The past 6-7 years or so I personally noticed a steep increase in homelessness in most metropolitan areas I visited and then slowly started to see an increase in homelessness in the surrounding areas. What was never clear to me was whether there was a genuine increase in homelessness or a change in policy/culture surrounding the "management" of homelessness. This article describes a mixed picture of homelessness (i.e. increases in some areas and decreases in other areas) which suggests to me that we have a policy problem that has a risk to create a feedback loop.
It feels to me that homelessness is more "tolerated" these days. If someone is sleeping in front of the metro station entrance we have a "leave them be" kind of attitude. I wonder if this correlates to a reduction in homelessness management systems like described in the article "less beds". If we're okay with homeless people camping on our trails and in our parks maybe there is less incentive to spend money on creating other places for them to go. Then with less places to go we have more homeless people so then we have less incentive to create places for them to go.
Makes me speculate if tolerance is part of the problem here. If culturally we found homelessness intolerable then we would be more motivated to solve it.
Homeless people are majority men, and we are a long way to having social discussion about helping men. At least in the US, the predominant view is that homeless men on the streets is a good thing, a sort of superiority/inferiority complex in our society. Not good like "we like this social problem" but good like "they deserve it" and the solution is to eliminate it from your eyes and city, a sort of homeless genocide of inferior men who do not deserve support. My brother was homeless and he'd send me pictures of all the spikes that cities built just to prevent homeless people from resting (US-biased)
> At least in the US, the predominant view is that homeless men on the streets is a good thing
I've been homeless a lot and literally never heard this view until now. Asserted and dismissed without evidence.
> we are a long way to having social discussion about helping men.
Are we? Which men? With which problems?
I hear this argument all the time from anti-feminists. MRM propagandists often make an argument like, "Almost all the domestic violence shelters are for women. You feminists only care about women." The response from feminists is generally, "Feel free to get to work." But of course, MRM people don't care about men's suffering under sexism, they care about bashing feminists, so they don't do any organizing. This dynamic would be funnier if it weren't so sad.
So what are you personally doing to address the suffering of men under sexism? I mean, aside from alienating your natural allies?
> I hear this argument all the time from anti-feminists. MRM propagandists often make an argument like, "Almost all the domestic violence shelters are for women. You feminists only care about women." The response from feminists is generally, "Feel free to get to work." But of course, MRM people don't care about men's suffering under sexism, they care about bashing feminists, so they don't do any organizing. This dynamic would be funnier if it weren't so sad.
Painting the above poster with an anti-feminist brush is uncharitable.
Disposable male theory isn't incompatible with a feminist perspective. I realize it's a mens rights talking point, but even a broken clock is right twice a day.
My take: Patriarchy reinforces male supremacy which puts men in positions of power, and prioritizes the needs of men at a societal level; but men without power (as well as non-white, non-straight, non-"traditionally masculine" men) are also victims of patriarchy, and face challenges specific to men.
I'd point you to the /r/menslib subreddit which was a great, anti-men's rights, intersectional, and feminist-allied discussion forum for men's issues, but they've unfortunately gone dark. For a brief introduction, there's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men%27s_liberation_movement at least
edit: Here's a fascinating video essay deconstructing the toxic masculinity of Andrew Tate, and how patriarchy affects men: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6_TOFy3k6k I found it on /r/breadtube, but it's definitely the type of fare common on /r/menslib
Right so your comment is full of the sorts contextualization it would certainly occur to you to make if you were looking at homelessness through a gender, but not anti-feminist, lens.
The other comment is using undiluted MRA & anti-feminist talking points without compromise or condition. The only way to read it charitably is to insert statements they didn't make, but easily could have and chose not to.
The other comment was pointing out that society is stacked against marginalized men. The support systems aren't there, people are less likely to extend empathy, and society isn't ready to treat mental health issues faced by men, since they're told from a young age that their emotions are invalid and unimportant (ok, this last bit admittedly is my own editorialization).
The person seemed to be commenting from a place of anger at how their brother was treated adversarially in his time of greatest need.
