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There’s a number of other studies that show that, overall, letting people go unhoused is far, far more costly than just fucking housing them. It’s not just paying for the cops and demo teams to chase them around, you’re also paying for excess use of medical services that wouldn’t be taking place otherwise, lost revenue because of people wanting to avoid the homeless, and a bunch of other things that all just pile up. It doesn’t help that some startups have entered this space and you’ve got cities like San Francisco paying them something like 40 or 80 thousand a year to keep the homeless in a fenced off area in a tent grid. It doesn’t really fix anything, it’s just another shitty, expensive band-aid whose funding could have gone to fixing the problem but didn’t.
Yes. They should do it like NYC, where it’s basically illegal to live on the street. The city is required by law to offer free housing at a certain quality level for anyone who needs it. It’s not amazing but you get a door that locks and a security team, plus a bathroom.
If you don’t want to sleep inside, you literally have to leave the city. It’s not cheap but it works much better than letting people live in tents.
Why the illegal part, though? People don’t really need an incentive to have shelter. It just punishes people who are struggling with even deeper issues.
Technically it’s not illegal to sleep on the street, but there are sanitation rules regarding it. NYC has 8 million people. Any problem you can think of is magnified. It’s literally a sanitary issue if you allow thousands of people to camp outside.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/26/nyregion/nyc-homeless-camp-bill-of-rights.html
In New York City, there are many rules on the books that have been used to restrict sleeping rough.
One is a piece of sanitation code that makes it unlawful to leave “any box, barrel, bale or merchandise or other movable property” or to erect “any shed, building or other obstruction” on “any public place.”
In city parks, it is illegal to “engage in camping, or erect or maintain a tent, shelter or camp” without a permit, or to be in a park at all between 1 a.m. and 6 a.m. unless posted rules state otherwise.
And on the property of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, both underground and in outdoor elevated subway stations, it is a form of banned disorderly conduct to “sleep or doze” in any manner that “may interfere” with the comfort of passengers. Nor may subway riders “lie down or place feet on the seat of a train, bus or platform bench or occupy more than one seat” or “place bags or personal items on seats” in ways that “impede the comfort of other passengers.”
Note that these rules also restrict people who have homes too. No one can have a party in the park after hours or take up a ton of space on the subway. Note also that you can sleep outside if you don’t get in the way.
someone who did not violate any of those rules — say, someone who set a sleeping bag in an out-of-the-way spot under a highway overpass and did not put up any kind of shelter — was legally in the clear, at least in theory.
Note that these rules also restrict people who have homes too. No one can have a party in the park after hours or take up a ton of space on the subway. Note also that you can sleep outside if you don’t get in the way.
This doesn’t apply because the law doesn’t forbid anyone from sleeping under bridges. Also, you can get housing for free. That’s my point. It’s the opposite of that quote. Unless you’re pro-theft or something.
I am not sure what the housing situation is actually like for homeless in NYC because I’ve never spoken to anyone there who experienced it. I don’t take your word for it that it’s good or ethical.
I am not protheft. I’m not wealthy like that. https://www.edelson-law.com/blog/2022/10/wage-theft-outpaces-all-other-theft-in-america/
There are a ton of articles on it. The system is huge and has been around for decades. Look it up if you like. If you don’t care, don’t.
No one said it was good at all. It’s a necessary service in a big city. Obviously some shelters are very different from others. None of them are at nice hotels, but you can get your own room and a place for some of your stuff.
The major complaints are usually “it’s too small” or “they don’t let me have pets”. Guess what? There are actual apartments people pay for that are too small and don’t allow pets. It’s NYC.
I’m talking about reality in this century. You’re quoting an 1800s writer from another country. The system is a complicated solution to a complicated problem. So there’s not going to be any simple answer, and definitely not from online quotes.
It’s a glowed up version of “The law binds both rich and poor equally”. A transparently untrue statement that’s meant to draw attention to laws that are a mere inconvenience for the rich but seriously hurt the poor.
Obviously they restrict people who have homes but that isn’t really relevant here, is it? Those people have choices, they get to choose to stay late in a park and the alternative for them is go home.
It’s not even close to the same thing.
They didn’t say it was the same thing, they just mentioned that it’s not just to target the homeless.
As you said in another comment, things are often more complex than one thing or another.
Exactly. These are necessary rules for a large city. No one can camp without a permit because then parks would be unusable. The same permit is for weddings, parties, whatever. It’s pretty easy to get one for a few hours, but they will reject it if you ask to use the park every day and night.
People living outside in public parks and on streets is a really bad use of urban space. It takes public space and makes it private. That’s why the city gives out free room in old hotels and shelters. It’s a good thing people can’t sleep wherever.
That’s not to mention that it gets very cold in NYC in the winter, unlike San Francisco. If you’re stuck outside in the winter in NYC, you will die.
