'Plan To Save Downtown San Francisco From Doom Loop Approved by Lawmakers' - Sla...

Posted by EditorDavid

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  While this is a positive move, nobody will want to move to the slums, just like nobody wants to shop in the slums or go to the office in the slums, and that's just what downtown SF has turned into. They need to send in the paddywagons to round up and drag away the hobos. Everything else is rearranging the deck chairs.

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    And do **WHAT** with them? Unless you have the balls to permanently eliminate them, there is no solution to the problem.

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      Is this really the American spirit of pride today?

      "Can't murder the homeless, welp, got no other ideas!"

      I'll give you this or for free. Give them homes. If they can work, get them a job. If they need help, get them help.

  • Gentrification happens. If you can convert a block of towers with the lower floors being light commercial, you can create a community that doesn't have much need to leave - and then you can police the hell out of it to ensure anyone breaking laws on the street is carted out.

    But criminalizing homelessness or mental illness isn't how you clear the streets - it's by making sure those things are extreme outliers that are most often taken care of by social services, whether that be education, medical care, or unemployment / welfare. It gets the right-wingers in a tizzy, but as long as you don't let the left-wingers con you into continually throwing money at their programs with no oversight it is the most humane AND cost-effective long term solution.

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        Er, black people only make up around 8.5% of downtown's SF's demographics, so I doubt they're mostly responsible for turning the place into a mess.
        
        It's mostly drugs isn't it? Maybe that should be criminalized, even if it's just a light penalty.
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      It depends on the people you fill the buildings with. If the area is still "high crime" then those "light commercial" businesses (stores primarily) won't last long. Especially with the "shoplifting isn't really a crime" policy.

      When the people you put into the apartments have pride in their area and work to keep it up then there is a greater chance of success. If you just stuff the apartments without a plan then you'll get the drug dealers mixed in, drug users who will steal to get their next fix, and peo

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      Nobody wants to open a lovely pour over organic fair trade café when there's a 6' homeless dude sleeping, defecating, and jerking off in the front while screaming incoherently and periodically shooting up. And nobody wants to live above the cafe either.

      Criminalizing homelessness doesn't end homelessness, but it absolutely does clear the streets and allow for productive folk to get on with life.

  • Re: They're idiots

    hobos have been rounded up for decades and they keep making more. that doesnâ(TM)t work. try something else next time.

    • Re: They're idiots

      Sterilize the hobos, addicts, retards, petty thugs, nutters, and the communists. The problem will attenuate with time.

  • San Fransico doesn't have slums

    Google "gentrification". There's a handful of problems with homeless because they're not allowed to round them up and jail them but they refuse to just give them homes, and the weather doesn't kill them like it does back East. But even that's just a handful of spots.
    
    99% of what you're hearing about the hellscape that is San Fransisco is propaganda from the Republican party because the state's run by their political opponents. What's left of the 1% could be fixed tomorrow if we'd just give the homeless h

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    drag them... where? jail? the most expensive conceivable way to house them?

• The obvious problem here is that buildings are primarily stores of value, like NFTs, rather than productive properties. Owners would rather stomach vacancies than admit that maybe the rental value has gone down (and thus potentially affect property value). Supply and demand is broken here.

  With a steep vacancy tax, owners would actually be forced to rent out their properties at whatever rate matches demand.

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    Or switch from taxing by the number of floors to a land value tax [wikipedia.org] (a.k.a. the "perfect tax") so a few vacancies on an otherwise highly productive parcel of land don't cause the land owner too much pain.

    Attracting jobs back to SF as a vacancy tax would do, will just increase home prices again, which is the exact opposite of what the city needs right now in the middle of a homeless crisis.

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      I'm convinced after pointing the problems with a vacancy tax (what is an illegally vacancy like withholding vs. a legal like renovation, how will it be enforced, if rent is a dollar and it isn't still rented; what then, etc.), this is less about fixing the problem than punishing evil landlords.

      Nevermind LVT in concept has been around since Thomas Paine, and still gets no traction.

• This is rearranging deck chairs. They're not addressing the actual problem, which is that people do not feel safe or comfortable. It's the crime, stupid!

  Even more sad: the residential areas will almost certainly be used as low-income housing nearly immediately. Please don't misunderstand; I do not have a problem with wanting to house the poor....the issue is that if you're looking for an economic kickstart to your downtown area...well, this ain't it.

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    tell me you've never been to San Francisco without saying you've never been to San Francisco.

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    It's not the poor that are homeless, it's the druggies and mentally ill. See all those "impromptu" shelters around the bay area? That's what they're proposing turning downtown SF into.

    This is going to go over like a lead balloon, but I'm sure it'll cost 500g per "resident" first.

• Most office building's HVAC, electrical, plumbing and floor layouts are not easily converted into residences. Even if you gave a developer the building for free and rubber stamped all the building permits, the conversion cost may be so high that the project can't make money. It might be more feasible to tear down the office building and start fresh.

  Older buildings often have lots of systems that are not up to current code. If you change an electrical panel, the inspector will usually focus on the panel that was changed and ignore everything else. Convert the whole building, and everything is going to have to be brought up to current code. I'm not from California, but I'm going to guess that an old building stripped bare might have trouble meeting the current earthquake building code during inspections.

• Art shops and pop-up stores will not bring anyone into the area if it's homeless and hobo city and your chances of being robbed etc are high.

  As for low-income housing - yes that will bring in the spending money of course.

  They really are not living in the same universe.

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    Agreed. Who wants to visit a town whose storefronts are occupied by miscreants and the behavior that goes along with them.

• No results in the article.

  Also nothing for ctrl-f "police".

  But I'm sure that converting those office blocks (where people used to work) into apartments (for the people who no longer work there) will do the trick.

• We have seen doom loops before, Detroit strikes me as the best example. Now the demographics aren't the same, but the net result is likely to be similar. And that's too bad, I remember visiting SF in the '80s when it was a bit funky, but still a nice place to visit.

• I swear I remember a time when this kind of thing was considered to be a failure of past policy.