6 ms·

Basic income, basic housing, basic food, basic education, basic healthcare? Seems like we need to address all of these issues. Literally the only institutions

Basic income, basic housing, basic food, basic education, basic healthcare? Seems like we need to address all of these issues. Literally the only institutions that provide all of these things are jails, which many homeless attempt to get into.

ams6110 9y ago
Not true at all. These things are all provided. Welfare, public housing, food stamps, public education, Medicaid. That we still have a homeless problem indicates that the reason for long-term homelessness is something else.
- Mz 9y ago
  There is a really huge shortage of genuinely affordable housing in the US. Public housing is generally pretty crappy and in short supply to boot. Having studied the problem in an actual college class and also spent the last 5.5 years on the street: It's complicated. But we need more solutions for people and fewer aimed at poor people specifically. Programs to help the poor are routinely craptastic. Affordable housing and single payer medical coverage would go a long way towards reducing the problem.
  - hueving 9y ago
    >There is a really huge shortage of genuinely affordable housing in the US. Public housing is generally pretty crappy and in short supply to boot. This is disingenuous, the housing shortages are all in the highly desirable locations like the SFO, LAX, NYC, etc. There is no housing shortage in the vast majority of the country (look at Detroit). It's completely unsustainable to try to support a model where anyone should be able to live in whatever city they choose for an extremely low cost.
    - thebooktocome 9y ago
      Follow this line of thought long enough, and you get to a hukou system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hukou_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hukou_system
      - EGreg 9y ago
        Is that good or bad? Listen, I support single payer systems, but how do they figure out how much to pay in each region? Same question for UBI. I have come to believe that UBI and all other safety nets have to come with immigration requirements. Not just everyone is going to be accepted to live among rich billionaires without concern for running out of money. And so on in every neighborhood. Thus, UBI needs for each area needs to be tied in with community membership, and be based on the Consumer Price Index in that area. Communities can open themselves up to more people from time to time.
        wbl 9y ago
        California makes adding new housing illegal.
        closeparen 9y ago
        I have enough faith in the American people that we would never permit the end of freedom of movement. For one thing, it would take a Constitutional amendment to legalize internal border controls. For another, geographical mobility has been core to American identity since the earliest days of the country. You're talking about locking the Okies in the Dust Bowl. Locking the autoworkers in Detroit even after the auto industry dried up. Preventing the Great Migration of Southern blacks to the more hospitable Northern states. Deepening inequality by locking in the regional disparities that perpetuate it. This is insane, dystopic (literally, geographically-based caste systems feature in dystopian fiction with some regularity, for example the Hunger Games and Elysium), un-Constitutional, and un-American. If internal border controls ever became law, I'd be the first to sign up for the resistance in the resultant civil war.
        EGreg 9y ago
        Whoa whoa, who's talking about ending freedom of movement? To be clear we are talking about being eligible to receive free money from whichever local area agrees to issue it to you.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - Mz 9y ago
      Disengenuous: not candid or sincere, typically by pretending that one knows less about something than one really does. synonyms: insincere · dishonest · untruthful · false · deceitful · duplicitous · lying · mendacious · hypocritical That is a personal attack. The shortage of affordable housing is very much real. It is not something I am making up. And, yes, every American city should have housing that single people with entry level jobs can afford without an hour long commute or three roommates. We did historically. We tore a lot of it down in the 60s and 70s when it wasn't really needed, then never rebuilt it when the need for such came back, in essence.
  - mobilefriendly 9y ago
    We have Single Payer for the poor and near-poor (Medicaid covers 1 in 5 Americans) and the U.S. government spends a couple hundred billion dollars a year on housing subsidies (directly and through the tax code and through subsidies in the mortgage market). Most federal public housing is privately administered through public vouchers to landlords and non-profits.
    - Mz 9y ago
      Since the demand for housing assistance often exceeds the limited resources available to HUD and the local housing agencies, long waiting periods are common. In fact, a PHA may close its waiting list when it has more families on the list than can be assisted in the near future. https://portal.hud.gov/hudportal/HUD?src=/topics/housing_choice_voucher_program_section_8 https://portal.hud.gov/hudportal/HUD?src=/topics/housing_cho...
      - njarboe 9y ago
