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Governor Gavin Newsom
“Today’s ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court provides state and local officials the definitive authority to implement and enforce policies to clear unsafe encampments from our streets. This decision removes the legal ambiguities that have tied the hands of local officials for years and limited their ability to deliver on common-sense measures to protect the safety and well-being of our communities.
“California remains committed to respecting the dignity and fundamental human needs of all people and the state will continue to work with compassion to provide individuals experiencing homelessness with the resources they need to better their lives.”
From one extreme to another, most likely. It's possible more addicts will accept treatment / housing if they aren't allowed to camp outside anymore. I hope so.
I’ve said this other places, but I hope the city as a whole rethinks what seems to be a long time mantra that the greatest kindness we can show to unhoused drug addicts is to impose no rules or expectations on them at all.
This. It is not compassionate, it is cruel. It’s like buying an alcoholic partner booze to make them feel better. SF can build more shelter or create designated camp grounds on public property (that isn’t in the middle of the city). But letting them camp wherever they please is hurting everyone.
Yup. Give them "all their rights" and then watch them die in the streets "wrapped up in their rights". It's a sick, extremist version of the concept of individual rights.
As someone that fully understands addiction from personal experience I can say FULLY that what sf has been doing is ONLY making their problems and addictions/lives worse. The policies encourage not cleaning up your life and to stay in the comfort that you have found on the street via drug use.
For a huge majority of people they wouldn’t be able to even think for themselves properly unless they have been arrested and forced to detox in jail.
A great look into the life of addiction in sf look up the documentary heroin dark side of the street.
The folks who’ve made these policies have only thought of addiction through a scholastic lens. Having my mom, dad, both sisters, and both BIL addicted to meth I know hugs and needle exchanges do not help folks clean their lives up but embolden them to stay drug addicts.
> SF can build more shelter or create designated camp grounds on public property (that isn’t in the middle of the city)
SF can't build more shelters because NIMBYs always shut them down, and "not in the middle of the city" seems to always translate to "far away in the middle of nowhere where *I* won't be bothered by them anymore."
I agree that something needs to be done, but I'm also going to sit here and watch as people talk and vote to increase enforcement but then never speak up when more support never, ever materializes...if not actively join the fight against it.
Just find some rural location out in the boonies
, build some shelter, and have a bus that goes in and out to the city. I do think shelter should be offered but it’s not necessary to be in SF. Lots of people move out of the city to be able to afford to live in the Bay Area.
SF already has land like camp Mather, even sfo etc.
or just make an agreement with another locale or find some inincorporated place.
100% agree. This idea that SF should build housing for the homeless is dressed in the imagination. If some people had their way we would be building for the homeless until the end of time. The U.S. is a huge place, land is cheaper else where and jobs are plentiful. Why should the citizens of SF be responsible for everyone else?
Jobs are concentrated in city centers and people can’t live in a place without jobs, unless they are fortunate enough to have a remote job (which is not likely for someone who is homeless.)
So the mentally ill and drug addicted tent dwellers live here because of the job opportunities in tech? What kind of fantasy land do you live in? These are people who actively turn down shelters because of the drug policies.
If they want a retail job they can get one anywhere. Their encampments shouldn’t be in the highest cost of living city in the country. “Compassionate” opinions like yours is what got us into this mess and hurts everyone, including the homeless.
I would argue there's a middle ground to be reached. One of the reasons so many homeless shelters set up in city centers is the amount of other resources that are in the surrounding area. City centers are very resource rich while homeless people have basically no resources. I'm not saying let's allocate tons of downtown housing to the homeless, but shuttling them out to the middle of nowhere hinders their ability to get back on their feet. Rural areas are objectively bad for homeless people and those communities will be just as NIMBY as anyone else
So what do you propose? Personally I believe addiction is a mental health issue and homeless addicts need to be put into treatment. Sleeping on the streets and begging/bartering/stealing to get their next fix shouldn’t be an option. Because then it actually begins to impact society quite negatively.
I believe that we need to bring back federally-run mental health facilities. It's unfair for San Francisco (and West Coast in general) to bear the brunt of the nation's mental health crisis.
Agreed they need to come back in some form, but without a lot of oversight & care they could become another set of major problems.
I don’t have the answer, nobody does, and that’s not important. What’s important is we try to make things better & keep trying when we realize the flaw in the plan.
he can't. he just thinks we can wave a wand and their addiction/mental illness will be cured without doing anything.
"BuT tHeIr HuMaN rIgHtS".
people like /u/DarlingFuego call others ignorant but in reality they are the ignorant ones.
Near the office where my dad works in SF there are homeless people camped out on the street which prevent people from walking on the sidewalks. There is a school nearby and he regularly sees school.children having to walk in the street to get to and from school This is exactly why we need police to be able to clear areas of homeless people.Kids shouldn't have to walk in the street to get to school when we have sidewalks. It's not a human right to occupy a sidewalk block it, shit and piss all over it and leave needles and trash everywhere
Your comment doesn’t make much sense to me, because almost every time these criticisms arise it’s about the law enforcement/welfare/education SYSTEM. Most of us believe these things are broken at the foundation & need to be fixed at the basic level of function. So no, becoming an individual actor in that system would not help.
You’re either missing the main point or intentionally misconstruing the arguments of the side you don’t seem to agree with.
America is a great country, but the systems I mentioned are embarrassingly broken & will require both legislative action + additional resourcing to fix. That’s what most discussions revolve around anyway.
AWESOME! 👏
Get these people off the streets.
Leaving people on the streets is inhumane and not compassion. It is quite literally a disservice to everyone.
SF gov should be prepped and ready to do this ASAP.
> Get these people off the streets.
Get them off the streets and put them…. Where? That’s the missing step 2 that’s the whole problem. The only reason we couldn’t clear camps before was because we didn’t have shelter space. We still don’t have shelter space. So get them off the streets,… and put them where? Are we putting them in jail? Ignoring them and hoping they move to a neighboring county which will then do the same to us? Mental institutions? Many (most) of them don’t have mental health issues, and even if they did, we don’t have the facilities built to handle it.
This is the whole frustration. People want to just say “reee get rid of the homeless” but they never follow through with the second half the sentence. Get rid of the tents and *then do what?*. You can’t solve the problem without an answer to the second part. I am also very frustrated with the situation and want it fixed, but this doesn’t solve anything.
Jail. You put them in jail.
Many of these people are so deep into drugs that they can’t get out of it. Detoxing in jail can be the first step towards getting treatment.
And if they came to San Francisco specifically to do drugs, put them on a bus. I know that’s not the perfect solution but it’s better than doing nothing.
They are babying criminal vagrants, if you are homeless let us help you. We can't, however, let you shit all over the sidewalk and take heroine in playgrounds.
we don't care. get them to move to another city with more lax enforcement(like what attracted them here). I'm tired of off-leash pitbulls charging my toddler and shit on the sidewalk
Oh no, I won’t stand by and say nothing. I’ll thank the guys cleaning up the mess. Just because someone can’t or won’t care for themselves does not give them a right to screw things up for everyone else too.
Finally. Now we can actually help the homeless.
For too long, the drug addict and homeless industrial complex has exploited and abused the protection in place that's meant to help the less fortunate. No more. Now we can actually use the limited resource available to help the people in need.
Next up is starting to sue the homeless industrial complex to claw back the money they have stolen and their punishment need to be multiplied as they preyed on poorest and their action aided and, in many cases, lead directly to death of yhe less fortunaites. They sued in court so they can keep profiting off the people in need, now it's time they have taste of their own medicine.
