We need more housing in San Francisco, plain and simple, and we especially need more affordable housing for our low-income households, seniors, teachers, formerly homeless people, veterans, and middle-income residents.
What we have found in this country, and maybe we're more aware of it now, is one problem that we've had, even in the best of times, and that is the people who are sleeping on the grates, the homeless, you might say, by choice.
I've never seen a homeless guy with a bottle of Gatorade.
The first thing that I ever made was a documentary that I shot... in downtown L.A. about a group of homeless people.
Most people, if you live in a big city, you see some form of schizophrenia every day, and it's always in the form of someone homeless. 'Look at that guy - he's crazy. He looks dangerous.' Well, he's on the streets because of mental illness. He probably had a job and a home.
Importantly, I still give money to homeless people - and all other charities.
I live near Thompson Square Park, and there are a lot of colorful people I see in the park - a lot of different personalities and homeless people - you get to know them. And every now and then, there is suddenly someone who is no longer around, and you're just like, 'Wow,' but you never really know what happened to them.
Living and working in the centre of a city, one cannot but be affected by the sight of the homeless on the streets. They are almost an expected feature of life in a big city, and it is tempting to think there is little or nothing that can, or even should, be done about it. This is not so.
It's one of these baffling things about the world we live in that there is still homelessness, and it's good that there are charities like Social Bite that go all out to help and make a difference.
All these people talking about morality should just take a walk downtown. They don't want to go downtown because instantly they see homeless people and they don't want to.
Chronically homeless means constantly homeless; it means repeatedly homeless.
For me, I grew up in a house doing charity work for homeless people, and my parents had a lot of homeless friends. We were always taught to not discriminate and not judge.
I've never seen anyone handling pans in the streets of New York, and if I did I doubt I'd give them money, unless I needed a pan. I do give money to homeless people, whether they ask or no.
I've always been a big supporter of homeless charities across the board, ever since I first moved to London.
Just to be a functioning adult in the world, we develop all of these layers of protection. When we see homeless people, we don't cry, even though homeless people probably deserve our tears - you know, it's a horrible thing.
These days many politicians are demanding change. Just like homeless people.
'Death at an Early Age' was about racial segregation in Boston. 'Illiterate America' was about grownups who can't read. 'Rachel and Her Children' was about people who were homeless in the middle of Manhattan.
Part of the problem is the connotation that some attach to the homeless: the assumption that if you're homeless, you're going to misbehave. But not all homeless people do misbehave.
Then a homeless man with a dog approached us and put his hand out. This happens to be something that I have a real problem with: homeless people with pets who approach you for food when they have a perfectly delicious dog standing right there?
I had people sleeping in front of my home. I couldn't go anywhere. It confronted me from the moment I woke up. There would be 100 people at the lot where we shot 'The Partridge Family.'
In college, when I was kind of confronted with facts and figures about inequality in America, a big impulse I had was to go hang out with homeless people around my university and hear them out and understand their situation from their perspective.
Homeless people bear God's image too.
David Cameron's government criminalised squatting in empty homes. This too was previously a civil matter. Thousands of homeless people found themselves on the wrong side of the law. Some have been imprisoned for using property abandoned by its owners.
