On one end of the spectrum, temporary homelessness typically garners the most sympathy, and brings the least trouble in terms of drug use and other petty crime.
On the other end, the chronic homeless are harder to deal with. My ex who worked with the local metro homeless population was frustrated by these, who through mental illness and / or drug use were simply not capable of dealing with the responsibilities needed to maintain a home or apartment; things like getting a job and not getting evicted for various bad behavior reasons. The hardest to deal with were those who refused to get help; no medicine, no job training program, no finance management couse, nothing accepted but food and cash.
These are the ones who are often the most visible- defecating on sidewalks, drugs, harassing people who are just going about their day.
You can have the biggest heart in the world, and you still won't be able to help them short of bringing back forced institutionalization, which no one wants either.
People who recently have become homeless would qualify, assuming they could provide mail or something from a year ago, but even that seems like a stretch for most people, I think.
Also, I don't know about SF, bit quite a few of the services provided here in the Midwest are privately run (I.e. in association with churches or otherwise non-profit), and I don't know that such a ban could be imposed on them.
They also aren't necessarily liberal when it comes to their personal safety.
People are individuals--watch what each individual does.
For those of you not from this area, it'd be hard to believe just how bad the SF homeless situation really is, and how it's tied to drug use and mental illness.
SF has a lot of resources for homeless people, so functional homeless folks who want help can get it. Shelters and low income housing up and down the peninsula don't allow drug use, don't allow people with criminal records, and some don't allow men. Cold weather shelters make exceptions, but those are very temporary. Those conditions exclude a lot of the homeless who would like to use them. Then, you have the issue of the homeless who are heavy drug users, mentally ill, or simply don't want to be in a shelter. These three groups are most of the homeless you see in the streets. San Francisco (and San Jose's) big homeless problems are exacerbated by the fact that peninsula cities crack down on homeless people by buying a bus ticket to SF or SJ, whichever is cheaper, and police escorting them to the bus.
So, as someone who's lived in the area for over twenty years, I'm sick of San Francisco's lack of action on this problem. On one side you have shelters, but on the flip side is utter lack of enforcement of loitering, since being on public land isn't illegal. These people need help, rehab, or even institutionalization, but you can't force that, and nobody's willing to pay for it. It's a mess, and the more money SF throws at homeless people in the form of food, shelters, and safe injection sites, the more homeless people it "hires" from abroad.
edit: That article is disingenuous. The homeless on the streets of SF are not due to displacement by tech, though I'm sure that contributes. They come from all over for the perks. The weather is mild, food is available, police turn a blind eye to minor crimes and shooting heroin on Market street, so as far as being homeless goes, it's not the worst place to be.
So they're explicitly designed to not shelter the majority of people needing them, that seems counter-productive. Is smoking crack in the shelter somehow worse than doing it in the street? Are they supposed to work out their addiction problem while they've got no where to live and no job?
If you're going to run shelters like that then they're just a feel good measure to make people think there's help available and nothing more.
Certainly it is going to be a lot worse for the politician who approved/backed this shelter, once this is packaged into a nice little media story like „X pays for smoking crack“.
There are not many politicians out there willing to do the right thing and being prepared to handle the expected uninformed outrage.
You have evidence of this?
Navigation Centers are far more than homeless shelters. They take people in as they are (pets, belongings, partners, etc.) and provide on-site services. Unlike traditional shelters, occupants are not forced back on the streets in the morning just to wait in line for a bed that night.
I have one in my neighborhood. I took a tour with a few other neighbors last year. I can’t imagine how you can argue that it would be better for the people I saw to be living outside on the streets.
Every district in San Francisco should have at least one Navigation Center.
"Family safety" has to be the most overused euphemism for "property values".
If you don't live here, you probably don't know that the Embarcadero area is, as the article says, right by the bay bridge. Heavily tourist-y area. The "wealthy people" of San Francisco actually live a mile or so away, in Russian Hill, Pacific Heights, Lake District (by Bakers Beach) etc. Embarcadero is also right by the FiDi / downtown area where Salesforce, Affirm, BlackRock, Lending Club and several other startups and major Corps have offices. So it's also a safety concern for the workers in downtown as the homeless population in SF is generally more aggressive than in the rest of the country.
A lot of homeless people in San Francisco also are drug users. It's not common to walk in downtown and step on a used needle. So building the housing in the downtown, touristy area is only going to deter people from coming to San Francisco, and deter companies from holding their conventions[1]. There's already 1 such example of a major medical convention cancelled from Moscone cos they were concerned with safety of their attendees due to homeless person crimes. That area has a lot of homeless people around there, many of who are quite aggressive, mentally ill etc.
This is not a case of NIMBY. It's far more complex than that.
I'm just calling it as I see it.
[1] Major medical group cancels San Francisco convention due to safety concerns => https://sf.curbed.com/2018/7/3/17531240/convention-moscone-c...
But I have a real hard time making the mental leap from "these people are an eyesore" to "I think we should force these people to leave." They're just living their lives, trying to make it day to day. They're people. I pass the same homeless people on the way to work and back every day. They're as much a part of the community as I am.
The crime angle seems transparently like dog whistling for people who are really concerned with property values, or for people who turn up their nose at the powerless and wish they'd go be someone else's problem. A few decades ago "crime" and "safety" were euphemisms deployed against urban youth who made middle-class white people nervous. It's depressing to see another generation of the same prejudice, now applied to a different marginalized group.
It will be interesting to see how it unfolds. I imagine the city will either find a way to return to greatness or descend into further dystopia. Which will it be? How will it be accomplished? Truly amazing.
