Local governments are clearly failing protecting their own citizens if they are having to resort to this. I blame the government and its lack of accountability.
Yep, it's a sad state of affairs that if one lives in these neighborhoods, ones choices are to put out these blocks or to have one's street become unlivable
Obviously there's a lot of potential options to solving the problem at large, not so much on a small scale. honestly, having been a resident of Seattle, I understand where the people are coming from placing the concrete blocks.
I don't think it's the right solution, but given what control residents actually have, it's understandable.
Instead of snarking about a false dichotomy, can you provide any productive suggestions for residents (i.e., not city policy makers) to improve the situation?
When your home becomes awash in dirty needles and fist fights, you can lecture the rest of us about "punching down".
It's not crazy or entitled to want your home to be safe and not an open air sewage pit.
Go actually stay in or near one of these encampments for a bit.
When my city was tired of them, the encampments moved to the mayors office as a form of protest. The mayor went from being pro-encampments to demanding extra security details.
> Vote in folks that plan to solve underlying problems, not vague "i'm gonna crack down on crime!" band-aids
Seattle did that. Repeatedly. For years. After endless failure and things getting worse people got fed up and voted the other way. Check back in 3 years to see if they’re happy with the outcome or if the pendulum will swing back.
> Vote in folks that plan to solve underlying problems, not vague "i'm gonna crack down on crime!" band-aids.
That's what the vast majority of people who run for local office try to do, the problem is that the issues like this tend to be far more complex than a soundbite can solve.
There are two problems here: legislative and enforcement. RVs park illegally overnight in neighborhoods,which leads to public health issues like how to deal with their wastewater, etc. The city fails to enforce the law, and residents respond by illegally putting up concrete barriers. Nobody wins reelection by spending lots of money and causing the city budget to increase, which would realistically be necessary in order to take enforcement seriously.
So I guess that's a long-winded way of asking: what should a problem-solver local candidate do in this situation?
there's actually more than that to it.. the state supreme court actually ruled that an RV is legally someone's home, which really limited the city's ability to do much about the situation
> Nobody wins reelection by spending lots of money and causing the city budget to increase
Is this a fact though? I'm sure things are drastically different in the US, but in the places that I have experience with, proposing to increase budget for popular things is definitely an election winner, often even if such promises goes hand in hand with explaining that taxes will be increased to cover it.
Neither of those things really help when you've got 10 RVs on your street and a random pile of human feces on the sidewalk. or there's someone passed out literally on the doorstep of your workplace.
Like...it's just not _actionable_. You're still talking on a group level rather than an individual...and even then, the mere presence of empathy doesn't do anything.
> 2) Learn about this crazy thing called "empathy", instead of punching down.
I want to call this out specifically, because Seattle's a city that's really filled to the brim with empathy and compassion. Yeah, there are definitely some people that're just concerned with their home value. There's more that really do want to see the problem solved in a way where everyone benefits.
It's really easy to berate anyone that's frustrated with the situation. It's a lot harder to come up with solutions that really will work and make them happen.
> Not the homeowners, cos heaven forfend we make them pay for anything.
I mean...it doesn't make sense to fine the homeowners that most likely had nothing to do with it at all. Fining them just turns them into victims.
I'm sure if the police were really interested in finding whodunit, there's enough ring footage around to be able to find out.
Flamewar comments like this are against the site guidelines, regardless of how right you are or feel you are. We ban accounts that post like this, so please don't post like this.
You also posted three copies of this comment. That's abusive. No more of that, please.
These comments posting the guidelines and threatening bans would probably be more effective if they were applied with a high degree of even-handedness instead of as a relatively heavy weight on the scales of debate when the wrong opinions are voiced.
If it is within the bounds of legitimate debate to repeatedly assail everyone who disagrees with you as being racist, having no empathy, and wanting to murder homeless people, as the person this "flame" was responding to has done all over this thread, then it's definitely within the bounds of legitimate debate to ask the flame warrior to put their money where their mouth is, so to speak.
Or, taken the other way, if the comment that you replied to is ban-worthy abuse, then why have you not taken action against the much greater abuser which incited this fairly mildly flame-y response?
Personally, I'd rather have a flame-free open discussion board here, and as written, the guidelines do too, but allowing unlimited abuse from the pro-enforced-narrative viewpoint on any and every topic while posting ban threats like this in almost every thread where someone questions the enforced narrative is not the way to get there.
It does help provide public evidence of top-down narrative enforcement, which I suppose is vaguely useful, since it makes it harder for people to pretend that narrative enforcement isn't happening, but the actually open discussion, without narrative enforcement, would be better and, I believe, more in keeping with the guidelines.
The guidelines as written do not require adherence to the narrative nor do they offer immunity to posts in furtherance or support of the narrative anywhere that I can find.
Please moderate the narrative enforcers like you would non-adherents. That would make this site better and would be more in keeping with the guidelines, regardless of how correct the narrative is, or how correct you feel the narrative is.
I posted more or less identical moderation comments to people on all sides of the argument in this thread. In other words, you are creating the bias you're objecting to, simply by choosing which data points to emphasize. You could have picked an opposite one to reply to and made exactly the opposite claim with as much justification.
It's extremely common for people to feel like the mods are against their side, when seeing a moderation comment they don't like.
I was being sarcastic not abusive. There is a big difference. Let me also point out that this whole page is political and therefore should not be allowed according to the guidelines. It can be argued of course that the "solution" presented in the article is novel enough to warrant an exception. But a counter argument is that the solution is just a variation on what we have seen before when cities selectively fail to uphold the law and citizens try other solutions to protect their neighbourhood and families. This is a story we have seen many times before and we will see many more variations of in the future. With the same old predictable comments repeating themselves on HN. So is this whole page really novel enough to not be in violation of the guidelines? I agree with the guidelines but they have no credibility if not enforced consistently.
Your comment was abusive because it crossed into personal attack as well as breaking other site guidelines. Plus it's particularly abusive to post the same provocation three times. You shouldn't be copy-pasting comments to begin with, and you were obviously stoking a flamewar in this case.
"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon."
What in your opinion is evidence of some interesting new phenomenon on this page? I am honestly courious because I don't see it. As I commented above the subject discussed on this page is nothing now.
I didn't look closely at the article, but I don't recall a discussion of that particular phenomenon ('eco-blocks' or whatever placed by businesses on city streets) on HN before.
Some commenters seem to think that if an article is provocative then that justifies whatever they feel like posting to the thread. That's extremely far from the case!
It is true that the petty crime committed in this case is novel (eco-blocks). But the political context and arguments most certainly aren't. I think it is fair to say that without the controversial political context nobody would care about "eco-blocks" or any other petty crimes. For example, let's say that the citizens tomorrow decided to throw paint at the minivans instead. That would be a novelty. But the ensuring political discussion, the real meat of the comments, would pretty much be the same. So yes the petty crime is technically novel. But the real story (NIMBYs and the homelessness problems), the real meat of the discussion, is not novel at all.
Those are good points! but at this point we're talking about whether the refs called a particular ball correctly (i.e. whether the mods interpreted the rules correctly in the case of one article). That's a different question than what the rules are, and whether it's ok to break them (it's not). Certainly the refs making a bad call doesn't give anyone a pass to break unrelated rules or go on a rampage.
There's even a rule designed specifically to dampen such reactions in such cases: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
i agree we gotta go back to enforcing laws. problem is then ppl just move they RVs.
like, we can't rly make them stop unless we take they RV, now we got 1 more homeless. or we could take them to prison, now we got 1 more prisoner. none of this fixes the problem bc it's rly hard to punish ppl who got nothing to lose.
Well, if they have to keep moving their RVs, then at least there'd be a good incentive to get them and keep them running. Talk about incentives - perhaps prioritizing enforcement of RVs with drugs, trash, and sewer issues first would do a world of good. "They won't hassle you if you keep to yourself and don't leak fluids and leave trash on the street".
These guys do have something to lose - their RV and all their stuff in it. You can't ask them to magically with money they don't have, but you can effect behavior and priorities.
Now if you lose your RV and start squatting in a park, get warned for trespass and then stay anyway, while doing drugs in the open and shoplifting, etc. I'd love to see an escalation that eventually lands you in jail (not prison) and a 1/2 way house and treatment.
Rules need to be enforced. They can and should be enforced extremely compassionately and incrementally. But they need to be enforced.
And if they are not, this is a perfect example of what happens. The city has now de-facto abdicated a lot of it's authority and here we go, back to vigilance committees and self-help of 150 years ago. As shown, the self-help mechanisms lead to sub-optimal solutions for everyone. Now no one can park on those streets at all and the homeless are still homeless. Society just isn't going to just sit back and let shit-heads ruin it for everyone because the current city governance is too ineffective to take care of business in an optimal way.
> perhaps prioritizing enforcement of RVs with drugs, trash, and sewer issues first would do a world of good. "They won't hassle you if you keep to yourself and don't leak fluids and leave trash on the street".
That does generally seem to be the case. I live in one of the neighborhoods the article is about. There are a couple of RV residents nearby that have been in the same spot for years, keep to themselves, and don't seem to leave much trash around. The city and neighbors seem content to leave them as-is.
> Governments should be protecting their citizens from this fate.
This framing does a disservice to the homeless because it takes away any of their agency. What about the people who choose to live this way? Or does the government take that choice away from them too?
The thing is it only takes one person to in stall the blocks. There might be 100 people on the block who are ok with the RVs, but if one person isn't the blocks show up.
The problem in many cases is that it's hard to prove who actually owns the blocks. Who do you fine when you don't know who put them there? They're so cheap to setup that they can easily be replaced if they're removed.
It's super simple. Get the police to investigate - go to the nearby business owners and ask them if they placed them or know who did, and remind them that lying to the police is a crime much worse than placing the blocks.
Do they have the resources to spend all that effort on what is basically littering? I also don't see that strategy working unless there's some sort of loophole that cancels out the 5th amendment. If cops try to pull that shit it's much easier to just have a blanket policy of not talking to them.
You have the right to remain silent but the police can investigate you deeper if you dont answer questions. Also - placing concrete blocks on the road is not littering - its creating a potentially dangerous situation for drivers in the area.
It seems unlikely that small business owners and homeowners actually rented serious trucks to move these into place themselves (or made them on the spot) , I would expect with a little asking around you could find someone enterprising who picks up chunks of concrete (aka 'urbanite') and tosses them into molds with additional concrete and delivers them for a price.
You don't even have to do that. It takes your city council 15 minutes to pass a nuisance abatement ordinance that says that if there are blocks in front of your business, it's your job to get rid of them, just like it would be your job to clean graffitti off of your building even if you weren't the one who'd painted it.
They can as easily fine a business for not removing the blocks as for placing them, and it's not like there's a question about where the blocks actually are.
It's more a matter of how far you're willing to go.
If the blocks are on the street not sure such a law would be legal - the city is 100% responsible for the street, and placing the burden on business owners without some kind of evidence they did it probably wouldn’t be legal.
Seattle PD doesn't even have enough resources to respond to all 911 calls right now, so it would be very hard to justify spending additional resources tracking down who place eco blocks.
Would you please stop posting flamewar comments to HN? This is not ok.
The comments you've been replying to are also bad, but what you've posted (in more than one case) is a noticeable step downward into flamewar. That's not cool.
In Seattle you can because the government has forced the police into survival mode. They naturally give a lot more leeway to people who invest in society than people squatting on public property without sewage access.
Can you expand on what you mean by "forced the police into survival mode?"
SPD is pretty ripe with all sorts of issues (e.g., they thought it was a good idea to teargas capital hill for days on end). They've kind of created a hostile relationship with their community.
