“Medieval” Diseases Flare as Unsanitary Living Conditions Proliferate | Hacker News Reader

“Medieval” Diseases Flare as Unsanitary Living Conditions Proliferate

scientificamerican.com

108 pointsspking166 comments

After learning about hep C (diarrheal, can survive in an infectious state for up to 6 months outdoors) the issue of sanitation became very 'real' to me.

I had the idea of starting a charity to rent port-o-potties for the homeless encampments near our office. For context, my company is filled with _completely_ woke people, super concerned about social justice and stuff like that...

But when i pitched the idea everyone universally shot it down, in disgust and with a dismissive attitude like it wasn't even worthy of consideration.

It messed with my head. It's a symptom of our fucked up country where "wokeness" is a separate idea from kindness, where disgust about the poor crosses all colors of skin, and it's worth keeping the poor in misery even when that decision threatens your own health.

I was homeless for nearly six years. I did my level best to never use a port-a-potty. I think they are generally gross.

I think the only exception was one set up permanently in a park as the only bathroom there. It was not as gross as the ones set up on city sidewalks, apparently usually for homeless individuals.

I really dislike most solutions aimed at helping the homeless. They are often solutions no middle class person would accept.

If you wouldn't want it for yourself, please think about why you think this is a good thing to do for the homeless population. It probably isn't. It's probably part of the pattern of societal behavior that helps keep this issue entrenched.

I use portapotties all the time, they're not unicorns and rainbows but assuming they haven't been defaced, i.e. poop or urine all over the inside and not in the receptacle, they're just fine.

I don't see them as a dehumanizing thing. Shoot, nearly all construction workers use them as their office toilet, is that unacceptable?

When you are homeless, you tend to wear the same clothes for days or weeks at a time. You may be unable to shower for long stretches.

Construction workers are going to go home, shower, change clothes, wash the clothes they wore all day and worked hard in.

You seem to be taking it for granted that one can get cleaned up again after being exposed to a port-a-potty. This is not a given for homeless individuals.

If you are in good health -- which many homeless people are not -- and have regular access to showers, laundry service, etc, using a port-a-potty may be no big deal. But this is generally not the case for people on the street.

I have had two friends, one still, homeless. I understand, and do not take for granted, that homeless people do not have ready access to clean clothes or showers. Does anybody think that homeless people can just shower and do laundry? If they do I do not know them.

Regardless you still are making portapotties out to be disaster zones, some are for sure, I've opened some up and there is human waste covering the entire thing and I wouldn't suggest that people, homeless or otherwise, plop down and use that. But portapotties are relatively sanitary places, they're a totally fine, emphasis on fine, way to keep human waste off of the streets. Having pooped in a lot of places I would 100% choose a portapotty over an alleyway or my apartment building's stoop. I'm a little surprised by your opinion as well, I can't speak for every homeless person by any means but the ones I do know would definitely prefer to see an unlocked and clean portapotty if they needed to go vs. having to go in an alley. Sure, a bathroom in their own home would be better...but that isn't what we're talking about right? We're talking about a public health crises and it is inhumane to suggest we take no action and instead shout, "These people deserve homes!", even though they do, when they're literally dying of Hep A.

I'm not suggesting we take no action. I'm just suggesting we take actions other than the one you are advocating. There is a huge difference between those two things.

I'm actively working on this problem space myself and have been for years.

I personally run multiple websites that help address the problem. I do my best to get that information into the hands of homeless people wherever possible, both via internet participation and handing out fliers to local homeless services and the local police department.

(Here is an edited version of what I am distributing locally: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1L5CsLmHLPUV1uehvRtu17H9y...)

I'm also involved (very part time) with two local non profits who do urban planning and economic development type work. Some of that I get a little for. Most of it is done pro bono.

I cannot afford to just give all my time away for free and such interests tend to not pay. I blog. I do freelance writing. I edit resumes. I do a little website work here and there.

