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I was really swept up in this article and the portrait of Amanda Barrows - what a unique and strong person and this city is incredibly lucky to have her.

Unlike some here, I came away with a deep sense of empathy, and today’s HN snark and frustration bounced off me pretty hard. The public order issues - homelessness in parks, the challenges of shared spaces—have certainly impacted me. But more than that, I struggle with how to translate the state of the world to my boys. I always remind them: every unhoused person was once a little boy or girl. We might be older now, but we’re still kids inside, and nobody dreams of growing up in these circumstances.

What struck me most was the balance of compassion and pragmatism that Amanda brings to her work. It’s easy to be frustrated with the policies and bureaucratic inefficiencies that slow down real solutions - but they are, in some ways, understandable.

The biggest frustration for me is the gap between the mental state of many unhoused individuals and the requirements needed to secure housing. The city surely understands the long-term costs of its policies, and it’s run by highly pragmatic people with limited budgets. But rules are rules, and at some point, top-down accommodations (including medical interventions...) are necessary to bridge this gap.

> What struck me most was the balance of compassion and pragmatism that Amanda brings to her work.

Nothing about this article strikes me as pragmatic. She's spending all her energy attempting to help people with the least likelihood of success and then gets angry at the system when they inevitably fail. The city didn't kick Morrisette out of the hotel because they like zero-tolerance policies, but because other people deserve a chance a chance to live in a free hotel room as well.

That's what the article was written for-- and it's one valid perspective on it.

To those whose lives have been irreparably harmed by the violent mentally ill people inhabiting SF's streets and parks while the police stand idle and billions of their tax dollars are spent annually failing to solve the problem-- it might hit a bit differently. That isn't the story here, but when you see people taking it differently than you it isn't necessarily because are in any way lacking in compassion.

The article paints the person in question as a harmless Garden Hermit ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_hermit ), perhaps he is but many of the support-resistant homeless are certainly not harmless.

I think it is an understandable reaction. They're a long history of articles like "man saves multiple orphans from the orphan crushing machine" and people go "ahhh that's so sweet" and nobody stops to ask "why do we have an orphan crushing machine and why can't do anything about that?"

I think it's important to do both.

Most people I met when homeless didn't want the help the government offered. There's a direct conflict between people who lead and those that actually want to help.

Unfortunately, a lot of the homeless I knew were very proud, arrogant, angry, bitter and many other emotions that made it nearly impossible to get them to take care of themselves through any intervention.

And if people refuse to take care of themselves, they will always be in a state where they need others to step in. Once they become destructive to society, I don't think any expectation of mercy from leadership should be expected. That leads to the situations we currently see in some places today.

It's not the lack of shelter that's the issue. There's plenty of shelter and housing if you want it.

Amanda's work is proof that personal engagement makes a difference, but scaling that kind of approach is incredibly difficult
This comment captured a lot of my thoughts about the article, Amanda and many of the other comments on this thread, except that you put them into words much more capably and eloquently than I was able to do. Well stated.
> The city surely understands the long-term costs of its policies, and it’s run by highly pragmatic people with limited budgets.

Is that the case? maybe there are highly pragmatic people in the org, but i dont think they are "running" things. and the city's budget for homelessness is astoundingly high (look it up)

I wish that park rangers didn't have to bear the cost of this problem. Nobody has the appetite to do anything effective about it.
I mean the article dances around it. I hate to say this, but we have to face reality.

It is empathy that is in great part responsible for for the crime ridden shit show that is much of SF.

How do we balance empathy while making SF not a gigantic pile of shit? I don't think there is an answer here. It's choose one, or choose the other.

This was written by AI.
Almost 20 years ago I spent two years trying to get a homeless person off the street and made a movie about it:

https://graceofgodmovie.com/

It's an incredibly complicated problem, but if there is one message I can share it is this: homeless people are, first and foremost, people. They span the full range of human experience (the main subject of my movie had a masters degree in psychology) and there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Homelessness is not one problem, it is a symptom of at least half a dozen different problems, all of which need different solutions. (And, BTW, some homeless people voluntarily choose the lifestyle. It's definitely a minority, but it's not zero.)

Yea, I'm a regular HN reader and I've been stuck on the street for going on 7 years. Used to be commended for persevering against the odds and the like, as a child and young programmer at 15 onward, home owner at 22.

I've left SF and landed in a college town in Sac Valley last year. Rent is $750/mo here. Been working in a kitchen for a year. Am I housed yet? Nope. Just gotta save a few thousand dollars. I have about the same amount of bills as a housed person, between gym + storage + take out food + car insurance.

