How Citizen Surveillance Ate San Francisco
November 30, 2023 5:30 AM Subscribe
"New York and London are known for being blanketed with government-run CCTV coverage, but surveillance here is different: It is as privatized as it is pervasive" (slWired)
Archive.li is down for me so I can't put up an ungated link. Sorry!
Archive.li is down for me so I can't put up an ungated link. Sorry!
Oh man, this is a topic I've been thinking about since moving to the Old City neighborhood of Philadelphia. It's messy, but at the moment, I'm team Little Brother.
I live on next to I-95, on a street that's not "Chinatown NYC" pedestrian-heavy, but still sees hundreds of folks going past my door every day. We live on the third floor of a building with a first-floor commercial space - previously a theater, eventually we plan to reopen it as a multi-disciplinary performing arts space. A doorbell camera seemed sensible, and initially we got one that was only supposed to record when there was movement. One day, I showed my uncle the unfinished first floor, and forgot to lock the door when we went back upstairs, and this motion-sensing camera didn't pick up the person who, by luck or by his own surveillance, walked over, opened the door, stole my bike, and left the door hanging open behind him.
That's when we decided to get a Nest camera - on 24/7, $12/mo for easy streaming access, and all the Rear Window weirdness that surfaces. (Note: I don't use Citizen or NextDoor)
For example - people piss up against buildings, they've been doing it for as long as there have been trees. If you live in an urban environment, someone's peed on your building. A lot of people have peed on your building. One of the unhealthy things about an always-on camera with easy browsing is that you're suddenly deeply aware of just how many people just open up and piss on the sidewalk. Maybe it's a woman at 2am who leaves behind the cocktail napkin she wiped with, maybe it's the dude who just pulls down his sweatpants while his immediate family pauses on their walk to Dave & Busters, and looks right into the camera as he pees on your door.
These things have always happened. You just don't see them, so you either don't know it, or if you do know it happened, it's an abstract of a human, not a guy pissing in the daylight in front of his toddler.
I had to wean myself off the show, and remind myself that I've always know that humanity is weird. But when FedEx consistently marks things as delivered and they aren't, it's also super helpful to say, "I have a doorbell camera and your truck didn't even drive past my house."
It's also, like in this article, something I've used to try to chip away at the soft strike by the Philly police. They're mad that our district attorney is a lefty, and at the risk of oversimplifying a complicated political situation, their perception is that he doesn't prosecute anyone, so they're not going to bother doing anything. For years now, the police response to emergency situations is often "Nothing we can do." There was a schizophrenic guy sleeping under 95 who was terrorizing women and seniors. For months. "We can't do anything if it's just your word against his," we were told, as a half dozen of us spoke to one officer after an unrelated incident. "That won't hold up in court," they'd pre-judge. Same thing with broken car windows. Pre-pandemic, there was a guy who, about once a month, would get drunk on Wild Turkey, walk past my house, smash a car window, steal something and bring it back to his house. I have footage of him going past, I have audio of the window breaking, I have footage of him returning with a bag in his hand. "Nothing we can do, there's no footage of him actually breaking into the car."
One day, the fire department connector on my building was stolen. This put me out $500, and is a huge safety liability. I went back to my camera - I had footage of a white mid-00s Cadillac pulling up, license plate in clear view. A shabby looking guy comes into frame, spends 15 minutes futzing around with my FDC, and going out of frame. I showed it to the cops - a license plate! Surely this! "Sorry, that's not enough to tie him to the car." Are you fucking kidding me? So I go to a nearby neighbor and ask if he's got footage. I compile a multi-angle shot, where you can see the car pull up, the guy gets out of the passenger side, I picture-in-picture him removing my FDC, he gets back in the car, and drives off. I've also noticed that FDCs are missing up and down the street for a mile and a half in each direction, and coordinate with business owners, some of whom have footage of the same guy. Fucking seize the Cadillac and auction it and at least pay for my repairs.
I not only went to the police, I went to the TV news, since dozens of buildings were now operating without functioning sprinkler systems. Turns out when you're on two different local news stations, they get detectives involved. Do they go after the Cadillac? Nope. They find the guy who was removing the FDCs, who was clearly living on the streets. Probably doing the work at the behest of a contractor, who was reusing them on new construction - charging hundreds of dollars for something he likely paid this guy $20-$50 a pop for. In the end, an addict goes to jail, the real perpetrator goes unpunished, and I'm still out $500.
