A lottery system for a few people is the rich's approach to looking down on the poor. Solving it requires relocation. There's no getting around it because the total cost of living is incompatible with people with slimmer means.
The problem is that eventually you need walls or forced relocation. We have evidence that people are already willing to live in SF with no shelter, and without changing fundamental ways America works, you can’t force them to leave and not come back (maybe a city can get a restraining order protecting itself? No idea).
I want this person off of the streets for completely selfish reasons to myself . Recovery program or not, they are going to have to live somewhere . If it's not a publicly funded home then it's going to be a tent in a public park that I am paying taxes for.
It's not selfish to want the public to be able to enjoy public spaces.
It’s a luxury belief as well, people of wealth don’t need to care about public spaces as much, they have plenty of other options. It hurts the poor the most.
Giving addicts drug money instead of providing for their needs is the peak of inhumanity.
Giving addicts drug money instead of providing for their needs is the peak of inhumanity. Not sure what you think a drug addicts needs are, because usually at the top of the list is "drugs". There other services provided en-masse for homeless people with addiction problems but you can't force them to take advantage of them. The "free-money" isn't about treating the root cause of the recipients addiction the hope is t…
As someone who lived in Southern California for a long time I can assure you they never spent $17B on homelessness. The last time I was in San Diego they were actually shutting down homeless shelters because of the lack of funding. I would love to see someone track down the $17B.
this seems fine to me, managing the greater boston food bank sounds like it needs a good manager to better spend the other 99.8%
That’s feeding 81k people a day. A huge job, for sure, but that’s the equivalent of a reasonably large town. Something has already gone wrong upstream if that many people cannot acquire food via their own means.
> Something has already gone wrong upstream if that many people cannot acquire food via their own means.
Are there any good studies into the most prevalent causes of homelessness? I'd be especially interested that are trying to tease apart cause and effect, without the study author trying to prove out their own preconceptions.
Lax law enforcement. When we used to have vagrancy laws homelessness had a way of working itself out.
Gross. Chasing away homeless people doesn't remove them from existence.
That’s because Cali’s approach is insane. They give you hundreds a month in cash grants (some make $1k a month in SF) and require you to make NO alterations to your lifestyle. I was amazed when living in SF how many of the homeless are not locals. Not even Californians! I myself lived on the streets for a number of years and have dealt with addiction issues. It is absolutely insane how we’ve stopped treating homeless…
>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…
It's not just inhumane, it's some wild ignorance of how addiction actually works.
It's easy to get someone to stop taking drugs. It's much harder to stop them from picking the addiction back up once you let them go.
Addiction is usually the result of other mental problems. It's a coping mechanism.
I hope you never end up on the other side of the situation and have to see people on the Internet write about you in such contempt like this.
Important to remember that every one of us are just a few accidents away from being ejected from society too. I try to catch myself when I'm looking down my nose at the bum who make a mess of my recycling because there is another richer person looking down their nose at me!
I don’t think I’m a few accidents away from what I see people doing every morning in the east village. I’ve been in four should-have-died accidents, when are you expecting me to abandon society? It’s a silly fantasy to pretend the average white collar is a few bad missteps away from the chronic detachment you see from these folks. We must live in very different worlds, my friend.
A lottery system for a few people is the rich's approach to looking down on the poor. Solving it requires relocation. There's no getting around it because the total cost of living is incompatible with people with slimmer means.
The problem is that eventually you need walls or forced relocation. We have evidence that people are already willing to live in SF with no shelter, and without changing fundamental ways America works, you can’t force them to leave and not come back (maybe a city can get a restraining order protecting itself? No idea).
Force cannot be used but offers of food, shelter, and care elsewhere can and must be offered. In general, only the very rich can afford to live in the most central, desirable locations because the costs of everything are so damn high. It's only fair that most people who aren't insanely rich (like me) should find somewhere they can afford to live or where society can afford to help them. Trying to linger in SF Presidio or Manhattan is well above almost everyone's means.