That's 1% of the population. Maybe not a big deal to you.

There's only 13,000 city blocks in SF.

That's a homeless person every 2 blocks.

Kind of dangerous to be walking past people in all different states of desperation multiple times every trip everywhere you go, is another way to look at it.

You also ignore that it's a rapidly growing problem.

Comparing it to DUI numbers doesn't make any sense whatsoever.

Sure, a quarter of a percent is not a big percent, but that sure is a lot of people. It is _more_ than the entire population of Alaska, Wyoming, or Vermont. It is near the population size of several other states.

An entire US state's worth of people are unable to find adequate housing and not just because they are off their meds. According to the 2024 Point-in-Time count, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development estimated 22% of homeless are facing a severe mental illness. So nearly 4 out of 5 homeless are regular people who simply cannot secure permanent housing.

That sure as hell sounds like a crisis to me.

But we can't do anything about it until we face up to the problem. Spending more money won't help. I'm somewhat familiar with the activity at our local jail, and a good part of it is homeless people rotating in and out. They get brought in because they were trespassing or shoplifting or something, the jail cleans them up and dries them out (they're usually on drugs, which they somehow manage to buy) and tries to get them back on their medications, they get released, and the cycle begins again. Most of them are mentally unstable, and perhaps they'd be somewhat functional if they could stay on their medication, but they don't, so they can't function in society for long.

We don't want to put them back in asylums, because some asylums really were hellholes, and I guess we don't trust ourselves not to let them be hellholes again. That seems awfully pessimistic; factories used to be pretty awful too, but we require them to be safe and clean now. Seems like we could do the same with asylums, but we won't even consider it. So we're left with letting them wander the streets, maybe bedding down at homeless shelters when they feel like it, using the jails as temporary asylums when they get in trouble, and throwing more money at the problem once in a while to soothe our guilt. It's sad.

The department of HUD generates this ~771K figure from a "point-in-time" estimate, a single count from a single night performed in January. They literally have volunteers go out, count the number of homeless people they observe, and report their findings.

It's not hard to imagine why this is probably a significant undercount. There is likely a long tail of people that happened to be in a situation that night where they were not able to be counted (i.e. somewhere secluded, sleeping in a friend's private residence that night, etc).

Even if these numbers are correct, to my mind a "crisis" is still more characterized by the trend than the numbers in absolute. From the first link you provided, we saw a 39% increase in "people in families" experiencing homelessness, and 9% in individuals. A resource from the HUD itself suggests a 33% increase in homelessness from 2020-2024, 18% increase from 2023-2024. That is far apace of the population increase in general.

https://www.huduser.gov/portal/sites/default/files/pdf/2024-...

And even then, I would say many people would suggest that the change in visible homelessness they've experienced in the last 10 years would amount to "crisis" levels, at least relative to the past.

It's completely fair to argue that it is not in fact a crisis, but claiming that it is certainly not "baseless."

"When he looked into the history, Dunkelman realized that progressives have long swung back and forth between two opposing impulses. One is what he calls Hamiltonianism: the desire to achieve progress by empowering government and institutions to tackle big problems at the direction of strong leaders (like Robert Moses) and informed experts. The other is what he calls Jeffersonianism: the desire to prevent unaccountable centralized authorities (also like Robert Moses) from abusing ordinary citizens by empowering them to fight back."

-- https://www.niskanencenter.org/why-nothing-works-with-marc-d...

My personal opinion is the working class, not the fancy educated types, need to run the Dem coalition. It would be far more effective in a number of ways... with broader appeal.

My point is that I'm not sure we need more assistance. TBH we need better, more efficient assistance. We spend a lot on deliberation, not enough on delivery.

A lot of this is due to leadership gaps IMO. Center-left leaders (ie Schumer) look weak because they excessively triangulate every stakeholder. Instead leaders need to act as true leaders, which means being a touch less collaborative / trying to triangulate. And more focused on some top-down, cut through red-tape, have a vision, persuade people etc.

(Then, arguably if people saw the system working well, they might want to award it with more money.)

Idk, I think it's different for every city. But I think the point I'm trying to make is that having some kind of political constraints in governance seems to typically be a good thing for the sake of getting some shit done.

Actually I think I'm just stating an obvious point now given the glaring ineffectiveness of our two party political system...

True if you can identify the correct stakeholders and those stakeholders are aligned to the goal.

It becomes unhelpful when the list of stakeholders is so long and disconnected from the goal that listening to stakeholders becomes an endless cycle of meetings and talking about the problem instead of doing anything about it.

In my local experience, initiatives related to homelessness and drug addiction treatment attract a lot of people who like the idea of being involved because it advances their career or sounds good on their resume, but many of them are unqualified to be involved and think the role will involve a lot of delegation and deciding where to send money to other groups, not actually doing any of the work directly.

Basically, a lot of people who want to be in charge and claim leadership but who also don’t want to actually do the hard work.

They spent far less to basically completely solve their street homelessness problem compared to "model" cities like SF, so...

Go take a look around the Nasa Bypass and Gulf Freeway. You've got apartments, a Great Wolf Lodge, an oil pipeline holding station, and single family homes all right next to each other all right on top of the creek.

The parks I used to play at had active oil and gas wells right next to them. My neighborhood growing up had a big, straight greenbelt that bisected the neighborhood due to the abundance of buried gas lines in between.

It literally goes townhouses, lumber yard, liquor store, train track, townhouses, bail bonds, Chevy dealership with limited sidewalks.

Whilst it’s true that europe does have homelessness too, and it has gotten worse in recent years, it is incomparable to America.

It doesn’t seem like a problem that can be fixed by some local policy or other. It’s a societal problem.

America also has stratospheric levels of inequality, a terrible healthcare system, and lacks a functional welfare state. I do not think this is a coincidence.

I’d much rather live somewhere more civilised, at the cost of higher taxation.

It always irks me to see Americans taunt Europeans on social media about their lack of very large tech companies, whilst the Europeans are perhaps too dignified to point out the consequences of America’s hypercapitalism (such as homelessness, crime, and trump) in return.