You’re misdiagnosing a political problem as a failing of morality or charity. Which of course is tempting because of all the gross hype in SF. But, if SF threw out its land use rules and adopted those of Houston, not exactly an exemplar of rectitude, it would almost mechanically have fewer obnoxiously unhoused. They would have fewer people falling in to homelessness because rent would be cheaper and charitable donations would go further to helping more people, more comprehensively. The problem is that people in SF are adamantly and deeply against such changes, although Lurie is marginally better than nothing on that front. My point is, you can’t simply throw money at a structural problem; you have to change the structure. And then, you can’t effectively change the structure just by throwing money at it either. Rather, people work through existing institutions and movements for incremental change. Which is all very unsatisfying and all the more so because of the AI hype but so it is.
"You can't simply throw money at a structural problem" Actually, you can. It's expensive and inefficient, but it's the constraint of the problem. You don't need to house everyone to offer addiction treatment. Fucking around and demanding change that's politically impossible doesn't lift people out of the daily horrors that they experience.
San Francisco has been talking about fixing housing as the root of its societal ills for OVER A DECADE. You can YIMBY all you want but that *doesn't fucking help*. The numbers have gotten worse. By all means, continue to fight for housing! But stop pretending, for the love of god, that you're doing ANYTHING to help the people in crisis in that city.
Said another way: you're not going to have more housing in five years. There's no path for it now. It's not going to get constructed in five years or probably even ten years. It's probably politically impossible for the foreseeable future. It is *morally irresponsible* to say "well it's a WASTE OF MONEY to try to help these people! It's just too hard!" If it starts raining acid rain, you don't say "well we have to work to pass policy to curb emissions to reduce the systematic causes of acid rain, but the right doesn't want that" while people scream and tear at their sizzling skin. You pass out fucking umbrellas.
Housing is literally the problem. So to say more housing isn’t going to help is like saying more water won’t help when you are thirsty because it is going to take a day to walk to the oasis. You try anyway and hopefully you make it in time. And you focus and conserve your energy. You stop insisting on two stairwells and outlawing dormitories. You stop insisting on union labor. You rezone (as Lurie recently did, forced by the state). You stop restricting investment to owner occupants. You streamline approvals for new construction and ADUs. And yes, you subsidize low income housing and beds. Focus on the problem is what’s needed. But focus means attention to costs. Capitalists care about cost effectiveness and so if you tell them it’s going to cost close to a million dollars to build a single low income unit, how do you think they will allocate their charitable giving? They will send to Africa where a few hundred bucks will save a life. Efficiency is the way to unlock the charity.
I never said housing is not the problem. But it's inarguable that the quality of life of nearly five thousand unhoused people (if the city hasn't already reached that number) is inexcusably bad. It literally doesn't matter if the correct policy decision is to cover city hall in buttercream icing or to tear up the streets and make them into canals. People are dying, there's exactly zero end to the abject suffering in sight on a time scale that actually matters, and it's a *fundamental moral failing* that we have decided it's too expensive to help those people. It's unbelievable to me that we can't figure out how to allocate enough money and lower the costs associated with putting that money to good use to bring these people out of crisis. I *cannot fathom* a worse outcome than the current status quo.
When your database is pegging the CPU and production is hard down, you don't say "we need to wait for the CTO to open a new DBA role to fix this properly." You spin up a new db.r8g.48xlarge. There should be *no amount of money* to invest *right now* which is too high. Fuck the capitalists. This isn't giving people a cushy lifestyle, it's literally mitigating the worst externalities of capitalism itself.
I think we should take a step back and be more concrete about what I meant "by throwing money at the problem," and I apologize for the phrasing which can seem dismissive. When you don't solve the structural issues (and to be clear, I would be open to market or left-wing structural solutions, it's just that market solutions have worked in other places, but I'm not against trying left-wing solutions), you have an ongoing need for money. Like, not a fixed amount of cash rather ongoing transfers in perpetuity. Many people have an idea that homeless or poor people can get better, so to speak, and become the type of person that can afford rent in SF. But they don't. They have the same issues that caused them to not be able to hold a job, do drugs or otherwise and more neutrally simply not be able to make the math work with rent as high as it is. It is not simply a matter of handing out umbrellas.