These days, the camera's mostly about whether or not a package was dropped off in front of my house rather than inside the front door. Was it stolen by a passer-by, or did the carrier never deliver it? I caught a guy smashing my car window earlier this year . Didn't even break it enough to reach in and find out there's nothing to take, just smashed it and cost me a couple hundred bucks. I'd heard the sound, rewound the footage, and went out to see if the guy was still there. He was, and he was a sad scene of a man. Rather than call the cops, I followed him for a couple of blocks, yelling about how he shouldn't smash people's car windows and he should never come back to this neighborhood. I'm never going to be the pepper spray guy, but if police won't help with things, that creates a vacuum.
Another common factor between my stories and the Wired article is the wealth gap. I mentioned I live next to the highway. When we bought this place, we were the only address on this remnant of a city block. In the intervening years, new buildings have popped up - some stuffed with tiny apartments that each have monthly rent that's more than my mortgage payment, and a single family home that sold for 10x what we paid for our building - seems we got in just under the wire. So right next to a highway underpass with seasonal encampments sits a $2.2M four story mansion. Surely bargain by San Francisco measure, but the same socioeconomic dissonance.
It feels like fruit from the poison tree, but I'd rather the neighbors have cameras than not.
posted by Leviathant at 6:36 AM on November 30, 2023 [29 favorites]
I live on next to I-95, on a street that's not "Chinatown NYC" pedestrian-heavy, but still sees hundreds of folks going past my door every day. We live on the third floor of a building with a first-floor commercial space - previously a theater, eventually we plan to reopen it as a multi-disciplinary performing arts space. A doorbell camera seemed sensible, and initially we got one that was only supposed to record when there was movement. One day, I showed my uncle the unfinished first floor, and forgot to lock the door when we went back upstairs, and this motion-sensing camera didn't pick up the person who, by luck or by his own surveillance, walked over, opened the door, stole my bike, and left the door hanging open behind him.
That's when we decided to get a Nest camera - on 24/7, $12/mo for easy streaming access, and all the Rear Window weirdness that surfaces. (Note: I don't use Citizen or NextDoor)
For example - people piss up against buildings, they've been doing it for as long as there have been trees. If you live in an urban environment, someone's peed on your building. A lot of people have peed on your building. One of the unhealthy things about an always-on camera with easy browsing is that you're suddenly deeply aware of just how many people just open up and piss on the sidewalk. Maybe it's a woman at 2am who leaves behind the cocktail napkin she wiped with, maybe it's the dude who just pulls down his sweatpants while his immediate family pauses on their walk to Dave & Busters, and looks right into the camera as he pees on your door.
These things have always happened. You just don't see them, so you either don't know it, or if you do know it happened, it's an abstract of a human, not a guy pissing in the daylight in front of his toddler.
I had to wean myself off the show, and remind myself that I've always know that humanity is weird. But when FedEx consistently marks things as delivered and they aren't, it's also super helpful to say, "I have a doorbell camera and your truck didn't even drive past my house."
It's also, like in this article, something I've used to try to chip away at the soft strike by the Philly police. They're mad that our district attorney is a lefty, and at the risk of oversimplifying a complicated political situation, their perception is that he doesn't prosecute anyone, so they're not going to bother doing anything. For years now, the police response to emergency situations is often "Nothing we can do." There was a schizophrenic guy sleeping under 95 who was terrorizing women and seniors. For months. "We can't do anything if it's just your word against his," we were told, as a half dozen of us spoke to one officer after an unrelated incident. "That won't hold up in court," they'd pre-judge. Same thing with broken car windows. Pre-pandemic, there was a guy who, about once a month, would get drunk on Wild Turkey, walk past my house, smash a car window, steal something and bring it back to his house. I have footage of him going past, I have audio of the window breaking, I have footage of him returning with a bag in his hand. "Nothing we can do, there's no footage of him actually breaking into the car."
One day, the fire department connector on my building was stolen. This put me out $500, and is a huge safety liability. I went back to my camera - I had footage of a white mid-00s Cadillac pulling up, license plate in clear view. A shabby looking guy comes into frame, spends 15 minutes futzing around with my FDC, and going out of frame. I showed it to the cops - a license plate! Surely this! "Sorry, that's not enough to tie him to the car." Are you fucking kidding me? So I go to a nearby neighbor and ask if he's got footage. I compile a multi-angle shot, where you can see the car pull up, the guy gets out of the passenger side, I picture-in-picture him removing my FDC, he gets back in the car, and drives off. I've also noticed that FDCs are missing up and down the street for a mile and a half in each direction, and coordinate with business owners, some of whom have footage of the same guy. Fucking seize the Cadillac and auction it and at least pay for my repairs.
