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I can't get over how US-centric that discussion is. I live within literally two minutes of a supermarket and it doesn't attract a homeless encampment. Probably because there's nowhere to camp at - if it's in a walkable neighborhood it doesn't have a humongous parking lot around it. I also live within literally two minutes of a metro station, and while its air curtains attract some homeless in winter, they don't go around committing crimes.
Same. For myself, I blame winter: If you don't spend several days a year in a heated shelter of some sort, you'll simply die. The death rate due to exposure is around 1.5/100k/yr (not counting starlight tours), or about a quarter of the murder rate. Those numbers have to be taken with a grain of salt: They aren't perfectly tabulated, they include ones caused by bad resources (eg. homelessness) as well as bad skills (eg. driving into a ditch), and they are what's happening after the mitigation measures have been put in place.
That's not to say there aren't any homeless encampments here; they do exist, but they take a lot of resources to build (insulation, shelter, heat), and don't receive support from the government or NGOs (see 1, 2). IIRC, the biggest ever was ~100 people and it was practically the entire city's unsheltered homeless population.
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In the US I live within easy walking distance of a supermarket while carrying groceries by hand in a not particularly wealthy city(as in, section 8 on the same street) with a slightly above average crime rate. There’s no homeless encampment here despite abundant space for one because the police do their jobs and clear them out, nor are there random crazy people doing drugs and harassing people in broad daylight because the police don’t tolerate such behavior. Even in the US, this discussion doesn’t cover broad swathes of the country.
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I'm in the United States and live within two minutes of a grocery store and lack a homeless encampment. Something that had started to look like one started to pop up in a nearby park last summer and it was broken up by a combination of police, park rangers, and social workers. Tolerating homeless encampments in areas of cities that should be desirable is entirely a policy decision, not some brute fact of how population density works.
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Not just US centric but specifically the most rabidly left-wing parts of the US.
I know I'm starting to sound like a broken record on this particular topic but the things @ChestertonsMeme are complaining about are not universal or even "American" problems they are "this is what happens when you let wealthy academic types who are completely divorced from ground level reality run the show" problems.
The Red Tribe solution to "I need a vehicle to shop" is stereotypically a truck, is it not? It's certainly not to design the world around the limits of a human on foot.
In more rural areas? certainly. You might only be going to the store once a month because it's an hour drive there and an an hour drive back and you're only going to do it once or twice a month. Accordingly you need to haul all your shit in one go plus what ever your neighbors need picked up as well hense the popularity of pick-ups and deep-trunked sedans in comparison to other vhehicles. Meanwhile Red tribers who live in town typically drive hatchbacks like anyone else.
That said, I think @hydroacetylene's on to something below when they get into the psychology of the two tribes.
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The red tribe solution to ‘I need a vehicle to shop’ is ‘well get you a vehicle’. The blue tribe solution is ‘we need to rearrange the city so you don’t need one’.
This says something about the psychology of the two tribes.
Which one shows greater will to power ?
No one's going to dedicate their life mission to getting cars for other people.
Driving instructors. Mechanics. People who manufacture cars? Heck, in a tangential way, my job ultimately involves getting cars into the hands of people to drive them. And among all those people, surely some are genuinely dedicated to what they do.
They're mostly bad at it (especially driving instructors, they can afford to be bad) and only doing it because they're incentivised through the profit motive.
People who want to rearrange the entire economic system because X are almost invariably desire doing away with the idea of profit and subordinating the economy under some system of command and control.
Under such a system, even those who'd truly desire to give people the means of personal transportation would be unable to do so unless the government consented. Y
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The blue but then the blue tribe have also always been the most corrupted by power. I don't think that's a coincidence.
Yes, the blues.
If it wasn't for AI or war, I'd be fairly certain blue tribe would collapse this century due to running out of susceptible human resources to psyop, however, with AIs all bets are off except the ones that says no one will bother to write SF because you could get the same fix just reading obscure internet forums. Things will get impossibly weird.
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I live in a rabidly left-wing city in the US within two minutes of a supermarket, and I still have no idea what they're complaining about, other than their desire for the isolation of suburban/rural living so they don't have to interact with anyone that doesn't fit their template of
which, uh, if you want to be isolated and limit interactions with anyone different from you as much as possible, may I ask why you also want to live within the city borders of Seattle (or any other city for that matter)?
I'm not saying that I would prefer suburban or rural living; there are a lot of good things about living in cities and I prefer them. The people are, in general, polite and law-abiding. Suburban and rural areas have their own pathologies. The main thing I am incensed about is that cities could be so much better if policy decisions took into account the fact that behavior varies from person to person in predictable ways and some people are net negative for the rest of the city.
The fact that I referred to the hypothetical man as using "PMC vocabulary" suggests that I don't particularly identify with him. I'm happy to live next to people who are different, just not different in such a way that they will burglarize my house, drive recklessly, or harass my daughter on the street.
Others in this thread have shared contrary examples of walkable areas that don't have higher crime, because the police enforce the law and arrest or harass lawbreakers to keep them away. Where I live this happens much less often. The whole concept of incapacitation depends on statistical discrimination - that people who have a history of committing crimes are more likely to commit more crimes in the future. The discourse in leftist enclaves is focused on rehabilitation and compassion, not incapacitation, and the police are basically barred from incapacitating criminals.
In my area the response of urban lawmakers to the vast majority of the troublesome people being in the city is to make laws to try to make suburbs take their "fair share" of these people (e.g. with "affordable housing" requirements, which handily double as a way to increase Democratic representation in suburbs). And at the same time prevent the suburbs from treating them with any less deference than the cities do. Can't make the cities better, so try to make the suburbs worse.
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You are not giving the homeless enough credit for their willingness to set up camp on sidewalks, door-steps, and gutters even where that blocks the public right-of-way.
Nor are you giving the dysfunction of U.S. legal and governmental structures enough credit: in the western united states enforcement of anti-public-camping ordinances is illegal unless the city can demonstrate that it has an empty homeless-shelter bed for every single homeless person in the area.
Wow. That is a crazy ruling. That's basically holding that society must provide some form of shelter to everyone, either directly or via land-grants at the location of their choice, and it must be situated within city limits. I thought declarations like that were usually constitutional amendments or acts of congress, not court decisions.
As a heartless pragmatist, I would like to point out that the local prison is shelter, and usually has plenty of capacity. There is also a ton of room for innovation in public shelters/public housing: public office space is not used at night which could double as shelters, public parking space could be requisitioned for the contruction of shipping container capsule hotels, and cheap homes could be bought up and partitioned.
In principle the decision isn't completely nonsense. You can't make it impossible for someone to not commit a crime. So if someone doesn't have a home, you can't arrest them for being homeless, since they have no choice but to be homeless.
However, they actually do have a choice--leave the city--especially since many of them were drawn to the city in the first place by homelessness policies. There should also be (but probably isn't) the possibility of arresting them for bad behavior; if there are public restrooms, you should be able to arrest them for urinating on the sidewalk instead of public restrooms, blocking places, aggressively begging, etc. since they do have a choice not to do those things.
There's also the problem that many homeless will refuse to use shelters. If I had to make a more sensible version of this ruling, I'd demand that 1) the city is only required to have a number of beds equal to the number of homeless willing to use them, not the total number of homeless, and 2) if a homeless person refuses to use a bed, or is sent to a bed and later caught outside sleeping on a street, they can be jailed.
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