California has about 12 percent of the US population, about 25 percent or so of the homeless population of the United States and about 50 percent of the unsheltered homeless in this country.
I don't think their affordable housing crisis is really a local problem that can be solved solely with local efforts.
And we can fix that. 90% of that 50% of the unsheltered in the country is hopelessly, rampantly, addicted to hard drugs that are still illegal, even in CA and committing multiple other misdemeanors per day.
While I don't think it's a good idea to force people into mental health or drug treatment against their will (e.g. involuntary commitment) just because they are mentally ill or addicted. But I do think that if they are busy committing strings of dozens of misdemeanors, stealing, openly using meth and fentanyl, etc. that this is the perfect opportunity to actually enforce the laws on the books. Then it is the state that can decide to show leniency by sentencing and enforcing treatment.
Poof! now you would have only 5% of the nation's unsheltered homeless instead of 50%. The rest would a minimum be sheltered. They could then be treated for mental illness and weaned off drugs. It would probably save the lives of many.
Taking a ridiculously permissive stance on squatting, stealing, drugs, trespassing, property crimes, etc. is not humane. On the contrary, it is 100% causing the situation.
Your number is a made up lie and you know it. Link some sources for this, or stop spreading this nonsense.
Some number of the unsheltered homeless are drug addicts, and some of those became drug addicts after they were homeless, because being homeless is soul crushing.
You need to be asking the true cause of a lot of this homelessness, and also the cause of the cases where folks became homeless because of drug use. A very large percentage of all homeless are veterans (20-30%) and california has the highest number of homeless veterans (so the percentage is likely higher there). Most folks become homeless due to costs, not drugs. The most visible, aggressive homeless are likely drug addicts, and those are the ones you notice, but they aren't properly representative of the problem, and your characteristic of the problem makes the problem worse, not better.
Where are you getting that 90% number from? That doesn't match with any source I'm familiar with. For example, the 2023 statewide homeless study from UCSF (https://homelessness.ucsf.edu/sites/default/files/2023-06/CA...) reported these numbers: "We describe current regular use of cocaine,
amphetamines, and non-prescribed opioids as use
three times a week or more. By this definition, one
third (35%) of participants reported currently using
cocaine, amphetamines, or non-prescription opioids
regularly (Figure 31). Thirty-one percent of
participants report current regular use of methamphetamines; 3% cocaine, and 11% non-prescribed
opioids. In the prior six months, 13% of all
participants report using injection drugs."
There is a nationwide shortage of affordable housing. Studies strongly support the idea that this is the primary root cause of homelessness.
It's a tired and inaccurate meme that "homeless people are all junkies and crazies who aren't trying hard enough to solve their personal issues." I'm talking about housing issues and what needs to be done to redress a nationwide shortage of affordable housing.
Lots of millionaire rock stars are also junkies and it doesn't land them on the street. They go in and out of treatment but still have sometimes multiple mansions. I see zero reason to believe that drugs and alcohol are some primary cause of homelessness.
Homelessness is a complex issue and people want a simple answer. The simple answer is that we lack affordable housing nationwide.
Another fairly simply concept that applies broadly is that you end up homeless when your problems exceed your support resources. The difference between a homeless person and a housed person can be one more problem or one less resource, whether a good friend, a steady source of income, a family doctor or some other form of support that helps you make your life.
Addiction is not magically fixed by prison and/or rehab. Even with a holistic approach of social support, medical treatment and mental healthcare, addiction has such a hold that rehabilitation hovers around 15% effectiveness. There's no easy fix, and it's almost impossible to stem the flow from the supply side. Your proposed solution would result in a very expensive revolving door, imo.
The US has underbuilt housing for decades and there are a lot of forces that have pushed up house size while average household size has decreased. There isn't a single US state with enough affordable housing.
It's like the Red Queen Effect where you have to run faster just to stay in place and some people can't keep up, fall off the treadmill and can't manage to get back on.
Studies show increased cost of housing is the single biggest predictor of rising rates of homelessness and homeless people somewhat often travel to places with better climates to camp. The temperate weather and low rainfall in California helps attract people from out of state and then housing costs there are so high its nigh impossible to get back into housing once there.
I have similar perspective. But, I struggle to imagine a holistic answer that doesn't seem self-contradictory.
