SF is currently spending $100K per homeless person. I agree, it will be extremely difficult, and that the human resources may be a bottleneck. But that's enough for an average person to live in SF, go out sometimes, and pay for therapy. There must be a way to deploy those funds effectively.

the human resources required to make it work are a bottleneck, but even if we had the resources we need to build a humane modern asylum system, there'd be a whole slew of civil liberties issues

Big enough to keep someone warm.

I agree with what you said; "mental health care and treatment work better alongside regulated supply."

But open-air drug markets are not regulated supply. They are a scourge. America's problem with fentanyl is unique in it's scale and it is not something that can be solved with permissive policy. It must be systematically dismantled.

I do think decriminalizing all drugs for use in clinical settings would be a healthy step forward. I don't think allowing illicit markets for the most dangerous substances helps anyone except criminals.

Why is wealth inequality an issue for people who have mental disorders, chronic drug issues or people who just don't want to live by societal standards?

My pet conspiracy theory is there is a fair amount of coordinated manipulation to get political posts on the HN front page. Fortunately, they are often quickly flagged to the abyss.

> No. They are 98% drug addicts or mentally ill people.

That might be true, but there are plenty of drug addicts and mentally ill people in West Virginia (#1 in per capita overdose deaths and well above CA/NY/etc in suicides) and yet West Virginia has a pretty low rate of homelessness (roughly 1/5th CA's and 1/8th NY's) so that's clearly not the explanation.

I'm sorry, who do you think the majority of homeless are? 2/3rd are people living in their car or moving from a friend apartment to another, sometimes sleeping in their school (I did that) if possible, or at their workplace (I know a cook who did that for a year). The visible homeless, sleeping in the street or in homeless camps, is the minority.

I guarantee you that 98% of homeless aren't drug addicts or mentally ill. Most of them are students from a poor family (me, for 2 years until my grandmother died and I use the inheritance to finance my last years) or working poors, who don't make enough to be eligible for rent.

> The left love to imagine that homeless people are just down-on-their-luck people who just missed out on a mortgage payment or a rent payment.

> No. They are 98% drug addicts or mentally ill people.

Drug addicts and mentally ill people can be down-on-their luck. That somebody is mentally ill or have an addiction does not mean that society should discard them.

BTW addiction is very rarely the root cause of a wasted life. It's usually a failed coping strategy.

> It's well known that the money that gets given out attract more homeless people.

Homeless people are not infinite resource. You can solve homelessness on the country level, not only on the state level, and then it doesn't matter which state attracts more homeless people - because there's very few of them in the whole country.

> It's insane that left-wing governments think that spending MORE money will solve the problem when in fact it is the cause of the problem.

Poor countries in Eastern Europe does not have this problem. Maybe instead of pretending US is the whole world and if it can't deal with something - it's impossible to deal with it - try to listen to what people did elsewhere?

> There are plenty of houses.

Are there?

Home ownership is a functional unmovable number in the USA: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RSAHORUSQ156S

The problem is that we only have plenty of houses... that are under occupied.

https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/06/more-than-a-q...

We dont build high density housing. We killed off the boarding house. There's like one left in DC when there used to be dozens... They were common enough that even in the 80's you could make a tv show about it, now if you said bording house someone would look at you like you had 9 heads.

We dont have SRO's any more... In 1940 the YMCA of New York had 100k rooms for rent...

https://ishc.com/wp-content/uploads/YMCAs2.pdf

> If you built 400 condos, 1600 more rich people move in. Supply is not the issue as far as I can see it.

Do you know what the largest predictor of voting is? Home ownership. DO you know what drives home owners to the polls more than anything else? Protecting the value of their home.

https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/wealthy-bay-area-town-a...

The state has, and continues to sue towns for the fuckery that they have been doing to block housing development to prop up property prices. 60 percent of people who are the most likely to vote will turn up to the polls to make sure the costs do NOT go down. It is the tyranny of majority...

SO yes there are plenty of HOUSES, and not enough of everything else that we need for people to live.

Makes no sense. You can build until demand goes down. Demand is high in part because supply’s low. If there were more homes than rich people who wanted them, prices would be lower. But that doesn’t happen because of NIMBYism. I suspect you know all this but are mythologizing the situation as inescapable destiny.

Maybe you’re used to seeing half measures. Be careful with that because half measures are sometimes used as justification to throw out the whole idea of progress instead of doing it properly (“well we tried that and things were still bad so now we have to do it my way”)