I not only went to the police, I went to the TV news, since dozens of buildings were now operating without functioning sprinkler systems. Turns out when you're on two different local news stations, they get detectives involved. Do they go after the Cadillac? Nope. They find the guy who was removing the FDCs, who was clearly living on the streets. Probably doing the work at the behest of a contractor, who was reusing them on new construction - charging hundreds of dollars for something he likely paid this guy $20-$50 a pop for. In the end, an addict goes to jail, the real perpetrator goes unpunished, and I'm still out $500.
These days, the camera's mostly about whether or not a package was dropped off in front of my house rather than inside the front door. Was it stolen by a passer-by, or did the carrier never deliver it? I caught a guy smashing my car window earlier this year . Didn't even break it enough to reach in and find out there's nothing to take, just smashed it and cost me a couple hundred bucks. I'd heard the sound, rewound the footage, and went out to see if the guy was still there. He was, and he was a sad scene of a man. Rather than call the cops, I followed him for a couple of blocks, yelling about how he shouldn't smash people's car windows and he should never come back to this neighborhood. I'm never going to be the pepper spray guy, but if police won't help with things, that creates a vacuum.
Another common factor between my stories and the Wired article is the wealth gap. I mentioned I live next to the highway. When we bought this place, we were the only address on this remnant of a city block. In the intervening years, new buildings have popped up - some stuffed with tiny apartments that each have monthly rent that's more than my mortgage payment, and a single family home that sold for 10x what we paid for our building - seems we got in just under the wire. So right next to a highway underpass with seasonal encampments sits a $2.2M four story mansion. Surely bargain by San Francisco measure, but the same socioeconomic dissonance.
It feels like fruit from the poison tree, but I'd rather the neighbors have cameras than not.
posted by Leviathant at 6:36 AM on November 30, 2023 [29 favorites]
No-barriers housing and medical care? Whoops, most homeless people will now be housed and not on the street, and most people with illness or addiction will be able to heal from or manage them effectively.
I support no-barriers housing and medical care, but I don't know that this actually would solve the problem alone - like, I was talking about this in another thread, but I think the amount of care and caregivers that are needed to help people with mental health or dementia issues (often prematurely induced by the effects of addiction) that would really be required for this go beyond just basic medical care and require an entire re-ordering of our society. But I suspect that the broader re-ordering of society that you would seek *would* get there, I just don't know how we get there from here.
I was, on a side note, really frustrated by this article, though - like as a public defender, you should never be supporting to the media any kind of speculation that someone taking the fifth is thus guilty; first of all it's not supported by law and constitutional rights, and secondly, a fuck ton of your clients are going to need that shit and you're just reinforcing bad thoughts for future venires.
posted by corb at 6:47 AM on November 30, 2023 [3 favorites]
I support no-barriers housing and medical care, but I don't know that this actually would solve the problem alone - like, I was talking about this in another thread, but I think the amount of care and caregivers that are needed to help people with mental health or dementia issues (often prematurely induced by the effects of addiction) that would really be required for this go beyond just basic medical care and require an entire re-ordering of our society. But I suspect that the broader re-ordering of society that you would seek *would* get there, I just don't know how we get there from here.
I was, on a side note, really frustrated by this article, though - like as a public defender, you should never be supporting to the media any kind of speculation that someone taking the fifth is thus guilty; first of all it's not supported by law and constitutional rights, and secondly, a fuck ton of your clients are going to need that shit and you're just reinforcing bad thoughts for future venires.
posted by corb at 6:47 AM on November 30, 2023 [3 favorites]
I support no-barriers housing and medical care, but I don't know that this actually would solve the problem alone
The thing is, what strikes me as someone who does mutual aid is that no-barriers housing and no-barriers medical care (with, let's say, existing amounts of social services redirected into navigating care) would be such a dramatic improvement that it would function like a solution at the society-wide level.
Although there are a lot of other personal and moral angles on our polycrisis, the absolute worsening of our collective daily lives and our shared spaces doesn't require a socialist paradise to fix, it just requires a substantial improvement in baseline conditions. Most unhoused or precariously housed people would be very substantially helped by housing and medical care.
Funnily enough, I actually have an anecdote to illustrate this. Locally there is a camp run by Native people which describes itself as a "healing camp"* - it focuses on helping people off drugs and into housing by various means, some of which I disagree with and think may be counterproductive. So yes, it is not perfect...and yet, it has demonstrably, since this summer, helped many people off drugs and into housing.
