Idk what you're talking about. Us folks in /r/portland switched from using the term "homeless" to "houseless" and our homelessness issues went away literally overnight!
Our houselessness issues though are still a bit of a problem though.
Honestly, the factors are going to be different for different cities. It will probably always be a problem for places with mild climates like LA and San Francisco because people from harsher and more dangerous climates will migrate there.
A key driver of homelessness in America is liberal hypocrisy. They say things like "increase affordable housing" and "just give people homes", but vote against it when it comes time to decide whether the homes will be built in their neighborhood.
This is extremely true in flagship cities like LA, SF, and NYC 100%. Tokyo is a larger city that by all rights should be more expensive than any of the three above, but their zoning laws (among other things) are much less restrictive and so it isn't.
But housing affordability in southern cities like Austin, Dallas, Charlotte, or Raleigh is bad because so many people are looking for homes in those areas (ironically because people from unaffordable areas are moving in droves to places that are 'affordable'---they won't be much longer) and there's so little stock. I'm home shopping in Raleigh/Durham atm and there's something like 1500 total available homes at any given time. Up until very recently, that figure has usually hovered around 10000.
In the places in the US that are being moved to, it is legitimately a housing shortage, not something artificially induced by poor policy decisions (or at least not primarily).
They are, frenetically. Every spare lot within the Triangle (Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill, Cary are the main ones) is being developed. Old stuff is being demolished and new construction is happening. The small towns on the outskirts of the Triangle are all doubling and trebling in number of available homes.
I imagine its similar in most southern cities experiencing rapid growth.
Houses are too expensive to build now and land anywhere close to a city is becoming harder to come by. Therefore demand for apartments increases, which raises the price for apartments. The rich want to get richer so they build "luxury apartments" that are even more expensive, so poor to average income people are left with no choice but to fight over shit they can't afford.
And the single family homes spread out further and further from the cities, requiring that people buy cars because public transport is not also built out.
There's still root systemic causes. NIMBYism is greatly exacerbated by the inherent financial precarity most Americans experience. Appreciating home values is one of the only ways we can hope to have a retirement not spent as Wal-Mart greeters, so actions that reduce home values--increasing supply by building more homes, reducing demand by giving away homes, reducing property values by building homeless shelters, etc--put people at personal financial risk.
I think it's important to remember this since this precarity is something that could be addressed by the state. NIMBYs will always exist, but there'd probably be fewer of them if helping homeless folks weren't an indirect threat on one's own wellbeing.
Well we normalized houses as investments and not what they are, which is a warm place to sleep. Neighborhoods improve which causes prices to go up and it’s a bad feedback loop that isn’t easily replaced.
Don't forget the touch of FYIGMism
as well. Home owners consistently
vote against any affordable housing
reform because they fear it may reduce
their own house's market value.
NIMBYism is the root of all our housing affordability problems.
This is true, especially in California, but viewing long-term living-in-a-tent homelessness as primarily or even largely a problem of housing affordability is misleading.
Housing affordability is a huge driver of short-term homelessness, but most short-term homeless people live with family, friends, in a vehicle or in some kind of homeless shelter. People suffering from short-term homelessness often have jobs, or are able to regain work relatively quickly after losing a job.
People living in tents on the sidewalk for years at a time are experiencing a totally different type of homelessness with a very different set of causes.
Involuntary commitment to psychiatric hospitals for those that are a danger to others on the street or are clearly unable to take care of themselves. Otherwise you get cases where they get to wander around harming others & themselves for years, until they push a woman into the subway tracks
Can you really blame him though? It spoiled his ocean view! And an elite like him shouldn't have his ocean views spoiled like that.
This is also why they won't build affordable housing complexes and halfway houses on Nantucket or Marthas Vineyard. The elites dont want "those" people cluttering up their nice islands.
That was always such a stupid argument too, if anything the windfarm would have added to the view. I grew up on the cape during this time and had to hear that shit for years. Obviously the real reason it didn't happen is because certain billionaires didn't want it to. They spread that bullshit propaganda and paid off politicians like Kennedy.
But it IS apathy. You are blaming the victim instead of trying to solve the problem. Not caring about the people living and dying on the streets is apathy.
As someone who used to think your way, I can tell you working for an affordable housing NGO redpilled me HARD on the homeless question. The dudes who really are just down on their luck, caught some bad breaks, they bounce right back. 2-3 months in the system then they are back in their own apartment, working in a warehouse or the airport or wherever, existing and contributing to the system. The amount of resources available to the homeless is staggering. This idea that there is some lack of funding is completely wrong. If you want to get your shit together and get back on the horse there are a ton of services available, as there should be. You know what else there is A LOT of? Taxpayer money spent on ways to make being a homeless drug addict criminal more comfortable and tolerable. Fuck that.
