update: Bill Walton attacked by homeless people, update: encampments banned!

This jives with what I said. The idea that homeless people are just lazy bums who won't work hard jobs and would rather mooch off of people is BS and that narrative and stereotype is a big reason why we don't commit the resources to solving it.

 

Yes, and we are not motivated to deal with it. It is the same thing with the debate of healthcare in this country.

I hear either "work harder" from one side of the political divide or "free houses and free healthcare".

The reality is that the subjects need to be tackled before people are homeless long term and before 20% of the country is diabetic.

We can solve a lot of the healthcare issues by changing the dietary culture in the USA and changing what is and isn't allowed on supermarket shelves, that would make a huge difference when it comes to healthcare and the cost of some sort of safety net would not be nearly as expensive.

With the homeless we need to put a greater cultural relevance on raising children and preventing abuse and changing some local building standards and codes and a better stratification of jobs. That will make a huge difference.

While the minimum wage was terribly low, and it should be tied to inflation and housing costs - bumping it up as quickly as they did probably was a mistake and may actually end up hurting homelessness more.

 

Does anyone else find it funny that an old rich man is complaining about the homeless around him and is claiming that the homeless don't live there..... especially coming from a left wing Hippie?

 

In contrast to its northern counterpart by the bay, San Francisco, LA has always pretended that it doesn't have a homeless problem.

The City of Angels is having little success in its campaign to hide its homeless from the view of its 1984 Olympic guests.

This Indian guru helped the city fathers. in preparation for the 1984 Olympics, to sterilize the mean street of LA,
busing 3,000 homeless to the Rajneesh Mandir Temple in central Oregon
​

 

Both Los Angeles and San Francisco have terrible homeless situations. In part because of the weather and because there are a lot of resources for the homeless in both cities. Also, both cities go out of their way to destroy affordable housing options. San Francisco is especially bad at ensuring that housing isn't affordable.

 

There are times when I feel this way. Expand funding to allow shelter care for every available homeless, then give the homeless who choose to sleep on the streets a choice...jail or conditional shelter care.

It's glib, but the situation has become a sprawl outside of Skid Row, and I don't like hearing stories of friends and family getting harassed by crazies whom Californians go out of their way to ignore.

As for wealth inequality, we still worship the hyper wealthy and pretend their piles of money doesn't distort living conditions for everyone else. It goes beyond "taxing the rich" or "financial repression", and more about how the system is weighted towards this small small minority, such as negative interest rates or adding 15 trillion dollars of debt over the past 15 years without giving one cent back into the middle to lower classes or the infrastructure they live in.

Some will call that "jealousy of success".

It's more like rage, and I'd bet there are way more folks entitled to that rage to the point of acting upon it.

 

Politically it would be hard to do because conservatives would complain about the cost and there would also be concerns over freedom of choice. There will always be some degree of homelessness and in the past we have had a lot of homeless, the local cops just had free reign to abuse the homeless and push them onto train ways and other places where they were hidden. For what it is worth, I think that is what will happen again in California eventually when enough liberals get upset enough to tolerate abusive conditions for the homeless.

The politicians in California are ignoring the homeless and not forcing them out and burning their tent cities because the voters in those areas would vote them out of office. When that sentiment changes we will see their settlements destroyed and they will be pushed into hiding again. In Chicago there are homeless in Midtown and some are allowed on the streets downtown. However they are not allowed tents, so they have no place to stay usually and when more than a few are together, they are discreetly given tickets on the bus out of town. We had camps being set up in the bad parts of midtown under the overpasses and discreetly in wooded areas. As soon as they were visible, the police came in and forced them all out of town.

That is what big cities have been doing for a long time. Anything to "keep them moving".

It isn't jealousy, it is a fact that society overall in the USA is worse off because of extreme wealth concentration. We are not talking about people making 500K a year ...... we are talking about thousands of people making 100 million a year or more.

 

I agree we need multiple solutions homelessness. Economically we have had low unemployment for decades, with a few short term exceptions, and there is still a strong demand for more labor so jobs are available. Many of those jobs though don't pay enough for rent, food and other essentials in many cities so that needs to be addressed through other services. At the same time we need more drug treatment and mental health treatment.

I think the Houston model looks good with housing first and then addressing the other services. Here in Minneapolis many of the homeless are Native Americans and some of the tribal agencies have been stepping up building more housing and providing services. There are still many homeless and homeless encampments though in Minneapolis and I suspect in Houston too. In Minneapolis though winter will drive off many of them, several die every year, but for the last several years in spring new homeless encampments come back.

Incarcertation might be one solution but that is the most expensive and inefficient solution. It cost far more to incarcerate someone probably than to build tiny homes and provide aid. Incareration really shoudl be left to dealing with the criminal element that exploit and hide out among homeless and the violent element but those are often tied to mental health issues.

I think there also is something to that there is just a portion of humanity that simply doesn't want to work or is incapable of working. Singapore is often held up as a model of an industrious society that has become well off from the willingness to work of it's people. When I was researching the housing system of Singapore one of the things I found out was that there is a population at the bottom of Singapore soceity that basically are people who don't work. The government doesn't want it publicly known and worse doesn't want these people out begging on the street. They've basically been given housing some basic aid and shut off in housing estates far from the glitz of those places that were seen in Crazy Rich Asians.

One more rambling thought. It's easy to despise the homeless and consider them a nuisance. There is a "but for the grace of God goes I" factor though. I was thinking about this awhile ago. I have an aunt who has mental and physical health issues. She lives in an assisted living facilty that the rest of the family pays for the rest of us help her with basic services. If not for having a loving family with enough members well off enough to pay for her she could very easily be one of those bag ladies living in filth on the side of the street and yelling at random things. A woman I used to date comes from a family that is relatively well to do with property management companies. She went to college and even got a masters degree in a science related field. She's always had issues with anxiety, depression and as such self medicates herself with alcohol. From those problems she has a very hard time keeping a job. So her family has put her up in an apartment and given her a job just handling some small things for their company. If not for her family she probably would be a homeless drunk and very likely being sexually exploited. It sounds like most of us have good jobs, loving families but what if we didn't? What if we because of illness, injury or some other disaster we lost our jobs. What if we were cut off from family support or our families didn't have enough money to support other members. How long do y'all think you could hold on to your house, car, and pay for food or anything else?

We could all end up homeless and forced to live on the street due to circumstances beyond our control and a lot of those people living under overpasses might have gotten there like that.

 

Hey Bill, you can go all Cyberpunk. Just tell your rich neighbors to set up automated machine gun turrets. That will make you see them less Bill.

Anyways I can see wealthy white majority suburbs in like 15 years having drones and turrets