If we're just looking to make our collective life better, we can start with the broad-brush solutions (or we could, except we can't) with the understanding that broad-brush solutions will make large scale improvements and we can then get fine-grained. Broad-brush solutions ought to help us because we won't be looking at a large, undifferentiated problem - all the people who just caught a bad break and need an apartment more than anything else, all the people who have chronic infections and untreated tooth problems that keep them in too much pain to function but that are perfectly treatable, all the kids who were kicked out for being gay, etc - all those people get taken care of on the first pass, and you can then look closely at the more subtle and complex problems of the remainder of people.
It's so weird to me that as a society, we can watch things worsen and worsen and yet not recognize that, eg, a 75% improvement in conditions would be an enormous improvement over where things are today.
*Now I want to say that at the local level, this is more complicated than it looks, there are issues and drawbacks, etc. It is not a shining beacon of perfection when you know the whole story, but then NOTHING is a shining beacon of perfection, we can only aim high and try to fail less.
posted by Frowner at 7:09 AM on November 30, 2023 [12 favorites]
Like, it's not at ALL simple to get to 100%, but it's fairly simple to get to, eg, 75%.
posted by Frowner at 7:09 AM on November 30, 2023 [9 favorites]
posted by Frowner at 7:09 AM on November 30, 2023 [9 favorites]
Oh yeah no - I completely agree with you there that we should do it, I just hesitate about making broad pronouncements like "it would solve it" because it's so easy to pick apart that I feel like it casts doubt on the very real fact that it would solve 75% of the problem and gives the opposition an easy gotcha. And I suppose I'm also feeling personally hopeless right now about what we do about the people suffering from severe addiction issues, because I'm watching a lot of the Iraq vets age into this, and it's pretty fucking bleak for the ones without robust social connections.
But back on the surveillance state: I understand why people want cameras: I personally have cameras. But I think that if you have cameras, you owe it to yourself and to others to rigorously delete your footage, and to get a camera which doesn't have a relationship with police that doesn't require a warrant. And I think there's a big difference between having cameras that warn you if something's actively happening, and having cameras that let you punitively go after people, especially since we live in a society that has jail as a consequence, wherein the conditions of jail are so inhumane it is unacceptable to send people there.
posted by corb at 7:16 AM on November 30, 2023 [4 favorites]
But back on the surveillance state: I understand why people want cameras: I personally have cameras. But I think that if you have cameras, you owe it to yourself and to others to rigorously delete your footage, and to get a camera which doesn't have a relationship with police that doesn't require a warrant. And I think there's a big difference between having cameras that warn you if something's actively happening, and having cameras that let you punitively go after people, especially since we live in a society that has jail as a consequence, wherein the conditions of jail are so inhumane it is unacceptable to send people there.
posted by corb at 7:16 AM on November 30, 2023 [4 favorites]
Money absolutely matters, and we need higher taxes on the middle-class and rich, but I didn't appreciate at all how complicated it is until reading this article about homelessness in SF. "San Francisco spends more per capita on homelessness solutions than nearly any other U.S. city—three hundred and thirty million dollars a year. That sum reflects an eighty-five-per-cent increase from 2005 to 2015, when homelessness rose by thirteen per cent. It’s puzzling that so much funding did so little. But the puzzle also makes San Francisco, a city that has tried some obvious things, a great place to think through more focussed solutions."
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 8:31 AM on November 30, 2023
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 8:31 AM on November 30, 2023
I moved to San Francisco in '92, and over the past 30+ years, I've watched the unhoused situation here just increase with little or no real change, except in the old days, people sat around on the street, and now there are tents and RVs all over the place. And way more people living this way. Every couple of years, some new solution is proposed, tried out, and then forgotten. Newsom, as mayor, said give them cash. Breed, as current mayor, had the intake village, that seemed to be doing some good, and then she pulled the plug. APEC came here, and suddenly downtown was clean and "nuisance" free, for a couple weeks. Given the amount of money spent here dealing with the situation, and with little or no change in the situation, cynical me is wondering if maybe somebody somewhere is just making money out of it, and that's why it's still here.
posted by njohnson23 at 9:46 AM on November 30, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by njohnson23 at 9:46 AM on November 30, 2023 [1 favorite]
njohnson23, Newsom’s slogan was “Care NOT cash.” He reduced cash benefits.
“ Care Not Cash officially launched in May 2004, reducing the amount of money homeless residents received from a maximum of $410 per month to $59. In exchange, program enrollees got food and a guaranteed bed at a shelter or in a single-room occupancy hotel.” - KQED
posted by larrybob at 10:38 AM on November 30, 2023 [2 favorites]
“ Care Not Cash officially launched in May 2004, reducing the amount of money homeless residents received from a maximum of $410 per month to $59. In exchange, program enrollees got food and a guaranteed bed at a shelter or in a single-room occupancy hotel.” - KQED
posted by larrybob at 10:38 AM on November 30, 2023 [2 favorites]
You know who makes money from homelessness? Cops. That's the encampment eviction model. Lots of overtime for either easy work (standing around at the perimeter) or brutal work if you like brutalizing. Scammy service providers make some money as well.
