by _bin_ | 2025-04-17 05:26:51+00:00
This is pretty-well considered; you're right that the SF's policies and climate go a long way to contributing to the problem. And yes, if other cities treated them better, SF's problem would be smaller. Sometimes this is due to a lack of services, to be sure, but SF's services are so unsustainably expensive that even were we to radically increase taxation and scale this federally, it wouldn't work. The "NGO-industrial complex" through which this is washed is the big culprit here, I think. But so is the fact that we do a bad job of caring for those who cannot participate. They cannot really live on their own, cannot keep their housing clean or well-maintained. At some level, the only thing to be done here is to move them to in-patient care, at least until they are psychologically stabilized.

This is really hard to do nowadays, legally speaking. The changes that made it so are entirely understandable: after reports of the incredible institutional abuse of the mentally ill, after the age of lobotomies being the craze, it's no wonder everyone agreed we were due for a change. But the pendulum swung too far, and this is helpful neither for the homeless nor for those who live near them. Psych hospitals are objectively not great and we should improve them. But living out on the street, hopelessly addicted or mentally ill with no treatment, isn't really better. I'm afraid we've let the perfect become the enemy of the good, let the valid conclusion that state psych wards are not nice places blind us to the streets being worse for at least some people.

This doesn't apply to those who are legitimately just down on their luck, obviously; for them, housing-first policies can work much better.

No arguments with you that state-sponsored suspicion is bad. That said, Trump just won all four counties in the Rio Grande Valley, an extremely Latino-dominant area that was a democratic stronghold. He's consistently performing better than any other republican in my lifetime amongst many minority groups (though with a heavy bias towards men), so he must be tapping into something more than anti-brown.

I see what you're saying about this being at some level a right-wing impulse, and distrust of the other is much more right-wing versus the classical left-wing openness. I just don't know that you will ever get people to be substantially open to those whom they see as victimizing them: this moves past the right-leaning "I don't like this other" to the fairly neutral "I don't like this person who is harming me." If I am mugged, my empathy for that person is zero. Maybe it should be different, and that may soften with time, but it's extremely hard to give people sermons on why they should really feel for the guy who just took their wallets at knifepoint.

All that said I agree with most of the issues you've identified. I'm a big fan of localism, moving things to smaller governance areas, because that does seem to resolve many of the scaling issues of democracy. My hope is that helps us apply empathy more consistently where it's deserved: it's much easier for me to look at folks in my city whom I know and figure out how to help them out than it is to do this for folks up in Washington, or over in South Carolina, or wherever.

The other side of this is crime committed by people besides the homeless. I think for that, you'll seldom get much sympathy, and that's incredibly unlikely to change. This is because most of us who are still sympathetic to the homeless are creating an exception to our dislike of people who wrong us, not defaulting to empathy as our first response. I'm not sure how realistically this is fixable. As much as government rhetoric doesn't help, most people get pissed when someone cuts them off in traffic. They don't think, "Wow, I bet that person is having a bad day, or has somewhere to be." And there's no government rhetoric telling them to flip that guy the bird.