People don’t really need an incentive to have shelter
Not necessarily true. For example if the place has “no alcohol and no being drunk” policy, some of them will rather stay out.
Right but that’s a choice the shelter can make and not a point against the idea that people, ultimately, won’t really refuse a place to sleep. It’s a more complex issue that takes more time than an evening so rules like “no being drunk” which sound fine don’t really help anyone.
I’d imagine it’d help make the unhoused who don’t want to have to deal with drunk people feel a lot safer about using them.
So what are the people who depend on alcohol supposed to do? They aren’t allowed to have seizures and go through withdrawal there either.
and if you want to use public money on it, then the goal has to be to help them get back to society, to which dealing with problematic behavioral patterns, like substance abuse, is a necessity…
Have you seen alcohol withdrawal?
People don’t really need an incentive to have shelter
Unfortunately some people do.
no. shut the fuck up with this authoritarian garbage. when the “shelter” offered comes with a slew of dehumanizing draconian traditions, forces them to abandon other resources (including pets, which are also functional when you’re homeless) and wildly precarious, you would have to be fucking stupid to take the deal. cut this shit out, or let me impose those conditions on YOUR shelter.
Hey, just to get it off my chest since you attacked me for no reason other than some preconception you brought with you, fuck you too!
Now that I’ve dealt with that, back to the topic. Some people don’t want structure, or shelter, or society, or any of it. It doesn’t matter if there’s no conditions applied, they just don’t want it.
I remember years ago reading about this guy who was the director of a huge hospital. He was worth millions of dollars. He could do anything he wanted to do. Guess what he wanted to do? He wanted to live on the streets and drink alcohol until he died. He left his mansion, and his family, and went and drank himself to death on the streets. Was he mentally ill? Probably, man! But if anyone had access to every available option for help that existed, it was him. He didn’t want it. He wanted to be a drunk homeless person.
So my point stands. You can offer whatever catch-all, condition-free solution you want, and some people are still going to reject it. That’s just reality, regardless of what we wish.
Are you talking about Todd Waters? Otherwise link source. It’s pretty rare for someone to want that lifestyle unless they’ve already involuntarily experienced it previously. Todd had started trainhopping when he was in high school.
I know of one other individual who is a millionaire and has a mansion he sleeps in, but during the day appears to be homeless and pushes a cart around cleaning up cans and trash. He’s beloved by his local community (very nice man and generous tipper). He also experienced living on the street involuntarily previously and got an inheritance.
Waters was a “hobo” who proudly noted in 2012 that he’s been arrested about 70 times jumping railroad cars out of St. Paul for parts unknown and known. He was also a millionaire.
“My life went south after my wife ran off with a bartender to Arizona. I sold everything I owned and hit the ‘first thing smokin’, running away, then after a year or so, drifting where ever I damned well pleased. I got off ‘the road’ after a few years to settle down,” he wrote on Hobo Times. “That lasted about three weeks. I was homesick for ‘the road’. I returned to ‘the road’. That lasted a few months until I got homesick for settled society. That lasted until I got homesick for the road again.”
Somewhere along the line, he got in the advertising business, made a lot of money, and lived in a million-dollar home on Lake Minnetonka.
Todd’s childhood friend, Bill Martin, once asked him why he would leave the comfort and security of his family and his Lake Minnetonka home every summer for 40 years to live the hobo life, with no money and no phone, exposing himself to danger, dodging the law and sleeping out in the elements. He replied, “It’s the freedom I feel.” The more risks he took, and the less he had in his pack, the more he was free to experience.
While Todd rubbed shoulders with the wealthy, prominent and powerful, the people he probably respected most for their guts and straightforwardness were hobos. So before hiring account executives for his agencies Waters Advertising, Waters & Company and WatersMolitor, Inc. he sometimes asked candidates to hit the streets and panhandle. He insisted that the people he worked with be brave, and know how to close a sale.
No, not him. I can’t find a source. I read about it in a newspaper, or magazine like 15-20 years ago. If I remember correctly, he was the director of St. Agnes hospital in Fresno, CA.
WHY do these people not want structure, or shelter, or society?
have you considered that? have you fucking asked that? why someone might want to see the world burn? or do you just accept when you’re told they do, and assume they’re a magical evil monster?
I used to do a lot of work with unhoused populations. I tended to get those people, because nobody else could deal with them. I could, because the structure I offered wasn’t coercive, the shelter I offered was clearly defined (when I could offer any) and no-strings-attached, and the society I was working for was one that would include them and give them a voice and treat them like fucking human beings.
okay. so someone wanted to drink on the streets. there’s a reason. maybe a dumb reason, maybe a crazy reason, but a reason. I’ve been pretty close to taking this option before, once after seeing some shit that an emergency room kicked out, once after dealing with police victims. if I had been complicit and tied into existing systems, if I hadn’t read all the theory and committed myself to working against oppression, I would have done something an awful lot like that.
seems like you just really enjoy throwing people away, and don’t want to put any effort into understanding awful shit that they’ve experienced and how it motivates them to do the things they do, which you sometimes find odd.
why do the sociopaths who declare noncompliant unhoused people ontologically evil want us to understand them, when they won’t even try to understand the people who make THEM uncomfortable?