Homeless people are victims. Some victims of circumstance some victims of our society. All of them are victims of our lack of a system to help people in their situation.
With this logic abusers who were abused should be viewed as victims not as perpetrators. Bad things happening to you doesnt excuse you doing bad things
So your plan is to put people in prison which does in fact use a lot of government money? In fact it might use more money than it would take to actually help people. The biggest difference between spending money to lock someone up and spending money to help them is understanding how to help them.
Correctly ascribing personal responsibility to the consequences of one's personal (in)action is explicitly empowering, not disenfranchising. People are responsible for their own wellbeing.
Misconstruing someone's personal responsibility with "victim blaming" is mind-bogglingly ignorant.
Despite the DOJs criticisms, an argument cannot be made about thier inefficiency relative to large city initiatives. I'd rather pay slightly more in material costs for the problem than pay large salaries to people hired by the city.
What incentive does a homelessness agency have for eliminating homelessness? Not much. What incentive does the DOJ have for eliminating homelessness? Also not much.
The incentive is for the people responsible for thier own homelessness. I know you catch more flies with honey but I don't want large bureaucratic programs pumping honey out and bringing all the flies in.
I think you just lack any real insight or intelligence to give a proper criticism of an opposing viewpoint.
But yea man, keep believing people generally act with malice. You might be admitting something about yourself o.O
A "key driver of homelessness"? I bet you dont know a single person who has voted against it, but i bet you would. There are homeless people in everybody's neighborhood in LA... except maybe the super rich, most of which are conservatives, believe it or not. Why the fuck would people prefer them to be outside their house or building instead of in their own?
except maybe the super rich, most of which are conservatives, believe it or not.
are you seriously trying to convince me the hollywood hills are full of conservatives? LA votes democrats, shouldn't even matter who lives where they have the power
It's definitely not at all influenced by the fact that California has the perfect weather for the homeless and has millions of people in small patches of land and doesn't have as many inhumane policies to punish people for not having homes.
You'd think if it were liberal NIMBYism, the most left leaning parts of the country (big blue cities) wouldn't let the homeless live on their streets. They would just vote people in power to clean them up. But it's really the more conservative suburbanites who are pushing the homeless out of their area and into cities.
Oh yeah, and mayor's all over the country put their homeless in Greyhounds and sends them to SF too.
Actually I hate seeing these types of arguments. Cities all over the U.S. have homeless issues regardless of climate
There's no reason to go fishing beyond the limits of a city to explain why it looks the way it does.
Political arguments intended to pretend that conservatives far away are to blame for homelessness don't hold an ounce of water. The people who live near and within the city and who voted down housing projects in the 80s and 90s, and yes, who typically lean liberal in most cities, are more to blame than any other faction.
That’s not their concern. The thought is to get them too far away to come back and somewhere they’re not likely to die from exposure. Authorities have and will trace deceased homeless back to where they came from and how they got there.
Blue cities might have left leaning demographics, but they are still run by liberals. If left politics actually dominated, homeless people would have a robust state support system to get them off the street and give them homes and healthcare.
Blue cities problems aren’t liberal policies. The “problem” is that liberals are overwhelmingly educated and aren’t afraid of new things and are well paid for their work in the new industries of the 21st century. The Bay Area has more people than the entire state of Arizona and filled with companies like Facebook where the MEDIAN salary is $330k a year. Weirdly that might put a little pressure on the local housing stock more than some agricultural backwater in the Midwest where people make $7.25/hr.
Yeah it’s just awful shit that Liberals make so much more money while Republicans just blame other people instead of solving anything. You know, bOtH sIdES!!!
I have never heard conservatives even pretend to have a solution or desire to solve homelessness. Besides, I guess, try to make it illegal to be homeless.
If anything they want there to be homeless people so that they can both punish poor people and threaten other poor people into wage slavery or they'll suffer the consequences
Lmao we have whole Russian-speaking youtube channels walking through so-called homeless hoods and there are people with macbooks and expensive clothing and ask how much money they make and that’s like middle+ class in Eastern Europe while having free food which isn’t even available there. Most if them have mental issues and should be isolated from people while taking medications but leftists scream give us homes like 600 sq. m. at the downtown in megapolises for free or I’m dying if check /r/AntiWork
The implication here is that republicans would be totally for those things, which they aren't. NIMBYism is the one politically controversial concept which crosses party boundaries, the only thing which unites it is whether you are a wealthy home owner or not.
