6 ms·

Homeless Numbers Rise in U.S. Cities

17 points by linusg789 3y ago

linusg789 3y ago
https://ghostarchive.org/archive/xktUc https://ghostarchive.org/archive/xktUc
fredabila 3y ago
Would you care to cover a story about an AI powered social media app
lazypenguin 3y ago
The past 6-7 years or so I personally noticed a steep increase in homelessness in most metropolitan areas I visited and then slowly started to see an increase in homelessness in the surrounding areas. What was never clear to me was whether there was a genuine increase in homelessness or a change in policy/culture surrounding the "management" of homelessness. This article describes a mixed picture of homelessness (i.e. increases in some areas and decreases in other areas) which suggests to me that we have a policy problem that has a risk to create a feedback loop. It feels to me that homelessness is more "tolerated" these days. If someone is sleeping in front of the metro station entrance we have a "leave them be" kind of attitude. I wonder if this correlates to a reduction in homelessness management systems like described in the article "less beds". If we're okay with homeless people camping on our trails and in our parks maybe there is less incentive to spend money on creating other places for them to go. Then with less places to go we have more homeless people so then we have less incentive to create places for them to go. Makes me speculate if tolerance is part of the problem here. If culturally we found homelessness intolerable then we would be more motivated to solve it.
- kavavita 3y ago
  You are correct that there was a legal change in what cities could do to punish homeless folks: https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/23748522/tent-encampments-martin-boise-homelessness-housing https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/23748522/tent-encampments-m... I don’t think homelessness should be tolerated. That said, homeless people definitely deserve our tolerance and compassion.
- joeythedolphin 3y ago
  Homeless people are majority men, and we are a long way to having social discussion about helping men. At least in the US, the predominant view is that homeless men on the streets is a good thing, a sort of superiority/inferiority complex in our society. Not good like "we like this social problem" but good like "they deserve it" and the solution is to eliminate it from your eyes and city, a sort of homeless genocide of inferior men who do not deserve support. My brother was homeless and he'd send me pictures of all the spikes that cities built just to prevent homeless people from resting (US-biased)
  - corinroyal 3y ago
    > At least in the US, the predominant view is that homeless men on the streets is a good thing I've been homeless a lot and literally never heard this view until now. Asserted and dismissed without evidence. > we are a long way to having social discussion about helping men. Are we? Which men? With which problems? I hear this argument all the time from anti-feminists. MRM propagandists often make an argument like, "Almost all the domestic violence shelters are for women. You feminists only care about women." The response from feminists is generally, "Feel free to get to work." But of course, MRM people don't care about men's suffering under sexism, they care about bashing feminists, so they don't do any organizing. This dynamic would be funnier if it weren't so sad. So what are you personally doing to address the suffering of men under sexism? I mean, aside from alienating your natural allies?
    - pcthrowaway 3y ago
      > I hear this argument all the time from anti-feminists. MRM propagandists often make an argument like, "Almost all the domestic violence shelters are for women. You feminists only care about women." The response from feminists is generally, "Feel free to get to work." But of course, MRM people don't care about men's suffering under sexism, they care about bashing feminists, so they don't do any organizing. This dynamic would be funnier if it weren't so sad. Painting the above poster with an anti-feminist brush is uncharitable. Disposable male theory isn't incompatible with a feminist perspective. I realize it's a mens rights talking point, but even a broken clock is right twice a day. My take: Patriarchy reinforces male supremacy which puts men in positions of power, and prioritizes the needs of men at a societal level; but men without power (as well as non-white, non-straight, non-"traditionally masculine" men) are also victims of patriarchy, and face challenges specific to men. I'd point you to the /r/menslib subreddit which was a great, anti-men's rights, intersectional, and feminist-allied discussion forum for men's issues, but they've unfortunately gone dark. For a brief introduction, there's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men%27s_liberation_movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men%27s_liberation_movement at least edit: Here's a fascinating video essay deconstructing the toxic masculinity of Andrew Tate, and how patriarchy affects men: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6_TOFy3k6k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6_TOFy3k6k I found it on /r/breadtube, but it's definitely the type of fare common on /r/menslib
- Hermitian909 3y ago
