I believe California is the dumping ground for America's homeless problem • Hacker News Board

Re: I believe California is the dumping ground for America's homeless problem

#81

Post by amanaplanacanal » Sat, Aug 28, 2021, 2:41 AM UTC

LurkingPenguin wrote: post #22

alisonkisk wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The callous disregard for human life exhibited in this post is sickening. My office has a janitorial staff. Why don't public spaces? Too many people in public parks? Claw back more public park space, maybe from the automobile lanes and parks that infest our cities and spew far more stinky poison than people living rough.

> My office has a janitorial staff. Why don't public spaces? San Francisco spends tens of millions of dollar a year cleaning its streets. https://www.businessinsider.com/san-francisco-spent-54-milli... > Too many people in public parks? Claw back more public park space... The issue isn't the number of people in public parks. The issue is that people are using public parks (and other public spaces) to set up encampmen…

Unless you have a better idea as to where these people should go, just saying that they shouldn’t be there isn’t very useful.

Re: I believe California is the dumping ground for America's homeless problem

#82

Post by webmaven » Sat, Aug 28, 2021, 2:42 AM UTC

LurkingPenguin wrote: post #22

alisonkisk wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The callous disregard for human life exhibited in this post is sickening. My office has a janitorial staff. Why don't public spaces? Too many people in public parks? Claw back more public park space, maybe from the automobile lanes and parks that infest our cities and spew far more stinky poison than people living rough.

> My office has a janitorial staff. Why don't public spaces? San Francisco spends tens of millions of dollar a year cleaning its streets. https://www.businessinsider.com/san-francisco-spent-54-milli... > Too many people in public parks? Claw back more public park space... The issue isn't the number of people in public parks. The issue is that people are using public parks (and other public spaces) to set up encampmen…

> The issue isn't the number of people in public parks. The issue is that people are using public parks (and other public spaces) to set up encampments, which is not the purpose of these public spaces. In fact, this infringes on the rights of the people who want to use these spaces for legal purposes.

All right, where do you think the encampments should be set up?

Re: I believe California is the dumping ground for America's homeless problem

#83

Post by LurkingPenguin » Sat, Aug 28, 2021, 2:43 AM UTC

epistasis wrote: post #76

LurkingPenguin wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if, for argument's sake, one accepts your claim, it's quite clear that the policies are not going to change. I'm a native Californian who left and now lives overseas, and every visit back has not only provided a stark demonstration of California's decline, but also taught me that many Californians refuse to believe their lying eyes. I have friends and family who in the past 5 years have lost homes to fire, seen…

Things are changing, as the entrenched interests die from old age. Last year, Prop 15 nearly eliminated the Prop 13 for commercial properties. That this was even within 10% points of passing is such a huge change as to be unthinkable. 15 years ago I would rant about Prop 13 and get nothing but hate from others for my position. These days I'm as likely to find somebody ranting about the evils of Prop 13 as I am to ini…

Hope springs eternal in California, but unfortunately water does not.

Re: I believe California is the dumping ground for America's homeless problem

#84

Post by hack-news » Sat, Aug 28, 2021, 2:44 AM UTC

rubicon33 wrote: post #24

jefftk wrote: post #12

"Dumping ground" implies other places did this to CA, which isn't substantiated by the article. As it says, the vast majority of CA homeless are from within the state. In the cities of CA, as in other rich cities, homelessness and high housing prices come from the same problem: prohibitive regulations on housing construction.

I'm really not convinced that high housing costs accurately depict the source of the homelessness problem in CA. If it does, it certainly isn't describing the homeless people I see. Most of the homeless people I see, the ones who are literally pitching tents on the side walks, sleeping on boxes, defecating anywhere and everywhere, passed out on park benches at 3 in the afternoon, are almost certainly not going to be…

Reread your comment a few times until you understand how dumb it is.

Re: I believe California is the dumping ground for America's homeless problem

#85

Post by MontyCarloHall » Sat, Aug 28, 2021, 2:45 AM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #61

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For existing homeowners this isn't a crisis, it's a free paper money bonanza. Just by living in their houses home "owners" (most are heavily leveraged) "earn" 100k in paper money year in year out - magic! Is this appreciation consistent with the rest of the country, or areas with comparable quality of life? If you only have one home, real estate appreciation only makes you money if it’s higher for your house relati…

> you only have one home, real estate appreciation only makes you money if it’s higher for your house relative to others, since if you sell your house and buy another house of comparable quality that’s also appreciated to a similar degree, you wouldn’t come out ahead. Equity can be leveraged meaningfully without selling, so that's not true.

Besides HELOCs, what are you referring to? A HELOC is just a tool for getting lower interest rates on another loan, which only would make you wealthier if you happened to invest it in some other appreciating asset with an extremely high ROI.