But then the social aspect, my old relatives and network need to distance themselves from me. Any kind of old reference or something, non starter.

I will beat this. I only keep posting here on these threads because as you say, we span the full range of human existence. I like to think I'll use my approach as a template to help others. Get out of the big metro and into a peaceful place with cheap rent and lots of opportunity, yadda yadda.

Cheers.

Does that mean we need some kind of big brother/sister program but for the homeless? Would having one capable volunteer who met with them for an hour a week or something and could advocate and help them navigate the system make a big change?

I really struggle with this because it feels like helping as much as possible is the only moral stance to have, but I also question what level of responsibility the homeless have for their own situation. If we keep approaching them with these 0 consequence strategies does that encourage failure? Would the second guy who was smoking meth have benefited if he got thrown in jail for two months, forcing him into sobriety and then released into some kind of temporary housing with strict work and curfew rules?

We balk at the idea of limiting someones freedoms, but it seems like a mercy to take someone who is killing themselves and endangering others and putting them through some kind of rehabilitation that forces them to get physically and mentally healthy. It might be a relief to have a schedule and safety and some kind of guiding hand.

I’m 24 (which I think is younger than most people in here) and I live in San Francisco. I’m pretty ashamed to live here and hope to move soon.

The “on the ground” feeling is bad. Every issue we had 5 years ago is worse (except the drought).

Daily life involves walking calculated circles around drug addicts to avoid agroing them (like Dead Island).

I’m seeing more trash on the streets, more graffiti covering highway signs.

People have given up trying to change anything and just tolerate it now. I thought I’d meet high agency tech people when I moved here. The tech scene is way better than Boston but the sprit of SF is really dead. All the money in the world and they can’t run a city half a well as was done before cars…

Where in SF do you live? I'm guessing Soma, or near downtown? Get out of your neighborhood now and then. Most of the city does not have a drug addict or three on every block, and trash everywhere.
You need to get out of SoMa. The rest of SF is pretty nice, there are definite hot zones like near Bayview but generally what you describe is just SF. I left to raise a family and one of the reasons was the homelessness BUT SF has always been like this and if it was not the homeless it was the gangs or other issues in different parts of the city. Try living in a different part of the city, it might change things up a bit.
It can take time to get to know any city, but SF has the advantage of being relatively dense and walkable.

I moved here in 2015, and I was about the same age when I arrived. It was an adjustment for me back then too. The problems don’t really seem worse to me overall, but I will say that market street and SoMa in general feel worse than I remember but not really because of homeless people or drug use (that was already a highly visible problem); I think it’s important to point out how much commercial real estate has gone fallow since tons of stuff was shuttered during the pandemic. That’s the most noticeable change to me, and it just makes the whole area that much more depressing.

So before writing off the city entirely as has-been or whatever, maybe try a day of walking around the northeast corner when the weather is nicer. Nob Hill into Chinatown, then North Beach. From there you can enjoy a view from Coit Tower before taking one of the semi-famous stairways down to the Embarcadero. Levi plaza is a nice spot to rest your feet. If you need a place to stop and work, and you don’t mind tethering, find your way up into the Embarcadero center. The upper portion is an open air walkway over the streets with really well-kept gardens/trees along the way (at least once winter passes). Below you’ll find shelter from cold or wet weather, with lots of places to sit. It’s kind of the best kept secret of the city if you work remotely.

> All the money in the world and they can’t run a city half a well as was done before cars…

This is hardly unique to SF. Hell, the city is a diamond in the rough among other post-industrial cities anywhere in the world.

If not the northeastern corner, maybe try the mission near 24th and Valencia, or Fillmore near Japan Town. There are other spots too of course but these are all places I walk or take the train to regularly and I will miss them dearly if I leave.

Weird. I’ve lived here for 12 years. Things seem slightly better if not the same.
You’re ashamed? I have to be honest with you - I just moved into the city last year after living in the suburbs since 2018. SF is the most beautiful city I’ve ever been in. Do you not have a strong attachment to the communities here? I’m finding the city surprisingly good at cultivating niches.
lol San Franciscans never tried to change anything for the last 50 years, they never gave up since they never tried to begin with - they actually prefer it this way.
Overpaid tech workers like yourself have done much more to destroy the "spirit" of San Fransisco than some homeless people sleeping in a park. You can look all the way back to the 1960s and see the same complaints about "lawlessness" in San Fransisco, there's always a marginalized scapegoat to blame - first the beatniks, then the hippies, then the gays, now the homeless. The homeless are not an aberration or a new phenomenon in San Fransisco. It's the entitled, overpaid tech transplants rampaging through the city that are destroying it.
Viewed from 10,000ft it could even be cheaper in the long term, as an overall outcome. Personal attention, guidance through the system, vs constant background EMT interventions, more costly health outcomes, Policing and ultimately incarceration risks.