Once we've identified the need for ongoing transfers, we can talk about private or public financing. With private financing, it's not going to be sustainable unless the legal and regulatory environment enables a competitive return. So, you're can't fairly say "why is their all this money for start-ups" or whatever and never enough money for the homeless. It's just not that kind of money, in our extant system. With public financing, you'd have to raise taxes. Which could work? People are trying to raise taxes on people richer than them (it's funny how it's always someone else), which are distortionary but idk could be worth it. But even with idealized public financing, there are strutural barriers, that is, the laws and regulations, that retard building and dissipate funds. Either way, there's no shortcut to addressing the need without addressing the structural issues that make the homelessness problem so much worse than I think anywhere else.
I would lastly ask you to take your moral judgment of SF (which, to be clear, is warranted) a little bit more seriously. If I may, I think you're actually underestimating have completely depraved people are. Your modal SF person does not care, in any meaningful way, whatsoever, about homelessness or even the absurd cost of living (unless it's them getting priced out, in which case they move and get over it). Sure they'll say all the right things and boy do they always know what to say. They'll blame all the right people, which is of course never themselves. But when it comes to (a) improving the material conditions of the poor or (b) maintaining their own personal comfort and convenience, they consistently pick the latter. People like Daniel Lurie are not perfect but they are trying to do what they can given just how bad things are.
I’ve had this exact same sequence of thoughts for several years now. I visited for SF for an AI hackathon in December 2022 right after ChatGPT was released, and took BART to Berkeley to get lunch at Sliver Pizzeria. The situation there was so bad that the restroom was closed even to customers. I took my greasy hands over to Chase where I have a bank account and an employee said, “you seem fine, you can use the bathroom”: they have to individually evaluate individual customers to determine who’s at risk of overdosing on the toilet or something. It made me think, “the people who live here are completely nuts. They somehow have the best AI technology, but absolutely cannot be trusted with it.” The whole thing about “avoiding the permanent underclass” is obviously no joke when you see the drug users passed out on the sidewalk.
I’m experimenting with AI story generation, which I know is not really helping the problem at all, but I thought this was funny at least:
You’re misdiagnosing a political problem as a failing of morality or charity. Which of course is tempting because of all the gross hype in SF. But, if SF threw out its land use rules and adopted those of Houston, not exactly an exemplar of rectitude, it would almost mechanically have fewer obnoxiously unhoused. They would have fewer people falling in to homelessness because rent would be cheaper and charitable donations would go further to helping more people, more comprehensively. The problem is that people in SF are adamantly and deeply against such changes, although Lurie is marginally better than nothing on that front. My point is, you can’t simply throw money at a structural problem; you have to change the structure. And then, you can’t effectively change the structure just by throwing money at it either. Rather, people work through existing institutions and movements for incremental change. Which is all very unsatisfying and all the more so because of the AI hype but so it is.
"You can't simply throw money at a structural problem" Actually, you can. It's expensive and inefficient, but it's the constraint of the problem. You don't need to house everyone to offer addiction treatment. Fucking around and demanding change that's politically impossible doesn't lift people out of the daily horrors that they experience.
San Francisco has been talking about fixing housing as the root of its societal ills for OVER A DECADE. You can YIMBY all you want but that *doesn't fucking help*. The numbers have gotten worse. By all means, continue to fight for housing! But stop pretending, for the love of god, that you're doing ANYTHING to help the people in crisis in that city.
Said another way: you're not going to have more housing in five years. There's no path for it now. It's not going to get constructed in five years or probably even ten years. It's probably politically impossible for the foreseeable future. It is *morally irresponsible* to say "well it's a WASTE OF MONEY to try to help these people! It's just too hard!" If it starts raining acid rain, you don't say "well we have to work to pass policy to curb emissions to reduce the systematic causes of acid rain, but the right doesn't want that" while people scream and tear at their sizzling skin. You pass out fucking umbrellas.
Housing is literally the problem. So to say more housing isn’t going to help is like saying more water won’t help when you are thirsty because it is going to take a day to walk to the oasis. You try anyway and hopefully you make it in time. And you focus and conserve your energy. You stop insisting on two stairwells and outlawing dormitories. You stop insisting on union labor. You rezone (as Lurie recently did, forced by the state). You stop restricting investment to owner occupants. You streamline approvals for new construction and ADUs. And yes, you subsidize low income housing and beds. Focus on the problem is what’s needed. But focus means attention to costs. Capitalists care about cost effectiveness and so if you tell them it’s going to cost close to a million dollars to build a single low income unit, how do you think they will allocate their charitable giving? They will send to Africa where a few hundred bucks will save a life. Efficiency is the way to unlock the charity.