I volunteered with homeless people for years, and 80% or more were men. This issue is close to my heart as well and I absolutely think the commenter was pointing out relevant systemic issues, including touching on toxic masculinity and its attitude of treating other men adverserially
> The only way to read it charitably is to insert statements they didn't make, but easily could have and chose not to.
By the same token, can you explain how it can be read uncharitably without inserting statements they didn't make? Because as you said, they "easily could have" included misogynistic commentary "and chose not to"
Because this topic doesn't exist in a contextless vacuum. It's certainly possible that an internet commenter happened upon the same arguments, using the same language, as popular online anti-feminist movements use. But believing that unlikely coincidence is far beyond benefit of the doubt and we have no obligation to extend that far.
You yourself were enough aware of this context and dynamic that you carefully phrased your comment to avoid it. It's dog whistle shit, intentionally plausibly deniable neutral-seeming language. Corin called it out and you're saying "but plausibly, couldn't they deny this?" Yes! That's the point of it.
I do not have any anger inside me -- just looking forward to helping more people. I support the health of women and men. The thread above is a perfect example of my point. It is literally impossible to talk about caring for men. If you talk about trying to save homeless men, people will get upset at you.
I talked about caring for men. It makes them so angry to care about men. When we talk about men freezing to death on the streets, the topic extends to "toxic patriarchy". I not participate in these abstract conceptual fictitious wars of mainstream though on any side. I care about helping life. Men are your brothers and need to be saved.
One day the world will wake up from their trance. I am optimistic.
I give out food, hygiene kits and money to homeless communities (predominately men). I stop and tell them where to access warming shelters and provide information on groups where they can find case workers to secure jobs and housing. I tell people it's safe to talk about saving men, that it does not make you a radical or an enemy of women. I try to give people hope by showing that you can save freezing men and still care about everybody, that they aren't opposites. It is time we give up abstract fictitious mainstream war philosophies so we can be effective.
I volunteer with the homeless in the Bay Area and am tapped into the "scene" as it were and so can speak to this.
Absolute numbers of homelessness are on the rise, in the Bay Area there was a dramatic uptick in COVID. This is in part due to rising housing costs and because homelessness is a "cumulative" problem. The most common outcomes for homeless people are either get it together after 2-4 years or become so damaged they're never able to re-enter society. We've been accumulating at an ever increasing rate since the 90s.
Visibility is also due to "management" side as you called it. IMO the driving force is the Supreme Court decision Martin v. Boise which forbids criminalizing homelessness. Previously a lot homeless were hidden out of necessity, being visible meant that police would confiscate your belongings and either jail you or move you forcefully. It's now quite easy to get restraining orders against cities who try to do this and people are doing it. For an example of how this can go see this article[0] on a Sausalito homeless encampment. The city spent north of $2 million trying and failing to disperse a homeless encampment.
> If culturally we found homelessness intolerable then we would be more motivated to solve it.
Plenty of people are deeply intolerant of the homeless, but the reaction is usually to hurt not help. Homeless people I know are regularly brutalized by the police and even by ordinary citizens.
The blocker here is that a large number of Americans don't believe that the state has a role in providing the necessities for life. This means its hard to fund programs and even if you do there's no institutional expertise to run them with any competency.
I came to HN for the tech discussion but stay to watch the train wreck whenever tech workers try their hand at humanities. Sure, maybe if we were even more cruel to one of societies most hated groups, we could make them disappear from view. Perhaps we should just move fast and disrupt homelessness with a solution that removes their suffering and provides a real benefit to normal, respectable people. Let's turn the homeless into into protein bars and hand them out at the Google HQ commissary.
Kidding aside, don't speculate--educate yourself. Then you would at least recognize when you say ridiculous and cruel things about people you don't like, don't know, and never bothered to understand.
What are you going on about? Please get off your high horse. Your disparaging comments have contributing nothing to the conversation except to virtue signal your alleged moral superiority. Perhaps instead of going online and lecturing people you could take a moment to read more critically. To extend my original comment further, my commentary was in regards to the phenomenon of homelessness rather than an attack on homeless individuals. We tolerate homelessness in so much as that when we come across a homeless individual we might be give them some money, a warm meal, some clothes or other things. This doesn't solve their troubles, this only continues their state of being. If homelessness as a state of being was truly culturally intolerable then we would be forced to find solutions to the root problem rather than simply making platitudes towards those suffering from homelessness.
