I’m not sure what the city can do about the price of hotels.
Anyway, lots of conventions are held in Las Vegas. C’est la vie.
I have a feeling whoever decided Las Vegas had cheaper hotels than San Francisco never went to Vegas during CES. The Tuesday and Wednesday of CES are pretty much the only two days of the year where hotels are more expensive in Vegas than they are on New Year’s Eve, and that’s saying something.
Case in point:
Want to stay at Caesar’s Palace on Tuesday 12/31? $600
Want to stay at Caesar’s Palace on Tuesday 1/7? $673
Want to stay at Caesar’s Palace on Tuesday 1/14? $139
Every member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors is a Democrat.
The mayor is a Democrat.
The Assessor is a Democrat.
The City Attorney is a Democrat.
The Treasurer is a Democrat.
The District Attorney is a Democrat.
This is becoming more commonplace in bigger cities. I believe they call them “relocation programs.” This is the first I’ve heard of a city that also provides a year’s rent, though; I believe most cities simply provide a one-way bus ticket.
That is fine, but would you say the inhabitants are generally liberal (to the extent you can define an “average inhabitant” in a city which is home to all sorts)? How does the general vibe compare to that in SF in the 1960s/1970s, or to some modern European cities (liberal and otherwise)?
As for the topic of this thread, last time I was there, there were definitely some Sanisette-type public toilets downtown, e.g., on Market Street. I did not use one, so no idea if it was in working order or not. If there are not enough of them around, it may not be a political or liberal/not liberal thing; it may be simple incompetence by the city bureaucracy. All cities are supposed to have functional sanitation, no matter the political affiliation of the elected officials.
“We’ll pay you to leave town, here’s a bus ticket and a year’s worth of rent, just make very sure you don’t come back” might sound vaguely plausible (if definitely not “liberal”) to certain crowds, but what’s the point of just handing out bus tickets, assuming it is not an “offer you can’t refuse”? The recipient merely sells the bus ticket and avoids the hassle of relocating to a different random city.
PS how can politicians roll out “relocation programs” without accusations of ethnic cleansing?
The homeless are probably a diverse group and in any case homeless is not an ethnicity.
No shit?
I’m sure all undesirables are equally unwelcome, but the concept of “relocation” has unfortunate historical connotations.
Did you read the comment I was replying to, or do you just want to shit on my reply?
Aren’t those numbers about proportional to their populations? SF has about 800K people, and NYC has about 8M.
well ive heard some of the “peoples parks” are really bad
a friend of mine went to check out the campus at Berkley and went through one and said 3rd world India didn’t look or smell as bad … even here in the desert we have more homeless but there’s an occasional pile of something awful mainly near the lower end stores and such
I have a hard time believing that, in the instance of the poop in the escalators and on the store shelves, that that was actually due to any lack of a more suitable place to poop. That has to be an **intentional **attempt to be a nuisance to society.
There’s only one Peoples’ Park. It’s not too bad during the daytime though definitely homeless people around. I don’t remember nothing too bad as far as bodily fluids but then down the road a bit I first saw adult penis when a guy decided to piss right in the street mid day.
I think the general voting pattern is very liberal, but on venues like Nextdoor you can read a lot of comments from those who blame all the city’s problems on liberals. Personally, like you, I don’t think the problem is so much the official liberal attitude to homelessness, it is just general political incompetence, which can and does afflict any ideology once in power. Perhaps you could say that the problem is the lack of a serious opposition party in the city.
The problems I have read about with those public toilets, which I think cost a quarter to use, is that certain people take them over to inject drugs. The toilets are self-cleaning after every use, so I’m not sure how that creates a problem except if those users won’t come out, and so no-one else can use the facility. Also, there aren’t enough of them, because they are pretty large and probably expensive to install and maintain. The existing ones were done as a deal maybe 20 or more years ago with a French company that wanted public space to sell advertising. I think that deal is over.
One last note on the man pooping in the Safeway: it was a one-off, enough so to get on the local news, and the man was described as mentally ill. I’m not sure that any particular conclusions should be drawn from that incident.
This is kind of a myth. Kind of an exaggeration. Kind of an intentional slam coming from sources with a strong anti-social-service agenda. (Not blaming you as one of those sources, Bijou Drains, just saying that the story you’re repeating probably came from them).
It’s not true that NYC is just handing out bus tickets and a year’s rent to get homeless people to go elsewhere. The truth is that there are two separate programs, “Special One-Time Assistance” (SOTA) and “Project Reconnect.”
SOTA gives people who meet fairly rigid criteria a year’s rent if they will move out of the shelter system and into approved housing (it can be in NYC or out of it). People have to have a place to move to, and have to demonstrate that they will be able to continue to pay the rent after the SOTA is finished. Nobody is just handing rent checks out on the streets. (Information about SOTA is here: www1.nyc.gov/site/hra/help/sota.page )
Project Reconnect pays one-way transportation for people who are stranded in NYC and would have a place to live somewhere else if they could just get there. You have to have (and prove that you have) a real place to live somewhere else and real support options (family, usually) to be sure that you will be able to live there. Nobody is just handing out bus tickets on the street and sending people anywhere. (Information about Project Reconnect is here: www1.nyc.gov/assets/dhs/downloads/pdf/project_reconnect_brochure.pdf )
I can’t speak authoritatively about the poop situation in San Francisco, but I think (as others have said) that the solution is really based in providing more clean, safe, private places for people to do what they (all of us) have to do. I have certainly seen human poop in the subways and on the streets here in NYC. But it’s definitely something that people do out of necessity, in the vast majority of cases. Give people a better option, and they will take that option.
I do not think the city can be directly blamed for the actions of some random menace to society, and it remains to be proved that there are any more psychos per capita than in any other city.
I am informed that SF has an extremely high cost of living, and that there are so many people sleeping rough so that you’d notice, so maybe the administration can be blamed at the very least indirectly for those prevailing conditions; I couldn’t say (though I would bet on incompetence before any actual political agenda).
The ones I’ve seen in Europe are free to use (at one point you had to put in the equivalent of a quarter, but eventually they realized that was silly, and didn’t cover the costs anyway), and kick you out after 15-20 minutes, precisely to prevent people from shooting up and nodding off in there.
Could you provide a cite on this (the ticket and rent part, at least)?
My post above has cites for the actual program–not for the exaggerated version (for which I don’t think you will find verifiable cites).
If I’ve learned anything in my time on this message board, a good 75% of the users here are convinced that EVERYTHING is conservative propaganda.