Walmart, Amazon, the dollar store, etc make a certain amount of profit too - I often reflect that we're doing the cheap tent industry huge favors because we buy and buy and buy in the off season because people's tents get trashed by the cops, damaged or stolen. And of course, if you're unhoused, you're eating single-serve products - can't exactly make a big pot of beans and rice for the week - so you're paying more for pre-made sandwiches, sodas, etc.
Two things strike me, having been part of a mutual aid project for about eighteen months now:
1. The encampment-to-eviction model that virtually all cities follow will never work AND it's very expensive and very destructive.
Here is what happens: encampments are allowed to grow but harassed and forced into instability - they are allowed on marginal land in dangerous areas far from services, harassed by cops and have services such as portapotties and trash pick-up denied to them. So the encampment grows more dangerous and trash-covered. Inevitably housed people complain or something bad happens, like a shooting. Then they are evicted by the cops, who trash: tents, tarps, clothes, paperwork, medications, blankets.
This is particularly dangerous in winter. The one time I observed a winter eviction close up, the entire day there was a stream of people wandering down the street clutching a few possessions, often wrapped in a blanket instead of a coat.
There are never, never enough appropriate shelter beds to deal with camp evictions. On every eviction where I've had the information, the city has had few or no beds, and those are usually just the "mat on the floor in a gym" beds anyway, not anything stable or appropriate for most people.
So then mutual aid organizations scramble to replace the tents, tarps, food, clothes, etc, and the unhoused people have to scramble to get their medications and new copies of papers.
Overdoses go up right after evictions - people are stressed, people's usually ways to manage things, access to methadone, or sources of relatively reliable clean drugs get interrupted, and while you may not like drug addiction, drug addiction without overdoses is better than drug addiction with overdoses.
Furthermore, everyone who is effectively helping unhoused people, whether that is the good social workers, religious orgs, mutual aid, random friends and neighbors, etc, loses track of people. Where did the vulnerable teenager who was being circled by pimps go? You haven't seen her for three weeks - is she dead, did she split town, did someone force her into sex work that she didn't want to do, or is she just...in St Paul at another site? The elder who needs a lot of different meds - is she dead or in the hospital? The guy who needs a lot of help but can't seem to hold onto a phone, where is he? What happens after an eviction is weeks of outreach people asking "have you seen so-and-so?"
Evictions are very expensive and they just create more encampments and so ad infinitum.
There are relatively few good solutions. I would rank them as "keep people from becoming homeless in the first place through rent supports, affordable housing and supportive housing", "ample no-barrier housing of many different types to suit the many people who need it" and "multiple small supported encampments in locations with good transit and access to services, plus mobile support for individuals and small groups who feel unsafe in any encampment".
For a while, there was a women-only encampment down the street from me in a location where they could take advantage of fencing and walls to have a relatively enclosed space. As far as I understood it, that was a fairly safe, stable encampment, but it too was evicted.
Letting encampments grow-deteriorate until there is public support for brutally evicting them is the worst, most cop-centric, fascism-enabling way to handle things.
2. And I wanted to make a second point - just because the state or the city is paying for a service provider, that does not mean that the services are competent or suitable.
Our project has met a lot of non-profit and state service providers. Some of them are great. Some of them are stymied by a general lack of resources. Some of them are simply badly trained or unsuitable - notably, outreach workers who are anxious about actually talking to unhoused people, especially new people they haven't met before.
Some are actually, actively bad - despite their nominal mission, groups may support the cops at evictions, remove unhoused people's property/resources, lie to or threaten people, obfuscate when emergency services are needed and cause delays, do things that cause harm to people dealing with addiction, etc.
You can spend a lot of money on "services" that are not fraudulent but that are almost totally unhelpful and unsuitable.
When people talk about the money that is being spent on unhoused people, it is really necessary to gain some on the ground knowledge of how that money is used before you can judge whether merely spending money is ineffective.
I'll tell you one thing, when I see the cops trashing thousands of dollars of tents, tarps and sleeping bags in the middle of winter, I feel like I am going out of my mind.
posted by Frowner at 10:54 AM on November 30, 2023 [39 favorites]
Walmart, Amazon, the dollar store, etc make a certain amount of profit too - I often reflect that we're doing the cheap tent industry huge favors because we buy and buy and buy in the off season because people's tents get trashed by the cops, damaged or stolen. And of course, if you're unhoused, you're eating single-serve products - can't exactly make a big pot of beans and rice for the week - so you're paying more for pre-made sandwiches, sodas, etc.
