Hasn’t the failed war on drugs shown the narrative that drugs cause the homelessness and crime and are not just another symptom of the underlying problems is a lie?
Guess not to the general public.
Whether they are a cause or symptom, people shooting up in the streets and leaving needles everywhere is unacceptable.
They wouldn’t have to shoot up in the streets if SF still had the safe injection sites up. People who shoot up in the streets do so mostly because they want to get found if they OD.
Making it illegal to be high won’t make addicts want to stop getting high, it will just push them into dark corners where they die when they OD. Imo that’s way more unacceptable.
So create safe injection sites then.
All of history has shown that getting tough by criminalizing drug use doesn’t solve the problem.
The only thing that drug screening welfare applicants has ever done is shown that the percentage of welfare applicants that use drugs is much lower than the general population.
You fucking morons are literally adopting Florida’s failures from a decade ago.
So if they test positive for drugs, that means you’ll set them up with support programs, right? Treat the underlying issue, correct? Not just write them off and let the problem grow even more… right???
Breed’s office has said the measure was intentionally designed to be flexible on the treatment component. Treatment options could range from out-patient services to a prescription for buprenorphine, a medication used to treat addiction. They noted it doesn’t include a requirement for participants to remain sober, recognizing that people often lapse in recovery and shouldn’t be kicked out of the program for a slip-up.
Yes?
Holy shit I’m glad to be wrong. Honestly surprised. That’s what I get for not reading the article and just assuming.
Thanks for the correction
Local tech billionares are recently dumping more money into the city politics to shift it ot the right. The CEO of Y combinator, a hugely influential silicon valley incubator is notoriously antagonist and recently drunkenly said the local city council should “die slow.”
Measures supporting low income housing, more ethics laws for city officials, turning office space into residential space, and $6B for mental health care also passed in the election. Those definitely don’t seem like things that the right would support.
The rest of the propositions you mentioned were pretty liberal but the office space one was lead by the right. It allowed for fast tracking transforming office space from commercial to residential, which sounds good on paper, until you realize that fast track already existed for affordable housing. All the proposition did was fast track developers plans to turn the space into non-affordable housing, which San Francisco already has plenty of, and removes the incentives to build affordable housing out of that space.
You could argue that reducing the red tape for market rate housing would help increase the supply and therefore reduce the cost for everyone, but that’s a standard right wing pro-developer argument. The left would say that SF has been building tons of market rate housing for years with no decrease in rent and that the only way to make housing affordable is to build affordable housing. You can either build it through state funding and building, like the affordable housing proposition A does, or by incentiving developers to build it, because the base incentive of the market is to build the most expensive housing possible to maximize profits.
Housing issues in big cities don’t fall squarely into right wing or left wing. For many progressives like me, we’re allied with the housing developers because there is a housing crisis and more housing helps people.
non-affordable housing, which San Francisco already has plenty of,
This is absolutely not true. Not anywhere close. SF is drastically behind on housing at all income levels. By tens if not hundreds of thousands of units.
This is absolutely not true. Not anywhere close. SF is drastically behind on housing at all income levels. By tens if not hundreds of thousands of units.
Could you cite something in this, because for nearly the past decade SF has beat it’s market rate housing goals by over 50% . This seems to be going down recently due to the tech recession and people leaving the city though . Even looking on Zillow there’s a thousand results for apartments under $3,000. If you’re medium to high income, based on AMI, and want to live in this city, you can find a place. If there were truly a housing shortage at all income levels and that’s causing high rents then the shortage would be alleviated and rents would be going down with the slow exodus that’s been happening in the city post pandemic and during the tech layoffs, but they haven’t. That’s a big question I have for the market fundamentalists and developers, how does the population go down, the total supply go up and rents stay the same?
Speaking anecdotally I recently moved from one of the newer high rises in mission bay and I’d guess it was half full. They were either fully vacant or as I discovered with my next door neighbor only occasionally occupied during some weekends. The building management probably knew this as they started to encourage residents to Airbnb as they tried to keep or attract more of these pied e terre types of residents. Some of my friends also live in mission bay a few blocks away and they say there building is mostly empty as well.
Here’s an article on some of the flaws of the yimby movement, I hope it’ll give you a different perspective on how to solve the housing problems facing the city.
I had a very long response typed but I hit the wrong button and it vanished😔
I had sources linked and everything, it’s so demoralizing when that happens
Nothing in your drafts? If you want to give a more condensed version that’s fine too, rarely get to talk about local politics on here with someone who actually lives here, as opposed to the people outside of the bay area who think it’s a hell hole covered in shit.
I don’t think the browser version saves drafts?
It just happened again and I’m seriously considering quitting lemmy due to it. What a shit feature. Even up voting or down voting a post destroys your comment box.