        Having government benefits available to some people but not others, who are in the same circumstance, seems immoral and very prone to corruption. If someone qualifies for housing assistance and gets it, then moves out of that situation, and if they need it again it might not be available. This is a system that discourages a person from getting off of assistance (dependence).
  - EGreg 9y ago
    Yes but costs vary from neighborhood to neighborhood. How do you determine how much to pay the doctors and who gets to live where? Obviously not every homeless can move into Beverly Hills tomorrow.
  - FuriouslyAdrift 9y ago
    There are tons of Section 8 apartments in my city. While I work my butt off trying to make my rent and have leaky faucets and 50 yr old single pane windows, the section 8 across the street has new windows, min splits, and granite counter tops... The landlord gets garaunteed income, huge waiting list of tenants, can VERY easily have them evicted for violations and actually get MORE than market rate brcause the govt pays better for the section 8. It's driving up rents and drug related crime has already increased. I'm currently looking at moving out of the city core and into a suburb.
    - Mz 9y ago
      To be clear, I am not for more Section 8 housing. I am for market based solutions. In the 60s and 70s, we tore down around 80% of the SROs we had because the Baby Boomers came from an unprecedentedly well off, large middle class and did not need minimal housing of that sort. Boarding houses used to also be common. Now, most housing is designed with a nuclear family in mind and our default expectation is that single adults should get one or more roommates to make such housing work for them. There is far too little market based housing aimed at singletons and childless couples. Meanwhile, our demographics have changed and we have drastically more singletons, childless couples or single parents, drastically fewer nuclear families. I want market based solutions, not more government interference of this sort. There are good things done by the government, but most programs to help the poor only entrench poverty and the problems that lead to it.
      - gamechangr 9y ago
        > "I want market based solutions". What would that look like? I assume it's not profitable for builders...or else there wouldn't be a problem? If it were, they would build them everywhere.
        Mz 9y ago
        My comment was written 13 days ago. I have since gotten off the street with a market based solution. I am in an SRO. Historically, we had a lot more SROs and boarding houses than we do currently. Up to 80% of SROs were torn down in the 60s and 70s when they weren't needed by Baby Boomers, who were a demographic anomaly. As demographics returned to something more normal, we never rebuilt them. They are less profitable than other land uses. This is not the same as being unprofitable. In California, residential prices are skewed by protectionist government measures. Dismantling the government interference that pushes housing costs up in the state would very likely reduce the need for government vouchers et al for the poor. I left California to find someplace I could afford.
- ubernostrum 9y ago
  All the programs you named are chronically underfunded and subject to restrictions and red tape designed to force people to jump through many hoops to prove they "deserve" help. And there is a nasty history of attitudes among those in power as to what kind of people "deserve" help and what kind of people don't. Well-funded truly universal (i.e., every citizen is automatically eligible and automatically presumed eligible by the administering agency) have not been tried in the US.
- drcross 9y ago
  >That we still have a homeless problem indicates that the reason for long-term homelessness is something else. I presumed it was common knowledge that the vast majority of homeless people have mental health issues. America seems to lack any public mental health services. I was disgusted by the number of disturbed homeless people roaming the streets of California when I visited in ways you never see in most of europe. There seems to be absolutely no support for the most vulnerable in society over there.
  - tjalfi 9y ago
    The following is an excerpt from [0]. Around the same time, the Court ruled, in O’Connor v. Donaldson, that a Florida man named Kenneth Donaldson had been kept against his will in a state psychiatric hospital for nearly fifteen years. The ruling added momentum to a nationwide campaign to “deinstitutionalize” the mentally ill. Activists decried the existence of mental hospitals that were filled, as one account put it, with “naked humans herded like cattle.” During the next two decades, states across the country shut down such facilities, both to save money and to appease advocates pushing for reform. But instead of funding more humane modes of treatment—such as community mental-health centers that could help patients live independently—many states left the mentally ill to their own devices. Often, highly unstable people ended up on the streets, abusing drugs and committing crimes, which led them into the prison system. [0] http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/02/the-torturing-of-mentally-ill-prisoners http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/02/the-torturing-o...
    - andirk 9y ago
