So I keep hearing about the homelessness and drugs in San Fran...

Jokes aside, this is common in a lot of big cities. SF is just an easier target because (1) librulz, and (2) it's densely packed making stuff like this easier to spot.

Yeah I'm sure that's it.

Virtually all large cities tend to be liberal politically aren't they? Even NYC under Giuliani was considered liberal wasn't it?

Not mile after mile, but at the rate they’re increasing, it won’t be long. Housing prices in Nashville have skyrocketed and the city has decided that one of the solutions to the problem is to force the homeless out of the city, so they’re coming to places like where I live. There’s few opportunities for them to panhandle, given the layout of the town, but they can at least sleep in the woods behind the shopping center and not have to worry about being hassled by the cops or set upon punk kids while they sleep.

I thought under the overpasses was a good place to sleep (relatively speaking of course). I remember seeing a bunch of homeless people under them in Houston. I always thought it would be a good idea for the city to put some porta-potties there. Can't hurt. Might help.

At least the U.S. is not like Sao Paulo, Brazil. I remember a news feature back in the 1990s about how many homeless teenagers had been murdered by police there. The short documentary said that the low estimate was that police had murdered more than 600 teenagers in the previous year in that city alone. They talked to several teenagers who talked about sleeping during the day and staying active at night because police were much more likely to kill them at night.

No, lulz aside it really is worse. Much worse. When was the last time you were there?

Keep it up, you'll make a Republican yet.

Now repeat after me:
-cholera's not even contagious.
-nobody's proved the black plague is really back, and anyway we can probably treat it, and probably it won't wipe out a bunch of the population again.
-typhus can probably be treated with antibiotics, and China probably won't stop selling us what we need to cure our sick. And TB is not really just a third world malady.
-hundreds of gun deaths every year in places like Chicago, Baltimore, Detroit and St. Louis (that have some of the country's strictest gun laws) aren't nearly as important as possible threats to potential Starbucks customers. It's all just politics.

Yep, the disease outbreaks prove this isn’t just the usual stuff as denialist keep claiming. It is exponentially worse and is caused by bad policies. Much of it is a drug problem which politicians keep lying about and pretending is a homeless problem. In L.A. a huge part of the disease and trash problem is caused by illegal dumping, mostly by illegal aliens, they don’t want to pay the dump fees charged at the city dump so they literally just drive to alleyways around skid row and dump entire truck loads of garbage. This combines with the massive amounts of trash and waste thrown EVERYWHERE by the homeless and results in the massive rat infestation. The rats live, eat, and hide in the garbage, fleas live on the rats, and that is why there are disease outbreaks. That and all the raw sewage every where.

They needn't seek it out. Free healthcare makes involuntary treatment for mental health patients more more feasible for a start (and yes, I do believe whole heartedly that can be ethical, especially when the alternative is a life of homelessness and jail time). People come into services through the courts, the police, social services, the school system.

Drug abuse is more problematic in that effective treatment generally requires the patient to be on side, so to speak, but bear in mind the scale of overlap here. An awful lot of mental health patients are dual diagnosis (in my experience for some demographics it's a majority in fact) and there are very good reasons for that, not all of which are "drugs make you ill" by the way.

Engage with one group and you are inevitably engaging with the other and it is therefore impingent on a conscientious healthcare provider to address the broader issues surrounding a mental heath diagnosis and not merely the medical model and there is little incentive for private providers to do any of this work. By it's nature it's a not for profit business but its' positive impact on the economy more broadly cannot be overstated where it reduces so many societal ills.

Well, insofar as you have tended to see a demographic shift, sure.

But turn that on it's head, if people are moving from an area without UH to an area with then an equally valid way of presenting that is as a failure of the former, with SF picking up the slack for other areas which are failing people. SF is worst not because it provides UH but because its' neighbours do not.

The real test would be how things look when every state and city has that UH coverage, thus removing the need for people to congregate in one particular area and create bottlenecks such as you are seeing. Lots of countries stand testament to the fact that said universality works far better than either a primarily private model or a patchwork of alternatives.

Not too many overpasses around here, and they can’t stay at the ones in Nashville any more.

Loads of them near me, but to put things in perspective I know pretty much every homeless person for miles around by name and none of them sleep under underpasses.

I visit it more often than you're sober.

