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It comes from a few things: 1. Rent has become insanely expensive such that a lot of people end up no the streets. This is the cause of the tent cities popping

It comes from a few things: 1. Rent has become insanely expensive such that a lot of people end up no the streets. This is the cause of the tent cities popping up, and really are a small part of what people have a problem with. The "invisible" homeless. 2. We do not have any resources for people who are too mentally ill or too sick to be of any "use" to society. A lot of those people end up on the street, where they are vulnerable to manipulation to start using heroin. A lot of them have mental disabilities. No, we do not have mental hospitals, and the ones that do exist are full, and they are not hurrying to build more. 3. We have a massive heroin addiction epidemic. These are the people who are crawling all over the place trying to get their fix, mugging people in the fugue states between scraping enough money together to get their next fix. The "highly visible" homeless. So. Something like 0.17% of our population is homeless. That is like 600k people. Imagine what it will take get these people off the streets and reintegrated into society, if that is even possible. They need: 1. Shelter. 2. Food. 3. Medical professionals to help them come down from the high, and help them get on a better path to stop using drugs. 4. Security to prevent re-victimization. 5. Legal authority to detain them without their consent ( a lot of homeless people have schizophrenia and are extremely paranoid and do not trust anyone ). Imagine how much that will cost. The US government is extremely austere around funding this stuff, so it has been left up to the cities and states, which do not have the resources to tackle the problem. So that is really it. It's too expensive, and all the money is pooled into the top .1% of the population, and we don't tax them, and they are busy building rocket ships, so we don't have any money to fix the issue. Some people want the cops to arrest them but that is actually MORE expensive and MORE prone to failure, other ethical issues aside. ( of which there are many )

prottog 4y ago
> It's too expensive, and all the money is pooled into the top .1% of the population, and we don't tax them, and they are busy building rocket ships, so we don't have any money to fix the issue. There may be more impactful things for the likes of Bezos to invest in than rocketships, but the idea that more wealth redistribution via taxation here would help things needs evidence to back it up. In 2021, when the stock market was at its peak and therefore the net worths of billionaires were the most inflated (for which you can blame government policy, anyway), the wealth of all billionaires in the US were around $4T. Even if you confiscated it all and were magically able to sell all of their interests in various holdings without affecting the price, it would pay for two, maybe three years of Social Security and Medicare; forget the rest of the federal government, let alone all the other levels of government. It's been pointed out elsewhere that San Francisco already spends over a billion dollars a year on programs related to homelessness, or around $57k per homeless person. To put it in context, if the whole country spent the same amount on welfare per capita, it would be $19T, which is 3x the current federal budget and over 80% of the GDP. It's a mind-boggling amount of money which would be completely untenable to sustain over time. You would have to rely on a lot of faith to think that lack of money is what is preventing these problems from being fixed.

prottog 4y ago

> It's too expensive, and all the money is pooled into the top .1% of the population, and we don't tax them, and they are busy building rocket ships, so we don't have any money to fix the issue. There may be more impactful things for the likes of Bezos to invest in than rocketships, but the idea that more wealth redistribution via taxation here would help things needs evidence to back it up. In 2021, when the stock market was at its peak and therefore the net worths of billionaires were the most inflated (for which you can blame government policy, anyway), the wealth of all billionaires in the US were around $4T. Even if you confiscated it all and were magically able to sell all of their interests in various holdings without affecting the price, it would pay for two, maybe three years of Social Security and Medicare; forget the rest of the federal government, let alone all the other levels of government. It's been pointed out elsewhere that San Francisco already spends over a billion dollars a year on programs related to homelessness, or around $57k per homeless person. To put it in context, if the whole country spent the same amount on welfare per capita, it would be $19T, which is 3x the current federal budget and over 80% of the GDP. It's a mind-boggling amount of money which would be completely untenable to sustain over time. You would have to rely on a lot of faith to think that lack of money is what is preventing these problems from being fixed.