I started getting off at Powell station and I can attest to this article. I've commuted to NYC stations for over 4yrs and even though i've seen my share of homelessness inside the NYC subway stations, it's nowhere as bad as SF BART station (Powell).
Every day I see some weird stuff going on (it's at a point where it's no longer weird to me).
I moved to SF from New York a couple years ago. A huge difference in the homeless populations for me has been the aggressiveness of the SF homeless. I can't recall a single time in New York where a homeless person got in my face or yelled at me or anything of the like. Since being here I've had a full cup of (hopefully) soda thrown on me and been yelled at from a 3ft range multiple times. It's a surreal experience. I'm not sure what led to cultural difference.
"Bryant Park, in the heart of midtown and adjacent to the New York Public Library, was an open-air drug market; Grand Central Terminal, a gigantic flophouse; the Port Authority Bus Terminal, “a grim gauntlet for bus passengers dodging beggars, drunks, thieves, and destitute drug addicts,” as the New York Times put it in 1992."
NYC's "solution":
"In sum, a diverse set of organizations in the city—pursuing their own interests and using various tactics and programs—all began trying to restore order to their domains. Further, in contrast with early sporadic efforts like Operation Crossroads, these attempts were implemented aggressively and persistently. Biederman, for example, worked on Bryant Park for 12 years. When Kiley was struggling to restore order in the subway, he had to withstand pressure from powerful opponents: the New York Civil Liberties Union, the mayor’s office (which had suggested bringing portable kitchens and showers into the subway for the homeless), the police commissioner, and the transit police. In fact, it was after the transit cops resisted Operation Enforcement, Kiley’s first effort to restore order, that he hired Bratton.
By the early 1990s, these highly visible successes, especially in the subway, had begun to express themselves politically. Better than any other politician, Rudy Giuliani understood the pent-up demand for public order and built his successful 1993 run for mayor on quality-of-life themes. Once in office, he appointed Bratton, who had orchestrated the subway success and understood the importance of order maintenance, as New York’s police commissioner.
Under Bratton, the NYPD brought enormous capacities to bear on the city’s crime problem—particularly Compstat, its tactical planning and accountability system, which identified where crimes were occurring and held local commanders responsible for their areas. Giuliani and Bratton also gave the force’s members a clear vision of the “business” of the NYPD and how their activities contributed to it. In short, a theory previously advocated largely by elites filtered down to—and inspired—line police officers, who had constituted a largely ignored and underused capacity."
From what I've seen, there are a lot of confounding factors in the studies that both back up and refute broken-windows policing. It can be hard to tell what actually works.
Objections aren't so much suggesting that it doesn't work, but that it was unjust, and New York should have been kept as it was in the 80s because the human cost of the cleanup was so high.
It was somewhat challenging to find good information online on crime at the PABT, but I found a few things that give some indication of how it has changed over time.
I would appreciate it if anyone can find better data or spot-check these numbers against other reports, because of course an order of magnitude is very large.
What would happen if you threw a cup of soda on someone in NYC or Boston, Trenton or Baltimore? I think you'd learn very quickly not to do that. Cultivating a culture where that sort of response by the person on which soda is thrown is frowned upon certainly doesn't help.
A homeless woman spit on me in SOMA a few months ago for no apparent reason. Just walked up to me squawking like a bird and spit on me. Probably was on something.
My immediate reaction was to jump out of my chair and aggressively move towards her - I'm actually not sure what I would've done next because it all happened so quickly. Probably shoved her? That seems like a legitimate response to someone walking up and spitting on you. Thankfully I was with a few friends and they restrained me before I could do anything and the woman ran away unscathed.
The entire experience left me so confused. I am legitimately concerned that if I had shoved her I would've been considered the 'bad guy' here be the absurd SF hyper liberals and could've ended up in jail been fired if my employer found out.
What are you supposed to do in this situation? There needs to be some sort of disincentive to this behavior but it seems like the way things are in SF it's actually socially acceptable behavior.
In many southern tech cities corning someone and yelling at/assaulting them with unknown fluids is a great way to get shot. We recently hired a CA transplant to the dev team and he was shocked how many of us carried.
If I'm cornered by a crazy man who's shouting and dousing me - if it hits me in the face, quite literally inoculating me - with God knows what? Even here in duty-to-retreat Baltimore, you'd have a hard time calling that other than self-defense.
In other cities I think the government has your back. The SF police will not respond not a non violent encounter because the court system heavily sympathizes with non violent offenders in SF, to the point where they don't even prosecute. I am at a loss as to what I, as an individual, can do to curb the aggressive behavior.
during my normal commute hours at Civic Center I've seen ...
- used needles strewn about in busy areas
- someone defecate on the station floor in broad daylight
- meth/heroin deals
- a dealer shaking down a high junkie for money owned on the platform
- entire hallways/stairways that were no-go because of strung out transients
- pretty much a third of BART cars have a homeless person sleeping off their high in them.
I feel stressed and not safe during my commute, can't believe I pay $9/day for the privilege of commuting via a cesspool of human misery. Not being on Civic Center or Powell station or being able to take Transit Bus will definitely be a consideration for my next job hunt.
Cleaning staff should remove the needles. Security or police arrest the dealers, and remove people loitering on stations or trains.
Is it a lack of funding, laws, sympathy for the homeless, or ... what?
I lived in London for ten years, and homeless people, or beggars, were extremely rare on public transport vehicles, and even rarer within stations. I don't know what combination of law and enforcement is used, and there are homeless people on the streets, but something prevents them from overtaking the transport system.