Homelessness has causes. Fix those. Most homeless people do NOT want to be homeless. Is it the wages lagging inflation? Fix it. Is it housing rates skyrocketing? Fix it. Is it our broken physical and mental health systems? Fix them. Fix all the homeless people. They will love you.
Tyrannical abuse of the collective over the individual. The collective fails to provide avenues for the healthy development growth of adults, then prosecutes them for drug and other penalties (State of California vs John Doe). Creates a cycle of collective tyrannical abuse over an individual. It is a philosophical problem of toxic collectivism.
Sounds like we're living through the early stages of Will McIntosh's Soft Apocalypse.
>“Gradual” is the key here: Soft Apocalypse shows normal people clinging to the shreds of life as they knew it, while things slowly go from bad to worse. Many still hope that the economy will pick up and life will go back to what it used to be. Even though the streets are filled with homeless people and unemployment stands at 40%, others can still drive a car to work. [1].
Talk to any homeless person in a tent city in the US and they will confirm most if not all of them are heavy drug abusers.
To solve the homelessness problem we first need to help these folks recover their health.
A drug addict with a house will still be a drug addict, the only difference is we won't see their struggle on the streets.
Seriously, if you have ever dealt with addiction you know when you are sick you can't even do the dishes or wash yourself, so how are these guys, just by getting a home, going to manage to get sober, find a job, pay the bills and eventually be able to support themselves and move out so that the next person in need can use the place?
Unfortunately the answer is very unpopular and controversial.
A drug addict will never voluntarily quit drugs and check themselves into rehab then follow a long, difficult treatment to get sober.
Addiction is an awful, depressing, humiliating and painful disease with momentary lapses of reason where many times you just want to put it all to rest with an overdose.
The most frustrating part is the resources are there, we can build SoTA facilities and run the programs and treatment plans these guys need, even customize them if necessary.
But again, we will somehow need to bring them in, most likely by force, and that's the part many in this country can't even consider for debate.
A great book on this is a little known paperback classic, "Love and Addiction" by Dr. Stanton Peele. It is about love, but there is a haunting chapter about society and social drifts. Highly, highly recommended to understand the societal problem of addiction and how it pulls individuals in like a fast moving expanding current. Also force is not going to work -- if a dog is abused and is afraid it will not respond well to being caged. Universal basic income, job opportunities, family and community relationship potential, hope, positive cultural surroundings, healthy food and water, the ability to exercise, a societal safety net, a feeling of camaraderie over competition, the ability to express oneself and develop hobbies, and to feel secure in the parent city, state and nation. Essentially everything the USA will not talk about or try to fix. USA is a warzone of violence of survival for the majority of people. Drugs are society's recommended course of action when the society has broken down.
I think cities should look into Ozempic as a treatment option for drug addiction. Preliminary reports shows that it's mainly a willpower drug, not just a weight loss drug.
> Talk to any homeless person in a tent city in the US and they will confirm most if not all of them are heavy drug abusers.
I don't think self reporting is useful here. Ask the guy who is smoking fent in the back of the bus (smells like burnt peanut butter) if he is a drug addict, and he will confirm that he has never even tried them before.
More to the point, most homeless are only homeless for a week or two. They usually aren't abusing drugs and find themselves back on their feet relatively quickly (or at least can get help and haven't burned all bridges with their family). However, among the chronic homeless, the ones that are the most visible to everyone, substance abuse and/or mental illness is a common problem (with fent, permanent mental illness results pretty quickly).
I really think we should be dumping our resources into easy cases (people who just need some financial support/housing) because if they fall into hard cases (people abusing drugs), it is very expensive to impossible to solve their problems. I don't even think force will work very well, unless you can apply it at the beginning of addiction, most of them will never be productive again and will, humanely, require some kind of assisted living for the rest of their lives.
