6 ms·

Its sad to imagine that people who turned to live in RVs probably aren't your average imagined homeless guy, who can't hold up any kind of job, but rather lower

by sva_ 4y ago

Its sad to imagine that people who turned to live in RVs probably aren't your average imagined homeless guy, who can't hold up any kind of job, but rather lower to middle class people who work a job but can't afford to live in an apartment in the area anymore.

seattle_spring 4y ago
- Grimburger 4y ago
  > I 100% support people doing everything in their power to push these people out. Where do you advocate for them to go?
  - hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
    Soylent Green, apparently. Edit: I just realized this after writing this comment, but Soylent Green is supposed to take place in 2022. Life imitating art I suppose...
  - Fatnino 4y ago
    Build a new city somewhere just for homeless people to sleep on the sidewalks in. Maybe name it New Detroit
    - collegeburner 4y ago
      lol i've heard a few ppl pitching a "city for the homeless". build a government subsidized city in the most cheap ass land we can find in the country. away from everything else. free housing free food, nothing fancy. have them do jobs processing food or building weapons or whatever else the government needs. there's cops everywhere, you step out of line there's somebody there to taze your ass. imports and exports is controlled so they can't relapse on drugs. oh wait, we got something like that... prison. it does a shit job at fixing homeless ppl.
      - mike_d 4y ago
        > it does a shit job at fixing homeless ppl. A large portion of that population have mental health issues that modern medicine just doesn't know how to fix. What we are doing is refusing to address the needs of the 99% because 1% have an unsolvable problem.
    - t-3 4y ago
      We don't have homeless people sleeping and shitting on sidewalks in Detroit. They sleep in 'bandos. See? More houses - less visible homeless (I'm sure the cold weather helps a bit too).
  - collegeburner 4y ago
    i really don't give a shit. like i know that's not a nice thing to say and it's not what i'm supposed to say but it's how i feel by this point. cities have been so destroyed and filled with literal shit and crime gone up and my friends get assaulted that they used up all their sympathy they got from us. to start force junkies into rehab and go back to institutionalizing ppl who are too crazy to survive. i remember when i was younger ppl would carry food in their cars and hand it out to homeless with hungry signs. some of them would take it and be grateful and that was good. some of them would only want money (obv what that would be for) and so we move on. but it was good we could hand out some food. now most ppl i know aren't comfortable doing that any more. bc a bunch of them have been attacked when they wouldn't give cash. most of them not bad, but having a guy trying to pull open the door or grabbing the car is scary for most of us and really fucking scary for somebody like a small woman. so it's not that people don't still have sympathy for the honest guy down on his luck but there's too many of the bad ones now. the problem is look at low income housing, people will tell you there's not enough. "oh just build more". but low income housing these days is really fucking bad. i have friends who are landlords and tried running low income housing and its awful how bad it gets torn up, how hard it is to get people to pay with rent and eviction moritoriums. and it only gets worse. it cost more for them to run low income housing than blue-collar housing that's still not fancy but has better tenants. there's so much damage and crime around the low-income. remember austin bought that hotel for a homeless shelter and it got trashed to shit in like 2 weeks? same kinda problem. so it ain't a simple problem to fix. and the moritoriums and rent control that cities keep adding only makes more people leave the low income housing business. but all that aside me and a whole bunch of other people are just done. and if the homeless don't leave other people will, look at these cities rn. and once all the rich people are gone and all the middle class people are gone then they're really gonna be in trouble. tbh our problem is we can't punish people who got nothing so laws don't mean nothing to them. like what do u even do to a person shitting in a downtown street? arrest them? put them where? now u spend money keeping them in jail and they will get out back on the street. and relapse rates out of rehab are shit specially since a lot of those people end up there from a court order so that ain't any kind of solution here.
    - poulsbohemian 4y ago
      >i really don't give a shit. ^ This right here is the fundamental problem in American politics. Because what you are missing is that society is like a house. If you don't maintain your house, eventually the roof caves in. There are people who believe that they can starve government - cut taxes back to nothing, better if we get rid of all the bureaucrats, better if Congress / state legislatures are stuck not able to do anything, who cares if I vote. That's the equivalent of letting the house fall down around you. Plenty of voters will say they don't care - they think they can somehow protect themselves. But they don't get that sooner or later, chaos reigns and it comes for all of us. Homelessness and depravity like we see in Seattle isn't the root disease - it's a symptom of the disease.
  - hotpotamus 4y ago
    I think the answer usually involves deporting them to Madagascar before settling on a more final solution.
    - sva_ 4y ago
      We need a new Australia
- wyclif 4y ago
  - xpe 4y ago