I never said housing is not the problem. But it's inarguable that the quality of life of nearly five thousand unhoused people (if the city hasn't already reached that number) is inexcusably bad. It literally doesn't matter if the correct policy decision is to cover city hall in buttercream icing or to tear up the streets and make them into canals. People are dying, there's exactly zero end to the abject suffering in sight on a time scale that actually matters, and it's a *fundamental moral failing* that we have decided it's too expensive to help those people. It's unbelievable to me that we can't figure out how to allocate enough money and lower the costs associated with putting that money to good use to bring these people out of crisis. I *cannot fathom* a worse outcome than the current status quo.
When your database is pegging the CPU and production is hard down, you don't say "we need to wait for the CTO to open a new DBA role to fix this properly." You spin up a new db.r8g.48xlarge. There should be *no amount of money* to invest *right now* which is too high. Fuck the capitalists. This isn't giving people a cushy lifestyle, it's literally mitigating the worst externalities of capitalism itself.
I think we should take a step back and be more concrete about what I meant "by throwing money at the problem," and I apologize for the phrasing which can seem dismissive. When you don't solve the structural issues (and to be clear, I would be open to market or left-wing structural solutions, it's just that market solutions have worked in other places, but I'm not against trying left-wing solutions), you have an ongoing need for money. Like, not a fixed amount of cash rather ongoing transfers in perpetuity. Many people have an idea that homeless or poor people can get better, so to speak, and become the type of person that can afford rent in SF. But they don't. They have the same issues that caused them to not be able to hold a job, do drugs or otherwise and more neutrally simply not be able to make the math work with rent as high as it is. It is not simply a matter of handing out umbrellas.
Once we've identified the need for ongoing transfers, we can talk about private or public financing. With private financing, it's not going to be sustainable unless the legal and regulatory environment enables a competitive return. So, you're can't fairly say "why is their all this money for start-ups" or whatever and never enough money for the homeless. It's just not that kind of money, in our extant system. With public financing, you'd have to raise taxes. Which could work? People are trying to raise taxes on people richer than them (it's funny how it's always someone else), which are distortionary but idk could be worth it. But even with idealized public financing, there are strutural barriers, that is, the laws and regulations, that retard building and dissipate funds. Either way, there's no shortcut to addressing the need without addressing the structural issues that make the homelessness problem so much worse than I think anywhere else.
I would lastly ask you to take your moral judgment of SF (which, to be clear, is warranted) a little bit more seriously. If I may, I think you're actually underestimating have completely depraved people are. Your modal SF person does not care, in any meaningful way, whatsoever, about homelessness or even the absurd cost of living (unless it's them getting priced out, in which case they move and get over it). Sure they'll say all the right things and boy do they always know what to say. They'll blame all the right people, which is of course never themselves. But when it comes to (a) improving the material conditions of the poor or (b) maintaining their own personal comfort and convenience, they consistently pick the latter. People like Daniel Lurie are not perfect but they are trying to do what they can given just how bad things are.
I’ve had this exact same sequence of thoughts for several years now. I visited for SF for an AI hackathon in December 2022 right after ChatGPT was released, and took BART to Berkeley to get lunch at Sliver Pizzeria. The situation there was so bad that the restroom was closed even to customers. I took my greasy hands over to Chase where I have a bank account and an employee said, “you seem fine, you can use the bathroom”: they have to individually evaluate individual customers to determine who’s at risk of overdosing on the toilet or something. It made me think, “the people who live here are completely nuts. They somehow have the best AI technology, but absolutely cannot be trusted with it.” The whole thing about “avoiding the permanent underclass” is obviously no joke when you see the drug users passed out on the sidewalk.
I’m experimenting with AI story generation, which I know is not really helping the problem at all, but I thought this was funny at least:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1UkSceM7tZA5AoDRN3mQ5gwXaewde2XNmGCIbXhbYbOg/edit?usp=drivesdk
It's not a bad thing. I didn't man to imply that it was.