31–40 of 110 posts
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Personally I'm holding out until 2024 so the Bell Riots can give us the utopia we've all been promised.
Sigh.
I'm not too worried. You'll all be standing out in the breadline with me soon enough. Keep building robots that automate your jobs out of existence. I find it amusing.
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I guarantee I could produce a program that would be acceptable to conservatives and provide free housing. Note also that Utah, a very conservative state, solves homelessness in exactly this way. It just might be that the housing would not be provided by funneling huge amounts of tax dollars to the rentier class, and might involve constructing more houses, and therefore would be opposed by the left.
Socialism becomes a lot more palatable to majority populations as long as minority populations are kept to a minimum. With a reasonable expectation that the recipients of help look like you, helping starts to seem more like an obligation than an imposition.
You're getting downvoted, but you're broadly correct. There's a lot of research showing how more homogeneously white populations are more likely to support leftist or socialist policies (policies, not affiliation) than people of the same demographics who live in more heterogeneous places.
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The loss of the distinction between the deserving poor and the undeserving poor also caused many people who would’ve supported help to one of those to just throw their hands in the air and forget the whole thing.
That's what I'm talking about. The ability to hold back aid from the "undeserving" becomes a lot less important to people who live in relative homogeneity racially and culturally. Absolutely no surprise to me that Utah is relatively socialist internally while being on the extreme right externally.
Utah is also heavily Mormon, which complicates things. Mormons have a lot of beliefs that sound fairly socialist when you describe them in practice, except that they believe the church should be the administrator of those policies.
Mormons also heavily oppose abortion, which makes them a nearly single-issue voting bloc, making Utah deep red in a purely partisan sense.
If somehow abortion were a non-issue - like, overnight, everyone somehow magically forgot abortion even existed - it's not hard to imagine Mormons being one of the least conservative Christian denominations.
(Yes, I'm aware that other Christians don't consider the LDS to be Christians, but that's beside the point)
This article is a good overview of the research about treatment-first vs housing-first approaches. The last paragraph is pretty clear on the real difficulty: >The major obstacles to resolving homelessness remain ideological. It is politically hard to sell the idea that people who take drugs or are disruptive should get free housing – even when the evidence shows that is actually what works.
The majority of effectively homeless in the US are working people. This means people who dont own or rent any kind of housing. They crash in other people's places, frequently going homeless for periods. This includes working families. Their size is estimated in millions.
The chronic homeless are people who dont even have any place to crash from time to time. People refer to these people as 'the homeless', without knowing that a lot of the above category also enters this category frequently over any given year. The chronic homeless category also includes working people due to the skyrocketing housing costs, especially in major metropolises like NY, SF etc. This segment's size is estimated in a range in between 500,000 to 3 million, depending on whose research and criteria you take.
Drug addicts are also in this category, and the existing economic establishment prefers to identify the homeless with them in order to thwart any reform that could cause an increase in their taxes or disturb the real estate sector.
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So that's right - the problem is ideological. But maybe even before that, its economical - those who hoard the wealth dont want anyone to disturb them and their ever-increasing hoards of wealth with any pesky taxes...
Portland, cited in the article, announced it's beginning yet another sweep of homeless encampments yesterday. At the press conference announcing it, the mayor - who's been ordering sweeps his entire tenure - admits they don't and haven't ever helped the people being swept. He's also still pushing his plan to establish city-run outdoor camps for homeless people, and to criminalize rejecting those city-run camps when s…
So I think this plan of his will never be implemented. Politically, talking about it makes more sense than actually implementing it.
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Yes that’s exactly what I’m saying. More precisely, they’re for public housing only if they can capture a lot of the funds to enrich themselves and their supporters and friends. See also the book “SanFranSicko” by Michael Schellenberger.
I have never met a left wing person who is pro landlord, is this some weird American spin on "the left"?
No, you don’t say.
It’ll never happen though. We look at housing as an investment from a cultural perspective in the USA. This has been a brilliant plan by the capitalist landlords to further concentrate their holdings and become more fiendishly rich.
But hey - your house goes up in value even though your kids will never get to own their own home. Maybe when you die - but oh wait you probably did a reverse mortgage because you didn’t save enough for retirement. Whoops. Too bad junior - no house for you!
Progressive cities have tried housing first solutions, yet they have a bigger homelessness problem and it keeps getting worse. Cities that have done treatment first policies have seen a reduction homelessness. A great book on this topic is San Fran-sicko. https://www.amazon.com/San-Fransicko-Progressives-Ruin-Citie...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guarantee I could produce a program that would be acceptable to conservatives and provide free housing. Note also that Utah, a very conservative state, solves homelessness in exactly this way. It just might be that the housing would not be provided by funneling huge amounts of tax dollars to the rentier class, and might involve constructing more houses, and therefore would be opposed by the left.
I'm so confused by this comment. Are you suggesting the left is against public housing and pro landlord?