The city needs to either enforce laws against both parking and eco blocks or neither. They haven’t been enforcing parking rules so citizens took it upon themselves. I don’t think anyone is happy with this outcome, but it is entirely predictable.
If the cities had the wherewithal to give the RVs a place to go, they'd already have the state of mind to have prevented so many people being forced to live out of RVs in the first place.
This is a problem of negligence and uncaring and the only "solution" those in charge seem to want to offer is to force the homeless into jails, to be used as slave labor.
If they went to cars, they'd have to spend a lot of time and money moving them around. And a car that will move costs a lot more than a chunk of concrete. And the car has to be registered.
According to the article, the city is set up to tow cars, but not set up to move the concrete blocks. The blocks are actually probably easier to move than the cars, if you set up a system for doing it. A flatbed with a crane could move those blocks out in time comparable to hitching up a car for towing, and carry more than one at a time.
On edit: cars would probably get vandalized, too. I am not saying I support that, but it makes rotating cars even more impractical.
Trailer parks are fine when it's normal trailers owned by people who have some basic respect for themselves and the people and land around them.
This isn't about that kind of RV -- this is about drug-den RVs full of people who are whacked out on drugs, are a danger to everyone around them, and cover the area around them in needles and feces.
Hey, you're pretty close to a breakthrough here. The real question is why American cities provide little free or near-free storage for private property, if and only if that private property is in the form of cars.
> Make drivers bear the full cost of their habits.
I don’t think public transit riders should be forced to pay the full price of their habit. Nor do I think cities shouldn’t charge taxes and spend the revenue on both roads and yes even curb side parking.
It’s quite reasonable for cities to fund numerous modes of transit.
Chicago finally did that couple years back, parking meters in the loop are making minimum wage.
It's still crazy to me that I can park a block away from the world trade center for $0 (there's usually open spots around the federal reserve on the weekend), when the real estate there goes for $1500+ per sq ft
If I have business in lower Manhattan on a Sunday afternoon, why is it more efficient to have me spend 10x the money and 5x the time to use public transportation than to just drive? Why spend the money on rule enforcement?
You’d probably expend more money having cops pointlessly drive around writing tickets for meter.
So this actually ends up being net benefit for the businesses in the area - having paid meters means there's actual turnover in the cars parked.
Before the meter change in Chicago, it would be next to impossible to find a parking spot in the loop - people were essentially using street parking as free week-at-a-time car storage. At $8/hr or whatever they run now, you can actually find open spots when you need them.
It's not "free", the property owners pay property taxes. The majority of roads inside cities in the US are paid for and maintained with property taxes.
Are you suggesting that curbside parking should be available only to property owners? In what proportion?
As I recently published at [1], my city of Berkeley does not raise anywhere near enough money from property taxes to pave the city streets. If you think the majority of roads in the United States are paved with property tax revenues, I'd like to see your math.
An analysis that starts with "most of the country" and then proceeds to "except California" is immediately suspect. In any case I'm still not seeing any concrete claims. I know that property tax payers believe they pay for this, but the question is: do they?
Where I live, cities have home rule responsibility including local highway maintenance. The city’s general fund is primarily funded by property taxes, followed by a prorata share of sales tax and various fees.
Suburban and rural towns are a little different - the state maintains state roads and US Highways, mostly with income, sales and excise tax. Counties maintain county roads, mostly with property and sales tax.
Given California’s strange relationship with property tax and the inherent inequality associated with it, it’s a different animal.
All of the things in your first paragraph are true of my city, but they don't imply that my city funds road maintenance in a steady state (it does not, in fact).
What's missing in your analysis is that a large fraction of American roads have simply never been maintained. They were laid down initially, often paid for by developer fees, and never touched again. So, your analysis still leaves the question unanswered.
You stated it was free. I stated it wasn't. Not sure how you twisted my statement to say that its use should be restricted only to property owners. I also said "the roads inside cities", which excludes county roads, state highways, and interstates. But people do not typically park on those.
It's telling that a city in California doesn't have enough property taxes to pay for their roads. It's almost like Prop 13 causes problems.
The people parking these RVs aren't following the rules, why should the people they're dumping their sewage and trash onto follow them?
It's really frustrating to be expected to follow the laws when the homeless aren't. I get cited for parking an RV in my own driveway because it is unsightly. 2 blocks away there is a full blown homeless encampment.
> The people parking these RVs aren't following the rules, why should the people they're dumping their sewage and trash onto follow them?
If you embrace only a purely strategic point of view, sure, choose from the palatable tools available to achieve your ends.
But most people have some kind of moral and ethical code, imperfect as it may be.
The golden rule is nearly universal across various moral belief systems.
Be careful: if you only consider the purely strategic point of view you may find yourself as the primary casualty. Living without a moral code is perhaps the most self-defeating decision you can make.
The alternative is simply that it's ethical to not follow laws against someone who isn't following laws, in proportion at the very least. Direct self defense is the simplest example, this is another - both are placing illegal objects in the parking area...
Understood. The ideas you mention overlap considerably with the notion of the moral sphere as explained by Robert Kane at the University of Texas at Austin. His books and audiobooks are very accessible and well done.
To summarize, when acting within the moral sphere (which Kane defines as the situation where people are acting in a way that respects other people's rights), we should act to maintain it.
But when it breaks down, we do the best we can to restore it, which might mean acting less ideally toward the people causing breakdown.
>But most people have some kind of moral and ethical code, imperfect as it may be. The golden rule is nearly universal across various moral belief systems.
I find that the people who espouse these views are usually insulated from the effects of them. Have you ever had a homeless camp near your residence? How close? How would you feel about your wife/daughter/mother being home alone near a homeless camp?
I'd love to be charitable and kind, but people have to protect themselves as well. Bringing a bunch of mentally ill drug users near your residence is a recipe for disaster. It should not be seen as some moral issue that we need to solve individually--the government and police should be able to resolve this on their own, especially considering the funding pumping into law enforcement and homeless funds. I think the big problem is we just keep creating more unaccountable programs and services instead of just giving people an SRO and a social worker. We're doing the dumbest possible thing because everyone wants to get a cut. Every other developed country has basically solved this--we could just copy a working model instead of dumping more and more money into hare-brained ideas every year that never work.
> Have you ever had a homeless camp near your residence? How close? How would you feel about your wife/daughter/mother being home alone near a homeless camp?
About my most recent experience in the East Bay (near San Francisco)... I lived (a) about 0.5 miles from a homeless person who lived in a truck; (b) about 1 mile from an industrial area with dozens of parked campers, (c) about 1.5 miles from a small tent encampment (maybe 10? tents), (d) and about 2 miles from a larger one (maybe 20?). In this experience, I did not personally feel threatened, nor did I hear accounts of them being violent or particularly troublesome.
But I get your point. I have been close to camps where I feel unsafe, and I would not recommend spending time nearby.
>>But most people have some kind of moral and ethical code, imperfect as it may be. The golden rule is nearly universal across various moral belief systems.
> I find that the people who espouse these views are usually insulated from the effects of them.
Would you give an example or two from your experience?
This is crazy but cities really are putting neighborhood residents and businesses in a position where they can either break the law by taking enforcement into their own hands with actions like this or let their neighborhoods descend into anarchy.
There are descent people that are pushed into homelessness, but one camper can turn to a dozen in less than a week and only one of them has to start threatening to hurt your family, breaking into vehicles or set a fire to turn a benign situation into one that can threaten your life or livelihood.
Speaking from personal experience, we turned a blind eye to a middle aged man living out of his car next to our garage for a few months. Then we woke up one night to find the van had erupted into a two story fireball that almost burned down our entire block.
I go out and talk to people now when they start forming an encampment in our neighborhood. Its incredibly difficult work and I have never had both more and less sympathy for their situations and the real threats encampments pose.
This is a complex issue but it is an issue that is the city's responsibility to address. Shame on them for putting people on both sides of this issue in impossible positions.
New York figured this out in 1979. Cities have a constitutional obligation to build shelters for everyone that needs them. They did.
New York in the 80s also got the other part of the puzzle: they enforced the laws. The people who are breaking the law - all of them, not just the politically convenient ones to go after - need to be fined and/or arrested.
Those blocks will come down really quickly if business owners started getting fined for putting them up and van-dwellers started finding their houses getting towed. However, the city likely can't do one without the other.
A city full of security cameras can't find out who placed a block? The city can always remove one round and wait to catch someone putting up another one.
They can make permits required to place eco blocks on city streets then inform every cement company and trucking company that failure to get a permit will result in a $10,000 fine and impounding of the delivery vehicle for 14 days at the expense of the trucks owner. Then offer citizens $5000 for proof of companies dropping these blocks off kind of like how they pay citizens part of the fine for recording vehicles idling in New York. There definitely is a way but not sure there is the will to do it.
When cities aren't enforcing public camping, illegal parking, dumping trash in public places, property crimes, or openly using hard drugs--what on earth makes you think they'd prioritize going after someone anonymously leaving a concrete block to prevent junkies camping there? I guarantee the cops won't put any resources into this. At most they remove the blocks and then it starts all over again. San Francisco had the same issue only it was with boulders, not eco-blocks.
Yes you can. I used to be a homeowner. Even if the area past the sidewalk wasn’t my property, I was expected to keep it reasonably maintained.
My suggestion:
If debris was left in front of my property irrespective of whether it was within my property or not, I’d get a notice to rectify. If I didn’t within a reasonable time frame, the city would rectify it for me and send me the bill. Failure to pay the bill within six months would simply result in it being folded into the property taxes. Consequences for not paying taxes don’t need explanation at this point. Very effective strategy. Not my fault someone dumped something in front of the house, but how to track who did it? Easier to shift it onto the property owner.
In my case I would simply put up security cameras that are clear enough to pick up license plates. The city would be only too happy to pass on the bill to the vehicle owner of whoever dropped off the crap.
Police and DAs seem to be abusing this idea. Both of these things should matter when writing laws, but not when enforcing them. We basically take selective enforcement of the law as a given these days, and it turns out that can cause a lot of social problems.
A big part of the problem in California is that county jails are releasing "non-violent" criminals (and often violent criminals as well) almost immediately due to COVID protocols. This is why property crime is going off the charts... there are no consequences for stealing.
I see your point, but the option space is not limited to two extremes. For example, getting press coverage is a viable third option as well.
I'll bet there are a broader range of options available worth considering. What about trying the public sanitation angle? Does that open up some options?
> There are descent people that are pushed into homelessness, but one camper can turn to a dozen in less than a week and only one of them has to start threatening to hurt your family, breaking into vehicles or set a fire to turn a benign situation into one that can threaten your life or livelihood.
> Speaking from personal experience, we turned a blind eye to a middle aged man living out of his car next to our garage for a few months. Then we woke up one night to find the van had erupted into a two story fireball that almost burned down our entire block.
This reads like an inflammatory article. Nothing but anecdotal reports of sample of one.
It's a great quote. It's meaningless when your wife gets assaulted by some drugged out homeless person in a place that she should be safe in. Or when you literally get harassed just walking downtown.
Yeah, if you want a system with private property then it needs men with guns who can kick peoples' doors down. And if you want that system to not be utterly horrible there's gonna be taxes that are enforced by men with guns kicking your doors down. I didn't introduce the men with guns here, that came with the private property. You can't have one without the other.
> some article obfuscating everything with relative instead of absolute numbers
Lived in Seattle for seven years and will return in another three. Encountered many homeless people in that time. Volunteered for the Tax Amazon project to raise funds for socialized housing. Donated a chunk of my salary to Plymouth Housing, a regional housing-first charity. Developed a deep disdain for other privileged techies who were utterly unwilling to engage with the externalities caused by them moving to the city.
