Here is a good summary of the issues with SB 827. http://www.sfweekly.com/news/tall-tales-the-potential-impact-of-sb-827/
When are we going to restore mental hospitals that treat patients with dignity, therapy, psychiatric counseling, and the long term help mentally ill people actually need instead of turning a shoulder when we see them begging or rambling along the street by themselves. It is increasingly unimaginable to me that we do not employ mental health and drug addiction counselors daily to assess homeless people and give them the housing, job counseling and treatment they need it is absolutely inexcusable for a rich country to not have solved this problem by 2019.
29
@Juliana James I agree, but the rubber meets the road when this kind of service needs tax dollars. People are just too selfish to have their tax dollars go to someone else. A day after the anniversary of the U.S. constitution, we still can't figure out how to secure the general welfare, but we sure can figure out how to provide for the common defense.
2
@Juliana James
The psychiatric hospitals an asylums were not a good answer to this problem. If you read the actual history and documentation about how they operated you would not think this is a humane way to treat people. Warehousing them in a hospital is NOT the answer. We who work in this field do know what the solutions are and we have the research to prove it. We have been unsuccessful at raising the $$ to get these solutions in place at high enough rates to avoid long term homelessness. It's takes $$, not hospitals.
And FYI, your solution would only be appropriate for a portion of the homeless population suffering from psychotic mental illnessess. The rest, like families with children need something very different, and in most cases as simple as a place to live with a rent subsidy!
2
@Juliana James
It is of little use if the mental health and addiction counselors can barely afford to live here.
4
I don't know why this comes as a great surprise. Donald Trump has made his fortune, that which he did not inherit anyway, on selling an image. Homelessness and the troubles that accompany it threaten the image Trump wants and needs to project to further his personal interests. He is breath-takingly self-absorbed, and as long as you understand that, nothing he does is really mysterious. Regardless of his motivation, however, homelessness is an issue that needs real and lasting solutions. Unfortunately, the current administration is woefully ill-equipped to provide them.
12
@Allison
His motivation is to cause this big uproar and then to help is for-profit prison industry friends fill their now vacant prisons with homeless people - and have HUD pay them for it as if they were shelters. He wants to help these folks make money. That is all.
3
The solution to the homeless problem can't be more people on the floors of what would become essentially unregulated private prisons for the the poor and mentally ill in warehouses.
As my old school (think 1980's) Republican boss used to say, "I live in subsidized housing because mortgage interest is deductible." And then he would say that housing is one of the few problems that can be entirely solved by throwing money at it. We both worked for a builder/developer of low income housing. He was mostly right. We also need mental health workers and an end to NIMBY interference.
14
Interesting strategy. With no obvious bogeyman for the Republicans to latch on to and scream to lock up, campaign against the 35 million people of a whole state, as if it were a foreign country. It has its interesting points. We can do the same to Mitch McConnell's state, and it needs us more than California needs Trump.
BDSK
(Boycott, Divest, and Sanction Kentucky)
11
For some reason I suspect that we're going to see a "privatized" solution to this problem that will result in a payout of $300 to $400 per day to house these people. That's probably what the "fundraisers" are: kickbacks from those who will profit from the plan.
9
@Thomas Payne You can be sure that he is not visiting CA to help the homeless nor our politicians to solve the problem. Your comments are probably very much his reasoning! More money for backers and contributions for him.
Municipalities are afraid that if they help the homeless, then more will flock there for the support and programs
That’s why they do nothing
11
@Deirdre
Well maybe three or four states should be given federal funds to set up specialized support facilities for those who are deemed "chronically
homeless".
"Chronically homeless" might be those who repeatedly violate the laws by illegally camping on streets and refusing help or treatment in local facilities.
After three citation warnings and offers of treatment, they might be involuntarily sent to facilities in those three or four designated "special support" states to live under supervision.
1
such ridiculous logic as the homeless are already “there” and have been for years. total lack of compassion and no moral compass .....
Though I cannot speak directly to California’s problems, those in my large Western city neighborhood are similar. We’ve dealt with increasing petty theft, nearby stores with shoplifting and food packages ripped open and thrown about, and our bus stop shelter is mostly unusable because of the people who spend the day there (and possibly the night too.) A large city park nearby draws them here. High housing prices are blamed, but the alleys where they congregate are littered with liquor bottles and needles.
Some high-density housing has been built near transit, but much of it is unsold high-priced luxury housing. Somehow developers, who are generally wealthy and would never use public transit, haven’t figured out that other wealthy people are just as arrogant as they are.
Finally, I want to point out that though my city has a large Hispanic population, I have never seen a homeless Hispanic (though there must be a few). Almost all homeless here are white, whatever that indicates.
16
Because the mentally ill would be unlikely to make the journey here or capable. So trumps claim of foreigners pitching a tent is nonsense of the highest order. The problem is domestic.
The destruction of unions, no medical, expensive housing, housing developments not for middle or lower Americans but for the wealthy, closure of mental health facilities, automation of simple labor work, housing costs outstripping wage growth by hundreds of percent.
One other one we don’t take serious is the drug war and how we punish such activity as illegal. Was it Portugal that had a similar problem many years ago and how did they try to solve it? Is it working?
You know find solutions based on evidence. Unfortunately we have one party in this country that prefers their gut to evidence and science.
This is a failure of the current version of our capitalist system. Why is this not said by anyone? It's actually a feature, not a bug. It's what our current system is designed to do.
14
@Mannley
So what is your solution?
You can't complain, well you actually can, but not legitimately complain without having some idea how to solve this growing crisis.
Since our "esteemed political leaders" seem to be unable to solve this very serious humanitarian crisis, perhaps "Crowd Sourcing" this homeless problem across the nation of 350 million people and offering a $1 Million award for the the citizen or group who comes up with the BEST workable solution would produce results!
1
How about having the billionaires, who all just got $1.5 Trillion in tax cuts thrown at them by the Trumpublicans, scrape together some of that vast windfall and put together some brilliant plan to take care of the homeless. Nah...isn't going to happen, because they're all a bunch of Calvinist, prosperity gospel "Christians" whose brand is belieiving that anyone who is poor is in that state because they're sinners rightly punished by god's wrath and undeserving of mercy. The rich will be putting that extra cash to better use putting up walls and reinforcing their bubbles to keep out the unpleasant stench of the poor and protect against the pitchforks and torches.
27
Medical bankruptcy is a major reason that families are homeless. I don’t understand why big and smaller businesses don’t back universal healthcare. It would not only help their bottom line, but provide the safety net needed by those who lose their jobs through no fault of their own.
30
These are not families! These are predominately men with mental or drug issues! You need to understand the problem to fix it. But with most liberals the problem is society, GOP, Trump or the Koch’s. And that is why their ‘solutions’ don’t work.
1
@Louisa Glasson
Spot on!
Yet Republicans do everything they can to sabotage the healthcare for the American people.
I wonder why?
Write you congressional representatives.
Each has a "Contact" form on their websites.
1
QED...it’s Trump’s fault
A great country can leave no one behind. A compassionate country finds the means and methods to leave no one behind. My mother used to say: There but for the grace of God go I.
And the Golden Rule: Do unto others as we would have others do unto us.
This is not that hard....once the will is there.
17
@Lee
Amen.
It's that simple.
The "Golden Rule" is all any human being needs to live by.
To put the issue in context, one might ask why it is that that there is so much poverty in the South? Is this not a failure of Republican governance?
20
@Ken
California has the worst poverty of any state.
3
"Still, the shared diagnosis of California’s housing problem left many policymakers here in the DEEPLY UNCOMFORTABLE POSITION of conceding that the Trump administration has made some fair points." - I added capitalization for emphasis.
Perfect example of the hypocrisy of the political class and sad state of policy making: public discourse is NOT based of facts and evaluation of the facts; is the a grotesque kabuki theater to symbols and association.
If facts matter and solving social problems is the objective: take the facts, analyze them, draw conclusions, take action. What does it matter what Trump thinks?
However, if the objective is to wind up your base with emotional, fact-free nonsense to harvest votes from voters, association with Trump matters. A lot.
The interesting footnote is that NYT accepts the latter as a fact and does not bother to point out the absurdity. Can't decide if it is complicity or realism. Time may tell....
10
We are surrounded by this and we are living it every day. Imperceptibly slowly, but very surely, the wealthy are successfully pushing us out, little by little, one by one.
At our last city council meeting, a full 25% of the discussion time was devoted to the homeless. It is clear there is no easy answer and there are no solutions we can agree on.
There are 5,000 new homes being built locally. On Saturday at an open house event I learned their prices exceed 1 million. It is pure fantasy to think it would ever be possible to live in one, yet the homes continue to sell as fast as they are built.
Prices of everything continue to rise 10% or more every year. Wages do not rise. We're continuously getting poorer year by year. I myself am homeless, squatting on bank-owned land, but I shower and wear clean clothes every day, hold down a steady job and pay the bank note.
Yesterday evening after work, my boss complained that I'm overpaid because I do not rent a home or apartment. Just the opposite ! It is almost impossible to save money. He lives in a 1.5 million dollar home, tone-deaf and clueless. These folks don't give the slightest thought to the homeless, except to disparage them.
27
@Kevin. What bank note? And, why don’t you consider moving to a cheaper area of the country? The California coast is definitely becoming exclusive because so many people want to be there. Such is life in our over-populated capitalist society. You can complain about it and remain homeless, or make a new plan and move! Believe me, there is life outside of California, and many great places to live and plenty of work for those who are capable and willing to work.
2
This problem is increasing day by day. I have personally thought many time to leave my job and work for an affordable housing community for homeless people. I want to help rehabilitating the homeless, create new laws to protect the unprivileged ones, Providing them safe housing, providing them healthcare, providing them security.
Mr President is bashing other political opponents and blaming them for homelessness.
Mr. President is just defining the problem and blaming their opponents for the current conditions. This is what he has done since he came into oval office. Does he have a solution to homelessness?
Is Mr. Trump going to legally protect these people once he wins California?
Is Mr. Trump the real sympathizer of these homeless people?
Is Mr. Trump going to donate 10% of his wealth for the noble cause for building TRUMP affordable community solution for these homeless people?
Do Mr. Trump or his committee has a 5 year or 10 year plan to fight the homelessness?
Do Mr. Trump is going to create Zones in California where these homeless people can live safely where the price of property will never increase?
If you feel that Mr. President has a concrete plan and you feel that Mr. President really care about these homeless people. Go and Vote for Mr. President.
It is not about voting for democrats or republicans. It is about fixing the system/laws/medical. Vote for the person who sees his JESUS in these Homeless people.
Thanks You
Charanjit Singh Channi
New York
9
There is a hypocrisy that exists among all of us. We don't want the homeless living next door to us, we want the government to solve it by throwing money at it, hopefully money that does not come from us. We want the money that comes from us to go into public education, healthcare and maybe help illegal immigrants. We could keep borrowing by floating bonds which is what we are doing today and the only good news is for people who don't have kids as they don't have to worry about the future burden.
The future costs are tremendous as we will see cities inundated by floods and constant droughts in a lot of areas. We will also have an endless stream of poor migrants into the country as things get even worse in their own. Considering all this, maybe the solution is to let the homeless live on the streets because the costs to solve this one issue are tremendous.