I don't like reductive economics logic over what is a humane response, but I do like that it may not only be nicer, but actually financially sensible.

What you're describing is universal healthcare being cheaper in the long term, which I would agree with. What is described in this article absolutely does not sound like a productive use of taxpayer money at all. Any one of the ranger's clients that gets semi-permanent shelter is someone else who doesn't. At best, we're pay a full-time salary for someone to play a zero sum game. IMO, it's actually worse than that because such housing is more efficiently allocated to those who are able and willing to navigate the bureaucracy of public housing themselves are more likely to rebound successfully.
Reminds me of an article from a while ago about a homeless alcoholic that ran up over $1M in hospital and ambulance costs over the years.

https://centerforhealthjournalism.org/our-work/insights/mill...

I have a pet theory that love is a basic human need (and a requirement for good mental health), and governments are notoriously bad at providing love no matter how much money you throw at mental health therapy, treatment programs, UBI, etc. Barrows is setting a good example here, but how to get more citizens involved so the burden isn't all on a few rangers?
> shepherding him through what one Recreation and Parks Department official described as the “arduous and achingly bureaucratic tasks” necessary just to be eligible for housing.

I'm going to risk a political statement and say that this is why I'm mostly hopeful about DOGE, even if parts of it are a shit show.

Building civilization comes with a hefty dose of institutional entropy, which keeps accumulating, despite (or often because) good intentions and competence. Everybody is improving their piece of the map, but this means you get stuck in a lot of spots of local maxima. Some can be fixed from a level above, but some need a round of creative destruction every 10 years or so.

I've read this yesterday: https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/why-japan-succ...

It's a good read and a good blog for many reasons, but the relevant part to this conversation: Japan managed to keep a very high level of living even through decades of economic stagnation and aging population in large part by having a sane zoning system. Yes, that simple. They have 12, nation-wide, mostly inclusive zoning types. This means the permitted building types carry over as you move up the categories, allowing mixed-use development by default.

And indeed, you can actually go to Japan and buy a house for about the price of a decent car - which coincidently used to be the case in most of the world, before the double pressure of zoning/coding on one hand, and migration towards urban centers on the other squeezed the housing pricing way above what actual costs would have it be.

I search through the internet looking for these type of stories that renew my faith in humanity. Thank you for sharing.
For those who live in San Francisco and witness homelessness and drug addiction across the city, this article feels deeply out of touch and even insulting.

We need to acknowledge that San Francisco has spent billions over decades on homelessness programs, yet the crisis persists, leaving us to ask: Is this truly the best we can do? Are we investing efficiently, or are we simply maintaining a broken system?

The last time I was in San Francisco was 8.5 years ago. My family had a cabbie with a pile of new tube socks in front seat. When he’d have to stop at a light, he would look for any homeless near the intersection, get their attention, and hand them new socks.

We gave the cabbie a good tip.

Great article highlighting a complex problem, and the steps required to solve it.

EDIT: May be a situation that would call for "Dog Fooding", to solve for the detailed use-cases?

USA does not spend enough resources to get a highly effective suite of services together, nor appreciate enough the value of human life to consistently provide care to people, ironically.

I'm currently dealing with the impact of a homeless, mutually abusive (shouting, fighting), drug-using couple camping either on the strip of grass directly in front of my home (most recently for weeks) or various sidewalks / bus stops in a 2 block radius, here in Seattle.

Worse, they attract "pals" who are : heavier drug users, very very disruptive to the neighborhood by causing nuisances including walking into traffic and being struck / killed here, creating public health issues with drug paraphernalia and human waste, etc.

This article reminds me of the complexity the couple faces, freeing themselves from the shackles of their abusive relationship, moving away from the homeo-statically well-know life on the streets.

I want them gone. I see it's difficult. I wish more Civil Servants were available to guide them.

There aren't that many. The Seattle Unified Care Team has been ineffective for this couple, they have been here for over four years, and it has not improved.