San Francisco infuriates me. There are activist groups that are made of actual literal unhoused people telling the city what they need and what they want. And the city could just give people the money they need for a fraction of the administrative costs it spins on its non-profits and its government agencies.
But the city says homeless people are drug addicts and criminals and can’t be trusted to use money responsibly.
So they funnel millions of dollars to corrupt non-profits and government agencies who promise to use the money responsibly for the benefit of the homeless and they fucking don’t. There was a $350K program run by the Salvation Army in partnership with the local public transit agency. One homeless person used their services.. One.
At least government agencies are, at some remove, responsible to the taxpayers and the voters. Non-profits dedicated to “helping” the homeless have a very strong incentive to make the problem worse. Because the worse the homelessness crisis becomes, the more money goes to the nonprofits. So they take government money, give it to their employees, make some sort of pathetic token effort to help unhoused people, and as the crisis worsens they go back to the government and say “the crisis is worse, we need more money”.
And civilians look at the amount of money being poured into assistance to unhoused people, and look at the crisis getting worse, and say “more money and services won’t help these people, we need to criminalize them”. And fucking Newsom is all over that because he’s angling for the Presidency and military style crackdowns impress the fascists in red states.
There’s a homelessness crisis because of government corruption and incompetence. And the majority of Americans think the solution is to give the government more military power, more police power, and let those same corrupt agencies brutalize the homeless more. It’s sickening.
I actually kind of went to a major fancy pants conference in Portland last year for homelessness issues.
Yes, it was extremely dystopian to drink wine and wear jewelry and fancy dresses while seeing presentations on homelessness. The whole thing was depressing. The other people who were there to genuinely resolve the issue were also depressed. Everyone got drunk. We talked a bit.
The problem is that it’s all a gridlock and all controversial and these people don’t face any real discomfort from that gridlock or from prolonging the situation. They still get paid. As much as they wince and say how it’s bad and they can’t figure out how to work with NIMBY’s and all the stigma and regulations etc- they still get paid. And they get to brag to all their friends about how kind and amazing they are for being the head of the Sad Pathetic Homeless People NonProfit Fund for the last 8 years.
It’s like they sympathy jerk off. They are just edging to the suffering in a different way. If they were effective, then they wouldn’t look so amazing and charitable because the homeless wouldn’t be an issue. They couldn’t keep jerking off to their own saintly ego.
The nonprofit industrial complex is a leech. At least government agencies have some level of accountability, because if they fail to solve a problem, the voters blame the politicians, and the politicians shit downhill on the agencies. Nonprofits don’t even have that minimal level of accountability. They just spend all the government money they get, write grants saying “we spent all the money you gave us doing stuff, please give us more”, and get more money.
But this is what you get when both the left and right have bought into libertarian free market ideology and agree that privatizing government services is more efficient than letting the government do its goddamn job.
Yes, charitable organizations are unfortunately corrupt.
you’ve got cities like San Francisco paying them something like 40 or 80 thousand a year to keep the homeless in a fenced off area in a tent grid
Star Trek DS9 predicting the future yet again
We’re less than 3 weeks away from the Bell Riots if we’re in the Prime Universe.
Unless I slept through the Eugenics Wars in the 90s I’m sad to report we are not in the Prime Universe.
Though in that case there is a distinctive lack of lens flare.
Who are you going to believe your lying eyes or your buddy teft? The eugenics wars totally happened. Dolly the sheep was one of the first soldiers.
nah, they’re about to happen, just late. check india and silicon valley.
The Eugenics wars were moved to 2022 through 2056 due to time travel bullshit.
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Eugenics_Wars
So we still got time to fuck it up.
and honestly, I would like to sit on a bench at night without worrying im keeping somebody out of their bed. that would be cool. I would like to stop the streets smelling like piss. I would like too walk on the sidewalk without having to detour and step into the street to avoid people’s homes at least twice a block.
clearly, armed neo nazi thugs, even if you LIKE armed neo nazi thugs (we should, um, have a chat separately. what the fuck is wrong with hypothetical you?) don’t make that happen. and for the libs: you wouldn’t even have to look at human tragedy beyond their full comprehension every time you go outside! yes, you would have to give resources and basic human dignity to the ‘undeserving’, and supply side jesus WOULD damn you to eternal hell (being homeless in san francisco but during extreme weather events), but the few years before you die would be substantially nicer.