Here's the core problem statement: As long as it is true that some places are more desirable than others, there is an increasing population, and we resolve access conflicts via capitalism, there are going to be financially displaced people.
Given that, where do we draw the line on whether it is a local problem to solve with "infill" (i.e. keep increasing density and lowering cost to satisfy all who want it) versus "displacement" (i.e. declaring the area is fully developed and occupied, so those without sufficient budget must try somewhere else)?
I am not advocating a particular view here. But, I do think the same question arises at different scopes/size/granularity, and I find it fascinating how people draw lines and answer completely differently for different scopes. It's heavily politicized too.
So here's the thought experiment: Does an individual rich person have to add housing to their mansion or estate for those who cannot offer enough to buy out the whole property? Or can the owner reasonably expect those people to look elsewhere?
What about a rich enclave/gated community/subdivision?
Or a small and rich city like Beverly Hills?
Or Los Angeles County?
Or various attractive regional or state parks?
Or Yosemite National Park?
Or coastal towns which are highly sought after and also more survivable without shelter?
Or the whole State of California?
Or the entire USA?
Of course we could ask similar questions about other US regions, but I tried to stick to California given the thread...
Homelessness is an inherently hard problem to solve. Programs to "help the homeless" tend to make the problem worse. If you need to be homeless to qualify for help, there are perverse incentives at work.
We need a new housing model. Since World War II, average house size has increased, average household size (number of people in the home) has decreased.
We fundamentally need a different form of housing than what is getting fostered by policies and financing mechanisms largely created as part of the process of solving the last housing crisis by inventing the modern suburb and blanketing the country with it.
We now have a cartoonish 1950s single family home on steroids as our default expectation, thus the red queen effect. We have torn down a million single room occupancy units and expect as a default that single young adults in the city rent a bedroom in a 5 bedroom family home shared with unrelated single people in a living situation not designed for that.
Then we make horror movies about room mates, like Single White Female, and pretend this is inevitable and not a consequence of policy decisions that actively discourage builders from building homes that work for singletons, students, seniors and single parents.
California has close to the worst per capita housing supply of any state in the US. From https://www.vox.com/cities-and-urbanism/2018/2/23/17011154/s...: "The state’s population has steadily grown, but it hasn’t been building new places for people to live at anything close to the same rate. It now ranks 49th in housing units per capita." There's a lot that can be done locally to improve homelessness.
The article you are quoting is from 2018. An article from 2019 says:
For this map, we analyzed the states with the most available housing based on population. We divided the number of housing units available in 2019 by the state’s population in order to determine the states with the most available housing per capita.
By this metric, we can see that the states where it’s easiest to find housing include Utah (2.83 units per capita), California (2.75), Hawaii (2.57), and Texas (2.57). Overall, in the United States, there are approximately 2.35 housing units available per capita.
I'm sure your comment is made in good faith, but it doesn't actually rebut my statement that this is not a problem that is likely to be solved by solely local efforts.
Adding more lanes to a freeway tends to not solve the problem of congestion. If you want fewer cars on the road, you need to make it feasible for more people to get where they want or need to go some other way: walking, cycling, public transit.
Our current financing mechanisms, housing policies and general expectations for what constitutes good housing are rooted in policies developed post World War II to help solve the housing crisis of that era and it gave birth to the modern suburb. We now have policies and practices that make it hard to build and finance anything other than single-family detached homes and various trends have pushed up average size of new homes while the average number of people living in such homes has shrunk.
Does California need more affordable housing? Absolutely.
So does every other state in the US. And other states are generally more affordable than California, so if other states will also address their housing issues, you will see fewer homeless people moving to California to camp in a tent and then finding it tough to get back into housing.
I tried to understand what that deedclaim.com article was saying and completely failed. There are obviously not 2.75 houses per person in California. I have no idea what that number is trying to indicate.
I'm not sure either. It really only is intended to support the point that this isn't a good way to try to "rebut" my statement and I didn't try hard to find a highly reliable source, which is generally a bad idea, especially when posting to HN.
Here is another figure:
California ranks among states with the lowest vacancy rates, according to a new report by LendingTree.
But because California is so large, it still has the second-highest number of vacant homes - about 8.7% according to the report, or around 1.2 million empty homes.