Probably not, because housing developments cost hundreds of millions of dollars and individual voluntary charitable donations are not a good vehicle for tackling this problem. Fortunately with taxation and collective action this problem is tractable, but you don't believe in that approach either. You're just here to snipe. In another comment you ask someone how many homeless people they've invited into their yard. You're just being mad online. What a pathetic waste of time.
Not at all. I am just pointing out that there is a lot of virtue signalling going on and very little problem solving. Don’t you agree that inviting a single homeless person into your home or backyard will actually solve a real problem? Imagine if 30k people decided to do that? It would take 30k homeless people off the street! Just like that. So why don’t you go ahead and do that? Show leadership and inspire others? Be a hero!
Yep you are absolutely right. People who spend money on things that doesn’t work but enables them to virtue signal is exactly what virtue signalling is. I gave you a real solution to the problem you can actually do (invite a homeless into your home/backyard) but you obviously don’t want to do it. Even though it would actually help a homeless person. Why not? Too smelly for you? Surely giving them access to a shower can fix that?
But it... does work? You know you don't have to personally completely solve a societal issue in order for your small individual contribution to the solution of that societal issue be worthwhile, right? Geez, this reminds me of how I used to think when I was a literal child. Just completely ignorant of the concept of universalization and collective action.
> You are not a serious person and bring nothing of value with you.
Whoa - you can't post like that to HN, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are.
You posted flamewar comments in other parts of this thread and have now crossed into personal attack. That's seriously not ok and we ban accounts that do this.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it. As a bonus, it will make your arguments more convincing because then you won't be discrediting them with flamebait and swipes.
Pointing the finger at others is not a good place to start with this. You broke the site guidelines egregiously and repeatedly, regardless of what other people did. Please fix this first, and then if you have a point or a question about moderation, I'd be happy to address it further.
It's easy enough to see that we moderate comments that break the site guidelines whether they agree with any particular view or not (your side, the opposing side, or otherwise). There were several examples in this thread alone.
the phrase "virtue signalling" is just "asshole signalling".
if you want to reach anyone vaguely on the left end of the political spectrum they're not going to listen to much after you drop that phrase. but you will score point with people who already agree with you.
which is a whole lot like the very thing that you're trying to criticize.
If my family gets harassed or threatened by a person then it is a problem whether the person is homeless or not. It has nothing to do with hating homeless people.
The law, in its majestic equality, also forbids rich and poor alike to aggressively demand cash, discard needles at random, and threaten violence at everyone who passes by.
There's a difference between sleeping under a bridge, and driving your 6 ton vehicle to the most valuable land in the world, depriving everyone else from using that space, and dumping your garbage all over it.
The land is so valuable, the city is giving it away to everyone with a hunk of metal that happens to have four rubber wheels. And I'm not even joking, cities of course do that all in the name of public parking no matter the opportunity cost. I guess unless the undesirables park on it, then concrete blocks will also do (everything but housing will do, presumably!).
> cities of course do that all in the name of public parking no matter the opportunity cost
Cities do not give away public parking. Either you have to pay for it (metered parking), it's provided "free" to customers only (i.e. paid for by the profit margin on goods and services), or it's only available to people who live in an area (i.e. those people paid property tax, either as owners or renters).
> everything but housing will do, presumably
Housing doesn't solve rampant drug addiction, theft, mental illness, and laziness. The article in the OP literally cites trash accumulating, rats running rampant, and vehicle fires spontaneously occurring. That is not the environment that a rational person occupies.
If you think any of these things can pay for the equivalent square feet housing cost, I have a bridge to sell you. Parking is a fantastically inefficient use of space and obviously only remains when propped up artificially.
I guess you just lack imagination and or empathy. That's one way to look at it but it so far has a zero success track record at solving these problems.
Those square feet are basically worthless without the city around them. So yeah, actually I think they probably could pay for the square footage they take up.
Even in Shanghai and Shenzhen, which have much higher density than NYC and the best public transit system in the world, people still use cars and like having parking space.
The product you're selling - public transit and high density walkable neighborhoods - isn't very appealing to most people. Public transit is slow, dirty, and dangerous. Neighborhoods without enough parking just force people to Uber everywhere or take public transit, raising the cost of living and wasting people's time. Smaller, hyperlocal grocery stores have inferior selection, higher prices, and worse quality than places like Costco.
And these aren't problems you can fix with more funding. Public transit is slow because NIMBYs block trains from running at high speed in most neighborhoods. It's dirty and dangerous because there is no political will to screen riders or to arrest vagrants. Smaller grocery stores suffer from inferior economies of scale, so they never will compete with places like Costco in price.
The price of basic goods like bananas in a bodega type store is triple what it would be at Costco. $1.29-1.99/lb for bananas vs. $0.50-0.70/lb at Costco. And the Costco bananas will be bigger and in better condition than the ones at the bodega. Make the comparison with baked goods like muffins or croissants and it's no contest.
> While ecology blocks are typically made with excess concrete and cost around $20 each
Wow, when Toronto put up concrete blocks (wtf is “ecology” in the name), they spent $100k for about 100 blocks to be bought and placed in front of various unregulated marijuana dispensaries. Then another $250k in bureaucratic/engineering/legal expenses.
Someone made a killing on that deal if the blocks they used look anything like the ones in the article. Blocks similar to those in the article (2 ft tall, 2 ft wide, 3 ft long) can be bought for $50. Add a foot of length to that and they are $75.
Someone there spent $1000/block and since those appear to be about 4 feet long they would likely cost about $100 each so the labor cost to install each block plus profit to the installer eats up $900. Probably a kickback in there somewhere.
Of course with lawyers involved there was probably a round of blowjobs to buy for the team and the final cost of that would depend on which corner they visited for that service.
Well if it was $100k to purchase and place them, then you're paying $1000 for the block itself, and for each one to be transported and placed. Not saying it wasn't grift, but it's not as simple as $1000 - $75 = $925 in the bank.
Remember that $925 is a per block rate. There is no way that transport, delivery, and installation is gonna eat up $900 per block. They will be transported on floats that can handle multiple blocks. A single block weighs approximately a ton so a loaded float can haul up to a couple dozen at a time. It will have the equipment to unload and place the blocks on the trailer so if you bought 100 blocks you have at most 5 loads. It takes one man less than 5 minutes to unload and place a block and if he has a swamper it is less time than that since the swamper can manage grabbing the blocks or setting them, either one. Your labor and fuel costs are gonna be low too since these will be procured locally. Any way you slice it you don't get to $900/block unless someone really pads the invoice. It was a giant rip-off from what I see.
Definitely. Since another level of government was paying (though a common set of tax payers...), there seemed to be a lot of running the clock. The war on drugs must not have budgetary limits!
While creative, the entire strategy was ineffective: within hours the blocks would be removed, operations would resume and then the city would do it again. Textbook insanity.
This will eat up part of it for sure though the blocks, by design, are meant to be laid end to end and stacked. You can clearly see the notch in the bottom of the block in the photo and the triangular ridge on the top nests into that ridge so that you can build walls of any height by overlapping these blocks as you add the next layer to tie them together. Seems like a simple engineer's signature is all that would be required for that if that was even necessary. Highly debatable and definitely part of the invoice padding if that's how it worked.
The barriers in the article photograph are DOT certified. They are routinely used to channel traffic flow on sections of highway under construction, to contain building materials like crushed stone for road base, sand, etc. When the project is completed they either go into storage for the next stretch of highway or they are sold as surplus.
The barriers in the three photos that show them are called bin blocks, and not DOT approved. Traffic approved barriers are required to have a deflection mechanism (that is why the common jersey barriers and K-rails you see have angled faces) or shock absorption mechanism. You can't have a flat face that doesn't move.
There are also composition requirements. Bin blocks are just made from remnant materials.
Thank you for this information. I did not know that, obviously. I have seen bin blocks and barriers for sale in auctions of highway-related materials and bin blocks alongside highways and assumed that they must be DOT approved.
No, because you see that would reduce property values. The line is only supposed to go up. You can't create affordable housing, or allow multifamily housing, or do anything that would stop the people who own homes there from having their property value raise 50k every 6 months.
But you also can't have homeless people around, that would be unsafe. Also they still expect people to live there and do service jobs for them, even though there is no place affordable to live.
Seattle heavily restricts development of housing, from zoning to committees that can veto buildings for the wrong facade to regulations that drive up expense like mandatory unit size and parking.
You’re witnessing the failure of “feel good” government regulation.
Its sad to imagine that people who turned to live in RVs probably aren't your average imagined homeless guy, who can't hold up any kind of job, but rather lower to middle class people who work a job but can't afford to live in an apartment in the area anymore.
lol i've heard a few ppl pitching a "city for the homeless". build a government subsidized city in the most cheap ass land we can find in the country. away from everything else. free housing free food, nothing fancy. have them do jobs processing food or building weapons or whatever else the government needs. there's cops everywhere, you step out of line there's somebody there to taze your ass. imports and exports is controlled so they can't relapse on drugs.
oh wait, we got something like that... prison. it does a shit job at fixing homeless ppl.
We don't have homeless people sleeping and shitting on sidewalks in Detroit. They sleep in 'bandos. See? More houses - less visible homeless (I'm sure the cold weather helps a bit too).
i really don't give a shit. like i know that's not a nice thing to say and it's not what i'm supposed to say but it's how i feel by this point. cities have been so destroyed and filled with literal shit and crime gone up and my friends get assaulted that they used up all their sympathy they got from us. to start force junkies into rehab and go back to institutionalizing ppl who are too crazy to survive.
i remember when i was younger ppl would carry food in their cars and hand it out to homeless with hungry signs. some of them would take it and be grateful and that was good. some of them would only want money (obv what that would be for) and so we move on. but it was good we could hand out some food. now most ppl i know aren't comfortable doing that any more. bc a bunch of them have been attacked when they wouldn't give cash. most of them not bad, but having a guy trying to pull open the door or grabbing the car is scary for most of us and really fucking scary for somebody like a small woman. so it's not that people don't still have sympathy for the honest guy down on his luck but there's too many of the bad ones now.
the problem is look at low income housing, people will tell you there's not enough. "oh just build more". but low income housing these days is really fucking bad. i have friends who are landlords and tried running low income housing and its awful how bad it gets torn up, how hard it is to get people to pay with rent and eviction moritoriums. and it only gets worse.
it cost more for them to run low income housing than blue-collar housing that's still not fancy but has better tenants. there's so much damage and crime around the low-income. remember austin bought that hotel for a homeless shelter and it got trashed to shit in like 2 weeks? same kinda problem.
so it ain't a simple problem to fix. and the moritoriums and rent control that cities keep adding only makes more people leave the low income housing business.
but all that aside me and a whole bunch of other people are just done. and if the homeless don't leave other people will, look at these cities rn. and once all the rich people are gone and all the middle class people are gone then they're really gonna be in trouble.
tbh our problem is we can't punish people who got nothing so laws don't mean nothing to them. like what do u even do to a person shitting in a downtown street? arrest them? put them where? now u spend money keeping them in jail and they will get out back on the street. and relapse rates out of rehab are shit specially since a lot of those people end up there from a court order so that ain't any kind of solution here.
^ This right here is the fundamental problem in American politics. Because what you are missing is that society is like a house. If you don't maintain your house, eventually the roof caves in. There are people who believe that they can starve government - cut taxes back to nothing, better if we get rid of all the bureaucrats, better if Congress / state legislatures are stuck not able to do anything, who cares if I vote.
That's the equivalent of letting the house fall down around you. Plenty of voters will say they don't care - they think they can somehow protect themselves. But they don't get that sooner or later, chaos reigns and it comes for all of us. Homelessness and depravity like we see in Seattle isn't the root disease - it's a symptom of the disease.
explain why the places with the worst homeless is the same ones with high taxes and liberal policies then. i used to give a shit but years of work on this problem and a lot of cities only made it worse.
literally all the progressives can come up with for a solution is "give more shit away free" when we used to give away less and didn't have the same problem. whatever the disease is that's not treating it.