  I volunteer with the homeless in the Bay Area and am tapped into the "scene" as it were and so can speak to this. Absolute numbers of homelessness are on the rise, in the Bay Area there was a dramatic uptick in COVID. This is in part due to rising housing costs and because homelessness is a "cumulative" problem. The most common outcomes for homeless people are either get it together after 2-4 years or become so damaged they're never able to re-enter society. We've been accumulating at an ever increasing rate since the 90s. Visibility is also due to "management" side as you called it. IMO the driving force is the Supreme Court decision Martin v. Boise which forbids criminalizing homelessness. Previously a lot homeless were hidden out of necessity, being visible meant that police would confiscate your belongings and either jail you or move you forcefully. It's now quite easy to get restraining orders against cities who try to do this and people are doing it. For an example of how this can go see this article[0] on a Sausalito homeless encampment. The city spent north of $2 million trying and failing to disperse a homeless encampment. > If culturally we found homelessness intolerable then we would be more motivated to solve it. Plenty of people are deeply intolerant of the homeless, but the reaction is usually to hurt not help. Homeless people I know are regularly brutalized by the police and even by ordinary citizens. The blocker here is that a large number of Americans don't believe that the state has a role in providing the necessities for life. This means its hard to fund programs and even if you do there's no institutional expertise to run them with any competency. IMO we're decades away from a solution. [0] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/sausalito-homeless-encampment-17531723.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/sausalito-homele...
- corinroyal 3y ago
  I came to HN for the tech discussion but stay to watch the train wreck whenever tech workers try their hand at humanities. Sure, maybe if we were even more cruel to one of societies most hated groups, we could make them disappear from view. Perhaps we should just move fast and disrupt homelessness with a solution that removes their suffering and provides a real benefit to normal, respectable people. Let's turn the homeless into into protein bars and hand them out at the Google HQ commissary. Kidding aside, don't speculate--educate yourself. Then you would at least recognize when you say ridiculous and cruel things about people you don't like, don't know, and never bothered to understand.
  - lazypenguin 3y ago
    What are you going on about? Please get off your high horse. Your disparaging comments have contributing nothing to the conversation except to virtue signal your alleged moral superiority. Perhaps instead of going online and lecturing people you could take a moment to read more critically. To extend my original comment further, my commentary was in regards to the phenomenon of homelessness rather than an attack on homeless individuals. We tolerate homelessness in so much as that when we come across a homeless individual we might be give them some money, a warm meal, some clothes or other things. This doesn't solve their troubles, this only continues their state of being. If homelessness as a state of being was truly culturally intolerable then we would be forced to find solutions to the root problem rather than simply making platitudes towards those suffering from homelessness.
lockhouse 3y ago
[flagged]
codevark 3y ago
Homelessness has causes. Fix those. Most homeless people do NOT want to be homeless. Is it the wages lagging inflation? Fix it. Is it housing rates skyrocketing? Fix it. Is it our broken physical and mental health systems? Fix them. Fix all the homeless people. They will love you.
- joeythedolphin 3y ago
  Tyrannical abuse of the collective over the individual. The collective fails to provide avenues for the healthy development growth of adults, then prosecutes them for drug and other penalties (State of California vs John Doe). Creates a cycle of collective tyrannical abuse over an individual. It is a philosophical problem of toxic collectivism.
tuatoru 3y ago
Sounds like we're living through the early stages of Will McIntosh's Soft Apocalypse. >“Gradual” is the key here: Soft Apocalypse shows normal people clinging to the shreds of life as they knew it, while things slowly go from bad to worse. Many still hope that the economy will pick up and life will go back to what it used to be. Even though the streets are filled with homeless people and unemployment stands at 40%, others can still drive a car to work. [1]. 1. https://www.tor.com/2011/04/13/the-gradual-collapse-of-a-society-a-review-of-soft-apocalypse-by-will-mcintosh/ https://www.tor.com/2011/04/13/the-gradual-collapse-of-a-soc...
Mizoguchi 3y ago
Talk to any homeless person in a tent city in the US and they will confirm most if not all of them are heavy drug abusers. To solve the homelessness problem we first need to help these folks recover their health. A drug addict with a house will still be a drug addict, the only difference is we won't see their struggle on the streets. Seriously, if you have ever dealt with addiction you know when you are sick you can't even do the dishes or wash yourself, so how are these guys, just by getting a home, going to manage to get sober, find a job, pay the bills and eventually be able to support themselves and move out so that the next person in need can use the place? Unfortunately the answer is very unpopular and controversial. A drug addict will never voluntarily quit drugs and check themselves into rehab then follow a long, difficult treatment to get sober. Addiction is an awful, depressing, humiliating and painful disease with momentary lapses of reason where many times you just want to put it all to rest with an overdose. The most frustrating part is the resources are there, we can build SoTA facilities and run the programs and treatment plans these guys need, even customize them if necessary. But again, we will somehow need to bring them in, most likely by force, and that's the part many in this country can't even consider for debate.
