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The death of tech idealism and rise of the homeless in Northern California
- Gimpei 11mo agoI don’t understand who commissions and who reads pieces like this. Here is a person with no expertise in housing policy, no expertise in homelessness, and no expertise in tech. The only thing he’s bringing to the table is an opinion, which, as the saying goes, are like assholes. Blame inequality and tech and libertarians all you want, but it won’t do a damn thing to solve the homelessness crisis, which is fundamentally a housing supply issue. But I suppose that doesn’t lend itself to the kind of uninformed moralizing that apparently brings such delight to the hearts of lithub readers.
- hooo 11mo agoAlso, why does it get upvotes so quickly?
- next_xibalba 11mo agoMy pet conspiracy theory is there is a fair amount of coordinated manipulation to get political posts on the HN front page. Fortunately, they are often quickly flagged to the abyss.
- GOD_Over_Djinn 11mo agoThat’s not a conspiracy theory. Anyone who doesn’t realize at this point that online discourse is heavily engineered and manipulated is an unthinking rube.
- next_xibalba 11mo agoI think many like to think HN is excepted.
- flag_fagger 11mo ago> Anyone who doesn’t realize at this point that online discourse is heavily engineered and manipulated is an unthinking rube. We call that “the voting populace”
- bigyabai 11mo ago> which is fundamentally a housing supply issue There are plenty of houses. The issue is demand; people are paying $4,000/month to live in a shithole because nobody knows what things are worth. Rich executives, H1Bs and digital nomads all flock there to displace working-class families that support the basic service economy. If you built 400 condos, 1600 more rich people move in. Supply is not the issue as far as I can see it.
- wahnfrieden 11mo agoMakes no sense. You can build until demand goes down. Demand is high in part because supply’s low. If there were more homes than rich people who wanted them, prices would be lower. But that doesn’t happen because of NIMBYism. I suspect you know all this but are mythologizing the situation as inescapable destiny. Maybe you’re used to seeing half measures. Be careful with that because half measures are sometimes used as justification to throw out the whole idea of progress instead of doing it properly (“well we tried that and things were still bad so now we have to do it my way”)
- grafmax 11mo agoLet’s say prices go down until houses are sold at cost. Even at cost people with little money won’t be able to buy houses.
- wahnfrieden 11mo agoLabor costs and a big part of materials cost is driven by landlords
- pandaman 11mo agoEven when rents go down to cost, they are still going to be greater than zero and labor and materials won't turn free. Cost won't ever be so low that one could afford housing while doing nothing productive and even less so while indulging in a drug habit.
- skavi 11mo agoWell it's a fairly entertaining read as someone with no current ambitions of solving any of these crises.
- etangent 11mo agoOkay, I disagree with a lot of views expressed in this piece, but still found it worth reading. It's well written. In particular, a lot of people here may agree with what the author wrote on housing.
- blindriver 11mo ago[flagged]
- khuey 11mo ago> No. They are 98% drug addicts or mentally ill people. That might be true, but there are plenty of drug addicts and mentally ill people in West Virginia (#1 in per capita overdose deaths and well above CA/NY/etc in suicides) and yet West Virginia has a pretty low rate of homelessness (roughly 1/5th CA's and 1/8th NY's) so that's clearly not the explanation.
- hunterpayne 11mo agoCounterpoint, WV and NY have snow several months a year.
- mlrtime 11mo agoWhat is your point? I mean I get it, people don't like sleeping in the snow, but what are you saying? Where are they going when it snows? You're saying CA cities wouldn't have this problem if it snowed but still gave out billions and allowed open drug usage?
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- ajuc 11mo ago> The left love to imagine that homeless people are just down-on-their-luck people who just missed out on a mortgage payment or a rent payment. > No. They are 98% drug addicts or mentally ill people. Drug addicts and mentally ill people can be down-on-their luck. That somebody is mentally ill or have an addiction does not mean that society should discard them. BTW addiction is very rarely the root cause of a wasted life. It's usually a failed coping strategy. > It's well known that the money that gets given out attract more homeless people. Homeless people are not infinite resource. You can solve homelessness on the country level, not only on the state level, and then it doesn't matter which state attracts more homeless people - because there's very few of them in the whole country. > It's insane that left-wing governments think that spending MORE money will solve the problem when in fact it is the cause of the problem. Poor countries in Eastern Europe does not have this problem. Maybe instead of pretending US is the whole world and if it can't deal with something - it's impossible to deal with it - try to listen to what people did elsewhere?