Not asking as a challenge to your comment, but what studies are you referring to? I’d be interested to learn more.
I would be very proud to say I had them on hand, but I don’t. I’ll look around, and share if I find them.
That would be very cool of you!
BuT I HaVe To WoRk FoR mY HoUsE!!
…yeah? And you get to choose how nice that house is and where it is. You aren’t “forced” to only have a small apartment…
America: land of the greedy, cold, asshole.
Yeah? Well if someone decided to build affordable housing near my McMansion, then my precious house’s market value will decrease. Also something about crime because of the poors
Noooooo my white flight suburb
Crime is a legitimate concern, especially for people raising a family. I get where you’re coming from, but you shouldn’t trivialize legitimate issues. I’m someone who grew up in a violent, crime infested area, and it fucking sucked.
It is a concern, but crime is a symptom of a larger issue, that being poverty and desparation (for the most part). We need to put out the fire from the base, otherwise it will continue to grow.
The vast majority of theft is done through the wealthy via time card fraud / theft from employees, and then police through asset forfeiture. Crime and morality have nothing to do with poverty, and associating them with poor people (when the rich do the most of it) is classist propaganda.
Eh … There are literally millions of people who work and don’t get to choose any of those things, and are forced into a small apartment and/or a roommate scenario.
Oh I know that all too well lol I currently rent an “apartment” that is the upstairs of a dilapidated garage and I work full time as a psudo-supervisor in a factory (whatever im considered idk lol we don’t use titles so we can’t determine our value properly)
For us, that “free housing” would probably be equivalent to what we have now lol
I mean, there’s no reason we can’t go the way of Japanese micro home in construction. Everything you need packed into an efficient little area you can still call home.
Hell… if I wasn’t married with kids and pets, I’d almost prefer that.
I wouldn’t call the masses all living in tiny boxes so that the wealthy can add a few more zeroes to their bank accounts progress. Japan has a lack of available land that most places don’t have. If people need to live in micro-homes to get by in places with plenty of space, then there’s still a very serious unresolved issue.
You definitely don’t need to (and shouldn’t!) go as far as Japan, but even in places with abundant space like America or Australia, there are huge advantages to keeping homes relatively smaller in terms of land-area per-person. (Floor space can stay higher by: building multi-storey row houses, building apartments, reducing private lawn areas, etc.)
Keeping things less spread out is much, much more affordable. Fewer roads to maintain, fewer ks of electricity, sewerage, and Internet infrastructure, etc. It makes public transport run much more efficiently, which reduces the cost of operating it, which means you get more of it. This makes it a better service, which means people use it, which takes cars off the road, which makes congestion less of a problem, which makes getting around faster. Ditto the cost and usability of bike paths and nice pedestrian footpaths, which become more usable as a result of things being literally closer together, resulting in a store you might once have had to drive to get to being possible to walk to now. This in turn makes things more affordable for individuals, because they might not need to pay the huge prices associated with cars (buying the thing, maintenance, insurance, petrol) if they can get around by bike and public transport. Or at the very least, a family can drop down from 2 or 3 cars to just 1 being enough.
It makes housing more affordable, since instead of paying for 300 sq m of land per 100 sq m of floor space, you might now be paying 50 sq m or less of land per 100 sq m floor space. And because things a denser, your commute can drop from potentially over an hour to something reasonable like less than 30 minutes.
Oh, no argument here at all. I’m simply saying that a perfectly livable micro home could be the answer for those who would bitch about “I’m paying for my home and theirs is nicer” or similar.
Make a home that is adequate, but most would want to improve their lives and move out of.
Of course I’m more a supporter of UBI, which would likely solve this issue among many others if properly implemented. But that’s a different topic completely.
That sounds like a good proposition. Of course it doesn’t matter what we think if we don’t get loud about it in places that matter, like city hall meetings, letters to the city council members, shouting while standing on top of a milk crate with a bullhorn, and stuff like that.
I was just kidding about the milk crate.
I think the issue is that if the government offered tiny houses or apartments for anyone that everyone would want one.
The value of “free shit” is somehow larger than the value of owning a large mansion or something.
And what’s the problem? So what if a whole bunch of single people moved into tiny government houses? Housing is a human right. And it sure would bring rents down.
There is no problem, they create the problem to justify their lack of empathy.
Maybe your opinion is that housing is a human right but I’m not sure where you are drawing that definitive conclusion from. Are you saying it’s a legal right somewhere or that it’s your emotional stance? In my experience, housing, or even just shelter, is a human responsibility not a right.
Don’t get me wrong, it’d sure be nice if it was a legal right for folks to have a safe shelter of sorts. Men are commonly turned away from the limited shelters that exist due to comfort and safety concerns for women and children. I don’t see how that happens if it’s a human right.
