5 ms·

So leave. I just don't get that. I mean, we're literally talking about a group of people with lower-to-middle class US jobs, who, on a daily basis, go to an au

So leave. I just don't get that. I mean, we're literally talking about a group of people with lower-to-middle class US jobs, who, on a daily basis, go to an auction together with a large amount of billionaires and millionaires, and bid against them for real estate, food and all kinds of amenities. To me, that's a joke. And then an article gets written about a staffer vs contractor dichotomy. Come on. Just because you were born in a place of 50 square miles of land, in a country of 3.5 million square miles of land, does not mean you're entitled to the laws of supply and demand being suspended by a massive subsidy program so that you can keep on living there when you're not needed and there's tons of people waiting in line for your spot who're willing to do it for less, while you are needed in other cities where your family can live much more affordably. And this is coming from a leftist who left his own home town because it got overrun by rich kids with daddy's money and expats. I didn't like it either. But I also saw that I was not entitled to hand outs in order for me to live in the most prime location in the country, because everyone wants that and that just does not work, as much as we want it. And the last thing I'm going to do is try to outbid the 1% as a middle class earner and have a shitty quality of life. Working fulltime without kids for 6 months and being homeless all that time because the average rent equals your pay just means you need to move. You've got skills, you're employable, you've got income...

fluxic 9y ago
People have roots, man. If somebody would have tried to kick my Grand-x father off his homestead in Scotland, he'd have shoed them away with the blunt end of an axe. And yet when it's capitalism rather than war that displaces people from their homesteads, it's lower-class stubbornness to blame? Why should money entitle people to live in certain places, rather than history? You can argue both sides.
- wallawe 9y ago
  Your grandfather owned the land. These people do not.
  - dcre 9y ago
    That may be an explanation, but it's not a justification. Why don't these people own the land they live on? Keep asking why a couple more times.
    - RestlessMind 9y ago
      Because we tried a bunch of ways to allocate lands over the course of human history. The current system (where you pay money, acquire it peacefully and the government backs your "property rights" with all the guns) seems the best among alternatives (like violence, ceding it to people who live somewhere for X years etc). Do you have a better alternative to allocate land (or any other asset)? Please share so that we can discuss.
      - dcre 9y ago
        Public housing works quite well in Vienna.[1] But my point was not necessarily that no one should own land. Another interpretation of my question — "Why don't these people own the land they live on?" — would be, why isn't there land around that they can afford to buy and give themselves security? And that has various types of answers, some related the kinds of opportunity in the economy that would give them more income, some about how we can change the supply of housing. Here are some more developed thoughts on the subject from someone more expert than I am: [2] [1] https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/case-for-public-housing-vienna-chicago https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/case-for-pub... [2] https://danielkayhertz.com/2017/05/11/what-is-a-left-approach-to-housing-in-2017/ https://danielkayhertz.com/2017/05/11/what-is-a-left-approac...
        Kalium 9y ago
        I find the argument in favor of sunset towns in your second link rather disturbing. The article about Vienna shows that the forces of supply and demand work very well, given an adequate supply. That seems very instructive.
  - fluxic 9y ago
- jimduk 9y ago
  I agree with your sentiment, but historically your Grand-x father potentially got sold out in the Highland Clearances by his clan leader and then emigrated to Canada/US. This made way for sheep (lots of Scotland is still relatively underpopulated) and the head of the clan probably blew the money on a town-house in London. People have roots, but they often get pulled out. See John Prebble - the Highland Clearances 1963 - ISBN-13: 978-0140028379 "‘Mr Prebble tells a terrible story excellently. There is little need to search further to explain so much of the sadness and emptiness of the northern Highlands today’ The Times.
  - fluxic 9y ago
    Historically, this is exactly what happened. I'm just saying—it's a morally repugnant thing to happen, and it shouldn't be any less morally repugnant whether it's an entitled capitalist techie kicking my grandfather out of his house, a swindling clan leader, or some imperialist with an (albeit smalller) axe to grind. Coercion is coercion.
- IkmoIkmo 9y ago