The gist of it was that SF has been setting its own housing goals artificially low, and that you should reframe your thinking from “people left but rent prices didn’t go down” to “people left and rent prices stopped rising”. I had sources etc. I also criticized your source for “why more housing is bad” for being the leftist version of Fox News, all hot takes with no substance, designed to manipulate people and harmful to society.
Edit1: here’s a good source for actual, realistic (in the sense that it matches the demand) home building goals: https://www.hcd.ca.gov/about-hcd/newsroom/state-releases-accountability-report-on-san-franciscos-housing-policies-and-practices
If San Francisco’s current rate of housing approvals and construction continues, the City will miss its housing production goal of over 82,000 new homes by 2031 that is necessary to address affordability and overcrowding challenges experienced by the current population, as well as providing homes for future San Franciscans. San Francisco must add over 10,000 new homes, including over 5,800 affordable homes, each year. So far in 2023, San Francisco has permitted less than one home a day.
Essentially, SF was blocking so much housing that the state stepped in.
Edit2: the article you linked is the worst kind of falsehood, an intelligent one.
A simple falsehood is lies: “the election was stolen”. Quantifiably untrue.
A slightly more complicated falsehood has elements of truth: “the DNC stole the election from Bernie”. Not exactly true, but the true parts give a shield for the unspoken overall implication.
The article you linked is what I like to call a Tier 3 Falsehood: one that acknowledges the flaws in a position, pretends to be on your side, and then skillfully manipulates you into a position supporting the very flawed argument that it led with. A reverse cargo cult is the classic example: https://hanshowe.org/2017/02/04/trump-and-the-reverse-cargo-cult/
I don’t think this article is as insidious as reverse cargo cults. I think it’s just a NIMBY using the standard NIMBY tactic of trying to justify their own self-interest and throwing every argument they can at you to see what sticks. But it’s clear half-truths and manipulations, to the point that while you started the article hating NIMBYs, you ended supporting them and aren’t quite sure why.
In a nutshell, it’s because the article is a mix of excellent arguments built on shaky premises, and traditional tribalist associations.
Let’s go over it in some detail.
As a Guardian report on the phenomenon noted, YIMBYs are not anti-capitalists. They are allies of developers
This is priming. It’s relying on the association “developers bad, therefore YIMBYs bad”.
The idea, generally, is that the problem of affordable housing is a problem of supply. Thus zoning restrictions should be rewritten to allow for more development. There is little interest in having the government build new public housing. Instead, when YIMBYs say “we need more housing,” they mean “we need to allow developers to build what sells.”
Why? Unexplained, hoping you’ll just assume “it’s because they’re capitalist scum in the pockets of the real estate developers”.
And even though they talk a lot about the need for affordable housing, they tend to be opposed to requiring developers to make housing affordable, assuming that the Invisible Hand of the free market will take care of that.
This time they explain it, but they lie. (for reference, the actual reason for relying on private developers is because the entire housing crisis is caused by government obstruction. If government wanted to build more housing, it would have done so. It doesn’t want to. Private developers are the only option left. It’s obvious if you understand the cause of the housing crisis, but the article deftly avoids talking about that.)
But what is called the “logic” of Econ 101 is often a fairy tale
Never EVER trust an article that tells you that a professional science is flat out wrong. This should ring alarm bells.
and it is only when you think a bit harder (i.e., when you get past the “101” class) that you realize it might be false.
Aka “do your own research”, but for intelligent leftists. Same message though: the experts are wrong.
Consider the pencil towers. Let’s say that
What follows is pulled from the author’s ass.
There were 30 single-family units in the old building. Our new pencil tower is 100 floors high and has 100 units. All of our pencil tower’s units are full of state-of-the-art appliances and high-end fixtures, and cost $2,000,000 each. They are swiftly bought up, 20 by rich people who live in the city, 30 by rich people lured to the city by its new pencil tower, and 50 by rich people who have no intention of living in the city but think pencil tower condos are an asset worth owning in a swiftly-gentrifying city.
There is no evidence that induced demand applies whatsoever to housing. Here’s an article, not without its own biases, but it at least backs its position up with data and rational arguments other than “suppose that such and such happens, wouldn’t that be terrible??” style bullshit: https://cityobservatory.org/another-housing-myth-debunked-neighborhood-price-effects-of-new-apartments/
The main point is that induced demand applies when something is free, such as roads. It does not apply to $2 million condos.
It’s important to note that induced demand is the shaky foundation of the entire article you linked. That’s why it’s a tier 3 falsehood: it takes a lot of detailed reading, preferably with someone who already opposes the premise, to understand that this is the single concrete mechanism by which increasing housing supply doesn’t work. There’s a bunch of ad hominem attacks (evil developers!) and tugging at heartstrings (grandma gonna get evicted!) but you have to ignore that. The central thing that the entire argument rests on is induced demand, and that theory is wrong.