Maybe your opinion is that housing is a human right but I’m not sure where you are drawing that definitive conclusion from. Are you saying it’s a legal right somewhere or that it’s your emotional stance?
The right to housing is a fundamental human right, according to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and many international treaties and agreements since. As the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights puts it:
Adequate housing was recognized as part of the right to an adequate standard of living in article 25 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and in article 11.1 of the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Other international human rights treaties have since recognized or referred to the right to adequate housing or some elements of it, such as the protection of one’s home and privacy.
https://www.ohchr.org/en/special-procedures/sr-housing/human-right-adequate-housing
Your personal experience has given you an incorrect belief regarding the human right to housing. I’m sorry to call you out so directly, but sometimes people need to hear hard truths. Facts don’t care about your feelings.
I don’t feel like you called me out at all but that doesn’t seem to establish any kind of legal human right to any specific area of interest that I have seen discussed here. Are you able to clarify how I’m missing that part of it?
Perhaps we’re talking past each other. Human rights are not defined by laws. Human rights come before laws. Laws, in decent nations, are written in such a way as to protect human rights.
The text of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, enacted by the UN in the hope that never again would the world see such widespread and horrific violations of human rights as it did during World War II, is an excellent starting point to understand how the modern world sees human rights. It is linked in the post I linked above.
And, just to circle back around to the topic, the laws of the United States are clearly failing to protect the fundamental human right to adequate housing for all persons resident in the United States.
That makes sense, thank you for clarifying.
There is a substantial argument for housing being a right, and also let’s get real - it’s bad for a government to be so unstable they can’t give adequate housing to everyone. It’d bad at a societal level even if it theoretically didn’t violate individual rights.
https://journals.openedition.org/interventionseconomiques/6499
51 Historical analysis reveals that American policymakers have consistently used happiness discourse and a specific notion of virtue to promote an ownership model of wellbeing. The eighteenth-century use of the term “happiness”—namely, a stable feeling of fulfillment and wellbeing that results from a virtuous way of life—was pivotal in forging a lasting rhetorical link between the pursuit of happiness and the lifestyle induced by property ownership. As if they were reading from James Truslow Adams’ playbook, subsequent generations of Americans appear to have unwaveringly stood up to save the American Dream of homeownership from any opposing forces (Adams 2017 [1931]). As the frontier reached the Pacific and small farmland became scarce, suburban crabgrass (Jackson 1985) became the next frontier to conquer for Americans in search of homeownership. As suburbanization fueled an urban crisis for many poor minorities, the Civil Rights Movement sparked political change in the 1960s that would attempt to give equal homeownership opportunities to all Americans regardless of skin color, sex, or origin. Then as unfavorable economic conditions made housing credit scarce, financial deregulation was used to keep the American Dream of homeownership alive. Even the subprime mortgage crisis, in which deregulation played a strong role, has barely put a dent in Americans’ attachment to the homeownership way of life.
From a theoretical standpoint, the long-term resistance and flexibility of this model, both in discourse and in practice, must be traced back to the fundamental contradiction between the universality of the principles enshrined in the nation’s founding documents, in which the link between the pursuit of happiness and ownership is institutionalized, and the reality of the racial, gender and class inequalities in the United States regarding property ownership. This is what makes the homeownership society a permanent horizon, a utopian dream for all Americans to strive for by overcoming whatever political, social, or economic obstacles they come across; and it’s the pursuit of this dream, not necessarily the achievement of it, that is presented as the gateway to happiness and virtue. As such, politicians can constantly reactivate this discourse to bolster support for either conservative or progressive policies that alternate between saving an ownership model in danger and expanding it toward new frontiers. By channeling political resistance toward the improvement or greater accessibility of a homeownership model, the validity of the model itself remains unquestioned. Happiness politics based on this model thus constructs and reconstructs loyalty to the American capitalist regime of private property by presenting obstacles to homeownership as an opportunity to defend the American way of life, while alternatives to the dream of homeownership are considered an un-American road to vice and unhappiness.
Of course, what is claimed in political discourse about homeownership and happiness should not be taken at face value, even if polls and the concrete living situation of the majority of Americans attest to a strong relationship between the two. While there is still more comparative research to be conducted on the strengths and weaknesses of renting and homeownership on various dimensions of wellbeing, this brief historical analysis may open up a new dimension somewhat specific to the United States. When homeownership has been culturally presented as the only virtuous and truly American gateway to happiness, can this lead to a feeling of being un-American, or a failed American, if one is either unable or unwilling to conform? To what extent is it important to have the same housing lifestyle as one’s fellow citizens to feel part of the national community? In other words, the effect of associating patriotic attitudes with specific ways of life—such as owning a house in the suburbs—on subjective wellbeing could be a new avenue to explore in happiness research.
‘Simple’ solution to that would be to put a time limit on how long you can stay.
