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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

#291

Post by ryanmercer »

tomrod wrote: post #243
DoreenMichele wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't say it only helped Mormons. From what I gather, the Mormon church has a very complex and well developed infrastructure for deciding who gets help, what kind of help they get, etc. This seems unlikely to be readily and easily replicable without the Mormon church. It has nothing to do with whether or not one believes in god. It has to do with social infrastructure.

I wouldn't say it's well developed. It's set up to get people on their feet temporarily. That covers many cases. It's less helpful for cases where chronic issues require ongoing help. Source: former Mormon, used to cut the welfare checks under congregational leadership, saw the inside baseball, politics, sausage-making, etc.

>former Mormon

*former Latter-day Saint

>used to cut the welfare checks under congregational leadership

You mean, send people to the storehouse as part of the Bishopric? It's pretty rare for people to be given money. Food from the storehouses yes, work through Church-owned companies and help via job placement services yes.

At least around here, maybe it's different in SLC.

Re: The Homeless Crisis Is Getting Worse in America’s Richest Cities

#292

Post by hedvig »

ArchTypical wrote: post #178
flaque wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. This is just provably false. Utah solved it's homelessness problem by just giving people homes. And it was pretty effective.

> This is just provably false Utah is not an example that proves anything. It's a fairly unusual area when talking about this problem. Utah's entire population is less than Los Angeles. The claim that 91% of Utah's homeless population was abated is somewhat suspicious, given the remaining 14k would mean they had a previous 155k+ - which outstrips the homeless count of most major cities (including Los Angeles). This i…

Does it make sense that they get the same number of senate seats as California?

Re: The Homeless Crisis Is Getting Worse in America’s Richest Cities

#293

Post by richeyrw »

ryanmercer wrote: post #291
tomrod wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't say it's well developed. It's set up to get people on their feet temporarily. That covers many cases. It's less helpful for cases where chronic issues require ongoing help. Source: former Mormon, used to cut the welfare checks under congregational leadership, saw the inside baseball, politics, sausage-making, etc.

>former Mormon *former Latter-day Saint >used to cut the welfare checks under congregational leadership You mean, send people to the storehouse as part of the Bishopric? It's pretty rare for people to be given money. Food from the storehouses yes, work through Church-owned companies and help via job placement services yes. At least around here, maybe it's different in SLC.

I'm not sure where you're getting your information. I'm currently in the bishopric of a ward in South Salt Lake, and I think it's rare for a week to go by without writing checks for rent, prescriptions, or utilities. I signed two checks just yesterday.

Re: The Homeless Crisis Is Getting Worse in America’s Richest Cities

#294

Post by maconic »

CryptoPunk wrote: post #281
DoreenMichele wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spent nearly six years homeless. Long before that, I had a class on Homelessness and Public Policy through SFSU when I was living in Fairfield. Most of my homelessness was spent in California and I actually moved to Washington to get back into housing. I blog about homelessness and still talk with homeless people online and in person. 1. If you are destitute, traveling is a huge barrier to moving elsewhere. There a…

>>But the reality is that saying poor people should "just move someplace cheaper" is basically a classist assumption that lack of adequate income is the only thing that matters in their life and their life can be boiled down to that one detail and that one detail should be the sole deciding factor in all their life choices. You would never suggest such a thing for someone who wasn't destitute. Like the saying goes, b…

We were all a burden on our family since day one weren't we? It takes a few takes decades to repay that burden, if ever.

> "Seeing the homeless gather with their buddies to smoke crack, and loiter all day on some street corner, while living and buying drugs at the taxpayers' expense, while people I know work back-breaking jobs at low wages, strikes me as a total injustice, brought about by people who manipulatively employ the victim narrative to perpetuate the current paradigm."

I think you're painting all homeless people with the same brush which is grossly unfair. The person that you're replying to said she was a military wife, I doubt she is one of these people you're describing that have crack smoking friends or loitering in the street. I assume you live in SF and have generalized all homelessness to what you see in certain parts of SF? The movie Pursuit of Happyness was based on a real-life homeless person based in SF. Sounds like you should watch that ;)

Re: The Homeless Crisis Is Getting Worse in America’s Richest Cities

#295

Post by jahaja »

CryptoPunk wrote: post #276
jahaja wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd think it would be good manners to at least provide a summary that puts the report into the discussions context when linking to some pdf report.

Here's an excerpt from the executive summary: >>Over the past three decades, local barriers to housing development have intensified, particularly in the high-growth metropolitan areas increasingly fueling the national economy. The accumulation of such barriers – including zoning, other land use regulations, and lengthy development approval processes – has reduced the ability of many housing markets to respond to grow…

Thanks. But as I suggested above, the same is happening in other countries, including mine, without these restrictions. And just as here, the report speaks of various tax and cash incentives etc, basically profit guarantees, needed to get private companies to build affordable housing. So to suggest that zoning restrictions are the core issue doesn't seem to hold water, even though I won't deny that it may increase the problem in the US.

Not sure how you can use such assured language when the very next line in your last cherry-pick about the GDP is this:

> This estimate is tentative, and would imply that some cities would see counterfactual employment increases of a significant magnitude resulting from reduced housing restrictions

Re: The Homeless Crisis Is Getting Worse in America’s Richest Cities

#296

Post by cazum »

CryptoPunk wrote: post #281
DoreenMichele wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spent nearly six years homeless. Long before that, I had a class on Homelessness and Public Policy through SFSU when I was living in Fairfield. Most of my homelessness was spent in California and I actually moved to Washington to get back into housing. I blog about homelessness and still talk with homeless people online and in person. 1. If you are destitute, traveling is a huge barrier to moving elsewhere. There a…

>>But the reality is that saying poor people should "just move someplace cheaper" is basically a classist assumption that lack of adequate income is the only thing that matters in their life and their life can be boiled down to that one detail and that one detail should be the sole deciding factor in all their life choices. You would never suggest such a thing for someone who wasn't destitute. Like the saying goes, b…

Your idea that these laborers are victims of "homeless crack addicts manipulatively employing the victim narrative" is such an extreme miscalculation that I wonder if you even looking at the data honestly.