  I did mention that. Again, I had to leave my own hometown too. And yes, we've argued, just like every major city, with history vs money. But at the end of the day, you're not entitled to live in the 0.01% richest square mileage because you were born there, or lived there a few decades. That's akin to birthrights. Now you can live there, if you can afford it. Affordability is a large spectrum. For example, for years I spent about 50% of my rent there, and I had a great quality of life, I liked it. But at some point, especially if you want to buy a house, get kids, reduce risk of total financial collapse the moment your income dips, etc, that's no longer affordable. The solution for me was to move to a cheaper area. In tech, wages vary quite wildly, but most people with ordinary jobs roughly earn the same. Facebook employs 17 thousand people. I don't really care much about them, relatively speaking. Walmart employs 2.3 million. I care about that number, relatively, loads more, as it concerns lots of people. Walmart salaries are pretty much the same across the country with little variance. So it just makes sense, from a quality of life perspective, for you and your family, to move to an at least somewhat affordable location. That doesn't mean sorting for price and picking the lost spot, there's lots inbetween. Lots of semi-expensive cities that can still be affordable. But SF? Come on. If you make $25k a year and have a family, that's just irresponsible. And if people need help moving, we should facilitate that. What else is the solution at scale? Giving birthrights? Giving million dollar subsidies to poor people so they can buy a 1 bedroom apartment in SF? There's ACTUAL huge issues that demands our government's resources. Look, if you live in an affordable city and can't make it on your own, need partial or full help, you should get all the help you need. But all these poor, but otherwise employable people with a decent brain and a decent body, who work hard but choose to live in a place among the richest on the planet... that makes no sense. In the same way I don't buy a BMW, or go to the four seasons, or pick the most expensive restaurant. At the end of the day, we need to pick our spending patterns based on our earnings for everything in life, living area included, and living in SF like some people do today is for many (not all) a (bad) choice. And I'm all for shifting the wealth, progressive tax rates, helping parents with daycare, in every city, I've always voted for those programmes. But we're talking about people trying to live in a city where a tiny home costs $1m, with a minimum wage income. You'd need programs that take 10x the resources that our government affords to helping people in other cities. I mean just extend the argument to the extreme... if all of the 200 million working Americans suddenly wanted to live in say Portland for some significant emotional bond... what would happen. Well there'd be homes for 10 million. The homes would skyrocket in price. There'd be jobs for say 20 million. So you'd have 200 million people offering their manhours for a tiny amount of jobs, and the wages would approach zero. You'd have affordability in the city crash, because rent and wages move in completely opposite directions at the speed of light. The solution then isn't for companies nor governments to pay/subsidise ever more than the market rate to a few million, while the rest are completely fucked. Nor is the solution to give a few people a birthright lottery ticket. The solution is for people to not choose to all live in Portland. SF is a bit like that, much less extreme. Affordability is dying, and the long-term solution probably is that some people improve their quality of life moving to places with 25% less wages and 50% lower expenses, and for the remainder to see their wages increase due to a drop in labour supply.
ShriekBob 9y ago
If you don't understand why these people can't leave, then you've never been poor. The reality for a lot of these people is that they can't really afford to stay where they are, but they equally can not afford to leave. No one is going to pay to relocate a Janitor from SF to Idaho. That Janitor can barely make there rent, let alone find the deposit for some place they can actually afford, and that's before you take into account moving costs, living while you find new work, etc. The truth is, moving is expensive, very expensive, and if you live somewhere with a high cost of living, it's hard to drum up that kind of money.
- merpnderp 9y ago
  My local church is setting up a ton of people from Tijuana who work menial jobs and came here with no money. They help anyone who asks with deposits, transportation, job hunting. The truth is, moving can be cheap, very cheap, and if you live somewhere with a low price of labor, it's profitable to drum up that kind of support.
- dntrkv 9y ago
  Can you show some statistics that proves that is the case? Because I grew up in a poor family surrounded by other poor families and everyone moved around a lot because they were poor and had to continually look for new housing and opportunities.
