4 ms·

I sympathize with them but a simple answer to your question is , leaving the city is an option. Technically people have options to leave the city if the cost of

I sympathize with them but a simple answer to your question is , leaving the city is an option. Technically people have options to leave the city if the cost of living is high enough that they cannot afford rent. This will be the first argument against the "law is wrong". I personally believe based on how US laws and public opinion works is that its better for them to leave the city and start somewhere the cost of living is not that high and they can get some kind of job (even if it is low paying).

DoreenMichele 8y ago
leaving the city is an option. I travelled to San Diego when I was first homeless because that's where the soup kitchens and homeless services are. It was possible to eat every day. Most small towns don't have the resources to provide such services to the homeless. If you are completely indigent, the nearest big city is your best bet for finding some kind of help. We need to fix affordable housing and health care in the US. Those two things would go a long way towards reducing this issue. But no one wants to do that and most Americans see zero connection between the lack of affordable housing and the high numbers of homeless people, which just flabbergasts me.
- throwaway917100 8y ago
  My worry with affordable housing in cities is that either it will turn into a corruption filed lottery system or they will turn into modern ghettoes. I think it's better to turn away homeless people away from cities and into places where cost of living is more reasonable and they can find some kind of job to bootstrap off (not by law but through incentives ). Yes, I agree most of the homeless services being in the city is a problem, which funnels people towards the city, where chances of getting affordable housing is becoming slim day by day.
  - DoreenMichele 8y ago
    The problem with your theory is the cities are where the jobs are, plus affordable housing is in general short supply. I find it very frustrating to keep running into comments like this on HN. I was willing to go almost anywhere in the Western US to get off the street. There are damn few places that aren't senior housing, aren't trailers, aren't the absolute muddle of nowhere where it would be along drive to even get groceries (thereby adding to the expense of living there because you need a car, etc) and can be had for under $500 per month. Even small towns aren't that cheap. I would like to actively foster the development of online incomes in small towns and rural areas. The internet savvy people are also mostly in the big cities and many rural places lack high speed internet. If we could somehow supply good internet to such areas and help people earn money online so that the lack of good jobs isn't an issue, now you are talking about a real solution. But most of the people saying that homeless folks need to just move someplace cheap aren't talking about helping them make money online. They are just ignoring the fact that these people simply cannot currently get their needs met at all outside of the big city and are being arrested for being in the big city where services are. I run a bunch of websites. I can't get Patreon support sufficient to let me develop them full time. I didn't get the economic development job I applied for last December. I think I have actual workable solutions that don't just throw people to the wolves. And I can't get traction because basically no one really wants this solved. They just want to blame the homeless and not actually work on real solutions. There is a nationwide shortage of affordable housing. This is not unique to big cities. So sending people to small towns with no services and poor job prospects isn't currently a fix. And it is starting to make me spit nails to hear that. Meanwhile, tech giants want to eliminate like 80 percent of jobs and replace it with UBI. Then articles that state that in the first paragraph fail to actually explore this dystopian vision and, instead, wax eloquent about how do gooder social workers will live so much better with UBI to supplement their underpaid job. They don't actually get into what life looks like if we hand everyone $10k annually with no hope of ever having a job again because robots are doing everything. And people wonder why I'm suicidal so much of the time. Good god.
    - throwaway917100 8y ago