The amount of money that actually goes to homeless people is extremely low, and most of those meager funds are used to give them food and temporary shelter so they don't literally die outside. And even then, the amount of taxes that "low wage laborers" earn is slim. Why can't those with vast excessive wealth give some of it to services that can rehabilitate the homeless, or create unskilled or low skill jobs that pay enough to keep people indoors?

If a homeless addict is smoking crack outside, what he needs is a shelter that can rehabilitate him, get him off drugs and get him employed somewhere where he can make meaningful contributions and connections to his society. Services like these barely exist, and are in desperate need of the money that we for some reason insist on giving to the wealthiest mega billionaires who keep it in offshore accounts and refuse to give to the people they are directly responsible for putting on the streets via critically unsustainable low wages.

To assume that the homeless are homeless because of "responsibility and consequence" is to totally ignore any systemic circumstance outside of their control that may have led them to become homeless or jobless in the first place.

Re: The Homeless Crisis Is Getting Worse in America’s Richest Cities

#297

Post by gre »

prostoalex wrote: post #236
gre wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know about the schools there, but imagine if families instead of rentals occupied the condos—I bet the schools would shape up real fast. I admittedly haven’t researched/thought about how to fix schools, but getting parents raging seems obvious to start.

School financing flows through property taxes, and they’re the same whether the property is occupied by a family, childless couple, an absentee out-of-town owner or an investor. Schools currently enjoy 100% of the money with nowhere near 100% of load, which in theory should result in smaller classes and excellent teacher-to-student ratios. In reality though LA Unified School District has been cutting so many sweet pe…

Just read an article about it from June, what a tough problem! No amount of complaining from parents can make enough pension money appear. Thanks for writing about it.

Re: The Homeless Crisis Is Getting Worse in America’s Richest Cities

#298

Post by docker_up »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #289
docker_up wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is poppycock. $10,000 a person is a lie unless maybe if you moved all the homeless from the West Coast to the middle of nowhere in Midwest, but then you would have homeless activists and Midwest NIMBY activists saying that the government is shipping people out to solve the problem. The activists have politicized every direction of this issue to the point where it's easier to just forget about the homeless rather…

There are people living on a few dollars a day... You really think we can't provide a cot in the equivalent of a walk in closet with communal bathrooms, and simple meals like beans and rice with a few vegetables for $10k/year?

Only if you ship them to a very low cost area, and then you immediately run into political issues as I mentioned, like shipping away your poor and gentrifying the area for rich people. Beans and rice? That's a terrible, unhealthy meal! You need to give them a balanced diet! How could you kill these poor people? Communal bathrooms? That's for criminals and it spreads disease! A walk in closet? These are human beings we're talking about! They're not prisoners, don't treat them like that! They need space!

And that's how it becomes an unsolvable problem. Activists with agendas.

Re: The Homeless Crisis Is Getting Worse in America’s Richest Cities

#299

Post by ryanmercer »

richeyrw wrote: post #293
ryanmercer wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>former Mormon *former Latter-day Saint >used to cut the welfare checks under congregational leadership You mean, send people to the storehouse as part of the Bishopric? It's pretty rare for people to be given money. Food from the storehouses yes, work through Church-owned companies and help via job placement services yes. At least around here, maybe it's different in SLC.

I'm not sure where you're getting your information. I'm currently in the bishopric of a ward in South Salt Lake, and I think it's rare for a week to go by without writing checks for rent, prescriptions, or utilities. I signed two checks just yesterday.

My personal experience? Perhaps things are different in SLC but out here it's:

"Who can help bro/sis so and so" or in EQ "So and so is looking for part-time work if you know of any place" and being sent to the storehouse for food. A friend was told no financial assistance and that she should consider subletting one of the rooms in the house she rented, even though there were 3 bedrooms for her and 5 kids and then 'coincidentally' within a week after that she had family services in her house saying she had x days to get a functional refrigerator before her children would be taken (apparently that's a thing). People here will ask for help on the private FB group for the ward when they do occasionally need it.

I imagine you see more instances because you probably have a considerably larger ward. We don't even set up overflow most weeks and I'm fairly certain in 13 years I've had to share a pew less than 5 times for sacrament and even at tri-stake mid-singles firesides we have tons of empty pew space.

Re: The Homeless Crisis Is Getting Worse in America’s Richest Cities

#300

Post by ryanwaggoner »

techsupporter wrote: post #153
biztos wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never heard of Revenue Management Software. What effect does it have exactly? If you own some apartments, wouldn't you just check the local advertised prices and set your prices similarly, possibly also using whatever your social network of landlords can tell you?

RMS is what airlines use to price tickets and have done almost since the automated calculating computer was invented. Use of that kind of software has spread to all kinds of industries. Large rental property management companies absolutely use RMS. You can see it in action if you go to the rental sites for a large apartment development (if you want one in real life, search for "Thorton Place Apartments" in Seattle).…

Yeah, I see this on cruise ship cabins now too. There are different classes, but the cabin pricing varies a decent amount within each class based on all kinds of minor factors. Midships vs forward or after, close to elevator, what's above / below you, size of balcony, adjoining room, pullout couch, obstructed view, etc, etc. Kind of annoying in that you used to be able to "get lucky", but it's more efficient in a competitive market (which cruising definitely is) to be able to select exactly what you want and only pay for that.
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