Still, I continue to struggle to get by. I suck at promoting my Patreon. People on the internet routinely tell me to go get a real job and stop trying to monetize my online work and yadda.

I'm a woman. I appear to be the only woman to have ever spent time on the leaderboard of HN. But being a woman closes a lot of doors for me. People here occasionally give me a few bucks out of compassion when I'm especially broke. But I can't, for example, get much support for my Patreon.

There are no doubt myriad reasons for that. But I don't know how to readily solve it. I am not willing to create a non-profit homeless services thing. That approach is antithetical to my beliefs about how to actually fix things.

I'm just saying that I have done substantial research on the problem space. I wanted to be an urban planner before life got in the way and I have taken a college class on Homelessness and Public Policy through SFSU when I was living in the San Francisco Bay Area as a military wife.

I think I have a good outline for what works. I am interested in promoting real solutions. But unless I can get an actual job in urban planning or economic development, the odds are poor that I can find a means to monetize my efforts to address this problem.

Some of those reasons are inherent to the problem space itself. Among other things, poor people don't have a lot of money to give you to fix their problems.

If you want to get your city to build proper public bathrooms with a 24 hour attendant, I would be all for that. I don't support a policy of more port-a-potties. I'm okay with you being all surprised and what not about that.

I'm tired and I think I left my best comments much earlier. It's probably all downhill from here. I plan on trying to step away from the discussion. I think I've made whatever useful points I can reasonably make. People can do with the info I've already posted as they see fit.

I noticed this weird trend with portas and how people treat them. I volunteer with orgs that put on big events and rent lots of portas. The attendees are "woke", and we give lots of warnings to not throw trash in the portas, to not deface them or stop them up. But they get destroyed anyway, and then we have to clean them out to avoid getting big cleaning costs from the porta rental companies. If, however, we have an event with "regular" bathrooms, they don't get as destroyed.

One solution may be to construct "alternative portas" with a different name, that look and feel more like a european or asian home-model toilet+shower combo. I think this might cause people to abuse them less, if they think of them more like their own bathroom.

This doesn't solve things like the laundry issue, or, well, housing. But most other developed nations have decent public toilets, and we should too.

The solution is public showers for the homeless.

I don't mean to shit on (pun intended) your solution, but really, the solution is for society to get serious in dealing with homelessness and to Do The Right Thing.

You, me and other others here have no idea what the right thing is. We can guess, but many of those guesses will have very unexpected side effects. (People using locked showers for things other than showering, for example.)

And bathrooms. And laundry. And a place to eat. And a clean bed. In other words: home. The only answer to the problems associated with homelessness is, as always, moving people from homeless to not homeless.

I also spent time on the streets. It's _not_ just a home. Many of the kids I hung out with ran away from "homes". A home can isolate you from your family (other street kids) who are the only other people you care about at the time.

Homeless kids need hope, they need time with people who will actually stick with them and really help them see the benefit of a job, going to bed on time (the shelter's had a curfew), how to be respectful, help getting off drugs (or staying off them).

If you give homes to homeless people as they are, I think most of them would get trashed and abused until they are no more liveable than a park bench.

Then what, evict the homeless people from their free homes? Give them another free home all fixed up?

It really is hard work without a simple answer.

For the record, I'm not personally talking about giving homes to people who are currently homeless. I'm talking about increasing supply of a certain kind of housing so that we see fewer people land on the street to begin with, as well as addressing other social issues, such as access to healthcare.

"Throwaway" children are a hard issue to resolve. There are no simple solutions once things have gone that far.

But I'm talking about focusing more on prevention generally. One side effect of that will be to have more per capita resources for those hard cases who do land on the street.

One of the problems with most conversations about the issue of homelessness is the mantra of wanting to "help the homeless." It tends to lead to a sense of hopelessness. The problem seems too big and thorny to resolve. It's also not the most humane approach.