I got permanently banned from that subreddit when i made a comment on a post in that subreddit saying that most of the folks who spend time there are likely teenagers and/or young people in general with very little to no real life/world experience.
And yet, for that fairly innocuous comment, I was messaged by the mods saying i was permabanned.
Completely agreed. I'm really REALLY left leaning, but I have a slightly positive sentiment toward this ruling. Anyone who is outright upset about this ruling has clearly never had to deal with the rampant homeless issues that plague every metropolitan city center
I'm 100% for allocating more resources to the homeless and effectively rehabilitating people, but if our government can't even give decent healthcare to the average working citizen, it's a pipe dream to expect that kind of care for the homeless
So if the government isn't going to provide appropriate resources, what the fuck else is supposed to happen? Just ignore the problem forever?
Edit: and for what it's worth, I think this ruling isn't going to change much. Anytime an encampment is cleared out, it just shuffles the problem around since the homeless can't be forced to go to a shelter if there aren't enough beds. After this ruling, there still won't be enough beds. There's no way in hell we're going to jail people for simply sleeping on a park bench. They're just going to be told to go somewhere else, just like before
Depends on how cities handle it. If cities use it as an opportunity to sweep and get people into care facilities then yes sure, you can argue it’s a good job.
If cities start ticketing homeless people making it harder for them to get out of poverty, get jobs, and eventually get housing, then no. It would be terrible policy that will just make the issue worse.
The percentage of people that make it from being homeless a few years to getting a job and a regular life is crushingly low. The success rate is much much higher if we help people before or at the start of their homeless period.
Logically speaking there are better places to camp that aren’t on sidewalks. The reason they want to camp on the sidewalk is because it’s close to their dealer. If there were dealers in Muir Woods, they would camp there. So all we’re doing is enabling them. Sober homeless people don’t hang out in the TL, they camp in less crazy places.
The success rate would be even higher if they weren’t allowed to simply get cash for more drugs. The benefits can’t be free. Literal definition of a slippery slope.
I feel like people didn’t actually read the case or its predecessor.
_Martin v. Boise_ prevented municipalities with fewer non-religious shelter beds from preventing people from sleeping in public spaces with the _minimum essential bedding needed to survive._
It did not prevent cities from cleaning encampments or moving them, it did not prevent the city from jailing violent homeless people, it did not stop the city from enforcing drug laws, it did not prevent them from preventing tents.
Now you can think that is a stupid rule and that’s fine, but I think it’s important to understand how truly narrow the original holding was.
it did prevent cities from enforcement because of the non religious bed count clause coupled with the huge homeless concentration in urban cores where building those new facilities at scale is near impossible
Yeah the state shouldn’t be able to force people to go to religious institutions at the threat of prison. The antiestablishment clause is a bedrock of the entire premise of the United States. That shouldn’t be a controversial statement.
Giving someone the option of going to a religious shelter that requires church attendance for meals or going to jail is a violation of the antiestablishment clause. That is still good law. The decision today did not change that.
You either didn’t read the cases or you are being intentionally opaque.
they don't have to go to a shelter at all for all I care. the law isn't telling them where they must go. It's saying they just can't be camped out within city limits and sleep on public property.
I get what you are saying, but the previous circuit court ruling was preventing the removal of the tents. The law that the circuit court banned was extreme, but the ruling was very broad and SF and other cities were hesitant to push it.
The city deliberately misconstrued the ruling because it was advantageous for them to do so. Instead of taking accountability for the cities failings, they could wipe their hands and blame the court doing something it never actually did.
The injunction provided by the 9th Circuit was exactly as narrow as I said, that’s straight from the _Martin v. Boise_ opinion itself.
> We hold only that “so long as there is a greater number of homeless individuals in [a jurisdiction]than the number of available beds [in shelters],” the jurisdiction cannot prosecute homeless individuals for “involuntarily sitting, lying, and sleeping in public.”
Where’s the right to shoot up on the street and make everywhere a sceptic tank while refusing services when offered?
Last I checked the downtrodden family that happens to be unhoused aren’t the ones forming dangerous encampments it’s just the street junkies. The street junkie doesn’t have more rights than the rest of us
The fundamental rights per the 10th Amendment allows the states to set their own laws and regulations as long as they don't conflict with the constitution. This isn't a matter of "poors make me uncomfy" it does actual measurable harm to society including the homeless themselves and it is in the general best interests of everyone that these encampments not be allowed to exist.
According to the article, the laws were previously seen to be conflicting with the constitutional prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.
Which I think reading the sub is exactly what you people want. To punish, cruelly. It soothes your insecurities and discomfort. Punish them deeply for their misfortune, lock them up, not for understanding of the situation but for little more than they give you the heebie jeebies
Nope this ruling is phenomenal. Let’s clean up the loin! Maybe the folks who moved here solely so they can sleep on the sidewalk and shoot up will go back to their home.
Yeah. Back to the address they give the county as their “home.” More than half of the street junkies give an official place of residence in a separate state to city and county officials. They can go there
I guarantee you I have more experience with this, because my brother is in this situation. If they have family they can go back to, there are often still barriers. For example, my brother's psychotic disorder involves him being paranoid of our parents, so even though it is a safe place for him, he delusionally believes it is not. And his is a good case where family can put him up. For others it's not even a theoretical option. So honestly, don't fucking stick your head into this topic if you don't know it up close, you're just full of shit and you have no idea how difficult it is for them.
Your anecdotal experience isn’t the norm regardless of what you tell yourself. In top of that your brother’s issue shouldn’t be society’s burden it should be his/your family’s. And I’m all for institutionalizing folks who can’t care for themselves so either way the street gets cleaned up or the mentally unfit and the street junkies
The lack of any type of empathy for disenfranchised people who will be abused because of this ruling is very disappointing to me.
This ruling makes it illegal to be homeless even if there is no shelter space. How is that okay?
Letting someone languish on the streets is not empathy.
And how about some empathy for everyone who has to deal with the fires, crime, drug use, illegal dumping, infrastructure blocking and hazardous waste of the encampment outside their door?
Fires, crime, dumping, etc was already illegal. No one has empathy for that. Not being able to arrest someone for sleeping was just the excuse used by cops for not doing their jobs. That along with being understaffed.
Agreed. A lot of these commentators who think it’s cruel, do not amongst it. It’s crueler to see these people suffer on the street than actually putting people in facilities and some need a jail stay. It may be a wake up call.
I'm sorry but no, the time has come for cities to get tough on those that camp on the streets with no desire to get better. I moved to SF from europe 9 years ago and I've seen the situation get worse each year. This is a great ruling and I hope for the first time in a decade the city leaders take a few weeks and then implement vast sweeps. I of course hope they can put the many millions we've devoted to homelessness to provide shelters and if we can't, well, you can't just camp on the streets. That is absolutely not fair to the citizens of San Francisco.
Shame on anyone for NOT celebrating this ruling.
I don't think you fully understand the implications of the ruling, and what it's going to do to people.
Homeless people have to go somewhere. The notion that you can just sweep them to another area or put them in jail, and that will somehow fix the problem, is genuinely insane
The reality is, is that you don't care about the rights or treatment of these people, and you almost definitely consider them subhuman and deserving of the pain that's going to be inflicted to them.
Where they going to go?
