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When people write responses like this I wonder if they’ve ever been to New York City. We don’t really have comparable problems. For me visiting LA, SF or Seatt

by CPLX 7y ago

When people write responses like this I wonder if they’ve ever been to New York City. We don’t really have comparable problems. For me visiting LA, SF or Seattle is jaw dropping. I totally reject this idea that these situations are just inevitable.

chrisrogers 7y ago
Or Tokyo, for that matter. That's about as urban as you can get on Earth, with none of the 'grittiness' that so many West coast city-dwellers seem to think is inherent to cities. And in a comparable democracy, no less.
- shados 7y ago
  This is a pretty important point. Everything wrong with big American cities is normalized. If you don't like it, you're told to just go to the suburb. But it's all solvable and are usually consequences of policies as well as cultural problems. Many cities in the world just don't have these problems.
  - rdtwo 7y ago
    Suburbs are how America does segregation and separate but equal legally. We have “cities” next to major urban centers that can keep all their taxes dollars locally and shift their problems to urban centers. If you live in a nice neighborhood in the city of Seattle a good chunk of your money goes to fund poor parts of town and the homeless industry. Half a mile away the neighboring town keeps all its money for the local school and sends its homeless people to Seattle.
fzeroracer 7y ago
That's just objectively wrong. NYC has a higher homeless population both in sheer volume and per 100,000 people. So what is NYC doing to stop the growth of their homeless population beyond making it out of sight and out of mind?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- thatswrong0 7y ago
  If their homeless population is far less dangerous and destructive to the lives of all the other citizens that live there, then they're doing _something_ right, even if their homeless population is somewhat bigger per capita.
- CPLX 7y ago
  NYC has a right to shelter law. They also have enforcement of basic public space issues like camping and being in parks overnight, or petty street crime. Those two things together are a good starting point for discussion.
caymanjim 7y ago
I suspect you aren't familiar with NYC from the 70s through the mid 90s. It was as bad then as SF is now. Giuliani completely transformed Manhattan and made the streets and parks usable again, and they stayed that way for a while. It's going downhill fast, though. Penn Station and Port Authority are turning into shooting galleries again, there are encampments growing, bodily waste on the sidewalks, and plenty of harassment. Give it another few years of hands-off policies and it'll be as bad as the west coast cities.
qes 7y ago
Yeah, because it gets cold in the winter in NY. Simple as that. You can't support the year round homeless population like the west coast.
joenot443 7y ago
I feel the same way about Toronto. Over triple the population of SF or Seattle, yet the problems I see described in this article are almost unthinkable here.
hbosch 7y ago
I agree, after living in NYC my jaw did drop when I got to Seattle. I found Seattle to be incredibly clean, open, and welcoming – far less dingy and polluted than where I lived in Manhattan. Green everywhere. Never felt unsafe or taken advantage of. Eventually I moved from NYC to Seattle, and I don't think I'd ever move back. Since I've been here, over the past 8-ish years, the homeless problem hasn't (in my opinion) become much more of a problem so much as it's become much more of a political issue. It's hard for me to tell if drug use and violence are actually up, or if reporting is up. When I visited in 2011, we were looking at an apartment that was listed on 1st Ave in Pioneer Square. We were charmed by the tree-lined street and the quaint shops leading from the Fairmont downtown toward Pioneer Square, but when we turned toward Occidental Sq (maybe 8 or 9am) we were suddenly in a mass of transient/homeless peoples waking up on the cobblestone. There were dozens of people, rolling up sleeping backs, loading backpacks, congregating. This was before the food trucks and the Weyerhauser building and the tied down tables and chairs and open-air ping pong tables displaced them, and even though it was jarring it also felt humane in a weird way that there was a place, out of the way, where they could go and be undisturbed. Pioneer Square also, of course, is where most of the homeless help centers are located (clinics, food banks, shelters). But as the city has grown denser and real estate developers continue to squeeze every ounce of oxygen out of the city, these people have nowhere to go so they are forced out of the margins and into everyone else's line of sight and that's really the problem. In NYC it's not such a big deal, because NYC is already acclimated to this density that the homeless problem there is simply ignored. The indifference I witnessed toward the homeless in NYC was crazy to me when I moved there at first from the 'burbs... people walking around a guy masturbating on the sidewalk as they hopped out of their cabs, moaning about the delays in the subway when a homeless person was killed in a subway tunnel or soiled a car in the middle of summer. If only all of the U.S. cities could just "look past" these people instead of focusing so much on what a drag it is to see someone begging for change on my way to have bottomless mimosas.