Two things strike me, having been part of a mutual aid project for about eighteen months now:
1. The encampment-to-eviction model that virtually all cities follow will never work AND it's very expensive and very destructive.
Here is what happens: encampments are allowed to grow but harassed and forced into instability - they are allowed on marginal land in dangerous areas far from services, harassed by cops and have services such as portapotties and trash pick-up denied to them. So the encampment grows more dangerous and trash-covered. Inevitably housed people complain or something bad happens, like a shooting. Then they are evicted by the cops, who trash: tents, tarps, clothes, paperwork, medications, blankets.
This is particularly dangerous in winter. The one time I observed a winter eviction close up, the entire day there was a stream of people wandering down the street clutching a few possessions, often wrapped in a blanket instead of a coat.
There are never, never enough appropriate shelter beds to deal with camp evictions. On every eviction where I've had the information, the city has had few or no beds, and those are usually just the "mat on the floor in a gym" beds anyway, not anything stable or appropriate for most people.
So then mutual aid organizations scramble to replace the tents, tarps, food, clothes, etc, and the unhoused people have to scramble to get their medications and new copies of papers.
Overdoses go up right after evictions - people are stressed, people's usually ways to manage things, access to methadone, or sources of relatively reliable clean drugs get interrupted, and while you may not like drug addiction, drug addiction without overdoses is better than drug addiction with overdoses.
Furthermore, everyone who is effectively helping unhoused people, whether that is the good social workers, religious orgs, mutual aid, random friends and neighbors, etc, loses track of people. Where did the vulnerable teenager who was being circled by pimps go? You haven't seen her for three weeks - is she dead, did she split town, did someone force her into sex work that she didn't want to do, or is she just...in St Paul at another site? The elder who needs a lot of different meds - is she dead or in the hospital? The guy who needs a lot of help but can't seem to hold onto a phone, where is he? What happens after an eviction is weeks of outreach people asking "have you seen so-and-so?"
Evictions are very expensive and they just create more encampments and so ad infinitum.
There are relatively few good solutions. I would rank them as "keep people from becoming homeless in the first place through rent supports, affordable housing and supportive housing", "ample no-barrier housing of many different types to suit the many people who need it" and "multiple small supported encampments in locations with good transit and access to services, plus mobile support for individuals and small groups who feel unsafe in any encampment".
For a while, there was a women-only encampment down the street from me in a location where they could take advantage of fencing and walls to have a relatively enclosed space. As far as I understood it, that was a fairly safe, stable encampment, but it too was evicted.
Letting encampments grow-deteriorate until there is public support for brutally evicting them is the worst, most cop-centric, fascism-enabling way to handle things.
2. And I wanted to make a second point - just because the state or the city is paying for a service provider, that does not mean that the services are competent or suitable.
Our project has met a lot of non-profit and state service providers. Some of them are great. Some of them are stymied by a general lack of resources. Some of them are simply badly trained or unsuitable - notably, outreach workers who are anxious about actually talking to unhoused people, especially new people they haven't met before.
Some are actually, actively bad - despite their nominal mission, groups may support the cops at evictions, remove unhoused people's property/resources, lie to or threaten people, obfuscate when emergency services are needed and cause delays, do things that cause harm to people dealing with addiction, etc.
You can spend a lot of money on "services" that are not fraudulent but that are almost totally unhelpful and unsuitable.
When people talk about the money that is being spent on unhoused people, it is really necessary to gain some on the ground knowledge of how that money is used before you can judge whether merely spending money is ineffective.
I'll tell you one thing, when I see the cops trashing thousands of dollars of tents, tarps and sleeping bags in the middle of winter, I feel like I am going out of my mind.
posted by Frowner at 10:54 AM on November 30, 2023 [39 favorites]
No-barriers housing and medical care? Whoops, most homeless people will now be housed and not on the street, and most people with illness or addiction will be able to heal from or manage them effectively.
This is what San Francisco needs, but there's no appetite to do it. A lot of the population, for various reasons, basically just wishes San Francisco (or at least their section of it) was a quaint little backwater frozen in time. And then real estate interests and tech-rich newcomers want more market rate housing and often pine for a teeming metropolis comparable to NYC. Neither of these visions really includes public or affordable housing.
posted by smelendez at 11:01 AM on November 30, 2023
This is what San Francisco needs, but there's no appetite to do it. A lot of the population, for various reasons, basically just wishes San Francisco (or at least their section of it) was a quaint little backwater frozen in time. And then real estate interests and tech-rich newcomers want more market rate housing and often pine for a teeming metropolis comparable to NYC. Neither of these visions really includes public or affordable housing.
posted by smelendez at 11:01 AM on November 30, 2023
Archive.li is down for me so I can't put up an ungated link.