    > Seattle has turned into a shithole akin to San Francisco and other west coast cities with Democrat mayors and single-party strangleholds. Let's extend this (sneakily) implied causal model to all geographic areas with an "X" party mayor (or county commissioner or sheriff or whatever) and single-party strangleholds. Let's look at rural areas, say, in the southern states. Let's talk about pervasive poverty, lack of education, and drug abuse there. We can play the blame game. How about this: let's talk about potential solutions and their associated costs? P.S. I don't dispute that downtown SF is shocking, disgusting, and _more importantly_ tragic for the people living there. I care relatively little about the cosmetic aspect. I care tremendously about finding ways that every human being can reach their maximum potential, without impinging on the rights of other people. P.P.S. Yes, this stated moral philosophy is somewhat underspecified, but I'm trying to leave open a wide space for reasonable people to agree. We can and should debate the margins, but I think there is considerable consensus in terms of public opinion about what is just, ASSUMING that people share a common set of facts and all inform themselves on a particular situation and dynamic (by which I mean interconnected causes and effects).
- xracy 4y ago
  - mbrodersen 4y ago
    - xracy 4y ago
      Sure thing! NIMBY-ism is at it's worst, not when people don't want homeless people in their back yards, but when people actively work against public policy that would affect their back yard, and improve the lives of homeless people. Overdose Prevention Centers would absolutely be something I would allow in my backyard. I think that probably hits enough of your criteria to qualify as what you're accusing me of hypocrisy for. I would also welcome removing roads where I live in favor of public transit lines. I would also welcome people to put in low-income housing where I live.
  - dang 4y ago
    You can't post this sort of aggressive attack here, regardless of how bad another comment is or you feel it is. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting to HN, we'd appreciate it.
- sva_ 4y ago
  By saying those people are struggling, I didn't say I support what they're doing. I think it is a complicated issue and I don't claim to know what the solution is.
- dang 4y ago
  Your posts in this thread broke the site guidelines badly and perpetuated a hellish flamewar. Please don't do that again. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32302402 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32302402 also.
zmgsabst 4y ago
Yes — that’s a sad fantasy. But it’s just that: a fantasy, born from ignorance. These are mobile drug dens often inhabited by people with long criminal records who throw trash all over the area — not middle class people down on their luck.
wmil 4y ago
There are a number of ways that someone with a severe substance abuse or mental health problem can end up on the streets but still have an RV.
munificent 4y ago
I live in one of areas the article is talking about. I can literally see the eco blocks around Fremont Brewing from my house. It's complicated. You're right that many homeless people are just people down on their luck doing their best to get by. Many of them aren't causing anyone any problems. From what I understand, most of these homeless people get by doing things like couch surfing and aren't very visible. In this particular corner of the city, most of the people living in these RVs are not in great shape. Most are drug addicts, or mentally ill, or both. There is a halo of crime that surrounds these encampments. In the past couple of years, I've seen: * Multiple cars broken into. * A drive-by shooting of one of the RVs right by my house. * That same RV's owner almost certainly selling drugs from her RV for years. * A woman, completely topless, staggering in the middle of the street screaming obscenities at no one. * Many needles on the ground. * People urinating on our garage. * Someone taking a shit next to our garage. * My neighbor's car was broken into and the urn containing his father's ashes was stolen. When he found the guy who broke into it at a nearby encampment and tried to get it back, he was attacked with a knife. * Rumors of prostitution and hep-C outbreaks in one of the encampments. * A large man beating the shit out of a woman in broad daylight. * Multiple shootings in other RVs and nearby homeless shelters. * One guy, clearly suffering from schizophrenia, who sits on the sidewalk and screams at no one for hours and hours. * Someone climbed our fence and was shambling around our backyard until a neighbor showed up and scared them off. * Package theft, obviously. Constantly. * Many many screaming matches and other domestic disputes. * Someone sitting on portable toilet seat in the middle of the street, taking a shit in the middle of the day. * Piles of trash, human waste, buckets of piss, bags of shit, etc. Because when you don't have property, that also means you don't have trash pick-up or sewer services. * Someone throwing rocks at someone's car and at people in their backyard. * A woman walked up onto our porch and stole the lightbulb right out of our porch light. (I've heard they use incandescent bulbs to make some kind of drug paraphernalia?) * One guy runs what he calls the "homeless recording studio". He has a venue-sized PA system in his RV that he cranks up to full concert volume and plays the radio. Then he plays his drum kit on top of that. With the doors open, at all hours of the day and night. In fact, I literally just got back from walking out to see what a large police response was about after seeing several cop cars circling. I don't know the details, but an officer said someone in an RV was refusing to come out. I have a lot of sympathy for people suffering misfortune and I think almost all of these people mostly need help and support. I don't want them to be punished. But I don't want to keep dealing with the kind of stuff they are doing either. (You may be wondering why we don't call the cops about this. We do. If we're lucky, they come. When they do, it's hours later and too late to do anything about it.)