- nope1000 11mo agoDoes an article need to supply all this expertise or can it not just be descriptive?
- grafmax 11mo agoMore housing supply doesn’t house people who have no people to pay for those houses. It’s a wealth inequality issue we just don’t want to face.
- mlrtime 11mo agoWhy is wealth inequality an issue for people who have mental disorders, chronic drug issues or people who just don't want to live by societal standards?
- grafmax 11mo agoThe scale of homelessness isn’t explained by individual traits. Societal factors produce and reproduce it. It’s greatest in areas of high inequality for example - a fact not explained by individual traits. Take mental illness. A mentally ill person with more resources can get the care they need, but someone who is poor can soon find themselves on the street. And homelessness itself is quite stressful, and can produce or exacerbate mental illness as well as drive people to drug addiction. Homeless people are just like the rest of us, with their own basic human needs, and just like everybody else are trying to navigate their world as best they can.
- pandaman 11mo agoWhat do you mean by "The scale of homelessness isn’t explained by individual traits."? Are you saying it's not obvious that being high all day with no income will eventually lead to eviction from whatever housing you had?
- grafmax 11mo agoNo I am saying your just so story of why homeless people are homeless does not explain why places with more wealth inequality see more homelessness. Why would this be if your sounds-good-to-you explanation were the actual factor driving homelessness?
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- w0de0 11mo ago“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives one.” Knowledge is prerequisite for all else. Do pity the millions who will grow old before reading Ishiguro’s ‘The Remains of the Day’ - you too? Could you see its point? Society is too large to see itself; someone must observe on our behalf. In this pursuit poesy may tell truth where ten thousand theses have honestly lied. Upton Sinclair was not a meat processor.
- hrbsoscbfo 11mo ago[flagged]
- wahnfrieden 11mo agoIs it because you thought it’s the author’s bitterness on a topic where you prefer optimism? The author didn’t say “Fuckers”. He’s quoting his client. Maybe you expected it to be the author’s sour grapes for what the rich have done to their environment. That sort of inversion of expectations is what makes writing fun and interesting (if you were to read on).
- parpfish 11mo ago[flagged]
- zer00eyz 11mo agoGo back to the 1990's, Gibson publishes Virtual Light that predicts that the bay bridge would be one massive homeless encampment. It was clear 30 ish years ago to him how it would turn out. It might be appalling but it should not be shocking.
- HeinzStuckeIt 11mo agoGibson was writing about California specifically, and the Bay Area specifically. That state and that part of it had already had, since the 1960s at least, a reputation for attracting homeless people from across the country thanks to its clement weather. He could have merely been extrapolating from that and not necessarily prophetic about any of the issues today.
- joshtbradley 11mo agoWell written, but it says nothing. No real breakdown of the problem, certainly no solution. Just generic hatred for the rich and empathy for the poor. Like most people who use the word "unhoused," it's performative. If you want to help, volunteer. I have. It's heartbreaking. You realize how dehumanizing it is to try to help someone who is unstable. Mental health, addiction, and deep trauma cannot be solved with money, or shelter, or food. Real treatment is necessary. A modern asylum, crushing drug markets, and taking responsibility for those who cannot take responsibility for themselves needs to be seriously considered. We did this poorly in the past, but the current paradigm clearly is not working, and it might be time to try again. Hard problems need hard solutions, not soft words.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- lapcat 11mo ago> No real breakdown of the problem, certainly no solution. The article appears to be an excerpt from a 300 page book.
- joshtbradley 11mo agoBig enough to keep someone warm.
- anthem2025 11mo ago[dead]
- gexla 11mo agoRight, it's an issue that requires intensive care to address mental health issues. The human resources required for this is always going to be a bottleneck. Much more so than housing shortages or funding for programs that are largely self service (if you can navigate the system, you may not be homeless for long.) Building, staffing, and funding such an institution seems like it would be extremely difficult.
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- carabiner 11mo agoIn san jose, I stayed at an airbnb in a home located inside a trailer park (though a nice trailer park). The owner went to stanford.