EssEff is in full panic mode, over 25% vacancy on office space and climbing, Snap just announced closing offices, Oracle laying off, etc. City is in freefall.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/san-francisco-economy-17490125.php
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/In-S-F-s-Hayes-Valley-merchants-are-arming-17539892.php
Use the empty office space to house the homeless. 
Plenty of empty factories for that as well. But govt likes to spend money on not fixing the problem.
Nothing motivates the wage slave to keep hacking away at a pointless job then stepping over someone sleeping outside his office.
Housing the Homeless was never an issue.
Itās To get Free Housing you must follow our rules, no drugs, no friends, no pets (depending), no loud noises, etc. Thatās the issue , the homeless are free, and the ones outside are the ones who like being āfreeā
Iām aware that the homeless are typically homeless for reasons other than just plain being poor.
Sadly a good number of them have mental issues or drug addiction so itās extremely hard to help them
iām sure all of your time spent doing homeless outreach has prepared you to make statements like this.
Actually itās all the time spent working in downtown seattle
What dt Seattle has become is so sad.
Or simply listening to the actual medical experts in the field that are working with that population, rather than the politicians pushing the narrative that its a housing price issue.
yeah iām sure there are tons of those and that money has nothing to do with it. everyone on the street is a crack whore junkie and deserves what they get according to doctors.
Most doctors that i have heard talk about the issue are begging to be able to help the people on the street, but are unable to due to conservatorship laws that prevent them from giving proper treatment. The primary issue is that the streets have become an open air asylum where the resolvable addiction and mental illness is left untreated.
And what would āproper treatmentā be, in the minds of the doctors to whom youāve spoken?
Maybe your state differs, but I work in the mental health field and worked at a county ER for a yr full time (and was there for training intermittently for several yrs prior). So I have some familiarity with treating the chronically and severely mentally ill.
A problem as big as the homelessness issue (Iām in California) isnāt going to just have one cause, but conservatorship laws (unless theyāve changed substantially in the past 10-15 yrs, which Iām pretty sure they havenāt) donāt prevent effective treatment.
You can conserve all the people you want, but when thereās not enough (or any) beds at state hospitals, there will be no place to send patients who are on conservatorship. And, from a purely practical standpoint, conservatorship can be more about placement in a long-term facility than it is about the day-to-day administration of medication(s).
I would say an equally big problem is that insurance and Medi-Cal (Medicaid in other parts of the country) punish hospitals for keeping patient for more than 3 days but refusing to pay for additional treatment. I was under the strong impression when I worked in the ER that many of the inpatient psychiatric units that accept Medi-Cal (who would accept our patients for transfer) simply kept the patients for 3 days and then would discharge, regardless of the patientās state, because they suspected it would be a fight to get more payment for a longer saty. Theyād happily accept the patients again from us, keep them for another 3 days, and then would stop accepting the patient altogether for the calendar yr when the benefit had run out.
And then the outpatient clinic at county facilities are typically overstaffed (and, until the past few yrs, very low paying). Hard to provide continuity of care when either no one wants to work at the clinic (or when the ones you can hire are not exactly good clinicians). The county has finally decided to join the wage āarms warā btw Kaiser and the prison system and increase salaries (to a startingly high amt, actually).
Sure, the laws might make things more complicated. But some of the old timers who were my supervisors think that the domino effect started when funding was cut for state hospitals.
Not sure how āresolvableā you think these issues are. We do not understand the fundamental mechanism for any defined mental illness (except for those that are consequences of medical illnesses), so resolution isā¦ difficult.
If one of the doctors you spoke to use the term āresolvable,ā I would think that genuinely funny, if it werenāt so tragically wrong.
Back to the topic.
This is exactly the point. You cant treat addiction in 3 days. It takes long term care to make any progress with and to start to bring someone back to being functional. Without a means of getting someone into treatement and keeping them there, theyre right back on the street, spiraling to the point where things arent āresolvableā.
you can thank Ronald Reagan for that one.
thatās what prisons are for these days.
This was my experience as a Public Defender in LA County. I represented many homeless defendants with mental health issues who needed help not incarceration. The county resources were woefully inadequate so most of my clients were sentenced to pointless jail time. Proper mental health resources would have benefited my clients but the system is geared towards punishment.
The movement actually started with the 1963 Community Mental Health Construction Act. Those mental institutions that got closed had a bit of a problem with being really terrible places to live. Shutting them was a well intentioned idea to try and change how we provide mental health. The 1981 omnibus spending bill was terrible though because it removed finding for a lot of the outpatient care that was supposed to replace those institutions.
Oh, please, not the blame Ronald Reagan trope. He was governor 50 years ago. Thereās been plenty of time for subsequent legislators and governors to remedy whatever of his ancient funding cuts that you assign blame for the current crisis of mentally ill and drug addicts wandering the streets. This includes complete democrat control of Sacramento, including the supreme court in for the past 20 years. Apparently, they are blameless.
Some of the oldtimer hippies Iāve talked to over the years insist Ken Keseyās One Flew Over The Cuckooās Nest was the final cultural trigger to decentralize mental health treatment, since it so successfully galvanized public opinion even in book form (movie was 1975).