6
@John
The costs not to solve it are even higher. We learned that lesson in the Middle Ages. Pestilence, epidemics, wildfire, crime...
2
@John
SOMEone out there has an answer.
We're just asking the wrong people to solve this problem... bureaucrats who are more concerned about their re-election chances than the homeless population.
We should required every one of our state and federal representatives take a homeless person off the streets to live with them as a condition of their election.
See how fast the homeless problem will be solved.
A good portion of blame for the homeless crisis in the Bay Area must go to Silicon Valley, whose hordes of highly paid young people have driven up the cost of housing to astronomic levels. For too many Californians in San Francisco and neighboring communities the cost of a decent home is unaffordable. Many high-tech moguls spout liberal opinions, but do they really care about the squalor they have helped create just outside their gilded gates?
22
California has a budget surplus of $10 Billion. Rather than fix the homeless problem, illegals receive free medical care (up to 26 years old), and a drivers license. California cities also provide legal defense for sanctuary cities. To start with, why not shift the money from the illegals to at least helping our the homeless vets?
I am so glad I moved out of California to Arizona 7 years ago.
18
@Arizona Cool Homeless vets should be helped by the VA. As far as medical care for people who are here without authorization, how cruel you are to suggest that they not receive care.
1
@Arizona Cool The typical false choice. There is enough money in this country to do both. The problem is too much of it is going into the hands of a small percentage of uber-wealthy people thanks to politicians like Trump.
1
So Arizona let’s sick people, including children, stay sick. Gee. That’s great.
1
Waiting for evidence that liberals feel "deeply uncomfortable" agreeing that homelessness is a problem.
8
@bill
Are you waiting for them to agree homelessness is a problem or, are you waiting for them to agree with Mr. Trump? Context is everything.
1
@bill. Being “deeply uncomfortable” paralyzes them and consequently they do nothing. Really effective governing here.
1
The cost of health care is one reason the number of homeless keep growing. In most advanced countries, health care is affordable or essentially free. In the US, one accident or medical emergency can bankrupt a family with surprise bills, even those with what they thought was good insurance.
Why is it that ALL developed countries EXCEPT the US can afford such health systems? What we have is not "great".
124
@Wade For profit healthcare drives innovation in medical science. The United States is not ready and may never be, willing to forgo the research and development of new drugs and medical procedures that will absolutely cease when profit is removed from healthcare.
Almost all of the advances in medical science either occur in the United States or are developed to be used or distributed in the United States. The reason for that is the scientists and medical engineers can make a significant profit from their work. To remove profit and make healthcare "free" will destroy our superior system of healthcare delivery.
5
@Wade
I'm sure that is part of the problem, but I'd be interested in knowing how much of the homeless population is actually homeless because of a lack of medical insurance and surprise bills. Do you happen to know?
5
@Wade it's not just the cost of health care, it's the cost of RENT. How much healthier would people be if they lived in a clean, safe home instead of the streets? In SF, the average cost of a one bedroom has risen to something like $3,500 a month!! That is more than most mortgages in typical working class communities. What has driven up the cost of real estate? Why, real estate developers, of course. Healthcare is a related issue, but if a person has nowhere to live, how is any medical treatment going to save their lives?
12
The State of California and Governor Gavin Newsom are setting on a $21.4 billion budget surplus, thanks to the sales and income taxes passed during Gov. Jerry Brown’s tenure. So what in Gods name are they waiting for? The New Colossus state openly welcomes the retched refuse, the homeless and the tempest tossed to come live on their streets while they tax the devil out of the people to do work there so they can boast about how much money they have. Yet the liberal Democratic establishment and their Presidential candidates have nothing but contempt for the rich and promise that they and their corporations treasuries are going to be pilfered in order to fund all the public entitlements they are going to give us. Yet the most liberal state in the union, California, with billions of surplus dollars in its pocket is immune from all of it. The state wants control but it is not within its leadership to the right thing when they have the opportunity and the resources to do so. They are the enemy of the people.
33
@Kurt Pickard
I see lots of ideologically driven bashing and attacks on your end, but very little of what exactly the Republicans have done and are doing about it.
What exactly is their and your solution to this problem other than to use it as an excuse to bash liberals and Democrats?
21
@Kurt Pickard I have a sort of answer for you. The state of California is the epicenter of the concept of "home rule." Google it for the details, but basically it means local government is the governing authority. So... the state may have lots of money, but if local governments (municipal, county) can't or won't engage in ending homelessness, mental illness, racial disparities, transportation woes, etc., the state can't make them do it.
8
Wanting the rich to pay taxes is not “contempt”
14
The interesting thing about all this is while big cities like California and New York has a huge homeless problem that the media and conservatives like to point to, the reality is states like Kentucky has a greater percentage of homeless population and tragically a larger percentage of teenage homelessness. The major difference is red states like Kentucky receive a larger amount of federal assistance than any other state.
California's homeless problem is compounded by poor logistics. Silicon Valley has plenty of job openings for service workers, the problem is housing costs within proximity of jobs are astronomical, and there is limited public transportation options. So if you're a low wage earner, owning a car, paying for gas to drive 2 hours to work becomes untenable, especially as major corporations are cutting health insurance benefits and transportation stipends.
Just look at how quickly middle class families in Kentucky, fell into low income brackets and then end up living in their cars. So yes, it's very popular to point to California or New York, but that's just a distraction to the real story as to why the poorest Americans voted for people like Mitch McConnell and Trump.
52
The real story is how progressives continue to deflect and deny any responsibility for the homeless disasters in SF, LA, Portland, Seattle, etc. These cities and states all have long term Democratic progressive governments at the state and local levels. Yet the situation on the streets continue to deteriorate before their very eyes. So let’s switch the subject to folks living in cars in Kentucky.
18
@Don
It is hard to find any statistics to show that level of homelessness in Kentucky (or red states in general). The problem (as you partially allude to) is the way homelessness is defined. In may areas, you can legally occupy a camper, mobile home, or shack and call it "home". As a result, areas where building and zoning codes are strict and, consequently, the cost of housing is high, are going to have a higher homeless problem by definition.
2
Let's stick to the point that there is a higher percentage of homeless in Kentucky while Kentucky receives a higher percentage of federal money.
2
California brought the homeless situation on themselves. California should deal with it.
16
@99percent
They also brought the air pollution problem on themselves, they themselves found a solution, and now Trump has decided to make that successful solution illegal.
18
Who brought on the myriad woes in the red states? And whose tax dollars go towards fixing them?
2
@99percent Great plan. Let each state carry their own weight. Most of the Southern red ones would collapse almost immediately from poverty, obesity and lack of education and healthcare for their populace.
We know Trump gives a rip about homeless. OK. So what are leaders in CA doing to alleviate this crisis? Lots of measured words but little action. How can a rich city like San Francisco have both a hip and 3rd World vibe? Do wealthy techies relish watching these sorry souls from their Tesla SUVs?
13
@charlie corcoran Wealthy techies want the city to get rid of them (read their local papers), although they probably wouldn't consider them "sorry souls."
California is no different from any other place in the U.S. as far as its lack of interest in human welfare (liberal or conservative, we are still all about greed). They just have a concentrated group of incredibly wealthy people, which, along with the American view that you can never spend too much of your income on housing, has resulted in what you see there now.
6
@charlie corcoran: Most techies I know wish it would go away, but after having paid a million dollars for a simply adequate (not fancy) house, they know that they could end up the same if they don't keep their noses to the grindstone.
The California tech millionaires that many people imagine are a distinct minority. Most techies are working stiffs, living somewhat like American unionized factory workers used to live. It's adequate, but hardly plush, and not as secure as you might imagine.
6
@charlie corcoran US big tech firms pay zero taxes .
That is not a difficult question.
The question is how or why Americans are so ignorant about it .
Having a home is a human right and an American state, local or national government obligation for the young, the old, the poor and the mentally ill regardless of color aka race aka ethnicity aka national origin.
See Matthew 25: 31-46
17
@Blackmamba: The great recession tried to correct that problem. It was after all a drop in housing prices that started the snowball rolling. But the bankers wouldn't allow the price of housing to drop, so they convinced Obama to spend a trillion dollars to prop it up.
Until we figure out how to have a robust economy without housing inflation, homelessness is inevitable. I don't like it that way, but I believe that is how it is.
2
Santa Monica was always referred to as “The Home of the Homeless “ by Harry Schearer on his weekly comedy show in KCRW.
6
I am born, raised and live in Manhattan and have the pleasure of visiting San Franciso regularly. Terming this issue a homeless problem is a lie. The squalor agreed to by San Fran Democrats and President Trump is really about mental illness , drugs and substance abuse. You will rarely see a single mother with kids in these situations. it is overwhelmingly single Males. start with honest definitions so we can solve the problem
124
@Mkm The homeless problem didn't just show up with Trump. I'm 75 years old and I don't remember when this problem has not been a problem. Trump gave me an idea, however. Banning tents and making cages would solve the blight.
5
@Mkm
I walk past mothers panhandling with children in tow every day. I'm certain that mental illness contributes. Another component is the insane cost of housing caused by local opposition to denser construction.
7
@Mkm - As someone who lives in Los Angeles and actually has family members who have been homeless, I can tell your "definition" is way off the mark.
There are a lot of families on the streets. You aren't seeing street kids on your visits because they go to school just like kids with homes. You aren't seeing their non-drug-abusing mother or father because they are working a job that simply doesn't pay enough. And you usually don't see them camped in front of a commercial building because at night these families sleep in their cars or homeless shelters (if they are that fortunate).
Before you start to define the problem, maybe you should get a little more familiar with it.
19
We do live in interesting times.
1
I recently moved to Florida. Despite the temperate weather year round there are no major homeless problems here with people sleeping on the streets. It’s not tolerated and housing is cheap enough for people to afford to live in it. It’s also a generally conservative republican state unlike liberal democrat California and New York. Maybe the liberal states should look to Florida for solutions instead of following policies that encourage and increase homelessness.
28
@new conservative My friends who live in Florida would disagree with you. They see large numbers of homeless people living in public parks. There is an absence of services for them and the both the social and physical climates are hostile. Florida is not, by an measure, "temperate." It is brutally hot. Most Floridians wouldn't know that, since they move from home to car to office to mall under constant cover of air conditioning. The homeless don't have that luxury.
25
@new conservative Granted, complex societies/economies are more difficult to manage than simple societies/economies. Why don't we all pitch in and manage them instead of taking potshots from the sidelines? (Here, as elsewhere, the White House is on the sidelines.)
5
@new conservative I would say that the weather isn't really temperate; high heat is lethal. That and your comment "It's not tolerated" has something to do with why you don't see as many homeless. Being attacked by police or jailed for being homeless may be more of a possibility in Florida.
14
Extremely affluent cities like San Francisco and portions of them like Manhattan --affluent with tourists as well as rich folks-- attract great concentrations of homeless, because such places have high housing costs and good begging prospects. The GOP solution, when it goes beyond campaign rhetoric and demonization of opponents, is displacement.