- joeythedolphin 3y ago
  A great book on this is a little known paperback classic, "Love and Addiction" by Dr. Stanton Peele. It is about love, but there is a haunting chapter about society and social drifts. Highly, highly recommended to understand the societal problem of addiction and how it pulls individuals in like a fast moving expanding current. Also force is not going to work -- if a dog is abused and is afraid it will not respond well to being caged. Universal basic income, job opportunities, family and community relationship potential, hope, positive cultural surroundings, healthy food and water, the ability to exercise, a societal safety net, a feeling of camaraderie over competition, the ability to express oneself and develop hobbies, and to feel secure in the parent city, state and nation. Essentially everything the USA will not talk about or try to fix. USA is a warzone of violence of survival for the majority of people. Drugs are society's recommended course of action when the society has broken down.
- polski-g 3y ago
  I think cities should look into Ozempic as a treatment option for drug addiction. Preliminary reports shows that it's mainly a willpower drug, not just a weight loss drug.
2388473423 3y ago
[flagged]
nytesky 3y ago
There are large swaths of rust belt cities with vacant housing. What about a National program to refurb that housing and rehouse the homeless Basically, turn struggling cities into the business of rehabilitation — federal investment into local housing, rent paying tenants, medicine, treatment, etc. Trying to build affordable housing in places like San Francisco doesn’t make sense. https://www.foxbusiness.com/features/which-city-has-most-vacant-homes https://www.foxbusiness.com/features/which-city-has-most-vac...
- seanmcdirmid 3y ago
  The homeless tend to gather in richer cities with economic opportunities for those just struggling or just lots of social programs for those who are completely lost. They aren't going to poor places where housing is cheap because they can't make it there. There is a youtuber that did a drive through the deep south recently (https://www.youtube.com/@NickJohnson https://www.youtube.com/@NickJohnson). Poor places in Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana. Housing isn't a problem in these places (well, for some definition of housing), but survival is still hard. You can't just move to places where housing is available and cheap, they are looking for more than that.
  - corinroyal 3y ago
    Homeless people tend to be homeless where the are from. They do not tend to move to places where being homeless is easier. If they could move, to somewhere better, they wouldn't be homeless.
    - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
      They could move to places where property is cheaper, at least the functional ones could (non functional would still be homeless), but it wouldn’t help much given the lack of economic opportunities and social help.
- giraffe_lady 3y ago
  Homeless people also have families and friends and community ties. They are as unwilling to break those bonds as you would be. Possibly more because often their survival literally depends on them.
pfannkuchen 3y ago
This is a fundamental problem with capitalism for which various band aids have been tried but no real solution has been found IMO. Capitalism gives stuff according to one’s production, where one’s production is judged in a distributed way by others in the society (subject to various flaws and exploits, of course). The question is - what do we do with the people whose production (again, as judged by others in society, not in any absolute sense) does not cross the threshold to get enough stuff to live? We need to tack on some extra subsystem which generally has not integrated well with capitalism in terms of scalability, distribution of judgement, etc. We should be looking for a decentralized fix of some sort, ideally, in the way that capitalism itself is decentralized. Any ideas?
- tetris11 3y ago
  Just provide a cheap alternative. It doesn't have to be decentralised, it could even come from the government. Mass produced self-contained pre-fab storage container style houses. Bed, shower, toilet, window, stove. The uglier, the better. You don't even need to sell them cheap, just cheap enough for enough millenials to be able to buy one in two years. Flood the market, and deregulate where they can be dropped. There'll be a mass exodus of people fleeing from tight landlords to these beauties, and rents and housing prices would drop. I'm waiting for the 3D printing revolution to take care of this one.
- giraffe_lady 3y ago
  Poverty isn't an unsolved problem of capitalism, it's one of its core functional mechanics and it's not clear that or how it would work without it. Most people are not willing to work in the ways and amounts that are necessary to generate surplus value for asset owners. Left to their own people would work enough to meet the needs of themselves and their communities and stop. So we don't leave them alone. We create a dangerous and criminalized situation you can fall into to provide "incentive" to create excess labor. Capitalism can't solve this problem because this isn't a problem from the point of view of capital. From capital's perspective unrest and violence is a problem, and that is what police are for.
  - effingwewt 3y ago