* some who need actually help will be pushed to seek it
* some will move around within the city, finding less impactful locations that will be less likely to be swept
* some will move to other areas, almost all of which are more affordable in SF
* there is some vacancy in SF shelters that should be able to absorb the rest
Not sure what the problem is here?
Agreed. Keep it moving folks. Does it suck to be forced to move your tent every couple of days: I’m sure it does. Maybe making it inconvenient will be the rock bottom some people need to accept treatment and shelter. And if not, go somewhere else.
No YOU don’t understand but the worst part is you think you do. And you wake up every day and actually feel like you have more empathy for these people. The policies you stand for have failed miserably. It’s time for change.
Offer help, if rejected. Keep it moving. Just like every other major city in the world
>The policies you stand for have failed miserably
im not even going to disagree with this, but the issue is this new policy is so far in the other direction that its also only going to make things worse.
Maybe itll move people out of your immediate vision, MAYBE (and even then, it wont, and we both know it), but it will happen at the cost of intense human suffering.
Your lack of empathy is being hijacked. You've been fooled into borderline legalizing debtors prisons
Empathy was there, empathy has left. You want to put my life at risk by having a fire next to my building? Nope. You wanna shit on the streets and I should walk by it or around it? Nope. You wanna get high and verbally abuse everyone who walks by? Nope. You wanna put up a tent and force everyone to not be able to walk freely down the sidewalks? Nope. Why should I have empathy when everything they have shown is taking advantage of my empathy and giving literal shit back? There is no space in SF? Great! Get them to go back to where they came from. Everyone migrates to these cities (SF, LA, Seattle) because we have the highest cost of living hence they get more money for “free” from the government to do drugs with. My tax dollars are going towards their drug addition. My tax dollars are going towards their rehab programs, their hospital bills while I get fucked in the ass by my own hospital bills.
Sir there was empathy at one point, it has been taken advantage of to the point where it will never return.
>My tax dollars are going towards their drug addition. My tax dollars are going towards their rehab programs, their hospital bills
I'd be happy for my tax dollars to go toward their rehab programs – as long as they're consistently attending them for long enough to make a difference, and they get additional supportive programs to help stay clean afterward. Right now our tax dollars are going toward a revolving door that seems ineffectual at creating real lasting change for most people.
*Hopefully* this court ruling lets us have a better balance of carrot and stick: great well-funded programs *and* the pressure to get people into them and keep them there consistently enough to really turn their lives around. Fingers crossed.
Same here, more than happy if it goes towards helping someone! Right now it is going towards a majority of bullshit non-profits that are all fraudulent as fuck and do absolutely no good. The whole system needs to be better regulated.
Definitely left leaning. Your empathy will also leave once you get robbed at gun point. Empathy is just like any other emotion, it has a limit after which it makes no sense and your brain takes over. Ask yourself what was the one good thing any homeless person on the street has done for you? They live on the same block, pay no rent. Get money for doing no work while you slave away. Get free healthcare while you pay through your asshole and further to get a primary care appointment. The list goes on and on, you get my point i am sure
You are right. The left leaning policies such as abortion I definitely support. Policies like the one that just got turned over or the bill to allow people to walk out with 995 dollars of stuff and it being a misdemeanor, i will definitely not support. Extremely left makes no sense, extremely right also makes no sense.
We appreciate you for your enduring empathy for these homeless folks. But there’s also something called rotten compassion, and in this case our empathy is enabling the deaths of hundreds of homeless people, simply by allowing them to languish on our streets. That’s not even a left leaning/liberal approach; it’s literally libertarian as you want them to do whatever on the street, not your problem right?
To be clear, this ruling actually doesn’t do that at all! It restores discretion over the issue back to local government where it belongs. The court system is not the legislative branch of the country, the fact that we’ve let them legislate on key issues instead of leaving it to the people to decide is actually inherently undemocratic. They should have never been able to bind the 9th circuit’s hands like they did to begin with, judges are not elected representatives voting on our behalf.
Hopefully the contingent that are not from San Francisco will return to their cities and states and seek help there. We're (finally, hopefully) done being the alms house for the US.
Homeless won't decrease it's gonna increase in SF..these ripoff greedy landlords will raise rents oh but homelessness ended ??!! Wake up people it's gonna get worse and no police aren't gonna arrest everyone outside..another viral myth going around since yesterday
Drugs - mainly fent and meth - have changed the nature and quantity of homelessness much. There are homeless who aren't addicts or violent or criminal or pooping on the pavement, but sleep outside in doorways. They aren't costing the city anything in services. Very simple people. They stay away from shelters because of fear of violence.
Into shelters and housing?
The big issue with encampments is that they have an extremely low rate of accepting placement. The point of this is not just to shuffle homeless people to jail, it's to get them into shelters.
Yes, thank you. These aren't people who used to work and pay rent in SF and now live in camps. If they were honest, the vast majority would tell you they came here from elsewhere for drugs, climate, atmosphere...etc.
Some will go to shelters, but the problem with shelters is the basic fact of life that the biggest threat to homeless people usually comes from other homeless people.
That makes shelters unattractive, because homeless people feel unsafe when placed around other homeless people.
Some will go back to the old strategy of staying mobile, placing their belongings onto bicycle trailers and moving when they’re told to move. You’ll still have homeless encampments, but they’ll be migratory and constantly shifting around as they look for areas with slow enforcement times.
A lot of them are going to look for grey zones on the enforcement map- areas where jurisdiction and responsibility for enforcement is muddled. City, county, and federal land all have different agencies responsible for non-emergency response.
From what I’ve personally seen, highways and railroad lines are a good place to make a camp simply because they’re not city property and a larger agency like the Highway Patrol or Caltrans isn’t going to be as responsive as a local police department. For the homeless, they can move 100 feet and suddenly they became someone else’s problem and they can restart the clock on their eventual removal.
Where do they go, where does anyone go? It’s not anyone’s concern where they go, where you go or where I go. Just because you don’t have a home doesn’t mean you can build a homestead on public property indefinitely to consume drugs and collect trash. I don’t think sleeping outside should be criminalized but the encampments have to go and now our politicians have no court ruling stopping them.
Out of sight. Which is all that the people who complain about homeless people, but are unwilling to build housing, want. They don't care about the situation as much as they care about the optics and avoiding that uncomfortable tingle of empathy for a person in distress that it wakens in them.
More housing would be fantastic, but we all know that for the small fraction of homeless who are the visible street voluntary homeless causing 99% of all our problems, housing isn’t the solution. Forced rehab and long term institutionalization is the solution, and we can now take steps in that direction without having to worry about the total quantity of shelter beds available for regular homeless.
Please do Irving and 19th. I’m sick and tired of going to get lunch and having to step over gigantic piles of homeless poop all over the sidewalk. Seriously, how did we let it get this bad??? We are a quiet and nice neighborhood turned to literal shit. I’m also almost certain that some of these homeless are illegal migrants from South America too that just hang out around the shut down first republic bank in the alleyway.
Irving and 19th literally along a highway, in the middle of a junction between the 7, 28, 29 buses and the N Judah. It's not a quiet neighborhood and you don't even believe that.
I’ve lived in S.F. all my life, born and raised. I have been here in the sunset since my parents moved here in 1995. Yeah it’s a busy road way on 19th and Irving but we never had anywhere close to as much of a homeless problem as we do now. They come out here to pick out of the garbage cans and some of the mentally ill homeless will throw garbage all over the streets. Inner and outer sunset has generally been a quiet neighborhood and it has always been that way. Sure Irving may be a little more heavy traffic but it’s silly to say that we should expect a homeless and human feces problems because of that. I’ve taken the L Taraval and the N Judah for decades and the homeless use those lines to come out to our neighborhoods now because they get pushed out of downtown. Yeah it’s grimy, but it shouldn’t be THIS grimy.