by CPLX 7y ago

chrisrogers 7y ago

Or Tokyo, for that matter. That's about as urban as you can get on Earth, with none of the 'grittiness' that so many West coast city-dwellers seem to think is inherent to cities. And in a comparable democracy, no less.

shados 7y ago
This is a pretty important point. Everything wrong with big American cities is normalized. If you don't like it, you're told to just go to the suburb. But it's all solvable and are usually consequences of policies as well as cultural problems. Many cities in the world just don't have these problems.
- rdtwo 7y ago
  Suburbs are how America does segregation and separate but equal legally. We have “cities” next to major urban centers that can keep all their taxes dollars locally and shift their problems to urban centers. If you live in a nice neighborhood in the city of Seattle a good chunk of your money goes to fund poor parts of town and the homeless industry. Half a mile away the neighboring town keeps all its money for the local school and sends its homeless people to Seattle.

fzeroracer 7y ago

That's just objectively wrong. NYC has a higher homeless population both in sheer volume and per 100,000 people. So what is NYC doing to stop the growth of their homeless population beyond making it out of sight and out of mind?

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
thatswrong0 7y ago
If their homeless population is far less dangerous and destructive to the lives of all the other citizens that live there, then they're doing _something_ right, even if their homeless population is somewhat bigger per capita.
CPLX 7y ago
NYC has a right to shelter law. They also have enforcement of basic public space issues like camping and being in parks overnight, or petty street crime. Those two things together are a good starting point for discussion.

caymanjim 7y ago

I suspect you aren't familiar with NYC from the 70s through the mid 90s. It was as bad then as SF is now. Giuliani completely transformed Manhattan and made the streets and parks usable again, and they stayed that way for a while. It's going downhill fast, though. Penn Station and Port Authority are turning into shooting galleries again, there are encampments growing, bodily waste on the sidewalks, and plenty of harassment. Give it another few years of hands-off policies and it'll be as bad as the west coast cities.

qes 7y ago

Yeah, because it gets cold in the winter in NY. Simple as that. You can't support the year round homeless population like the west coast.

joenot443 7y ago

I feel the same way about Toronto. Over triple the population of SF or Seattle, yet the problems I see described in this article are almost unthinkable here.

hbosch 7y ago

I agree, after living in NYC my jaw did drop when I got to Seattle. I found Seattle to be incredibly clean, open, and welcoming – far less dingy and polluted than where I lived in Manhattan. Green everywhere. Never felt unsafe or taken advantage of. Eventually I moved from NYC to Seattle, and I don't think I'd ever move back. Since I've been here, over the past 8-ish years, the homeless problem hasn't (in my opinion) become much more of a problem so much as it's become much more of a political issue. It's hard for me to tell if drug use and violence are actually up, or if reporting is up. When I visited in 2011, we were looking at an apartment that was listed on 1st Ave in Pioneer Square. We were charmed by the tree-lined street and the quaint shops leading from the Fairmont downtown toward Pioneer Square, but when we turned toward Occidental Sq (maybe 8 or 9am) we were suddenly in a mass of transient/homeless peoples waking up on the cobblestone. There were dozens of people, rolling up sleeping backs, loading backpacks, congregating. This was before the food trucks and the Weyerhauser building and the tied down tables and chairs and open-air ping pong tables displaced them, and even though it was jarring it also felt humane in a weird way that there was a place, out of the way, where they could go and be undisturbed. Pioneer Square also, of course, is where most of the homeless help centers are located (clinics, food banks, shelters). But as the city has grown denser and real estate developers continue to squeeze every ounce of oxygen out of the city, these people have nowhere to go so they are forced out of the margins and into everyone else's line of sight and that's really the problem. In NYC it's not such a big deal, because NYC is already acclimated to this density that the homeless problem there is simply ignored. The indifference I witnessed toward the homeless in NYC was crazy to me when I moved there at first from the 'burbs... people walking around a guy masturbating on the sidewalk as they hopped out of their cabs, moaning about the delays in the subway when a homeless person was killed in a subway tunnel or soiled a car in the middle of summer. If only all of the U.S. cities could just "look past" these people instead of focusing so much on what a drag it is to see someone begging for change on my way to have bottomless mimosas.