There are lots of empty homes in the US and lots of homeless people on the streets and lots of people with modest incomes struggling to find housing they can afford that works for them financially and in other ways. The empty homes are often not homes that would serve the needs of homeless people well. You can have a lot of empty homes and still have a lot of people on the street and California does have both.
I tend to talk about walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods rather than affordable housing because the phrase "affordable housing" is a hot-button phrase and most people seem to think it means either government projects or poverty housing (or both). It's a really tough topic to communicate well on and I have been absent from HN in recent weeks, as is common for me around the holidays, and I'm probably making a mistake trying to discuss this at all.
It's not really a central topic of focus for the forum and it's endlessly frustrating trying to do that Vulcan mind meld "my mind to yours" and convey what I am thinking by little black characters on a light background. It routinely gets very wildly misconstrued and it's very unusual for people to actually care to understand my point. Most are just waiting to shoot it down and reassert whatever they already believe is true, which often boils down to "Let's just round up homeless people and throw them in jail!"
> By this metric, we can see that the states where it’s easiest to find housing include Utah (2.83 units per capita), California (2.75), Hawaii (2.57), and Texas (2.57). Overall, in the United States, there are approximately 2.35 housing units available per capita
I don't know how deedclaim computed those numbers, or the reliability of the source; but California most definitely has a shortage of housing. The numbers I quoted come from the McKinsey Global institute study: https://web.archive.org/web/20161105022549/https://www.mckin...
And local policy is very much a problem. Briefly as described in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0IHEMHc2yfY, California has a lot of housing restrictions, a high cost of construction, and processes that make it easy for housing opponents to block new developments.
And your statement "you will see fewer homeless people moving to California to camp in a tent and then finding it tough to get back into housing." is not an accurate characterization. Most of the homeless in California are Californians. Quoting from 2023 UCSF homeless study (https://homelessness.ucsf.edu/sites/default/files/2023-06/CA...): "People experiencing homelessness in
California are Californians. Nine out of ten
participants lost their last housing in California;
75% of participants lived in the same county as their last housing"
I've spoken to people and read articles where they moved to California to stay with a friend temporarily and try to find work or a similar scenario, it didn't work out and they ended up homeless. If your last address was prison in California, your last address makes you "a Californian."
Those stats tend to be self reported. They tend to try to frame the local homeless as members of the community in which they are currently homeless in order to try to convince people to see them as human beings deserving help and compassion because it's already far too common for cops to drive them to the edge of town and dump them or stick them on a bus to elsewhere.
It's illegal to dump homeless people that way but it's common knowledge that it happens. And it's a known thing some hospitals and such in other states release people, stick them on a bus and send them to California.
I spent nearly six years homeless. I traveled to California as a homeless person to camp there. I left California to get back into housing after all attempts to get into housing in California failed, even though I repeatedly relocated to someplace cheaper within California to try to arrange it.
I have talked to homeless people in person or online for years. I know for a fact other homeless people choose to physically relocate to more temperate, drier climes to survive it. You can go on reddit and find questions about "where to go" as a homeless person. Warmer and dryer are two frequent criteria sought.
I've participated in the planning stages of an annual point in time count. I'm familiar with the enormous challenges involved in getting useful data on a population that does its best to remain invisible.
The highly obvious homeless are the tip of the iceberg. There are far more homeless in stealth mode hiding it from their employer or their college, sleeping in a vehicle or couch surfing or living in situations not intended to be permanent housing, such as hotels.
I'm confident that my characterization of the situation is accurate. And that the people publishing data on homeless populations rarely have good data to begin with and then routinely spin it to serve a political agenda of trying to get some compassion and sympathy for people instead of more abuse.
I don't want that. I want housing solutions, not a pity party, and I've been pursuing education and doing personal research etc for decades to try to serve that goal.
So I guess we can agree to disagree because that's a big fat NO from me, sorry.
> By this metric, we can see that the states where it’s easiest to find housing include Utah (2.83 units per capita), California (2.75), Hawaii (2.57), and Texas (2.57). Overall, in the United States, there are approximately 2.35 housing units available per capita.
I just read the article. I think the article makes a grave error. It is not 2.37 houses per person, which would be absurd. Instead it is 2.37 persons per available house. So instead of being 2nd easiest to find housing, California is 2nd most difficult. This is also borne out by the new construction rates in California, which has faced huge population growth but below national average house construction.