The title let me down; I was hoping this would be an article about a trebuchet. [edit: I see the post title has changed, the original one was something like "park ranger uses extraordinary methods to remove homeless from SF parks"]

I lived next to the park for several years and grew to loathe the dynamic where the lives of people sleeping rough in Golden Gate Park or Civic Center merit months of one-on-on outreach, while the lives of all of those who can't walk through the park in safety, can't send their kids there to play, and can't sit on the grass for fear of stepping on a used needle or a pile of human excrement, don't seem to matter.

I would like to see the city adopt a compassionate approach that doesn't at the same time enable years of lawbreaking by people who make nominally public spaces off-limits to the law-abiding. I'd like to see a San Francisco where there can be at least one clean, safe, working public toilet.

It's nice to read an article showing someone with serious empathy and understanding. We need more of that these days.

But it's also immediately obvious that more of this cannot possibly be the solution. This article is basically the "California liberal" solution turned up to 11: maximum personalized attention, empathy, "softness" plus several opportunities for housing. And yet as the article shows, you put a homeless person with extreme mental illness and/or addiction into a shelter/apartment/SRO/wherever and they will usually end up homeless again. And this system has an extremely high cost. People harassed or attacked by the homeless. Volunteers and government employees with their own trauma from the things they deal with when working with the homeless. Sections of cities that are unlivable. Even when there's a "success story" it is usually "this person's life still sucks, they're still addicted and have the same other demons but now life sucks in a shitty apartment in a shitty neighborhood instead of in a park where it's other people's problem."

The only real option is prevention. We need stronger communities, stronger families, mentorship for young people. The interventions from the article, across the small handful of homeless men described, cost at least several million dollars. Take a fraction of that money and invest it in new windows and fresh paint and flowerbeds in the neighborhoods they grew up in. Give them access to nutritious food and exercise. Provide for regular contact with community leaders and mentors and people who can make a difference in their lives. Allocate money to wholesome community activities (sports, robotics, arts, etc) such that they can vacuum up all the free time of a teenager with nothing better to do. Every dollar invested in each of these things will repay itself a hundredfold.

Much of homelessness is a disease without a cure. What do you do with a disease without a cure? Prevent it.

the hn cynicism is crazy but unsurprising. turns out can really easily spend your whole life obsessed with a pragmatism that betrays taking any action, however directionally correct
The park rangers empathic personal approach is interesting, she is working within a system not worth navigating as even that best case outcome is still a poor case outcome

> For him, “it was overwhelming,”

I’ve dealt with people that take 15 years to do some basic action because of something considered overwhelming. The only thing I observe is that you could literally start from scratch, the age of zero, and be competent in any field by this time

In this guys case, it took 7 months to get basic identifying paperwork regenerated, so that he can walk into one of those classic grifter housing projects

So many issues with that, masqueraded as a solution

California is simply amazing. In so many areas they have problems simply nobody else has (wildfires due to bad fire control policy, homelessness and public drug usage as discussed here) or is at magnitudes worse scale than elsewhere, and then policymakers handwring about how “nothing can be done”. Nowhere else I have ever been even comes close to what I see in California.
Then why are the parks still full of homeless? Maybe they need to re-evaluate such extraordinary methods.
If this person wants to be left alone and live by himself, why doesn't he find some place in the wilderness, away from a city; maybe an area managed by BLM where he won't be bothered? Why does he have to fuck up one of the few parks in a city of 850,000 people?
Gotta love the change in terminology. 'Unhoused' people instead of homeless, as though their being without a place to live is now someone else's (the American taxpayers') responsibility.
This story shows a rare instance where the system actually helped someone... But unfortunately I think without a truly personal approach, most initiatives (in this field) end up as half-measures at best
Why does it take seven months and a team in order to fill out the paperwork to make one eligible for a room at a state SRO?
The frustration of some of the people in the comments is clear - "the city is spending a lot of our tax money on these criminals, savages and addicts and they don't even want help".

It's incredibly privileged and reductive to think of it that way - that, after surviving in a park for 10 YEARS, struggling for food and shelter, surviving the seasons, rest of society and getting beat down to square 1 so many times -and basically being in constant fight or flight mode as the article states - you think you wouldn't resort to escaping through alcohol or drugs, and could simply "decide to get your act together" and adapt to anything the govt agencies expect from you on daily basis in some of those housing solutions.

Those people did not cheerfully decide one day to dedicate their life to shitting all over a park and be addicted to meth. A lot of homeless people got there either by being let down by the society very early on, or by 1-2 bad events in life making it impossible to pay rent and getting dragged into a downward spiral from there.

