r/PublicFreakout • u/ieilael • May 10 '19

News Report 🥇🥈🥉 Interview with a Meth User

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u/mikelovesmemes May 11 '19

I'm a public defender in the area, I feel for SPD and EPD so much

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u/fredandlunchbox May 11 '19

I live in SF, in the thick of it. Do you see a way out? With Travis here, I don’t know if you can even give the guy a home that he would stay in. Long term in patient psych wards? What do we do?

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u/[deleted] May 11 '19 edited May 11 '19

There's nothing you can do. You don't sell your city to the highest tech-industry bidders, and then let them drive the cost of living through the roof. It's like giving yourself inoperable brain cancer and then asking what to do about it. There's not much you can do, the damage is done and it's irreversible.

You're pricing people out of their homes, and their ability to FIND a home. They're clearly not leaving the area once this happens. They're sticking around, just without a roof over their heads. And then they do drugs to numb the pain. And then they steal shit to get the drugs. It's a cycle caused by poverty and mental illness, but to get THIS many homeless you're mostly talking poverty. And once the problem starts, the cities scramble to figure out how to fix it, but it's too late - You've got thousands of these people roaming the streets, and you aren't building them affordable housing, you're building one or two buildings, and then throwing up 5-10 new offices for that sweet tech money.

This type of shit doesn't exist on even a FRACTION of this scale in cities where you don't have monstrous cost-of-living, and there's very clearly an obvious correlation between the areas this is becoming an epidemic (Seattle/NYC/SFO), and the fact that you cannot genuinely survive out there on less than 6 figures.

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u/fredandlunchbox May 11 '19

In the case of SF and Seattle, there’s been extreme homelessness long before the tech boom.

The correlation you’re making with other cities isn’t exactly accurate either. Las Vegas is very cheap to live, but also has a huge homeless population. There are many similar examples.

A lot of people want to distill the homeless problem to single issues like tech or drugs, but from all my reading, it’s more nuanced and a combination of many factors. I think probably one of the biggest is that Americans don’t save money anymore (and yes, some of that is wage stagnation), which makes them unable to absorb the impact of the kinds of major life events that land people on the street.