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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   29233 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 19, 2024

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If we could just figure out a solution for the very worst hundred to a thousand that would make a massive difference.

This is also not really all that much of a puzzle. It's not that we've failed to figure out a solution, it's that there are malevolent attorneys that fight to keep these parasites on the streets and camping in parks.

I think the wider justice reform movement has some more harm than this judgement, along with long term tolerance of this behavior in some places.

I mean, what this really is just the Skid Rowization of every West Coast downtown. But LA has been like this for decades. It can’t just be this one law. If cities cared they still have a lot of levers they can use even with this law, like just defunding all homeless shelters and homeless funding to starve them out and drive them elsewhere, or having cops use laws against drug use and dealing on the books.

Oh, I don't mean just the one ruling, that was intended as an example of the sort of malicious actor that I think can't really be negotiated with and just needs to be defeated if you're going to attempt cleaning things up. That there are people that make their living fighting to prevent towns from preventing vagrants from camping in parks highlights that this is a difficult problem because of those bad actors.

It's not just this one ruling, but this ruling is tying the hands of anyone who tries to fix the problem: letting those who prefer not to fix it free reign to make things worse.

The ruling doesn’t stop DAs from enforcing existing state drug law in a way that would rapidly clean up a large proportion of the homeless population. I agree the ruling is a bad thing and I’m hopeful it’ll get struck down later this year. But I don’t think it’s the main thing preventing major change.

Yes, true: however, I think the ruling must be having a strong effect because you are not seeing the same street people crises in very left wing cities outside of the 9th Circuit's jurisdiction. The East Coast doesn't have this problem, even though they have quite a few activist DAs.

The East Coast has much harsher weather, I think it’s largely that simple. You see the worst homeless problem in San Diego (it’s just slightly less visible because the city is more suburban), even though SD is more ‘moderate’ than a lot of blue cities in at least some ways, because of the weather. If NYC had Seattle’s climate the crisis would be much worse, but NYC’s politics are also arguably hardened by reverence for the police in some places and a memory of the retaking of the city in the 80s and 90s from a violent crime epidemic. NYC also has a larger black population that tends to vote for more establishment/moderate democrats.

New York has 5 times as many homeless people as Washington: even if weather is harsher in NYC, they still have an enormous population of homeless and manage them better than any city in the 9th Circuit's jurisdiction. 39% of the total number of homeless people in America live in the 9th Circuit's jurisdiction, despite those states making up only 19% of the United States by population.

I don't deny that local politics can make the situation much better or much worse despite the 9th Circuit: but it is clear to me that the 9th Circuit has had a powerful effect on making the problem worse.

What about the coastal cities of the Southeastern US then? I suppose the weather there is also mild.

The Gulf Coast has much stronger storms than the West Coast. Seattle has a lot of rainy days half the year but on those rainy days it's cloudy all day and they get a 1/4" of rain. The Gulf Coast gets a storm once a week that drops many times more rain, possibly some hail, and gale or worse winds. It's also far less pleasant to be outside all day in the hot, muggy summer.

Moreso once you get north of florida/georgia, most of the coast experiences freezing temperatures for at least a few weeks during the winter. I imagine this kills some of the most feral and deranged junkies, which makes the remaining east coast homeless population seem less eccentric than it otherwise would be.

edit: i wrote this comment then immediately wondered if my ramblings had any correlation with reality, and looking at the maps here it seems like the west coast actually has lower lows than the same latitude on the east coast. https://gisgeography.com/us-temperature-map/

I'm praying the Supreme Court will strike Martin down. If they don't, I see no solution to the problem.

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