Most of the homeless in SF actually want to be on the streets.
That is perhaps the most ignorant sentence I have ever read on HN. Most homeless people don't have a choice. If they do have a choice, the fact that they choose to live on the streets likely speaks to the horrific situation they would face at their home. I can assure you that no one wants to be homeless.
Seriously. Comments like that are the reason I try to frequent HN less often. I grew up in the mission in SF, but that was when it was still a 'ghetto' that nobody wanted to set foot in (I still have a lot of friends that are paranoid about it), and as you might assume from that, my family wasn't ever that financially well off either. So seeing things like this just makes me cringe at how disconnected and insensitive this newer wave of (for the lack of a better term) 'more fortunate' people are.
Being able to simultaneously look at the absurd rent prices in SF, and then interpret the homelessness problem as a 'choice' is some serious obliviousness, if not an all-out exercise in orwellian double-think. I know it's a bit of a popular 'thing' amongst a certain subculture in the Haight (hell some of my friends have done that), but that's been around for ages, and I'd hardly call that culture a majority...
The original article pretty much got it right: people here like living in bubbles.
There are exceptions that prove the rule. But "most" is an excuse.
As Paul Graham said on a different thread yesterday, if you have a choice between two explanations and one justifies you being lazy, choose the other one.
By "offer", do you mean for free? Well, duh. What the GP most likely meant is that some people prefer to be homeless rather than having to get and hold down a job to afford a place to live.
I've watched several friends spend two or three years doing nothing but hunt for a job, and they were lucky enough to have friends with couches to crash on, enough money for interview clothes and a computer to access job ads on. You act like that's a trivial step: it's not.
Besides the challenge of actually finding a job, a minimum wage job won't cover rent in SF and certainly not with money left over for things like food, transportation or phone service. Have you seen the installation art piece about the minimum wage? It's a box with a crank on it that spits out a penny every 4.97 seconds: http://disinfo.com/2012/12/the-mininum-wage-machine/ That's what working is like to most people, except often more dangerous and demeaning.
That is perhaps the most ignorant sentence I have ever read on HN. Most homeless people don't have a choice. If they do have a choice, the fact that they choose to live on the streets likely speaks to the horrific situation they would face at their home. I can assure you that no one wants to be homeless.