Ah, yes, you mean like how detention of kids in Obama cages didn't matter until we changed presidents?

And now it's like Hitler.

Do you know anything about the actual numbers behind gun deaths in the US and how little can be attributed to "mass shootings", although the Left hasn't met a mass shooting incident that couldn't be exploited for their anti-2nd Amendment propaganda?

Complete tangent but if you believe a gun has to be actually discharged to influence the level of violence in a society then you've a whole lot of explaining to do about your murder rates.

Agreed on the cages though, don't give a fuck which party did it first, it needs to stop.

Says a guy in a country surrounded by water.

I can only describe many of the posts in this thread as just complete denial. That is being generous.

Maybe they need to be visible to the general populace because I asked a few people if this was everywhere and they said it isn't. They said they saw places like that but most of it is fine. No one said there were needles up to your shins as you claim. Maybe you need to stop looking for shit because I am sure you will find it in a city.

My thought is @Dinner is a fucking wachydoodle. I am going to trust the reasonable people because I am pretty sure dinner is fucked in the head.

I do on a daily basis (although a lot of 'em are just drunk on Chinese cooking wine)
We've got two shelters and a couple of drop in centers here, which is about all that's left now that the funding for mental health has been cut to a fraction of what it was 20 years ago.

this is what happens when low skilled jobs and affordable housing dry up, you wind up with people with nothing productive to do and nowhere to live. Then, when they do create some sort of self support like a tent city under a highway, they still get moved along.

I'm just more angry at the policies that put and keep them there than I am at them for falling off of a "straight and narrow" that's become a tightrope.

For the nonreality impaired that news report is from a year ago where the city of San Francisco went from just four people cleaning up used needles (their only job) to 14. Back then it was 250,000 needles per month picked up with just four workers. Today they now have 30 dedicated needle removers. All of those needles are given out 50 at a time to every junky, free of charge, courtesy of the taxpayers.

Needle exchanges can be ok if it is an exact one to one exchange but when you give out 50 per go to everyone and no exchange at all is required then it isn’t a needle exchange, is it? That is why there are millions of needles on the streets needing to be picked up all day, every day.

I'm pretty sure the leading cause of gun related death is tangentially gun related deaths, which are hard to quantify.

In a society where firearms are considered normal so is lethal force and the threat thereof.

Well the answer seems to be pretty straightforward doesn't it?

Needle exchanges are indeed supposed to be one to one (or a reasonable facsimile thereof) and the best way to get close to that ideal is to supply sharps boxes to users, a strategy which works best when they are also off the streets.

That video is almost ten months old and the states say it got 44% more crowded with homeless since then. Watch the piles of trash, see how there are trash cans feet away but they don’t use them, see the mountains of garbage and rats running every where. Realize, no, he didn’t go to the worst parts and just skirted the edges.

And an entirely immigrant population.

We agree. Now convince the brain damaged “advocates” who are really just lunatic extremists. Yet Dems always do what these self declared advocates want because if they don’t they will get called names and risk getting primaries for not being woke enough. It is rule by the most extreme of extremists.

I'm not sure how clearly this is a left/right thing though. Clearly there are procedural issues on the way needle exchanges are running there and very possibly that should be a matter of legislation if they cannot self regulate, but bear in mind as a nation we are wayyyyy to the left of the Democrat party yet manage to operate exchanges properly.

No @Dinner, we do indeed have exactly that. Literally everyone in the UK is an immigrant or descendent of immigrants somewhere along the line.

A very sanitized and milquetoast report on L.A.’s skid row. It doesn’t even touch on the disease outbreak. Eric Garcetti is spending billions on stuff to get himself and his buddies set up for life but fails on even the most basic parts of running a city.

Says a guy who's tongue is surrounded by my balls.

There are some distinctions that are simply endemic with the American left and it is getting worse not better. In the 80’s and 90’s when public health officials told politicians you can’t do that as it will cause disease outbreaks... Even Dems listen. Now you have brainwashed young self appointed “advocates spit out of brainwashing schools where they weren’t taught regular job related skills but they were taught to be “woke and angry”. Yes, they are idiots but they are relentless idiots who don’t care at all about results and who have no understanding about how things work yet they can create a Twitter mob so politicians fear them. Thus they pander to the dumbest voices in the room.