381–390 of 404 posts
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"I have friends who have tried to hire homeless for help with moving because her movers did not show up." That....sounds terrible.
It sounds risky but what's so terrible about offering paying work to people who appear to need it? It's not like they were compelled to accept.
This is becoming such a frustrating issue. As an advocate of public spaces and parks, it's kind of heartbreaking that maybe 1/3 of public spaces in our town are no longer usable for all - they have more or less become private spaces for the homeless. I don't have much respect for communities that solve the issue by just "kicking them out" and passing the problem onto others, but it is almost becoming unacceptably com…
> The rise of homelessness is almost equal to the decline of single occupancy housing (flophouses, chicken wire hotels, etc). This has specifically been a huge problem in cities with expensive real estate like Los Angeles and San Francisco. It is why the free market approach to fixing the housing crisis doesn't work. The land is so expensive that it doesn't make financial sense to waste it on low margin affordable ho…
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Allowing more denser zoning would help, but it doesn't fix the problem I mentioned. As I said, new construction is often replacing higher density affordable housing with lower density luxury housing. This is motivated by profit and not zoning.
Mandating density increase would solve this. Of course the problem is that US cities are legally small, the metro areas are big sprawling low density money sinks, and there's very little zoning coordination between cities in a metro area.
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It seems very consistent. Many people are also pro-bike but generally agree it is not in the public interest to allow bikes to be ridden on crowded city streets.
I think it's not in the public interest to allow cars on crowded city streets. After all, sometimes there isn't room on the sidewalk and cars send people to the hospital.
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> I've always found it a bit ironic when people intending to advocate for better treatment of the homeless proclaim that homeless shelters are havens of violence This is the equivalent of suggesting that there is irony in the position that one can support animal welfare but still be against the position of beating animals with a stick (rather than an iron bar). Homeless shelters can be violent. They are certainly ful…
People are too shy to say it but I think a lot of them would prefer a much more violent solution to the problem. I mean, what other answer could there even be, if you don't like the status quo and also don't think homeless people should be offered housing? That's the dark secret behind a lot of these debates where people's positions otherwise seem nonsensical, I think.
I suppose it makes sense from a certain perspective, but I think the lack of a safety net is a costly economic mistake. Take bankruptcy as an example, you can take risks and if something goes wrong (including bad decisions), you are not necessarily ruined forever because we allow you to walk away from some or all of the debt.
There's a cost to allowing bankruptcy, but I think it's worth it even though I've had to "pay" (indirectly) for other's bad decisions. I think about all the value lost to society because we make the danger of not having a job, even for a short time, very high for most members of society.
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IMO the city should provide enough homeless shelters for everyone and then just make homelessness illegal. So if you are found sleeping in a tent you get referred to the nearest shelter and if you refuse you get arrested. We can not allow homelessness to exist because it makes public spaces unsafe like you mention. Homeless shelters can also help by making it hard for them to continue their drug addictions.
Even in the best case, homeless shelters have serious downsides (to put it mildly) that you may not have considered. -Have a pet? Not coming with you. A stint at the pound, likely followed by euthanization due to overcrowding. -How about a family? If you can even get into a shelter, odds are it's going to be male or women and children. -Shelters are often unsafe and filled with people who have untreated problems. Vio…
I have considered it, and I don't care. I live in one of these high homeless cities, and it's horrid. No one who hasn't lived in a place like this can really understand the decay that a lot of homeless inflict upon a city and upon social cohesion. I am leaving as soon as possible. The lives and cities of productive members of society do not deserve to be ruined by homeless people. Go to the shelter or go to jail. Camping on the sidewalk or in the park should not be an option. I don't care if the shelter sucks, that still doesn't give you the right to camp in the park. I don't care if the park sucks either, that doesn't give you the right to camp in my back yard, which has actually happened and the police declined to remove the person.
If we have to sacrifice a few people who are overwhelmingly drug addicted or mentally ill or just unintelligent to make our lives and cities orders of magnitude better, sorry, but I'm voting for that option.
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That’s why my suggestion is to offer them the choice to willingly use a shelter or go to jail. Homelessness and drug abuse can not be allowed to exist to keep public spaces safe.
> That’s why my suggestion is to offer them the choice to willingly use a shelter or go to jail You can't jail someone for not sheltering themselves. That would most probably violate their civil rights and would not survive a test in the courts.
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The encampment underneath the 101 on Gower is extremely dangerous. There is a stop sign at the end of the exit from the highway, and cross-traffic does not stop. When you want to go south on Gower and there is any amount of traffic, you need to hustle to make the left. The encampment has taken over one of the lanes of southbound traffic, and when you hustle to make that left, unless you overcorrect on the turn and sl…
Strange. If that popped up here they'd be arrested for illegally blocking traffic.
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Hard to see how the net impact of this lawsuit is going to be anything other than more state violence directed at homeless people.
Perhaps it’s hard for you to envision. You may not have seen this before. It has not always been the case that losing your way in life consigns you to living under a tarp on the overpass, while the $1B borrowed by the city to care for you disappears to cronies. Let me paint a picture of a different world where people engage with their local organizations, neighbors, and their colleagues to provide and care for those…
I really want to know whose history you studied. From what I've read, "losing your way in life" usually resulted in starvation and death. Maybe if you're lucky you get drafted into war, and extra lucky you come back alive and intact.
Seems like it's only been the last hundred years or so that we've made any real progress here.
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> The rise of homelessness is almost equal to the decline of single occupancy housing (flophouses, chicken wire hotels, etc). This has specifically been a huge problem in cities with expensive real estate like Los Angeles and San Francisco. It is why the free market approach to fixing the housing crisis doesn't work. The land is so expensive that it doesn't make financial sense to waste it on low margin affordable ho…
There doesn't need to be regulation to force construction - they need to remove the regulation that prohibits construction.