17 points by linusg789 3y ago

linusg789 3y ago

https://ghostarchive.org/archive/xktUc https://ghostarchive.org/archive/xktUc

fredabila 3y ago

Would you care to cover a story about an AI powered social media app

lazypenguin 3y ago

The past 6-7 years or so I personally noticed a steep increase in homelessness in most metropolitan areas I visited and then slowly started to see an increase in homelessness in the surrounding areas. What was never clear to me was whether there was a genuine increase in homelessness or a change in policy/culture surrounding the "management" of homelessness. This article describes a mixed picture of homelessness (i.e. increases in some areas and decreases in other areas) which suggests to me that we have a policy problem that has a risk to create a feedback loop. It feels to me that homelessness is more "tolerated" these days. If someone is sleeping in front of the metro station entrance we have a "leave them be" kind of attitude. I wonder if this correlates to a reduction in homelessness management systems like described in the article "less beds". If we're okay with homeless people camping on our trails and in our parks maybe there is less incentive to spend money on creating other places for them to go. Then with less places to go we have more homeless people so then we have less incentive to create places for them to go. Makes me speculate if tolerance is part of the problem here. If culturally we found homelessness intolerable then we would be more motivated to solve it.

kavavita 3y ago
You are correct that there was a legal change in what cities could do to punish homeless folks: https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/23748522/tent-encampments-martin-boise-homelessness-housing https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/23748522/tent-encampments-m... I don’t think homelessness should be tolerated. That said, homeless people definitely deserve our tolerance and compassion.
joeythedolphin 3y ago
Homeless people are majority men, and we are a long way to having social discussion about helping men. At least in the US, the predominant view is that homeless men on the streets is a good thing, a sort of superiority/inferiority complex in our society. Not good like "we like this social problem" but good like "they deserve it" and the solution is to eliminate it from your eyes and city, a sort of homeless genocide of inferior men who do not deserve support. My brother was homeless and he'd send me pictures of all the spikes that cities built just to prevent homeless people from resting (US-biased)
- corinroyal 3y ago
  > At least in the US, the predominant view is that homeless men on the streets is a good thing I've been homeless a lot and literally never heard this view until now. Asserted and dismissed without evidence. > we are a long way to having social discussion about helping men. Are we? Which men? With which problems? I hear this argument all the time from anti-feminists. MRM propagandists often make an argument like, "Almost all the domestic violence shelters are for women. You feminists only care about women." The response from feminists is generally, "Feel free to get to work." But of course, MRM people don't care about men's suffering under sexism, they care about bashing feminists, so they don't do any organizing. This dynamic would be funnier if it weren't so sad. So what are you personally doing to address the suffering of men under sexism? I mean, aside from alienating your natural allies?
  - pcthrowaway 3y ago
    > I hear this argument all the time from anti-feminists. MRM propagandists often make an argument like, "Almost all the domestic violence shelters are for women. You feminists only care about women." The response from feminists is generally, "Feel free to get to work." But of course, MRM people don't care about men's suffering under sexism, they care about bashing feminists, so they don't do any organizing. This dynamic would be funnier if it weren't so sad. Painting the above poster with an anti-feminist brush is uncharitable. Disposable male theory isn't incompatible with a feminist perspective. I realize it's a mens rights talking point, but even a broken clock is right twice a day. My take: Patriarchy reinforces male supremacy which puts men in positions of power, and prioritizes the needs of men at a societal level; but men without power (as well as non-white, non-straight, non-"traditionally masculine" men) are also victims of patriarchy, and face challenges specific to men. I'd point you to the /r/menslib subreddit which was a great, anti-men's rights, intersectional, and feminist-allied discussion forum for men's issues, but they've unfortunately gone dark. For a brief introduction, there's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men%27s_liberation_movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men%27s_liberation_movement at least edit: Here's a fascinating video essay deconstructing the toxic masculinity of Andrew Tate, and how patriarchy affects men: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6_TOFy3k6k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6_TOFy3k6k I found it on /r/breadtube, but it's definitely the type of fare common on /r/menslib
Hermitian909 3y ago
I volunteer with the homeless in the Bay Area and am tapped into the "scene" as it were and so can speak to this. Absolute numbers of homelessness are on the rise, in the Bay Area there was a dramatic uptick in COVID. This is in part due to rising housing costs and because homelessness is a "cumulative" problem. The most common outcomes for homeless people are either get it together after 2-4 years or become so damaged they're never able to re-enter society. We've been accumulating at an ever increasing rate since the 90s. Visibility is also due to "management" side as you called it. IMO the driving force is the Supreme Court decision Martin v. Boise which forbids criminalizing homelessness. Previously a lot homeless were hidden out of necessity, being visible meant that police would confiscate your belongings and either jail you or move you forcefully. It's now quite easy to get restraining orders against cities who try to do this and people are doing it. For an example of how this can go see this article[0] on a Sausalito homeless encampment. The city spent north of $2 million trying and failing to disperse a homeless encampment. > If culturally we found homelessness intolerable then we would be more motivated to solve it. Plenty of people are deeply intolerant of the homeless, but the reaction is usually to hurt not help. Homeless people I know are regularly brutalized by the police and even by ordinary citizens. The blocker here is that a large number of Americans don't believe that the state has a role in providing the necessities for life. This means its hard to fund programs and even if you do there's no institutional expertise to run them with any competency. IMO we're decades away from a solution. [0] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/sausalito-homeless-encampment-17531723.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/sausalito-homele...
corinroyal 3y ago
I came to HN for the tech discussion but stay to watch the train wreck whenever tech workers try their hand at humanities. Sure, maybe if we were even more cruel to one of societies most hated groups, we could make them disappear from view. Perhaps we should just move fast and disrupt homelessness with a solution that removes their suffering and provides a real benefit to normal, respectable people. Let's turn the homeless into into protein bars and hand them out at the Google HQ commissary. Kidding aside, don't speculate--educate yourself. Then you would at least recognize when you say ridiculous and cruel things about people you don't like, don't know, and never bothered to understand.
- lazypenguin 3y ago
  What are you going on about? Please get off your high horse. Your disparaging comments have contributing nothing to the conversation except to virtue signal your alleged moral superiority. Perhaps instead of going online and lecturing people you could take a moment to read more critically. To extend my original comment further, my commentary was in regards to the phenomenon of homelessness rather than an attack on homeless individuals. We tolerate homelessness in so much as that when we come across a homeless individual we might be give them some money, a warm meal, some clothes or other things. This doesn't solve their troubles, this only continues their state of being. If homelessness as a state of being was truly culturally intolerable then we would be forced to find solutions to the root problem rather than simply making platitudes towards those suffering from homelessness.

