551–560 of 660 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How would it be possible to fix the problem at the expense of the lower working class?
If you force owners to artificially reduce rent for a single class of properties (here: cheap flats made for the homeless) the rent for others go up a bit. This has happened in several US cities.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Why would they not scale? Due to the complexity and diversity in economic, cultural, and social value networks. For example, the approach which is working for Modesto will probably not work for San Francisco.
That has less to do with the size of the US but everything to do with the lack of size in the US. We make it impossible to do things by making each city small independent, and having a lack of unity. Our government is not more complex than Finland's because we have more people, it's because we chose to make it inefficient and complex. Removing local cities' power to be different for the sake of complexity would solve…
Name an efficient government of a country with hundreds of millions of people.
The US chooses not to end homelessness. We have the highest GDP in the world. We could end it if we wanted to. I was in Japan recently. A choice was made there as well.
It's funny, I was as well and saw homeless everywhere, for the first time ever.
I was recently in Scandinavia and while i've seen homeless there as well, there was a noticeable increase.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How could the United States end homelessness? It is a mix of federal government, state governments, and local/county/municipal governments. The level of government best suited to do the actual work is hamstrung... if any one city fixes homelessness (somehow), more homeless will show up. If they do that again for the new arrivals, more homeless show up. The first to solve it is punished with tens of thousands of newly…
70-80% of homeless people are local. Fixing homelessness in your community does not attract large numbers of additional people.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, like women getting educated, working, and having equal rights? Universal literacy and education? Instant global telecommunications? Democracy? ... I think it can be done!
>Sure, like women getting educated, working, and having equal rights? That only took a few thousand years and still isn't really there yet.
They delivered the results, and there's nothing you can say that changes the facts. You seem to really want to believe, and everyone to believe, how hopeless you are.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I'm sure there are extreme cases but the vast majority of homeless are not much different than you and I. i have seen estimates saying 50% are addicted to substances. in any case housing first prioritizes the most unstable and mentally ill to give immediate housing. this is a very typical feature of the program. if you are finnish, you should check out some videos of what our homeless are like. it's obviously not th…
> this is a funny statement considering wages in finland vs real estate prices. ive been told by a top 5% income finn that buying a house is not really possible for most people there currently. you can only inherit. the wages are lower, the taxes much higher, and real estate more expensive. Income is lower but actually taxes are fairly similar in the lower income brackets thanks to progressive taxation (and I'm not t…
outside the area where 30% of the entire country lives? ok. the actual number of years for helinski metropolitan area appears to be 10, and is higher than boston and nyc which are both INCREDIBLY expensive places to live. note that is generously comparing the actual cities to the metrpolitan area of helsinki.
the next largest metropolitan area is tampere, which is 6.9 years at median salary. this is very slightly cheaper than where i live which is also a very expensive city to live in. the city i live in is straight up not affordable to buy a house in at median salary.
>Either way if you're top 5% income you can easily afford to buy a house.
they are able to, but this wasnt the point of what they said. you have to be top 5% to comfortably own. doing some number crunching with chatgpt (lets pretend its accurate) to own at median salary in tampere requires more than 50% of your post tax income. that's with a 20% downpayment on a 300k house.
if i got any of those numbers wrong, feel free to correct. in the interest of time, they were done with chatgpt. i believe the prompts and data asked for should be simple enough to be accurate.
>and I'm not too concerned about the top earners starving
should also be noted that this top earning income is the equivalent of 80k USD. if they lived in the US they would be making double that. in the us, this is near median in a lot of places, and quite attainable in most.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
Regular people have a stigma against the homeless and that perceptions of crime from the homeless are higher than they should be and that's detrimental to help them. That is clear as water. I genuinely think you're trying to just push some perceived overton window and are ending up in a nonsensical argument about nobody being afraid of a whole group of people. And then you say I'm too fearful, which was the opposing…
Wow.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Speaking as a Finn. It's foremost NOT about mental&substance issues treatment but general financial aid to anyone in need. I think this phraze from the article summarizes it well. "The Finnish experience demonstrates the effectiveness of tackling homelessness through a combination of financial assistance, integrated and targeted support services and more supply: " It's a holistic system that actually kicks-in way bef…
Sounds like the result of being a small and rich country. The scale of these actions in a country like the US (Or India) would be impossibly expensive.
US is rich. Vastly richer than Finland. PPP GDP for US in 2023 was 73k $ and for Finland 64k $.
The systems are quite different. But it’s not about total wealth as such. If we use GDP as rough back-of-the-envelope estimate (problematic I know!) us could implement similar system economically but politically probably not.
The gini coefficient gives some hints about these differences (US 0.48, FI 0.28). In Finland people are taxed until there are very little income differences and then that money is used for social policies and healthcare. So everybody gets high quality healthcare for all of the serious stuff (until you reach best-before-date and government pulls the plug), you never need to freeze to death, go hungry (in theory at least) and your kids will have free education. Based on my limited understanding of US politics and social structure I find similar arrangement improbable.
But it’s not about country’s total wealth!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
there are different ways of accomplishing a needle program. around here they hand out packs of 100 without any stipulation. to everyone's surprise, our city is now littered in stray needles and requires constant cleanup. they're everywhere. the various programs do attract people from other states. this much is evident by our shelter logs which survey where they are from. it's important to note that it's probably not…
Your local community implemented a thing poorly, hence nobody should ever attempt to improve anything? You spend a lot of time accusing others of dishonesty and condescending, but your own comments read much more in that spirit. Housing support with social services on the side can be done well enough to help some fraction of the drug-using homeless recover. Some fraction may remain drug addicted, but now have a safe…
the original context was a ridiculous characterization of anyone being against a needle program. i am giving you one context of why someone might be against one, from the perspective of how it has been going in my city. whether standard protocol or poorly implemented, that is how it has been going.
>You spend a lot of time accusing others of dishonesty and condescending, but your own comments read much more in that spirit.
the condescension is hard to avoid when replies are posing snarky rhetorical questions which make understanding or addressing anything difficult. if you felt i've been dishonest, feel free to point it out. but preferably not in the way you did a second ago which took the form of "SO WE SHOULDN'T DO ANYTHING TO IMPROVE EVER?" which was clearly a good faith interpretation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
By what mechanism would reducing needle and syringe programs lead to fewer needles being left in public places? It's not like access to needles causes people to take up an injection drug habit.
He's going off the logic that the more services you provide for drug addicts, the more drug addicts you get. It's tied to the idea that an increase in homeless services attracts more homeless, which is true if you have a federalized system like the USA where the majority of homeless go to one place (or city). But there's no evidence that drug services increase drug use.