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I write software for a living, and have on more than one occasion had the opportunity to live and work in California. Seeing the poverty and, how the poor are

I write software for a living, and have on more than one occasion had the opportunity to live and work in California. Seeing the poverty and, how the poor are treated in San Fransisco, Los Angeles, and every other large US I've been to, is so degrading and offensive that the idea of participating in the financial system that sustains it is unacceptable. Surely I can't be the only one who feels this way.

Johnny555 9y ago
Where have you seen the poor and homeless treated better? It's a hard problem to solve, even by throwing a lot of money at the problem. Part of the problem is that some people want to be homeless (for a variety of reasons (or a combination of reasons) like not losing their independence, not trusting the system, wanting to continue a drug/alcohol habit, bad experiences with the system previously, mental illness, etc). In a country that values individual rights, it's not clear how you help that person get off the streets without forcing them. In a city with relatively mild climate like LA or SF, it's even harder to get the homeless into shelters where social services can more effectively help them. Granted, there are plenty of people that do want to get off the streets, but not everyone living on the streets is willing to make the sacrifices to do so.
- robert_foss 9y ago
  > Where have you seen the poor and homeless treated better? In most countries with functional social security networks. Canada, Germany and Sweden. So while the above are leaps and bounds better, they aren't flawless. Canada has lots of mentally ill people on the streets due to _very_ poor mental health care available to them. And Germany and Sweden have people from Romania begging on the streets, since they're part of a group of people that have been historically (and currently are) mistreated in their homeland. > In a country that values individual rights.. If you want people off the streets, offer them free housing. There is even (and remarkably so) an example of this from Utah, where free housing was provided to the ones in need. And the city saved money doing it, since fewer other services were needed as a result. Also, separately, I find this argument to be a bit of a straw man, since the treating homeless people decently and having strong individual rights aren't fundamentally opposed. In America some things are done well collectively, in the interest of everyone, like providing roads.
  - Johnny555 9y ago
    There's some debate over whether or not Utah really did solve their homeless problem: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/kevin-corinth/think-utah-solved-homeles_b_9380860.html https://www.huffingtonpost.com/kevin-corinth/think-utah-solv... https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/apr/27/utah-homeless-shelters-housing-first https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/apr/27/utah-homeles... And even when a region does offer good homeless services, word gets out and more homeless move in: https://www.heraldextra.com/news/local/more-homeless-move-to-utah-county-after-operation-diversion-raids/article_d1b15bdd-a47c-513c-a75a-61d55f3d1c9b.html https://www.heraldextra.com/news/local/more-homeless-move-to...
  - refurb 9y ago
    As someone who lived in Canada, I wouldn't agree they are treated better. Every winter there is a mad rush to get people out of the cold. Vancouver has about as severe a homeless problem as SF. Can't speak to the other two countries.
  - mantas 9y ago
    > And Germany and Sweden have people from Romania begging on the streets, since they're part of a group of people that have been historically (and currently are) mistreated in their homeland. Gypsies is a wee of a special case tbh. They've a very weird honor system that makes it hard to integrate them. We're trying to do that for decades and results are mediocre so far. I've heard crazy stories from people working at NPOs with them. The only thing we didn't try yet is forcibly taking away children and putting them in boarding schools. I know it sounds terrible, but those people just don't want to integrate. Which is why may look mistreated. But in reality it's vice versa - they mistreat anyone else around them. Of course, some gypsies do drop that way of life and integrate. But then they just look like normal citizen. Thus there're little "good gypsies".
    - oelmekki 9y ago