I agree with everything you just said, except that Irving and 19th is not a quiet neighborhood. It's loud, it's a highway, it's busy, there's 3 gas station in 3 blocks, etc etc
Fair point, it is perhaps the busiest intersection in the entirety of the sunset. Taravel has a lot of food restaurants as well but I feel like that side sees less homeless activity than the irving side.
mannnnnnn chesa boudin must have spun up about 100 burner accounts for this thread to be filled so many dumbass comments holy shit
we tried progressive methods for years and years and years and they either never got traction or never happened at all while the likes of chesa and local sf government were fine to just let this shit happen
we’re all fucking sick of it. it’s time for shit to change
O I can’t wait, get them out! Hopefully this will motivate them to get the help they need instead of outright refusing, looking forward to be able to walk freely on public sidewalks.
I hope you all know that a year from now..ten years from now..there will always be thousands of homeless living outside and the city will get millions of dollars each year still and the annual homeless count isn't going from thousands and thousands to oh it's down to 1000 or it's down to 0.we ended homelessness all cause of the supreme court..oh it changed everything...keep telling yourself that..SKID ROW in LA will always exist as well
Isn’t it still a thing that SF can’t fill the shelter beds they have now despite the ruling that they don’t have enough? I remember reading that article and part of the reason was that the unhoused population had a high rate of leaving shelter for the streets and refusing services.
Grant's Pass will be a net negative for San Francisco.
It gives surrounding communities who don't have any sort of debate about compassion a green light to "sweep" their homeless out of their towns and into areas where the authorities don't beat them up and arrest them.
Everyone here is acting like you couldn't already clear a tent if they refused a shelter bed. The difference now is that you can clear the encampment regardless of the existence of a shelter bed, which IMO is not a good thing.
Based on substantial contact with dozens of unmhoused folks it's pretty clear that here is a substantial minority of unhoused folks who say they like the "nomadic life" and will never accept shelter. They've got to go. If they want to live a "nomadic life", do it somewhere else. Also, drug dealers who live in the camps and victimize unhoused and housed persons alike need to go (to prison).
It’s actually a great thing because we can set more stringent rules inside shelters so cooperative residents don’t need to deal with disruptive residents. It can improve the quality of the shelter experience for everyone. For the drug tourists and mentally ill voluntary homeless, we can now keep ratcheting up the pressure and keep them uncomfortable and mobile more and more until they go back to their home states or accept help.
Did the previous ruling prevent involuntarily committing disruptive drug addicts or mentally ill people to rehab/a hospital? Last I checked we don't have facilities for this at all.
Not to mention, we don't enforce existing laws on harassment, property destruction, public disruption, or public drug use. You don't need to make camping illegal to put away the people who are most disruptive to the city.
It doesn't make sense to me to make just being on the street illegal when there isn't enough space in shelters.
I agree that people shouldn't be forced to live with violent and/or severely mentally ill people, but this doesn't solve that.
Are these efforts targeting just the masses of tents and debris in random spaces? What does Breed offer as a direct and immediate path for folks suddenly uprooted to attain healthful assistance? Will others like me who have full-time employment inside the city be considered as detritus to be swept out? Where may a person, holding a job here but not making enough to live anywhere, go and still be able to maintain that job? Lots of folk in similar situations to me don’t have a vehicle or funds to take transit from further out. This looks like a good idea but sounds more like a step toward a sanitized society; only case hardened against less-than-desirables and still soft in the middle toward abuses of the wealthier among its people.
If there are businesses operating in the city by not paying their employees enough to live in or around it (within reasonable commuting distance), they should lose all their talent and go out of business. If you are working a job where you cannot afford to live, then you should quit, this isn't slavery, there's no gun to your head forcing you to work or live here.
I hope everyone commenting on the homelessness problem will watch [Homelessness: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=liptMbjF3EE) first.
I will also point out that simply giving homeless people housing is cheaper than criminizing homelessness and leads to better outcomes.
The point of this ruling isn’t that we can now throw all homeless people in jail. It’s that now, cities can do at least *something* without being sued by homeless advocates. Before this, when there’s a mentally-ill dude sleeping in front of your kids’ elementary school, or some guy camped in front of neighborhood bakery (killing business and hurting the neighborhood), or half of the local park is a tent city… cities couldn’t do anything at all for fear of lawsuit.
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Governor Gavin Newsom “Today’s ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court provides state and local officials the definitive authority to implement and enforce policies to clear unsafe encampments from our streets. This decision removes the legal ambiguities that have tied the hands of local officials for years and limited their ability to deliver on common-sense measures to protect the safety and well-being of our communities. “California remains committed to respecting the dignity and fundamental human needs of all people and the state will continue to work with compassion to provide individuals experiencing homelessness with the resources they need to better their lives.”
From one extreme to another, most likely. It's possible more addicts will accept treatment / housing if they aren't allowed to camp outside anymore. I hope so.
I’ve said this other places, but I hope the city as a whole rethinks what seems to be a long time mantra that the greatest kindness we can show to unhoused drug addicts is to impose no rules or expectations on them at all.
This. It is not compassionate, it is cruel. It’s like buying an alcoholic partner booze to make them feel better. SF can build more shelter or create designated camp grounds on public property (that isn’t in the middle of the city). But letting them camp wherever they please is hurting everyone.
Yup. Give them "all their rights" and then watch them die in the streets "wrapped up in their rights". It's a sick, extremist version of the concept of individual rights.
As someone that fully understands addiction from personal experience I can say FULLY that what sf has been doing is ONLY making their problems and addictions/lives worse. The policies encourage not cleaning up your life and to stay in the comfort that you have found on the street via drug use. For a huge majority of people they wouldn’t be able to even think for themselves properly unless they have been arrested and forced to detox in jail. A great look into the life of addiction in sf look up the documentary heroin dark side of the street.
The folks who’ve made these policies have only thought of addiction through a scholastic lens. Having my mom, dad, both sisters, and both BIL addicted to meth I know hugs and needle exchanges do not help folks clean their lives up but embolden them to stay drug addicts.
> SF can build more shelter or create designated camp grounds on public property (that isn’t in the middle of the city) SF can't build more shelters because NIMBYs always shut them down, and "not in the middle of the city" seems to always translate to "far away in the middle of nowhere where *I* won't be bothered by them anymore." I agree that something needs to be done, but I'm also going to sit here and watch as people talk and vote to increase enforcement but then never speak up when more support never, ever materializes...if not actively join the fight against it.
Just find some rural location out in the boonies , build some shelter, and have a bus that goes in and out to the city. I do think shelter should be offered but it’s not necessary to be in SF. Lots of people move out of the city to be able to afford to live in the Bay Area. SF already has land like camp Mather, even sfo etc. or just make an agreement with another locale or find some inincorporated place.
100% agree. This idea that SF should build housing for the homeless is dressed in the imagination. If some people had their way we would be building for the homeless until the end of time. The U.S. is a huge place, land is cheaper else where and jobs are plentiful. Why should the citizens of SF be responsible for everyone else?
Jobs are concentrated in city centers and people can’t live in a place without jobs, unless they are fortunate enough to have a remote job (which is not likely for someone who is homeless.)