Solutions should be focused on the root causes, and not the symptoms. If the country is such a late-stage capitalism shithole that so many people are 1 medical emergency away from not being able to pay rent, and there's no safety net or effective government support to prevent them from going homeless, the cost of trying to rehabilitate someone after years on the streets / in the parks is going to be multiplied. I'd like to see how those large budgets are being targetted first at number of new people coming into this situation being reduced, and then additionally decreasing the existing homeless population.

As usually, there are methods being successfully (at least to a larger extent) used in other societies - but USA is very often dismissive of them, because it's special and different.

Sorry but the idea that such a system of personal involvement is a practical solution is a pipe dream. We need some system of involuntary confinement that isn't prison or psych hospitals imo. A place where we can put these people in humane conditions that is meant to transition them into being able to take care of themselves. A place where they can have private rooms and be given useful work to do, as well as counseling for their mental health issues.
Root cause of this issue all wonderfully explained in the Tom Holland's Dominion (not to be confused with the Spiderman actor).
The rising homeless crisis is a symptom of a much larger issue: poor economic policy propagated by decades of awful neoclassical economic theory and neoliberalism (ie, “trickle down economics” or Reagon-omics)
Quoting a reddit comment:

> Wow, this is almost a parody. An able-bodied meth addict and convicted felon was illegally living in a public park for 20 years, littering the land around him and forcing rangers to spend countless time and resources cleaning up the mess he left behind, making regular emergency room visits due to his unhealthy lifestyle costing the city hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, constantly doing illegal drugs while not holding down a job and suspiciously acquiring new supplies for his encampment after every sweep (how much do you want to be he engages in illegal activity), and giving an extremely hard time to caseworkers and HHS staff who already have a busy workload (including leaving/getting kicked out of housing multiple times). That one Golden Gate Park Dweller has probably cost the city millions of dollars over the last few years while consuming valuable time from caseworkers and park rangers who could be helping someone else (they're already overloaded). Not to mention the potential damage to the park's environment caused by his littering. What this guy needs is outpatient mental health treatment, and it's honestly criminal that our country has basically no resources for people with mental illness and shoves them into jail or shelters without treating their underlying problems.

So I've been looking through overhead map views, and identified possible swastikas near Mental Health Care facilities. For example, This "Specialized Pharmacy" dispenses BH drugs

https://maps.app.goo.gl/ktnBzitvbKjPrFp78

Is this clockwise or widdershins? I need to squint and ponder the shape before the swastika spins out. Like the arrow in the FedEx logo.

Activate the Satellite Photo view to see the building design

This area in Glendale, AZ is a large medical complex, and the two "spins counterclockwise swastika style" buildings are "Advanced Health" which is boutique cosmetics and upgrades for the wealthy, mostly, and there are dentists and imaging/radiology and vision care. You can Street View the shingles hung outside. No BH here that I found.

https://maps.app.goo.gl/srBLyNUkMLNmD3gt6

Another interesting clockwise swastika, if I am not hallucinating it, is by road design in Tempe 85288:

It's at Priest Drive, [psychiatrists and physicians are a priestly class who practice a religion of Aesclepius, wearing casual blue or dressy white vestments and stethoscope rosary, in temples that smell sanitized and sterile], and there is a little international food court with good falafel and Hindu fare, cybersecurity/IT firms kitty-corner to that, homes going up, a train station, and oh yeah, up the road to NW there's the central behavioral health authorities and crisis line operators, a large disability center, the D.E.S. services for SNAP, unemployment, not far actually from the Phoenix Zoo, etc, (is the Zoo hiring this month? any vacancies for carbon-based homeless?) and a housing agency for the Mentally Ill, Disabled and Chronically Homeless, commercial blood testing lab, etc.

https://maps.app.goo.gl/PXz44uHWc4vTw8hR9

Now of course a Swastika is not automatically rabid Nazi supremacist style, but it helps to understand the positioning of Mental Health Care and ordinary normal physicians and hospitals, the legal authority they carry to route patients out of the community, and into court-ordered drugging, or the penal/corrections/prison system, and the pipeline to cemeteries such as White Tanks or crematoria. Of course many mentally ill people also die or become gravely disabled, or felons, without any treatment.

But I just looked at the graceful curved arms of Priest & Washington as the wheel spins clockwise, I suppose.

Don't forget that the WWII losers and refugees migrated to elsewhere and contributed all their research and intellect to receiving nations. Herr Mengele drowned off South American coast. So it goes.

What a horrible problem with such a simple solution. Give people adequate and decent housing at reasonable prices or for free if necessary. Laughable this is still a question in the richest country in world history.
Paul Graham approves.