      It's a lot easier to help a guilty person with "correctional" incarceration than it is to help an innocent person with a path to a decent life.
- InclinedPlane 9y ago
  That's ... a fantasy. Do you understand the limits of welfare? Do you know the waiting lists on typical public housing? Have you seen how much the SNAP program has been cut? Have you seen the limits of medicaid? Are you aware of how underfunded our school systems are in general and how poorly educated students can be even if they've been given a diploma? Every single program you've listed has a coverage that is only a fraction of what it needs to be to actually keep people housed, fed, educated, and alive. Edit: Here are some interviews that explain what poverty is really like in the US today: http://www.wnyc.org/series/busted-americas-poverty-myths http://www.wnyc.org/series/busted-americas-poverty-myths
- icantdrive55 9y ago
  Oh boy. Public housing: Section eight has been closed for years. The sign up list has been closed for years now--in many counties. Of yea, the current lease for Section 8 housing is 47 pages in my county. 47 pages of "can't, and do this!". It's beyond petty. Food Stamps: Requires a degrading elegabily approval. Designed so people just don't even sign up. (Clinton made it very degrading, and cut people off after a certain time period. Obama had a heart. Who know what Wonder boy will do to the program.) Then finding stores to buy food. Then being told you can't buy orange juice. Why--I don't know, just overheard the demeaning conversation. Another one that stuck with me. A mom bought a cheap birthday cake for her child. The Checker "schooled" her on how to bake a cake from scratch. The women said, "I need to buy 10 ingredients for one birthday cake?" Cashier, "I don't make the rules lady!". Yea--I wanted to pull the guy across the counter. She walked out in silence, with child looking perplexed. Public Education: great if you live in the right district. Medicaid/Medical: It's almost like having no insurance. So much is not covered. So many doctors don't take it. 30 day supplies on a very restrictive Formulary. I imagine it does when wheeled into the emergency rooms. So many of our Welfare Programs are purposely administered so people just give up. Personally, I think we need to open up any available federal, state, and county land to allow homeless to at least pitch a tent. Right now being homeless is for all practical purposes a crime. We are beyond finding solutions. Americans shouldn't be forced to sleep on the sidewalks--just waiting for a ticket, or being the victim of a random crime. We have a huge problem in America. And it's the way we treat those that don't fit in. Tech community should take notice. When the balloon pops; you just might see the misery first hand. I know Willie Brown is wondering out loud what San Francisco will do when Iwasfired.com happens.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
rsync 9y ago
"Basic income, basic housing, basic food, basic education, basic healthcare?" I am open minded about UBI, etc. However, it has occurred to me recently that we already have a decent experimental result with regard to: "Basic income, basic housing, basic food, basic education, basic healthcare" Poor white people in the rural United States have all of those things. Even the poorest of them have basic food, housing and education that we might consider "first world". I notice that they aren't following their passions and climbing up to the peak of mazlows hierarchy. Instead, the lack of self-determination and "purpose" causes a despair that drives them to substance abuse. (apologies for the cascading UBI debate, below...)
- kakarot 9y ago
  As someone who grew up a poor white person in the rural United States, what the heck are you talking about?
- RandomInteger4 9y ago
  I don't think you know what you're talking about. Most places that offer food or financial assistance do so in a manner that is detrimental to those receiving it, specifically due to sentiments like yours. Those in power with similar political mindsets as you purposely neuter the usefulness of these programs, making them difficult to obtain and then taking them away for arbitrary reasons at the most inconvenient of times, setting back those relying on them, probably while they're trying to become financially stabilized.
  - rsync 9y ago
    " ... specifically due to sentiments like yours. Those in power with similar political mindsets as you purposely neuter the usefulness of these programs" The only sentiment I expressed was that I am open-minded about UBI. You have no idea what my political mindset is nor do you have any idea what my background is.
- pmiller2 9y ago
  I think you need to provide some sources for the statement that poor people have "basic food, housing, and education." Education, sure, in the form of public k-12 schooling (which is not always great, but certainly qualifies as 'basic'). But, food and housing? Let's forget about "white" for a second: tell me, where does an able-bodied, poor person get basic, safe housing, and food that's at least somewhat healthy to survive on? Are you talking about section 8 and food stamps? Because if that's what you're talking about, that's not really what I would consider fulfilling the role of "basic housing and food."
gadders 9y ago
Doesn't the military do that as well?