      I am not an American citizen so I don't know about your experience in US, but I have seen similar problems in my own country (A developing country 3rd world) where building subsidized housing has only increased the problem. It created ghettoes with lack of ammenties and people clumped in together (Because the government will want to save money and I bet they will do a shody job at building these place). This has caused a lot of people to start living in a very small area which has severely strained the resources of the city (water , sewage, garbage ). This also created a feedback loop as since cities has more opportunities and now you can find housing on the cheap, more and more people start coming to the city even if they cannot afford living there. Life is hard and it becomes harder when you are homeless and I am not undermining this. But your solution is a tried and tested solution which didn't work before and there is no indication that it will work in the future. Gist : There is no point in concentrating all resources in the same place.
      - DoreenMichele 8y ago
        You are making a lot of assumptions about my remarks that are inaccurate. First, when I say affordable housing, I don't mean "government owned or subsidized projects built to serve poor people." I mean that as literally as can be meant: Housing that is affordable for a certain subset of the population. Historically, the US had a lot of small, cheap rentals and those have largely gone away. For example: The United States saw a decrease in single room occupancy housing during the period of 1960s and 1970s urban decay. For example, in Chicago 81% of the SRO housing stock disappeared between 1960 and 1980. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy Second, I'm not suggesting building affordable housing only in big cities. The entire US needs additional affordable housing. For every 100 families living in poverty on the West Coast, there are no more than 30 affordable homes https://www.geekwire.com/2018/every-100-families-living-poverty-west-coast-no-30-affordable-homes/ https://www.geekwire.com/2018/every-100-families-living-pove... The history here is that we had savings rates that exceeded 50% some years during WW2, the soldiers came home and had money in the bank and also help from the government to buy housing as part of their benefits. So the ladies with factory jobs were asked to give up their factory jobs and go home so men could have jobs and many of them were happy to do that (though not all) and this is where we get the Baby Boomer generation. It is a historical anomaly where the US had an extremely large middle class population with working class values that had survived the Great Depression and they were thrilled to be homeowners. And houses built in the 1950s were typically 1200 sq ft and held an average of like 4.5 people, IIRC. Today, the average new home in the US is over 2400 sq ft and holds one less person on average than in the 1950s. Meanwhile, we have a terrible homeless problem and single young people are expected to rent a two or three bedroom place designed for a nuclear family and get roommates. We used to have SROs, boarding houses and other things as a common market based option for young people just starting out who weren't married, didn't have kids and didn't have a lot of money. We have largely eliminated those options and then wonder why there is a problem. The 1950s probably saw Peak Nuclear Family (tm) for the US. All of our housing policies and financing mechanisms are rooted in that era and it is like a ghost continuing to haunt and terrorize us. Meanwhile, our demographics have diverged and we have more single young people, single parents, and childless couples and virtually none of our housing is designed for these people. It is almost all designed for a breadwinner dad, a homemaker mom and 2.5 kids to live happily ever after in, never mind that this is practically a myth today. I'm well aware that building poverty housing has the potential to deepen the problem. I'm absolutely not talking about building poverty housing. I'm talking about building stuff that isn't insanely oversized, isn't aimed at a small subset of the population -- the mythical old fashioned nuclear family with a stay at home mom that is nearly extinct -- and isn't insanely expensive. That's vastly different from what you are talking about. And your "I'm not American, but I know better than you do what is best for your country, never mind that I am completely misinterpreting your statements" isn't any more pleasant to deal with than when upper class Americans tell me that we should ship all the poor people to rural hell holes or something.

