I mean if you really want to be blunt and honest about it, the reason we have a worse problem is because ......
Drugs, mental illness, and sometimes just bad decision making skills. The US has a LOT of drugs, and you can look at our education system at large and make up your own conclusion about our decision making ability as a whole.
I volunteered with homeless and the facts are out there. Honestly the experience left me jaded. On the bright side, almost all people who become homeless only remain so for like 2 weeks. These are the majority of people who are just down on hard times and they seek out and utilize charity and social services to get back on their feet.
Then... you have the "homeless" that everyone means, like the stories you hear from SF. Half of these folks are mentally ill. The other half are basically just incapable or uninterested in making good decisions due to past circumstances. Because we live in a civilized society, it would be unconstitutional to force mentally ill people into mandatory mental health treatment. Also, people don't want to jail the guy who has been arrested dozens of times and beat a couple grandmas. The solution seems to be to allow open air drug markets and removal of police presence all around the Civic Center and downtown areas.
> Drugs, mental illness, and sometimes just bad decision making skills.
Any explanation which comes down to personal decisions has to account for the fact that many other developed countries have avoided the same dystopian hell of inequality as the Bay Area and likely have similar distributions of behavior. Are people in California just more prone to using drugs, being mentally ill and making bad decisions? No. In civilized places, if you mess up a little (or even a lot) the consequence should not be to sleep on the street. It’s a moral failing at a societal level.
so you skipped over the part where I said that almost everyone who becomes homeless is off the street within two weeks?
The people who continue sleeping on the street are the other group I mentioned. and yes they come to CA from other states because the laws here are loose and weather is nice every single day.
Refusing to stay in a shelter because drugs aren’t allowed. Instead of helping people wean off hard drugs, SF allows open air drug markets run by gangs. The “homeless” issue will always exist this way.
Most people in SF aren’t from California, let alone counting the unhoused population. America has freedom of movement, you just need a bus ticket, no hukou or residency permit needed.
Drugs, mental illness, and sometimes just bad decision making skills. The US has a LOT of drugs, and you can look at our education system at large and make up your own conclusion about our decision making ability as a whole.
I volunteered with homeless and the facts are out there. Honestly the experience left me jaded. On the bright side, almost all people who become homeless only remain so for like 2 weeks. These are the majority of people who are just down on hard times and they seek out and utilize charity and social services to get back on their feet.
Then... you have the "homeless" that everyone means, like the stories you hear from SF. Half of these folks are mentally ill. The other half are basically just incapable or uninterested in making good decisions due to past circumstances. Because we live in a civilized society, it would be unconstitutional to force mentally ill people into mandatory mental health treatment. Also, people don't want to jail the guy who has been arrested dozens of times and beat a couple grandmas. The solution seems to be to allow open air drug markets and removal of police presence all around the Civic Center and downtown areas.