- IkmoIkmo 9y ago
  That's nonsense man. I'm literally referring to a woman in the article who sleeps in a parkingarea because she can't pay rent, but she does work, owns a phone, a car, earns more cash than is necessary to pay for her non-rent living expenses. You're telling me she can't drive, or take a bus? Because what, she has to move all her belongings from the parking lot she currently lives in? Come on. Look, my parents were on welfare since I was 3, never had any financial support, I've hustled plenty of times moving places, never having owned a single car. Not a single piece of furniture in my home is new, everything is second hand and half of it I found on the street. Look I'm not saying it's as easy as opening an email account. Life is hard. But we're talking about a person who is homeless. She's way more capable than you may think, and I'm telling you, the solution to her problem is NOT staying in SF. You know that and I know that. But even if people can't move without help from third parties, the solution to this problem still isn't letting people who make little money to stay in the most expensive place on earth that they can't afford, it's just not going to work out. It's governments facilitating them to move. I'd completely support that. As soon as some people leave, who's quality of life will improve, companies will be forced to pay a living wage for those who stay, who's quality of life will improve, too. Would you stay?
FireBeyond 9y ago
> you can keep on living there when you're not needed and there's tons of people waiting in line for your spot who're willing to do it for less That "need" is supplied by Facebook, et al, who have this race to provided the most "perks" to their employees. And at a certain point, you're going to find there are less and less people willing to "do it for less" due to simple economies of scale, cost and time. And (hopefully) the bubble will burst.
- ryandrake 9y ago
  > And at a certain point, you're going to find there are less and less people willing to "do it for less" due to simple economies of scale, cost and time. Unfortunately, that point is well below minimum wage. You will always have a line of people willing to "do it for less" until you make it illegal to pay less.
eli_gottlieb 9y ago
>And this is coming from a leftist who left his own home town because it got overrun by rich kids with daddy's money and expats. I didn't like it either. But I also saw that I was not entitled to hand outs in order for me to live in the most prime location in the country, because everyone wants that and that just does not work, as much as we want it. You're not a leftist. You're as bourgeois as they freaking come, dude. But hey, surely with the shiny new open borders y'all left-neoliberals will put in, middle-class Americans can move to Mexico, where there will be tons of manual labor jobs with no safety standards, just like everyone remembers!
sageabilly 9y ago
Moving requires a massive amount of privilege in the first place: - Money to fund the logistics of moving (van, first month's rent, etc) - Money to cruise on until you get a job in a new location - Money to transfer all of your life-stuff to a new location (internet, cable, power and water, etc) - Building on the last point, a high enough credit score to be able to get power, water, cable, etc in a new place without putting down a deposit - Ability to take time off work to interview, IF you're lucky enough to be in a position where you can job hunt while still being employed full-time - Reliable daycare where you are moving TO- daycare is super expensive and often times daycare has waiting lists so you can't just plop your kid down somewhere else. - No ties to the area you're leaving- so no elderly parents to take care of, no family network to leave behind, etc And on and on and on. Saying "Just Leave" is like saying "Just pull yourself up by your bootstraps!". If you're already working 60 hours a week and barely scraping by, how in the hell are you going to find the time and the money to uproot everything and move?
- justinzollars 9y ago
  I moved to San Francisco with no money and 50,000 in college debt with a degree that wasn't worth much at the start of the great recession. No one wanted to hire me. Yet I pulled through. Having a bad attitude is the worst advice.
  - ricw 9y ago
    Easily said when you're young, unbound and without family.
    - KekDemaga 9y ago
      Ok, eliminate anyone who meets that criteria and the criticism remains valid.
    - justinzollars 9y ago
      I met a lyft driver yesterday: a man from Afghanistan who quit his day job is starting a business (a smoke shop in Santa Rosa). He has a family and he said "I have had many businesses in my life, I fail and I try again, I fail and I try again". He lost his home in the war and is literally starting at zero. It is really about a positive attitude vs a shit attitude.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

