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Originally Posted by iheartthed
Nobody would voluntarily sleep on the street if given a choice.
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That is obviously untrue. As in Seattle, a huge percentage of street campers in California refuse shelter offers for the reasons spelled out previously.
Quote:
Originally Posted by iheartthed
Even if this is true, this is not incompatible with my point. If you want them off the street then house them without condition.
But I don't think this is the reason. There have been drugs and rules for decades, but the problem of tent cities on the west coast seems to have recently proliferated. So either there is a recent explosion in homeless people or past options that were available to keep people off the street are no longer available. Seems pretty straightforward to me, but tell me why else this would suddenly be a problem?
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I'm sure homelessness has grown, but there were always lots of unhoused people on the streets of San Francisco and Los Angeles. The tents, however, are the biggest difference. Unhoused people used to sleep rough, took up less room on the sidewalk, and were less visible overall. Now they have elaborate, sprawling encampments. I saw that evolution in my old SF neighborhood. When I first moved into the area in the mid-1990s, the homeless slept in sleeping bags in doorways or against walls. A few would have a small tarp and shopping cart setup. By the time I moved out of the area in 2020, the common setup was several family-sized tents connected by tarps, taking up the entire sidewalk as well as parking spaces in the adjacent roadway.
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