      What you describe is pure fascism. And for the elders, maybe we should build camps to hold them? I hear a lot about how this or that part of the population "doesn't integrate". What I never hear about is why it's so important they integrate.
- latch 9y ago
  Frankly, despite your caveats, I think this is a reckless and hurtful thing to think and say. Unless you have sources, it's just a dismissive logical extreme. Sure we can find some non-mentally ill people who want to be homeless. But let's focus on getting the 2.5 million children off the streets rather than even looking at framing this as an individual freedom issue. I've been to a lot of places for a prolonged periods of time. The only place that has ever made me think of LA was Seoul. Every other city, no matter how poor, was in considerably better shape. One difference that I feel is key, are housing regulations. You can put up 4 cement walls, with a cement floor and corrugated metal sheet roof, meet no safety standard, but still have a home. An address, a place of safety, where you can cook, clean clothes, and have access to electricity and water (possibly not legally, and certainly not reliably). Where your kids have light and can read and do their homework. Often housing 3 or 4 generations and forming their own community.
icelancer 9y ago
It was a significant reason I didn't continue working in San Jose, which is roughly 1000x worse. San Jose, Costa Rica, that is.
- mirimir 9y ago
  Indeed. True story. I was drifting through the mountains of southern Mexico with some friends, in an old pickup. We encountered an old woman, carrying a large pot, and gave her a ride to a nearby town, maybe ~10 km away. So it turns out that she had made the pot. Mined the clay. Fired it in charcoal from a wood fire. And she was intending to sell it for several pesos, with which she'd buy corn, beans and chillies. Walking both ways.
  - icelancer 9y ago
    Getting over the guards with shotguns at the ATMs took a little time, but not much (I grew up in a bad urban area of a Midwestern city). Getting over the theft and such, a little while still. But I started figuring out the usual scams and such. (Taxis still only cost $1 at the most, with no tipping expected, anyway.) I even was able to mostly get over the fact that when you drove 5 km outside of the city that I'd see abject poverty that I hadn't even seen in the worst areas of my rust belt city - stuff that makes this article look like absolutely nothing. It was a chronic thing: Ex-pats all living inside a literal walled garden, getting everything delivered. This was before Uber Eats and the like, so getting McDonalds and other fast food delivered to the complex was a new thing. Groceries, food, entertainment. And then the constant trips to Hotel del Rey and the Blue Marlin Bar so my co-workers could pick up prostitutes on the cheap with rooms available for rent by the hour... What I realized slowly over a period of a few months is that it wasn't the insane poverty - and relatively low violent crime rate! - that got to me. It was what we were doing to "gentrify" the area. It felt like, and was, pure exploitation and taking advantage of massive economic gradients. That we worked in tech and could sling some code made us masters of our domain, being paid well-above-average wages for Silicon Valley - and literally unheard of sums in Costa Rica. We've met the enemy, and it was us.
    - 9y ago
mirimir 9y ago
I get what you say. And there's a lot more poverty in the US than what you see in large cities. I recall being very disturbed by my first Amtrak from NYC to DC. North Philly. Somewhere further south, north of Baltimore. And damn, you can see some sad areas from the Northeast Extension of the PA Turnpike. And on back roads in the Southeast generally.
DoreenMichele 9y ago
Housing policy in the US is a very large part of the problem. Tax incentives, financing mechanisms, zoning codes and myriad other factors have helped make affordable housing nearly non existent. Our default expectation in the US is that young single people rent a multi bedroom place designed for a nuclear family and share it with roommates, who may be total strangers. If for any reason whatsoever that doesn't work for you, well, fuck you. Enjoy sleeping under a bridge while cops harass you. We really need to stop talking about The Homeless in this country and start talking about the housing crisis. No one can get a handle on how you fix homelessness when we focus on the people who are homeless. But we could make a lot of headway on the problem if we tackled the housing piece of it. It would not get everyone off the street. But it would, for example, get retirees off the street whose income will not cover rent because we simply do not have housing at the price point they need.