Here you go, and if you’re using Safari, try turning off private relay in settings.
posted by ellieBOA at 11:57 AM on November 30, 2023 [2 favorites]
Here you go, and if you’re using Safari, try turning off private relay in settings.
posted by ellieBOA at 11:57 AM on November 30, 2023 [2 favorites]
Richest country in the world…
posted by signal at 1:29 PM on November 30, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by signal at 1:29 PM on November 30, 2023 [2 favorites]
a teeming metropolis comparable to NYC. Neither of these visions really includes public or affordable housing
NYC is the US city with the most public housing, I thought? Including one or two developments of nigh-Red-Viennese age and niceness. And I don’t understand why more places can’t do Mitchell-Lama, maybe with longer protection.
posted by clew at 2:05 PM on November 30, 2023 [1 favorite]
NYC is the US city with the most public housing, I thought? Including one or two developments of nigh-Red-Viennese age and niceness. And I don’t understand why more places can’t do Mitchell-Lama, maybe with longer protection.
posted by clew at 2:05 PM on November 30, 2023 [1 favorite]
NYC has the most public housing but it also has 8 million people.
I think we could and should do more public housing, but the problem with implementing public housing is that if it's placed in an area with enough services that could sustain families, it nearly universally lowers property values in the area it's placed, so people protest it and fight it hard enough that they're pretty successful in stopping, delaying, or minimizing it. What *could* be viable, and what would be really interesting to see tried, is kind of a full takeover of an industrial area - building not only public housing but also public schools and hospitals, etc, adequate for the amount of public housing built.
posted by corb at 2:20 PM on November 30, 2023 [3 favorites]
I think we could and should do more public housing, but the problem with implementing public housing is that if it's placed in an area with enough services that could sustain families, it nearly universally lowers property values in the area it's placed, so people protest it and fight it hard enough that they're pretty successful in stopping, delaying, or minimizing it. What *could* be viable, and what would be really interesting to see tried, is kind of a full takeover of an industrial area - building not only public housing but also public schools and hospitals, etc, adequate for the amount of public housing built.
posted by corb at 2:20 PM on November 30, 2023 [3 favorites]
I read this first thing this morning and here’s what came into my head - that old Clash song Red Angel Dragnet
“Who shot the shot?
Who got shot tonite?
Not even five enforcement agencies can save their own.
Never mind the people
Tonite it's raining on the angels of the city
Did anyone prophesize these people?
Only Travis
Come in Travis
All the animals come out at night.
Queens, fairies, dopers, junkies, sick, venal.
Some day a real rain will come and wash all the scum off the streets.
Thank God for the rain to wash the trash off the sidewalk.
Listen screwheads:
Here is a man who would not take it anymore.
A man who stood up against the scum, the filth.
Now I see clearly.”
I also thought that if someone wanted to remake “Bewitched” into a movie set in modern day the character of Gladys Kravitz now has immense potential
posted by cybrcamper at 6:48 PM on November 30, 2023
“Who shot the shot?
Who got shot tonite?
Not even five enforcement agencies can save their own.
Never mind the people
Tonite it's raining on the angels of the city
Did anyone prophesize these people?
Only Travis
Come in Travis
All the animals come out at night.
Queens, fairies, dopers, junkies, sick, venal.
Some day a real rain will come and wash all the scum off the streets.
Thank God for the rain to wash the trash off the sidewalk.
Listen screwheads:
Here is a man who would not take it anymore.
A man who stood up against the scum, the filth.
Now I see clearly.”
I also thought that if someone wanted to remake “Bewitched” into a movie set in modern day the character of Gladys Kravitz now has immense potential
posted by cybrcamper at 6:48 PM on November 30, 2023
I support no-barriers housing and medical care, but I don't know that this actually would solve the problem alone
As someone who's been homeless multiple times, sometimes for a while, who has several close friends who have been as well.
If you just gave people housing they didn't have to stress about, that they wouldn't get kicked/aged out of in a couple months, that was real housing and not some kind of "transitional" program or bullshit shelter with tons of rules, and they knew for sure that they could live there for years if they wanted
Then yes, i think it really would for a majority of people. Like, "i have a place and it's stable and i can't be kicked out of it and it'll be there tomorrow" is a huge part of the problem. A lot of the rest of it is the fetishization of work and "lazyness", because you really need to be able to just rest, recover, stabilize, and destress for MONTHS after being homeless. Really honestly like a year.