Re: I believe California is the dumping ground for America's homeless problem

#86

Post by mc32 » Sat, Aug 28, 2021, 2:45 AM UTC

epistasis wrote: post #64

mc32 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

California was a semi desert before we built the canals and aqueducts -which is why it was a backwater with few people till that was done and its fertile soil was able to sustain life. People (city dwellers) came _after_ the farmers. So, it might be in need of an update, but I think you're mischaracterizing how this happened.

Giving people rights to water simply because they took it from the Spanish first is the definition of feudal. We don't allocate resources logically or helpfully, we give people rights because their ancestors got their first, and it is preposterous economically and morally.

Extensive canals and water rights and riparian water rights were not developed till the demand by the Gold Rush, and then after its admission into the Union additional laws and provisions were passed and levees and canals built, and then in the early 1900s water from the Colorado was diverted into Calif. then much later aqueducts to channel water into semi-desert cities.

The Spanish may have had a few little channels here and there (for their missions along the el camino), but it wasn't till the Gold Rush people built large elaborate systems for water distribution (for their claims). Then appropriative and riparian rights attracted many farmers into fertile lands.

Does it deserve a revisit, sure. It will be fraught and messy, but sure.

Re: I believe California is the dumping ground for America's homeless problem

#87

Post by randallsquared » Sat, Aug 28, 2021, 2:45 AM UTC

LurkingPenguin wrote: post #15

alisonkisk wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author and submitter has >35000 karma on HN. The blog post has more linked sources than most content marketing spam that appears on HN from page. There are already several comments on the post by HN users that are repeating statements from the post. This suggests it is HN material.

This is an unconvincing example of appeal to (internet) accomplishment.

The case made upthread was that this blog post wasn't the sort of thing Hacker News readers want to see on Hacker News:

> pure flamebait and not really relevant for HN.

All three claims in what you respond to address that case head-on. It isn't as if they're talking about twitter, facebook, or discord stats.

Re: I believe California is the dumping ground for America's homeless problem

#88

Post by LurkingPenguin » Sat, Aug 28, 2021, 2:45 AM UTC

webmaven wrote: post #82

LurkingPenguin wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My office has a janitorial staff. Why don't public spaces? San Francisco spends tens of millions of dollar a year cleaning its streets. https://www.businessinsider.com/san-francisco-spent-54-milli... > Too many people in public parks? Claw back more public park space... The issue isn't the number of people in public parks. The issue is that people are using public parks (and other public spaces) to set up encampmen…

> The issue isn't the number of people in public parks. The issue is that people are using public parks (and other public spaces) to set up encampments, which is not the purpose of these public spaces. In fact, this infringes on the rights of the people who want to use these spaces for legal purposes. All right, where do you think the encampments should be set up?

I find it interesting that you apparently have the belief that such encampments should or need to exist.

Re: I believe California is the dumping ground for America's homeless problem

#89

Post by DoreenMichele » Sat, Aug 28, 2021, 2:47 AM UTC

betwixthewires wrote: post #78

DoreenMichele wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm the author. It's really not mostly mental health problems. I've studied this issue for years. I write about homelessness on Street Life Solutions. I try to write about housing and community development stuff elsewhere, like Eclogiselle.com and https://projectsro.blogspot.com/ . This post wasn't intended to be some opus solving everything. I wanted to make one point: California's extreme homeless problem is not so…

So what do you think is the root problem? A national housing shortage? What do you think drives that shortage if so? What do you think are good solutions? I understand it takes more than a blog post but every big problem takes more than a blog post, we can still have a conversation about it here. Could you shed a little light on the issue for us?

We need to bring back smaller homes in walkable neighborhoods. We aren't providing the right kinds of housing.

Our American ideal is a home designed for a nuclear family with a breadwinner father, homemaker mother and 2.5 kids because that's who had the money to finance the birth of the modern suburb. That was never the majority of our demographics but we've further diversified away from that in the decades since.

Meanwhile, our housing stock has increasingly converged on their ideal home and that ideal home has grown larger and more sprawling over time because the only people who could afford it were people with good money. Our 1950s suburban home has more than doubled in size, from about 1200 sqft to over 2400 sqft in recent years.

If we had just kept building 1950s style little suburban homes, we wouldn't have such a mess. But we didn't. Our homes today are that single family detached house dream on steroids.

We need to reverse course. We have vastly more small households of just one to three people, meanwhile our housing stock tends to skew to three bedrooms or larger.

Re: I believe California is the dumping ground for America's homeless problem

#90

Post by api » Sat, Aug 28, 2021, 2:48 AM UTC

Schnitz wrote: post #26

> Rather than asking "Who can we blame?" maybe we could start asking "How do we fix it?" Nobody talks about the hard truth: The homeownership rate in California is ~55% and therefore over half of Californians are heavily incentivized to keep the housing crisis going. For existing homeowners this isn't a crisis, it's a free paper money bonanza. Just by living in their houses home "owners" (most are heavily leveraged)…

At this point the only economically rational thing for the other 45% to do is leave. Yes California is awesome in lots of ways, but it's someone else's house (literally) and you don't really live there.

If enough people do this, the NIMBYs will get what they deserve as home values crash.