Seeing as the article is not about solving homelessness across the country, but in a specific place, I'm a bit confused by your comment. Do you think the measures undertaken in the article are useful or pointless?
I think a more equitable distribution of wealth than the status quo would be great, but I'm still not sure what you think of the judge's decision. Seems to me it's a good ruling, trying to push the locals to build more affordable housing. No, it won't solve homelessness, but it seems like the judge is helping, a little bit.
Re your edit: It's probably not just theater. It's probably a good faith effort to fix a problem that's poorly understood using the tools available in a situation where it's very challenging to try get a real solution implemented.
But in practice that makes it not much better than theater. If it simply doesn't work, it makes little difference if they genuinely meant well or were consciously going through the motions to "look good" without having to deliver real results.
Yes this sounds accurate to me. He drew a line in the sand, as you say, but it's incredibly ineffective, almost to being pointless. I guess I hope at least one person gets an affordable home from this, but even that seems questionable.
While locally-managed, tailored efforts are better than central planning, social security functions need federal support to spread the costs evenly. Rather than pouring billions into militarized repression or untested pipedreams, housing shortages needs to be solved with housing and sensible policies.
I take it this sort of activist lawmaking from the bench likely exceeding their authority intends to compel reactive lawmaking of viable alternatives. This sounds unproductive and political in nature rather than policywonk-worthy.
Disclaimer: I was unhoused and invisible in California for 9 years. No one cared since actions speak louder than words. The only way the situation will ever change is through focused, patient, nonviolent, disruptive collective action to insist on it. It's unlikely to ever change because 80% of Americans are either motivated by selfishness, callousness, selfishness, ignorance, or expedient neglect.
28 comments
[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 62.5 ms ] threadOMG, _the horror!!_
I don't think their affordable housing crisis is really a local problem that can be solved solely with local efforts.
While I don't think it's a good idea to force people into mental health or drug treatment against their will (e.g. involuntary commitment) just because they are mentally ill or addicted. But I do think that if they are busy committing strings of dozens of misdemeanors, stealing, openly using meth and fentanyl, etc. that this is the perfect opportunity to actually enforce the laws on the books. Then it is the state that can decide to show leniency by sentencing and enforcing treatment.
Poof! now you would have only 5% of the nation's unsheltered homeless instead of 50%. The rest would a minimum be sheltered. They could then be treated for mental illness and weaned off drugs. It would probably save the lives of many.
Taking a ridiculously permissive stance on squatting, stealing, drugs, trespassing, property crimes, etc. is not humane. On the contrary, it is 100% causing the situation.
Some number of the unsheltered homeless are drug addicts, and some of those became drug addicts after they were homeless, because being homeless is soul crushing.
You need to be asking the true cause of a lot of this homelessness, and also the cause of the cases where folks became homeless because of drug use. A very large percentage of all homeless are veterans (20-30%) and california has the highest number of homeless veterans (so the percentage is likely higher there). Most folks become homeless due to costs, not drugs. The most visible, aggressive homeless are likely drug addicts, and those are the ones you notice, but they aren't properly representative of the problem, and your characteristic of the problem makes the problem worse, not better.
It's a tired and inaccurate meme that "homeless people are all junkies and crazies who aren't trying hard enough to solve their personal issues." I'm talking about housing issues and what needs to be done to redress a nationwide shortage of affordable housing.
Lots of millionaire rock stars are also junkies and it doesn't land them on the street. They go in and out of treatment but still have sometimes multiple mansions. I see zero reason to believe that drugs and alcohol are some primary cause of homelessness.
Homelessness is a complex issue and people want a simple answer. The simple answer is that we lack affordable housing nationwide.
Another fairly simply concept that applies broadly is that you end up homeless when your problems exceed your support resources. The difference between a homeless person and a housed person can be one more problem or one less resource, whether a good friend, a steady source of income, a family doctor or some other form of support that helps you make your life.
But devils advocate, we also have a lot of the money.
Look at a state like Mississippi. Yes, they likely have less unhoused population per capita, but they're also much lower in GDP per capita.
To get at the real metric, we should be comparing GDP per unhoused person of each state.
It's like the Red Queen Effect where you have to run faster just to stay in place and some people can't keep up, fall off the treadmill and can't manage to get back on.