I'm talking about creating a world where people are at less risk of homelessness because their lives aren't being suddenly and completely derailed by high medical bills, because they can find housing within their budget that works for them even if they have no car, etc.

Such a world should generally see fewer throwaway kids as well. We really don't do enough to support parents in America today. It's dreadful.

While I don't disagree with you in general, it does seem that there are a lot of things that can be done that our modern society simply won't tolerate.

I think we could _easily_ provide shelter and food for every single homeless person in America right now. But I can tell you that most of the homeless people won't take that shelter. Because you'd have to remove weapons, drugs, violence, etc... to make the shelter safe. So then you have a jail system.

I spent exactly zero nights in a homeless shelter in my years on the street. They were generally pretty revolting, for a very long list of reasons.

I don't use recreational drugs and never have. I have no criminal record. I carried no weapons while homeless.

I am not really for expanding the current shelter system. I am for improving supply of the right kind of housing, as well as providing adequate healthcare. Health issues and cost of healthcare are major factors in the equation here.

I spent time in youth shelters (I was young when on the streets) and they weren't terrible in some places. But it was still not totally safe.

But if it weren't for a shelter, I would not have been able to stay clean and get a job.

And if you can't get a job and maintain an income, you can't afford housing of any kind.

There's a chicken/egg problem with housing/job. But you can't house people that won't/can't work in the same housing as people who will work.

There's so many obstacles in the way that I think the focus should be on the people that recently became homeless and help them get back off as quickly as possible. It's the lifers I think that really may be beyond ever taking care of themselves, no matter how much help is given.

I'm glad you apparently got off the street. I'm not talking about dismantling the current shelter system.

I'm leery of answers that entrench the problem. A lot of people want to "help the homeless," which is a very different goal than reducing the incidence of homelessness overall in the US. Focusing exclusively on "helping the homeless" has a tendency to entrench and even grow the problem by ignoring the need to solve other issues.

It tends to create a situation where the only way you can help is to wind up on the street and there is no help available before the problem is that severe. Lesser problems don't count or get any assistance.

I'm personally focused on those other issues.

I don't deny that we will always need some emergency services, such as shelters and soup kitchens. I just am very leery of cries for more shelters and more soup kitchens and more port-a-potties as the only approach to the issue, thereby not bothering to address some of the root causes.

I'm not trying to argue with you and I'm not trying to "win" some argument here. I'm trying to communicate my position clearly. I'm trying to let you know that my position isn't a threat to people getting the help they need once they are in crisis.

You can have soup kitchens and homeless shelters and also affordable healthcare and affordable (missing middle) housing. It doesn't have to be one or the other.

I just would like to see enough resources put into solutions like universal healthcare such that the homeless problem actually begins to shrink without anyone being "rescued."

I'm trying to step away from this discussion.

Have a great day.

Yes, let's just leave them on the street and give them lousy port-a-potties and shower access. That's the humane approach.

(Do I need a sarcasm tag here?)

That still leaves them wearing the same filthy clothes. It doesn't remotely solve the problem. Furthermore, homeless showers tend to be as horrible as most homeless services.

Either you have no privacy -- because why the hell should your dignity matter when you are homeless? -- or it has mold issues, etc.

All services specifically designed to service the homeless population tend to be really, truly terrible in a "you would get sued if this were aimed at middle class people" kind of way. The general attitude is "beggars can't be choosers" and "don't be so uppity -- show a little gratitude for the shitty service you are getting for free, you ungrateful whiner."

So, no, that's not the solution. Missing Middle Housing is The Solution here. Or one part of it.

There is no single cause of homelessness. There is no single solution.

> There is no single cause of homelessness. There is no single solution.

This is really important to emphasize.

I've never been homeless, but I did spend two years hanging out with homeless people while making a documentary film. The range of people on the street is almost as broad as the range of people off it. I met homeless people with Ph.D.'s. I met homeless people with florid schizophrenia. I met homeless people with substance abuse issues. I met homeless people who were perfectly ordinary but had some bad luck (ranging from losing their job to losing their entire family in a car crash). I even met homeless people who chose to live on the street (or in their car) because they wanted a nomadic lifestyle.