- prostoalex 9y ago
  > myriad other factors have helped make affordable housing nearly non existent That's quite a blanket statement for the entire US. Can we confidently claim that no affordable housing whatsoever exists in Detroit, Baltimore, rural Pennsylvania, non-metropolitan Texas, or Midwestern states, where in some places http://freelandks.com/ http://freelandks.com/ one can still get free land? The problem seems to arise when everybody is vying for roughly the same space - large coastal cities with mild weather, proximity to public transportation, beaches, decent restaurants, some entertainment scene, job growth and economic prospects. Same coastal cities also seem to be earthquake-prone and therefore require more expensive (than aforementioned Midwestern states) building codes and safety regulations. As the cities are dense, there's a set of regulations in regards to mandatory parking, green zones and other stuff that's just peculiar to large cities. Combined with higher than average cost of labor, the construction and compliance costs alone command a premium, and that's before we get into land prices.
  - DoreenMichele 9y ago
    That's a blanket statement rooted in more than 3 years of researching where in hell I could move to get myself off the street. It is also rooted in formal education and other research because I wanted to be an urban planner before life got in the way. In the 1950s, the average new home was about 1200 sqft and held about 3.5 people. Today, it is over 2400 sqft and contains about 2.5 people. Meanwhile, we tore down something like 80 percent of our Single Room Occupancy units over the course of a couple of decades. The lack of affordable housing has been severe and growing worse for decades. This is why waiting lists for Section 8 housing is routinely measured in multiple years or even more than a decade in some cases. I will add that these comments about "It is just big cities that have expensive housing" are a red herring. That's where the jobs are. If you have no job, you can't afford a place to live. Jobs in small towns typically pay less. Moving someplace cheaper works for the privileged few with portable income and/or passive income. People who still need to work for a living cannot magically solve their problems by moving someplace cheaper.
bamboozled 9y ago
You're not alone. I've lived in two major cities of the world, spent time in many others; However, I've never seen anything as bad as San Francisco and surrounding areas. Some of my colleagues are from Europe and felt so shocked and uneasy about what we saw. I hate to say it, but it definitely left a bad impression of the USA on my friends and I. It certainly made me question a lot of the things the US claims to stand for. Land of the free and home of the brave? If you say so...
- DoreenMichele 9y ago
  When I was homeless and collecting recyclables for the money, thus picking up after housed people with zero respect for the land who just threw stuff on the ground everywhere, I often called it land of the sleeze, home of the depraved.
- Cthulhu_ 9y ago
  > Land of the free and home of the brave? If you say so... Yeah as in, people are free to be homeless if they didn't work hard enough. It's the Trump argument, he's a self-made man who kicked off with a small loan of just one million. A lot of Republican, anti-socialist voters are poor, but don't see themselves as poor but "temporarily underfinanced". And the truly destitute / homeless apparently lose their right to vote.
  - bamboozled 9y ago
    His father was a multi-millionaire [1], Donald Trump has never had to work hard for his wealth, he inherited it. I'm not sure I understand what you're trying to say anyway. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Trump https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Trump
YaxelPerez 9y ago
Oh, definitely. America's hatred of poor people is ingrained into it's culture. The prevailing attitude is that if you're poor, it probably your fault. Many evangelical christians go so far as to say that if you're poor, it's because god is punishing you for being a bad person. People love getting mad when they see a homeless person with a cellphone, or a mother buying a steak with food stamps, because poor people are seen as "leeches on society".

