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.
