I interviewed a few homeless for a project for this social justice class I took as an undergrad requirement. Bought em' a meal and asked them to tell me their life stories.
Yes there was drinking, drugs and mental health issues, but there was also this sort of resignation where once they'd got used to sleeping and defecating in the street and they knew where they could get food and maybe some cheap liquor they kind of stopped caring about improving their lives. They didn't want to move into a shelter with dangerous people who would steal their meager posessions or attack them. They had basically accepted they had failed at life and had come to terms with an existence of scraping along the bottom of city existence.
I think the main thing that attracts them to San Francisco is the nice climate, progressive politics that doesn't persecute them and that they can walk to services, walk to begging spots, walk to the liquor store, and walk to where they sleep. Notice how there are no homeless up at the top of hills in S.F?
I’ve been homeless for six years now. If there’s such a thing as an effective homeless man, then I suppose I’m effective. Being homeless is probably the only thing I’ve ever been good at. I know where to get the best free food. I’ve made friends with restaurant and convenience-store managers who let me use their bathrooms. And I don’t mean the public bathrooms, either. I mean the employees’ bathrooms, the clean ones hidden behind the kitchen or the pantry or the cooler. I know it sounds strange to be proud of this, but it means a lot to me, being trustworthy enough to piss in somebody else’s clean bathroom. Maybe you don’t understand the value of a clean bathroom, but I do.
It's true, the less money you have the more time you have to spend on the basics. As much as I love laundry and housekeeping services, if I'm not making income they're gone and there's 4 hours a week I now have to spend to be clean. No credit card? No Amazon Prime delivery, needs more time to go to the market +1hr/day. No money for quality restaurant food? Time to start going to farmers' markets and learning to cook, +2hr/day... etc. Car service? LOL. No cash to load Clipper? Hours of travel time. Medical care? I pity the fool.
Was this comment actually downvoted? It is important to recognize that survival is a full time endeavor to many people and will directly impact their ability to "pull themselves up by their bootstraps".
Well, to be fair, the tops of the hills are where the wealthier people live (with a few small exceptions), so the residents there would likely notify the police that homeless persons had penetrated their sanctums and should be removed, post haste.
The only 2 hilly neighborhoods that support your theory are Pac Heights and Russian Hill, but that has less to do with the hills and more to do with the historical housing in those areas.
If you look at Nob Hill, Potrero, Twin Peaks, Bernal Heights, and Telegraph Hill, they really aren't any more expensive than the surrounding areas. In a lot of cases (SoMa, Dog Patch) the flat parts of town are even more expensive.
Yea in SF the bottom of the hill (Mission dostrict) is just as pricy if not more. Also SOMA is probably the lowest and flattest and most expensive area.
Yes there was drinking, drugs and mental health issues, but there was also this sort of resignation where once they'd got used to sleeping and defecating in the street and they knew where they could get food and maybe some cheap liquor they kind of stopped caring about improving their lives. They didn't want to move into a shelter with dangerous people who would steal their meager posessions or attack them. They had basically accepted they had failed at life and had come to terms with an existence of scraping along the bottom of city existence.
I think the main thing that attracts them to San Francisco is the nice climate, progressive politics that doesn't persecute them and that they can walk to services, walk to begging spots, walk to the liquor store, and walk to where they sleep. Notice how there are no homeless up at the top of hills in S.F?