fluxic 9y ago

People have roots, man. If somebody would have tried to kick my Grand-x father off his homestead in Scotland, he'd have shoed them away with the blunt end of an axe. And yet when it's capitalism rather than war that displaces people from their homesteads, it's lower-class stubbornness to blame? Why should money entitle people to live in certain places, rather than history? You can argue both sides.

wallawe 9y ago
Your grandfather owned the land. These people do not.
- dcre 9y ago
  That may be an explanation, but it's not a justification. Why don't these people own the land they live on? Keep asking why a couple more times.
  - RestlessMind 9y ago
    Because we tried a bunch of ways to allocate lands over the course of human history. The current system (where you pay money, acquire it peacefully and the government backs your "property rights" with all the guns) seems the best among alternatives (like violence, ceding it to people who live somewhere for X years etc). Do you have a better alternative to allocate land (or any other asset)? Please share so that we can discuss.
    - dcre 9y ago
      Public housing works quite well in Vienna.[1] But my point was not necessarily that no one should own land. Another interpretation of my question — "Why don't these people own the land they live on?" — would be, why isn't there land around that they can afford to buy and give themselves security? And that has various types of answers, some related the kinds of opportunity in the economy that would give them more income, some about how we can change the supply of housing. Here are some more developed thoughts on the subject from someone more expert than I am: [2] [1] https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/case-for-public-housing-vienna-chicago https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/case-for-pub... [2] https://danielkayhertz.com/2017/05/11/what-is-a-left-approach-to-housing-in-2017/ https://danielkayhertz.com/2017/05/11/what-is-a-left-approac...
      - Kalium 9y ago
        I find the argument in favor of sunset towns in your second link rather disturbing. The article about Vienna shows that the forces of supply and demand work very well, given an adequate supply. That seems very instructive.
- fluxic 9y ago
jimduk 9y ago
I agree with your sentiment, but historically your Grand-x father potentially got sold out in the Highland Clearances by his clan leader and then emigrated to Canada/US. This made way for sheep (lots of Scotland is still relatively underpopulated) and the head of the clan probably blew the money on a town-house in London. People have roots, but they often get pulled out. See John Prebble - the Highland Clearances 1963 - ISBN-13: 978-0140028379 "‘Mr Prebble tells a terrible story excellently. There is little need to search further to explain so much of the sadness and emptiness of the northern Highlands today’ The Times.
- fluxic 9y ago
  Historically, this is exactly what happened. I'm just saying—it's a morally repugnant thing to happen, and it shouldn't be any less morally repugnant whether it's an entitled capitalist techie kicking my grandfather out of his house, a swindling clan leader, or some imperialist with an (albeit smalller) axe to grind. Coercion is coercion.
IkmoIkmo 9y ago
I did mention that. Again, I had to leave my own hometown too. And yes, we've argued, just like every major city, with history vs money. But at the end of the day, you're not entitled to live in the 0.01% richest square mileage because you were born there, or lived there a few decades. That's akin to birthrights. Now you can live there, if you can afford it. Affordability is a large spectrum. For example, for years I spent about 50% of my rent there, and I had a great quality of life, I liked it. But at some point, especially if you want to buy a house, get kids, reduce risk of total financial collapse the moment your income dips, etc, that's no longer affordable. The solution for me was to move to a cheaper area. In tech, wages vary quite wildly, but most people with ordinary jobs roughly earn the same. Facebook employs 17 thousand people. I don't really care much about them, relatively speaking. Walmart employs 2.3 million. I care about that number, relatively, loads more, as it concerns lots of people. Walmart salaries are pretty much the same across the country with little variance. So it just makes sense, from a quality of life perspective, for you and your family, to move to an at least somewhat affordable location. That doesn't mean sorting for price and picking the lost spot, there's lots inbetween. Lots of semi-expensive cities that can still be affordable. But SF? Come on. If you make $25k a year and have a family, that's just irresponsible. And if people need help moving, we should facilitate that. What else is the solution at scale? Giving birthrights? Giving million dollar subsidies to poor people so they can buy a 1 bedroom apartment in SF? There's ACTUAL huge issues that demands our government's resources. Look, if you live in an affordable city and can't make it on your own, need partial or full help, you should get all the help you need. But all these poor, but otherwise employable people with a decent brain and a decent body, who work hard but choose to live in a place among the richest on the planet... that makes no sense. In the same way I don't buy a BMW, or go to the four seasons, or pick the most expensive restaurant. At the end of the day, we need to pick our spending patterns based on our earnings for everything in life, living area included, and living in SF like some people do today is for many (not all) a (bad) choice. And I'm all for shifting the wealth, progressive tax rates, helping parents with daycare, in every city, I've always voted for those programmes. But we're talking about people trying to live in a city where a tiny home costs $1m, with a minimum wage income. You'd need programs that take 10x the resources that our government affords to helping people in other cities. I mean just extend the argument to the extreme... if all of the 200 million working Americans suddenly wanted to live in say Portland for some significant emotional bond... what would happen. Well there'd be homes for 10 million. The homes would skyrocket in price. There'd be jobs for say 20 million. So you'd have 200 million people offering their manhours for a tiny amount of jobs, and the wages would approach zero. You'd have affordability in the city crash, because rent and wages move in completely opposite directions at the speed of light. The solution then isn't for companies nor governments to pay/subsidise ever more than the market rate to a few million, while the rest are completely fucked. Nor is the solution to give a few people a birthright lottery ticket. The solution is for people to not choose to all live in Portland. SF is a bit like that, much less extreme. Affordability is dying, and the long-term solution probably is that some people improve their quality of life moving to places with 25% less wages and 50% lower expenses, and for the remainder to see their wages increase due to a drop in labour supply.