Don’t mistake my comment for a lack of compassion. Having been homeless myself for almost a year when I was younger, camping out in a local forest preserve and packing out each and every day in the midwest, I do have quite a lot of compassion for homeless people. While I was working my way out of the hole I was in, many of my coworkers were also homeless, I got to know many of them and their individual struggles quite well. However, I’m curious about the cost of assisted living for every drug abusing homeless person in the United States, the ones that don’t work and likely never will, and how the rest of society could shoulder that burden with tax dollars when a huge portion of society barely understands how they will afford to retire when they become too old to work blue collar jobs themselves. I don’t see that being a realistic goal, but I’m interested in hearing more about that if I’m somehow wrong.
I was homeless for a couple of weeks when I was young. It wasn't really that bad for me though, since I was working, and was eventually given a couch in a friend's house.
Finland's method of dealing with chronic homeless should provide a model for an assisted living solution. It comes out to be cheaper than providing services they would consume on the street. A small apartment and a (more well payed than in the states) social worker for every 10 or so residents to make sure they don't burn down the place they are being given by the government.
But we need to provide it nationally rather than at the state or local level. This would give us the opportunity to house them in less expensive locations and would prevent the current "tragedy of the commons" situation we have now.
Worth pointing out that Finland has a much more sparse population density than the United States, with the United States having about 35 people per square kilometer, to Finland's 16. This might enable them to create even cheaper buildings in less desirable parts of their country, though on the flip side, I don't know that all of Finland's land is considered "liveable", basically being in the North Pole. Looking at their homelessness statistics, they've been on a downward trend for homelessness since 1989, having about 17,000 homeless individuals. So assuming that's around the time they started working to put homeless people in houses, I'll use that as their baseline. I'm not sure how accurate the census is on the homeless population in the US, but according to the following link we have about 582,000:
I guess the question here is: does Finland's assisted living solution scale to the size of the United States' homeless problem? And I truly don't have that answer, but while I think it's valuable to point out the patterns that other countries have done to course correct their issues, I think it's also fair to say not every pattern that smaller countries use will work at scale, or even work with our current economic and social systems.
> Ask the guy who is smoking fent in the back of the bus (smells like burnt peanut butter) if he is a drug addict, and he will confirm that he has never even tried them before.
This feels like a reverse Bloom filter situation. Positive means positive, negative means maybe.
That is true. But surely there is a better way to get a handle on this problem than just via self reporting. The issue is also that there are many different kinds of homeless that really aren’t very related to each other. You can’t use the same methodology to even count them.
There are large swaths of rust belt cities with vacant housing. What about a National program to refurb that housing and rehouse the homeless
Basically, turn struggling cities into the business of rehabilitation — federal investment into local housing, rent paying tenants, medicine, treatment, etc.
Trying to build affordable housing in places like San Francisco doesn’t make sense.
The homeless tend to gather in richer cities with economic opportunities for those just struggling or just lots of social programs for those who are completely lost. They aren't going to poor places where housing is cheap because they can't make it there.
There is a youtuber that did a drive through the deep south recently (https://www.youtube.com/@NickJohnson). Poor places in Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana. Housing isn't a problem in these places (well, for some definition of housing), but survival is still hard. You can't just move to places where housing is available and cheap, they are looking for more than that.
Homeless people tend to be homeless where the are from. They do not tend to move to places where being homeless is easier. If they could move, to somewhere better, they wouldn't be homeless.
They could move to places where property is cheaper, at least the functional ones could (non functional would still be homeless), but it wouldn’t help much given the lack of economic opportunities and social help.
Homeless people also have families and friends and community ties. They are as unwilling to break those bonds as you would be. Possibly more because often their survival literally depends on them.
This is a fundamental problem with capitalism for which various band aids have been tried but no real solution has been found IMO.
Capitalism gives stuff according to one’s production, where one’s production is judged in a distributed way by others in the society (subject to various flaws and exploits, of course).
The question is - what do we do with the people whose production (again, as judged by others in society, not in any absolute sense) does not cross the threshold to get enough stuff to live?
We need to tack on some extra subsystem which generally has not integrated well with capitalism in terms of scalability, distribution of judgement, etc.
We should be looking for a decentralized fix of some sort, ideally, in the way that capitalism itself is decentralized. Any ideas?
Just provide a cheap alternative. It doesn't have to be decentralised, it could even come from the government.
