The mental illness is a symptom of the root problem. The inability to cope with the modern world isn't by itself a mental illness, but it keeps getting called one.
I'll even take it a step further. I think most of these mental illnesses being attributed to inability to cope with modern society aren't mental illnesses at all, and are in fact a very healthy reaction to a very unhealthy system. But maybe I'm just crazy.
Housing is a great place to start fixing it though. It doesn't matter what other issues there might be if there isn't any housing available to someone.
Where is this "$100k/person" statistic coming from? SF hates homeless people, so I kind of just don't believe that.
Your held hostage to rent where you live? Move.
That's great, I'm glad for you. Not everyone can do that. If 2/3 of your income is going to rent alone, where are you gonna get the money for moving costs? You're going to need storage and/or shipping if you're moving far enough that your rent is going to drop significantly, you'll also need first month's rent, last month's rent, deposit, setup fees for utilities, termination fees for old utilities, and maybe even termination fees for your existing contract which usually just means paying the rest of the rent for the term of your contract all at once. Then you need a new job, new community, new resources, new doctors, etc. And don't forget people who are unable to move to certain areas due to marginalization. Some areas are literally deadly to live in if you're queer or a person of color, and some areas are completely unlivable if you're disabled. What about people who are already homeless? They can't move because social services are tied to the city where they last had residence.
Earlier in the thread you asked "If it was somehow just as easy to build public housing, why wouldn’t they?". The answer to that is almost always "lobbying", or "anti-homeless sentiment". Why aren't they building public housing? Because people with beliefs like yours are pushing back against it. You're arguing that it doesn't work because it doesn't happen, and it doesn't happen because it doesn't work.
Obviously a society set up to force citizens to engage with power structures like police isn't going to mesh will with anarchist ideas. A lot of anarchists just don't do shit when they get victimized like that. The cops aren't going to find your stuff and if they do they aren't going to give it back. You suck it up, accept the loss, and ask your community for mutual aid.
But what if society wasn't like that? What if we created other avenues for empowerment besides go to the cops or deal with it? What if there was a justice system based on restorative justice and rehabilitation instead of violence and oppression? It turns out that most people are only stealing things because they can't meet their needs any other way, and most people actually don't want to just randomly hurt others if they have adequate food, shelter, services, and community. Build a society based on helping people up instead of beating them down, and appealing to your community for help no longer necessitates violence.
Anarchism is not a single static end goal to be achieved, it's a moving target that we're always chasing. Anarchists living under hierarchical systems foment anarchism by building alternative non-hierarchical systems, and implementing anarchist theory in our daily lives to try and better the material reality of ourselves and those around us. A better world is possible, and until we get there we can at least try to make things better around us.
You should talk to anarchists some time. We're (usually) nice people, and we do actually have reasons for holding the beliefs and ideals that we do. We also love infodumping about our beliefs, tactics, and opinions on theory and praxis!
Anarchism is not anti-government. Anarchism is anti-hierarchy. Government is very possible without hierarchy, which is why most anarchists see direct democracy on the level of individual communities as the only valid system of government. One of the most popular forms of anarchism right now is anarcho-communism. One of the core ideas of anarcho-communism is that people need to band together as a ~~free-association of producers~~ ~~society~~ commune. It's based on the ideas put forth by Kropotkin in The Conquest of Bread where his opening argument for anarchism is that everything that has ever been built has only been possible because of people cooperating and building off of each other.
It can sound a bit ridiculous at first because a lot of people spend their whole lives hearing nothing but anti-anarchist propaganda created by states that are inherently threatened by anarchism. If you've been told your whole life that anarchists are just weird people who hate the government then you're probably going to end up believing it. Most anarchists I've met have held a negative view of anarchism at some point in their life because of it!
You should dig around the wikipedia page for anarchism a little bit. It might not convince you, but it does a decent job of presenting anarchist ideas as anarchists would describe them and you might get an idea of what anarchists are actually fighting for.
Sure is interesting how people being unable to cope with the accelerating horrors of the modern age keeps getting called "mental illness". Turns out you don't have to care about people who don't have food, or shelter, or any other basic needs. You can just call them crazy and blame all their issues on "mental illness".
Thanks for being cool about it. You didn't seem malicious so I was trying not to be too much of an asshole. Sorry for being snarky, I was arguing with some transphobes at the time and got a bit edgy 😛
That's the 2002 vote, this post is referencing the 2021 vote. Check out that meeting's agenda for more fucked up voting records.