All this talk about personal safety... there were so many homeless people in SF that clearly had an untreated psychiatric condition. How safe do you think it is for them? Everyone goes on about shit on the streets like it's a normal 'poor person' thing to do. It isn't.
What are we supposed to do? People seem to be against institutionalization because it denies them their freedom and they refuse to use the many public and private homeless assistance programs available to them.
It's not like this is a unique local issue, but SF seems to handle it worse than almost any other city in the developed world. All you need is the political will and to copy how other places do it.
The high cost of housing no doubt plays a large role in the Bay Area's homelessness situation.
That in turn has a demand side cause -- the continued influx of highly paid tech workers -- and a supply side cause -- the economically illiterate politics which paints housing development as some sort of handout to developers. The supply side of this problem could be fixed through political means, at no real cost to anyone. New York has 6x the population density of San Francisco yet lower housing prices, because it has the capacity to meet the demand.
