361–370 of 376 posts
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Medical debt can be discharged in bankruptcy, there's no reason anyone should become homeless over it.
Have you tried renting with a lack of a credit score or with a tanked score? It is increasingly out of reach.
Imagine you're a municipality like San Francisco. You control all of the zoning regulations, and many of the permitting requirements. You have a AA+ credit rating, and even in today's higher rate environment, you can borrow billions of dollars at 6%. You already own oodles of land. You can build to whatever height you want within reason, because you control the zoning, and you even control many of the ordinances that…
The government is run by and for the benefit of the established land owners and they don't want housing, they want excess returns. Simple.
Simple but simplistic, that's just a caricature. Reality is more complex, and regular homeowners don't care about returns, excess or otherwise. People buy homes to live in, to raise their kids in and to maybe retire in if health allows. Most people enjoy stability, so it's nice for the neighborhood to change slowly or not that much.
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Especially for a city that is explicitly progressive, why the "all rapid change is bad, it must take decades or centuries, otherwise it's not natural" approach? Germany's large cities have similar issues where they don't want to start building new districts because it'd be artificial and not naturally grown building by building. And it's better to have rents double every 10 years, apparently. I don't get the "why", b…
> I don't get the "why", but the approach is fairly explicit -- and politicians get reelected while following it, so I guess it's what "the people" want. Consider every time you have moved into a new place to live. What kind of research did you do and what factors did you consider when prioritizing multiple option down to the final selection? It's possible you might say (since I don't know you) that you only look at…
But in cities with lower ownership percentage, everybody is feeling the heat when you just cannot afford to move if you're not a top earner because your current flat would cost twice as much since you moved in ten years ago. Rent as a percentage of income steadily rises, 30% was the maximum recommended value, which is now considered good, 50% is now accepted. Germany has relatively low incomes and high taxes, people are clearly feeling it.
Yet still, they re-elect politicians who block large-scale developments in open areas. I've lived in Hamburg, they have plenty of space that can be easily developed and integrated into the public transportation network, but they don't. They wouldn't even need to build it themselves, they'd just need to allow private investors or housing coops to build. But they don't, because ... I don't know. Change is bad? It's too good of a topic to bemoan and win elections with, because people are too simple to see that they've been running the government for 50 of the past 55 years? Landlords paying them off? I don't know.
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People in the neighborhoods with fewer problems (let’s face it, there are many very quiet expensive neighborhoods in the Bay Area) have very “progressive” views on the homelessnesses. They don’t experience its effects frequently, so don’t think it’s a big problem. They vote for policies that grow social services for the homeless, even though those policies don’t work. But the idea they have is that these services jus…
Progressives live in cities more than anywhere else, San Francisco being a center of progressivism. The critics live elsewhere, and love to tell people in cities what they really should want and do (more guns, no progressive reforms, etc. etc.). In NY, the anti-progressive vote was in the suburbs; in the city they do well. In Philadelphia, the progressive DA did best in African-American neighborhoods.
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The BoS & electorate create laws, bureaucracies, structures and courts that would create those 25 year court cases in the first place. The properly allocated elected set of judges, supervisors, mayor and DAs can make most of those disappear in the first place by changing the law, how the government runs and how the courts run and rule on cases, complete with prioritizing court cases for the few they don't have a choi…
> The BoS & electorate create laws, bureaucracies, structures and courts that would create those 25 year court cases in the first place. The properly allocated elected set of judges, supervisors, mayor and DAs can make most of those disappear in the first place by changing the law, how the government runs and how the courts run and rule on cases, complete with prioritizing court cases for the few they don't have a ch…
So on net, a few will move away, the vast majority will shrug as usual and SF will have a lot more people in it.
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> Rates of homelessness are not correlated with "life choices" What could this possibly even mean? Someone roles a dice and then somebody materializes on the side of the road with a tent and a shopping cart and a fentanyl addiction? This person just existed in a choiceless state up until the exact moment where the gained agency and simultaneously became homeless?
It means that poor choices and addiction can’t explain why San Francisco has so much higher homelessness than other places like West Virginia, which has much higher addiction rates.
Nothing more or less.
It does not even come close to justifying the statement
> Rates of homelessness are not correlated with "life choices" or "events" at all
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Those are great opportunities to teach your children about the consequences of an apathetic voting base. It’s also a great time to nurture children’s empathetic abilities by teaching them to juxtapose indecent behavior, mental illness, poverty, and general despair. Want more action? Try protesting and demanding solutions that include no questions asked housing, healthcare, food, water, and basic essential communicati…
>>Those are great opportunities to teach your children about the consequences of an apathetic voting base I think you would be much better off using those opportunities to teach your kids to stay away from drugs and alcohol, and to study hard and work hard - so they don't end up like that.
Tangentially, I think it’s much better to use people like Elon musk, or Donald trump, or Sam bank man fried, jk Rowling, etc as examples of who not to become. Bad luck can befall anyone whereas these people woke up and chose violence, repeatedly.
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Yeah, the thing I always say about the people who complain about tech workers and gentrification in a place like San Francisco is like, look, if you can't figure out how to gain from an influx of wealthy, highly-educated, low-criminality, nerdy tech workers, then that's really on you. What a gift! Any city would be lucky to have that "problem." You have to actively work to make that a negative (by, say, refusing to a…
I didn't want the tech workers flowing into Seattle with Amazon's decision to invade by building their HQ right in the heart. There was a lot of music culture there, at Cap Hill, in the basements of Seattle families that had lived there a long time. It really felt, if you were there, like an invasion: nobody coming in had any context of what was already there, they just took and took and all they could offer was soft…
Story as old as time. There were people 30 years ago who wanted to keep out the people you're celebrating as the old-timers. If the older-old timers had their way your preferred old-timers would never have been allowed to move there. And there were even older-than-the-older-old timers who wanted to keep out the older-old-timers. And on and on and on.
Cities change. It's natural. You'll like some changes and hate others, but that's what comes with freedom of movement and, well, freedom more generally. At one time Midtown Manhattan was a forest. Then it was farmland. Then a semi-rural village. Eventually, rich New Yorkers started building Mansions up 5th Avenue. But they did this in the old days before powerful people could block change and even they couldn't stop the walk-ups that replaced their estates. Then those walk-ups were mostly lost to taller buildings. And then even taller ones. And now here come the super-tall skinnies that every New Yorker loves to hate.
At every step there were constituencies opposed to the changes, people who thought the newcomers didn't properly understand the true spirit of Midtown Manhattan. And maybe they were right. But on it goes.
As much as you might not like the changes, the alternatives are far worse. Internal migration controls? Way worse. Refusing to build any new housing to spite the newcomers? Just ends up hurting everyone.
You want to live in Seattle and so do lots of other people. And in a free country their claim on the city is equal to yours. They are full citizens the day they move in. They don't have to pass any kind of Authentic Seattleite test. Because what it means to be an Authentic Seattleite will change, too. That's just life in a free society.
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When a company creates a new HQ, it's displacement. When a company leaves a town (especially a small one) it leaves people jobless and they are evil for it. On the surface it seems some people think cities should stay entirely static forever, frozen at the particular time when they remembered they enjoyed it most. The people moving in will have their own experiences. Places change. If you don't like your place, work…
> On the surface it seems some people think cities should stay entirely static forever, frozen at the particular time when they remembered they enjoyed it most. I didn't say this. > The people moving in will have their own experiences. Places change. If you don't like your place, work to make it better or find one you like more. Maybe not everyone in your city is into the arts and "scene" as much as you are, and the…