I'll offer up this explanation from arch-conservative James Burnham (so please don't downvote the messenger) just for consideration on the idea that the "doing something about this", as SF tries so mightily, can make the problem worse. This is from 1964:
But what exactly is Skid Row? In reality it is not, other than incidentally, a spatial concept, but a functional one. . . Skid Row is the end of the line, and there must be an end of the line somewhere. ... The whole [reform] operation has proved to be, inevitably, an ideological illusion. Since Skid Row is not a static place, it cannot be abolished or rubbed out. The most noticeable consequence of this anti-Skid Row campaign has been merely to diffuse Skid Row, for a while, throughout the City.
I've elided a lot of supporting argument, the gist of which is that the denizens of Skid Row tend to form networks of support & attract institutions that maintain them. And while that level of maintenance looks (and is) rather squalid and miserable to outsiders, breaking it up is just replacing an organic support network with an artificial one which looks at the symptoms more than the roots.
I can't speak to London except that I guarantee London has a Skid Row, even if it's not physically located in London, if that makes sense.
Final disclaimer that I don't claim to have the answer, just pointing out one point of view that seems rather pertinent to 2017 SF despite being written 53 years prior, whatever moral valence you assign to the author & his politics.
I'm not suggesting solving the whole problem. London hasn't -- see, for example, the events that led to the fire and many deaths in Grenfell Tower last week. I'm out of touch, but I think that building was one step above Skid Row.
What I am suggesting is removing the homeless people from the public transportation network, so it's kept cleaner and feels safer for the users.
I think the difference is that the US has abject poverty at levels that call into question its status as a proper first world country. So many of these people probably simply require some basic mental health/rehab services, but they just have too many hoops to jump through to get them (assuming they qualify for Medicaid or other assistance, which isn't necessarily a given). It's not surprising that a country like Britain with reasonably accessible social services has way fewer people in this condition.
To your question about why they've taken over public transit in particular - I think the situation is just that out of hand. Libraries and parks are similarly full of homeless people, probably just due to the fact that they're public.
SF attitudes towards certain behaviors make hard to do what most cities do, which is arrest these people and make them go somewhere out of sight.
There are cleaning staff going through the area cleaning stuff up. But people still are doing their crap and the laws are unenforced because of those political reasons.
I also think SF police & the city decided the tenderloin was the homeless containment zone long time ago with SROs being there. That is also where the civic center station is.
I'm sure they clean the Civic Center station area daily. If they didn't, it would be knee deep in filth.
That's just where they've decided to gather. I'm not entirely sure what attracts them there, other than the burger king with the huge "EBT Cards Accepted" poster.
all of the above; plus a janitor or a police officer cost $200k+/year each when you factor in pay, benefits, overtime. So you can imagine they might be a little thinly staffed.
The UK has a population of 60 million people. There are only about 4500 rough sleepers.
This figure has risen every year for the past 6 years, and it's likely to keep rising. Removing the single room supplement / imposing the bedroom tax, freezing housing benefit, cuts to local authorities (and thus cuts to drug and alcohol services, and to some mental health provision, and to some housing provision) all mean that rough sleeping is going to increase.
And that number doesn't include people who are in temporary accommodation or vulnerably housed or sofa surfing.
Every complaint I've seen on this topic is about how repulsive or unsafe it feels for someone commuting to their job in SF. No one talks about these thousands of people who are suffering from drug addiction, mental disorders, socioeconomic injustice, and all kinds of abuse. No one's complaint is: "how can we, as society, allow these conditions to persist, why aren't we helping these people in a meaningful way?" It's the apathy of the population in general that allows this kind of situation to come about and then persist despite the best efforts of "they" who are supposed to "do something about it."
Millions of homeless people in hundreds of other cities around the world suffer from the exact same conditions you've described. Yet nowhere but the Bay Area have I seen those conditions caused those people to behave the way they do in SF. The city has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on safe injection sites, needle disposals, and public restrooms, and yet still must continue to spend money to pay city employees to clean up needles and human waste from the streets and transit stations.
Homelessness is a massive problem in SF, but the attitude that they behave this way "because of the situation they're in" is untrue and counterproductive.
I disagree with that strongly. There are loads of people describing what they see of the homeless issue, and proposing or discussing potential solutions in a generally respectful way. For the most part, the evidence is described more as remarkable than repulsive. Whenever the topic comes up on HN, I think the discussion is very reasonable and considerate, and I always find it an interesting read.
I get off at Civic Center and it's astonishing how many used syringes I see on the ground by the escalators. Those needle tips are extremely dangerous and could be life changing if you happened to get punctured by one.
I'm in Australia and don't mind if there are sharps bins. They're easily ignored and generally placed high enough that curious kids don't get themselves in trouble. Whatever community/health experts deem best is fine by me.
I don't think it's an issue for most people. The sharps bins look very medical so it is easy to forget that the users are potentially throwing away things other than insulin needles, especially if you're not wandering around looking to be angry about the fact that people inject drugs.
I don't know when you lived in NYC, but it has certainly gotten worse in the last few years. I'm tempted to date it from the start of the de Blasio administration but I couldn't swear to it.
In addition to what others have said, NYC is legally mandated to, and mostly does, provide sufficient shelter beds. Some homeless people for a mix of reasons, some quite rational, avoid these shelters. However on the coldest nights of the year they are an option even for people that would usually rather avoid them. A similar story applies for Rikers Island (jail) or the public hospital system.
Some can find shelter. Sometimes open vent grates on the ground provide heat (until they start putting spikes on those). Sometimes you can make fire someplace. Sometimes you have to migrate away. Or, you freeze to death...
Does anyone know why enforcement hasn't been stepped up at the Market St. BART/MUNI stations? Powell is literally the core of our tourism market (Yes, Pier 39, which everyone gets to from Powell or Embarcadero), and all of the downtown business/banking. The two things SF can't afford to lose...
Every day I see some weird stuff going on (it's at a point where it's no longer weird to me).