The Homeless Crisis Is Getting Worse in America’s Richest Cities
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Re: The Homeless Crisis Is Getting Worse in America’s Richest Cities
#2I will go to my grave not understanding why this is so complex and difficult for people to understand and politicians to fix.
Wages are stagnant, save for a handful of sectors, in which they're growing quickly. Housing prices are rising due to limited supply and backward policies towards new construction. Inequality therefore expands exponentially, creating a city of haves-and-have nots.
Either reduce inequality through taxes and social re-distribution programs, or build more housing supply. Preferably both.
Re: The Homeless Crisis Is Getting Worse in America’s Richest Cities
#3To the barricades!
Re: The Homeless Crisis Is Getting Worse in America’s Richest Cities
#4I will go to my grave not understanding why this is so complex and difficult for people to understand and politicians to fix. Wages are stagnant, save for a handful of sectors, in which they're growing quickly. Housing prices are rising due to limited supply and backward policies towards new construction. Inequality therefore expands exponentially, creating a city of haves-and-have nots. Either reduce inequality thro…
The complexity lies in the web of incentives that make up regional and local politics. The people most negatively affected have the least clout politically. The people with the most political influence have a vested interest in ensuring housing prices don't drop. So as a result, the optimal choice for a politician isn't the optimal choice for the city as a whole. Not to mention policies like rent control that can produce a huge sort term political gain, at the expense of making drastically harder to build more housing in the future.
Re: The Homeless Crisis Is Getting Worse in America’s Richest Cities
#5I will go to my grave not understanding why this is so complex and difficult for people to understand and politicians to fix. Wages are stagnant, save for a handful of sectors, in which they're growing quickly. Housing prices are rising due to limited supply and backward policies towards new construction. Inequality therefore expands exponentially, creating a city of haves-and-have nots. Either reduce inequality thro…
How can we accomplish this without being a nanny state? I see more and more that people that are on fringes don't even want to try to work anymore because they don't have to with all the safety nets in place. I don't know the answer, but I think I do know why you will go to your grave without it being solved - GOP vs Dems solution to this is the exact opposite, and we are permanently stuck. We can't go full bore on either solution (both of which can probably work to some extent) but instead we're 100% deadlocked for the rest of time.
Re: The Homeless Crisis Is Getting Worse in America’s Richest Cities
#6I will go to my grave not understanding why this is so complex and difficult for people to understand and politicians to fix. Wages are stagnant, save for a handful of sectors, in which they're growing quickly. Housing prices are rising due to limited supply and backward policies towards new construction. Inequality therefore expands exponentially, creating a city of haves-and-have nots. Either reduce inequality thro…
I don't think it is either too challenging or too complex for politicians and people to understand, the problem is one of incentives.
Those with the resources that could be taxed and redistributed do not want to be taxed and have resources taken away from them. Since they have resources they can use some percentage of them to both influence politicians and influence other people. The people who do not have resources cannot do either of these things.
Re: The Homeless Crisis Is Getting Worse in America’s Richest Cities
#7In San Francisco is equally bad. In the morning @7am you see so many people sleeping on sidewalks like sardines, it's pretty sad considering it's a rich city.
Re: The Homeless Crisis Is Getting Worse in America’s Richest Cities
#8"Houston, the fourth-most-populous city in the nation, has cut its homeless population in half since 2011, in part by creating more housing for them."
Re: The Homeless Crisis Is Getting Worse in America’s Richest Cities
#9Long-time Seattle resident here who volunteered for several years in the homeless community. Homelessness has always been a thing in Seattle, but has definitely become a much larger issue in the past five years.
I'll spare my thoughts on any number of reasons as to why we got here as a city, but will say I think we are doing a terrible disservice to actually finding a solution by lumping "anyone who doesn't have a home" into the "homeless crisis."
There are so many nuanced issues across a variety of problems here. There are drug abuse issues, mental health issues, physical health issues, cost of living issues, etc., and not to mention the varying cocktail of comorbidity, that to bulk "people without permanent housing" all under the umbrella of "homeless crisis" is not going to get us anywhere. Trying to assist the single mother with children who lives in her car because she lost her job is a VASTLY different issue than trying to assist the drug addict sitting in an alley passed out in their own feces. But at the end of the day, they're both human beings, and it breaks my heart that either of them are in that situation.
Several separate issues, that need to be subdivided and approached in distinct ways if any progress is to be made on any of them. Smaller, subdivided problems should feel more solvable, too.
Unfortunately, a lot of the solutions are expensive and frankly politically toxic. Despite Seattle's deep blue on most things, suddenly we get very "every person for themselves" the second homelessness has a price tag.
Re: The Homeless Crisis Is Getting Worse in America’s Richest Cities
#10I will go to my grave not understanding why this is so complex and difficult for people to understand and politicians to fix. Wages are stagnant, save for a handful of sectors, in which they're growing quickly. Housing prices are rising due to limited supply and backward policies towards new construction. Inequality therefore expands exponentially, creating a city of haves-and-have nots. Either reduce inequality thro…
I mean, I think you're missing a key factor here: politicians require money to be elected. The poor (the folks most affected by these issues) don't have the money to donate. The rich (the ones you propose taxing) do. Thus, the only ones who can get elected are catering to an audience that does not want this problems solved in this way (and indeed, one could argue, does not care to have it solved at all).
Until the problem of money in politics gets fixed, your "simple" problem is largely unfixable.