Mass produced self-contained pre-fab storage container style houses. Bed, shower, toilet, window, stove. The uglier, the better. You don't even need to sell them cheap, just cheap enough for enough millenials to be able to buy one in two years.
Flood the market, and deregulate where they can be dropped. There'll be a mass exodus of people fleeing from tight landlords to these beauties, and rents and housing prices would drop.
I'm waiting for the 3D printing revolution to take care of this one.
Poverty isn't an unsolved problem of capitalism, it's one of its core functional mechanics and it's not clear that or how it would work without it.
Most people are not willing to work in the ways and amounts that are necessary to generate surplus value for asset owners. Left to their own people would work enough to meet the needs of themselves and their communities and stop. So we don't leave them alone. We create a dangerous and criminalized situation you can fall into to provide "incentive" to create excess labor.
Capitalism can't solve this problem because this isn't a problem from the point of view of capital. From capital's perspective unrest and violence is a problem, and that is what police are for.
California also keeps homeless people down with their insane rents and requirements.
Even working people have a hard time getting and keeping a 650 credit score, as well as first and last month's rent and a security deposit. Used to be the last month's rent was the security deposit.
Couple that with the fact that 99% of properties are run by the same handful of 'property management firms', and it's nigh impossible to pull yourself up by your bootstraps.
Perhaps instead of spending so much money on what I saw accurately dubbed as 'the homeless industrial complex' it could better use the funds to assist home-buyers and even renters to get off the streets.
California offers a form of assistance in helping you by paying your first, last, deposit, and three months rent at a new place. They issue you a letter but inform you that it takes 90+ days to pay out. No one will accept the paper in lieu of real money now, so the case worker's advice? 'Pay it up front and we can pay you back instead'...because homeless people have several grand on hand and a good credit score. Three months of searching until the letter expired and all I had to show for it was approximately $600+ spent on rental applications that were supposed to be paid back by the entity providing the assistance but never was. I stopped paying for them when I realized this. Also some places had literally hundreds of pending applications for the same places and were still accepting more- how is that legal?
Good ideas killed by bureaucracy should be termed 'Californication'.
Edit to add- they also have insane income requirements like 4-6x and up. So $1200/mo for a one bedroom would easily be $4800+/mo required income. On top of $3600+ to move in. At minimum wage if you're lucky enough to find full time you will barely make $2400 pre-tax.
Can you expand on how poverty is a core functional mechanic of capitalism? That is not obvious to me. Capitalism would cease to function without poverty?
It seems to me more like capitalism just does not do anything to prevent poverty, since the system itself is blind to human needs.
I do think that inequality is fundamental to capitalism, and that if we added an equality constraint the system would definitely cease to function. But I don’t see how the same applies to poverty.
If you had inequality without poverty, eg a true basic income or a standard of living "floor" that provided for all basic needs, a grueling low wage job would not be an attractive alternative for a great many people.
When you look at capitalism globally it depends on a tremendous number of people who are paid much less than the value their labor produces, straightforwardly because the alternative is misery and plausible death. The real threat of penury provides the coercive force that gets work done at rates that capital owners are able to take as profit.
And like yes there is varying tolerance of different forms and degrees of deprivation, and maybe there is some balanced "sweet spot" where you can keep people sad enough, and provide a well paid-enough minimum wage where grim poverty is gone but owners can still accrue profits.
But if that's even possible which I'm not convinced about, we are deep in a local maximum and not climbing out of it. The accumulation of capital provides its own feedback loop for optimizing the value extracted from peoples' labor. The existence of poverty is a highly efficient pressure mechanism in that cycle. There's no incentive from the top to remove it and make the machine less effective at its purpose, generating profit.
So many times I've read a thoughtful comment on these topics, and when I look up it is by giraffe_lady. Like, literally dozens. Probably just an odd conjunction of interests and views.
Anyhow. Keep up the thoughtful writing, and thanks.
42 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 102 ms ] threadIt feels to me that homelessness is more "tolerated" these days. If someone is sleeping in front of the metro station entrance we have a "leave them be" kind of attitude. I wonder if this correlates to a reduction in homelessness management systems like described in the article "less beds". If we're okay with homeless people camping on our trails and in our parks maybe there is less incentive to spend money on creating other places for them to go. Then with less places to go we have more homeless people so then we have less incentive to create places for them to go.
