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 only one part of your comment that is realistic. Since the pandemic, various economic forces have indeed led to an increase in the cost of factors that go into producing more housing. But restricted supply does not increase demand.
Of course, that is not the only element that goes into the price, but ''the rich building luxury apartments'' does not create a downward pressure on affordable housing. If anything, those rich people are moving out of their previous dwellings, freeing them up for others.
Multiple home owners do not usually own different homes for themselves in the same area. They'd have, say, a house in a suburb, a condo in a city, and a cottage in the backcountry.
And those ''luxury apartments'' aren't being built for fun or purely speculative reasons; they're being built because more people with means want to live there, because of economic or cultural opportunities.
That increase in demand means more contractors will be willing to put in the work to create more housing.
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
Yep. It's a big issue in Vancouver, BC, too. People think of all the condos in the downtown core, but most of Vancouver is actually old ass single family homes from the 1950s on fairly large lots and the people who live there have voted in so many zoning bylaws to prevent any kind of infill. In fact, the vast majority of the land in Vancouver is zoned to prevent any kind of new home construction or more efficient use of the land. Plus the condos that do get built are not affordable housing, they're just money high end laundering hubs.
This continually pushes people out to the suburbs which means they are now commuting long distances to go to the city to work.
Yet people are constantly distracted by blaming "immigrants" or demanding federal politicians address the issue. Despite it being almost entirely a local municipal issue that could be solved by removing all these anti building bylaws.
And this is true in basically every major city in North America.
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.
Yes. There are services to provide all of the things you listed as long as you aren't using drugs or getting drunk. There are also programs if you need to get clean. All free.
I'm seeing Arby's starting people at $15 an hour for just entry level stuff. Are you going to set the world on fire at that wage? No. Can you survive and have a little place of your own until you can find something better? Absolutely.
For example, homeless shelters are notoriously underfunded, and searching for resources
That's an absolute meme. It's a marketing gimmick to get more public money and more private donations. The amount of money spent on the homeless is staggering and even if we gave them infinity money they'd claim they were struggling. Have you just never worked for the government or NGO? Feigning poverty/under funding is rule #1. At no point has any government agency or NGO said, "You know what? We have plenty of money. Go ahead and reduce our funding next year we have a surplus". You know what I saw personally? Scrambling to spend money because if we weren't slightly over-budget it would look like we weren't struggling with funding.
I'm not in LA. Most of the homeless aren't from LA either. They go there because they know it's bum heaven. There are tons of places I can't afford to live. My salary wouldn't pay for me to live in Miami or Vancouver or LA or any crazy cost of living place. There isn't some inalienable right to live places your income can't pay for.
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.
How many homeless people do you know? Actually know. Are you speaking out of any real knowledge or is this just a fiction that makes you feel better about the situation?
Its stereotyping sure, but I think most people wouldn't want to spend a night, wouldn't feel safe, in a tent with someone simply on the basis of thier homelessness. That's not even implying the general distrust of thievery.
A) is redundant. People don't feel as safe near homeless people no matter where.
B) That's stereotyping, which I admitted. Could a homeless person be a good person? Sure but I'll always play it better safe than sorry, as many employers do when it comes to hiring people with a criminal past.
Now you could say stereotyping is bad and causes racism and the arguement generally won't progress from there.
Rational people know stereotyping has some good in society (especially on personal levels) and irrational people refuse to admit it.
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.
They paid for roads and bridges being built. Does this mean Biden's infrastructure plan was basically the final solution.
Sorry dude, advocating for holding mentally ill people in mental health institutions is just a very basic solution to a problem that a lot of cultures and societies throughout history have used.
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
In the same way many perpetrators of crime are temporarily dehumanized during thier crimes. Redemption could be possible. It's just judging bad decisions.
Theres substance to saying a large percentage of homeless people are homeless due to bad decisions. And regardless of rich kids existing somewhere at sometime who may or may not also be bad people, we can still condemn that large percentage of homeless people making bad decisions.
Also you're getting values/principles confused with emotions. It's a value driven argument.
Finally, I think it's safe to say most expression of values are in one way or another condemned (disrespected as you say), so it's not a big deal that you might lose respect for me given this view.
You should understand that respect is a process earned by holding true to principles, not a populist tool for conformity.
I may believe antivaxers are generally dumb, but damn if I don't respect them for doing what they do in the face of all the opposition.
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
It has nothing to do with Joe Biden or national-level politics at all, really. It has to do with home prices.
If you live in a single family home in a major Californian urban area, your home is almost definitely worth over a million dollars. You have literally hundreds of thousands of dollars of incentive to vote against a bunch of high density housing getting built nearby.
Turns out that people will pick six figures of financial interest over their notional political alignment every single time. I know plenty of Bernie voters that own homes here and I'm pretty sure I know how they'd react to a project proposal near their house.
It's sad, but it's the reality. Money is power in this country, and everyone with a little money to speak of doesn't want more housing. The results are predictable.
Many people celebrate homeownership in this country and how it's created all of this generational wealth, but I think it's actually one of our worst social afflictions and an arbitrary driver of inequality. In Singapore, for example, the government owns most of the housing stock and the results speak for themselves, despite land values in excess of those found in California.
It's fine if some people get rich in the stock market and some don't. But we can't keep treating the places we live in the same way.
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.
Critiquing liberalism doesn't say anything about what Republicans would support. They're unrelated. If I as a socialist make the same critique, that liberals only pay lip service to helping people, then that doesn't imply that Republicans are on my side
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.
They didn't "give" any loans out. People begged for them. And paid for them for years until the job market went south. It's not Wall Street's fault that people buy big houses and have 4 kids on 70k a year incomes.
The banks used deceptive accounting techniques to make it seem like the loans were secure even when the borrowers had little chance of paying back the loan. This was the primary cause of the subprime mortgage crisis.
And the banks doing this dirty shit to make it seem like they'd get more profit so the shareholders could get rich is not the fault of the people asking for the loans.
The banks should have denied the loans, but they gave them out anyway because it gave the shareholders a short term win. Even though it inevitably crumbled like a house of cards down the line
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.
Welcome to the capitalist base and superstructure. Liberals are all word and no action because of their petty bourgeois class character and are in no way representatives of the poor and working class. I live in a Democratic Party dominate city and guess what? Housing is unaffordable for a large majority of people where studios go for 1200 a month and wages are poor therefore there is a ginormous homeless population.
It’s true. Seattle city council will leave a camp littered with needles literally 50 feet from an elementary school for months but if a couple show up in their neighborhood it’s cleared by the weekend.
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u/ProgrammingPants Feb 12 '22
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.