Johnny555 9y ago

Where have you seen the poor and homeless treated better? It's a hard problem to solve, even by throwing a lot of money at the problem. Part of the problem is that some people want to be homeless (for a variety of reasons (or a combination of reasons) like not losing their independence, not trusting the system, wanting to continue a drug/alcohol habit, bad experiences with the system previously, mental illness, etc). In a country that values individual rights, it's not clear how you help that person get off the streets without forcing them. In a city with relatively mild climate like LA or SF, it's even harder to get the homeless into shelters where social services can more effectively help them. Granted, there are plenty of people that do want to get off the streets, but not everyone living on the streets is willing to make the sacrifices to do so.

robert_foss 9y ago
> Where have you seen the poor and homeless treated better? In most countries with functional social security networks. Canada, Germany and Sweden. So while the above are leaps and bounds better, they aren't flawless. Canada has lots of mentally ill people on the streets due to _very_ poor mental health care available to them. And Germany and Sweden have people from Romania begging on the streets, since they're part of a group of people that have been historically (and currently are) mistreated in their homeland. > In a country that values individual rights.. If you want people off the streets, offer them free housing. There is even (and remarkably so) an example of this from Utah, where free housing was provided to the ones in need. And the city saved money doing it, since fewer other services were needed as a result. Also, separately, I find this argument to be a bit of a straw man, since the treating homeless people decently and having strong individual rights aren't fundamentally opposed. In America some things are done well collectively, in the interest of everyone, like providing roads.
- Johnny555 9y ago
  There's some debate over whether or not Utah really did solve their homeless problem: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/kevin-corinth/think-utah-solved-homeles_b_9380860.html https://www.huffingtonpost.com/kevin-corinth/think-utah-solv... https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/apr/27/utah-homeless-shelters-housing-first https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/apr/27/utah-homeles... And even when a region does offer good homeless services, word gets out and more homeless move in: https://www.heraldextra.com/news/local/more-homeless-move-to-utah-county-after-operation-diversion-raids/article_d1b15bdd-a47c-513c-a75a-61d55f3d1c9b.html https://www.heraldextra.com/news/local/more-homeless-move-to...
- refurb 9y ago
  As someone who lived in Canada, I wouldn't agree they are treated better. Every winter there is a mad rush to get people out of the cold. Vancouver has about as severe a homeless problem as SF. Can't speak to the other two countries.
- mantas 9y ago
  > And Germany and Sweden have people from Romania begging on the streets, since they're part of a group of people that have been historically (and currently are) mistreated in their homeland. Gypsies is a wee of a special case tbh. They've a very weird honor system that makes it hard to integrate them. We're trying to do that for decades and results are mediocre so far. I've heard crazy stories from people working at NPOs with them. The only thing we didn't try yet is forcibly taking away children and putting them in boarding schools. I know it sounds terrible, but those people just don't want to integrate. Which is why may look mistreated. But in reality it's vice versa - they mistreat anyone else around them. Of course, some gypsies do drop that way of life and integrate. But then they just look like normal citizen. Thus there're little "good gypsies".
  - oelmekki 9y ago
    What you describe is pure fascism. And for the elders, maybe we should build camps to hold them? I hear a lot about how this or that part of the population "doesn't integrate". What I never hear about is why it's so important they integrate.
latch 9y ago
Frankly, despite your caveats, I think this is a reckless and hurtful thing to think and say. Unless you have sources, it's just a dismissive logical extreme. Sure we can find some non-mentally ill people who want to be homeless. But let's focus on getting the 2.5 million children off the streets rather than even looking at framing this as an individual freedom issue. I've been to a lot of places for a prolonged periods of time. The only place that has ever made me think of LA was Seoul. Every other city, no matter how poor, was in considerably better shape. One difference that I feel is key, are housing regulations. You can put up 4 cement walls, with a cement floor and corrugated metal sheet roof, meet no safety standard, but still have a home. An address, a place of safety, where you can cook, clean clothes, and have access to electricity and water (possibly not legally, and certainly not reliably). Where your kids have light and can read and do their homework. Often housing 3 or 4 generations and forming their own community.

icelancer 9y ago

It was a significant reason I didn't continue working in San Jose, which is roughly 1000x worse. San Jose, Costa Rica, that is.

mirimir 9y ago
Indeed. True story. I was drifting through the mountains of southern Mexico with some friends, in an old pickup. We encountered an old woman, carrying a large pot, and gave her a ride to a nearby town, maybe ~10 km away. So it turns out that she had made the pot. Mined the clay. Fired it in charcoal from a wood fire. And she was intending to sell it for several pesos, with which she'd buy corn, beans and chillies. Walking both ways.
- icelancer 9y ago
  Getting over the guards with shotguns at the ATMs took a little time, but not much (I grew up in a bad urban area of a Midwestern city). Getting over the theft and such, a little while still. But I started figuring out the usual scams and such. (Taxis still only cost $1 at the most, with no tipping expected, anyway.) I even was able to mostly get over the fact that when you drove 5 km outside of the city that I'd see abject poverty that I hadn't even seen in the worst areas of my rust belt city - stuff that makes this article look like absolutely nothing. It was a chronic thing: Ex-pats all living inside a literal walled garden, getting everything delivered. This was before Uber Eats and the like, so getting McDonalds and other fast food delivered to the complex was a new thing. Groceries, food, entertainment. And then the constant trips to Hotel del Rey and the Blue Marlin Bar so my co-workers could pick up prostitutes on the cheap with rooms available for rent by the hour... What I realized slowly over a period of a few months is that it wasn't the insane poverty - and relatively low violent crime rate! - that got to me. It was what we were doing to "gentrify" the area. It felt like, and was, pure exploitation and taking advantage of massive economic gradients. That we worked in tech and could sling some code made us masters of our domain, being paid well-above-average wages for Silicon Valley - and literally unheard of sums in Costa Rica. We've met the enemy, and it was us.
  - 9y ago

mirimir 9y ago

I get what you say. And there's a lot more poverty in the US than what you see in large cities. I recall being very disturbed by my first Amtrak from NYC to DC. North Philly. Somewhere further south, north of Baltimore. And damn, you can see some sad areas from the Northeast Extension of the PA Turnpike. And on back roads in the Southeast generally.