What 1990s Manhattanite can forget the 1990s the spectacle of the homeless filling every waiting room of Grand Central station and ensconced above and below the benches alongside Central Park West -- or the nagging guilt felt once the spectacle was effaced by Mayor Giuliana.
Off course, San Francisco and New York might do better. The Democratically governed city of Houston is reported to do well.,
5
@Alex
I often heard when I was living in NYC that Giuliani solved the homeless problem in NYC by shipping all of them to NJ and letting NJ deal with it.
I've noticed over the years, this is the basic solution for everything by the Rs. Sweep the dirt under the rug so it's no longer easily visible then declare victory and brag about it forever.
2
@JustJeff
if you turn to images after Googling something like "Grand Central homelessness 1990s" you will find a horric image of what I wrote. even though visual record of it now is hard to find. My most striking recollection is of tuxedoed and white-gown celebrants partying amidst trays of high held trays of champaign up on one of Grand Central's mezzanines above the the great hall of the station crammed with prostrate homeless.
A rare verbal report of the 1990-ish Brechtian spectacle that Giuliani would transform into misery in oblivion is available at https://www.nytimes.com/1990/11/15/opinion/help-for-grand-central-s-homeless.html .
3
My niece is a perfect example of someone who is slipping through the cracks.
She is mentally ill and after she kills my sister ( who is going to have a stroke) she will live on the streets. There is no help for her. She recently stabbed herself in the arm so severely she almost bled out. She is starving herself to death , she used to weight 150 lbs now she weights 90 lbs.
none of this is enough to get her involuntarily committed in New Jersey.
99
@Joan. Yes, the way we treat the mentally ill in this country is despicable. Somehow we have concluded that the constitutional rights of the mentally ill are best served by letting them fend for themselves in cardboard boxes on unsafe streets rather than being placed in group homes or hospitals.
27
@Joan My sympathies Joan, I know your trouble all too well. We have failed these people because its cheaper to let them die on the streets, then treat them in properly funded facilities.
6
@Joan . How is it possible that there is no help? Are you saying that your niece must voluntarily committ herself into a facility? Does she have to do someone harn before she is helped? This is insane.
2
How many immigrants or migrants are homeless? It might be close to none. And so many immigrants get even smaller wages. It is about how you spend and where you spend your money. Immigrants will even share one bedroom apartment among 5 people which Americans will never do. They are ready to share road rather than apartment.
9
@M
Over crowding is not the solution. Higher density in spaces that were not designed for it lead to friction among residents concerning parking, noise, trash and crime.
Most jurisdictions allow or require landlords to limit the number of residents in a rental unit based on square footage. Many tenants across the population spectrum under report occupancy. If unauthorized residents are found over crowing a unit, everyone in the unit may be evicted.
Most jurisdictions plan for schools, policing, public transportation, public utilities etc., based on predictable population densities.
6
@M - "Immigrants will even share one bedroom apartment among 5 people which Americans will never do." What about fire codes and occupancy rules, for, you know, things like safety.
The problem is that because of the willingness of immigrants to live in overcrowded circumstances you describe landlords end up raising the rent for everyone.
Also, what makes you think immigrants aren't living in subsidized housing? (from the outcry of this paper over enforcing public charge rules in immigration, I would guess the number is higher than we're being told)
6
This is so sad - it’s a collective helplessness and failure in our society
Everytime I see homeless camps it enrages me - it just shows the total breakdown of society
I can’t understand the citizens of SF and LA just driving and walking past and not doing anything about it
In NYC, every camp I see, I call 311 until it’s gone
Maybe they go to a different neighborhood, but at least in ours, we are not tolerating it
Once you tolerate it, than help and resources go away
11
I live near Seattle (fled because Seattle is now an expensive pit). Homelessness exists in Seattle because a bunch of bleeding heart liberals don’t have the smarts to elect politicians who are willing to face the problem head on rather than throw bags and bags of money at “homelessness” when the real problem is chronic drug use, mental illness and petty crime. There is plenty of shelter housing but no, you can’t do drugs and you can’t take your dog. The chronic homeless don’t want that, and they are perfectly satisfied fouling the streets with a government nod. The only fault of the good people of Seattle is that they are too liberal for their own good and continue to elect chicken politicians who refuse to face the root causes of homelessness—drug addiction and mental illness.
3
And where is it that you'd like these human beings to go?
1
The number one biggest cause of this problem is lack of housing. In the Bay Area, over the last decade, new jobs were created at eight times the pace of new housing. Guess what also spiked during that time? Homelessness.
I lived in the Bay Area from 2016-2018 and I moved away because this problem was so bad I couldn’t take it anymore. (It leads to safety issues — I had three homeless people try to do things to me in two years, whereas in 13 years in NYC, I’d had zero incidents in which I felt unsafe.) In the two years I lived there, however, I was shocked at how plans to build new housing were constantly shot down. And yet people complained about rents skyrocketing.
This is simple supply and demand, folks. If demand shoots up and supply stays the same, prices surge and the number of people who can no longer afford rents goes up.
Build more housing! Then the supply can meet demand, rents will go down and fewer people will be one big medical bill away from being out on the streets.
23
I am very disappointed by the lack of journalistic professionalism in this article. The headline says “Trump and California [do not see] the same solutions.” It discusses solutions from a California senator and the state’s governor, but includes no apparent attempt to convey what might be Trump’s solutions.
The story’s focus on Californian viewpoints about Trump and Trump’s visit might have more credibility if at least the headline didn’t suggest the article was about the differences between state and federal solutions to the problem. Additionally, the liberal viewpoints seem aimed at critiquing Trump, while there are no viewpoints substantively supporting his unnamed solutions. Either the reporters did not do their due diligence on the scene and before publication, or they are not being transparent about the process to note failed attempts to get Trump’s solutions or perspectives on the critiques.
If you could explain how this represents the full journalistic process, I’d be very interested. I see a number of articles from NYT when big stories break about the process behind the article. Have you also explained the process behind smaller daily stories like this one to show why the apparent bias is a result of something else?
14
@Ginger Loggins
The link to the administrations 40 page report on homelessness is provided. The administration’s action on homelessness is also provided “The Department of Housing and Urban Development is, after all, putting into effect new regulations that could turn thousands of legal residents and citizens, including 55,000 children, out of public housing.” The president’s statements were also included in the report and present the issue as one which creates discomfort among those people who are not homeless yet cannot avoid observing the abject poverty and squalor of tent camps.
@Ginger Loggins
Part of the problem is that Trump has NO solutions. He wants to publicly whine about it and point fingers. Haven't you noticed how he's almost gleeful whenever he can stick his finger in CA's eye or how he likes to smirk whenever he talks about the homeless? He doesn't care about solving the problem, only scoring perverse points from it. Homeless people aren't people to him, just talking points, like they are with so many others - liberal and conservative alike.
To solve the problem, we'd require the rich to pony up and provide the funds to help build sufficient housing for the homeless, then walk through each of the homeless camps and register everyone to get them into that housing. If they're unemployed, help them find work because all too often you have to have an address to get a job but need a job to maintain an address. (and shelters don't count; one is not allowed to receive mail in those places) Above all, ensure the system is reciprocal; there is housing the homeless can afford, and the homeless have the means to pay for it. This would put a lot more money back into the economy, take human beings off the streets, allow for better monitoring of people needing mental healthcare, and provide a boost to those who aren't all that fond of having to lie half-awake at night because someone is always willing to take their stuff or rape them.
I despise Trump, and he's right about this.
I owned my home in San Francisco, free and clear. I didn't leave because of housing costs; I left because it became a depressing, filthy, dysfunctional place where property crimes like auto burglary aren't even worth reporting to the police and firefighters spend their shifts shuttling homeless people to SF General Hospital. The city I once loved became someplace I don't even want to visit.
San Francisco's $250,000,000 per year homelessness "solution" hasn't solved anything.
32
I used to have a west coast travel book of business and so sad to see the decline of this once wonderful city of San Francisco.
You could not pay me to travel there now.
My husband and I once thought of getting a home in CA, but have decided to go to Florida specifically Miami instead.
Eventually except for tech I think many of the wealthy in CA will move somewhere else as these issues get worse.
When you have the homeless camping out in beautiful areas such as san diego not sure if they are in Santa barbara yet so sad.
Eventually these wealthy areas will have to become gated communities for those who stay as the politicians offer no solutions.
2
@marie: You can't throw a stone here in the Front Range without hitting a tech professional formerly of California. We can work anywhere, and we tend to travel in packs. Woe to the cities we choose next because, although we look unassuming in our black fleece and jeans, we're a major disruptive force that isn't always a healthy influence on local economies.
4
@Randy
Couldn't agree more! Seattle's city council spends huge amounts of money and our problem gets worse. It is like a magnet for homeless to come here. Filth, danger, and death are all evident throughout downtown. Who would want to visit filthy Seattle?
4
It is obvious that Trump struck a cord with his typical blame game, rather than "what can we do together to solve this problem". And the people have succumbed to his non-stop scree about Democrats, liberals, Pelosi, Newsom.
In the past we would see a president regardless of party attempt to work with the "opposition" and attempt to find the root cause and find a workable solution.
Alas, we have a person as a president who stokes the fires of hate, hate that mimics his own, and the fires become out of control. And Trump is skillful at this game. And the supporters cheer in glee.
And Trump, with his usual hit and run, will tweet in glee that he, our favorite president, successfully targeted those pesky liberals. And we will hear nothing more on the issue of homeless unless the Governor of California angers Trump.
So, commenters, rather than parrot Trump and Fox "News", why not help to find a solution? Or, just realize you have been conned-again.
13
GOP and it's policies since 80s are the direct reason for such homelessness. For what - to save few bucks?
GOP is like a classic new unqualified CEO; he/she will create fires and attempts to solve them so they survive few years; rip of the company and move on.
GOP supporters need to realize that this is real life and there will be forever implications; and GOP & Trump are making America great for only few people; while making it bad for rest of us.
7
Mat be if the taxpayers of California didn’t have to pay for Red State America through the federal taxes?
16
@Dev: those taxes go for Medicare and Social Security.
Some of your Federal tax dollars also goes to MEDICAID for the POOR.
Medicaid is THE biggest line item cost in the entire Federal budget -- dwarfing the cost of the US military!!!!
SO…as a liberal, you are now opposed to Medicare and Social Security? Please elaborate.
1
Try paying everyone a living wage.
23
@Tfish: that's an issue but not THIS ISSUE.
The homeless do not work, unless you think begging is an actual job covered by the minimum wage laws!
2
Every worker deserves a living wage. If the job didn’t need to be done, there wouldn’t be a job
1
Many homeless work several jobs. If they were paid a living wage, they could afford a home. Educate yourself beyond GOP rhetoric.
2
Since when does Trump care about the homeless? Or California for that matter? Something else is afoot here.
17
@MMS It is nothing more than Trump as our arsonist firefighter setting another fire of hate and bigotry.
When he departs California he will have forgotten all about it and move on to the next fire that needs stoking.
1
You can be sure that although California ignores helping the homeless, they will make a huge effort to count them during the census to assure that more Federal dollars are received by the state.
8
@Richard Wright
California pays more in federal tax than it receives in federal spending.