But no matter how you slice it, the only real solution to homelessness is housing.

You made an excellent movie about the issue. I highly recommend it:

http://www.graceofgodmovie.com/

Thanks! :-)

If the purpose of society is to compete for evolutionary fitness status by hoarding socioeconomic tokens...seemingly for the eventual purpose of turning every part of the environment including the human body into a sooty tern egg and a fungible asset, then that IS a single cause of homelessness, ethnic cleansing, authoritarianism, metabolic syndrome and the rest of the parade of monsters.

If the point of the lives we lead is some seemingly positive direction for the human soul, individually or communally, maybe the single cause of homelessness is that we have lost our way, perhaps irrevocably.

But maybe we can be optimistic and imagine things becoming so horrific in the future that the survivors stop doing the things that led us to build a world that either wears down the people or the living ecosystem or both.

It's hard to walk past a homeless person without condemning the society you live in. It's even harder to do anything substantial to change their situation, especially yourself. But to not blame anyone is just morally disorienting. Eric Weinstein, in a podcast that was posted here a day ago, kept harping on "there are intentional causes and emergent causes."

But maybe people are just basically hypocritical lying jerks.

But surely a porta-potty is better than going to toilet in the open?

Perhaps better than openly pissing and pooping on a city sidewalk in broad daylight. But I spent nearly six years homeless and never did that.

In the city, you can find proper bathrooms. Big cities sometimes have public bathrooms open 24 hours and with an attendant. San Diego had at least two that I knew of.

You can also use the library bathroom if you haven't been banned from the library by staff for behaving badly. There are bathrooms at homeless services. There are bathrooms in malls, grocery stores, homeless services, etc.

If you aren't in the big city, if you are camped in a patch of woods, you poop and pee in the bushes. It's vastly more sanitary than a port-a-potty. If you grew up in a semi-rural environment with a culture of folks who did things like go hunting in the woods, relieving yourself in the bushes isn't a weird idea at all. It's only in recent years that anyone seems to think it is. It certainly wasn't when I was growing up.

Thanks for the explanation. One of the things I hear about SF is the public pooping, so assumed that was a large part of the problem.

With your experience, what solution would you offer knowing the situation better than many here?

We need to bring back housing that works for people without a car that doesn't cost too much. The best term for this type of housing seems to be Missing Middle Housing.

http://missingmiddlehousing.com/

Just as one data point, we have torn down more than a million SROs in recent decades while population has risen. SROs used to be a normal form of market rate housing that worked well for people just starting out who didn't have much money and didn't need much space because they were single and childless.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy

We also need to resolve the health care coverage issues in the US. Health insurance eats up a high percentage of the US GDP. Most homeless people have serious health issues, either physical health or mental health issues.

This is a significant contributing factor to homelessness. There are studies that show that when people get affordable health coverage, it reduces the risk of eviction.

https://www.benefitspro.com/2018/12/14/one-side-effect-of-th...

We don't need "homes for the homeless." We need homes for the people. We currently tend to build homes for rich people only and basically shrug and say "not my problem" when the rest of the US can't make their life work.

Then we act like homeless individuals are simply defective individuals and weren't screwed over by a broken system. No, they just need to stop drinking/using drugs, obviously. "It's just a personal issue."

Never mind that new housing has more than doubled in size since the 1950s and added substantial additional amenities at the same time that the average number of occupants has declined. These changes in housing pushing up housing costs couldn't possibly be related, no. Ask anyone with a good income and cushy life.

I think those are really good ideas and I think we should get to work on them ASAP.

I'm curious if you have any short term solutions to give the people that keep pooping in front of my office at night a place to poop while we try to implement these solutions.