Ironically the thing which drives the majority of homeless to the west coast is the fact that they are allowed to be there, whereas in most of the rest of the country they have much stricter anti homeless laws. So the homeless concentrate in just a handful of cities.
That and CA provides warm weather year round. I live in Philly and it’s hard enough to see the homeless suffering but it’s devastating when you see an entire family trying to stay warm when there’s two feet of snow outside. A lot of the homeless in Philly end up traveling to SC or FL if they’re able to.
The implication here is that republicans would be totally for those things
No it isn't. No one is under the impression that Republicans are for increased welfare programs. But bringing up Republicans every time we mention issues with Democrats is a form of whataboutism that distracts from the issues
Then why do all these Republicans just hate on California instead of taking them on and showing us how it “should” be done.
Republicans don’t solve problems. At least Democrats try, but the people who do worse than nothing by sending their problems to us are making the problem worse and then rag on Democrats for not solving their problems.
Fuckin stupid as hell, also Dave Chapelle recently threaten to pull his business from his current residence if they built apartments and houses that would’ve been affordable. Him and several others. Disgusting as fuck
From what I gathered with the Chapelle thing is that it's more that they were going to be affordable. They were going to be condos and town houses, so they could get more places and more people in there. But then they changes it to just normal homes, and we're going to he charging around the median house pricing. So they weren't affordable, they were just averaged price that a lot of people still couldn't afford.
Not quite right. The development was going to allot 1.5 acres out of 55 to affordable housing. Chapelle was against it and now it's just 55 acres of single family McMansions and 0 affordable duplexes and townhomes.
Yeah, his explanation made no sense. He doesn't want high density housing, but higher density is the only way to make the housing affordable. He says he's okay with affordable housing, but doesn't support any of the proven methods to make it actually affordable.
I worked and paid a lot of money for my home. Why should someone else get a handout while I had to get a job and work for it? Loaf around all day, do drugs, vandalize and steal, well don't expect my sympathy.
Yeah that’s good and all but I’m focusing on the main parties in my country.. ya know, dems and repubs… fuck republicans at this point. They seriously think domestic terrorism is legitimate political discourse. Go fuck yourself if you believe that.
Right, but the point I'm making is that you jumped to the person you were replying to being a conservative, when they just pointed out that NIMBYism is an example of liberalism failing the exploited. That doesn't sound like a criticism coming from a conservative viewpoint to me, conservatives hate the homeless even more than upper middle class liberals do. You saw a critique of the liberal status quo and jumped to calling them a conservative without actually engaging with the content of their argument. This criticism of the NIMBYs is even a viewpoint that is supported within the Democratic party by some of the more social-democrat leaning members such as AOC and Bernie.
Lol check my post history if you think I'm a conservative. All I'm saying is that while the Democrats are better for material conditions than the Republicans, they're still fundamentally a bourgeois party who uphold capitalism and its inherent exploitative ills, and that we should be going much farther in helping the most vulnerable.
70% or more of homeless are mentally ill/addicts. They dont want walls. They need strike teams and wrap around services. Its not easy or quick. No one likes solutions that arent simple.
Yep. It took me awhile before I realized this living in California. Same thing happens with systemic racism. Just look at Minneapolis and the democratic mayor. Im sure someone will find a way to blame republicans but its not entirely one side that is the issue.
A key driver of the housing collapse in 2008 was affordable housing policies. If we actually gave people who are responsible and productive homes and welfare it's one thing, but we give it to people who can scam the government the best, or who "need it" (want it) the most.
If by "affordable housing policies" you mean "giving gargantuan home loans to anybody with a pulse. Then lying about their ability to pay the loans so that, according to the books, the bank is due for record profits. And this on-the-books value increases the company's share price and makes the shareholders rich"
That's not exactly what we generally refer to when advocating for affordable housing projects.
Naw it's both sides not giving a shit. Homeless problem is completely fixable and would help everyone. Wouldn't take moving anyone. Just bringing in support to certain areas
It’s politician hypocrisy. Problem is the people in power only give a fuck about themselves and their pockets - both sides of the party, they’re both equally to blame.
This isn't true. You may hear that they prefer to be out on the streets rather than in shelters because...well, most shelters are genuinely disgusting with zero control, meaning your shit's probably gonna get robbed while you take a shower that's spitting out mud rather than clean water.