33
@Rusty Shackleford: but only because of MEDICARE…SOCIAL SECURITY….and Medicaid.
Do you seriously wish to curtail or end these programs?
If not….they will ALWAYS flow more to poor states and to poor people, than to rich states with rich, younger people.
2
Maybe, but how does that make my statement wrong? California will count every person who is breathing to raise their representation in Congress and to get more Federal tax dollars.
1
Before he rest of the Country points the finger of blame at “ liberal” California one should consider that it is not the political climate that encourages the homeless to sleep on our streets it is our benign climate.
One should also look at the relatively high percentage of Veterans who are homeless
We have a collective duty to ensure their well being , so why can’t they be housed on Military bases and absorb the cost in our massive bloated Military budget.
We need to find solutions both micro , building low cost homes , developing inner cities and macro reducing income inequality.
Trump is trying to use this tragic situation to his advantage and to further his vindictive assault on California. Even in my beautiful small Southern Coastal town run by a Republican City Council there is a homeless population and it is growing.
Let’s look for solutions not partisan attacks on this State
18
Part of the funding for Trump’s beloved wall is coming from the military housing budget. They won’t be able to house active duty families, let alone vets.
2
The construction of affordable housing in major metropolitan areas has to be made a priority in America.
We have rural communities that are being hollowed out, but we can't hope to repopulate those without first figuring out how people will make a living there. Good luck with that one in our brave new world of deindustrialization.
As it is, we have too many new immigrants coming to our already overpopulated metropolitan areas - and too much real estate being developed for the upper middle class, wealthy, and super-wealthy.
Left to its own devices, capitalism does not address the need for the construction of new affordable housing.
Real estate interests are in the business of chasing dollars - but the homeless, working class, lower middle class, and elderly tend not to have nearly enough of those dollars; and yet they all need some place to live.
Attention must be paid. If the only way to get the likes of Trump to pay attention is to have the homeless squat in the playgrounds of the rich, then perhaps the next protest should be to relocate as many of our homeless to the immediate vicinity of Trump properties.
14
@Matthew Carnicelli
Housing is not the problem here, it's drugs, drugs, drugs!
1
Trumps behavior towards California is somewhat an effect of the electoral college. He can loose a major state in the nation like California by a large margin and still win the Presidency. He can act with indifference to the state with the biggest population and punish the state with his petty politics. Yes California has a homeless problem. It is also a warm place beautiful place that will attract people. Who wants to be homeless in Fargo in the winter?
19
@scott t
I’d rather live in Fargo than San Francisco. I know people who live in both places and the quality of life for a working person is higher in Fargo.
2
State mental hospitals are almost extinct and people cannot be permanently committed ( No more “One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest”).
A person over 18 with mental illness is not required to take meds except in extreme circumstances
Cognitive behavioral therapy and other non medical treatments for bipolar disorder, depression, schizophrenia are only partially effective.
Welcome to an unsolvable problem.
31
As they say, states are incubator for national ideas. If the Pelosi et al, policies work so well, why does this situation exist. CA continues to see exodus of residents and businesses, sky high taxes and some of worst housing availability and income inequality in the country. Shouldn’t the reason be understood before these policies become national?
6
I've been hearing about how bad Homelessness has gotten in California for at least 5-7 years now. Looking forward to reading the Report. Something has to be done to control this disgraceful blemish on our great Country. Sounds like the political establishment in CA are finally realizing that this will destroy the State. People like me would not invest or live or visit the State with such an out of control situation.
Fix the problem and forget about Partisan politics.
6
There is another class of people who are vulnerable to homelessness and they are released felons who have served their sentences. With a felony record it is very difficult for them to get jobs and rent an apartment. Here in Minnesota where the winter temperatures can be subzero there are people who commit crimes just to get into jail where they can have a warm meal and a warm spot to sleep. Alternatively some people migrate to California because of the weather. Generally not going to freeze to death on the streets of LA or even SF.
14
@underwater44
So true about opportunities for felons. And lots of those guys on the street have PTSD from having been forced to enlist due unequal distribution of wealth. They end up in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. Many of them end up trusting nobody, making it pretty hard to work. They also become afraid to be confined indoors, even to their own home.
Is it possible they live on the streets in California because they feel it’s the safest place for them?
Americans are not educated enough to understand or even know how the economy of the USA works .
They are completely alienated in the narrative of mercantilism and have no idea that a part of the population cannot mathematically participate in the commercial market of housing.
Wealth is distributed in a highly unequal fashion, with the wealthiest 1 percent of families in the United States holding about 40 percent of all wealth and the bottom 90 percent of families holding less than one-quarter of all wealth. ... Notably, 25 percent of families have less than $10,000 in wealth .
The USA are a very poor nation .
Americans have no idea because they are educated in thinking that this is a marxist point of view .
10
Government can’t or won’t fix the homeless issues at the local, state or federal levels for many reasons articulated in this article .... now you expect government run health care to be any better ... See where trump is going with this .
2
The decision of the Reagan administration to deinstitutionalize secure mental health residential programs and create less restrictive community based programs was the beginning of the end of the homeless crisis. People with severe mental illnesses who are unable/unwilling to manage their illness through medication management and other treatment modalities fill the streets, homeless shelters, and jails across our nation. I've seen this first hand working with homeless populations as well as personally having a schizophrenic sister who was unable to manage a debilitating illness. Some mentally ill individuals are able to successfully live in a community and manage their illness; others not so much. Let's look at other alternatives to safely and humanely care for those unable to care for themselves. The streets and shelters are not the answer.
43
@Kevin Donegan, Deinstitionalization itself was less the problem than the failure to provide people with serious mental illness with necessary community based mental health services and sufficient wrap around support. Assertive Community Treatment teams and permanent supportive housing (which provide not only affordable units but also intensive community supports) are designed for individuals with the most significant behavioral health challenges to community living but have been shown to improve community integration and well-being.
10
Please quit blaming Gov. Reagan’s 50 year old decisions on California’s homeless problem. The Democratic politicians have very little since to fix or help the situation.
5
@Kevin Donegan Once again, urban legend. It was the ACLU that took the states to court to close the institutions saying it was 'fair' to institutionalize someone against their will. Liberal policies once again don't turn out as expected.
Looks like Economics 101, to me. Simple supply and demand.
Zoning regulations prohibit the construction of apartment buildings that could house more people at an affordable cost. And the big cities create vast wealth for those fortunate enough to tap into it. Everyone else is left will little money, and no affordable housing options.
Trump is just trolling California for political points, which is the only thing he seems politically capable of doing. Well, along with accepting people's money.
But this problem is of California's making. They were too successful, and spent too much regulatory effort catering to the successful.
22
@Lou S.-
Homelessness is a complex worldwide problem. For example, it’s a long-established fact of life throughout the Third World. All major African, South Asian, South American and Southeast Asian cities have their “favelas”, sprawling shantytowns. The bulk of the population survives in them as best it can often in desperate situations; a hand-to-mouth existence.
But even wealthy First World nations haven’t escaped it. The Republic of Ireland now confronts an acute rental housing shortage rooted in the Financial Crisis, although supply/demand imbalances and credit market dynamics are also to blame. And it’s no different here. Los Angeles and San Francisco are burdened with armies of homeless poor, both among the most expensive cities to buy or rent even a modest dwelling. New home construction hasn’t kept up with population growth but inflation has priced large segments of the population out of the market even if it could.
For working class and lower middle class Americans the economic picture remains bleak. Although the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act cut taxes for a wealthy few, it didn’t benefit most Americans nor create those promised jobs. So, wages stagnate, their purchasing power falling in constant-dollar terms. Reforms enacted in response to the Financial Crisis make qualifying for a mortgage difficult. Demand pushes the poorest into the streets, reduces them to penurious vagabonds.
Relocating them to concentration camps, as Trump suggests, is not the answer.
2
Trump should be so fortunate as to have the nation running like CaliforniaTrumpwo; soon follow the arch-criminal Netanyahu into the dust bin of history. Good riddance.
9
What is the Trump administration proposing to help end homelessness in California? What are the local governments doing or trying to do? This article could be far more useful if it focused on policy differences between the two parties rather than constantly expressing shock that they have agreed upon a problem.
13
Far more useful “stating where the parties differ”... than discussing similarities. Spoken like a true liberal partisan. That faction revels in differences, desires them, hopes for bigger and more extreme divisiveness. You remember the adage, ‘Man bites dog’. It is unusual when the parties agree, so why can’t we come to solutions! That is the story, here. Go back to CNN and MSNBC, or for that matter FOX to reinforce your biases, we’re trying to fix things.
He is not worried about California's homeless problem. He was always irked about the homeless people in front of his "beautiful" buildings. Hence his solution of incarceration en-masse of all these people.
Read about this person and his story.
https://www.cnn.com › 2019/09/17 › los-angeles-yale-graduate-homeless
18
Better to inherit daddy's money and live comfortably ever after. Right Donald?
29
Trump's only worry...homeless people make the real estate look bad.
65
@Edgar
Maybe so, but he knows that his words will resonate with a lot of property owners and especially small business owners who're fed up with dealing this day in and day out. Those people vote and make donations, the homeless don't.
5
@Edgar
Trump is afraid that homeless people will start sleeping right outside his front door on city property of his overpriced gaudy buildings.
Trump is afraid that the homeless person would be the actor Richard Gere who was filming a movie outside Grand Central, no one recognized him in his make up. Gere was highlighting the plight of the homeless but was touched by the generosity of the common man when strangers were so good to him.
Trump is an evil stupid man and California doesn’t need his concerns to do nothing.
5
If readers want the facts about the homeless in San Francisco, they should read the San Francisco 2019 Homeless Count and Survey Comprehensive Report http://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/FINAL-PIT-Report-2019-San-Francisco.pdf.
Get the facts and do not listen to the erroneous anti-poor propaganda being peddled by the criminal currently occupying the White House and his cabinet. Fact: 70 percent of our homeless had housing in SF prior to becoming homeless. Fact: 55 percent had lived in SF for 10 years or more.
The majority of our neighbors (because they are and have been our neighbors and part our communities) currently living on the streets come from California and have NOT been bussed from other places.
This administration does not care about human beings. The homeless are easy targets because, like immigrants, this sick administration preys on the most vulnerable among us. They demonize those who need help.
61
@Patricia
While your passion is laudatory, you do not address the fact that this is a self-inflicted, local problem due to the crazy cost of living and poor management by your leadership.
So what are you going to do about it?
6
@g
But, the point is that Trump is not really interested in trying to solve the problem. Instead, he wants to frame this as a failure of Democrats, as do you. And, Patricia's point, along with that of many others here, is that this is a distorted, politically-motivated characterization of the problem. There are larger societal forces in play, such as wealth inequality, urbanization, etc. which we as a society have not come to grips with.
6
@tyron Good question. On a personal level, what I do is vote for city supervisors who care about addressing the root causes of homelessness and support investment in supportive housing and social services. I also meet the homeless when I volunteer at the St. Anthony Foundation, one of the numerous organizations providing food, clothing and housing to the unhoused.
It is a fact that housing is the answer. Beds in wraparound mental health facilities are the answer.