Say maybe 2 years unless you have a medical condition or something. That should be plenty of time for people experiencing hardship to get past it.
I think it’d be better with an income limit if that’s possible to check.
Where I live, the only involuntarily homeless people are generally those who experience longer than 2 year medical or psychological issues.
Income limit would lead to people ‘gaming’ the system. Either just misreporting what they actually make or purposefully not making enough to qualify.
Or it will go just like current systems do - you make one cent over their arbitrarily decided number and you don’t qualify even if you cant actually afford to live.
It would also screw over people who might have a ‘good’ income, but made honest mistakes and are upside down in debt or similar situations.
Income limit fosters a ‘you deserve this, you don’t’ attitude which is what we are trying to get away from.
I just see a time limit system (with exceptions for those who are sick/unable to fully care for themselves) doing a better job of providing a basic human right to anyone who needs it while avoiding a bunch of bullshit an income limit would bring to the table.
I just see a time limit system (with exceptions for those who are sick/unable to fully care for themselves)
Are we putting a time limit on processing who gets that designation? Because federal disability claims are a shitshow that take roughly six months just to get your first denial. And then can take years to go through appeals.
It’s all just different takes on who “deserves” to live and for how long.
Right - but thats a whole other can of worms.
There is no quick fix or Simple solution.
Its not like its just one small system that is broken - we have multiple broken systems that need to be torn down and rebuilt because the rot is in the bones.
There are major problems with income based limits. In theory they work, but they often break down over time locking people into the poverty they are trying to escape. It creates a grey area where they lose more than they gain by improving their income. Sometimes as much as an hour of extra work can lose them their benefits.
I wish I was “cold”, I’m friggin’ hot all the time. I need a personal AC suit.
I really wish I was cold too. I have to work in an open air factory and long island summers succcccckkkkkkk lol
Ahhh, Lonnng Island… I was born at Bayshore. Flew the coop while still in diapers.
Small world! That’s pretty cool! I wish I could get out, but for the last like 3 years everyone is singing the song of “omg a recession is coming” so I keep waiting lol
Do they really call it “iced tea” there? Also that might explain why you feel hot all the time…
Yeah if it’s a tea and usually lots of sugar that is kept cold then we’d call it iced tea. I think if it’s like actually “served” at a restaurant or whatever it should be in a glass with ice too so that’s probably really where the name came from. Now if it’s just cold tea we’d call it iced tea lol
Then there’s the “long Island iced tea” which is a cocktail lol
I distrust toots that assert something without providing a link
I was lucky and found a link to the 31K figure; sounds partially like it does NOT apply to all homeless people, just some small percentage, so probably a bullshit numberhttps://homelessvoice.org/the-cost-to-criminalize-homelessness/
I appreciate the link!
The article, I think, is very clear on how those dollar amounts were measured, and I don’t think they’re bullshit at all, but everybody here can read the article and decide for themselves.
Also, they quote $10k for “supportive housing” and show a picture of San Francisco. I guarantee that’s not accurate. The state needs to pay to house these people, but we need to be realistic about the cost.
Housing in places like SF is expensive because of private landlords jacking up proces to the moon. If the government owns the property and gets to control the cost then it’s really not any more expensive than housing them anywhere else. Better still it puts those people within the range of public services like transit so they can actually work on getting themselves into a better situation.
And where does the government get this land from?
Government identifies optimal residential location for facility. Invites largest residential land owner in that location over. Place land lenders head in guillotine. Presents document to sign over land to the government assuring them they can maintain possession of their head in turn. Validate signature. Remove head so they can’t claim they signed under duress.
If they refuse to sign then remove head and forge signature.
Needs strict compartmentalization. Group A identifies optimal location and knows nothing about anyone else.
Group B finds land owner but knows nothing about why or who it’s for.
Group C secures ownership transfer documents and sends to a drop box
Group D delivers landowners to intake facility but knows only who they are getting and to where.
Group E transports landowner to meeting facility/room.
Group F picks up transfer documents and holds meeting with land owner. Sends documents to city hall.
Nobody knows or talks to anyone outside of their group or is provided any information on why they are performing their portion of the process. Group F needs to be strictly limited to a very small number of people. Vetting for group F is done by kidnapping a potential candidates young children and spouse while leaving a note where they are to report for work. Perform their duties for six months to have their family safely returned. During the exit interview remind the group F individual and kidnapped party that all group F members that have ever been involved in the history of the program, their family along with any subsequent family members will be executed should they ever speak to anyone regarding the existence of the program.
Cities have more property than you’d think. They homd a lot of it so they don’t get locked out of being able to do things like this.
The $10k for supportive housing seems insanely low…
I can’t imagine a government doing anything over the course of a year and it only costing $10k.
Single small bedroom with shared kitchen and bathrooms is pretty cheap. You probably want to spend a bit more though to help the homeless into a position, where they can take care of themself.