ams6110 9y ago

Not true at all. These things are all provided. Welfare, public housing, food stamps, public education, Medicaid. That we still have a homeless problem indicates that the reason for long-term homelessness is something else.

Mz 9y ago
There is a really huge shortage of genuinely affordable housing in the US. Public housing is generally pretty crappy and in short supply to boot. Having studied the problem in an actual college class and also spent the last 5.5 years on the street: It's complicated. But we need more solutions for people and fewer aimed at poor people specifically. Programs to help the poor are routinely craptastic. Affordable housing and single payer medical coverage would go a long way towards reducing the problem.
- hueving 9y ago
  >There is a really huge shortage of genuinely affordable housing in the US. Public housing is generally pretty crappy and in short supply to boot. This is disingenuous, the housing shortages are all in the highly desirable locations like the SFO, LAX, NYC, etc. There is no housing shortage in the vast majority of the country (look at Detroit). It's completely unsustainable to try to support a model where anyone should be able to live in whatever city they choose for an extremely low cost.
  - thebooktocome 9y ago
    Follow this line of thought long enough, and you get to a hukou system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hukou_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hukou_system
    - EGreg 9y ago
      Is that good or bad? Listen, I support single payer systems, but how do they figure out how much to pay in each region? Same question for UBI. I have come to believe that UBI and all other safety nets have to come with immigration requirements. Not just everyone is going to be accepted to live among rich billionaires without concern for running out of money. And so on in every neighborhood. Thus, UBI needs for each area needs to be tied in with community membership, and be based on the Consumer Price Index in that area. Communities can open themselves up to more people from time to time.
      - wbl 9y ago
        California makes adding new housing illegal.
      - closeparen 9y ago
        I have enough faith in the American people that we would never permit the end of freedom of movement. For one thing, it would take a Constitutional amendment to legalize internal border controls. For another, geographical mobility has been core to American identity since the earliest days of the country. You're talking about locking the Okies in the Dust Bowl. Locking the autoworkers in Detroit even after the auto industry dried up. Preventing the Great Migration of Southern blacks to the more hospitable Northern states. Deepening inequality by locking in the regional disparities that perpetuate it. This is insane, dystopic (literally, geographically-based caste systems feature in dystopian fiction with some regularity, for example the Hunger Games and Elysium), un-Constitutional, and un-American. If internal border controls ever became law, I'd be the first to sign up for the resistance in the resultant civil war.
        EGreg 9y ago
        Whoa whoa, who's talking about ending freedom of movement? To be clear we are talking about being eligible to receive free money from whichever local area agrees to issue it to you.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - Mz 9y ago
    Disengenuous: not candid or sincere, typically by pretending that one knows less about something than one really does. synonyms: insincere · dishonest · untruthful · false · deceitful · duplicitous · lying · mendacious · hypocritical That is a personal attack. The shortage of affordable housing is very much real. It is not something I am making up. And, yes, every American city should have housing that single people with entry level jobs can afford without an hour long commute or three roommates. We did historically. We tore a lot of it down in the 60s and 70s when it wasn't really needed, then never rebuilt it when the need for such came back, in essence.
- mobilefriendly 9y ago
  We have Single Payer for the poor and near-poor (Medicaid covers 1 in 5 Americans) and the U.S. government spends a couple hundred billion dollars a year on housing subsidies (directly and through the tax code and through subsidies in the mortgage market). Most federal public housing is privately administered through public vouchers to landlords and non-profits.
  - Mz 9y ago
    Since the demand for housing assistance often exceeds the limited resources available to HUD and the local housing agencies, long waiting periods are common. In fact, a PHA may close its waiting list when it has more families on the list than can be assisted in the near future. https://portal.hud.gov/hudportal/HUD?src=/topics/housing_choice_voucher_program_section_8 https://portal.hud.gov/hudportal/HUD?src=/topics/housing_cho...
    - njarboe 9y ago
      Having government benefits available to some people but not others, who are in the same circumstance, seems immoral and very prone to corruption. If someone qualifies for housing assistance and gets it, then moves out of that situation, and if they need it again it might not be available. This is a system that discourages a person from getting off of assistance (dependence).
- EGreg 9y ago
  Yes but costs vary from neighborhood to neighborhood. How do you determine how much to pay the doctors and who gets to live where? Obviously not every homeless can move into Beverly Hills tomorrow.
- FuriouslyAdrift 9y ago
  There are tons of Section 8 apartments in my city. While I work my butt off trying to make my rent and have leaky faucets and 50 yr old single pane windows, the section 8 across the street has new windows, min splits, and granite counter tops... The landlord gets garaunteed income, huge waiting list of tenants, can VERY easily have them evicted for violations and actually get MORE than market rate brcause the govt pays better for the section 8. It's driving up rents and drug related crime has already increased. I'm currently looking at moving out of the city core and into a suburb.
  - Mz 9y ago