Every time i've been homeless, once i really settle down for months then i can reasonably think about and start acting on getting a new job, advancing beyond basic fight/flight hunter gatherer care and feeding stuff, and keep advancing my life along. If you handled those first two things(and medical care includes mental health, addiction, all of it) most people would just start taking care of themselves and doing normal person shit after however long they needed to take of just chilling and centering themselves.
And some people wouldn't, and that's fine. Those people should just be allowed to watch tv all day and be convinced the government is microwaving their brains and giving them havana syndrome. Some people are traumatized and wronged enough by life that they're just a little weird now. But if you give them housing and medical care, they very very often stop being a """problem""" and keep to themselves.
I dream of a society where everyone has their basic needs met in a way where they can be left the fuck alone for as long as they need to be. For some people that's forever. That should be fine.
But holy shit, just those two things would transform so many people into "productive members of society" or whatever you wanna call it. I've spent enough time on this earth now to see it happen to many people who were perpetually in crisis, if they could just somehow lock down those two things.
So many of my friends have been the "crazy homeless person" or "potentially dangerous crazy person on drugs" at times in their life. Fuck, i have honestly. Just give them an apartment indefinitely run by someone who wont call the cops every time they scream too loud or something. Those two things, given non paternalistically will solve way more than you think.
posted by emptythought at 11:47 PM on November 30, 2023 [20 favorites]
As someone who's been homeless multiple times, sometimes for a while, who has several close friends who have been as well.
If you just gave people housing they didn't have to stress about, that they wouldn't get kicked/aged out of in a couple months, that was real housing and not some kind of "transitional" program or bullshit shelter with tons of rules, and they knew for sure that they could live there for years if they wanted
Then yes, i think it really would for a majority of people. Like, "i have a place and it's stable and i can't be kicked out of it and it'll be there tomorrow" is a huge part of the problem. A lot of the rest of it is the fetishization of work and "lazyness", because you really need to be able to just rest, recover, stabilize, and destress for MONTHS after being homeless. Really honestly like a year.
Every time i've been homeless, once i really settle down for months then i can reasonably think about and start acting on getting a new job, advancing beyond basic fight/flight hunter gatherer care and feeding stuff, and keep advancing my life along. If you handled those first two things(and medical care includes mental health, addiction, all of it) most people would just start taking care of themselves and doing normal person shit after however long they needed to take of just chilling and centering themselves.
And some people wouldn't, and that's fine. Those people should just be allowed to watch tv all day and be convinced the government is microwaving their brains and giving them havana syndrome. Some people are traumatized and wronged enough by life that they're just a little weird now. But if you give them housing and medical care, they very very often stop being a """problem""" and keep to themselves.
I dream of a society where everyone has their basic needs met in a way where they can be left the fuck alone for as long as they need to be. For some people that's forever. That should be fine.
But holy shit, just those two things would transform so many people into "productive members of society" or whatever you wanna call it. I've spent enough time on this earth now to see it happen to many people who were perpetually in crisis, if they could just somehow lock down those two things.
So many of my friends have been the "crazy homeless person" or "potentially dangerous crazy person on drugs" at times in their life. Fuck, i have honestly. Just give them an apartment indefinitely run by someone who wont call the cops every time they scream too loud or something. Those two things, given non paternalistically will solve way more than you think.
posted by emptythought at 11:47 PM on November 30, 2023 [20 favorites]
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No-barriers housing and medical care? Whoops, most homeless people will now be housed and not on the street, and most people with illness or addiction will be able to heal from or manage them effectively.
Median income supports so that everyone has at least a secure, clean, adequate place to live and decent food? Hey, most people aren't out there committing petty theft because it's fun.
Everyone gets good quality deep sleep without chronic pain and fear? Suddenly no one is on a hair-trigger or feels that they need to fight to keep "respect" or run the risk of attack, or wants to drink themselves insensible to escape the cruelty of their situation.
Approximate equality and security would solve most social problems. We could then iterate to solve the problems that would still remain, and none of us would need to be amateur spies, whether for good or for evil.
This is as true on a global level as on a personal level, and yet we're all always reduced to debating when it is acceptable to attack which civilians, which unaccompanied children should be treated as refugees and which as criminals, etc etc etc.
We could all live pleasant, secure lives in moderate comfort if we were content to be more or less materially equal.
posted by Frowner at 6:27 AM on November 30, 2023 [58 favorites]