lockhouse 3y ago

[flagged]

codevark 3y ago

Homelessness has causes. Fix those. Most homeless people do NOT want to be homeless. Is it the wages lagging inflation? Fix it. Is it housing rates skyrocketing? Fix it. Is it our broken physical and mental health systems? Fix them. Fix all the homeless people. They will love you.

joeythedolphin 3y ago
Tyrannical abuse of the collective over the individual. The collective fails to provide avenues for the healthy development growth of adults, then prosecutes them for drug and other penalties (State of California vs John Doe). Creates a cycle of collective tyrannical abuse over an individual. It is a philosophical problem of toxic collectivism.

tuatoru 3y ago

Sounds like we're living through the early stages of Will McIntosh's Soft Apocalypse. >“Gradual” is the key here: Soft Apocalypse shows normal people clinging to the shreds of life as they knew it, while things slowly go from bad to worse. Many still hope that the economy will pick up and life will go back to what it used to be. Even though the streets are filled with homeless people and unemployment stands at 40%, others can still drive a car to work. [1]. 1. https://www.tor.com/2011/04/13/the-gradual-collapse-of-a-society-a-review-of-soft-apocalypse-by-will-mcintosh/ https://www.tor.com/2011/04/13/the-gradual-collapse-of-a-soc...

Mizoguchi 3y ago

Talk to any homeless person in a tent city in the US and they will confirm most if not all of them are heavy drug abusers. To solve the homelessness problem we first need to help these folks recover their health. A drug addict with a house will still be a drug addict, the only difference is we won't see their struggle on the streets. Seriously, if you have ever dealt with addiction you know when you are sick you can't even do the dishes or wash yourself, so how are these guys, just by getting a home, going to manage to get sober, find a job, pay the bills and eventually be able to support themselves and move out so that the next person in need can use the place? Unfortunately the answer is very unpopular and controversial. A drug addict will never voluntarily quit drugs and check themselves into rehab then follow a long, difficult treatment to get sober. Addiction is an awful, depressing, humiliating and painful disease with momentary lapses of reason where many times you just want to put it all to rest with an overdose. The most frustrating part is the resources are there, we can build SoTA facilities and run the programs and treatment plans these guys need, even customize them if necessary. But again, we will somehow need to bring them in, most likely by force, and that's the part many in this country can't even consider for debate.