Dude. “Progressives” is a big span of people and ideas. “Give more shit away for free” is not a policy position and you know it. Do I like things like land grants (an actual progressive policy idea)? No, personally I’m skeptical. What we do need to be looking at though is things like the cost of health care, the cost of child care, access to education (including cost of student loans) that push people into economic hardship and ultimately into homelessness. Likewise - regardless of politics - we all recognize that we are in an enormous mental health crisis as a nation. You work on these root causes and work your way back into solving homelessness. None of that involved “giving away shit for free” and none of it happens overnight.
That said - maybe you should look at places like Houston, which is hardly a liberal hotbed but I understand has improved their homeless problem by… giving away free housing.
How many homeless people have you invited into your home? Or invited to live in your back yard? Why don’t you show us all how to do it? Be an inspiration or whatever?
I’m absolutely working to improve the housing situation and reduce the potential for homelessness in my area. So yes, I am backing up what I’m saying with action.
Edit: how many times mbrodersen are you going to post the same sarcastic response to messages you don’t like?
> Seattle has turned into a shithole akin to San Francisco and other west coast cities with Democrat mayors and single-party strangleholds.
Let's extend this (sneakily) implied causal model to all geographic areas with an "X" party mayor (or county commissioner or sheriff or whatever) and single-party strangleholds. Let's look at rural areas, say, in the southern states. Let's talk about pervasive poverty, lack of education, and drug abuse there.
We can play the blame game. How about this: let's talk about potential solutions and their associated costs?
P.S. I don't dispute that downtown SF is shocking, disgusting, and _more importantly_ tragic for the people living there. I care relatively little about the cosmetic aspect. I care tremendously about finding ways that every human being can reach their maximum potential, without impinging on the rights of other people.
P.P.S. Yes, this stated moral philosophy is somewhat underspecified, but I'm trying to leave open a wide space for reasonable people to agree. We can and should debate the margins, but I think there is considerable consensus in terms of public opinion about what is just, ASSUMING that people share a common set of facts and all inform themselves on a particular situation and dynamic (by which I mean interconnected causes and effects).
NIMBY-ism is at it's worst, not when people don't want homeless people in their back yards, but when people actively work against public policy that would affect their back yard, and improve the lives of homeless people.
Overdose Prevention Centers would absolutely be something I would allow in my backyard. I think that probably hits enough of your criteria to qualify as what you're accusing me of hypocrisy for.
I would also welcome removing roads where I live in favor of public transit lines. I would also welcome people to put in low-income housing where I live.
By saying those people are struggling, I didn't say I support what they're doing. I think it is a complicated issue and I don't claim to know what the solution is.
But it’s just that: a fantasy, born from ignorance.
These are mobile drug dens often inhabited by people with long criminal records who throw trash all over the area — not middle class people down on their luck.
I live in one of areas the article is talking about. I can literally see the eco blocks around Fremont Brewing from my house.
It's complicated. You're right that many homeless people are just people down on their luck doing their best to get by. Many of them aren't causing anyone any problems. From what I understand, most of these homeless people get by doing things like couch surfing and aren't very visible.
In this particular corner of the city, most of the people living in these RVs are not in great shape. Most are drug addicts, or mentally ill, or both. There is a halo of crime that surrounds these encampments. In the past couple of years, I've seen:
* Multiple cars broken into.
* A drive-by shooting of one of the RVs right by my house.
* That same RV's owner almost certainly selling drugs from her RV for years.
* A woman, completely topless, staggering in the middle of the street screaming obscenities at no one.
* Many needles on the ground.
* People urinating on our garage.
* Someone taking a shit next to our garage.
* My neighbor's car was broken into and the urn containing his father's ashes was stolen. When he found the guy who broke into it at a nearby encampment and tried to get it back, he was attacked with a knife.
* Rumors of prostitution and hep-C outbreaks in one of the encampments.
* A large man beating the shit out of a woman in broad daylight.
* Multiple shootings in other RVs and nearby homeless shelters.
* One guy, clearly suffering from schizophrenia, who sits on the sidewalk and screams at no one for hours and hours.
* Someone climbed our fence and was shambling around our backyard until a neighbor showed up and scared them off.
* Package theft, obviously. Constantly.
* Many many screaming matches and other domestic disputes.
* Someone sitting on portable toilet seat in the middle of the street, taking a shit in the middle of the day.
* Piles of trash, human waste, buckets of piss, bags of shit, etc. Because when you don't have property, that also means you don't have trash pick-up or sewer services.
* Someone throwing rocks at someone's car and at people in their backyard.
* A woman walked up onto our porch and stole the lightbulb right out of our porch light. (I've heard they use incandescent bulbs to make some kind of drug paraphernalia?)
* One guy runs what he calls the "homeless recording studio". He has a venue-sized PA system in his RV that he cranks up to full concert volume and plays the radio. Then he plays his drum kit on top of that. With the doors open, at all hours of the day and night.
In fact, I literally just got back from walking out to see what a large police response was about after seeing several cop cars circling. I don't know the details, but an officer said someone in an RV was refusing to come out.
I have a lot of sympathy for people suffering misfortune and I think almost all of these people mostly need help and support. I don't want them to be punished. But I don't want to keep dealing with the kind of stuff they are doing either.
(You may be wondering why we don't call the cops about this. We do. If we're lucky, they come. When they do, it's hours later and too late to do anything about it.)
I live on one of the Seattle streets mentioned in the article where there was a cluster of RVs, they were forced to move, and now there are ecoblocks.
The RVs arrived a little over six years ago after they were forced to move from a lot underneath a nearby overpass. There were around a dozen vehicles and some tents.
There was a lot of violent crime, including several shootings toward the end of the encampment.
There was a lot of trash and sewage. When they were moved the city hauled away several tons of trash and "shopping bag toilets".
There was a lot of obvious mental health problems and the deep fear and desperation that goes along with it. I've worked in enough urban service jobs to recognize people who don't have access to the mental health support they need.
There were single people, couples, and two families with children. The people I spoke with are mostly from Seattle and a few grew up in this neighborhood. They are homeless but not from some far away place. This is their neighborhood. They stay here because they know people and because they can sometimes find work here.
We failed as a city to provide a safety net when these people fell. My street is more safe and has less trash and it's true that I like it but to get that we didn't solve a single problem. We just moved it along.
Thank you for stating all of the above. I speak to a lot of people in my area who say "we don't want to become Seattle" but without understanding or seeking to understand how things in Seattle came to be. I think you hint at this above - it wasn't about Seattle providing handouts to "attract" homelessness (like I hear many conservative types arguing), rather it was a series of unfortunate events - housing got crazy expensive, there wasn't enough mental health and similar resources, incomes and opportunities don't align with expenses (health care being a major one!) and before you know it totally normal people are slipping through the cracks all over the place.
Let them camp in front of the mayor, governor, and state senators houses. They conveniently always seems to allow camping in the lower socio-economic areas and protect the richer ones.
Homeless advocates say it is not fair that the city expects vehicle dwellers to obey parking laws..
It does not matter if it's to run errands or improvised RV housing, why should some obey the parking laws and others are allowed not to? The defeats the point of having parking spaces. Parking spaces were never intended to be dwellings. This seems really unfair. It's a difficult problem...everyone says that housing affordability/availability is the answer yet nothing get done.
This isn't a problem Seattle can solve on its own -- whether resident, business owner, police, mayor, or otherwise. Hyperfocusing on RV vs concrete blocks is missing the forest for the trees. This is the new face of urban America, where rampant wealth inequality makes it so that many people have no viable alternative to living on the streets. Instead of depression-era tenements, we have luxury apartments next to tent cities. There is a lot more money these days, but it's so concentrated in the hands of so few that everyone else is left fighting over scraps. Seattle is dying. San Francisco is dying. Portland is dying. All victims of their own successes, that perfect storm of a gilded, top-heavy society crushing those beneath them, combined with public policy that has turned a blind eye to decreasing real purchasing power for decades, all veneered over by a thin layer of new money and bravado.
Blame drugs, blame political opponents, blame the government, blame developers, blame tech bros, blame whatever or whoever you want... but at the end of the day, still no solution is in sight. There is no widespread push for affordable housing or a pathway out of poverty, no real long-term care for people fighting addictions or mental illness. There is only the relentless push for profit for a few as society crumbles around them and more and more Americans get displaced.
It's going to get a lot worse before it gets better. We're circling the drain with no end in sight.
San Francisco spends $61k/year/tent [1] on homeless tents, which is more than median income in the US. The problem is not funding. The problem is that the local population would rather spin performative activism instead of taking real action (i.e. institutionalizing mentally ill people and forcing people off the streets and to stop using heroin and meth).
Forced institutionalization is plainly unconstitutional, and there's no particular evidence that you can disappear whichever group of undesirables you see fit and guarantee that more won't appear. The homeless don't spontaneously generate from other homeless; they come from the same households that you and I do.
The solution is what it's always been: a universal housing mandate, and adequate social services (including harm reduction). The things stopping that aren't "performative activism"; it's Seattle's pathological disdain for housing and a polite-society liberal ethos that values property values over human lives.
> Forced institutionalization is plainly unconstitutional
It is not illegal to arrest someone for stealing/drug use/etc. and then have a psychiatrist examine them to determine whether they should go to jail or be institutionalized. Courts regularly examine criminals for mental fitness to stand trial already.
> no particular evidence that you can disappear whichever group of undesirables you see fit and guarantee that more won't appear
Funny, because that's exactly what lots of cities do and it works pretty well. Take a look at any wealthy SoCal city and you'll find no homeless.
> a universal housing mandate, and adequate social services (including harm reduction)
So, spending more than the median American makes per year on tents? Or allowing crazy drug addicts to trash temporary housing and hotels? Because that's what happens in SF. From the SF Chronicle, which is a super left leaning publication: "Residents have threatened to kill staff members, chased them with metal pipes and lit fires inside rooms, incident reports show. At the Henry Hotel on Sixth Street, a tenant was hospitalized after a neighbor, for a second time, streamed bug spray into their eyes, public records show. Last May, less than a mile away at the Winton Hotel, a resident slashed another tenant’s face with a knife, leaving a trail of blood out of the building" [1]
And from the director running one of these programs: "“We throw all these people into our hotels who have no demonstrated ability to live independently, who have severe problems and need to be elsewhere,” Shaw said"
Clearly the problem is not housing, it's the lack of support around getting mentally ill people the treatment (i.e. institutionalization) they need. And obviously, a crazy person is not going to consent to treatment for their craziness, so you need to force them into institutionalization.
> It is not illegal to arrest someone for stealing/drug use/etc. and then have a psychiatrist examine them to determine whether they should go to jail or be institutionalized. Courts regularly examine criminals for mental fitness to stand trial already.
It is if the arrest is pretextual; that’s functionally no different from rounding up whichever group you think is bad and working backwards to disappear them.
In any case, nobody who lives in a van, tent, or even on the street meets the standard for forced institutionalization by those conditions alone. See the other thread.
> Funny, because that's exactly what lots of cities do and it works pretty well. Take a look at any wealthy SoCal city and you'll find no homeless.
I was under the impression that Los Angeles is both extremely wealthy and has lots of homeless. I’ve only visited once, however.
Either way: you surely understand that “move them somewhere else” is not a sustainable solution. You can’t sweep human lives under the rug in a country that has due process, as threadbare as ours might be.
