91–100 of 376 posts
I’ve lived on the streets and worked with homeless charities for years and years. I am extremely skeptical this is case and for those whom it is true, I expect them to fall into the class of “transient homeless” who experience it for a short period.
Solving that would be a huge win for society.
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It's not wrong, though. This is just a rephrasing of the same problem. Imagine two people, one with a family that will take them in in an emergency and another with nobody. They both become heroin addicts. The addiction results in a job loss and a few arrests. Soon they've sold all their possessions, their health is declining, and they're behind on rent. Person A puts their tail between their legs and goes and sleeps…
And what happens when your hypothetical "emergency" isn't due to a personal failing? There are people homeless in the US right now because of medical debt due to illness, is that their fault too?
Is street homelessness really driven by people who couldn't pay their rent? You would think they'd stay away from drug-addled violent tent cities - and sleep in a car or at a friend's house. Too many ideas seem to be conflated with the umbrella term "homeless"
It's obviously both. If you're a heroin addict in West Virginia you just rent a trailer with a revolving list of fellow addicts for like $400 month and you beg or steal enough to get by. Plus, you're in a part of town where nobody is really going to notice you. That doesn't work in San Francisco. So did the heroin make you homeless or the high prices? It's kind of a silly question. It's both, in some sense. That's wh…
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Yeah, the thing I always say about the people who complain about tech workers and gentrification in a place like San Francisco is like, look, if you can't figure out how to gain from an influx of wealthy, highly-educated, low-criminality, nerdy tech workers, then that's really on you. What a gift! Any city would be lucky to have that "problem." You have to actively work to make that a negative (by, say, refusing to a…
Maybe San Francisco is just not suitable any more? There's nothing magic about SF's geography that makes it a tech hub. It's not a mining town that needs to be next to coal or minerals, or a ski resort town that needs some mountains and snow. It's based on work that can literally be done anywhere. Hollywood, after all, was just a dusty desert town that became the hub of the movie business because it was easier to mov…
Yes, but also no. Keep in mind the popularity of Westerns in the 1930’s-1950’s and the ease with which you can get to desert/mountain/beach/city/forest/etc settings within a relatively short drive from L.A.
That said, I generally agree with your point.
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There's "covering risk", and there's tenant lock-in. I have no problem with requiring a tenant to rent for a year, to prevent quick turnover and the risk and costs associated with that. But multiple landlords now have all had the same policy: the lease will never go month-to-month, basically. You can , but e.g., for my current lease, it costs ~60% more to go month to month. This creates bizarre pay-off points, and gr…
I was renting until just a few years ago and I never had a lease longer than 12 months, and it was actually difficult to find one longer than that. I'm not sure where you live, but in a lot of places, a landlord refusing to allow a lease to go month-to-month is illegal.
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> How is this not the easiest decision in the world? Unfortunately wealthy established homeowners don't want more people to near to them so they vote against any and all change. Welp! This is why higher orders of government need to step in to "force" municipalities to enact some of these sorts of policy changes you describe. This gives the local municipalities cover to enact the good policies that the selfish rich wo…
No, just average people, who built the community over time into something desirable, that were promised with zoning laws that it would be the type of community (single family homes, etc) that they wanted, and that then dedicated the majority of their lifetime earning power to purchase a home there. There are how many acres of land in this country? Why do you have a right to overrule the will of people in one comparat…
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> How is this not the easiest decision in the world? Unfortunately wealthy established homeowners don't want more people to near to them so they vote against any and all change. Welp! This is why higher orders of government need to step in to "force" municipalities to enact some of these sorts of policy changes you describe. This gives the local municipalities cover to enact the good policies that the selfish rich wo…
No, just average people, who built the community over time into something desirable, that were promised with zoning laws that it would be the type of community (single family homes, etc) that they wanted, and that then dedicated the majority of their lifetime earning power to purchase a home there. There are how many acres of land in this country? Why do you have a right to overrule the will of people in one comparat…
If you're trying to keep it the same, keep it the same
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It's obviously both. If you're a heroin addict in West Virginia you just rent a trailer with a revolving list of fellow addicts for like $400 month and you beg or steal enough to get by. Plus, you're in a part of town where nobody is really going to notice you. That doesn't work in San Francisco. So did the heroin make you homeless or the high prices? It's kind of a silly question. It's both, in some sense. That's wh…
But my question is - if you can't pay rent in LA, what draws you to set up camp in skid row? Why add that burden of living there on top of everything else you're dealing with?
Imagine you're a municipality like San Francisco. You control all of the zoning regulations, and many of the permitting requirements. You have a AA+ credit rating, and even in today's higher rate environment, you can borrow billions of dollars at 6%. You already own oodles of land. You can build to whatever height you want within reason, because you control the zoning, and you even control many of the ordinances that…
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Unfortunately wealthy established homeowners don't want more people to near to them so they vote against any and all change. Yes, combined with useful idiot "anti-gentrification" activists who have convinced themselves that the concept of supply and demand is a capitalist myth.
I’ve just become negatively polarized into supporting gentrification at this point. Seems like the alternative is crime ridden, blighted cities without amenities.