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The elderly are becoming homeless at a rate not seen since the Great Depression

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351–360 of 1001 posts

Re: The elderly are becoming homeless at a rate not seen since the Great Depression

#351

My mom was homeless for years, thankfully she got stable housing right before covid took off. - in shelters/churches-with-cots there would be crazed drug-users, she was threatened numerous times in them and the shelter can't do anything - I wasn't financially able to help her much but managed to buy her a "clunker" of a car which she later slept in before getting housing - she's entirely dependent on getting social s…

> My mom was homeless for years > I wasn't financially able to help her much but managed to buy her a "clunker" of a car which she later slept in before getting housing Ah… So… If you had a place to live couldn’t you let her live in that same place too, instead of her being homeless? My parents lost their jobs due to covid, and even though they treated me bad when I was a kid I still let them in my house. How can you…

OP may not live alone- you are making a lot of assumptions.

Maybe their mother was a proud woman who didn't want to impose/intrude more than she already was.

Their mother may live in another state, in which she is more comfortable.

Rather than reprimanding OP, try having some empathy.

If not for OP then for their mother. No one should have to be homeless, it's a special kind of hell. I speak from personal experience.

Re: The elderly are becoming homeless at a rate not seen since the Great Depression

#352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, this is a take on gun control I don't think I've ever seen: "Lack of gun control is preventing the state from forcibly redistributing the wealth of middle class families." (And this is bad). NRA, eat your hearts out, I guess.

[flagged]

poe's law. I can't tell if you are trolling sarcastically or actually a progressive.

Re: The elderly are becoming homeless at a rate not seen since the Great Depression

#353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most Metro areas do not have enough affordable housing. There's no such thing as affordable housing[0]. Just housing. You can certainly argue that building a house is too expensive -- and due to NIMBYism, discriminatory policies, and anti-density regulatory environments, this is often true -- but affordability is not an intrinsic value of a building, and the problem is generally that housing stock simply doesn't ke…

Building any housing is building affordable housing. Adding one home at the top of the price range, increases the number of affordable homes for someone, somewhere, by at least one.

Come tell that to the residents of Vancouver. We've had countless luxury condos made year after year for two decades and we're at around 3k/mo for a 1br.. tell us more about how building units that "regular" people can never afford that it's always helping them.

Re: The elderly are becoming homeless at a rate not seen since the Great Depression

#354
I was holding out on joining the wave of doomerism that pervades everyone's mindset so thoroughly nowadays, but I'm starting to be won over. Between economic things like this and the apparent infeasibility of carbon capture (meaning a likely 3+ degree C increase in global temperature (and the resulting catastrophic effects that not even activists talk about because the scenario is too bleak to imagine)), I am starting to join the doomer mindshare.

Re: The elderly are becoming homeless at a rate not seen since the Great Depression

#355
post #100

I moved to Portland a year ago. We certainly have a lot of homeless people, many of which are people caught up in the substance abuse cycle with particular drugs. However, one day I was driving back to East Portland, I drove under an underpass that's a particularly rough place. I saw a woman that looked to be my mom's age with what appeared to be a modern suit case, she was well dressed, and sober looking. The blood…

It's comforting to think homelessness is caused by people making bad decisions, but it's almost entirely a result of bad public policy. West Virginia has a much higher rate of drug addiction than Portland, but much less homelessness. Because drug addicts in West Virginia can afford housing. Other places have worse access to mental healthcare but less homelessness for the same reason. Demand in metropolitan areas has…

Housing is cheap in West Virginia because it's currently experiencing the largest population exodus in the US.

https://apnews.com/article/al-state-wire-west-virginia-lifes...

Re: The elderly are becoming homeless at a rate not seen since the Great Depression

#356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their parents, society, etc. I won't convince you because you've got your anecdotes. Though I'd say if a public school counselor, parents and teachers all tell a 17 year old it's "college or bust", it's laughable to argue "ah, those teenagers should have been rational, informed consumers of professional training and eschewed the advice of every trusted adult in their life".

It does not take professional training to see the price tag of a student loan and to question if one can reasonably pay it off in the future. Certainly, someone equipped with the skills needed to be accepted into a college that costs so much should be able to do the math required on that calculation.

I disagree.

Re: The elderly are becoming homeless at a rate not seen since the Great Depression

#357
post #327
post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You only perceive corporate landlords as the greater problem because we're not living in the counterfactual reality where there are millions of new apartments that are inexpensive, tiny, safe, quiet, modern, clean, dignified, and well-located. In pretty much every major city in North America, it is illegal or there is too much red tape to build the affordable housing people actually want. Why is it that living in a t…

> build the affordable housing people actually want. And the unspeakable little problem that people don't want to live around the people who will be living in the affordable housing people actually want. Hence, NIMBY.

This here. You can't fix housing problem in a bubble. You need to solve healthcare, public transit and more. It needs to be handled as a complex unit with solutions advanced in parallel.

Re: The elderly are becoming homeless at a rate not seen since the Great Depression

#358
post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But no one forced those people to take on those loans.

Not explicitly but the choice is “stay in your economic class or invest in the only thing reliably proven to improve your future”.

And those who do not want to deal with the risk of going through school and not getting a better job to pay for the onerous loans can just remain in their economic class.

Re: The elderly are becoming homeless at a rate not seen since the Great Depression

#359
post #100

I moved to Portland a year ago. We certainly have a lot of homeless people, many of which are people caught up in the substance abuse cycle with particular drugs. However, one day I was driving back to East Portland, I drove under an underpass that's a particularly rough place. I saw a woman that looked to be my mom's age with what appeared to be a modern suit case, she was well dressed, and sober looking. The blood…

I don't know why we don't just have a single state where all homeless people can live. Where homeless people from all over can be bussed into. Where all homelessness resources can be directed. Where a majority of caseworkers can go, where lots and lots of housing can be built and no NIMBYs can complain. A state that is already basically this kind of place. Like West Virginia.

Re: The elderly are becoming homeless at a rate not seen since the Great Depression

#360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes unfortunately. There are TikTok "challenges" go slap your teacher for example. Similar to the "challenges" where you should eat a spoon of cinnamon, eat a Tide pod, etc. There's an air of do this and film it for clout. Most kids roll their eyes as well of course, but there are people who follow along.

Facebook was bad, Instagram was worse, but TikTok is downright freaky. It's like each additional layer of multimedia added to social media amplifies whatever mental toxin these platforms feed people. Edit: as a sibling notes, this particular challenge appears to not actually exist: https://www.snopes.com/news/2021/10/07/slap-a-teacher-challe...

I constantly have to remind myself that TikTok is a Chinese owned company and while a video like this would be banned in China the algorithm amplifies anti-social behaviour like this in the west.

When I see kids around me watching videos like this, I make sure to remind them and their parents this is deliberate propaganda.

When Facebook/Insta does it the motivation is money. When TikTok does it the motivation is political.

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