I've suggested just handing out key fobs and the key for the first floor bathroom of our building but it was turned down by management. I'm not sure what we can do but I'm sad that the best option for a poo for whoever is doing this is our doorway.

Homeless people have trouble finding bathrooms. When I had a "bathrooms" page on my homeless site, it was absolutely the most popular, well-trafficked page on the site by a wide margin. Homeless people live in an information vacuum, among other things.

If it were me, I would create a "homeless map" for the area. I would list all bathrooms nearby that are reasonably publicly accessible. I would probably also include other useful information. I would print multiple copies and hand them out liberally.

If you want to do this:

If your city has actual public bathrooms, make sure to specify where those are. List park bathrooms. List mall bathrooms and grocery stores and department stores, like Walmart or Target. List hours available if possible. Highlight anything available 24 hours.

Put a blurb on the bottom half of the page about cleanliness and health and the rise in disease among the homeless population caused by unsanitary conditions. Recommend that they carry hand sanitizer and spray peroxide to clean up after toileting. (Spray peroxide is available at Walmart and CVS Pharmacy -- it's cheaper at Walmart).

Do not put the info on the internet. I have reason to believe that publicizing such things online just attracts more homeless to your area. Instead, make it a paper handout and hand it out.

Give it a few weeks and then start calling the cops on these people if it doesn't stop. In nearly six years on the street, I never pooped in anyone's business doorway. Some homeless people intentionally do assholish things like that because they are mad as hell at how the world treats them and they want to express themselves.

This is a sanitized version of the flier I have been giving out to local homeless services and the local police department. I removed the paragraph with local information. Anyone here is welcome to adapt it for their own use.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1L5CsLmHLPUV1uehvRtu17H9y...

Oops. Updated the link to a "shareable" one. Let me know if you have any problems accessing it.

This seems to contradict your earlier point. You say that since I wouldn’t want to use a port-a-potty myself, I shouldn’t consider it as a solution for homeless people.

On the other hand, I also wouldn’t want to live in an SRO, so why should I accept that for homeless people?

One way to think of it isn't "A place to keep homeless people", but as an option that someone could choose to live in voluntarily at an affordable rate.

When I was in college, I loved living in the dorms. I don't understand why that isn't more of an option for people. It's a community in a building rather than along a street.

> We need SRO's. (snip) We don't need "homes for the homeless." We need homes for the people.

I totally 100% agree, but your suggestion for SRO's sort of seems to counteract your statement above. Why would we build tenements for homeless, if no reasonable person would want to live in one?

If we want people to not be homeless, shouldn't we build them homes. Like real homes (where "real" means that at minimum, it meets all the same legal requirements that a 'market-rate' 1-bed or studio apartment would?)

If we need "homes for the people", shouldn't we actually build that? And not tenement/dormitory/SRO things that aren't really housing?

I currently live in an SRO. It has real walls. It has real plumbing. I have internet access and electricity 24/7. There is a kitchen down the hall and I am allowed to cook in my unit, though you have to supply your own means to cook, such as a microwave or hot plate.

To my mind, SROs work just fine. They weren't always perceived the way they are currently. Our current American expectations for space, a full kitchen, etc etc etc is not the historical norm.

It isn't even the norm from around the world. In Japan, which has much more affordable housing than the US, from what I gather, it's common to room with other people in a two room rental where one room is a bathroom with only a sink and toilet and the other room is where everyone sleeps. Japan has public bathhouses. They related differently to various things than we do.

From what I gather, ovens are an oddity in Japanese kitchens. They typically have a wok and maybe stove top, I'm not sure. They usually don't have an oven.

When I got divorced, the two and three bedroom apartments I inhabited with my two sons had fully outfitted American-style kitchens. We often kept sodas in the fridge, not because we needed them cold, but because the fridge was too big for our needs. If we didn't keep something extra in it to keep it full, the milk would spoil because it didn't stay cold enough.