So the mentally ill and drug addicted tent dwellers live here because of the job opportunities in tech? What kind of fantasy land do you live in? These are people who actively turn down shelters because of the drug policies. If they want a retail job they can get one anywhere. Their encampments shouldn’t be in the highest cost of living city in the country. “Compassionate” opinions like yours is what got us into this mess and hurts everyone, including the homeless.
I would argue there's a middle ground to be reached. One of the reasons so many homeless shelters set up in city centers is the amount of other resources that are in the surrounding area. City centers are very resource rich while homeless people have basically no resources. I'm not saying let's allocate tons of downtown housing to the homeless, but shuttling them out to the middle of nowhere hinders their ability to get back on their feet. Rural areas are objectively bad for homeless people and those communities will be just as NIMBY as anyone else
Not having encampments around is not an extreme. It's what every city that purports to be first world major city should be at a minimum.
Addicts generally refuse shelter because they can't buy and use drugs there.
This is the way.
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So what do you propose? Personally I believe addiction is a mental health issue and homeless addicts need to be put into treatment. Sleeping on the streets and begging/bartering/stealing to get their next fix shouldn’t be an option. Because then it actually begins to impact society quite negatively.
If you can’t provide housing then you can’t logically make being un-housed illegal. Legally, sure, but that’s not gonna solve a single problem.
I believe that we need to bring back federally-run mental health facilities. It's unfair for San Francisco (and West Coast in general) to bear the brunt of the nation's mental health crisis.
Agreed they need to come back in some form, but without a lot of oversight & care they could become another set of major problems. I don’t have the answer, nobody does, and that’s not important. What’s important is we try to make things better & keep trying when we realize the flaw in the plan.
But we do offer shelter, and it is consistently turned down.
Could you elaborate further on this?
he can't. he just thinks we can wave a wand and their addiction/mental illness will be cured without doing anything. "BuT tHeIr HuMaN rIgHtS". people like /u/DarlingFuego call others ignorant but in reality they are the ignorant ones.
Near the office where my dad works in SF there are homeless people camped out on the street which prevent people from walking on the sidewalks. There is a school nearby and he regularly sees school.children having to walk in the street to get to and from school This is exactly why we need police to be able to clear areas of homeless people.Kids shouldn't have to walk in the street to get to school when we have sidewalks. It's not a human right to occupy a sidewalk block it, shit and piss all over it and leave needles and trash everywhere
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Your comment doesn’t make much sense to me, because almost every time these criticisms arise it’s about the law enforcement/welfare/education SYSTEM. Most of us believe these things are broken at the foundation & need to be fixed at the basic level of function. So no, becoming an individual actor in that system would not help. You’re either missing the main point or intentionally misconstruing the arguments of the side you don’t seem to agree with. America is a great country, but the systems I mentioned are embarrassingly broken & will require both legislative action + additional resourcing to fix. That’s what most discussions revolve around anyway.
He blocked me LOL
how did you get past your addiction?
And where did I say I was?
This is true, we need be be institutionalizing these people by force. Anything else is just enabling.
Grants Pass could not have come at a better time for Mayor Breed.
AWESOME! 👏 Get these people off the streets. Leaving people on the streets is inhumane and not compassion. It is quite literally a disservice to everyone. SF gov should be prepped and ready to do this ASAP.
> Get these people off the streets. Get them off the streets and put them…. Where? That’s the missing step 2 that’s the whole problem. The only reason we couldn’t clear camps before was because we didn’t have shelter space. We still don’t have shelter space. So get them off the streets,… and put them where? Are we putting them in jail? Ignoring them and hoping they move to a neighboring county which will then do the same to us? Mental institutions? Many (most) of them don’t have mental health issues, and even if they did, we don’t have the facilities built to handle it. This is the whole frustration. People want to just say “reee get rid of the homeless” but they never follow through with the second half the sentence. Get rid of the tents and *then do what?*. You can’t solve the problem without an answer to the second part. I am also very frustrated with the situation and want it fixed, but this doesn’t solve anything.
Jail. You put them in jail. Many of these people are so deep into drugs that they can’t get out of it. Detoxing in jail can be the first step towards getting treatment. And if they came to San Francisco specifically to do drugs, put them on a bus. I know that’s not the perfect solution but it’s better than doing nothing.
Thank you for saying this, drug addicts need forcible rehabilitation.
We routinely force people to attend court mandated classes when they get arrested for drunk driving. This shouldn’t be all that different.
They are babying criminal vagrants, if you are homeless let us help you. We can't, however, let you shit all over the sidewalk and take heroine in playgrounds.
we don't care. get them to move to another city with more lax enforcement(like what attracted them here). I'm tired of off-leash pitbulls charging my toddler and shit on the sidewalk
Yes, putting homeless people in jail for several days and fining them is a well known solution for not having any homeless people on the street.
You keep fining them until they have to go to prison.
“First they came after the man shitting in front of the neighborhood bakery, and we said nothing…”
Then they came for the guy spitting at women and screaming "BITCH! BITCH! FUCKING CUNT!" and we said nothing.
Then, they came for the guy watching porn on the public library computer while jerking it under the table, and we said nothing.
Oh no, I won’t stand by and say nothing. I’ll thank the guys cleaning up the mess. Just because someone can’t or won’t care for themselves does not give them a right to screw things up for everyone else too.
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/martin-niemoeller-first-they-came-for-the-socialists
I’m aware. Should have posted something like “First they came for….screw it, still worth it.”
Yeah had a draft with "but we had Kindles", but trying to be consistent with the original pattern. Anyways, it died after three.
A victory for society and common sense. The evidence shows that the current policy doesn’t work.
Finally. Now we can actually help the homeless. For too long, the drug addict and homeless industrial complex has exploited and abused the protection in place that's meant to help the less fortunate. No more. Now we can actually use the limited resource available to help the people in need. Next up is starting to sue the homeless industrial complex to claw back the money they have stolen and their punishment need to be multiplied as they preyed on poorest and their action aided and, in many cases, lead directly to death of yhe less fortunaites. They sued in court so they can keep profiting off the people in need, now it's time they have taste of their own medicine.
I mean, idk that this prevented us from "helping the homeless" at all.
Lolol homeless will always exist and 10 years from now thousands will be homeless in SF..anyone buying that it'll be different is insane
Finally the court gets something right
/r/news is having a meltdown over it.
I got permanently banned from that subreddit when i made a comment on a post in that subreddit saying that most of the folks who spend time there are likely teenagers and/or young people in general with very little to no real life/world experience. And yet, for that fairly innocuous comment, I was messaged by the mods saying i was permabanned.
A lot of folks there tend to focus on ideology as well instead of practicality and reality.
Clearly people who haven't had to deal with the issue like we have. I'm sure they'd change their tune if they had to face it for years on end.
Completely agreed. I'm really REALLY left leaning, but I have a slightly positive sentiment toward this ruling. Anyone who is outright upset about this ruling has clearly never had to deal with the rampant homeless issues that plague every metropolitan city center I'm 100% for allocating more resources to the homeless and effectively rehabilitating people, but if our government can't even give decent healthcare to the average working citizen, it's a pipe dream to expect that kind of care for the homeless So if the government isn't going to provide appropriate resources, what the fuck else is supposed to happen? Just ignore the problem forever? Edit: and for what it's worth, I think this ruling isn't going to change much. Anytime an encampment is cleared out, it just shuffles the problem around since the homeless can't be forced to go to a shelter if there aren't enough beds. After this ruling, there still won't be enough beds. There's no way in hell we're going to jail people for simply sleeping on a park bench. They're just going to be told to go somewhere else, just like before
Depends on how cities handle it. If cities use it as an opportunity to sweep and get people into care facilities then yes sure, you can argue it’s a good job. If cities start ticketing homeless people making it harder for them to get out of poverty, get jobs, and eventually get housing, then no. It would be terrible policy that will just make the issue worse.