My first residence after the military was a common kitchen and living room with an exterior door and four bedrooms with a bedroom door at each corner with its own keyed entry. Each bedroom had its own closet and bathroom. So you needed an exterior door key and your bedroom door key to get to your room from the quad. It was one of my favorite places to live and I didn’t get along well with one of the other guys but we just left each other alone.
The building had eight of these quads per floor per building and it was two stories. Two buildings were connected on the second floor by an attached breezeway and paths to the stairs. The first floor had a rec room and facility office in leu of two of the center first floor quads.
I agree. Where is this $800/MO housing? Especially when you recognize that most homeless live in cities where housing is more expensive than average.
Yea this isn’t really believable to me for most cities.
In my Canadian city: “While each of the locations would have different operating budgets, the average annual cost is almost $111,759 per bed.”
I don’t get it
Sure, but are you accounting for the profit gained from slave labor in the private prisons?
People love paying extra for the cruelty.
At least in countries with shanty towns, the poor are allowed to live in squats. We don’t even give people that tiny grace. We don’t even give them free cheap cars to live in parking lots, or vouchers for mechanic repairs for the cars they live in. We’d have shanty towns if we allowed it. We just hide it rather than see how bad things really are.
And those shanty towns often get mass transit services so the people can get to work.
In America (and Britain), towns specifically avoid serving very poor areas for fear that they might actually use it.
Can’t allow competition for corporate landlords, could cut into their profits.
Well sure, but if you spend the ten thousand, will you get sixty thousand of free labor production in return like you will with the incarcerated option? We’ve got to look at net profit, people!
/s
We need to end slavery
The shareholders will not like this concept
We should enslave them
But you see this easy they would be getting an …undeserved benefit (gasp!!) and we can’t have those.
I kid you not, this is what the conservative brain thinks.
Yep, punishment must be part of the deal, even if it costs us 3 times as much. This is how we know that, for conservatives, the cruelty is the point.
It’s honestly stunning how much they value cruelty. This is why we shouldn’t spank our kids. All it teaches them is to add a pointless step for violence before actually problem solving.
We’re fine providing housing for these losers.
In prison.
We cannot allow these men a little wooden house with windows and an open door. Their housing must be a little part of a concrete and iron world attended by sadists, their neigbors and roommates should be mean, violent people.
And you have to let us enslave them a little bit and ensure they have no freedom to roam and no worldly pleasures, no intimacy or sex except that which the strong can take homosexually nonconsensually from their fellow man.
It’s what Jesus would want us to do.
Does anyone have the actual research on this? Both of those numbers seem really low.
https://www.npscoalition.org/post/fact-sheet-cost-of-homelessness
The savings/costs drastically change based on state/city. But the overwhelming majority of the time it is cheaper to do the morally correct thing of providing permanent housing assistance.
$10,000 a year to provide a single person housing? To put that in perspective. I’d assume that means a studio type apartment of some kind. Not high end, but a roof and place to live for $10,000 a year. I have a 1500sqft home in Washington state on 3 acres of land, and I pay $27,000 a year for my mortgage. So to me, $10,000 seems reasonable for a government funded studio for a year.
And I know it’s probably unheard of in America now, but $840 a month in rent is not that wildly low. I assume there’s more to it than just that though.
I live in the middle of Hamburg, second biggest city of Germany, in a recently renovated apartment of roughly 40 sqm and pay round about 700 EUR (~ 770 USD) for that with all facilities including electric power, home insurance and internet. The housing market in this city is considered to be tough for this country.
If you “dare” to live in a “small” flat the price really should manageable. Social assistance is another cost factor but that’s an investment in your country and its people.
That sounds so nice! I’m from America, am 32, make $35,000 a year and still live in my parents basement. I know I can “afford” an apartment, but I really don’t want to see ~50% of my pay go to rent. If you don’t mind me asking, how much do you make a month in Hamburg?
By the way, I’ve been to Germany a few times! Only ever around Frankfurt but it’s such a lovely country. ☺️
You’re judging a country by one city?
Not to invalidate your lovely experiences, mind you. Germany has its lovely sides. But keep in mind that we have more people than California and Texas combined in an area smaller than either. There is a vastly diverse array of cultures and personalities. If you want an accurate image, you’ll have to spend enough time here to observe the discourse around significant events, including the ugly sides, and judge from that.
I don’t know what that person makes, nor what industry you’re in, but minimum wage (12.41 EUR ~ 13.67 USD) with a full 40h job comes out to a gross income of about 31.4k USD per year. Your net income varies depending on where you are, whether you’re married etc. but including public (legally mandated) health / long term care insurance, unemployment insurance and pension insurance, your net income would be about 22.5k USD per year / 1.85k USD per month. It’s not exactly a way to get rich, but at least that’s the bottom of the range.