I don't think our standard American housing expectations are currently serving us well in a number of metrics. Our expectations are rooted in the assumption of a four or five person household consisting of a stay-at-home mom, two or three minor children and a breadwinner father. It was dreamed up in the 1950s post WW2. In the years since, our demographics have diversified and such families are much less common while single young adults, childless couples and single parents have become more common.

I have also seen on TV shows that when you house hunt in Japan, they tell you the time it takes to walk to the nearest public transit station, not the time it takes to drive various places. I have heard a lot of good things about how Japan handles housing. They seem to generally do a much, much better job than the US.

Regarding the housing in Japan, I've heard from an expat that a lot of tenants are discriminating against foreigner, often explicitly.

Reasonable people DO live in SROs - surely you've heard of college dormitories? Sharing a bathroom and kitchen while having your own bedroom (or one shared with just one other person) is worlds apart from living in a tent without plumbing or real protection from the elements.

SROs are best considered temporary housing, but it absolutely is still housing. Additionally, this style of housing is often far cheaper to build than even tiny studios, enabling more units to be built on a faster timeline. Some would even consider the social aspect a positive, as living completely alone can be very isolating.

I don't think it's the only solution, but there should definitely be a place for very low-cost housing options like SROs even if we can build more studios or 1-bedroom units in the future.

I don't think it's the only solution

I did list it as "just one data point" in my above comment. I am generally promoting the idea of Missing Middle Housing, not SROs. SROs are simply one form of many that we largely no longer build. I provided a link to the Missing Middle Housing website that defines the various forms of housing we largely no longer build.

The website doesn't even list SROs, though I think they could reasonably be assumed to fit under the heading "residential above commercial" in most cases.

There's startups doing exactly this, "dorms for adults": https://www.geekwire.com/2018/quasi-dorms-adults-gain-popula...

> surely you've heard of college dormitories?

Of course I have (I explicitly mentioned them in my first comment). But are you volunteering to move back into your college dorm room right now? No? Why not? Reasonable people do live there, right?

> SROs are best considered temporary housing, but it absolutely is still housing.

So, I partially agree. Calling an SRO "temporary housing" is totally fine by me. But if, by your own admission, they're 'best considered temporary housing', then it's not really housing, is it?

If my home burns down, so I move into an extended-stay hotel, I'm still homeless, despite being in a hotel room. That hotel room does not mean I am no longer homeless, just because I'm living out of it. If I run out of money for the hotel room, so I start living out of my car, my car does not count as "housing", just because I'm living out of that instead.

> but there should definitely be a place for very low-cost housing options like SROs even if we can build more studios or 1-bedroom units in the future.

This is where I wholeheartedly disagree -- the studio and 1-bed units should be those very low-cost housing options.

It's one thing to use SROs in places where we don't want to fully respect human autonomy (like College Dorms, or Hotels, or similar). But these are not replacements for housing, they are only temporary placeholders at best.

Port-a-pottys work because they are temporary toilets. We don't use port-a-potty's as a long-term solution to sanitation, we build real bathrooms instead. For the same reason, why would we burn money building SROs for poor/working-class people, when what we really need is long-term housing?

Or in general, why is everyone so quick to devalue the importance of quality housing? As the OP put it, why are we so quick to push ideas that "no middle class person would accept".

There are loads of people who would be perfectly happy to live in an SRO. They've been outlawed by people who either want to run off the riff-raff or just don't understand housing.

we have built them recently in Seattle, but they are called "micro-apartments", and they seem pretty popular, although we are making them harder to build. I used to live next door to one seemed like a pretty decent place to live and had excellent bus access.

https://apodment.com/capitol-hill-apodments/videre/

Just because you wouldn't want to live in an SRO doesn't necessarily mean others wouldn't. I don't think she is suggesting building Hong-Kong style cage beds, but it sounds like something more like a college dormitory. It's not ideal housing, but for many maybe worth the price. Look at all the people renting bunk beds in SF - maybe they would prefer a single room?