The rest of the comment ignores what “housing mandate” really means: it means a combination of shelters, supported living (including mental institutions), and independent living based on the needs and capabilities of the individual.
LA itself is not extremely wealthy with the median household income less than national according to a quick search. There are rich cities that people consider "LA" but actually separate cities with own government: Santa Monica,Malibu, Beverly Hills, Calabasas etc.
I wasn't aware that arresting someone for stealing or illegal drug use was pretextual. Oh wait, it isn't. People committed a legitimate crime.
> nobody who lives in a van, tent, or even on the street meets the standard for forced institutionalization by those conditions alone
Then you give them a choice: go to treatment or go to jail. It is a strictly better outcome than only giving them the choice to go to jail.
> “move them somewhere else” is not a sustainable solution
It's a fully sustainable solution for many cities in SoCal, like I've said. Go to Newport Beach some time and you'll see. If you want your city to spend billions supporting people who don't want to be supported, you can do that with your own money and vote.
> due process
You're not entitled to violate local laws without consequences. Notice I never said to specifically go after people for being homeless, but to go after people for violating actual laws. Illegal drug use, illegal trash dumping, stealing, etc. Just because those actions are associated with homeless people does not make them any less illegal.
> supported living (including mental institutions)
The entire point is that the political will does not exist to force people who should be in mental institutions but don't want to be, into those institutions. If you steam bug spray into someone's eyes or chase them with a metal pipe, you are a danger to others around you.
> Forced institutionalization is plainly unconstitutional
False. If you are a danger to yourself or others, then you can be involuntarily committed after a hearing with a judge, and it's completely constitutional.
The context here is homeless or parking encampments. The standard for institutionalization is established in Donaldson, which requires that the state demonstrate that you’re either incapable of surviving on your own or are a danger to yourself or others (like you said).
“Danger,” in turn, has been narrowly interpreted by the courts to steer clear of obvious due process concerns: the state generally needs to show than danger is imminent and unavoidable, rather than merely plausible or even likely.
In other words: people living in RVs or tents do not prima facie meet either condition for forced institutionalization. People living on the street don’t even meet the conditions necessarily, since there’s no test for “quality of life.” And that’s the way it should be, unless you think that your civil liberties evaporate as soon as you cease to own property.
It's weird to see this sort of legal analysis in this day and age. It feels like a relic of the 90s, when the supreme court was still considered somewhat legitimate, vs the political puppets they are today.
The Constitution itself is pretty worthless when it's subject to the whims of a bunch of corrupt asshats. It doesn't really matter what is or isn't constitutional anymore. If any appeal makes it to the court, it's just gonna be a red blue split anyway, and largely ignored or maliciously complied with by agencies leaning the other way. You might as well make it a system based on Facebook likes. That would at least be more democratic and just than what we have today, lol.
It might sound like some intentional conspiracy but it's mostly just a natural consequence of the stalemate. As long as new home development is crippled by zoning, NIMBYism, and the endless related issues it's only natural for those who care to become cynical and team up with those who don't to find ways to feed the never-ending demand for performative action (backed by millions of dollars) with a supply of expensive temporary solutions.
i urge you to talk to ppl who have run low income housing. from the people i know who done it they quit bc it cost more to maintain it with all the damage and crime then a modest blue collar unit. "building more housing" dont fix nothing if the ppl who live there treat it like shit attract crime and don't reliably pay.
What you just described sounds like an intentional conspiracy:
> team up […] to find ways to feed the never-ending demand for performative action (backed by [billions] of dollars) with a supply of expensive temporary solutions [that enrich themselves]
If you’re spending most of the money on politicians, their friends, and bourgeois — for the purpose of virtue signaling rather than fixing the problem — you’re a second problem.
> relative, Laurence Belinsky, who is married to one of Cuomo's cousins, was the group's CEO. Belinsky had to step down in 2011 after his $500,000 salary became public at a time when a Cuomo-appointed task force was looking at excessive compensation at charities.
A lot of the funds go to bureaucrats running various targeted problems--so they spend like 80% of the funds on salaries of employees instead of it going to directly to the people who need it. We have too many programs--we just need one comprehensive program that gives them housing vouchers and assigns a social worker. And if you use drugs in public or steal--you get put in a halfway house or something. We need to do what Europe does... they have compassion but they enforce the law. US is the worst of all outcomes--expensive and getting nothing out of it.
> US is the worst of all outcomes--expensive and getting nothing out of it.
Seattle in particular has turned to abusive gaslighting:
Per capita, Seattle citizens pay nearly the most in the country — only for politicians to prey on that, by pocketing the money and heaping abuse (“yOu’Re nOt cOmPaSsIoNaTe!”) on the public to exploit their good nature.
I’m at the point I hope a Republican administration drops the RICO hammer on the racketeering — these people need jail for a decade for their treachery.
So this is not a figure for the cost of the tent itself, but to lease the space the tent occupies? That would make more sense, but not much. For $5000/month I would expect to be able to rent an actual apartment there, you know, with an actual kitchen, den, bathroom and bedroom.
> San Francisco spends $61k/year on homeless tents, which is more than median income in the US. The problem is not funding.
The city has 815,201 residents as of 2021. I think they can spend more than 13¢ per resident per year on this. Maybe there are other details that compound the problem, but the math insists that funding is obviously a massive part of the problem. They should be spending $20M a year at the very least, just to start, and increase from there. $20M/yr is $25 per resident per year. Even a homeless person could probably afford $25/yr, while the median household income in San Francisco is $120K/yr. If they want the problem fixed, paying for it to be fixed is really the only option.
What the hell kind of a tent costs $61K every year?! I think maybe this is the problem. A $500 tent is about the best you can buy, so spend $1000 per tent for an extremely luxurious tent, and save $60K per year per tent.
the vast majority of the people are not mentally ill, that will do nothing for this. It could possibly help tent cities and homeless. A lot better scheme would be to end crazy restrictive building and zoning laws and letting the market fix it and stop letting NIMBYs keep prices artificially high
>the vast majority of the people are not mentally ill
The vast majority of homeless people are drug users AND mentally ill. If you are living on the street when we have 3.6% unemployment--it's most likely drugs and mental illness (yes, there are rare exceptions).
You are completely wrong. Look up statistics. -Chronically- homeless people are likely drug users. That's the only part where you are partially correct.
Rest assured, other parts of the world have this all figured out. My favorite term is Favela which Wikipedia assures me is "also known as community". Eventually the ruling class throws up their hands. You can't put people in poor houses, jails, mental hospitals, subsidized housing--all too expensive/illegal/impractical. So you let them live in an ill-maintained "community" like the rest of the world does. It's coming.
we used to have those in a lot of cities in america, ghettos and tenements. at least they were cheap ig. the problem is we still don't know what else we can do with those people. a lot of them just don't give a shit so we got 0 leverage to make them do anything.
Maybe stop trying to coerce people and offer a little incentive to participate in society? Maybe offer some incentive for the wealthy to create jobs and offer gainful employment? Maybe get rid of zoning laws and force rich NIMBY landowners out of manipulating housing markets for their own gain? If people don't give a shit about their society, that's a problem with the society, not the people.
> rampant wealth inequality makes it so that many people have no viable alternative to living on the streets.
This is repeated often, but doesn't seem based in reality. Most of the people living on the streets are addicted to meth or heroin or mentally ill or some combination of the those. If you're on meth or heroin, you'll never be able to afford an apartment regardless of what they cost.
I don't disagree with what you are saying here - but it also takes money, time, resources, and political capital to do the things to get people off the streets. Seattle is so clearly overwhelmed by the problem that it could pretty clearly take years to unravel the problem even if there is an agreed path forward.
I’d agree if homelessness was a new thing. Homeless people living on the street was an issue in USA for decades, and it’s as American as McDonald, obesity and gun violence. Most of people coming to visit USA from other developed country was shocked by it for a really long time. There are no excuses left.
We’ve been trying for decades to solve the problem by helping people just a little. That’s only leads to issue getting much worse.
This is definitely one of those "it's going to get worse before it gets better" kind of things, because the increasing price of everything means that people are not going to have better upward mobility (out of homelessness) anytime soon.
If we wanted that, we should've invested in low-income housing, and public transit infrastructure so that people could live elsewhere, and commute. Also, healthcare for folks who struggle with mental health.
Lacking investment in those things, I imagine we can't start the clock on when this might get fixed.
> If we wanted [better upward mobility (out of homelessness)], we should've invested in low-income housing, and public transit infrastructure so that people could live elsewhere, and commute. Also, healthcare for folks who struggle with mental health.
I want to focus on the "If we wanted that," part. The "we" part is notable and problematic. I'll mention two senses here:
* desire (measured by preference aggregation): what do "we" want, based on aggregating (somehow) individual preferences
* action (collective action): what can we agree to do?
My point is this: Just because _action_ hasn't happened does not mean that _desire_ is not there. There is big gap between the two. One recipe is:
1. define the group with the desire
2. find and organize them
3. identify the common preferences
4. accumulate political capital
5. wield the power
I'm not a naive optimist; this is hard. But don't assume the _desire_ is not there! It takes effort to align a previously scattered group of people into something with cohesion and identity.
oh, yeah, I mean, clearly people want the symptoms fixed. And I think a reasonable number of people want to live in a city with low-income housing, public transit, and mental healthcare for all who need it.
I'd be surprised if anyone didn't want that. But I think the specific things when suggested, are things people oppose. "I want public transit, but I don't want them to put it on my street".
Also, full agreement that I'm not able to comment that people don't actually want this, only that the elected officials (and other powerful people) don't appear to want this (in Seattle). That is definitely who I'm referring to.
> we should've invested in low-income housing, and public transit infrastructure so that people could live elsewhere, and commute. Also, healthcare for folks who struggle with mental health.
How far do you think Seattle can get on its own? What kind of assistance is needed from the county? ... Washington state? ... the federal government?
P.S. I realize this is an easy question to ask but difficult to answer in any reasonable amount of space. I'd be happy to read recommended articles on case studies or data-oriented comparisons.
Honestly investing in just any reasonable amount of housing and transport would have helped but we had an entire generation just not bother and dump that cost onto us. Low-income housing is by necessity low-cost housing and that’s simply not achievable in an age of expensive land, expensive labor, and expensive materials.
I will grant that Seattle is currently investing in public transit. And that in the next 10-15 years, they have the opportunity to improve that situation greatly (providing people good/consistent transit to downtown).
There's a lot of the missing middle in Seattle for housing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCOdQsZa15o&ab_channel=NotJu... Which has been demonstrated to pay for itself (and support other businesses). Zoning for this would go a long way towards helping to alleviate the increasing cost of housing. (Also actively/readily) makes more money than it costs to maintain.
I think there's also something to be said for getting rid of cars in Downtown Seattle (still need to provide good accessible options). I originally clicked on this article in hopes that was what people were doing. Tangent: Shuffling homeless people around with cement "eco" blocks (legitimately interested in the etymology of that name) turned out to be the sad waste of resources we were going for here...
Mental Health feels a lot more difficult than this. Probably needs more of a national fix cause healthcare is too expensive and inaccessible in the US.
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[ 0.27 ms ] story [ 342 ms ] threadI don't think it's the right solution, but given what control residents actually have, it's understandable.
Instead of snarking about a false dichotomy, can you provide any productive suggestions for residents (i.e., not city policy makers) to improve the situation?
It's not crazy or entitled to want your home to be safe and not an open air sewage pit.
Go actually stay in or near one of these encampments for a bit.
When my city was tired of them, the encampments moved to the mayors office as a form of protest. The mayor went from being pro-encampments to demanding extra security details.
Also, I live in San Francisco. Depending on who you ask, I can barely close my front door due to all the feces and needles!