by sva_ 4y ago

seattle_spring 4y ago

Grimburger 4y ago
> I 100% support people doing everything in their power to push these people out. Where do you advocate for them to go?
- hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
  Soylent Green, apparently. Edit: I just realized this after writing this comment, but Soylent Green is supposed to take place in 2022. Life imitating art I suppose...
- Fatnino 4y ago
  Build a new city somewhere just for homeless people to sleep on the sidewalks in. Maybe name it New Detroit
  - collegeburner 4y ago
    lol i've heard a few ppl pitching a "city for the homeless". build a government subsidized city in the most cheap ass land we can find in the country. away from everything else. free housing free food, nothing fancy. have them do jobs processing food or building weapons or whatever else the government needs. there's cops everywhere, you step out of line there's somebody there to taze your ass. imports and exports is controlled so they can't relapse on drugs. oh wait, we got something like that... prison. it does a shit job at fixing homeless ppl.
    - mike_d 4y ago
      > it does a shit job at fixing homeless ppl. A large portion of that population have mental health issues that modern medicine just doesn't know how to fix. What we are doing is refusing to address the needs of the 99% because 1% have an unsolvable problem.
  - t-3 4y ago
    We don't have homeless people sleeping and shitting on sidewalks in Detroit. They sleep in 'bandos. See? More houses - less visible homeless (I'm sure the cold weather helps a bit too).
- collegeburner 4y ago
  i really don't give a shit. like i know that's not a nice thing to say and it's not what i'm supposed to say but it's how i feel by this point. cities have been so destroyed and filled with literal shit and crime gone up and my friends get assaulted that they used up all their sympathy they got from us. to start force junkies into rehab and go back to institutionalizing ppl who are too crazy to survive. i remember when i was younger ppl would carry food in their cars and hand it out to homeless with hungry signs. some of them would take it and be grateful and that was good. some of them would only want money (obv what that would be for) and so we move on. but it was good we could hand out some food. now most ppl i know aren't comfortable doing that any more. bc a bunch of them have been attacked when they wouldn't give cash. most of them not bad, but having a guy trying to pull open the door or grabbing the car is scary for most of us and really fucking scary for somebody like a small woman. so it's not that people don't still have sympathy for the honest guy down on his luck but there's too many of the bad ones now. the problem is look at low income housing, people will tell you there's not enough. "oh just build more". but low income housing these days is really fucking bad. i have friends who are landlords and tried running low income housing and its awful how bad it gets torn up, how hard it is to get people to pay with rent and eviction moritoriums. and it only gets worse. it cost more for them to run low income housing than blue-collar housing that's still not fancy but has better tenants. there's so much damage and crime around the low-income. remember austin bought that hotel for a homeless shelter and it got trashed to shit in like 2 weeks? same kinda problem. so it ain't a simple problem to fix. and the moritoriums and rent control that cities keep adding only makes more people leave the low income housing business. but all that aside me and a whole bunch of other people are just done. and if the homeless don't leave other people will, look at these cities rn. and once all the rich people are gone and all the middle class people are gone then they're really gonna be in trouble. tbh our problem is we can't punish people who got nothing so laws don't mean nothing to them. like what do u even do to a person shitting in a downtown street? arrest them? put them where? now u spend money keeping them in jail and they will get out back on the street. and relapse rates out of rehab are shit specially since a lot of those people end up there from a court order so that ain't any kind of solution here.
  - poulsbohemian 4y ago
    >i really don't give a shit. ^ This right here is the fundamental problem in American politics. Because what you are missing is that society is like a house. If you don't maintain your house, eventually the roof caves in. There are people who believe that they can starve government - cut taxes back to nothing, better if we get rid of all the bureaucrats, better if Congress / state legislatures are stuck not able to do anything, who cares if I vote. That's the equivalent of letting the house fall down around you. Plenty of voters will say they don't care - they think they can somehow protect themselves. But they don't get that sooner or later, chaos reigns and it comes for all of us. Homelessness and depravity like we see in Seattle isn't the root disease - it's a symptom of the disease.
- hotpotamus 4y ago
  I think the answer usually involves deporting them to Madagascar before settling on a more final solution.
  - sva_ 4y ago
    We need a new Australia
wyclif 4y ago
- xpe 4y ago
  > Seattle has turned into a shithole akin to San Francisco and other west coast cities with Democrat mayors and single-party strangleholds. Let's extend this (sneakily) implied causal model to all geographic areas with an "X" party mayor (or county commissioner or sheriff or whatever) and single-party strangleholds. Let's look at rural areas, say, in the southern states. Let's talk about pervasive poverty, lack of education, and drug abuse there. We can play the blame game. How about this: let's talk about potential solutions and their associated costs? P.S. I don't dispute that downtown SF is shocking, disgusting, and _more importantly_ tragic for the people living there. I care relatively little about the cosmetic aspect. I care tremendously about finding ways that every human being can reach their maximum potential, without impinging on the rights of other people. P.P.S. Yes, this stated moral philosophy is somewhat underspecified, but I'm trying to leave open a wide space for reasonable people to agree. We can and should debate the margins, but I think there is considerable consensus in terms of public opinion about what is just, ASSUMING that people share a common set of facts and all inform themselves on a particular situation and dynamic (by which I mean interconnected causes and effects).
xracy 4y ago
- mbrodersen 4y ago
  - xracy 4y ago
    Sure thing! NIMBY-ism is at it's worst, not when people don't want homeless people in their back yards, but when people actively work against public policy that would affect their back yard, and improve the lives of homeless people. Overdose Prevention Centers would absolutely be something I would allow in my backyard. I think that probably hits enough of your criteria to qualify as what you're accusing me of hypocrisy for. I would also welcome removing roads where I live in favor of public transit lines. I would also welcome people to put in low-income housing where I live.
- dang 4y ago
  You can't post this sort of aggressive attack here, regardless of how bad another comment is or you feel it is. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting to HN, we'd appreciate it.
sva_ 4y ago
By saying those people are struggling, I didn't say I support what they're doing. I think it is a complicated issue and I don't claim to know what the solution is.
dang 4y ago
Your posts in this thread broke the site guidelines badly and perpetuated a hellish flamewar. Please don't do that again. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32302402 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32302402 also.

