731–740 of 873 posts
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Many of the homeless don’t have jobs. They wouldn’t be able to afford rent in Bangladesh.
In Bangladesh someone can put up a plywood shack somewhere and call it their home Anyone living in a tent city would most likely not only survive but thrive there
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I think it is infeasible because I saw restrooms become less numerous and more restricted over the past 4 decades. If it was feasible, the OP’s article wouldn’t be describing a real phenomenon. As for the class I was raised in, my parents worked 24/7, my mom cleaned 20+ bathrooms every day, and my parents, myself and my sister slept in one room until I was 16 years old. I have also worked at places where public restr…
>I think it is infeasible because I saw restrooms become less numerous and more restricted over the past 4 decades. Cool. My point was that I was a minimum wage worker and still cleaning toilets. Did it for minimum wage. There were many other coworkers doing the same. You said > Try hiring someone for a job where the job could sometimes be cleaning up bodily fluids and odors in a bathroom. Even the government deems i…
>Its literally one of the lowest paid jobs there is.
Today, real life says that is not sufficient pay if we want more public bathrooms (in the places lacking them, such as urban, high density areas).
My conclusions are not based on my feelings or opinions, but a simple observations of real life market trends.
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It probably isn't as much about population growth as the increasing wealth gap. My hypothesis would be that a society where people don't feel fair distribution of wealth is more prone to this 'abuse' that you call 'overuse'.
I think it's mostly drug addicts.
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> We did as little as possible to deal with homelessness and mental illness SF would beg to differ. They have a budget of $100k per homeless person. They can't solve the problem because the problem is not money
I think around 1986 Reagan cut the federal funding to the facilities that would house the mentally ill. This created the homeless situation in the USA. I remember the term homeless as newly formed at that time and remember the population exploding as I went through college in center city Philadelphia.
https://factually.co/fact-checks/politics/did-ronald-reagan-...
The homeless situation as we know it had multiple causes in the 80s and prior. Part of it was Reagan-era policies wanting to save money, but the other half (which in my view would have probably still "achieved" the same end result) was activists who argued that involuntary institutionalization violated the rights of those who were committed. "The Left" and "The Right" were full partners in dismantling what we had. In my opinion, both were too stupid to realize the consequences of just deleting what existed without having a realistic plan for how to deal with those people. It's like if you realized your water heater was consuming $30 worth of electricity every month so you just turn the breaker off and say "We saved $30 and improved our climate footprint" but now everyone has to take cold showers forever and the dishes don't get properly cleaned.
Lack of bathrooms has been called tragedy of the commons in this thread, but it's not the "commons" that are the problem. The worst 10% of society determine what we can and can't have. The "commons" aren't having public sex, shooting up drugs, or destroying the bathrooms with lack of... etiquette. The commons are victimized when these things happen and then there's eventually no choice but to shut them down unless th…
Homelessness and the post-2008 wave of poverty ruined it. A few people who need to use a public bathroom everyday is fine, but when you have 100x of ppl who are desuetude, on drugs, mentally ill etc. emptying their medications and needles and so on it becomes a public health hazard, attracts crime, and overwhelms staff. Better to just shut it down altogether or limit to staff only. .
but the US is not poor. The US has the richest "poor" people in the entire world. There is a massive social security net with massive redistribution. There was no "post-2008 wave of poverty".
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You're right about who is causing the damage etc. but the 'commons' does not refer to the people; it refers to the shared resource. So a public park is the commons. And when it gets polluted with plastic rubbish etc. because externalities are not internalized that's a tragedy of the commons.
The fallacy in "the tragedy of the commons" is that there's something inherent in having a shared resource that dooms the shared resource. At least this is the popular understanding. And I'll add that if we look at shared resources both with more breadth -- e.g. across history and cultures -- and in more depth -- e.g. cross-analysis, they come out looking much more successful than you'd think.
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> We did as little as possible to deal with homelessness and mental illness SF would beg to differ. They have a budget of $100k per homeless person. They can't solve the problem because the problem is not money
SF - and probably much of the US homeless problem elsewhere - is largely cost of housing; rent and home prices are ridiculous enough that if you don't make big bucks, you are likely barely scraping by. Rents here are rising way faster than inflation, and it makes everything more expensive and means a lot more people are living that much closer to not being able to pay their rent. Way easier to end up homeless after l…
The less fortunate simply deal with shrinkflation of the bottom tiers of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Only 12% of married Americans under 30 own a home in 2026. In 1960 it was 52%.
https://wealthvieu.com/homeownership-rate-by-demographics/
The pandemic-heightened desire for more spacious and independent living, as well as “excess” savings accumulated early in the lockdown stages of the pandemic, propelled headship rates of young adults by two percentage point to 43.1%, the highest level since 2010. This still didn't meet parity with the historic norms of 1990-2000s.
https://eyeonhousing.org/2023/01/how-pandemic-changed-living...
In other news, U.S. Home Prices Are up 29 Percent Since 2019.
https://www.jpmorgan.com/insights/global-research/real-estat...
tl;dr Americans will vote for an Economy over a Society, so long as Social policies continue to be villainized in political discourse.
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HN comments always seem to be driving in the right direction and then yank the steering wheel at the last moment. Gotta be some kind of weather vane for you guys.
Please elaborate. Where does my comment leave the "right direction"?
surely then they aren't volunteering, but rather being volunteered
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I assure you, if they stopped spending that money tomorrow, things would get dramatically worse, as all the people that money keeps off the streets would be on them.
Do they spend $100,000 per homeless person in Europe and Asia? If not, why don't they have similar problems?