ShriekBob 9y ago

If you don't understand why these people can't leave, then you've never been poor. The reality for a lot of these people is that they can't really afford to stay where they are, but they equally can not afford to leave. No one is going to pay to relocate a Janitor from SF to Idaho. That Janitor can barely make there rent, let alone find the deposit for some place they can actually afford, and that's before you take into account moving costs, living while you find new work, etc. The truth is, moving is expensive, very expensive, and if you live somewhere with a high cost of living, it's hard to drum up that kind of money.

merpnderp 9y ago
My local church is setting up a ton of people from Tijuana who work menial jobs and came here with no money. They help anyone who asks with deposits, transportation, job hunting. The truth is, moving can be cheap, very cheap, and if you live somewhere with a low price of labor, it's profitable to drum up that kind of support.
dntrkv 9y ago
Can you show some statistics that proves that is the case? Because I grew up in a poor family surrounded by other poor families and everyone moved around a lot because they were poor and had to continually look for new housing and opportunities.
IkmoIkmo 9y ago
That's nonsense man. I'm literally referring to a woman in the article who sleeps in a parkingarea because she can't pay rent, but she does work, owns a phone, a car, earns more cash than is necessary to pay for her non-rent living expenses. You're telling me she can't drive, or take a bus? Because what, she has to move all her belongings from the parking lot she currently lives in? Come on. Look, my parents were on welfare since I was 3, never had any financial support, I've hustled plenty of times moving places, never having owned a single car. Not a single piece of furniture in my home is new, everything is second hand and half of it I found on the street. Look I'm not saying it's as easy as opening an email account. Life is hard. But we're talking about a person who is homeless. She's way more capable than you may think, and I'm telling you, the solution to her problem is NOT staying in SF. You know that and I know that. But even if people can't move without help from third parties, the solution to this problem still isn't letting people who make little money to stay in the most expensive place on earth that they can't afford, it's just not going to work out. It's governments facilitating them to move. I'd completely support that. As soon as some people leave, who's quality of life will improve, companies will be forced to pay a living wage for those who stay, who's quality of life will improve, too. Would you stay?

FireBeyond 9y ago

> you can keep on living there when you're not needed and there's tons of people waiting in line for your spot who're willing to do it for less That "need" is supplied by Facebook, et al, who have this race to provided the most "perks" to their employees. And at a certain point, you're going to find there are less and less people willing to "do it for less" due to simple economies of scale, cost and time. And (hopefully) the bubble will burst.

ryandrake 9y ago
> And at a certain point, you're going to find there are less and less people willing to "do it for less" due to simple economies of scale, cost and time. Unfortunately, that point is well below minimum wage. You will always have a line of people willing to "do it for less" until you make it illegal to pay less.

eli_gottlieb 9y ago

>And this is coming from a leftist who left his own home town because it got overrun by rich kids with daddy's money and expats. I didn't like it either. But I also saw that I was not entitled to hand outs in order for me to live in the most prime location in the country, because everyone wants that and that just does not work, as much as we want it. You're not a leftist. You're as bourgeois as they freaking come, dude. But hey, surely with the shiny new open borders y'all left-neoliberals will put in, middle-class Americans can move to Mexico, where there will be tons of manual labor jobs with no safety standards, just like everyone remembers!

sageabilly 9y ago

Moving requires a massive amount of privilege in the first place: - Money to fund the logistics of moving (van, first month's rent, etc) - Money to cruise on until you get a job in a new location - Money to transfer all of your life-stuff to a new location (internet, cable, power and water, etc) - Building on the last point, a high enough credit score to be able to get power, water, cable, etc in a new place without putting down a deposit - Ability to take time off work to interview, IF you're lucky enough to be in a position where you can job hunt while still being employed full-time - Reliable daycare where you are moving TO- daycare is super expensive and often times daycare has waiting lists so you can't just plop your kid down somewhere else. - No ties to the area you're leaving- so no elderly parents to take care of, no family network to leave behind, etc And on and on and on. Saying "Just Leave" is like saying "Just pull yourself up by your bootstraps!". If you're already working 60 hours a week and barely scraping by, how in the hell are you going to find the time and the money to uproot everything and move?

justinzollars 9y ago
I moved to San Francisco with no money and 50,000 in college debt with a degree that wasn't worth much at the start of the great recession. No one wanted to hire me. Yet I pulled through. Having a bad attitude is the worst advice.
- ricw 9y ago
  Easily said when you're young, unbound and without family.
  - KekDemaga 9y ago
    Ok, eliminate anyone who meets that criteria and the criticism remains valid.
  - justinzollars 9y ago
    I met a lyft driver yesterday: a man from Afghanistan who quit his day job is starting a business (a smoke shop in Santa Rosa). He has a family and he said "I have had many businesses in my life, I fail and I try again, I fail and I try again". He lost his home in the war and is literally starting at zero. It is really about a positive attitude vs a shit attitude.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]