Just to quickly addrrss some other points:
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Neighborhood character: dog-whistle
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Eviction for the purpose of development: not legal in CA
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“we communities of color, we poor people and immigrants, we working-class queers” literally cultural appropriation. Working class people need housing more than anyone, it’s the fucking bourgeoisie who are anti-housing, and it’s a little sick that they pretend to be one of the people in a blatant call to leftist sympathies. The average homeowner in San Francisco is a millionaire.
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“Any understanding of the desirability of development depends on deeper questions like: whose backyard are we talking about? Who is saying yes? To what? Why?”: delay, deny, muddy the waters. Above all, anything that threatens the status quo is to be resisted.
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So it’s trying to get rid of the rest of its poor people basically
I wonder how much money would be saved if they stopped means testing the poor and spent all their money helping people instead of paying cops to terrorize them.
Cops in SF don’t do shit. They effectively went on strike a couple of years ago.
This has had both good and bad effects.
Drug treatment is important, yes, but making it a precondition for benefits will absolutely hurt the most vulnerable. If there was actually enough affordable housing available for everyone that needs it, there would be far less of a need for this kind of policy. It is well documented that providing housing before anything else sets people up for success. If someone has been living on the streets and suddenly has housing available, their life will improve so drastically thanks to the job and social opportunities that will become available, also making it less likely that drug abuse will continue.
This seems like a cop out to me. Just build houses for fuck’s sake.
Breed has been on the wrong side of so many issues. Most recently she made an incredibly tone-deaf statement denouncing the city council’s vote against the genocide in Gaza. I’m done with her.
Given that neither her nor the council have anything to do with policy in Gaza and that both are going to be making statements purely to aim to appeal to chunks of the electorate, does it make sense to condition your vote on that?
If you were choosing a dentist, would you use their stated positions on the Levant to do so?
I’m not a San Francisco resident, so I don’t get a vote, I just have lots of connections to the region. She didn’t have to denounce the city council’s resolution against the genocide, she chose to, and that felt like a gut punch to me at the time. As for the relevance of it all, it was a non-binding (obviously) resolution taking a moral stand on an issue directly impacting hundreds if not thousands of residents in a pretty small city, so it matters.
I take your point, but if I asked my dentist if they thought it was okay to indiscriminately kill tens of thousands of children because they were born on the wrong side of a border, and they said yes? I’d absolutely find a different doctor.
Now I’m imagining a binding resolution on Gaza lol
Representatives of the City of San Francisco being legally required to go try to negotiate a cease fire, per city mandate
This is the opposite of the advice in the book, The End of Policing. Book was so good that I bought copies for people close to me.
Just take care of people. We can afford to. It costs less than enforcement costs.
Just take care of people. We can afford to
Debatable. San Francisco spends a billion dollars a year on homelessness. That’s unsustainable even for SF. Only 800,000 people live in SF.
Debatable. San Francisco spends a billion dollars a year on homelessness. That’s unsustainable even for SF. Only 800,000 people live in SF.
The costs for locking up homeless people is greater than the cost of providing housing. The following quote is from a slapdash search; I haven’t read the document because my original source is a book, The End of Policing, and that book had multiple citations that I’m not listing here.
As identified in the chart above, the total cost of incarceration is estimated to be 25% higher than the total cost of providing equivalent supportive services to prevent recidivism.
There’s a question of induced demand. We don’t have really good data, but anecdotally there’s a common belief that a lot of SFs homeless either migrated here from other parts of the country or were bussed here, because of SFs lenience.
During most surveys, most homeless people report being born here. Which is a useless fact, because if they report being from somewhere else, they’ll likely get sent back there.
In any case, San Francisco does not incarcerate the homeless. It allows them to live on the streets.
People vote left wing
Left wing policies make city better
Better city attracts more people
More people increases costs
Increased costs filter for rich people
Rich people vote authoritarian.
You skipped the essential NIMBY step between these two:
Better city attracts more people
More people increases costs
Costs scale way out of proportion with population because of artificial constraints imposed by those lucky enough to be here first.
Worth noting that constraints aren’t 100% artificial in SF, just mostly artificial. It, like Helsinki, is situated on a peninsula and is part of a metropolitan area, so expansion isn’t really an option. Intentional NIMBY constraints make it so much worse.
Suburban sprawl is terrible for the environment anyway.
These Trump areas need to just fall into the ocean. It is sick what they want to do to poor people.
San Francisco, California is now a Trump area? What the fuck are you talking about?
And why does your gibberish have so many upvotes??
The city that walks through literal human shit is finally tired of that.
