It's not a matter of "affording" food/products or not. It's a political decision, to not prosecute people for crimes against property. And it's an extremely dangerous decision. The rule of law, and the freedom that societies that enforce it have, are inextricably linked. A government that does not protect the property of it's citizens has no right to exist. It's basically telling the ordinary citizen "you're on your own". What this type of goverment creates, either by stupidity or malice, is an anarchy fueled law of the jungle.
It works if you have a captive population and the people have no other choice. As this thread demonstrates, people are getting fed up and just leaving. If the city doesn't turn things around it will setup a downward spiral that's very hard to get out of. I think that's a real risk for a post-covid comeback, if it gets bad enough after all the people making the city great have left then it just won't come back.
Unfortunately many of the people who've left San Francisco have moved to Austin and are enacting exactly the same policies. It's already created a dramatic shift in the city, and I can easily see Austin strongly resembling San Francisco from a quality of life / lawfulness perspective in just 5-10 years.
Im a third generation Texan and welcome all the Californians and their politics.
Even in Austin, Texas is a backwards, overtly racist, pro-big business anti-small business state that hates “freedom” unless it has to do with guns or corporate protections.
By the way, we have so many homeless because other republican heavy cities ship them here. Google ‘Haruka Weiser’ for a pretty normal example of a cop from a small town picking up a mentally unstable transient and dropping them off in downtown Austin a couple of blocks near the university.
I think there are pros and cons to each policy position, but let's not kid ourselves, San Francisco is not the city to model yourself after. A lesson that unfortunately all the people fleeing SFO didn't learn when they landed in Austin.
I am glad to see that Austin has become more progressive in some ways, but being completely ineffectual in how we care for members of our community while enabling the worse consequences of untreated mental illness and homelessness isn't something to be happy about. The key factor here is "untreated". There are some cities in the US that are actually working in a positive direction to help the homeless communities in their area to improve their lives, rather than just giving them a free pass out of doors.
Homelessness is a major problem all across America, and it's also a very complex problem. There are no easy fixes, but there are some obvious things which make the conditions and problem worse. It'd be great if there were easy fixes, but the reality is that it's very difficult to help people unless they want to be helped, and there's very real human rights considerations to forcing people into mental health or addiction treatments. Our country tried that at one point too, and it also didn't end well.
"Our country tried that at one point too, and it also didn't end well."
In fact the mental health insttutions system of the 70's and earlier was very successful from what I've read about. It was the victim of a mass campaign of what we today would call "fake news" from activists. The result is the crisis you have today, where people that NEED help, even if they are incapable of understanding and consenting to it, can't get it and are left to fend for themselves on the streets.
Unfortunately, the horror stories about state mental hospitals in the US were true. Patients had no ability to leave of their own accord, even if they were reasonably of sound mind. Once committed, you were completely at the whim of the doctor(s). In many cases people had unnecessary and permanently damaging procedures done to them such as electro-convulsive therapy (ECT) or a frontal lobotomy. There are serious philosophical concerns around consent and patient rights when it comes to permanent involuntary commitment.
