I'm guessing that you misunderstand the threats, and are much more likely to be hit by someone in an SUV. I've spent lots and lots of time in cities; I've never had a problem with a homeless person.
Would you count having to step over an active urine stream on your way to the grocery store as "a problem"?
How about walking with your pregnant wife past someone who is splitting his time yelling at the sky and scratching his crotch from the inside of his pants?
Sure, in both scenarios we weren't physically harmed, but it certainly made us feel unsafe and uncomfortable. It's not something that I think we should all just get used to.
Those are great opportunities to teach your children about the consequences of an apathetic voting base. It’s also a great time to nurture children’s empathetic abilities by teaching them to juxtapose indecent behavior, mental illness, poverty, and general despair.
Want more action? Try protesting and demanding solutions that include no questions asked housing, healthcare, food, water, and basic essential communication technology and interconnection.
Unless people want to misery murder homeless people en masse, the above is the solution. Hard stop. Don’t like it? That’s not my problem, I’m not complaining about desperate people from a place of immense privilege.
There are so many countries on earth with a far, far more apathetic voting base than San Francisco which face a fraction of the homeless issues. It’s not fair to tell regular citizens that the homeless people harassing them on their walk to work are only there because they haven’t protested hard enough, that’s just baloney.
Something’s very, very wrong in SF and it’s absolutely okay for tax paying law abiding citizens to be making noise about it.
People in the neighborhoods with fewer problems (let’s face it, there are many very quiet expensive neighborhoods in the Bay Area) have very “progressive” views on the homelessnesses. They don’t experience its effects frequently, so don’t think it’s a big problem. They vote for policies that grow social services for the homeless, even though those policies don’t work. But the idea they have is that these services just need more money. And then more money again, and again.
Progressives live in cities more than anywhere else, San Francisco being a center of progressivism. The critics live elsewhere, and love to tell people in cities what they really should want and do (more guns, no progressive reforms, etc. etc.). In NY, the anti-progressive vote was in the suburbs; in the city they do well. In Philadelphia, the progressive DA did best in African-American neighborhoods.
You may misunderstand me. I’m not saying tax payers are at fault for not protesting hard enough. What I am saying is that Direct Action is required to force the hands of people who have the authority make the direly needed changes.
I’m not interested in quibbling about how the homeless population grew so large unless it is explicitly for the purposes of calculating reparations and identifying perpetrators.
Make all the noise you want, complaining about people peeing is ineffective. I see trust fund brats pissing in public regularly and have never seen this volume of outrage directed at this population of people. More public bathrooms is the solution to that particular problem.
>>Those are great opportunities to teach your children about the consequences of an apathetic voting base
I think you would be much better off using those opportunities to teach your kids to stay away from drugs and alcohol, and to study hard and work hard - so they don't end up like that.
Plenty of people have worked excruciatingly hard and never done drugs but wound up homeless anyways. Reducing homelessness to laziness and drug addiction is a good indicator that you aren’t familiar with the the literature around homelessness and might have some prejudices against homeless presenting people.
Tangentially, I think it’s much better to use people like Elon musk, or Donald trump, or Sam bank man fried, jk Rowling, etc as examples of who not to become. Bad luck can befall anyone whereas these people woke up and chose violence, repeatedly.
Take a deep breath, or just don't live in cities if you can't handle it. These are momentary distractions; just go on with your day.
The second person is very easy to avoid; I've done it many times (maybe the same person!). The first you just keep going.
I do have empathy for these people, who have noplace else to go. Maybe build some public bathrooms - I know when I'm out in the city, it can be hard to find a bathroom, and I don't get stereotyped and rejected by most places (just stereotyped and accepted!).
However, I spend lots and lots of time in cities and hardly ever see these situations, though critics love to describe them. What smells isn't urine (people love to give examples including human waste - the well-used 'human feces' now gets a laugh from a few of us - how could you tell what kind of feces? Did you examine it closely? Take a sample? Tell us your technique!).
A variant of this comment comes up every time someone expresses tense situations.
I used to live around the corner from homeless services in the greater Seattle area and commute by foot after dark regularly. I never got physically assaulted but certainly would have if I didn't have my wits about me.
Are most homeless folks problematic? Absolutely not. Is there higher prevalence of mental illness, drug abuse, and other things that lend themselves to irratic behavior among that demographic? Absolutely.
It's ok to be both compassionate and recognize that there is a real safety/health issue. We don't have to minimize someone's experience based on "the numbers"
> I used to live around the corner from homeless services in the greater Seattle area and commute by foot after dark regularly. I never got physically assaulted but certainly would have if I didn't have my wits about me.
How do you define a “problem”? Is poop on the streets a problem? Used syringes? Mountains of trash? High people blocking public areas? Mentally ill people shouting at night and waking up whole neighborhoods? Physical assaults on weaker looking people (women, elderly, etc)?
This is the everyday reality in SF.