Studies show increased cost of housing is the single biggest predictor of rising rates of homelessness and homeless people somewhat often travel to places with better climates to camp. The temperate weather and low rainfall in California helps attract people from out of state and then housing costs there are so high its nigh impossible to get back into housing once there.
Here's the core problem statement: As long as it is true that some places are more desirable than others, there is an increasing population, and we resolve access conflicts via capitalism, there are going to be financially displaced people.
Given that, where do we draw the line on whether it is a local problem to solve with "infill" (i.e. keep increasing density and lowering cost to satisfy all who want it) versus "displacement" (i.e. declaring the area is fully developed and occupied, so those without sufficient budget must try somewhere else)?
I am not advocating a particular view here. But, I do think the same question arises at different scopes/size/granularity, and I find it fascinating how people draw lines and answer completely differently for different scopes. It's heavily politicized too.
So here's the thought experiment: Does an individual rich person have to add housing to their mansion or estate for those who cannot offer enough to buy out the whole property? Or can the owner reasonably expect those people to look elsewhere?
What about a rich enclave/gated community/subdivision?
Or a small and rich city like Beverly Hills?
Or Los Angeles County?
Or various attractive regional or state parks?
Or Yosemite National Park?
Or coastal towns which are highly sought after and also more survivable without shelter?
Or the whole State of California?
Or the entire USA?
Of course we could ask similar questions about other US regions, but I tried to stick to California given the thread...
We need a new housing model. Since World War II, average house size has increased, average household size (number of people in the home) has decreased.
We fundamentally need a different form of housing than what is getting fostered by policies and financing mechanisms largely created as part of the process of solving the last housing crisis by inventing the modern suburb and blanketing the country with it.
We now have a cartoonish 1950s single family home on steroids as our default expectation, thus the red queen effect. We have torn down a million single room occupancy units and expect as a default that single young adults in the city rent a bedroom in a 5 bedroom family home shared with unrelated single people in a living situation not designed for that.
Then we make horror movies about room mates, like Single White Female, and pretend this is inevitable and not a consequence of policy decisions that actively discourage builders from building homes that work for singletons, students, seniors and single parents.
For this map, we analyzed the states with the most available housing based on population. We divided the number of housing units available in 2019 by the state’s population in order to determine the states with the most available housing per capita.
By this metric, we can see that the states where it’s easiest to find housing include Utah (2.83 units per capita), California (2.75), Hawaii (2.57), and Texas (2.57). Overall, in the United States, there are approximately 2.35 housing units available per capita.
https://www.deedclaim.com/states-with-most-housing-growth/
A favorite quote of mine: There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.
It's often attributed to Mark Twain, who popularized it. He attributed it to Benjamin Disraeli.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies,_damned_lies,_and_statist...
I'm sure your comment is made in good faith, but it doesn't actually rebut my statement that this is not a problem that is likely to be solved by solely local efforts.
Adding more lanes to a freeway tends to not solve the problem of congestion. If you want fewer cars on the road, you need to make it feasible for more people to get where they want or need to go some other way: walking, cycling, public transit.
Our current financing mechanisms, housing policies and general expectations for what constitutes good housing are rooted in policies developed post World War II to help solve the housing crisis of that era and it gave birth to the modern suburb. We now have policies and practices that make it hard to build and finance anything other than single-family detached homes and various trends have pushed up average size of new homes while the average number of people living in such homes has shrunk.
Does California need more affordable housing? Absolutely.
So does every other state in the US. And other states are generally more affordable than California, so if other states will also address their housing issues, you will see fewer homeless people moving to California to camp in a tent and then finding it tough to get back into housing.
Here is another figure:
California ranks among states with the lowest vacancy rates, according to a new report by LendingTree.
But because California is so large, it still has the second-highest number of vacant homes - about 8.7% according to the report, or around 1.2 million empty homes.
https://www.foxla.com/news/california-housing-vacancy-rate
There are lots of empty homes in the US and lots of homeless people on the streets and lots of people with modest incomes struggling to find housing they can afford that works for them financially and in other ways. The empty homes are often not homes that would serve the needs of homeless people well. You can have a lot of empty homes and still have a lot of people on the street and California does have both.
I tend to talk about walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods rather than affordable housing because the phrase "affordable housing" is a hot-button phrase and most people seem to think it means either government projects or poverty housing (or both). It's a really tough topic to communicate well on and I have been absent from HN in recent weeks, as is common for me around the holidays, and I'm probably making a mistake trying to discuss this at all.