Also, which Frankfurt? We have two and it’s fun to see confused foreignerd 😄
I just need to say that 31k/22k with health as a bottom line would be a dream for so many Americans. They’re running on 25k without medical, and having to fit rent in there too.
Don’t forget a minimum of 20 days paid time off and unlimited sick leave (the employer pays full for the first six weeks, after that the government pays a reduced amount, but you’re not suddenly unemployed or without income), as well as limited (paid) leave if you need to take care of sick children (30 days per parent per year for single children, 65 if you have multiple, single parents get double).
These are things we occasionally take for granted, but I’ve learned that they seem utterly fantastical to others.
I have a Bachelor’s Degree, I’m working IT full time on a permanent contract with a Union, I get about 46k gross / 34k net per year and 30 days paid time off, while paying about 12k in rent. Food prices have gone nuts lately and various other private bills gobble up most of the rest, but I’m doing alright.
It was more the fact that, while I stayed in Frankfurt (expo hall Frankfurt) for work, I got to go outside of the city and see a handful of different ‘villages’ and castles and stuff. It was really cool.
But I do understand where you’re coming from. Blows my mind that people would come to the US from another country and not come here:
Full time equivalent of about 2.500 EUR net per month (it’s more pre taxes, of course; I don’t mind paying taxes as that affords me living in a safe and functional country). As I work part-time I take home less than that number but still get by easily (time is much more valuable than money if you cross a certain relatively low threshold of income and don’t live a flashy lifestyle).
Thanks for the praise ;) Germany has its troubles and problems but continues to be a nice place to live.
It depends on where you are. $840 a month anywhere near Chicago is either stupidly cheap for what you’re getting, or stupidly bad for what you’re paying.
Begs the question: who’s getting paid the difference right now? And how much are they paying which elected officials?
The overhead goes to a bunch of stuff. The costs of housing inmates include the cost of hours of judges, lawyers, COs, etc. However the way it it profitable, beyond just collecting fines, and deciding your money is suspect, and taking it, is because of the corpratization of the legal system. Huge, but, often, not well known, corporations that run aspects of jails, and prisons. They make the food, run the inmate phone systems, control the inmate commissary, staff the medical departments, and more. These are just the ones that work with jails. There are third part corporations that provide bulk legal assistance work, editing services, services for a lot of the moving factors of the legal system.
These companies, in turn, give huge amounts of “donations” to politician’s needs. Campaign funds being the most well known. This money, while paying for these costs, is also used to keep them living an exceptionally comfortable life. Many, after pushing through legislation favorable to a company, will be compensated in a number of ways. From them being able to take advantage of stock investment knowing how the law is about to change, and how that will affect their holdings, to exiting politics and being given a cushy, high paying, fluff job in the industry they helped out.
There isn’t so much of the straight bribes, graft, and other forms of corruption people assume with politics. It is more abstracted than that, and technically legal. Obviously there are conflicts of interest that can easily be seen in this, however, since a company isn’t just handing the official a bag of money, that they will keep as their own income, it is deemed legal.
Housing is kept artificially scarce to keep prices up. Criminalizing homelessness raises the demand for housing. I wonder how many people making these policies have rental properties or invest in housing.
Yesterday, Human Rights Watch published a report on criminalization of unhoused people in Los Angeles. It’s worth a read.
Any particular points you could summarise for us?
Hilariously Los Angeles and a bunch of California cities just told Newsom to fuck off with his orders to clear homeless encampments.
And water is wet. Next
It’s for a church honey. NEXT!
Holy. Shit. That’s what… 4 years old? 6 years? What year was it…?
Wow that was an interesting side trip.
There’s frequently a lot more to homelessness than just giving someone a place to live. Many of these people are mentally ill or addicted to something and cannot function or take care of themselves. There’s additional costs above just providing a place to live - like food and clothing and healthcare.
Inmates are supposed to be provided with services like meals, showers, uniforms, and healthcare so that’s part of the reason for the discrepancy in costs. I doubt there’s much addiction care or mental health care in prison though.
These people really need a better place to get help than jail. But we don’t have socialized medicine in the US, and that’s probably a huge contributor to homelessness. Just think if you couldn’t drown in medical debt, or could walk in to any clinic and sign up for addiction care or mental health assistance how many homeless people might not have ended up homeless.
Also I’m not aware of any major US city where rent or mortgage is $10k per year. A lot of cities are buying up old motels and providing support services and temporary housing. That seems to be a good start, but it probably costs more than $10k per year per person. And without free continuing healthcare a lot of people are going to end up back on the street.
Some of them it was for sure a preexisting condidtion. But how many homeless people developed addictions and assorted health problems because of homelessness?
A HELL of a lot more.
If they had had a home that they wouldn’t lose to bullshit to begin with…