    To be clear, I am not for more Section 8 housing. I am for market based solutions. In the 60s and 70s, we tore down around 80% of the SROs we had because the Baby Boomers came from an unprecedentedly well off, large middle class and did not need minimal housing of that sort. Boarding houses used to also be common. Now, most housing is designed with a nuclear family in mind and our default expectation is that single adults should get one or more roommates to make such housing work for them. There is far too little market based housing aimed at singletons and childless couples. Meanwhile, our demographics have changed and we have drastically more singletons, childless couples or single parents, drastically fewer nuclear families. I want market based solutions, not more government interference of this sort. There are good things done by the government, but most programs to help the poor only entrench poverty and the problems that lead to it.
    - gamechangr 9y ago
      > "I want market based solutions". What would that look like? I assume it's not profitable for builders...or else there wouldn't be a problem? If it were, they would build them everywhere.
      - Mz 9y ago
        My comment was written 13 days ago. I have since gotten off the street with a market based solution. I am in an SRO. Historically, we had a lot more SROs and boarding houses than we do currently. Up to 80% of SROs were torn down in the 60s and 70s when they weren't needed by Baby Boomers, who were a demographic anomaly. As demographics returned to something more normal, we never rebuilt them. They are less profitable than other land uses. This is not the same as being unprofitable. In California, residential prices are skewed by protectionist government measures. Dismantling the government interference that pushes housing costs up in the state would very likely reduce the need for government vouchers et al for the poor. I left California to find someplace I could afford.
ubernostrum 9y ago
All the programs you named are chronically underfunded and subject to restrictions and red tape designed to force people to jump through many hoops to prove they "deserve" help. And there is a nasty history of attitudes among those in power as to what kind of people "deserve" help and what kind of people don't. Well-funded truly universal (i.e., every citizen is automatically eligible and automatically presumed eligible by the administering agency) have not been tried in the US.
drcross 9y ago
>That we still have a homeless problem indicates that the reason for long-term homelessness is something else. I presumed it was common knowledge that the vast majority of homeless people have mental health issues. America seems to lack any public mental health services. I was disgusted by the number of disturbed homeless people roaming the streets of California when I visited in ways you never see in most of europe. There seems to be absolutely no support for the most vulnerable in society over there.
- tjalfi 9y ago
  The following is an excerpt from [0]. Around the same time, the Court ruled, in O’Connor v. Donaldson, that a Florida man named Kenneth Donaldson had been kept against his will in a state psychiatric hospital for nearly fifteen years. The ruling added momentum to a nationwide campaign to “deinstitutionalize” the mentally ill. Activists decried the existence of mental hospitals that were filled, as one account put it, with “naked humans herded like cattle.” During the next two decades, states across the country shut down such facilities, both to save money and to appease advocates pushing for reform. But instead of funding more humane modes of treatment—such as community mental-health centers that could help patients live independently—many states left the mentally ill to their own devices. Often, highly unstable people ended up on the streets, abusing drugs and committing crimes, which led them into the prison system. [0] http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/02/the-torturing-of-mentally-ill-prisoners http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/02/the-torturing-o...
  - andirk 9y ago
    It's a lot easier to help a guilty person with "correctional" incarceration than it is to help an innocent person with a path to a decent life.
InclinedPlane 9y ago
That's ... a fantasy. Do you understand the limits of welfare? Do you know the waiting lists on typical public housing? Have you seen how much the SNAP program has been cut? Have you seen the limits of medicaid? Are you aware of how underfunded our school systems are in general and how poorly educated students can be even if they've been given a diploma? Every single program you've listed has a coverage that is only a fraction of what it needs to be to actually keep people housed, fed, educated, and alive. Edit: Here are some interviews that explain what poverty is really like in the US today: http://www.wnyc.org/series/busted-americas-poverty-myths http://www.wnyc.org/series/busted-americas-poverty-myths
icantdrive55 9y ago
Oh boy. Public housing: Section eight has been closed for years. The sign up list has been closed for years now--in many counties. Of yea, the current lease for Section 8 housing is 47 pages in my county. 47 pages of "can't, and do this!". It's beyond petty. Food Stamps: Requires a degrading elegabily approval. Designed so people just don't even sign up. (Clinton made it very degrading, and cut people off after a certain time period. Obama had a heart. Who know what Wonder boy will do to the program.) Then finding stores to buy food. Then being told you can't buy orange juice. Why--I don't know, just overheard the demeaning conversation. Another one that stuck with me. A mom bought a cheap birthday cake for her child. The Checker "schooled" her on how to bake a cake from scratch. The women said, "I need to buy 10 ingredients for one birthday cake?" Cashier, "I don't make the rules lady!". Yea--I wanted to pull the guy across the counter. She walked out in silence, with child looking perplexed. Public Education: great if you live in the right district. Medicaid/Medical: It's almost like having no insurance. So much is not covered. So many doctors don't take it. 30 day supplies on a very restrictive Formulary. I imagine it does when wheeled into the emergency rooms. So many of our Welfare Programs are purposely administered so people just give up. Personally, I think we need to open up any available federal, state, and county land to allow homeless to at least pitch a tent. Right now being homeless is for all practical purposes a crime. We are beyond finding solutions. Americans shouldn't be forced to sleep on the sidewalks--just waiting for a ticket, or being the victim of a random crime. We have a huge problem in America. And it's the way we treat those that don't fit in. Tech community should take notice. When the balloon pops; you just might see the misery first hand. I know Willie Brown is wondering out loud what San Francisco will do when Iwasfired.com happens.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