Seattle did that. Repeatedly. For years. After endless failure and things getting worse people got fed up and voted the other way. Check back in 3 years to see if they’re happy with the outcome or if the pendulum will swing back.
That's what the vast majority of people who run for local office try to do, the problem is that the issues like this tend to be far more complex than a soundbite can solve.
There are two problems here: legislative and enforcement. RVs park illegally overnight in neighborhoods,which leads to public health issues like how to deal with their wastewater, etc. The city fails to enforce the law, and residents respond by illegally putting up concrete barriers. Nobody wins reelection by spending lots of money and causing the city budget to increase, which would realistically be necessary in order to take enforcement seriously.
So I guess that's a long-winded way of asking: what should a problem-solver local candidate do in this situation?
https://www.courts.wa.gov/content/publicupload/eclips/2021%2...
Is this a fact though? I'm sure things are drastically different in the US, but in the places that I have experience with, proposing to increase budget for popular things is definitely an election winner, often even if such promises goes hand in hand with explaining that taxes will be increased to cover it.
Like...it's just not _actionable_. You're still talking on a group level rather than an individual...and even then, the mere presence of empathy doesn't do anything.
> 2) Learn about this crazy thing called "empathy", instead of punching down.
I want to call this out specifically, because Seattle's a city that's really filled to the brim with empathy and compassion. Yeah, there are definitely some people that're just concerned with their home value. There's more that really do want to see the problem solved in a way where everyone benefits.
It's really easy to berate anyone that's frustrated with the situation. It's a lot harder to come up with solutions that really will work and make them happen.
> Not the homeowners, cos heaven forfend we make them pay for anything.
I mean...it doesn't make sense to fine the homeowners that most likely had nothing to do with it at all. Fining them just turns them into victims.
I'm sure if the police were really interested in finding whodunit, there's enough ring footage around to be able to find out.
You also posted three copies of this comment. That's abusive. No more of that, please.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If it is within the bounds of legitimate debate to repeatedly assail everyone who disagrees with you as being racist, having no empathy, and wanting to murder homeless people, as the person this "flame" was responding to has done all over this thread, then it's definitely within the bounds of legitimate debate to ask the flame warrior to put their money where their mouth is, so to speak.
Or, taken the other way, if the comment that you replied to is ban-worthy abuse, then why have you not taken action against the much greater abuser which incited this fairly mildly flame-y response?
Personally, I'd rather have a flame-free open discussion board here, and as written, the guidelines do too, but allowing unlimited abuse from the pro-enforced-narrative viewpoint on any and every topic while posting ban threats like this in almost every thread where someone questions the enforced narrative is not the way to get there.
It does help provide public evidence of top-down narrative enforcement, which I suppose is vaguely useful, since it makes it harder for people to pretend that narrative enforcement isn't happening, but the actually open discussion, without narrative enforcement, would be better and, I believe, more in keeping with the guidelines.
The guidelines as written do not require adherence to the narrative nor do they offer immunity to posts in furtherance or support of the narrative anywhere that I can find.
Please moderate the narrative enforcers like you would non-adherents. That would make this site better and would be more in keeping with the guidelines, regardless of how correct the narrative is, or how correct you feel the narrative is.
It's extremely common for people to feel like the mods are against their side, when seeing a moderation comment they don't like.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
The HN guidelines don't say that nothing political should be allowed - see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4922426.
The approach to that on HN has been pretty stable for many years - for more info, see https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so....
What in your opinion is evidence of some interesting new phenomenon on this page? I am honestly courious because I don't see it. As I commented above the subject discussed on this page is nothing now.
I didn't look closely at the article, but I don't recall a discussion of that particular phenomenon ('eco-blocks' or whatever placed by businesses on city streets) on HN before.
Some commenters seem to think that if an article is provocative then that justifies whatever they feel like posting to the thread. That's extremely far from the case!
There's even a rule designed specifically to dampen such reactions in such cases: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Agree.
And guess where the sewage goes when you can't or won't drive your RV to the dump site?
like, we can't rly make them stop unless we take they RV, now we got 1 more homeless. or we could take them to prison, now we got 1 more prisoner. none of this fixes the problem bc it's rly hard to punish ppl who got nothing to lose.
These guys do have something to lose - their RV and all their stuff in it. You can't ask them to magically with money they don't have, but you can effect behavior and priorities.
Now if you lose your RV and start squatting in a park, get warned for trespass and then stay anyway, while doing drugs in the open and shoplifting, etc. I'd love to see an escalation that eventually lands you in jail (not prison) and a 1/2 way house and treatment.
Rules need to be enforced. They can and should be enforced extremely compassionately and incrementally. But they need to be enforced.
And if they are not, this is a perfect example of what happens. The city has now de-facto abdicated a lot of it's authority and here we go, back to vigilance committees and self-help of 150 years ago. As shown, the self-help mechanisms lead to sub-optimal solutions for everyone. Now no one can park on those streets at all and the homeless are still homeless. Society just isn't going to just sit back and let shit-heads ruin it for everyone because the current city governance is too ineffective to take care of business in an optimal way.
That does generally seem to be the case. I live in one of the neighborhoods the article is about. There are a couple of RV residents nearby that have been in the same spot for years, keep to themselves, and don't seem to leave much trash around. The city and neighbors seem content to leave them as-is.
This framing does a disservice to the homeless because it takes away any of their agency. What about the people who choose to live this way? Or does the government take that choice away from them too?
They can as easily fine a business for not removing the blocks as for placing them, and it's not like there's a question about where the blocks actually are.
It's more a matter of how far you're willing to go.
The block has flowers painted on it, it’s pretty. Why can’t I park a block on the public street?
The problem is that many make a mess. Punish that. But there's nothing wrong with living in a public spot.
If someone started living in an RV directly in front of my house, I would be displeased.
The comments you've been replying to are also bad, but what you've posted (in more than one case) is a noticeable step downward into flamewar. That's not cool.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
SPD is pretty ripe with all sorts of issues (e.g., they thought it was a good idea to teargas capital hill for days on end). They've kind of created a hostile relationship with their community.
They'd just move from eco blocks to old cars that they rotate.
Give the RVs somewhere to go, trailer parks are pretty common in other places.
This country is falling into major societal disrepair, and we need major public investment in affordable housing.
The RVs aren't the problem, the problem is the people in them.
This is a problem of negligence and uncaring and the only "solution" those in charge seem to want to offer is to force the homeless into jails, to be used as slave labor.
According to the article, the city is set up to tow cars, but not set up to move the concrete blocks. The blocks are actually probably easier to move than the cars, if you set up a system for doing it. A flatbed with a crane could move those blocks out in time comparable to hitching up a car for towing, and carry more than one at a time.
On edit: cars would probably get vandalized, too. I am not saying I support that, but it makes rotating cars even more impractical.
The issue is still they need to give people somewhere to live. Public housing, RV parks, rental legislation etc.
This isn't about that kind of RV -- this is about drug-den RVs full of people who are whacked out on drugs, are a danger to everyone around them, and cover the area around them in needles and feces.
This isn't really about urban campers.
Of course if a business/person wants to provide free parking on their property, that’s fine. But they shouldn’t be required to by zoning.
edit: disabled parking should be free, that’s different
I don’t think public transit riders should be forced to pay the full price of their habit. Nor do I think cities shouldn’t charge taxes and spend the revenue on both roads and yes even curb side parking.
It’s quite reasonable for cities to fund numerous modes of transit.
The funny thing is that you wouldn’t even need to make parking super expensive to act as a huge disincentive. $1/h is enough to change behavior.
It's still crazy to me that I can park a block away from the world trade center for $0 (there's usually open spots around the federal reserve on the weekend), when the real estate there goes for $1500+ per sq ft
You’d probably expend more money having cops pointlessly drive around writing tickets for meter.
Before the meter change in Chicago, it would be next to impossible to find a parking spot in the loop - people were essentially using street parking as free week-at-a-time car storage. At $8/hr or whatever they run now, you can actually find open spots when you need them.
As I recently published at [1], my city of Berkeley does not raise anywhere near enough money from property taxes to pave the city streets. If you think the majority of roads in the United States are paved with property tax revenues, I'd like to see your math.
1: https://observablehq.com/@jwb/property-tax-whales-of-the-eas...
Local streets are a local responsibility. The state or Federal government will provide grants for ADA amenities or multi model transportation.
Suburban and rural towns are a little different - the state maintains state roads and US Highways, mostly with income, sales and excise tax. Counties maintain county roads, mostly with property and sales tax.
Given California’s strange relationship with property tax and the inherent inequality associated with it, it’s a different animal.
What's missing in your analysis is that a large fraction of American roads have simply never been maintained. They were laid down initially, often paid for by developer fees, and never touched again. So, your analysis still leaves the question unanswered.
It's telling that a city in California doesn't have enough property taxes to pay for their roads. It's almost like Prop 13 causes problems.
It's really frustrating to be expected to follow the laws when the homeless aren't. I get cited for parking an RV in my own driveway because it is unsightly. 2 blocks away there is a full blown homeless encampment.
If you embrace only a purely strategic point of view, sure, choose from the palatable tools available to achieve your ends.
But most people have some kind of moral and ethical code, imperfect as it may be. The golden rule is nearly universal across various moral belief systems.
Be careful: if you only consider the purely strategic point of view you may find yourself as the primary casualty. Living without a moral code is perhaps the most self-defeating decision you can make.
To summarize, when acting within the moral sphere (which Kane defines as the situation where people are acting in a way that respects other people's rights), we should act to maintain it.
But when it breaks down, we do the best we can to restore it, which might mean acting less ideally toward the people causing breakdown.
I find that the people who espouse these views are usually insulated from the effects of them. Have you ever had a homeless camp near your residence? How close? How would you feel about your wife/daughter/mother being home alone near a homeless camp?
I'd love to be charitable and kind, but people have to protect themselves as well. Bringing a bunch of mentally ill drug users near your residence is a recipe for disaster. It should not be seen as some moral issue that we need to solve individually--the government and police should be able to resolve this on their own, especially considering the funding pumping into law enforcement and homeless funds. I think the big problem is we just keep creating more unaccountable programs and services instead of just giving people an SRO and a social worker. We're doing the dumbest possible thing because everyone wants to get a cut. Every other developed country has basically solved this--we could just copy a working model instead of dumping more and more money into hare-brained ideas every year that never work.
About my most recent experience in the East Bay (near San Francisco)... I lived (a) about 0.5 miles from a homeless person who lived in a truck; (b) about 1 mile from an industrial area with dozens of parked campers, (c) about 1.5 miles from a small tent encampment (maybe 10? tents), (d) and about 2 miles from a larger one (maybe 20?). In this experience, I did not personally feel threatened, nor did I hear accounts of them being violent or particularly troublesome.
But I get your point. I have been close to camps where I feel unsafe, and I would not recommend spending time nearby.
> I find that the people who espouse these views are usually insulated from the effects of them.
Would you give an example or two from your experience?
There are descent people that are pushed into homelessness, but one camper can turn to a dozen in less than a week and only one of them has to start threatening to hurt your family, breaking into vehicles or set a fire to turn a benign situation into one that can threaten your life or livelihood.
Speaking from personal experience, we turned a blind eye to a middle aged man living out of his car next to our garage for a few months. Then we woke up one night to find the van had erupted into a two story fireball that almost burned down our entire block.
I go out and talk to people now when they start forming an encampment in our neighborhood. Its incredibly difficult work and I have never had both more and less sympathy for their situations and the real threats encampments pose.
This is a complex issue but it is an issue that is the city's responsibility to address. Shame on them for putting people on both sides of this issue in impossible positions.