I am embarrassed to read that some Americans think shuffling the homeless out of their neighborhoods and “not tolerating” them is an answer. Really, what have we become as a nation? So devoid of humanity and compassion. That to me is the problem, not the unhoused.
9
Little has changed in America since the Great Depression of the 1930's. The very poor, mentally challenge, addicted, and simply stupid, don't stand a chance in our society; never have. Our capitalist system is built to have a bottom, and these poor folks are the chosen. If you have a wealthiest 1%, you necessarily have a poorest 1%. Our political class should have figured out a way to mitigate the suffering of the poorest people, but it lacks the will and lacks the motivation, and lacks the intelligence. We are stuck. Perhaps we should warehouse all of them in those border cages that are now emptied? Perhaps we should solve the issue in more humane ways? It seems to me we have spent enough time whining about their condition and their presence.
11
Since homelessness is largely a mental illness problem, perhaps we need to return to the so-called mental institutions of yore. Not for everyone, of course. A basic assessment at would determine who goes where. For those who are otherwise mentally sound, perhaps they could go to supervised dormitory-style housing.
And no one---by choice or otherwise----would be allowed to live on the street.
All we need is the will and the dollars to pull this off. Perhaps a tax or 'destitution fee' on property developers? That would be one way to offset the very gentrification that contributes to homelessness and the affordable housing shortage overall.
38
@David Bartlett There are plenty of towns and cities where people are not allowed to camp on the street.
3
@David Bartlett
But real estate prices keep going up so it is harder and harder for the low paid workers, people scraping by, and the mentally ill to buy or rent shelter. Real estate prices go up because of planned or unplanned inflation.
4
@Anon You're right Anon and the blame for the inflation can be laid directly at the feet of the moment Smoot Hawley was scrapped, we went off the gold standard and worship of Milton Friedman Economics became the God of America’s bright and clever.
I hear California's a rich state. California is home to some of the world's richest and most innovative companies. In California there are famous and rich people who fight for the climate, for gender equality and for any other issue concerning the violation of human and animal rights. So why are there so many poor people and so much misery? Best regards from Padua (EU)
25
@Flavius The US since 1980 has with the political decisions of the Republicans greatly increased the income gap between rich and poor. There is no universal health care in the US - you get physically or mentally sick while not rich you die. People of the middle classes lose their homes to banks when a family member gets a bad cancer. This political group of which Trump is the worst example ever in the US has eliminated all social safety net. Essentially if people lose their jobs they may just end up on the streets-
US govt has favored corporate elites who siphon out all the money, very weak to nonexistent labor laws, workers are expendable. The 1% offshore their money in tax havens. Republicans like Senator Mitt Romney come from this mentality - he made a fortune destroying companies for profit. They accept bribes from corporations and are involved in destroying the balance of power between Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches through manipulation and corruption.
Its easy to see how it happened Flavius. The rich people won, everybody else lost. Current president owes mega money to Vladimir Putin who placed him there and is actively destroying the country´s institutions. So the US that your Venetian ancestors might have wanted to migrate to exists no more, change happens fast in the world. Surely you have seen that in your area. US needs to rout the terrible corruption of people like Trump, Mitch McConnell, Elaine Chao who are actively killing us.
2
@P Wilkinson
Any solution?
The Democrats have handed an issue to Trump for which they have no reasonable reason explanation.
Trump is simply pointing out that this is what you get when Democrats are in charge.
California has decided that laws really shouldn’t be enforced on Black people, or illegal immigrants, or poor people, or drug addicts...
It is a theme in the Democrat platform. Showing utter disdain and contempt for our laws and the people that enforce them, the police, ICE, rather than change the laws through democratic processes is a strangely anti-American position to take.
This election, if the economy keeps up, will be the one where people truly stop listening to Democrats’ constant whining about how horrible the US is.
26
Trump’s concern for homeless people is on a par with his concern for blacks, Hispanics, Muslims, coal miners, gays and women.
It’s all about what they can do for him.
52
@A. Stanton - Not to mention his utter Dis-concern with his wife or son, Baron he has never-ever mentioned
1
@SEAN
Coal miners vote, young boys don't.
1
I am a professor of social work and have been working with and studying the homeless for 25 years. We know what causes homelessness and how to fix it, and have know for some time. We need affordable housing and living wage jobs. As housing prices go up, and wages remain flat, housing loss increases alongside it. It has nothing to do with a person's character, period. What you see on the street is not the full picture- we have hundreds of thousands of people living in shelters, most of whom are in families, and working... and yes paying taxes. Their wages simply do not allow them to afford childcare (if people only knew how huge a problem affordable childcare is...!) , rent, healthcare, transportation. The vast majority of people experiencing this problem want to work, to contribute, to be productive. NIMBY is a problem, but we ultimately we need to look beyond public housing and shelters- this is basically institutionalizing people, simply because they are in lower or mid (yes the middle class) level earners. We need to create a society where people can house themselves, but as long as people are getting rich from the rising cost of housing, this won't happen. Don't just blame Republicans. Rich liberals offer lip service but as soon as their housing values are threatened its game over. It's pure greed. I don't really care about Trump's intentions- which I am sure are not good, but if he says or does anything that might help alleviate the suffering out there- I'm listening.
384
@W.F. Call
The people you are describing should be the easy ones to help. They know what they need and want to be successful members of society. Of course it's a money issue first and foremost, but the solutions are there. I believe helping these people before they become accustomed to living on the streets is a first step and should technically be the easy step. The problem remains what to do with the homeless population that will be left behind. The people who don't want help, mistrust the government, are mentally ill and/or addicted to drugs and alcohol. That will really test us as a society that values personal liberty above all else. Can you force people into shelters? Can you arrest people for sleeping on the streets? Should we accept that some will be unreachable and provide injection sites and bathrooms to keep our streets cleaner? This second step will be much harder and require real leadership, not just building more housing.
58
@W.F. Call - Well Said from a fellow(MSW, MPA) but I'm listening & only hear the roar of classism...
13
@W.F. Call
In the world there is enough for the needs of man, but not for his greed (Mahatma Gandhi)
45
The challenges of homelessness are like so many other social problems handed off to the government by society: we expect them to be SOLVED. We fund this program and that program, and look there are still homeless, or poor children, or people living in subsidized housing.
Yes there are. And there always be. Homelessness is not a new issue. It's been a problem for a long time. Maybe not as visible as it used to be, but there.
Since we can't really solve this problem yet, we have to manage it. Identify subsets of the population and target effective solutions to them. Victory will come one case at a time.
So many programs are temporary fixes to a permanent problem. Actively managing the problem with resources over time should not be regarded as a government failure ( ie why haven't they fixed this problem yet?) We expect things to get better, but homeless will be with us for a while.
5
I hadn't been to San Francisco in 12 years when I visited last month. I had read about the homeless problem, but seeing it for myself broke my heart. Besides gentrification, the closing of state-run mental hospitals across the country decades ago has turned many people onto the streets who are not the best suited to care for themselves. The financial means to help the homeless exists in the exceedingly rich U.S. It's time to stop complaining and resolve to continue to think creatively to find a solution that will help people live less painful lives with roofs over their heads.
45
We in the US neglect everything to spend $700 billion on the Military and $1 trillion on tax breaks to the wealthy. Homelessness addiction, mentally illness, chronic illness and infrastructure aren’t our priorities.
We can hav me it all if we realign our priorities to really make America great and not just great for the wealthy.
89
@Deirdre
you are correct in your assessment of our national priorities.
But my own reading and observations of the homeless includes the fact that a significant percentage of homeless refuse the large scale programs offered, particularly shelters. Call it their obsession with independence or anything else. (I refuse to give homeless one penny while they're on a street corner. I'll gladly help a homeless shelter program keep afloat and I think we all need to do the same.)
Even if we say they need mental health care, you can't ignore the fact that tens of thousand of non-homeless Americans who really want mental health care can't find it. So who should we prioritize then?
If we set aside 500 large scale housing projects for them, away from urban settings and in a more healthy semi-rural setting, how many of them would work their way back to cities such as S.F. and simply go back to living on the streets?
Then what do we do?
16
@Deirdre
I could not agree more.
The US spends $700 Billion annually on the military and Republicans gave $1.5 Trillion in tax breaks to the wealthy and corporations.
The money is there to tackle homelessness. Sadly Republicans loathe social welfare programs. Additionally they're hypocrites regarding fiscal conservatism since they gladly over-spend on the military and give tax revenue to the 1% and corporations while raising the national debt.
The minimum wage needs to be a living wage so low and middle income Americans can afford sky-rocketing housing costs.
I am confident that the homeless prefer a home to the streets. A home is not a mattress on the floor in the basement of a church.
1
This is an excellent article. It highlights the main causes of the problem—zoning laws, Nimbyism, drugs, and government policies. The solutions will be much harder to find. California is the epicenter of urban sprawl. It has a population similar to Metropolitan Tokyo, but it also has a footprint that is the size of almost California. There is very little buildable space left in the state, so they need to build “up”. However, there are few politicians willing to allow developers to do this, and government “projects” come with a stigma. So they are stuck.
4
We have plenty of room. It’s just not located in San Francisco.
5
I'm in NYC. I see some homeless. Invariably there is a bottle of liquor visible and, I would suspect that in many cases, what's not so visible are drugs.
If we address substance abuse issues much of the homeless problem will disappear. Get rid of the substances and many of these people will be rehabilitatable. Those hard core homeless who cannot be rehabilitated should be housed at public expense in decent, humane places. This living on the street business has got to go.
22
We need to bring back rent controlled apartments, if the average salary is $57,000 in the USA, and the average salary in large cities is under $100,000 then how can you afford to pay $4,000 a month rent for a studio apartment in alphabet city (NYC) where I grew up. If you want to buy the studio it may cost $800,000 to 1,000,000 to purchase.
11
Learn the basics of supply and demand. Rent control in NYC is part of the reason why it’s so expensive to find a market rate apartment. Nobody built anything new in NYC for decades because it didn’t make financial sense to do so.
It’s still not financially viable to build here unless aimed at big dollar rents and purchases. But when someone tries to build farther out in Brooklyn or Queens, the usual leftist interest groups get in the way.
If you don’t like it then YOU build it. Oh, right, you can’t because you have neither the money nor the resources. Hmmm. Funny how that works. So get out of the way of people who do and want to build.
Rents will never go down so long as 100Ks of people are looking to rent in a few 1K of available inventory.
You need more supply. Lots and lots more supply.
3
every time I see people camped on the street in NYC: bedding, crates, suitcases: encampments —it makes me ill. Most of these folks belong in hospitals or treatment programs—alcohol or drug abuse or psychiatric illness is the cause. Our inability not to “commit” the mentally ill and provide long term support for these sick people is the issue. This is rarely about “affordable”housing. It is about addiction and mental illness.
87
@Honeybluestar
It's about both, as there are working homeless people who also need homes.
As another commenter wrote, the reason you don't see the homeless families is they often sleep in shelters or their cars and during the day the parents work while the kids are in school.
2
Ben Carson is brilliant, as evidenced by his stellar record as a brain surgeon. Find the five or ten toughest jobs in the world, and brain surgery will be on the list.