DoreenMichele 8y ago

leaving the city is an option. I travelled to San Diego when I was first homeless because that's where the soup kitchens and homeless services are. It was possible to eat every day. Most small towns don't have the resources to provide such services to the homeless. If you are completely indigent, the nearest big city is your best bet for finding some kind of help. We need to fix affordable housing and health care in the US. Those two things would go a long way towards reducing this issue. But no one wants to do that and most Americans see zero connection between the lack of affordable housing and the high numbers of homeless people, which just flabbergasts me.

throwaway917100 8y ago
My worry with affordable housing in cities is that either it will turn into a corruption filed lottery system or they will turn into modern ghettoes. I think it's better to turn away homeless people away from cities and into places where cost of living is more reasonable and they can find some kind of job to bootstrap off (not by law but through incentives ). Yes, I agree most of the homeless services being in the city is a problem, which funnels people towards the city, where chances of getting affordable housing is becoming slim day by day.
- DoreenMichele 8y ago
  The problem with your theory is the cities are where the jobs are, plus affordable housing is in general short supply. I find it very frustrating to keep running into comments like this on HN. I was willing to go almost anywhere in the Western US to get off the street. There are damn few places that aren't senior housing, aren't trailers, aren't the absolute muddle of nowhere where it would be along drive to even get groceries (thereby adding to the expense of living there because you need a car, etc) and can be had for under $500 per month. Even small towns aren't that cheap. I would like to actively foster the development of online incomes in small towns and rural areas. The internet savvy people are also mostly in the big cities and many rural places lack high speed internet. If we could somehow supply good internet to such areas and help people earn money online so that the lack of good jobs isn't an issue, now you are talking about a real solution. But most of the people saying that homeless folks need to just move someplace cheap aren't talking about helping them make money online. They are just ignoring the fact that these people simply cannot currently get their needs met at all outside of the big city and are being arrested for being in the big city where services are. I run a bunch of websites. I can't get Patreon support sufficient to let me develop them full time. I didn't get the economic development job I applied for last December. I think I have actual workable solutions that don't just throw people to the wolves. And I can't get traction because basically no one really wants this solved. They just want to blame the homeless and not actually work on real solutions. There is a nationwide shortage of affordable housing. This is not unique to big cities. So sending people to small towns with no services and poor job prospects isn't currently a fix. And it is starting to make me spit nails to hear that. Meanwhile, tech giants want to eliminate like 80 percent of jobs and replace it with UBI. Then articles that state that in the first paragraph fail to actually explore this dystopian vision and, instead, wax eloquent about how do gooder social workers will live so much better with UBI to supplement their underpaid job. They don't actually get into what life looks like if we hand everyone $10k annually with no hope of ever having a job again because robots are doing everything. And people wonder why I'm suicidal so much of the time. Good god.
  - throwaway917100 8y ago
    I am not an American citizen so I don't know about your experience in US, but I have seen similar problems in my own country (A developing country 3rd world) where building subsidized housing has only increased the problem. It created ghettoes with lack of ammenties and people clumped in together (Because the government will want to save money and I bet they will do a shody job at building these place). This has caused a lot of people to start living in a very small area which has severely strained the resources of the city (water , sewage, garbage ). This also created a feedback loop as since cities has more opportunities and now you can find housing on the cheap, more and more people start coming to the city even if they cannot afford living there. Life is hard and it becomes harder when you are homeless and I am not undermining this. But your solution is a tried and tested solution which didn't work before and there is no indication that it will work in the future. Gist : There is no point in concentrating all resources in the same place.
    - DoreenMichele 8y ago
      You are making a lot of assumptions about my remarks that are inaccurate. First, when I say affordable housing, I don't mean "government owned or subsidized projects built to serve poor people." I mean that as literally as can be meant: Housing that is affordable for a certain subset of the population. Historically, the US had a lot of small, cheap rentals and those have largely gone away. For example: The United States saw a decrease in single room occupancy housing during the period of 1960s and 1970s urban decay. For example, in Chicago 81% of the SRO housing stock disappeared between 1960 and 1980. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy Second, I'm not suggesting building affordable housing only in big cities. The entire US needs additional affordable housing. For every 100 families living in poverty on the West Coast, there are no more than 30 affordable homes https://www.geekwire.com/2018/every-100-families-living-poverty-west-coast-no-30-affordable-homes/ https://www.geekwire.com/2018/every-100-families-living-pove... The history here is that we had savings rates that exceeded 50% some years during WW2, the soldiers came home and had money in the bank and also help from the government to buy housing as part of their benefits. So the ladies with factory jobs were asked to give up their factory jobs and go home so men could have jobs and many of them were happy to do that (though not all) and this is where we get the Baby Boomer generation. It is a historical anomaly where the US had an extremely large middle class population with working class values that had survived the Great Depression and they were thrilled to be homeowners. And houses built in the 1950s were typically 1200 sq ft and held an average of like 4.5 people, IIRC. Today, the average new home in the US is over 2400 sq ft and holds one less person on average than in the 1950s. Meanwhile, we have a terrible homeless problem and single young people are expected to rent a two or three bedroom place designed for a nuclear family and get roommates. We used to have SROs, boarding houses and other things as a common market based option for young people just starting out who weren't married, didn't have kids and didn't have a lot of money. We have largely eliminated those options and then wonder why there is a problem. The 1950s probably saw Peak Nuclear Family (tm) for the US. All of our housing policies and financing mechanisms are rooted in that era and it is like a ghost continuing to haunt and terrorize us. Meanwhile, our demographics have diverged and we have more single young people, single parents, and childless couples and virtually none of our housing is designed for these people. It is almost all designed for a breadwinner dad, a homemaker mom and 2.5 kids to live happily ever after in, never mind that this is practically a myth today. I'm well aware that building poverty housing has the potential to deepen the problem. I'm absolutely not talking about building poverty housing. I'm talking about building stuff that isn't insanely oversized, isn't aimed at a small subset of the population -- the mythical old fashioned nuclear family with a stay at home mom that is nearly extinct -- and isn't insanely expensive. That's vastly different from what you are talking about. And your "I'm not American, but I know better than you do what is best for your country, never mind that I am completely misinterpreting your statements" isn't any more pleasant to deal with than when upper class Americans tell me that we should ship all the poor people to rural hell holes or something.