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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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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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