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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   28525 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 24, 2024

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Your point holds true for OR and WA but unless I’m misreading the graph, California has 100k extra homeless but only 40k fewer beds. Even if they build as many beds as New York they’d still have a homeless problem.

On a more meta level, you seem be presuming that homeless people have a right to a bed in the major metropolis of their choice. I don’t think it’s illegitimate to say, ‘we have 20k beds and 50k homeless, so the 30k we don’t have beds for need to go somewhere they can find work and cheaper accommodation’.

Your point holds true for OR and WA but unless I’m misreading the graph, California has 100k extra homeless but only 40k fewer beds. Even if they build as many beds as New York they’d still have a homeless problem.

That's a strange way to look at the data. I gave the per-capita numbers because I thought it was much more fair to norm on the size of the state. What you said is equivalent to saying that if California built as many beds as New York, a state half its size, then it would still have a homeless problem. Which when put that way seems completely unsurprising.

On a more meta level, you seem be presuming that homeless people have a right to a bed in the major metropolis of their choice.

I made a descriptive claim, not a normative one. There being shelter beds available to sleep in seems like a more immediate cause of fewer homeless people visibly sleeping on the streets than the police forcing homeless into beds, which doesn't seem like a workable strategy if there aren't enough beds.

You seem to be implying an alternative strategy of forcing the homeless to move elsewhere, which unlike forcing them into shelters that don't exist is at least physically possible. It's unlikely to be very popular with either the homeless or the elsewhere, but it's possible you could come up with an option some of them would find acceptable. One difficulty is that in the US outside of urban centers, you usually need a car, which is part of why homeless shelters are usually in fairly dense areas with transit.

It's pretty common in cities with climates that are undesirable to offer homeless people free greyhound tickets to coastal California during peak bad-weather season(EG August in Dallas, December in Milwaukee) IIRC. And, honestly, New York probably has more homeless in shelters than coastal California at least partially because there are times of year when you'll die if you sleep on the streets in NYC.

And, honestly, New York probably has more homeless in shelters than coastal California at least partially because there are times of year when you'll die if you sleep on the streets in NYC.

Yes, as unpopular as homeless shelters are, letting them all die of exposure is even less popular. But the political consensus in west coast cities seems to be on the side preferring people sleep on the streets over building homeless shelters.

This is, in part, because you can sleep outside year round on the west coast without dying.

I gave the per-capita numbers because I thought it was much more fair to norm on the size of the state. What you said is equivalent to saying that if California built as many beds as New York, a state half its size, then it would still have a homeless problem.

Mea culpa, I missed this. I’m not American and I instinctively think of NY and CA as having similar importance and size. I apologise.

I take your point about requiring car access but OTOH expecting to house a hundred thousand homeless in the richest and most expensive cities in the world doesn’t seem plausible. I would be inclined to think that either they are capable of finding work at some level and should move to where land is cheaper and competition is less fierce, or they genuinely can’t support themselves in which case the government should house them somewhere it will cost less.

I’m not sure how this plays out with regards to state budgets and central funding though.

I’m not sure how this plays out with regards to state budgets and central funding though.

This is pretty core to the problems with housing and the homeless in the United States. Housing is handled at the very local level, often effectively even below the city level due to the impact of public meetings. There's been some pushback on that in the past few years with some amount of state-level zoning overrides happening in a few places, but I'm pretty sure most places do homeless services funding at the county or city level, so sending the homeless to another city is a cheap and popular solution for the source city.

You can build trailer parks in the middle of nowhere to house former homeless in. They'll leave, of course. No one actually wants to live in a trailer park full of lumpenproles, including the people who do so now.

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