rsync 9y ago

"Basic income, basic housing, basic food, basic education, basic healthcare?" I am open minded about UBI, etc. However, it has occurred to me recently that we already have a decent experimental result with regard to: "Basic income, basic housing, basic food, basic education, basic healthcare" Poor white people in the rural United States have all of those things. Even the poorest of them have basic food, housing and education that we might consider "first world". I notice that they aren't following their passions and climbing up to the peak of mazlows hierarchy. Instead, the lack of self-determination and "purpose" causes a despair that drives them to substance abuse. (apologies for the cascading UBI debate, below...)

kakarot 9y ago
As someone who grew up a poor white person in the rural United States, what the heck are you talking about?
RandomInteger4 9y ago
I don't think you know what you're talking about. Most places that offer food or financial assistance do so in a manner that is detrimental to those receiving it, specifically due to sentiments like yours. Those in power with similar political mindsets as you purposely neuter the usefulness of these programs, making them difficult to obtain and then taking them away for arbitrary reasons at the most inconvenient of times, setting back those relying on them, probably while they're trying to become financially stabilized.
- rsync 9y ago
  " ... specifically due to sentiments like yours. Those in power with similar political mindsets as you purposely neuter the usefulness of these programs" The only sentiment I expressed was that I am open-minded about UBI. You have no idea what my political mindset is nor do you have any idea what my background is.
pmiller2 9y ago
I think you need to provide some sources for the statement that poor people have "basic food, housing, and education." Education, sure, in the form of public k-12 schooling (which is not always great, but certainly qualifies as 'basic'). But, food and housing? Let's forget about "white" for a second: tell me, where does an able-bodied, poor person get basic, safe housing, and food that's at least somewhat healthy to survive on? Are you talking about section 8 and food stamps? Because if that's what you're talking about, that's not really what I would consider fulfilling the role of "basic housing and food."

gadders 9y ago

Doesn't the military do that as well?