Makes me speculate if tolerance is part of the problem here. If culturally we found homelessness intolerable then we would be more motivated to solve it.
I don’t think homelessness should be tolerated. That said, homeless people definitely deserve our tolerance and compassion.
I've been homeless a lot and literally never heard this view until now. Asserted and dismissed without evidence.
> we are a long way to having social discussion about helping men.
Are we? Which men? With which problems?
I hear this argument all the time from anti-feminists. MRM propagandists often make an argument like, "Almost all the domestic violence shelters are for women. You feminists only care about women." The response from feminists is generally, "Feel free to get to work." But of course, MRM people don't care about men's suffering under sexism, they care about bashing feminists, so they don't do any organizing. This dynamic would be funnier if it weren't so sad.
So what are you personally doing to address the suffering of men under sexism? I mean, aside from alienating your natural allies?
Painting the above poster with an anti-feminist brush is uncharitable.
Disposable male theory isn't incompatible with a feminist perspective. I realize it's a mens rights talking point, but even a broken clock is right twice a day.
My take: Patriarchy reinforces male supremacy which puts men in positions of power, and prioritizes the needs of men at a societal level; but men without power (as well as non-white, non-straight, non-"traditionally masculine" men) are also victims of patriarchy, and face challenges specific to men.
I'd point you to the /r/menslib subreddit which was a great, anti-men's rights, intersectional, and feminist-allied discussion forum for men's issues, but they've unfortunately gone dark. For a brief introduction, there's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men%27s_liberation_movement at least
edit: Here's a fascinating video essay deconstructing the toxic masculinity of Andrew Tate, and how patriarchy affects men: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6_TOFy3k6k I found it on /r/breadtube, but it's definitely the type of fare common on /r/menslib
The other comment is using undiluted MRA & anti-feminist talking points without compromise or condition. The only way to read it charitably is to insert statements they didn't make, but easily could have and chose not to.
The person seemed to be commenting from a place of anger at how their brother was treated adversarially in his time of greatest need.
I volunteered with homeless people for years, and 80% or more were men. This issue is close to my heart as well and I absolutely think the commenter was pointing out relevant systemic issues, including touching on toxic masculinity and its attitude of treating other men adverserially
> The only way to read it charitably is to insert statements they didn't make, but easily could have and chose not to.
By the same token, can you explain how it can be read uncharitably without inserting statements they didn't make? Because as you said, they "easily could have" included misogynistic commentary "and chose not to"
You yourself were enough aware of this context and dynamic that you carefully phrased your comment to avoid it. It's dog whistle shit, intentionally plausibly deniable neutral-seeming language. Corin called it out and you're saying "but plausibly, couldn't they deny this?" Yes! That's the point of it.
I talked about caring for men. It makes them so angry to care about men. When we talk about men freezing to death on the streets, the topic extends to "toxic patriarchy". I not participate in these abstract conceptual fictitious wars of mainstream though on any side. I care about helping life. Men are your brothers and need to be saved.
One day the world will wake up from their trance. I am optimistic.
I give out food, hygiene kits and money to homeless communities (predominately men). I stop and tell them where to access warming shelters and provide information on groups where they can find case workers to secure jobs and housing. I tell people it's safe to talk about saving men, that it does not make you a radical or an enemy of women. I try to give people hope by showing that you can save freezing men and still care about everybody, that they aren't opposites. It is time we give up abstract fictitious mainstream war philosophies so we can be effective.
They are wonderful people and deserve it.
Absolute numbers of homelessness are on the rise, in the Bay Area there was a dramatic uptick in COVID. This is in part due to rising housing costs and because homelessness is a "cumulative" problem. The most common outcomes for homeless people are either get it together after 2-4 years or become so damaged they're never able to re-enter society. We've been accumulating at an ever increasing rate since the 90s.
