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Posted May 21, 2017, 11:50 PM
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Registered User
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Join Date: Dec 2016
Location: San Francisco
Posts: 24,177
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Quote:
Originally Posted by ue
The situation in Edmonton isn't that bad compared to BC or California, which seem to be their respective country's dumping grounds for homeless.
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Probably the weather mainly. Where else in Canada can you live outdoors year around? Certainly not Edmonton.
The US sunbelt, generally, works but much of it is politically more conservative and harsh on the homeless than the Pacific coast. In Texas, Florida, Arizona they just don't tolerate what we tolerate.
Anyway, today after posting what I posted above, I went out and, again, to a fast food joint for a large diet drink (I seem to be constantly thirsty) and a place to sit and read the Sunday paper. I was sitting at a counter and a homeless guy comes in (I have to assume he was homeless--he had a beat up wheeled suitcase bulging with his personal stuff), sets up a boom box taking up the remaining counter space, pushes past me to plug it all into the only customer-accessible outlet in sight, and begins to chill (purchasing nothing). Restaurant staff says nothing to which he might take offense, all clearly intimidated. I moved to another isolated table in the back of the store.
This sort of behavior, so common, is not that of people who simply lack a home. It is the behavior of people with a seething anger toward everyone who does have one and probably many others who don't, and a middle digit raised to the world attitude. It can easily become dangerous.
Meanwhile, have we addressed the second part of the thread title: What is being done about it? The following is a year old but not that much has changed:
Quote:
S.F. spends record $241 million on homeless, can’t track results
By Heather Knight and Kevin Fagan
February 5, 2016 Updated: February 6, 2016 7:20pm
Visitors may wonder why one of the wealthiest cities in the world can’t cough up enough money to alleviate homelessness, but, in fact, San Francisco spends tremendous amounts of money on the problem. The city is allocating a record $241 million this fiscal year on homeless services, $84 million more than when Mayor Ed Lee took office in January 2011.
But the city struggles to track exactly how all that money is being spent and whether it’s producing results. Eight city departments oversee at least 400 contracts to 76 private organizations, most of them nonprofits, that deal with homelessness.
No single system tracks street people as they bounce among that galaxy of agencies looking for help.
That’s a major systemic weakness that’s been noted before: Fourteen years ago — a lifetime in politics — the city controller called for a single information network to ensure better tracking of homeless people as they seek services and better tracking of money spent to help them. There’s still no network and still no plan for one.
That’s a mistake, said Dr. Josh Bamberger, a UCSF professor who for many years has helped craft homeless policy in San Francisco and for President Obama.
He said few things are more crucial to tackling homelessness than having a system that tracks people through every aspect of service and that such a system has helped New Orleans, Minneapolis, Salt Lake City, Phoenix and the state of Virginia make great progress.
“You have to treat the sickest homeless people first, because they use the most resources, and the only way to do that is to know exactly who and where they are and what has worked or hasn’t in each case,” Bamberger said. “Once those people are housed, you can concentrate on the rest of the population and snowball to ending homelessness” . . . .
Last month, Supervisor Aaron Peskin (who, through anti-development and excessively tolerant social polices may be responsible for some of the problem--Pedestrian) called 911 because a homeless man, naked from the waist down and his legs smeared in feces, was standing on the Filbert Steps on Telegraph Hill, screaming obscenities and blocking the path of passersby.
Currently, there’s no way for the police officer who responded or a doctor at San Francisco General Hospital to easily learn much about the man’s service profile, such as stints in rehab, which city-funded nonprofits might have tried to help him, if he receives food and shelter, or if he gets government benefits.
“There’s no question it has gotten exponentially worse,” Peskin said of homelessness in San Francisco. “How the city spends a quarter of a billion a year, I have not figured out. It’s not working” . . . .
(Near one sidewalk homeless tent city) on a recent night, in a two-hour period, one man was beaten and robbed, three fights broke out, and two men smoking methamphetamine stormed up and down the traffic median, screaming at each other and traffic for more than an hour. At least 250 people cycle in and out of the camp . . . .
The $241 million is about equivalent to the annual budget for the Public Works Department, which cleans all the city’s streets, repairs its sidewalks, cleans up illegal dumping, maintains its trees, removes graffiti and more. That much money would pay for San Francisco’s entire library system for two years.
In truth, the figure is even higher. It doesn’t include emergency services from police or the Fire Department when they respond to homeless people in crisis, because spending by those departments isn’t broken out that way.
The number is likely to grow this year. Lee is pushing a June ballot measure that would dedicate $20 million to modernize homeless shelters and build more sites like the Navigation Center in the Mission District, which temporarily houses entire camps of homeless people and tries to steer them into services . . . .
Almost half of the $241 million — $112 million — is spent on supportive housing for the formerly homeless. Nationally, permanent supportive housing that includes social workers and other care is considered the best way to end homelessness. It’s also less expensive than caring for people on the streets — $17,353 a year per person, compared with $87,480 a year for each of the 278 homeless “high users” of the city’s public medical system, Howard said.
But, as the city builds more supportive housing, it must continue to pay the cost for all those new residents. Few of the formerly homeless are ever able to find jobs, afford market-rate apartments and shrug off city support . . . .
Since January 2004, the city has moved 21,742 people off the streets. Of those, 9,286 people left with a bus ticket from Homeward Bound, at an average cost of $185 per person. The rest were housed through a variety of city programs . . . .
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http://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/a...ss-6808319.php
__________________
Rusiya delenda est
Last edited by Pedestrian; May 22, 2017 at 12:04 AM.
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