141–150 of 1001 posts
Homelessness is a failure of the Federal government that nobody there is even willing to talk about. This can't be solved at a local or state level in a country with unrestricted freedom of movement.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> How is giving people money unconditionally not treating them as “humans with potential and aspirations”? If access to money is not their actual impediment then you may be making their situation worse. > I’m not entirely sure what your point is. Are you saying that adding more rules and conditions and whatnot is better? You are drowning. I throw $1000 at you. Are you saying I should have done more? > argue for fewer…
>You are drowning. I throw $1000 at you. Are you saying I should have done more? What if we apply your logic to your own scenario? You are drowning. I will jump in and help you get to safety only after you have taken a blood and piss test. Are you saying I should have done more?
> You are drowning. I will jump in and help you get to safety only after you have taken a blood and piss test. Are you saying I should have done more?
I think his point was that if someone's drowning, you throw them a life preserver or jump in and save them. You don't throw them $1000, because that's not the solution to the problem they're actually having. It's not like the water will spit them out if you pay it.
And if your problem is addiction, $1000 might just make your problem worse. That $1000 might as well be considered a pile of drugs or booze.
When I was growing up I was friends with a kid whose Dad actually worked trying to help homeless people in a very cold climate. IIRC, one time they had a program to give out subzero rated sleeping bags, but stopped once they realized they were just getting pawned.
It is mentioned in the article about a woman working full time, yet still unable to afford rent. I think a big steps towards resolving homelessness should go in addressing the housing market; which in California is really really bad. This isn't just "build more homes" (which is already an extremely difficult task in the state given the zoning laws) but comprehensive housing policies. Take a look at the way Austria ha…
There's multiple issues and there's no easy fix, but here's some points from a laypersons' point of view. Construction of new houses (up to modern standards) has not kept up with population growth. Population growth has been higher than birth rate due to migration; I wouldn't be surprised if in 10, 50, 100 years, historians will look back on this period and call it a mass migration event due to climate change, war, e…
More stats: It has a quarter of all homeless and a high percentage of the chronically homeless who likely skew those stats pretty badly.
My opinion: This is a national issue and California is just the presenting problem. I think California is essentially our dumping ground for homeless people from across the nation and California can't solve it alone.
Edit: In case it needs to be said again, the primary root cause is a nationwide shortage of appropriate housing options.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Qz9GvoPbnFwGrHHQB/visible-ho...
If you spend [big scary number] on a thing and it "doesn't work", absent some real analysis that just as much means you under spent as that you may have over spent. It's like pointing at construction cranes in a rapidly growing city and saying, "look none of this new housing is working because rents keep going up!" California and so many other regions have real unaddressed homelessness issues that have long, long bee…
Homelessness is a failure of the Federal government that nobody there is even willing to talk about. This can't be solved at a local or state level in a country with unrestricted freedom of movement.
Let me just quality a bit further: homelessness is a failure of the neoliberal ideology (land free markets/privatization never worked, from the enclosures [1] to modern times, see Georgism for a solution [2]) and further a failure of the metaphysics of meritocracy based in desert-people's belief "by the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground", which simply isn't the case today, and i…
This reads as a political ad, not a news story. The ad is good at pulling heart strings and getting people riled up (see comments here) but does not do any actual reporting. How did California spend the money? Were there leaky buckets? How does California have 50% of the homeless and 12% of the population? Are people being bussed in, making this a federal problem? Who's responsible? Don't just tell me the governor, t…
California's homelessness problem is not caused by other states offloading their homeless to California.
This reads as a political ad, not a news story. The ad is good at pulling heart strings and getting people riled up (see comments here) but does not do any actual reporting. How did California spend the money? Were there leaky buckets? How does California have 50% of the homeless and 12% of the population? Are people being bussed in, making this a federal problem? Who's responsible? Don't just tell me the governor, t…
Dig into the data all you want. If you dig deep enough, you'll most likely find what you're looking for...
Anything political like this is going to have competing "sources of truth" which are largely funded by Super PACs and essentially just arms of political parties.
Either party can "show you the data" now to come to whatever conclusion they want.
This is a useful gambit to game all the people who claim to want to be "data-driven".
Sometimes, it's useful to zoom out to a 1000 foot view and simply observe that something is clearly broken, and the current solution does not appear to be making it less broken.
Maybe this is something everyone can agree on - but, that won't be very helpful - as there's unlikely any changing solution that both parties will agree on.
I'll simply note - at the 1000 foot view - there are 115,000 homeless people, and $17B was spent on them.
That's $147k per person. And all that happened is the problem got worse at MUCH faster rates than it did in almost every other state in the US, nearly all of which are spending much less on the problem.
Draw your own conclusions...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>It is absolutely insane how we’ve stopped treating homeless people as humans with potential and aspirations and assume that all they can be is a vacuum for drugs and cash. Vancouver has the same approach- warmest place in Canada. When I suggested active intervention (eg. force detox), the activists would accuse me of treating homeless people as sub-humans, that I am being cruel and inhumane and a monster, and that w…
Detox doesn't really work if they don't want it. The active intervention w/r to homelessness would be to actually house these people. Lots of these people are using drugs to cope with other problems, without dealing with the other issues what are the chances of detox actually being worthwhile?
Vancouver is doing a lot more for homeless people than SF/LA and it is still not working.