Visibility is also due to "management" side as you called it. IMO the driving force is the Supreme Court decision Martin v. Boise which forbids criminalizing homelessness. Previously a lot homeless were hidden out of necessity, being visible meant that police would confiscate your belongings and either jail you or move you forcefully. It's now quite easy to get restraining orders against cities who try to do this and people are doing it. For an example of how this can go see this article[0] on a Sausalito homeless encampment. The city spent north of $2 million trying and failing to disperse a homeless encampment.
> If culturally we found homelessness intolerable then we would be more motivated to solve it.
Plenty of people are deeply intolerant of the homeless, but the reaction is usually to hurt not help. Homeless people I know are regularly brutalized by the police and even by ordinary citizens.
The blocker here is that a large number of Americans don't believe that the state has a role in providing the necessities for life. This means its hard to fund programs and even if you do there's no institutional expertise to run them with any competency.
IMO we're decades away from a solution.
[0] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/sausalito-homele...
Kidding aside, don't speculate--educate yourself. Then you would at least recognize when you say ridiculous and cruel things about people you don't like, don't know, and never bothered to understand.
>“Gradual” is the key here: Soft Apocalypse shows normal people clinging to the shreds of life as they knew it, while things slowly go from bad to worse. Many still hope that the economy will pick up and life will go back to what it used to be. Even though the streets are filled with homeless people and unemployment stands at 40%, others can still drive a car to work. [1].
1. https://www.tor.com/2011/04/13/the-gradual-collapse-of-a-soc...
To solve the homelessness problem we first need to help these folks recover their health.
A drug addict with a house will still be a drug addict, the only difference is we won't see their struggle on the streets.
Seriously, if you have ever dealt with addiction you know when you are sick you can't even do the dishes or wash yourself, so how are these guys, just by getting a home, going to manage to get sober, find a job, pay the bills and eventually be able to support themselves and move out so that the next person in need can use the place?
Unfortunately the answer is very unpopular and controversial.
A drug addict will never voluntarily quit drugs and check themselves into rehab then follow a long, difficult treatment to get sober.
Addiction is an awful, depressing, humiliating and painful disease with momentary lapses of reason where many times you just want to put it all to rest with an overdose.
The most frustrating part is the resources are there, we can build SoTA facilities and run the programs and treatment plans these guys need, even customize them if necessary.
But again, we will somehow need to bring them in, most likely by force, and that's the part many in this country can't even consider for debate.
I don't think self reporting is useful here. Ask the guy who is smoking fent in the back of the bus (smells like burnt peanut butter) if he is a drug addict, and he will confirm that he has never even tried them before.
More to the point, most homeless are only homeless for a week or two. They usually aren't abusing drugs and find themselves back on their feet relatively quickly (or at least can get help and haven't burned all bridges with their family). However, among the chronic homeless, the ones that are the most visible to everyone, substance abuse and/or mental illness is a common problem (with fent, permanent mental illness results pretty quickly).
I really think we should be dumping our resources into easy cases (people who just need some financial support/housing) because if they fall into hard cases (people abusing drugs), it is very expensive to impossible to solve their problems. I don't even think force will work very well, unless you can apply it at the beginning of addiction, most of them will never be productive again and will, humanely, require some kind of assisted living for the rest of their lives.
Finland's method of dealing with chronic homeless should provide a model for an assisted living solution. It comes out to be cheaper than providing services they would consume on the street. A small apartment and a (more well payed than in the states) social worker for every 10 or so residents to make sure they don't burn down the place they are being given by the government.
But we need to provide it nationally rather than at the state or local level. This would give us the opportunity to house them in less expensive locations and would prevent the current "tragedy of the commons" situation we have now.
https://endhomelessness.org/homelessness-in-america/homeless...
I guess the question here is: does Finland's assisted living solution scale to the size of the United States' homeless problem? And I truly don't have that answer, but while I think it's valuable to point out the patterns that other countries have done to course correct their issues, I think it's also fair to say not every pattern that smaller countries use will work at scale, or even work with our current economic and social systems.
This feels like a reverse Bloom filter situation. Positive means positive, negative means maybe.
Basically, turn struggling cities into the business of rehabilitation — federal investment into local housing, rent paying tenants, medicine, treatment, etc.
Trying to build affordable housing in places like San Francisco doesn’t make sense.
https://www.foxbusiness.com/features/which-city-has-most-vac...