New York figured this out in 1979. Cities have a constitutional obligation to build shelters for everyone that needs them. They did.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Callahan_v._Carey
Those blocks will come down really quickly if business owners started getting fined for putting them up and van-dwellers started finding their houses getting towed. However, the city likely can't do one without the other.
My suggestion: If debris was left in front of my property irrespective of whether it was within my property or not, I’d get a notice to rectify. If I didn’t within a reasonable time frame, the city would rectify it for me and send me the bill. Failure to pay the bill within six months would simply result in it being folded into the property taxes. Consequences for not paying taxes don’t need explanation at this point. Very effective strategy. Not my fault someone dumped something in front of the house, but how to track who did it? Easier to shift it onto the property owner.
In my case I would simply put up security cameras that are clear enough to pick up license plates. The city would be only too happy to pass on the bill to the vehicle owner of whoever dropped off the crap.
Context and proportionality are important too.
I'll bet there are a broader range of options available worth considering. What about trying the public sanitation angle? Does that open up some options?
> Speaking from personal experience, we turned a blind eye to a middle aged man living out of his car next to our garage for a few months. Then we woke up one night to find the van had erupted into a two story fireball that almost burned down our entire block.
This reads like an inflammatory article. Nothing but anecdotal reports of sample of one.
https://www.seattlemet.com/news-and-city-life/2019/03/licton...
> some article obfuscating everything with relative instead of absolute numbers
give me a break.
That’s an ugly way to describe safe clean socialized housing.
Whoa - you can't post like that to HN, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are.
You posted flamewar comments in other parts of this thread and have now crossed into personal attack. That's seriously not ok and we ban accounts that do this.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it. As a bonus, it will make your arguments more convincing because then you won't be discrediting them with flamebait and swipes.
Pointing the finger at others is not a good place to start with this. You broke the site guidelines egregiously and repeatedly, regardless of what other people did. Please fix this first, and then if you have a point or a question about moderation, I'd be happy to address it further.
It's easy enough to see that we moderate comments that break the site guidelines whether they agree with any particular view or not (your side, the opposing side, or otherwise). There were several examples in this thread alone.
the phrase "virtue signalling" is just "asshole signalling".
if you want to reach anyone vaguely on the left end of the political spectrum they're not going to listen to much after you drop that phrase. but you will score point with people who already agree with you.
which is a whole lot like the very thing that you're trying to criticize.
Cities do not give away public parking. Either you have to pay for it (metered parking), it's provided "free" to customers only (i.e. paid for by the profit margin on goods and services), or it's only available to people who live in an area (i.e. those people paid property tax, either as owners or renters).
> everything but housing will do, presumably
Housing doesn't solve rampant drug addiction, theft, mental illness, and laziness. The article in the OP literally cites trash accumulating, rats running rampant, and vehicle fires spontaneously occurring. That is not the environment that a rational person occupies.
I guess you just lack imagination and or empathy. That's one way to look at it but it so far has a zero success track record at solving these problems.
The product you're selling - public transit and high density walkable neighborhoods - isn't very appealing to most people. Public transit is slow, dirty, and dangerous. Neighborhoods without enough parking just force people to Uber everywhere or take public transit, raising the cost of living and wasting people's time. Smaller, hyperlocal grocery stores have inferior selection, higher prices, and worse quality than places like Costco.
And these aren't problems you can fix with more funding. Public transit is slow because NIMBYs block trains from running at high speed in most neighborhoods. It's dirty and dangerous because there is no political will to screen riders or to arrest vagrants. Smaller grocery stores suffer from inferior economies of scale, so they never will compete with places like Costco in price.
The price of basic goods like bananas in a bodega type store is triple what it would be at Costco. $1.29-1.99/lb for bananas vs. $0.50-0.70/lb at Costco. And the Costco bananas will be bigger and in better condition than the ones at the bodega. Make the comparison with baked goods like muffins or croissants and it's no contest.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32300502.
Wow, when Toronto put up concrete blocks (wtf is “ecology” in the name), they spent $100k for about 100 blocks to be bought and placed in front of various unregulated marijuana dispensaries. Then another $250k in bureaucratic/engineering/legal expenses.
https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2020/01/20/blocking-off-ill...
Someone there spent $1000/block and since those appear to be about 4 feet long they would likely cost about $100 each so the labor cost to install each block plus profit to the installer eats up $900. Probably a kickback in there somewhere.
Of course with lawyers involved there was probably a round of blowjobs to buy for the team and the final cost of that would depend on which corner they visited for that service.
Definitely. Since another level of government was paying (though a common set of tax payers...), there seemed to be a lot of running the clock. The war on drugs must not have budgetary limits!
While creative, the entire strategy was ineffective: within hours the blocks would be removed, operations would resume and then the city would do it again. Textbook insanity.
There are also composition requirements. Bin blocks are just made from remnant materials.
PNW = Pacific NorthWest?
But you also can't have homeless people around, that would be unsafe. Also they still expect people to live there and do service jobs for them, even though there is no place affordable to live.
Seattle heavily restricts development of housing, from zoning to committees that can veto buildings for the wrong facade to regulations that drive up expense like mandatory unit size and parking.
You’re witnessing the failure of “feel good” government regulation.
Where do you advocate for them to go?
Edit: I just realized this after writing this comment, but Soylent Green is supposed to take place in 2022. Life imitating art I suppose...
Maybe name it New Detroit
oh wait, we got something like that... prison. it does a shit job at fixing homeless ppl.
A large portion of that population have mental health issues that modern medicine just doesn't know how to fix.
What we are doing is refusing to address the needs of the 99% because 1% have an unsolvable problem.
i remember when i was younger ppl would carry food in their cars and hand it out to homeless with hungry signs. some of them would take it and be grateful and that was good. some of them would only want money (obv what that would be for) and so we move on. but it was good we could hand out some food. now most ppl i know aren't comfortable doing that any more. bc a bunch of them have been attacked when they wouldn't give cash. most of them not bad, but having a guy trying to pull open the door or grabbing the car is scary for most of us and really fucking scary for somebody like a small woman. so it's not that people don't still have sympathy for the honest guy down on his luck but there's too many of the bad ones now.
the problem is look at low income housing, people will tell you there's not enough. "oh just build more". but low income housing these days is really fucking bad. i have friends who are landlords and tried running low income housing and its awful how bad it gets torn up, how hard it is to get people to pay with rent and eviction moritoriums. and it only gets worse.
it cost more for them to run low income housing than blue-collar housing that's still not fancy but has better tenants. there's so much damage and crime around the low-income. remember austin bought that hotel for a homeless shelter and it got trashed to shit in like 2 weeks? same kinda problem.
so it ain't a simple problem to fix. and the moritoriums and rent control that cities keep adding only makes more people leave the low income housing business.
but all that aside me and a whole bunch of other people are just done. and if the homeless don't leave other people will, look at these cities rn. and once all the rich people are gone and all the middle class people are gone then they're really gonna be in trouble.
tbh our problem is we can't punish people who got nothing so laws don't mean nothing to them. like what do u even do to a person shitting in a downtown street? arrest them? put them where? now u spend money keeping them in jail and they will get out back on the street. and relapse rates out of rehab are shit specially since a lot of those people end up there from a court order so that ain't any kind of solution here.
^ This right here is the fundamental problem in American politics. Because what you are missing is that society is like a house. If you don't maintain your house, eventually the roof caves in. There are people who believe that they can starve government - cut taxes back to nothing, better if we get rid of all the bureaucrats, better if Congress / state legislatures are stuck not able to do anything, who cares if I vote.
That's the equivalent of letting the house fall down around you. Plenty of voters will say they don't care - they think they can somehow protect themselves. But they don't get that sooner or later, chaos reigns and it comes for all of us. Homelessness and depravity like we see in Seattle isn't the root disease - it's a symptom of the disease.
literally all the progressives can come up with for a solution is "give more shit away free" when we used to give away less and didn't have the same problem. whatever the disease is that's not treating it.
That said - maybe you should look at places like Houston, which is hardly a liberal hotbed but I understand has improved their homeless problem by… giving away free housing.
Edit: how many times mbrodersen are you going to post the same sarcastic response to messages you don’t like?
Let's extend this (sneakily) implied causal model to all geographic areas with an "X" party mayor (or county commissioner or sheriff or whatever) and single-party strangleholds. Let's look at rural areas, say, in the southern states. Let's talk about pervasive poverty, lack of education, and drug abuse there.
We can play the blame game. How about this: let's talk about potential solutions and their associated costs?
P.S. I don't dispute that downtown SF is shocking, disgusting, and _more importantly_ tragic for the people living there. I care relatively little about the cosmetic aspect. I care tremendously about finding ways that every human being can reach their maximum potential, without impinging on the rights of other people.
P.P.S. Yes, this stated moral philosophy is somewhat underspecified, but I'm trying to leave open a wide space for reasonable people to agree. We can and should debate the margins, but I think there is considerable consensus in terms of public opinion about what is just, ASSUMING that people share a common set of facts and all inform themselves on a particular situation and dynamic (by which I mean interconnected causes and effects).
NIMBY-ism is at it's worst, not when people don't want homeless people in their back yards, but when people actively work against public policy that would affect their back yard, and improve the lives of homeless people.
Overdose Prevention Centers would absolutely be something I would allow in my backyard. I think that probably hits enough of your criteria to qualify as what you're accusing me of hypocrisy for.
I would also welcome removing roads where I live in favor of public transit lines. I would also welcome people to put in low-income housing where I live.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting to HN, we'd appreciate it.
Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32302402 also.
But it’s just that: a fantasy, born from ignorance.
These are mobile drug dens often inhabited by people with long criminal records who throw trash all over the area — not middle class people down on their luck.
It's complicated. You're right that many homeless people are just people down on their luck doing their best to get by. Many of them aren't causing anyone any problems. From what I understand, most of these homeless people get by doing things like couch surfing and aren't very visible.
In this particular corner of the city, most of the people living in these RVs are not in great shape. Most are drug addicts, or mentally ill, or both. There is a halo of crime that surrounds these encampments. In the past couple of years, I've seen:
* Multiple cars broken into.
* A drive-by shooting of one of the RVs right by my house.
* That same RV's owner almost certainly selling drugs from her RV for years.
* A woman, completely topless, staggering in the middle of the street screaming obscenities at no one.
* Many needles on the ground.
* People urinating on our garage.
* Someone taking a shit next to our garage.
* My neighbor's car was broken into and the urn containing his father's ashes was stolen. When he found the guy who broke into it at a nearby encampment and tried to get it back, he was attacked with a knife.
* Rumors of prostitution and hep-C outbreaks in one of the encampments.
* A large man beating the shit out of a woman in broad daylight.
* Multiple shootings in other RVs and nearby homeless shelters.
* One guy, clearly suffering from schizophrenia, who sits on the sidewalk and screams at no one for hours and hours.
* Someone climbed our fence and was shambling around our backyard until a neighbor showed up and scared them off.
* Package theft, obviously. Constantly.
* Many many screaming matches and other domestic disputes.
* Someone sitting on portable toilet seat in the middle of the street, taking a shit in the middle of the day.
* Piles of trash, human waste, buckets of piss, bags of shit, etc. Because when you don't have property, that also means you don't have trash pick-up or sewer services.
* Someone throwing rocks at someone's car and at people in their backyard.
* A woman walked up onto our porch and stole the lightbulb right out of our porch light. (I've heard they use incandescent bulbs to make some kind of drug paraphernalia?)
* One guy runs what he calls the "homeless recording studio". He has a venue-sized PA system in his RV that he cranks up to full concert volume and plays the radio. Then he plays his drum kit on top of that. With the doors open, at all hours of the day and night.
In fact, I literally just got back from walking out to see what a large police response was about after seeing several cop cars circling. I don't know the details, but an officer said someone in an RV was refusing to come out.
