If you want to find out what a situation is like, why would asking someone about it be more informative than actually going there and witnessing it yourself? The self proclaimed "experts" are the ones responsible for the policies that have turned San Fransisco into what it is today.
A lot of strife in our society today can be attributed to non-profits being incentivized to keep their raison d'être continuing in perpetuity.
Their insincerity becomes very obvious when you start pushing for accountability - like status reports / reports on progress and effectiveness - when entities get public funds. Another fun one is asking for a reduction in overlap when you have 2, 3, and 4 entities doing the same thing and all of them want public funds.
I'm not sure what point you tried to make. I mean, this discussion is about identifying the root causes of a problem in order to actually fix it, but your comment focuses exclusively in organizations which, at worse, only work to mitigate it's impact while the problem is perpetuated.
Let's put it this way: homeless shelters do not fabricate homeless people out of thin air, nor do they spend their budget hiring extras or crisis actors to pretend there are homeless people in the city. At most, you're putting up a strawman to attack organizations that exist to take the edge off this problem.
What exactly do you believe would happen if suddenly all homeless shelters disappeared from the face of the earth? Do you believe homelessness would go away with that too?
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-inquiry/the-trial-o...
If that really is true, then it makes sense to have someone familiar Guide you through various aspects of the problem. Especially the non-obvious parts.
Consider Jay Forrester in Brooklin in the 70s. He correctly argued (and was apparently almost beat up by saying that), that simply setting up more housing projects increased the problem. The simplified argument went: The word spreads that there’s housing available, people move to the area, housing gets full but the inertia of the word-spread keeps going and people keep coming in. This leads to creation of more projects (as there are still people on the streets) perpetuating the cycle. Meanwhile, the businesses and residents start moving away from the area because of the projects and many homeless, dropping real estate prices and compounding the problem with another feedback loop. Complex stuff. Whatever the solution if SF (that I like very much) is, it better be looking out for that sort of policy resistance.
That's a far better outcome than mindlessly brushing everything under the rug with baseless knee-jerk reactions of pinning the blame on moral weaknesses and failings of individuals.
Naturally these kids were skipping class (since classes were in session), and of course they told him everybody does it because in their social circle that was true.
Needless to say the students that he could not have interviewed (since they were actually attending class) would have given him a different perspective