There is a youtuber that did a drive through the deep south recently (https://www.youtube.com/@NickJohnson). Poor places in Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana. Housing isn't a problem in these places (well, for some definition of housing), but survival is still hard. You can't just move to places where housing is available and cheap, they are looking for more than that.
Capitalism gives stuff according to one’s production, where one’s production is judged in a distributed way by others in the society (subject to various flaws and exploits, of course).
The question is - what do we do with the people whose production (again, as judged by others in society, not in any absolute sense) does not cross the threshold to get enough stuff to live?
We need to tack on some extra subsystem which generally has not integrated well with capitalism in terms of scalability, distribution of judgement, etc.
We should be looking for a decentralized fix of some sort, ideally, in the way that capitalism itself is decentralized. Any ideas?
Mass produced self-contained pre-fab storage container style houses. Bed, shower, toilet, window, stove. The uglier, the better. You don't even need to sell them cheap, just cheap enough for enough millenials to be able to buy one in two years.
Flood the market, and deregulate where they can be dropped. There'll be a mass exodus of people fleeing from tight landlords to these beauties, and rents and housing prices would drop.
I'm waiting for the 3D printing revolution to take care of this one.
Most people are not willing to work in the ways and amounts that are necessary to generate surplus value for asset owners. Left to their own people would work enough to meet the needs of themselves and their communities and stop. So we don't leave them alone. We create a dangerous and criminalized situation you can fall into to provide "incentive" to create excess labor.
Capitalism can't solve this problem because this isn't a problem from the point of view of capital. From capital's perspective unrest and violence is a problem, and that is what police are for.
California also keeps homeless people down with their insane rents and requirements.
Even working people have a hard time getting and keeping a 650 credit score, as well as first and last month's rent and a security deposit. Used to be the last month's rent was the security deposit.
Couple that with the fact that 99% of properties are run by the same handful of 'property management firms', and it's nigh impossible to pull yourself up by your bootstraps.
Perhaps instead of spending so much money on what I saw accurately dubbed as 'the homeless industrial complex' it could better use the funds to assist home-buyers and even renters to get off the streets.
California offers a form of assistance in helping you by paying your first, last, deposit, and three months rent at a new place. They issue you a letter but inform you that it takes 90+ days to pay out. No one will accept the paper in lieu of real money now, so the case worker's advice? 'Pay it up front and we can pay you back instead'...because homeless people have several grand on hand and a good credit score. Three months of searching until the letter expired and all I had to show for it was approximately $600+ spent on rental applications that were supposed to be paid back by the entity providing the assistance but never was. I stopped paying for them when I realized this. Also some places had literally hundreds of pending applications for the same places and were still accepting more- how is that legal?
Good ideas killed by bureaucracy should be termed 'Californication'.
Edit to add- they also have insane income requirements like 4-6x and up. So $1200/mo for a one bedroom would easily be $4800+/mo required income. On top of $3600+ to move in. At minimum wage if you're lucky enough to find full time you will barely make $2400 pre-tax.
It seems to me more like capitalism just does not do anything to prevent poverty, since the system itself is blind to human needs.
I do think that inequality is fundamental to capitalism, and that if we added an equality constraint the system would definitely cease to function. But I don’t see how the same applies to poverty.
When you look at capitalism globally it depends on a tremendous number of people who are paid much less than the value their labor produces, straightforwardly because the alternative is misery and plausible death. The real threat of penury provides the coercive force that gets work done at rates that capital owners are able to take as profit.
And like yes there is varying tolerance of different forms and degrees of deprivation, and maybe there is some balanced "sweet spot" where you can keep people sad enough, and provide a well paid-enough minimum wage where grim poverty is gone but owners can still accrue profits.
But if that's even possible which I'm not convinced about, we are deep in a local maximum and not climbing out of it. The accumulation of capital provides its own feedback loop for optimizing the value extracted from peoples' labor. The existence of poverty is a highly efficient pressure mechanism in that cycle. There's no incentive from the top to remove it and make the machine less effective at its purpose, generating profit.
Anyhow. Keep up the thoughtful writing, and thanks.