zmgsabst 4y ago

Yes — that’s a sad fantasy. But it’s just that: a fantasy, born from ignorance. These are mobile drug dens often inhabited by people with long criminal records who throw trash all over the area — not middle class people down on their luck.

wmil 4y ago

There are a number of ways that someone with a severe substance abuse or mental health problem can end up on the streets but still have an RV.

munificent 4y ago

I live in one of areas the article is talking about. I can literally see the eco blocks around Fremont Brewing from my house. It's complicated. You're right that many homeless people are just people down on their luck doing their best to get by. Many of them aren't causing anyone any problems. From what I understand, most of these homeless people get by doing things like couch surfing and aren't very visible. In this particular corner of the city, most of the people living in these RVs are not in great shape. Most are drug addicts, or mentally ill, or both. There is a halo of crime that surrounds these encampments. In the past couple of years, I've seen: * Multiple cars broken into. * A drive-by shooting of one of the RVs right by my house. * That same RV's owner almost certainly selling drugs from her RV for years. * A woman, completely topless, staggering in the middle of the street screaming obscenities at no one. * Many needles on the ground. * People urinating on our garage. * Someone taking a shit next to our garage. * My neighbor's car was broken into and the urn containing his father's ashes was stolen. When he found the guy who broke into it at a nearby encampment and tried to get it back, he was attacked with a knife. * Rumors of prostitution and hep-C outbreaks in one of the encampments. * A large man beating the shit out of a woman in broad daylight. * Multiple shootings in other RVs and nearby homeless shelters. * One guy, clearly suffering from schizophrenia, who sits on the sidewalk and screams at no one for hours and hours. * Someone climbed our fence and was shambling around our backyard until a neighbor showed up and scared them off. * Package theft, obviously. Constantly. * Many many screaming matches and other domestic disputes. * Someone sitting on portable toilet seat in the middle of the street, taking a shit in the middle of the day. * Piles of trash, human waste, buckets of piss, bags of shit, etc. Because when you don't have property, that also means you don't have trash pick-up or sewer services. * Someone throwing rocks at someone's car and at people in their backyard. * A woman walked up onto our porch and stole the lightbulb right out of our porch light. (I've heard they use incandescent bulbs to make some kind of drug paraphernalia?) * One guy runs what he calls the "homeless recording studio". He has a venue-sized PA system in his RV that he cranks up to full concert volume and plays the radio. Then he plays his drum kit on top of that. With the doors open, at all hours of the day and night. In fact, I literally just got back from walking out to see what a large police response was about after seeing several cop cars circling. I don't know the details, but an officer said someone in an RV was refusing to come out. I have a lot of sympathy for people suffering misfortune and I think almost all of these people mostly need help and support. I don't want them to be punished. But I don't want to keep dealing with the kind of stuff they are doing either. (You may be wondering why we don't call the cops about this. We do. If we're lucky, they come. When they do, it's hours later and too late to do anything about it.)