But Dr. Carson also has a back story that makes him an excellent choice: "Benjamin Solomon Carson was born in Detroit, Michigan, on September 18, 1951, the second son of Sonya and Robert Solomon Carson. His mother was raised in Tennessee in a very large family and dropped out of school in the third grade. With limited prospects in life, she married Baptist minister and factory worker Robert Carson when she was 13. The couple moved to Detroit and had two children.
"Sonya eventually discovered her husband was a bigamist and had another secret family. After the couple divorced, Robert moved in with his other family, leaving Sonya and her children financially devastated.
"Ben was 8 and Curtis, his brother, was 10 when Sonya began to raise them as a single mother, reportedly moving to Boston to live with her sister for a time and eventually returning to Detroit. The family was very poor and, to make ends meet, Sonya sometimes toiled at two or three jobs simultaneously in order to provide for her boys. Most of the jobs she had was as a domestic worker."
Ben Carson's story is similar in several ways to that of another famous Black man: both had bigamist fathers who were absent from their young lives. The other man's mother and grandparents had more money and education. That other man is Barack Obama.
6
@Azalea Lover
"My own personal theory is that Joseph built the pyramids to store grain."
"Ultimately, if you accept the evolutionary theory, you dismiss ethics."
"Obamacare is really I think the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery." [not the Great Depression, nor WWII, nor 9/11...)
"A lot of people who go into prison go into prison straight -- and when they come out, they're gay."
"We'd be Cuba if there were no Fox News."
Some eloquent truths there, from a "brilliant" guy.
2
Why is it that the same people who blame homelessness and gun violence on mental health are the same people who slash public funding for mental health care at every opportunity? Are they ignorant or just hypocrites?
Developers like the President and his son in law are a huge part of the problem here. The kind of people who drive out working and middle class renters to build huge "luxury" apartments and condo buildings that sit empty. The kind of people who add "affordable" units to their buildings that are nowhere near affordable to anyone not making over 10x the average household income.
He wants to complain about California not cleaning up his (and his friends') messes, maybe we should start sending all our homeless to Columbus Circle and Park Avenue and see how these developers like it. Put a homeless shelter on 61st and Amsterdam. Let's build some Section 8 housing on 62nd & 3rd. Maybe then we'll see some movement on help for the homeless.
48
@Mike Ask the ACLU. And oh, by the way, the mentally ill homeless refuse assistance and mental health care.
I'm pretty sure that the majority of homeless are NOT policemen, firemen and teachers.
The Country has a mental health problem alright - at the top of the political class.
31
A landlord, along with his father, practiced housing discrimination and is now concerned about the homeless?
Naw, just more smoke and mirrors from the ringmaster of the dog and pony show.
Nothing to see. Move on.
But, is it not a state issue, dealing with the homeless?
19
The housing crisis, the health care crisis , the educational crisis are all examples of why we cannot leave those things we define as "essential human services" to the whims and fancy of the marketplace.
The real estate industry cannot make a sufficient profit to bother with creating shelter for people of modest means. Over the last 30 median housing const have gone up 296%. Median household income has only increased 14%.
One doesn't have to be a trained economist to do the math and see that the average American is living at, or beyond the breaking point.
There have been housing crises in the past. We resounded with rent control, urban development projects and massive public housing efforts. Some were misconceived. But we know better now how to do public housing right.
What we lack is the political will. Our real crisis is a crisis of our political economy.
16
Jeff Bezos makes 275 million a day. In 36 hours he could give every person a America 1 million. Amazon gets fed tax REBATES.... the last one was around 130 million. Yes, there is something incredibly wrong with this. Do voters have the courage to fix it??
112
@Ahf
Actually that would be $1 dollar to every American in 36 hours
19
@Ahf
I can't think of anything we could do to fix it.
Except maybe voting for Bernie Sanders.
6
@Ahf Voters are ignorant in the USA .
They just don't know.
Everything in the narrative of the social strata is made so that they don't know .
And the press, the educated, don't do anything to tell them .
1
So let me get this straight. We can't afford to feed the homeless, we can't afford to house them, we can't afford health care for the homeless,but if they break the law seriously enough then they get all of the above in prison. Am I missing something?
119
@Mhevey
To paraphrase a classic American line:
"Millions for punishment, but not one cent in care."
26
@Mhevey
Don't forget that the private prison industry, which was becoming very nervous under Obama, is booming again.
15
People are homeless as for many reasons, but they go to places, like the West Coast, because the climate in Seattle, Portland, and California cities is temperate, and they move from city to city, state to state. Pretty much everything has been tried in the fight against homelessness. The Ten Year Plan (Bush) to End Homelessness by helping people into housing, didn’t work. Passing laws to forbid sitting and lying on sidewalks in the core downtown (Portland) didn’t work because they were over turned. Shelters work for only people willing to sleep inside (some people think there are cameras and recording devices in the walls). Providing bus tickets to go “home” or some place said to have jobs...no. Homeless people are: families and individuals priced out of housing; addicts; mentally ill, since Reagan’s “de-institutionalization “; young people aged out of foster care; people recently released from county jails and prisons; runaways of all genders. I picture Trump having police round everyone up, then putting them in detainment camps in the desert. The man has no empathy, morals or ethics.
37
@Brenda Snow Mayor Guiliani tried to arrest all the homeless people here in NY in the late-90s.
https://www.nytimes.com/1999/11/20/nyregion/in-wake-of-attack-giuliani-cracks-down-on-homeless.html
1
@Brenda Snow First it was the ACLU that closed down institutions. Took the states to court and won. Second, most homeless are men, capable of working but won't. You don't see women and families living on the streets - they prefer housing. And if you cannot afford to live on the west coast, you shouldn't be there. I'm not, my friends have left. All because we cannot afford it and cannot tolerate the public school disaster.
In the midst of all this 'wealth' is this disgraceful situation.
I spent 11 great years in SF but am very glad to be out of it. The place is the new Potemkin Village and speaks very poorly about inequality in this ghastly time of ours.
24
Completely omitted from this article -- as if it was totally irrelevant ! -- is the question of how many people in California need housing. In one lifetime(70 years) the number of people in California has quadrupled, going from 10 million in 1950 to about 40 million now. Could it possibly be that adding 30 million people to California has something to do with the increase in number of homeless?
24
@Marigrow So you're saying California should build a wall, to keep people from other states from coming in and living on the streets?
4
Isn't it ironic that a guy who has lived in a limo-lined bubble all of his life, who has probably never even actually walked a sidewalk in San Francisco or L.A.....has any view about homelessness ? Typical him, his focus is only on the optics of them living on our 'best sidewalks and highways'. Translation: 'me and my rich donor-buds don't want to have to look at them them as our limos pass by ', and ' they're bringing down our property values'.
An economy that has increasingly favored only part of the population, and developers seeking involvement in 'high-end' projects, Tump's 'opportunity zone' shtick which will only serve to enrich more developers and push more poor people out of already limited affordable housing...... the lack of access to quality health/mental healthcare which the GOP is determined to make even worse.....
Sure, homeless people....Trump cares about you, ha.
23
It is well known that Trump despises anything he perceives as “weak” or “broken” and no doubt he would put the homeless in either of those categories. By the way, it is way past old for Trump and his supporters to keep whining about what President Obama did or didn’t do in response to everything Trump has failed to fix. We are three years into the “maga reality show” and Trump can’t legitimately claim one solid achievement of his own making that he didn’t inherit from the previous administration. Wasn’t Trump the guy who said he is the genius who would fix this country’s problems all by himself? Trump’s sadistic response to the weak and broken is to despise and exploit them for political gain with his base.
23
Trump is a bozo, but this isn’t on him. You may not like what he says about it, but his policies didn’t create the issue, and the D’s have had full control of the state and most of the cities for some time now.
27
@Bk2 It will be as stated in the piece when he and the $30,000 dining room man take public assistance from people.
3
@Dan I have no idea what that means. Explain.
I live in Fairfax County, Virginia, about 15 minutes outside Washington. Fairfax County is one of the wealthiest counties in the country, with a high proportion of professional people and government employees and one of the highest percentages of people with graduate degrees in the country.
The public high schools in Fairfax County have been on the list of top 100 U.S. high schools for decades. 2 are currently ranked in the top 20.
The public housing waiting list for the poor, disabled and mentally ill in Fairfax County has been closed to new applicants for 12 yrs. Most people on the waiting list will never be offered an apartment.
Someone I know, a 50 yr old veteran, became homeless when a medical problem left him unable to work. He lived in his truck for several months before moving into a homeless shelter located in an old post office.
This is a scandal in one of the wealthiest counties in the country.
I have never heard my congressman, Gerry Connolly, mention this problem.
I have never heard my senators, Mark Warner and Tim Kaine,
mention this problem.
If Fairfax County won't provide public housing for poor and disabled residents because there is no initiative to do so, what county in this country with resources is willing to?
In this wealthy county with a highly educated population, there is no desire to tackle this problem.
275
@fast/furious ... When the homeless start erecting tents or sleeping in sleeping bags on the door steps of businesses and the wealthy they'll get interested in doing something.
14
@fast/furious
NIMBYism at its finest!
Thanks for sharing and calling out your politicians. While all homelessness is abhorrent, we should all be really embarrassed at how we treat or veterans in need.
14
@fast/furious I work in a public library in western Maryland and see the same thing. People come to the desk asking to check the wait list for public housing and it's years, sometimes as long as 5 years. My mother is chronically disabled and when the section 8 neighborhood I grew up in got sold to a slumlord who gave discounts for a year's worth of rent up front, what was a nice family neighborhood (albeit poor) turned into a haven for drug lords and crime. The new developer gave my mother 6 months to get out (which was generous) but the wait list for section 8 housing was over 2 years, and this was 20 years ago. If she hadn't had an aunt with room to spare, she would have been on the streets. This is the reality of the housing problem in America. It isn't just mental illness and drug abuse. It is greed and callousness, a dark rot in the soul of America. We are the richest nation in the world but we can't even adequately care for the most vulnerable among us.
37
Cities have lacked and continue to lack any semblance of federal guidance regarding homelessness. They've had to create a patchwork of solutions subject to the vagaries of election cycles. There's no long-term, overarching plan in place to take care of these people. There's no permanent budget earmarked for feeding and sheltering them. When public sentiment (i.e. the sentiment of those better off) sways towards the unsympathetic, such as when cities are so embarrassed by their inability to handle the crisis that they capriciously do everything they can to hide it, there aren't any guidelines to stop them.
The lack of guidance or support is due to a lack of interest, plain and simple. Any time the federal government doesn't want to act, they cry state and municipal rights faster than the staunchest libertarians. At times, they're practically bordering on social anarchism. It's a race to the bottom for who can care the least.
8
@Sean
One of the underlying problems is the Faircloth Amendment, which forbid any federal money for building new public housing -- only federal money to destroy existing public housing.
If the free market is clearly failing, as it is, the solution is for the government to build new housing.
When people from Communist countries describe the good and the bad, they often say, "I never saw anyone sleeping on the streets."
2
@Norman The so-called "free market" does not exist in the US. What you have is a government by the wealthy for the wealthy. Rest of us are serfs.
