SF and Oakland have both had problems with fires in encampments. I'm betting the... let's call them guerilla housing efforts generally don't measure up on fire safety.
The city should create encampments themselves rather than let them grow organically. Then provide security and sanitation service. Portland may actually try this, all because the city got sued for violating the ADA. Maybe someone should try that in SF.
That's such a good idea that SF already does it! They're called "navigation centers". As you might guess, where to site one is an intensely political process.
Oakland tried doing one temporarily. Three months turned into nine with major drug abuse and violence problems. Further, they couldn't actually manage the shrink-the-encampment goal, so eventually they had to clear it.
Yeah, I think the only way to make it work is to provide plenty of security, right along with the social workers. The NIMBYs in Portland primarily argue against siting a homeless shelter near them because of the associated violence. If the city actually staffed the shelters with enough security, that argument could be dismissed.
Of course another argument would pop up to replace it. So the other thing we need to do is quit trying to do direct democracy at every last level of the process. We elect representatives, so we should let them do their thing. And if we don't like it, elect someone else next time.
That only works if the people in need of assistance don't respond to the on-site security by moving out of the encampment. You wind up having to establish a sizable security-protected area around the blessed encampment, otherwise you wind up with a series of unsanctioned and unsecured encampments anchored by the serviced one. Neighbors tend to object to that kind of thing.
What SF actually needs to do is house people. Unfortunately, its main dysfunction is its flat refusal to actually do this.
Is housing really an option? I mean that seriously. I suppose we could build "projects," like in Baltimore, but I definitely wouldn't call those a success. Right now, most of the Section 8 projects are skimming the better candidates off the top. The hard cases, the truly drug addicted and mentally disturbed (and there are a whole lot of them), will take whatever housing you give them and either ruin it, or move back onto the street, or both. I always hear this appeal to just "house people," but it seems to me there's more to it than that. I think in many, many circumstances, you would have to involuntarily commit them. And then it starts looking like a jail or mental hospital. In my mind, those are probably the best answers, but that ship sailed a long time ago.
Honestly, all SF has to do is stop obstructing projects that are a mere 20% subsidized units. It's become common political practice to pretend that a parking lot housing zero people is preferable to a lot housing a bunch of people, of which up to 20% are impoverished and formerly unsheltered vulnerable community members. Couple it with a fantasy that 100% subsidized is within reach in all cases and you have a recipe for a parking lot staying that way forever and the unsheltered staying that way too.
Getting people in housing is often the first step to being able to help them with everything else making their lives difficult. It's remarkably hard to deliver psychiatric care to people who cannot be reliably contacted.
How do you weigh incipient death-by-fire-with-major-public-hazards against other options? I have no idea how you'd do it or how you'd weight other options.
Basically, how many avoidable deaths by fire are you willing to sign off on with this justification?
Given the permanently mild weather in the SF Bay, this number is probably smaller than you think. Whereas fires in homeless encampments are a relatively frequent occurrence.
Being exposed without, say maybe wooden structure to block the wind around you while you sleep, may be a reason homeless build fires.
The last story I was able to find was of someone that died exactly that way, a fire in near freezing weather in SF [0]. If that person had a lockable wooden shed to put blankets and sleep in, she wouldn't have needed a fire.
When I lived in Oakland, my apartment building had several close calls with wildfires caused by poorly contained campfires in a nearby encampment of vulnerable community members housed in tents to keep the wind off as they slept. Given that lockable wooden sheds / "tiny homes" can and do catch fire from things like poorly managed propane stoves in particle board construction, perhaps a better solution is in order. As stopgaps go, this one has a bunch of known drawbacks that lead policy to shy away from it.
The Canadian woodworker built these structures for people who had no actual housing. Not people who had the immediate option of an actual house and just picked living in the shack for funzies.
Your suggestion that these homeless people should have just went in 'actual' housing instead is absurd, it almost certainly wasn't an option for many if not most of them in the face of the immediate expedient options.
Thank you for clarifying that I correctly understood the earlier comment.
What would you like me to say at this juncture? I firmly believe that the root of the issue at hand is California's, and the Bay's, collective aversion to housing. It's an aversion written into policy. Policy can be changed.
Similarly, people in need can be housed by municipalities sufficiently devoted to doing so in a cost and time-effecitve manner. It just requires the political will to do so and a political system that does not cater to NIMBY impulses.
Please accept my apologies for my lack of clarity earlier. I do not think that people lacking housing should "just go into housing". You are completely correct. That would be utter nonsense. I think the proper policy response is actual housing for people, as opposed to an entrenched policy apparatus devoted to doing literally anything but that. I hope this clears things up for you.
If that was the problem, I think it would have been solved long ago without as many fires as we see today. Warmth is available in a variety of ways, including and not limited to warming centers and chemical warmers. Propane stoves are a poor way to warm people.
To be honest, I'm being very generous when I ascribe those wildfires to a need for warmth and poor fire management. None of them happened in particularly cold weather.
