In 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.
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The Homeless Crisis Is Getting Worse in America’s Richest Cities
111–120 of 340 posts
Re: The Homeless Crisis Is Getting Worse in America’s Richest Cities
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
> endless money pits The reason they are money pits is because they aren't something that will be solved by a city or even a state. Any attempt to solve the problem locally in a "humane" way has a high risk of just attracting more folks in the same circumstance to the area. The most effective way for a city or state to "solve" the local homeless problem is to simply pay for one-way bus tickets to somewhere else. But…
I'd be interested to hear how homelessness can be meaningfully addressed in a humane way by the federal government (especially if it is constitutional).
Maybe not addressed in a prescriptive policy way but a financing way. Let cities do what works best for that city, but all the funding should come from federal grants. It isn't fair to financially burden individual municipalities with what amounts to a systemic, country wide problem.
Re: The Homeless Crisis Is Getting Worse in America’s Richest Cities
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually spending targeting homelessness is fairly minimal. So, IMO it’s hard to call it a money pit.
Well in SF and Seattle the spending continually increases and the homelessness problem manages to get worse every year. Sounds like a money pit.
Dumping this on Local government and homeless people move around based on what’s best for them. Solve it nationally and you don’t have that problem.
Re: The Homeless Crisis Is Getting Worse in America’s Richest Cities
#114homelessness is the societal manifestation of the lower end of the bell curve. period. anyone who's interacted with homeless people knows this. yes there are exceptions, and no they do not make up the bulk of the distribution. putting your hand in the sand and blaming "slow wage growth" or some other secondary factor instead of pointing out the obvious is a disservice to those people. and before you call me harsh, kn…
You are spot on. It's unpopular to talk about this, but it's absolutely true. 90% of homeless people are on the low end of the IQ spectrum, some with other mental issues to boot. Low IQ is strongly correlated with poor self control and an inability to delay gratification.
You couple that with a lack of decently paid low-skill work in America (thanks Globalism!) and these people can't survive any longer. They simply don't have the biological or mental makeup to succeed. 50 years ago they would have worked at a machine press, or done physical manufacturing tasks like assembly. Those options don't exist anymore.
Re: The Homeless Crisis Is Getting Worse in America’s Richest Cities
#115You mean, in the bluest cities?
Re: The Homeless Crisis Is Getting Worse in America’s Richest Cities
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
> suddenly we get very "every person for themselves" the second homelessness has a price tag. A confounding factor involved here is that many government strategies for dealing with the homeless are endless money pits without noticeable results. I think a lot of people would be more comfortable with their tax dollars going to that purpose if they didn't feel like nothing was actually happening from it.
I think the other problem is that the more one city spends to "fix" its homeless problems, the more other areas ship their homeless to these cities with more resources. It's certainly the case in Texas, where many smaller cities and rural areas give homeless people a one-way bus ticket to Austin, Dallas or San Antonio.
Why is it a problem when poor people want to move in but not rich people?
Does some homeless dude from Boise degrade Austin any more or less than some programmer from SF? Both are seeking what they think is a going to be a better life. Both are ever so slightly changing the character of their destination by showing up.
Re: The Homeless Crisis Is Getting Worse in America’s Richest Cities
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the other problem is that the more one city spends to "fix" its homeless problems, the more other areas ship their homeless to these cities with more resources. It's certainly the case in Texas, where many smaller cities and rural areas give homeless people a one-way bus ticket to Austin, Dallas or San Antonio.
This is a common enough misrepresentation of the sources of homelessness that it's imperative that you stop spreading it. 71% of San Francisco's homeless used to have homes in the city, it is likely a similar proportion elsewhere. http://sfist.com/2016/02/11/71_of_sf_homeless_once_had_homes...
These studies always sound dubious, just like the misrepresentations that you are pointing out. First, they are just surveying a population that is incredibly difficult to survey. Second, they don't look into what they meant by having a home, was it just crashing at a friend's house? Were they ever employed at all in the city? Where were they born, where did they grow up?
Cities act as a catchment for the rural areas around them: you can't really be homeless in Ellensburg or Aberdeen or Walla Walla (with no social services), but you can be homeless in Seattle or Spokane. A lot of kids on the street near UW in Seattle (aka ave rats) hail as far away as Montana. When I was working in downtown Seattle, many of the homeless that came around were Native Americans from various regions in the PNW.
And ya, people do wind up homeless after they move to the big city, but often for reasons back home (they lost their support network and couldn't stay solvent). Anyways, you can't fix the homeless problem in individual cities without also fixing it in the surrounding regions, or even the nation. People are mobile, they will be attracted to the best deal.
Re: The Homeless Crisis Is Getting Worse in America’s Richest Cities
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
> endless money pits The reason they are money pits is because they aren't something that will be solved by a city or even a state. Any attempt to solve the problem locally in a "humane" way has a high risk of just attracting more folks in the same circumstance to the area. The most effective way for a city or state to "solve" the local homeless problem is to simply pay for one-way bus tickets to somewhere else. But…
I'd be interested to hear how homelessness can be meaningfully addressed in a humane way by the federal government (especially if it is constitutional).
Noah Smith's perspective on the necessity of a federal approach to homelessness:
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-05-21/ending...
Key graf:
> About 3.5 million Americans will experience homelessness at some point in time, but only about a half-million are homeless at any given time, and roughly 87,000 of these are chronically homeless. By some estimates, housing a homeless person and providing them with a caseworker to see to their needs costs about $10,000 a year. That means for less than a billion dollars a year, chronic homelessness could be ended in the U.S. If temporarily homeless people were housed in temporary housing, and if each temporary residence were occupied half the time, homelessness of all kinds could be eliminated for about $10 billion a year. That’s less than a seventh of what the government spends on food stamps.
Re: The Homeless Crisis Is Getting Worse in America’s Richest Cities
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'm perfectly happy to give back more If you really feel that way, charitable organizations can effectively distribute donations far more efficiently and effectively than any government organization has ever been able to. I suspect that if all of the people who say they feel the same way did just voluntarily donate what they considered their own fair share to charity, the homeless crisis would be mostly solved.
When it comes to stuff like housing, government regulations like zoning can stand in the way. If we had an unfettered market perhaps cheap apartments could be built and given to the homeless by charity. In practice new housing that complies with all zoning codes, labor regulations, etc ends up costing quite a lot. Government certainly has a role to play here even if it is just changing policies to stop driving up cos…
Unfettered market? I think the word you were looking for is 'slums'.
Re: The Homeless Crisis Is Getting Worse in America’s Richest Cities
#120Long-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 ho…
In many cases, drug addiction and mental issues come as a result of homelessness itself. There is a severe mental toll inflicted on human beings that are required to live as outcasts in their own city.
I mean, I see why that would be possible, but considering cause and effect, one is more likely to burn out their support network by having a drug addiction and mental issues than the other way around.