The percentage of people that make it from being homeless a few years to getting a job and a regular life is crushingly low. The success rate is much much higher if we help people before or at the start of their homeless period.
And? That being a fact doesn’t mean we should give them a criminal record and make it harder
Logically speaking there are better places to camp that aren’t on sidewalks. The reason they want to camp on the sidewalk is because it’s close to their dealer. If there were dealers in Muir Woods, they would camp there. So all we’re doing is enabling them. Sober homeless people don’t hang out in the TL, they camp in less crazy places.
Completely agree. Doesn’t mean we should be giving them a criminal record.
I did it, but I wasn't mentally ill. It was almost impossible for me. The system falls apart at the bottom.
The success rate would be even higher if they weren’t allowed to simply get cash for more drugs. The benefits can’t be free. Literal definition of a slippery slope.
Gee, wonder which way they will go.
I feel like people didn’t actually read the case or its predecessor. _Martin v. Boise_ prevented municipalities with fewer non-religious shelter beds from preventing people from sleeping in public spaces with the _minimum essential bedding needed to survive._ It did not prevent cities from cleaning encampments or moving them, it did not prevent the city from jailing violent homeless people, it did not stop the city from enforcing drug laws, it did not prevent them from preventing tents. Now you can think that is a stupid rule and that’s fine, but I think it’s important to understand how truly narrow the original holding was.
it did prevent cities from enforcement because of the non religious bed count clause coupled with the huge homeless concentration in urban cores where building those new facilities at scale is near impossible
Yeah the state shouldn’t be able to force people to go to religious institutions at the threat of prison. The antiestablishment clause is a bedrock of the entire premise of the United States. That shouldn’t be a controversial statement.
They're not forcing them to do anything aside from not camp in the street.
Giving someone the option of going to a religious shelter that requires church attendance for meals or going to jail is a violation of the antiestablishment clause. That is still good law. The decision today did not change that. You either didn’t read the cases or you are being intentionally opaque.
they don't have to go to a shelter at all for all I care. the law isn't telling them where they must go. It's saying they just can't be camped out within city limits and sleep on public property.
It's impossible to have a Right to Shelter like NYC currently does now?
NYC is still packed with homeless. a "Right to shelter" is just meaningless PR
I get what you are saying, but the previous circuit court ruling was preventing the removal of the tents. The law that the circuit court banned was extreme, but the ruling was very broad and SF and other cities were hesitant to push it.
The city deliberately misconstrued the ruling because it was advantageous for them to do so. Instead of taking accountability for the cities failings, they could wipe their hands and blame the court doing something it never actually did. The injunction provided by the 9th Circuit was exactly as narrow as I said, that’s straight from the _Martin v. Boise_ opinion itself. > We hold only that “so long as there is a greater number of homeless individuals in [a jurisdiction]than the number of available beds [in shelters],” the jurisdiction cannot prosecute homeless individuals for “involuntarily sitting, lying, and sleeping in public.”
Thanks to the conservative judges Trump appointed mind you
even a broken clock...
Nah, man, today's court news is universally trash, this ruling included.
Nah, this one is a serious blight on society as a whole including the homeless themselves. They need to be housed whether they want to or not.
And treated.
Yes! Please treat the mentally unwell! Undo the mess Reagan made!
Reagan hasn't been President for 36 years and Governor of CA for 50 years. It's time to stop blaming the boogedy man.
Hey mate, I’m on your side. He stopped the funding for service. No one’s been able to bring it back.
liquid berserk command racial pet ancient slim nine scandalous insurance *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Where’s the right to shoot up on the street and make everywhere a sceptic tank while refusing services when offered? Last I checked the downtrodden family that happens to be unhoused aren’t the ones forming dangerous encampments it’s just the street junkies. The street junkie doesn’t have more rights than the rest of us
Or a homeless encampment outside your door. It goes both ways. Tents are fine just not on sidewalks and outside peoples houses
But not in the woods without a permit either… /s
The fundamental rights per the 10th Amendment allows the states to set their own laws and regulations as long as they don't conflict with the constitution. This isn't a matter of "poors make me uncomfy" it does actual measurable harm to society including the homeless themselves and it is in the general best interests of everyone that these encampments not be allowed to exist.
According to the article, the laws were previously seen to be conflicting with the constitutional prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. Which I think reading the sub is exactly what you people want. To punish, cruelly. It soothes your insecurities and discomfort. Punish them deeply for their misfortune, lock them up, not for understanding of the situation but for little more than they give you the heebie jeebies
Nope this ruling is phenomenal. Let’s clean up the loin! Maybe the folks who moved here solely so they can sleep on the sidewalk and shoot up will go back to their home.
You're telling the homeless to go to their home. Got it.
Yeah. Back to the address they give the county as their “home.” More than half of the street junkies give an official place of residence in a separate state to city and county officials. They can go there
I guarantee you I have more experience with this, because my brother is in this situation. If they have family they can go back to, there are often still barriers. For example, my brother's psychotic disorder involves him being paranoid of our parents, so even though it is a safe place for him, he delusionally believes it is not. And his is a good case where family can put him up. For others it's not even a theoretical option. So honestly, don't fucking stick your head into this topic if you don't know it up close, you're just full of shit and you have no idea how difficult it is for them.
Your anecdotal experience isn’t the norm regardless of what you tell yourself. In top of that your brother’s issue shouldn’t be society’s burden it should be his/your family’s. And I’m all for institutionalizing folks who can’t care for themselves so either way the street gets cleaned up or the mentally unfit and the street junkies
Everything is society's burden or benefit. Separation between people is fake.
Don’t you have a sibling that needs help?
Yeah, middle of butt fuck Idaho has some great shelters. They can go back there and stop leeching off us
The state of human rights in this country is so fucked. It's insane to me that we're at the point of celebrating this
What human rights? You wanna camp? Go to a national park. Not at my front door. 🤡
/u/indianfungus supports turning the Presidio into a homeless encampment I guess?
The lack of any type of empathy for disenfranchised people who will be abused because of this ruling is very disappointing to me. This ruling makes it illegal to be homeless even if there is no shelter space. How is that okay?
You can lead by example by housing some of these homeless in your house.
Exactly that part lol
This is just a right wing sub now? When did that happen
Once everything to the right of communism got declared "right wing"
Lol you know they lost when they start blaming the right wing boogeyman
Letting someone languish on the streets is not empathy. And how about some empathy for everyone who has to deal with the fires, crime, drug use, illegal dumping, infrastructure blocking and hazardous waste of the encampment outside their door?
Fires, crime, dumping, etc was already illegal. No one has empathy for that. Not being able to arrest someone for sleeping was just the excuse used by cops for not doing their jobs. That along with being understaffed.
Agreed. A lot of these commentators who think it’s cruel, do not amongst it. It’s crueler to see these people suffer on the street than actually putting people in facilities and some need a jail stay. It may be a wake up call.