I have a lot of sympathy for people suffering misfortune and I think almost all of these people mostly need help and support. I don't want them to be punished. But I don't want to keep dealing with the kind of stuff they are doing either.
(You may be wondering why we don't call the cops about this. We do. If we're lucky, they come. When they do, it's hours later and too late to do anything about it.)
The RVs arrived a little over six years ago after they were forced to move from a lot underneath a nearby overpass. There were around a dozen vehicles and some tents.
There was a lot of violent crime, including several shootings toward the end of the encampment.
There was a lot of trash and sewage. When they were moved the city hauled away several tons of trash and "shopping bag toilets".
There was a lot of obvious mental health problems and the deep fear and desperation that goes along with it. I've worked in enough urban service jobs to recognize people who don't have access to the mental health support they need.
There were single people, couples, and two families with children. The people I spoke with are mostly from Seattle and a few grew up in this neighborhood. They are homeless but not from some far away place. This is their neighborhood. They stay here because they know people and because they can sometimes find work here.
We failed as a city to provide a safety net when these people fell. My street is more safe and has less trash and it's true that I like it but to get that we didn't solve a single problem. We just moved it along.
Homeless advocates say it is not fair that the city expects vehicle dwellers to obey parking laws..
It does not matter if it's to run errands or improvised RV housing, why should some obey the parking laws and others are allowed not to? The defeats the point of having parking spaces. Parking spaces were never intended to be dwellings. This seems really unfair. It's a difficult problem...everyone says that housing affordability/availability is the answer yet nothing get done.
To me, a permanent concrete block is an even worse violation of parking laws than a semi-permanent RV.
Blame drugs, blame political opponents, blame the government, blame developers, blame tech bros, blame whatever or whoever you want... but at the end of the day, still no solution is in sight. There is no widespread push for affordable housing or a pathway out of poverty, no real long-term care for people fighting addictions or mental illness. There is only the relentless push for profit for a few as society crumbles around them and more and more Americans get displaced.
It's going to get a lot worse before it gets better. We're circling the drain with no end in sight.
[1] https://sfist.com/2021/03/04/insanely-it-is-costing-san-fran...
The solution is what it's always been: a universal housing mandate, and adequate social services (including harm reduction). The things stopping that aren't "performative activism"; it's Seattle's pathological disdain for housing and a polite-society liberal ethos that values property values over human lives.
It is not illegal to arrest someone for stealing/drug use/etc. and then have a psychiatrist examine them to determine whether they should go to jail or be institutionalized. Courts regularly examine criminals for mental fitness to stand trial already.
> no particular evidence that you can disappear whichever group of undesirables you see fit and guarantee that more won't appear
Funny, because that's exactly what lots of cities do and it works pretty well. Take a look at any wealthy SoCal city and you'll find no homeless.
> a universal housing mandate, and adequate social services (including harm reduction)
So, spending more than the median American makes per year on tents? Or allowing crazy drug addicts to trash temporary housing and hotels? Because that's what happens in SF. From the SF Chronicle, which is a super left leaning publication: "Residents have threatened to kill staff members, chased them with metal pipes and lit fires inside rooms, incident reports show. At the Henry Hotel on Sixth Street, a tenant was hospitalized after a neighbor, for a second time, streamed bug spray into their eyes, public records show. Last May, less than a mile away at the Winton Hotel, a resident slashed another tenant’s face with a knife, leaving a trail of blood out of the building" [1]
And from the director running one of these programs: "“We throw all these people into our hotels who have no demonstrated ability to live independently, who have severe problems and need to be elsewhere,” Shaw said"
Clearly the problem is not housing, it's the lack of support around getting mentally ill people the treatment (i.e. institutionalization) they need. And obviously, a crazy person is not going to consent to treatment for their craziness, so you need to force them into institutionalization.
[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2022/san-francisco-sros...
It is if the arrest is pretextual; that’s functionally no different from rounding up whichever group you think is bad and working backwards to disappear them.
In any case, nobody who lives in a van, tent, or even on the street meets the standard for forced institutionalization by those conditions alone. See the other thread.
> Funny, because that's exactly what lots of cities do and it works pretty well. Take a look at any wealthy SoCal city and you'll find no homeless.
I was under the impression that Los Angeles is both extremely wealthy and has lots of homeless. I’ve only visited once, however.
Either way: you surely understand that “move them somewhere else” is not a sustainable solution. You can’t sweep human lives under the rug in a country that has due process, as threadbare as ours might be.
The rest of the comment ignores what “housing mandate” really means: it means a combination of shelters, supported living (including mental institutions), and independent living based on the needs and capabilities of the individual.
I wasn't aware that arresting someone for stealing or illegal drug use was pretextual. Oh wait, it isn't. People committed a legitimate crime.
> nobody who lives in a van, tent, or even on the street meets the standard for forced institutionalization by those conditions alone
Then you give them a choice: go to treatment or go to jail. It is a strictly better outcome than only giving them the choice to go to jail.
> “move them somewhere else” is not a sustainable solution
It's a fully sustainable solution for many cities in SoCal, like I've said. Go to Newport Beach some time and you'll see. If you want your city to spend billions supporting people who don't want to be supported, you can do that with your own money and vote.
> due process
You're not entitled to violate local laws without consequences. Notice I never said to specifically go after people for being homeless, but to go after people for violating actual laws. Illegal drug use, illegal trash dumping, stealing, etc. Just because those actions are associated with homeless people does not make them any less illegal.
> supported living (including mental institutions)
The entire point is that the political will does not exist to force people who should be in mental institutions but don't want to be, into those institutions. If you steam bug spray into someone's eyes or chase them with a metal pipe, you are a danger to others around you.
False. If you are a danger to yourself or others, then you can be involuntarily committed after a hearing with a judge, and it's completely constitutional.
https://www.samhsa.gov/sites/default/files/civil-commitment-...
When you start with an immediate falsehood, why read further? The italics don't help your argument either.
“Danger,” in turn, has been narrowly interpreted by the courts to steer clear of obvious due process concerns: the state generally needs to show than danger is imminent and unavoidable, rather than merely plausible or even likely.
In other words: people living in RVs or tents do not prima facie meet either condition for forced institutionalization. People living on the street don’t even meet the conditions necessarily, since there’s no test for “quality of life.” And that’s the way it should be, unless you think that your civil liberties evaporate as soon as you cease to own property.
The Constitution itself is pretty worthless when it's subject to the whims of a bunch of corrupt asshats. It doesn't really matter what is or isn't constitutional anymore. If any appeal makes it to the court, it's just gonna be a red blue split anyway, and largely ignored or maliciously complied with by agencies leaning the other way. You might as well make it a system based on Facebook likes. That would at least be more democratic and just than what we have today, lol.
https://www.kqed.org/news/11209729/did-the-emptying-of-menta...
A lot of money goes to politicians, their supporters, and bourgeois — while only a small percentage goes to fixing homelessness.
This is essentially looting the public by corrupt actors under the false guise of moral action.
> team up […] to find ways to feed the never-ending demand for performative action (backed by [billions] of dollars) with a supply of expensive temporary solutions [that enrich themselves]
If you’re spending most of the money on politicians, their friends, and bourgeois — for the purpose of virtue signaling rather than fixing the problem — you’re a second problem.
Government looting the public.
> relative, Laurence Belinsky, who is married to one of Cuomo's cousins, was the group's CEO. Belinsky had to step down in 2011 after his $500,000 salary became public at a time when a Cuomo-appointed task force was looking at excessive compensation at charities.
https://twitter.com/thebl0w/status/1418642879111745541
>This is a shelter on Ward’s island. NYC pays $3500 - $4000 per person a month to sleep in a room with 30 ppl.
Seattle in particular has turned to abusive gaslighting:
Per capita, Seattle citizens pay nearly the most in the country — only for politicians to prey on that, by pocketing the money and heaping abuse (“yOu’Re nOt cOmPaSsIoNaTe!”) on the public to exploit their good nature.
I’m at the point I hope a Republican administration drops the RICO hammer on the racketeering — these people need jail for a decade for their treachery.
The city has 815,201 residents as of 2021. I think they can spend more than 13¢ per resident per year on this. Maybe there are other details that compound the problem, but the math insists that funding is obviously a massive part of the problem. They should be spending $20M a year at the very least, just to start, and increase from there. $20M/yr is $25 per resident per year. Even a homeless person could probably afford $25/yr, while the median household income in San Francisco is $120K/yr. If they want the problem fixed, paying for it to be fixed is really the only option.
[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/S-F-has-an-unpre...
The vast majority of homeless people are drug users AND mentally ill. If you are living on the street when we have 3.6% unemployment--it's most likely drugs and mental illness (yes, there are rare exceptions).
Rest assured, other parts of the world have this all figured out. My favorite term is Favela which Wikipedia assures me is "also known as community". Eventually the ruling class throws up their hands. You can't put people in poor houses, jails, mental hospitals, subsidized housing--all too expensive/illegal/impractical. So you let them live in an ill-maintained "community" like the rest of the world does. It's coming.
Hate to break it to you, but there are still plenty of ghettos and tenements, and replacing some of these with tent cities is not an improvement.
This is repeated often, but doesn't seem based in reality. Most of the people living on the streets are addicted to meth or heroin or mentally ill or some combination of the those. If you're on meth or heroin, you'll never be able to afford an apartment regardless of what they cost.
We’ve been trying for decades to solve the problem by helping people just a little. That’s only leads to issue getting much worse.
If we wanted that, we should've invested in low-income housing, and public transit infrastructure so that people could live elsewhere, and commute. Also, healthcare for folks who struggle with mental health.
Lacking investment in those things, I imagine we can't start the clock on when this might get fixed.
I want to focus on the "If we wanted that," part. The "we" part is notable and problematic. I'll mention two senses here:
* desire (measured by preference aggregation): what do "we" want, based on aggregating (somehow) individual preferences
* action (collective action): what can we agree to do?
My point is this: Just because _action_ hasn't happened does not mean that _desire_ is not there. There is big gap between the two. One recipe is:
1. define the group with the desire
2. find and organize them
3. identify the common preferences
4. accumulate political capital
5. wield the power
I'm not a naive optimist; this is hard. But don't assume the _desire_ is not there! It takes effort to align a previously scattered group of people into something with cohesion and identity.
I'd be surprised if anyone didn't want that. But I think the specific things when suggested, are things people oppose. "I want public transit, but I don't want them to put it on my street".
Also, full agreement that I'm not able to comment that people don't actually want this, only that the elected officials (and other powerful people) don't appear to want this (in Seattle). That is definitely who I'm referring to.
How far do you think Seattle can get on its own? What kind of assistance is needed from the county? ... Washington state? ... the federal government?
P.S. I realize this is an easy question to ask but difficult to answer in any reasonable amount of space. I'd be happy to read recommended articles on case studies or data-oriented comparisons.
There's a lot of the missing middle in Seattle for housing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCOdQsZa15o&ab_channel=NotJu... Which has been demonstrated to pay for itself (and support other businesses). Zoning for this would go a long way towards helping to alleviate the increasing cost of housing. (Also actively/readily) makes more money than it costs to maintain.
I think there's also something to be said for getting rid of cars in Downtown Seattle (still need to provide good accessible options). I originally clicked on this article in hopes that was what people were doing. Tangent: Shuffling homeless people around with cement "eco" blocks (legitimately interested in the etymology of that name) turned out to be the sad waste of resources we were going for here...
Mental Health feels a lot more difficult than this. Probably needs more of a national fix cause healthcare is too expensive and inaccessible in the US.
If placing them is illegal, but requires specialised equipment to do it, couldn't the city go after the operators of that equipment?