DoreenMichele 9y ago

Housing policy in the US is a very large part of the problem. Tax incentives, financing mechanisms, zoning codes and myriad other factors have helped make affordable housing nearly non existent. Our default expectation in the US is that young single people rent a multi bedroom place designed for a nuclear family and share it with roommates, who may be total strangers. If for any reason whatsoever that doesn't work for you, well, fuck you. Enjoy sleeping under a bridge while cops harass you. We really need to stop talking about The Homeless in this country and start talking about the housing crisis. No one can get a handle on how you fix homelessness when we focus on the people who are homeless. But we could make a lot of headway on the problem if we tackled the housing piece of it. It would not get everyone off the street. But it would, for example, get retirees off the street whose income will not cover rent because we simply do not have housing at the price point they need.

prostoalex 9y ago
> myriad other factors have helped make affordable housing nearly non existent That's quite a blanket statement for the entire US. Can we confidently claim that no affordable housing whatsoever exists in Detroit, Baltimore, rural Pennsylvania, non-metropolitan Texas, or Midwestern states, where in some places http://freelandks.com/ http://freelandks.com/ one can still get free land? The problem seems to arise when everybody is vying for roughly the same space - large coastal cities with mild weather, proximity to public transportation, beaches, decent restaurants, some entertainment scene, job growth and economic prospects. Same coastal cities also seem to be earthquake-prone and therefore require more expensive (than aforementioned Midwestern states) building codes and safety regulations. As the cities are dense, there's a set of regulations in regards to mandatory parking, green zones and other stuff that's just peculiar to large cities. Combined with higher than average cost of labor, the construction and compliance costs alone command a premium, and that's before we get into land prices.
- DoreenMichele 9y ago
  That's a blanket statement rooted in more than 3 years of researching where in hell I could move to get myself off the street. It is also rooted in formal education and other research because I wanted to be an urban planner before life got in the way. In the 1950s, the average new home was about 1200 sqft and held about 3.5 people. Today, it is over 2400 sqft and contains about 2.5 people. Meanwhile, we tore down something like 80 percent of our Single Room Occupancy units over the course of a couple of decades. The lack of affordable housing has been severe and growing worse for decades. This is why waiting lists for Section 8 housing is routinely measured in multiple years or even more than a decade in some cases. I will add that these comments about "It is just big cities that have expensive housing" are a red herring. That's where the jobs are. If you have no job, you can't afford a place to live. Jobs in small towns typically pay less. Moving someplace cheaper works for the privileged few with portable income and/or passive income. People who still need to work for a living cannot magically solve their problems by moving someplace cheaper.

bamboozled 9y ago

You're not alone. I've lived in two major cities of the world, spent time in many others; However, I've never seen anything as bad as San Francisco and surrounding areas. Some of my colleagues are from Europe and felt so shocked and uneasy about what we saw. I hate to say it, but it definitely left a bad impression of the USA on my friends and I. It certainly made me question a lot of the things the US claims to stand for. Land of the free and home of the brave? If you say so...

DoreenMichele 9y ago
When I was homeless and collecting recyclables for the money, thus picking up after housed people with zero respect for the land who just threw stuff on the ground everywhere, I often called it land of the sleeze, home of the depraved.
Cthulhu_ 9y ago
> Land of the free and home of the brave? If you say so... Yeah as in, people are free to be homeless if they didn't work hard enough. It's the Trump argument, he's a self-made man who kicked off with a small loan of just one million. A lot of Republican, anti-socialist voters are poor, but don't see themselves as poor but "temporarily underfinanced". And the truly destitute / homeless apparently lose their right to vote.
- bamboozled 9y ago
  His father was a multi-millionaire [1], Donald Trump has never had to work hard for his wealth, he inherited it. I'm not sure I understand what you're trying to say anyway. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Trump https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Trump

YaxelPerez 9y ago

Oh, definitely. America's hatred of poor people is ingrained into it's culture. The prevailing attitude is that if you're poor, it probably your fault. Many evangelical christians go so far as to say that if you're poor, it's because god is punishing you for being a bad person. People love getting mad when they see a homeless person with a cellphone, or a mother buying a steak with food stamps, because poor people are seen as "leeches on society".