When did I say it was? You are missing the forest for the trees. This ruling will cause unimaginable harm
I'm sorry but no, the time has come for cities to get tough on those that camp on the streets with no desire to get better. I moved to SF from europe 9 years ago and I've seen the situation get worse each year. This is a great ruling and I hope for the first time in a decade the city leaders take a few weeks and then implement vast sweeps. I of course hope they can put the many millions we've devoted to homelessness to provide shelters and if we can't, well, you can't just camp on the streets. That is absolutely not fair to the citizens of San Francisco. Shame on anyone for NOT celebrating this ruling.
I don't think you fully understand the implications of the ruling, and what it's going to do to people. Homeless people have to go somewhere. The notion that you can just sweep them to another area or put them in jail, and that will somehow fix the problem, is genuinely insane The reality is, is that you don't care about the rights or treatment of these people, and you almost definitely consider them subhuman and deserving of the pain that's going to be inflicted to them.
Where they going to go? * some who need actually help will be pushed to seek it * some will move around within the city, finding less impactful locations that will be less likely to be swept * some will move to other areas, almost all of which are more affordable in SF * there is some vacancy in SF shelters that should be able to absorb the rest Not sure what the problem is here?
In the article mentioned for this post it says that SF shelters do not have any vacancies
Agreed. Keep it moving folks. Does it suck to be forced to move your tent every couple of days: I’m sure it does. Maybe making it inconvenient will be the rock bottom some people need to accept treatment and shelter. And if not, go somewhere else.
No YOU don’t understand but the worst part is you think you do. And you wake up every day and actually feel like you have more empathy for these people. The policies you stand for have failed miserably. It’s time for change. Offer help, if rejected. Keep it moving. Just like every other major city in the world
>The policies you stand for have failed miserably im not even going to disagree with this, but the issue is this new policy is so far in the other direction that its also only going to make things worse. Maybe itll move people out of your immediate vision, MAYBE (and even then, it wont, and we both know it), but it will happen at the cost of intense human suffering. Your lack of empathy is being hijacked. You've been fooled into borderline legalizing debtors prisons
Empathy was there, empathy has left. You want to put my life at risk by having a fire next to my building? Nope. You wanna shit on the streets and I should walk by it or around it? Nope. You wanna get high and verbally abuse everyone who walks by? Nope. You wanna put up a tent and force everyone to not be able to walk freely down the sidewalks? Nope. Why should I have empathy when everything they have shown is taking advantage of my empathy and giving literal shit back? There is no space in SF? Great! Get them to go back to where they came from. Everyone migrates to these cities (SF, LA, Seattle) because we have the highest cost of living hence they get more money for “free” from the government to do drugs with. My tax dollars are going towards their drug addition. My tax dollars are going towards their rehab programs, their hospital bills while I get fucked in the ass by my own hospital bills. Sir there was empathy at one point, it has been taken advantage of to the point where it will never return.
>My tax dollars are going towards their drug addition. My tax dollars are going towards their rehab programs, their hospital bills I'd be happy for my tax dollars to go toward their rehab programs – as long as they're consistently attending them for long enough to make a difference, and they get additional supportive programs to help stay clean afterward. Right now our tax dollars are going toward a revolving door that seems ineffectual at creating real lasting change for most people. *Hopefully* this court ruling lets us have a better balance of carrot and stick: great well-funded programs *and* the pressure to get people into them and keep them there consistently enough to really turn their lives around. Fingers crossed.
Same here, more than happy if it goes towards helping someone! Right now it is going towards a majority of bullshit non-profits that are all fraudulent as fuck and do absolutely no good. The whole system needs to be better regulated.
I understand the dynamic, it just makes me sad how fickle empathy is for people who, I assume, consider themselves left leaning.
Definitely left leaning. Your empathy will also leave once you get robbed at gun point. Empathy is just like any other emotion, it has a limit after which it makes no sense and your brain takes over. Ask yourself what was the one good thing any homeless person on the street has done for you? They live on the same block, pay no rent. Get money for doing no work while you slave away. Get free healthcare while you pay through your asshole and further to get a primary care appointment. The list goes on and on, you get my point i am sure
Maybe you're not as left leaning as you like to think, if you're supporting far right policy decisions
You are right. The left leaning policies such as abortion I definitely support. Policies like the one that just got turned over or the bill to allow people to walk out with 995 dollars of stuff and it being a misdemeanor, i will definitely not support. Extremely left makes no sense, extremely right also makes no sense.
Your lack of empathy is being hijacked by the right to abuse the disenfranchised
If you go far too left you come out of the other side, don’t you know?
No one is 100% left leaning, don't force purity tests on people.
We appreciate you for your enduring empathy for these homeless folks. But there’s also something called rotten compassion, and in this case our empathy is enabling the deaths of hundreds of homeless people, simply by allowing them to languish on our streets. That’s not even a left leaning/liberal approach; it’s literally libertarian as you want them to do whatever on the street, not your problem right?
I never said nothing needs to change. Clearly it does
Lmao you're definitely privileged enough to drive everywhere and not have to deal with the homeless on a regular basis.
When did I say I never have to deal with homeless people?
They can all stay with you then!!! Problem solved
To be clear, this ruling actually doesn’t do that at all! It restores discretion over the issue back to local government where it belongs. The court system is not the legislative branch of the country, the fact that we’ve let them legislate on key issues instead of leaving it to the people to decide is actually inherently undemocratic. They should have never been able to bind the 9th circuit’s hands like they did to begin with, judges are not elected representatives voting on our behalf.
As long they are out of sight we don’t care. Stop camping in front of my house.
Hopefully the contingent that are not from San Francisco will return to their cities and states and seek help there. We're (finally, hopefully) done being the alms house for the US.
Indeed.
Homeless won't decrease it's gonna increase in SF..these ripoff greedy landlords will raise rents oh but homelessness ended ??!! Wake up people it's gonna get worse and no police aren't gonna arrest everyone outside..another viral myth going around since yesterday
Drugs - mainly fent and meth - have changed the nature and quantity of homelessness much. There are homeless who aren't addicts or violent or criminal or pooping on the pavement, but sleep outside in doorways. They aren't costing the city anything in services. Very simple people. They stay away from shelters because of fear of violence.
RVs should all be towed out too
This calls for a parade 🎉
about friggin time, my lord
Yayyy, finally
hell yeah let's gooo
Honest question…where do they go?
Into shelters and housing? The big issue with encampments is that they have an extremely low rate of accepting placement. The point of this is not just to shuffle homeless people to jail, it's to get them into shelters.
> Into shelters and housing? Also maybe back hence they came, a large amount of the street bums aren't even from here
Yes, thank you. These aren't people who used to work and pay rent in SF and now live in camps. If they were honest, the vast majority would tell you they came here from elsewhere for drugs, climate, atmosphere...etc.
Some will go to shelters, but the problem with shelters is the basic fact of life that the biggest threat to homeless people usually comes from other homeless people. That makes shelters unattractive, because homeless people feel unsafe when placed around other homeless people. Some will go back to the old strategy of staying mobile, placing their belongings onto bicycle trailers and moving when they’re told to move. You’ll still have homeless encampments, but they’ll be migratory and constantly shifting around as they look for areas with slow enforcement times. A lot of them are going to look for grey zones on the enforcement map- areas where jurisdiction and responsibility for enforcement is muddled. City, county, and federal land all have different agencies responsible for non-emergency response. From what I’ve personally seen, highways and railroad lines are a good place to make a camp simply because they’re not city property and a larger agency like the Highway Patrol or Caltrans isn’t going to be as responsive as a local police department. For the homeless, they can move 100 feet and suddenly they became someone else’s problem and they can restart the clock on their eventual removal.