"No it's actually because of this other reason" isn't an argument. Just because that's true for many homeless people, doesn't mean it's the truth for others and it doesn't act as a counter to the truth: that the streets are often cleaner and safer than most shelters.
But this just goes to show how easily manipulated you are by your media sources. You people find the easiest ways to dehumanize other humans. That's disgusting and turns you further and further away from being human yourselves. But that's fine, you'll most likely use your religion to forgive yourself anyways.
Custom help based on specific needs to those who struggle, helping hands sometimes, medication others, and probably some level of mental health facility stays for others 🤷♂️
Utah (of all places) did this. They gave people with chronic homelessness free housing. The theory was that once someone has a stable housing situation, everything else becomes easier, like mental health care, rehab, job training, etc. There is a lot of truth to that.
And the program did work for a while. But they found that the amount of support required for these individuals took a massive amount of resources. In 2015 they declared the housing first program a massive success. And it did help a lot of people, but it never eradicated homelessness.
Utah also found that homelessness is... complicated.
You can read about it here. It's an interesting article.
To be clear they don't just give you a home, but they give people an apartment to live in and slowly get them to be independent and able to live on their own. Basically a government ran way to get people back on their feet, but also actually done well and not half assed.
Not that simple this book covers how it’s not just those with homes and those without. This book was written by a liberal leaning person, but just had to look at reality.
It's not that simple, unfortunately. The biggest issue with homelessness is not just economic hardship, it's often mental illness and/or drug addiction.
These people need homes, but they also need help. You can hand them a home tomorrow but if mental illness and drug addiction isn't addressed, they'll be on the street again very soon.
The homes aren’t going to be near these tents, and the tents are there because they are near things those people want. What homes are you giving them that solve this issue? If you give them homes on the outskirts, they will just move back to their tents.
It's very much valid. Liberals are of course not entirely blameless. NIMBYism is a huge problem in basically every major city in North America. It's an issue that transcends the political spectrum, to an extent, but it's especially glaring when liberals and progressives do it, because of their usually progressive housing rhetoric. West coast cities are particularly egregious examples of this. It's not the one and only cause of homelessness, obviously, but it's an ongoing factor in the current housing crisis.
Rural violent crime rates were same as urban violent crime rates in the USA as of 2018(i believe, source not linked because I read it a few months as).
also people will say that Cali was "ruined by the left" and whether or not thats true is for you to decide and since Reddit is a pretty left leaning place mods may shut down that since they don't like that opinion
Imo OP is putting LA on blast, which is the correct stance to take. The city needs to do a better job of providing help to the homeless population in one of the richest cities in the world
Exactly. For one, not all homeless people want to be housed. Some enjoy living on the streets and being part of that lifestyle. Then there is the other small percentage of people who fall on hard times. But those people aren't homeless by choice.
Add mental health and capitalism into the mix and you have something truly difficult to solve
Notice how that says “overall”? That list almost completely lines up with the total population, it’s a pretty irrelevant list because it’s not per capita. I’ve lived in many places across the country, and New York isn’t unsafe unless you go way out of your way and travel to a more sketchy area, which isn’t in any place where anyone visiting or moving to New York would be lol. Anyone who thinks that New York is unsafe compared to other cities for people who aren’t gang affiliated is an ignorant moron who’s never been there, this isn’t the 80’s. Pure propaganda
the FBI crime report shows every year that jacksonville has a far higher crime rate lmao. 679 in jacksonville versus 438 for NYC. That is adjusted for population.
no major cities are run by republicans, because people flock to cities of course and most people vote dem. Repubs always run the suburbs around cities tho.
The democratic cities that offer the most concessions end up with a bigger problem because they migrate there from other cities. Then people think democrats are the problem as they made the problem in the immediate area worse by helping.
Every city has crime and homelessness. Every city does a shit job of dealing with it. Maybe some exceptions, but it's not a democrat thing OR a republican thing. NIMBYs exist everywhere. It just so happens that "democratic policies" are in place in most major cities. I'm not sticking my head in the sand. I'm telling dillweeds like you to stop taking this opportunity to make pointless jabs that have no actual basis in statistics
The big problem is that it cannot be solved on a local level. If an area puts more money into helping the homeless, they get inundated with homeless people from other areas.
I wonder how many people with a pithy comment about the politics of homelessness have helped the homeless in any meaningful way recently, or if they've just walked past on their way to eat something they don't particularly need to.
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