It’s illegal in Cuba to evict people from their homes.
I also never saw homeless in Germany. I asked a German friend about it and he said that there are homeless in Germany but “we provide them with homes. “
This country has a mental health problem. So many of these other problems are a result of that. Of course any normally functioning human wants a safe home to live in, but many of these on the street have severe mental illness that prevents them from achieving that, drugs and alcoholism are forms of self medication, the only things that makes them feel better. Even though they’re are a few services available, many do not want to accept the services, or even acknowledge that they are suffering from mental health. They cannot be forced to be evaluated, unless they are a threat to themselves or a threat to others. We need to do better. More aggressive mental health outreach, and better support and rehabilitation after. I was born as raised in San Francisco, and it’s a shame what has become of that city.
31
@D
I believe you are 100% correct. At the root of homelessness is mental illness. Who wants to live in a cardboard box?
We have a very poor system in place to help the mentally ill.
They cannot be involuntarily committed until they are a danger to others or to themselves? I wonder if anyone realizes how much damage is done when a unchecked mentally ill person is allowed to roam the streets and until they pull a knife on someone its ok?
This is an absolute failure on our part as a society. I'm glad the homeless are camping in doorways.
8
@D You are not able to see that mental illness is also a symptom of socio economic pressure ?
Bad education in the USA .
6
@JPH How right you are. The media loves to ignore that fact. The socio-economic pressure in the US is crippling us as a society. These are the results.
1
What this article highlights so clearly is that homelessness and poverty predominate in cities completely controlled by liberal Democrats. Those same people refuse to consider bipartisan solutions, much less working in anyway with President Trump for improvement. Yet they blame Republicans for the mess they have created.
You also accurately point out that governor Newsom ran on a platform of creating 3.5 million housing units for the homeless, knowing that it was a pie in the sky proposal. This is the Democratic Party of today. Whimsical ideas with no chance of implementation while blaming the other side for everything. You reap what you sow.
17
@HENRY The doubt that the perponderence of liberal leaning voters in large urban areas is the cause of urban problems, but is more likely the electorate's response to the social and infrastructural problems that they see every day around them. I'll wager that more conservatives lean liberal after making a life in a large city and witnessing these problems, than liberals turn conservative after moving out.
6
@HENRY The reason the numbers are so high in California has nothing to do with who is running the city/state. That's a Trumpian argument. It's about the weather. Where would you choose to live outside, CA or MI?
5
@HENRY Well, rather than help find a solution you have climbed aboard the Trump Blame Train.
The liberals, those pesky liberals, unwilling to find a bipartisan solution and on and on. Lay the blame on the first convenient group that is in range.
That is what Trump has done and many believe.
Have you ever thought that conservatives can also be blamed?
There are "liberal" cities that are attempting to take action, bipartisan action.
But Trump and other diehard conservatives will attempt to take credit rather than help. Just like Trump and his adoring fans have done with California.
2
We won't begin to solve the "homeless" problem until we call it what it actually is: a DRUG problem. The media could do its part by explaining and investigating the drug issues deeply involved in homelessness and how (perhaps) the laissez faire attitude in California towards crime and drugs is one factor (among many) creating the "homeless" problem. It isn't just the cost of housing, or even primarily the cost of housing. It's drugs; helping people get off of drugs is the #1 way to deal with homelessness.
22
@Jason McDonald. Agree: drugs and alcohol exacerbate the homelessness and unemployment, but, as many have pointed out, a large portion of the homeless are self medicating a chronic mental illness, so it would be better to focus on treating the illnesses that drives drug use, homelessness, and unemployment.
It may not be "just the cost of housing," but it certainly is a "primarily" cause. The homeless usuallu aren't qualified to earn enough to afford market rate housing in large cities, especially those in Southern California, and there just isn't enough affordable subsidized housing to put them in, unless you plan to forcefully relocate them to places that are often lacking in convenient public housing and employement.
2
Of course homelessness is a worthy subject for news: some of us also would like to know who, in the bastion of liberalism was in attendance at the Trump fund raiser?
Likewise CA, home to the Hollywood elite, often critical of this administration, but have there been Trump fund raisers there as well?
One wonders, the very wealthy Silicon Valley C suite execs, entertainment & athlete multimillionaires ...etc once Behind the Voting Curtain how do they really vote?
IE Tax cuts are very seductive.
3
This is the second article I've seen here that tries to turn the homeless problem into a standard Trump piñata article. Yet another reader I see is blaming Reagan, as if nothing could have been done about his policies.
I don't think this attempted deflection works. The grotesque condition of their cities is indeed a good political stick with which to beat the Democrats.
Sometimes I wonder if Trump is a figure similar to the Duc d'Orleans. I marvel that the citizens of Seattle, SF, LA, Oakland, etc. can wade through this mess day after day.
We are badly governed. Third party now.
10
Wow! So all of this homelessness and drug use occurred only after Trump became President. I guess we should go back to doing whatever Obama was doing so successfully. I find it strange that no Democrats made mention of Obama’s hugely successful programs that virtually eliminated poverty and homelessness throughout America. Or maybe he didn’t ever attempt that goal and the problems existed long before Democrats could blame Trump. California has billions in surplus tax money. They should spend it on problems like this. There’s plenty of empty land east of Indio California that wouldn’t cost much to develop with high quality housing for the homeless. It is in nobody’s backyard. Meanwhile, many California residents are fleeing to other states with lower taxes and fewer problems. Maybe California can erect walls to keep them in.
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@Richard Wright
You're right about the Democrats, but that's the result of the neoliberal takeover of the party.
As the left has been saying for years, the Democratic Party has been taken over for years by neoliberals like the Clintons, Obama, Chuck Schumer, Rahm Emanuel, etc., whose main contribution to the party is to serve the needs of rich contributors. So they've been becoming more and more like the Democrats.
The question in the Democratic Party is whether someone like Bernie Sanders should try to reform it within the party, whether he should challenge them with a third party, or whether it's hopeless.
Robert Reich said, "I'm 75. It's not my problem. It's your problem."
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@Richard Wright
You are spot on! Building walls to keep people in California is really humorous given the States' position on amnesty and open borders.
2
The answer to the problem is.....Welcome companies like Amazon into your community to build their headquarters and give them huge tax breaks to do so. And create wonderful 'urban renewal'. When your economic model is to do everything in your power to help people and corporations that do not need the help, this is what happens. There are no services to help the homeless. And no tax money to pay for those services. Americans need to recognize the downside to voodoo economics when they slip on it on the sidewalks of San Francisco. Americans think there is an easy answer. Like locking up children at the border. Out of sight/out of mind. You either take peoples' rights away and force them into cage like places. Or come to realize that taking some of that wealth away from people who don't need it may help pay for mental health services, substance abuse treatment, affordable housing. Yes. I know, you don't want your taxes to go to pay for lazy homeless people that won't work. You can't have it both ways. Either treat them like animals or as human beings. Make up your mind. Chop, chop. We've got to get the country looking pretty and all so Trump can get reelected.
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@Walking Man
you said:
> You can't have it both ways. Either treat them like animals or as human beings. Make up your mind.
+1 on that.
Notably, if you allow to monopolize resources like land (=space for living) - and Trump himself is one of the big players in this game - at the hand of few powerful people, its no wonder you end up with some unable to cope at the lower end.
And for the likes of Trump, this seems to be more a matter of taste, then a social problem or a matter of humanity.
In medieval Germany, some aristocrats ordered their equipage to warn them on excursions: on the cue 'common people present', the aristocrats would turn their noses to the sky, as not to be bothered with the sight of poverty - the very poverty their inept reign caused in the first place.
Questions:
- will America - the land of the free - install Mr. Trump as its monarch?
- or will it start to curb the power of the rich ones to bully the others around?
Funny enough, Trumps ancestors are German.
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@T Trump's grandfather was kicked out of Germany for cowardice and draft-dodging. Isn't the US lucky to have a family with such a proud tradition?
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@Walking Man
Trump is in the real estate business. He is only too happy to create more opportunities for his contractor cronies, be it building walls, prisons, detentions centers, or homeless shelters. Of course, they all will have the same inhumane characteristics we are already seeing.
I'm sure, too, that Trump will be profiting from all of these in one way or another. Our country has become one big gold mine for him personally.
6
Skyrocketing rents and high salaries from the tech industry have priced out long time residents in SF and LA, and NY to a lesser lesser extent.. exacerbating the problem. These are cities in which people of varying means used to be able to live.
Clearly, it is a big problem, both for the people living in these conditions, and for public health and safety.
But Trump's concern is not with the welfare the homeless, but of those who step over or around them. Some may be mental ill, some have drug problems, and need services. Some are teachers or nurses or other full time workers who just can't afford $3000/month for rent - living in cars, but none of them have access to basics of bathroom or showers easily. I had a friend who lived in her car for 2 years in LA, keeping a gym membership so she could shower, a library card for internet access.
Trump wants the cities "cleaned up", Remove the unpleasantness and ship them to camps somewhere else. Judging form the the amount of empathy he has shown towards migrants, babies and children, the fate for these homeless looks likely to be worse in the camps than on the street. There will be no treatment nor rehabilitation, just removal.
In the meantime - we do need solutions to this as it spreads to other cities, other towns because the situation is untenable and indefensible in the richest country in the world.
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@Ellen you need to do more research very few of these people are because of affordability. The average person that’s homeless due to housing not drugs or mental illness is quite low and is typically solved within 3 months. The rest are there because they’re not well and need serious mental health help which CA refuses to provide because they believe that human rights apply to those extremely ill. They need to forcibly institutionalize people. If areas get too expensive you simply move. Leave the state if necessary. There’s 49 others more affordable than SF. You have millions of illegal aliens in CA do you see them sleeping on the streets? Nope.
11
Trump’s solution reminds me of the old movie where people were turned into food, Soylent Green.
2
I honestly don't know what the solution is to this problem. All I know is that the stunning jewel of the San Francisco I lived in back in the '90s is no longer. What happened is anyone's assumption but I was beyond shocked to see it last year. Very, very sad.
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@Na
Good point however the wealthy tech guys are not that sharing as they take separate buses to work. Real estate increased so dramatically that both rent and purchasing is extremely difficult for the majority .
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@Nan
I lived in San Francisco in the 1990's and there was a lot of homeless even then
18
There is no way I could afford ANYTHING in the Bay now. I could barely get by 20 years ago and I had a pretty decent job. I'm sure it's untouchable now.
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I often wonder what the answer to solving the Homeless Crises is. It seems so complicated that it makes solving health care easy.
Who is homeless? Is it mentally ill people? Drug addicts? Foster kids? People's rent that went up? Domestic violence?
And then we ask; are people entitled to receive help? Can landlords charge whatever they want and keep raising rents? Where will new low-income housing be built? Do we mandate a living wage?
And do we... fill in the blank...
Homelessness is out of control, not only here in the Bay Area but around the country. To people who point to us and criticize California's problem with homelessness you should know this is a national crises. When I talk to homeless people they come here from all over the country in hopes of finding a better life. In other words these people are your people and your families. In fact my own sister was homeless from 1997-2006. We did not know if she was dead or alive and raised her (abandoned) children.