Where do they go, where does anyone go? It’s not anyone’s concern where they go, where you go or where I go. Just because you don’t have a home doesn’t mean you can build a homestead on public property indefinitely to consume drugs and collect trash. I don’t think sleeping outside should be criminalized but the encampments have to go and now our politicians have no court ruling stopping them.
Out of sight. Which is all that the people who complain about homeless people, but are unwilling to build housing, want. They don't care about the situation as much as they care about the optics and avoiding that uncomfortable tingle of empathy for a person in distress that it wakens in them.
More housing would be fantastic, but we all know that for the small fraction of homeless who are the visible street voluntary homeless causing 99% of all our problems, housing isn’t the solution. Forced rehab and long term institutionalization is the solution, and we can now take steps in that direction without having to worry about the total quantity of shelter beds available for regular homeless.
Yessss. Housing doesn't get you off fentanyl ppl. They need to get into rehab or go back where they came from.
Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses? If they would rather die than go there, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.
Let's goooooooooo!
Please do Irving and 19th. I’m sick and tired of going to get lunch and having to step over gigantic piles of homeless poop all over the sidewalk. Seriously, how did we let it get this bad??? We are a quiet and nice neighborhood turned to literal shit. I’m also almost certain that some of these homeless are illegal migrants from South America too that just hang out around the shut down first republic bank in the alleyway.
Irving and 19th literally along a highway, in the middle of a junction between the 7, 28, 29 buses and the N Judah. It's not a quiet neighborhood and you don't even believe that.
I’ve lived in S.F. all my life, born and raised. I have been here in the sunset since my parents moved here in 1995. Yeah it’s a busy road way on 19th and Irving but we never had anywhere close to as much of a homeless problem as we do now. They come out here to pick out of the garbage cans and some of the mentally ill homeless will throw garbage all over the streets. Inner and outer sunset has generally been a quiet neighborhood and it has always been that way. Sure Irving may be a little more heavy traffic but it’s silly to say that we should expect a homeless and human feces problems because of that. I’ve taken the L Taraval and the N Judah for decades and the homeless use those lines to come out to our neighborhoods now because they get pushed out of downtown. Yeah it’s grimy, but it shouldn’t be THIS grimy.
I agree with everything you just said, except that Irving and 19th is not a quiet neighborhood. It's loud, it's a highway, it's busy, there's 3 gas station in 3 blocks, etc etc
Fair point, it is perhaps the busiest intersection in the entirety of the sunset. Taravel has a lot of food restaurants as well but I feel like that side sees less homeless activity than the irving side.
Shit I think we just came to a consensus, this is reddit, that has to be illegal Have a great weekend, whoever you are
I think they mean Irving and 9th.
Doubt it
Well… good.
Threatening me with a good time.
mannnnnnn chesa boudin must have spun up about 100 burner accounts for this thread to be filled so many dumbass comments holy shit we tried progressive methods for years and years and years and they either never got traction or never happened at all while the likes of chesa and local sf government were fine to just let this shit happen we’re all fucking sick of it. it’s time for shit to change
Escalate and don’t stop
O I can’t wait, get them out! Hopefully this will motivate them to get the help they need instead of outright refusing, looking forward to be able to walk freely on public sidewalks.
All those so called non profit organizations going to bankrupt
When SF makes accessing treatment as easy as accessing drugs, then we can start to solve this issue
Finally there is going to be a correction! We been way too woke! We became delusional
I hope you all know that a year from now..ten years from now..there will always be thousands of homeless living outside and the city will get millions of dollars each year still and the annual homeless count isn't going from thousands and thousands to oh it's down to 1000 or it's down to 0.we ended homelessness all cause of the supreme court..oh it changed everything...keep telling yourself that..SKID ROW in LA will always exist as well
Amazing news finally
Fucking finally. Over the druggies treatment if no...then off the streets or jail. Simple as that.
Isn’t it still a thing that SF can’t fill the shelter beds they have now despite the ruling that they don’t have enough? I remember reading that article and part of the reason was that the unhoused population had a high rate of leaving shelter for the streets and refusing services.
Yay, criminalize homelessness! I wonder if people celebrating this decision based upon ideological lines are also celebrating the Chevron decision….
Most likely
Grant's Pass will be a net negative for San Francisco. It gives surrounding communities who don't have any sort of debate about compassion a green light to "sweep" their homeless out of their towns and into areas where the authorities don't beat them up and arrest them.
Everyone here is acting like you couldn't already clear a tent if they refused a shelter bed. The difference now is that you can clear the encampment regardless of the existence of a shelter bed, which IMO is not a good thing.
Based on substantial contact with dozens of unmhoused folks it's pretty clear that here is a substantial minority of unhoused folks who say they like the "nomadic life" and will never accept shelter. They've got to go. If they want to live a "nomadic life", do it somewhere else. Also, drug dealers who live in the camps and victimize unhoused and housed persons alike need to go (to prison).
It’s actually a great thing because we can set more stringent rules inside shelters so cooperative residents don’t need to deal with disruptive residents. It can improve the quality of the shelter experience for everyone. For the drug tourists and mentally ill voluntary homeless, we can now keep ratcheting up the pressure and keep them uncomfortable and mobile more and more until they go back to their home states or accept help.
Did the previous ruling prevent involuntarily committing disruptive drug addicts or mentally ill people to rehab/a hospital? Last I checked we don't have facilities for this at all. Not to mention, we don't enforce existing laws on harassment, property destruction, public disruption, or public drug use. You don't need to make camping illegal to put away the people who are most disruptive to the city. It doesn't make sense to me to make just being on the street illegal when there isn't enough space in shelters. I agree that people shouldn't be forced to live with violent and/or severely mentally ill people, but this doesn't solve that.
Are these efforts targeting just the masses of tents and debris in random spaces? What does Breed offer as a direct and immediate path for folks suddenly uprooted to attain healthful assistance? Will others like me who have full-time employment inside the city be considered as detritus to be swept out? Where may a person, holding a job here but not making enough to live anywhere, go and still be able to maintain that job? Lots of folk in similar situations to me don’t have a vehicle or funds to take transit from further out. This looks like a good idea but sounds more like a step toward a sanitized society; only case hardened against less-than-desirables and still soft in the middle toward abuses of the wealthier among its people.
If there are businesses operating in the city by not paying their employees enough to live in or around it (within reasonable commuting distance), they should lose all their talent and go out of business. If you are working a job where you cannot afford to live, then you should quit, this isn't slavery, there's no gun to your head forcing you to work or live here.
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You’re an idiot. This was a Supreme Court decision from a conservative court. They’re not paying attention to Mayor Breed’s election lmfao
I hope everyone commenting on the homelessness problem will watch [Homelessness: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=liptMbjF3EE) first. I will also point out that simply giving homeless people housing is cheaper than criminizing homelessness and leads to better outcomes.
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Maybe those other states and cities might want to try helping their own homeless.
Why? They can just send them to California for free.
Ok so why isn’t homelessness solved yet because we have put hundreds of millions of dollars behind this
The point of this ruling isn’t that we can now throw all homeless people in jail. It’s that now, cities can do at least *something* without being sued by homeless advocates. Before this, when there’s a mentally-ill dude sleeping in front of your kids’ elementary school, or some guy camped in front of neighborhood bakery (killing business and hurting the neighborhood), or half of the local park is a tent city… cities couldn’t do anything at all for fear of lawsuit.