Can understand this, as I own a home in the East Bay, but I fight the urge to be a NIMBY, because I've come to realize, it's not good for the area in the long run.
One of the main causes of our homeless problem is our high-housing cost. At least from what I've read, the Bay Area has such a high-level of homelessness because people who normally can afford apartments can't and are forced on to the streets. We have some of the highest housing costs in the world, and if prices keep going up, homelessness and crime will get worse and worse. We need to bring prices down (or at least keep them from going up like crazy as they have been) so that we can support a range of workers, from cooks and teachers to well-educated techies and business people.
It came as a surprise to me too when I first heard about it, but it kind of makes sense. There are a lot of people living at lower incomes (not necessarily poor, just low), and in the Bay Area, their biggest expense is rent. All it takes is for them to lose their job or incur a big medical expense and they can't afford their apartment. So a lot of people who would normally live in cheaper apartments are eventually forced on to the street.
Yeah, i'm not opposed to high rent costs, but San Francisco is in the top two in the world in cost for renting apartments. This is just insane and it seems better for the city in the long run if this could be brought down.
Are a disproportionate number of those people suffering from addiction and or mental health issues? Yes. But make no mistake, the gap between people apartment shopping and people living on the street is frighteningly small in a housing market as expensive as SF.
>Then who will do the lawn care, cook, and serve? Will they have to commute hours everyday to make coffee and clean floors?
Sure, why not? They can then charge a fortune for these services because of the commute time.
And for restaurants and the like, they can simply charge extremely high prices to eat there, to pay for workers needing to commute so far. And if the wealthy people refuse to pay for that, the restaurants can just go out of business, and the wealthy people can just cook their own food at home.
I don't really see the problem here, except that this wouldn't result in a healthy community, but it seems these wealthy assholes don't actually want healthy communities. So maybe the healthy communities should be elsewhere, and the wealthy NIMBYs can just live in their own enclave and cook their own food and clean their own floors.
One of the main causes of our homeless problem is our high-housing cost. At least from what I've read, the Bay Area has such a high-level of homelessness because people who normally can afford apartments can't and are forced on to the streets. We have some of the highest housing costs in the world, and if prices keep going up, homelessness and crime will get worse and worse. We need to bring prices down (or at least keep them from going up like crazy as they have been) so that we can support a range of workers, from cooks and teachers to well-educated techies and business people.
Just my two cents.