I feel that housing is a need such as utilities are a need. I think that we need a type of Marshall Plan to solve this issue. We need all of the states to step up and help their citizens before they get on that bus and come here to California. We need California to step up and help their own before they land on the streets.
I do not see a huge uprising of people who have the will to do this and until that happens it will be status quo I'm afraid
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@FerCry'nTears We are where we are today in California because the Democratic Party has sold their soul to the activist left and their progressive co=dependents. State, county, & municipal legislators have made it impossible for new housing to be built. This is a Democratically controlled state from top to bottom. Affordable housing has always been one of the cornerstones of our party. This state should be a showcase on how well we can execute this policy. Instead, it's yet another example of our complete hypocrisy. It's symptomatic of a much bigger problem. The growing divide between some Democrats who want to practice what they preach & fanatical progressives who want to strangle everything. Environmentalists will go to the barricades to stop any housing projects from being built here. Mind you we are talking about affordable housing for working-class families. Thanks to their efforts the gateway to middle-class security, has been pushed way beyond their reach. The ease with which environmentalists can stop housing developments is a direct result of the numerous local & state laws that favor environmental concerns over affordable homes. The result: millions of hard-working people are without access to high-quality low-cost housing. The question needs to be asked? Do we need people in the party who are subverting core American values? If we can't fix affordable housing here then we are a joke. We all have a stake in solving this crisis. But our leaders don't have the will.
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@Bill Brown
It's only been a "Democratic controlled" state for a short time. The Republicans broke or stole everything and someone's whining because the repair job is taking too long?
14
@Bill Brown
So if we get rid of the environmentalists everything will be solved? I read your letter a few times because it confused me. What you are saying about not wanting to build due to environmental reasons is outdated by more than a few years. In fact it is the wealthy communities who do not want to provide housing. Sure they like to have workers come in and mow their lawns and clean their houses, as long as they're gone by nightfall it seems.
It is these very communities that are being sued by the state for their failure to build housing. I also must tell you that I for one am glad that California has improved their air quality (a lot of backsliding going on there lately I'm sorry to say). I'm glad the coastline is not built up with high rises and that everybody can enjoy the ocean. Thank you environmentalists for that!
You are full of talking points and blame but no solutions.
I don't know why but your letter made this quote from Shakespeare's MacBeth come into my mind-
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
3
There are homeless men, women and children in every state and city in the U.S. some invisibly eat and live in church shelters at night others encamp in the darkness of parking lots and woods.
We need to address how to feed, clothe and shelter them first, then address the every growing problem of those homeless with mental illness. A extended family member has schizophrenia and lives on the streets of LA. The family has two choices, institutionalization or allow her be homeless. Her family visits but she refuses to “live” with them. Is she harmless? Yes, but not a pretty sight for the people who love her and the citizens of California.
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I don’t think the family can force an adult into mental health treatment any more. Here, at least, a 3-day hold is the most that can be done.
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@Brenda Snow
They claim it's a human rights issue but the number of mental health beds for long-term stays is so limited as to be absolutely useless.
With Kaiser of the Bay Area, for example, they have a one-month day program (IOP) that regularly hits its quota and has to turn away anyone not vigorously suicidal. And that's the backstop for inpatient, which takes only those who are both severely ill and who have some treatment option. Inpatient beds are de facto nonexistent.
Regular hospitals don't want to touch these folks beyond emergency room care.
There is no treatment or sanctuary for the severely mentally ill, and the result is cruel to them...and to the rest of us.
11
@Mary Murphy And our laws need to change to enable forced care for the mentally ill. But, the ACLU fought that too.
Another example of Trump reaching across the aisle. Americans need to take an honest look at Trump and they will start to notice that he has very centrist and moderate policies and he is very focused on actually getting things done. He has upset the political dynamic because he does not fit the stereotypical politician mold and ran as a Republican. Unfortunately, his approach is often crude and, as a result his impact is diminished.
15
You’re joking, right? One would never put Trump and humanitarian in the same sentence, much less centrist. This is another of Trump’s attempts at attention seeking.
21
@AB
O for that to be true. He reaches across the aisle but then forgets what he was reaching for. His centrist policies include putting children in cages, with space blankets for warmth on cement floors, where pre-teens are sexually abused and the whole lot is fed ramen noodles. He rolls back environmental protections that 90% of the US supports, like for clean air and endangered species. He has upset the political dynamic because he is a puppet for our emerging oligarchy and was put into office after losing the popular vote by three million - and that's without estimating the vote tampering by Russia.
His impact is diminished not by his crudeness but by his being about as constant as a weathervane, by his improvisational approach to serious matters that take study and preparation, of which he is utterly incapable, and by his tendency to go with whatever was said to him last. His impact is further diminished by what seems to be the diminishment of his reasoning, physical balance and memory. He fires cabinet officials on by Twitter ambush. He goes AWOL for days at a time. . .
I'd leap at the chance to be frustrated by the President you describe. It's not Trump.
14
Is Trump a “centrist”?
He’s certainly not a principled conservative, as he ignores or trashes conservative principles like balanced budgets, free trade, federalism (e.g. allowing California’s clean air laws) and standing up to Russian dictators.
But he’s no liberal either, given his vicious bigotry, gross misogyny, destruction of environmental protections and his zeal for caging impoverished immigrant kids.
I’m all for bipartisan solutions, but we probably have to wait for a sane, decent grownup leader before progress can really happen.
7
This a Democratic-controlled state from top to bottom. The homeless crisis is yet another example of our complete intellectual bankruptcy. We talk the talk but we never walk the walk. This issue has gotten dramatically worse in the past decade with zero solutions. As of January 2018, California had an estimated 129,972 experiencing homelessness on any given day. California's rate of homelessness, 33 per 10,000 residents, was among the highest in the country. Among homeless veterans, California has the nation’s highest share that are unsheltered (67%). It's simply unacceptable. California has a housing crisis — not an “alleged housing shortage” as state politicians like to label it. According to the most recent survey by the state we will need to build 180,000 homes per year through 2025. We've been building 80,000. The current deficit of needed housing in the state is about 3.5 million units, with little hope of closing the gap. The strain is hardest on rental housing for moderate- and low-income residents, most of whom pay more than 30% of their income toward rent (the standard for “unaffordable” housing) and a third of whom pay more than 50%. There is a fundamental flaw in the state’s housing policy: It has placed responsibility for residential development in the hands of local officials whose political fortunes are tied to local voters who organize to oppose construction of apartment buildings, especially for lower-income residents. This is embarrassing and indefensible.
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@Bill Brown
At least Gavin Newsom's administration is going after municipalities and demanding they build housing. He has been singling out affluent cities. This is the first time I have seen this
5
@Bill Brown What are your thoughts on climate change? Did you know the CA coast cannot, has never been able to, sustain the growth invited by your policies (e.g. open borders, no property tax increases)? Are you aware that the only available CA lands are arid or desert and people 'want' to live on the coast? Do homeless get to live on the coast? We need mental institutions and to recognize that too many men want to live on the streets. Then what?
Homelessness is a problem. No question. However, worrying about prestige is such a shallow, narcissistic response to that problem, it is hard to believe anyone would lack the shame to vocalize such a concern.
Let's face it, as a nation, we have become used to homelessness since Ronald Reagan jumped at the idea of closing mental hospitals because patients could be "cured" by meds which never worked. But hey, it saved us money, right? Well, one simpleton GOP politician helped create this mess, so it follows that another one should solve it. Let's see Trump find a humane way to "get them off the streets". The genie is out of the bottle. Let's see him get it back in.
255
You are rewriting history pure and simple and at worst making it up. I was a psychologist in the 70s during the deinstitutionalization craze. The idea of closing mental hospitals was a liberal idea pure and simple, based on the radial notion of Thomas Szaz that mental illness was a lifestyle choice. Those people from institutions joined the hippie street people from the 60s who were left over drug users. That created the street culture of the early 80s it was not Regan. I agree that conservative politicians never follow through on community mental health centers but just like today’s homelessness problem there’s enough blame to go around and it doesn’t help for partisan and idealogical reason to completely blame one side or the other certainly not Regan who came after the idea entered mainstream society. If we’re going to solve our problems and use scientific methods then we need to be clear eyed and practical and not ideological.
151
@Paul
That's because a lot of the institutions were scandalous. Think One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest here. It never really was replaced with appropriate care.
17
@FerCry'nTears One flew over the cuckoo‘s nest was a novel. I’m not justifying the conditions in some of the institutions but there were some very very sick people there (I know I worked in one) and very dedicated staff and it did not justify throwing out the entire model. We were shocked when we were told by the state that the institution was closing down. It was obvious these politicians had no idea what they were doing. Conservatives may have been eager to save money but the liberals did not have to hand it to them on a plate by destroying the whole system. There was some very good work being done with very sick people under difficult conditions. But what we have now is mental patients on the street self-medicating with drugs. Is that better?
40
There are many reasons for the large number of homeless people in California aside from the amount of housing. Many people from all over the country get themselves to Los Angeles and San Francisco because of cultural factors (they are more tolerated), the weather is better, they hope for job opportunities, and they get better support from various programs. These factors also attract people from Latin America, Asia, and the Pacific. Many areas in the US dump their misfits and mentally ill on California. So building high density housing will not solve the problem, and in some cases may exacerabate it. High-quality medical facilities for the mentally ill, if it is possible to actually make them, would help both the cities and the homeless.
163
@seattle expat. No other state is dumping the homeless in California. They go there of their own volition.
6
@Thomas Smith .... Actually some states do move their homeless to other states. I remember reading Boulder, CO did this...some time ago. Homeless were given a one way ticket out of town.
10
@Thomas Smith
Seattle expat is 100% correct. For decades, many cities and states across the country paid for one way bus for homeless/transients/vagrants/etc to come to California. SF especially. This very newspaper you're commenting on just wrote an article about it four days ago in fact. Look it up. Mike Baker wrote it.
16
For too many years cities have looked to Washington to solve the problem of homelessness. At least with Trump no one is under the illusion that he will be of any assistance. The answer to the crisis must come from within the localities through changes in zoning, available jobs, education, drug treatment and early intervention. If San Francisco cares about the homeless then the people of that city need to solve the problem. Don't look to Trump, he doesn't care.
28
@Jeff
Right. He doesn't care and his deregulation will eventually kill everyone, including the homeless. By then the one person he cares about, himself, will be dead. Meanwhile, too many American voters remain focused solely on the economy--they really don't care about the homeless. They should be wondering what good money will do any off us if we are on our way to extinction caused by a polluted world. Actually, we may all be dying from the effects of toxic air, sooner than predicted, or from temperatures so hot we all perish.
10
@Jeff
Thank you for mentioning San Francisco. They have been housing homeless in Single Room Occupancy Hotels for awhile now (about ten years?). This is working for the lucky ones who can take advantage of this. The City takes over a hotel, refurbishes it and provides supportive services in the building. There is mental help and help with drug issues and health problems. Even if they are still doing drugs in their rooms it still makes a huge difference to them personally to have stability and access to plumbing as well. A lot of these formally homeless when asked say they are happy with this situation
24
This has all been done. Nothing works, that’s why it’s a crisis.
4