It's not really a central topic of focus for the forum and it's endlessly frustrating trying to do that Vulcan mind meld "my mind to yours" and convey what I am thinking by little black characters on a light background. It routinely gets very wildly misconstrued and it's very unusual for people to actually care to understand my point. Most are just waiting to shoot it down and reassert whatever they already believe is true, which often boils down to "Let's just round up homeless people and throw them in jail!"
I don't know how deedclaim computed those numbers, or the reliability of the source; but California most definitely has a shortage of housing. The numbers I quoted come from the McKinsey Global institute study: https://web.archive.org/web/20161105022549/https://www.mckin...
And local policy is very much a problem. Briefly as described in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0IHEMHc2yfY, California has a lot of housing restrictions, a high cost of construction, and processes that make it easy for housing opponents to block new developments.
And your statement "you will see fewer homeless people moving to California to camp in a tent and then finding it tough to get back into housing." is not an accurate characterization. Most of the homeless in California are Californians. Quoting from 2023 UCSF homeless study (https://homelessness.ucsf.edu/sites/default/files/2023-06/CA...): "People experiencing homelessness in California are Californians. Nine out of ten participants lost their last housing in California; 75% of participants lived in the same county as their last housing"
Those stats tend to be self reported. They tend to try to frame the local homeless as members of the community in which they are currently homeless in order to try to convince people to see them as human beings deserving help and compassion because it's already far too common for cops to drive them to the edge of town and dump them or stick them on a bus to elsewhere.
It's illegal to dump homeless people that way but it's common knowledge that it happens. And it's a known thing some hospitals and such in other states release people, stick them on a bus and send them to California.
I spent nearly six years homeless. I traveled to California as a homeless person to camp there. I left California to get back into housing after all attempts to get into housing in California failed, even though I repeatedly relocated to someplace cheaper within California to try to arrange it.
I have talked to homeless people in person or online for years. I know for a fact other homeless people choose to physically relocate to more temperate, drier climes to survive it. You can go on reddit and find questions about "where to go" as a homeless person. Warmer and dryer are two frequent criteria sought.
I've participated in the planning stages of an annual point in time count. I'm familiar with the enormous challenges involved in getting useful data on a population that does its best to remain invisible.
The highly obvious homeless are the tip of the iceberg. There are far more homeless in stealth mode hiding it from their employer or their college, sleeping in a vehicle or couch surfing or living in situations not intended to be permanent housing, such as hotels.
I'm confident that my characterization of the situation is accurate. And that the people publishing data on homeless populations rarely have good data to begin with and then routinely spin it to serve a political agenda of trying to get some compassion and sympathy for people instead of more abuse.
I don't want that. I want housing solutions, not a pity party, and I've been pursuing education and doing personal research etc for decades to try to serve that goal.
So I guess we can agree to disagree because that's a big fat NO from me, sorry.
I just read the article. I think the article makes a grave error. It is not 2.37 houses per person, which would be absurd. Instead it is 2.37 persons per available house. So instead of being 2nd easiest to find housing, California is 2nd most difficult. This is also borne out by the new construction rates in California, which has faced huge population growth but below national average house construction.
I think we need national solutions to this issue. I think California cannot solve it alone.
A problem of this size doesn't get solved at the point of impact. You have to step back, get a bigger picture view and see where it's coming from.
It's like a flood. Drawing a line in the sand at your door won't stop it.
[edit] or is his ruling just theater?
Because for me, that's kind of irrelevant, for reasons I've already covered.
But in practice that makes it not much better than theater. If it simply doesn't work, it makes little difference if they genuinely meant well or were consciously going through the motions to "look good" without having to deliver real results.
I take it this sort of activist lawmaking from the bench likely exceeding their authority intends to compel reactive lawmaking of viable alternatives. This sounds unproductive and political in nature rather than policywonk-worthy.
Disclaimer: I was unhoused and invisible in California for 9 years. No one cared since actions speak louder than words. The only way the situation will ever change is through focused, patient, nonviolent, disruptive collective action to insist on it. It's unlikely to ever change because 80% of Americans are either motivated by selfishness, callousness, selfishness, ignorance, or expedient neglect.