joeythedolphin 3y ago
A great book on this is a little known paperback classic, "Love and Addiction" by Dr. Stanton Peele. It is about love, but there is a haunting chapter about society and social drifts. Highly, highly recommended to understand the societal problem of addiction and how it pulls individuals in like a fast moving expanding current. Also force is not going to work -- if a dog is abused and is afraid it will not respond well to being caged. Universal basic income, job opportunities, family and community relationship potential, hope, positive cultural surroundings, healthy food and water, the ability to exercise, a societal safety net, a feeling of camaraderie over competition, the ability to express oneself and develop hobbies, and to feel secure in the parent city, state and nation. Essentially everything the USA will not talk about or try to fix. USA is a warzone of violence of survival for the majority of people. Drugs are society's recommended course of action when the society has broken down.
polski-g 3y ago
I think cities should look into Ozempic as a treatment option for drug addiction. Preliminary reports shows that it's mainly a willpower drug, not just a weight loss drug.

2388473423 3y ago

[flagged]

nytesky 3y ago

There are large swaths of rust belt cities with vacant housing. What about a National program to refurb that housing and rehouse the homeless Basically, turn struggling cities into the business of rehabilitation — federal investment into local housing, rent paying tenants, medicine, treatment, etc. Trying to build affordable housing in places like San Francisco doesn’t make sense. https://www.foxbusiness.com/features/which-city-has-most-vacant-homes https://www.foxbusiness.com/features/which-city-has-most-vac...

seanmcdirmid 3y ago
The homeless tend to gather in richer cities with economic opportunities for those just struggling or just lots of social programs for those who are completely lost. They aren't going to poor places where housing is cheap because they can't make it there. There is a youtuber that did a drive through the deep south recently (https://www.youtube.com/@NickJohnson https://www.youtube.com/@NickJohnson). Poor places in Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana. Housing isn't a problem in these places (well, for some definition of housing), but survival is still hard. You can't just move to places where housing is available and cheap, they are looking for more than that.
- corinroyal 3y ago
  Homeless people tend to be homeless where the are from. They do not tend to move to places where being homeless is easier. If they could move, to somewhere better, they wouldn't be homeless.
  - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
    They could move to places where property is cheaper, at least the functional ones could (non functional would still be homeless), but it wouldn’t help much given the lack of economic opportunities and social help.
giraffe_lady 3y ago
Homeless people also have families and friends and community ties. They are as unwilling to break those bonds as you would be. Possibly more because often their survival literally depends on them.

pfannkuchen 3y ago

This is a fundamental problem with capitalism for which various band aids have been tried but no real solution has been found IMO. Capitalism gives stuff according to one’s production, where one’s production is judged in a distributed way by others in the society (subject to various flaws and exploits, of course). The question is - what do we do with the people whose production (again, as judged by others in society, not in any absolute sense) does not cross the threshold to get enough stuff to live? We need to tack on some extra subsystem which generally has not integrated well with capitalism in terms of scalability, distribution of judgement, etc. We should be looking for a decentralized fix of some sort, ideally, in the way that capitalism itself is decentralized. Any ideas?

tetris11 3y ago
Just provide a cheap alternative. It doesn't have to be decentralised, it could even come from the government. Mass produced self-contained pre-fab storage container style houses. Bed, shower, toilet, window, stove. The uglier, the better. You don't even need to sell them cheap, just cheap enough for enough millenials to be able to buy one in two years. Flood the market, and deregulate where they can be dropped. There'll be a mass exodus of people fleeing from tight landlords to these beauties, and rents and housing prices would drop. I'm waiting for the 3D printing revolution to take care of this one.
giraffe_lady 3y ago
Poverty isn't an unsolved problem of capitalism, it's one of its core functional mechanics and it's not clear that or how it would work without it. Most people are not willing to work in the ways and amounts that are necessary to generate surplus value for asset owners. Left to their own people would work enough to meet the needs of themselves and their communities and stop. So we don't leave them alone. We create a dangerous and criminalized situation you can fall into to provide "incentive" to create excess labor. Capitalism can't solve this problem because this isn't a problem from the point of view of capital. From capital's perspective unrest and violence is a problem, and that is what police are for.
- effingwewt 3y ago