The missing middle housing makes sense in theory.

In practice, it still needs clarification on preventing sprawl and allowing car-free transportation:

1. This type of housing (various mid-level multiplex housing) seems to pragmatically fit in the area between urban (high-rises) and suburban (single-family homes) for cost and accessibility. To prevent sprawl, more people would have to choose middle housing over detached (single-family) housing, and there would need to be more of a geographic cap to the suburbs. There needs to be some compulsion to discourage developers from buying cheaper rural land to push the suburbs out further with more detached homes and McMansions for people who want to be further removed (thus having an unintended consequence of more sprawl).

The US in particular has so much damn land its been crazy to see new suburban developments pop up in just a few years. Conversely, in Europe (or Japan), it would be astounding to see suburbs being built the way they are in the US where there always seems to be a supply of land.

2. Public transportation needs to seriously catch up to allow for car-free middle housing. US cities have had so much planning around cars that public transportation is still a greater inconvenience in various cities. Buses and trains need major improvement to be cheap and reliable. Bicycles (and mopeds) also need to be less of an afterthought to appropriately integrate with the other forms of transportation.

I don't know how to fix this without city grid changes and/or more transportation investment (or incentives to use it). Relying on a $10 metro ride, or 2 hour bus ride, or 3 hour walk is not convenient to get across town on a daily basis.

In some ways, SROs may be more immediately impactful than middle housing. SROs can house more people for the given real estate in urban areas, and could offer shorter/easier commutes to work. Perhaps they are also cheaper to maintain if they are in high rises setups.

In NYC, there are "Projects" buildings next to newer, "luxury" apartments in various neighborhoods. If that kind of setup works, why does adding SROs not?

In that missing middle housing thing, what's the difference between a bungalow court and a trailer park? I know the latter still is actively built since I regularly pass double-wides in transit on the highway, but I'm curious about the former.

http://missingmiddlehousing.com/building-types/bungalow-cour...

Bungalows are basically small houses, not trailers.

> I had the idea of starting a charity to rent port-o-potties for the homeless encampments near our office. For context, my company is filled with _completely_ woke people, super concerned about social justice and stuff like that...

You might find that this kind of disconnect is very common. In San Francisco, for example, there's broad and strong public support for providing housing and care to the homeless among us. Yet a great deal of this support vanishes once a particular site is proposed - the same people who like the idea of helping the homeless frequently don't like the idea of doing so right next to their homes.

It can be difficult to blame them too much. Nobody likes dealing with the used needles, petty property crime, and fires that seem to go hand in hand with encampments here. Most everyone would much rather help those in such dire need at arms-length.

NIMBY, not in my back yard.

It's an understandable thing, at times. I know I became significantly less friendly towards encampments after one sparked a wildfire that posed a non-trivial chance of affecting the building I lived in.

I first went through a phase of "but why can't we just get them into housing?". Eventually I realized that helping the current members of the encampment would address the issue for a few days or a week, but that a new set of vulnerable neighbors would occupy the same space in short order. This cycle would repeat until who knows when, which did not strike me as an attractive proposition.

The other residents in my building followed the same thought process, and decided that the best thing for them was to advocate for the owner of the land to clear encampments. I kept my mouth shut. Nobody was going to thank me for telling them that the morally superior option was to risk having their homes burned down and their children burned alive.

That's not NIMBY. It's more like saying vs. doing.

That’s EXACTLY what NIMBY is. Everyone talks a big game until it hits close to home. There is an effort going on called YIMBY as obviously an opposite that is trying to get people on board with housing developments in these areas we’re talking about. [0]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/YIMBY

Political correctness and being "open minded" only on the latest trends and hot topics is what means being "woke" these days

They take a lot of shortcuts, they aim for equality of outcome and nitpick on useless details

I'm really not surprised about the reaction you got from your coworkers / employees of your company

The city of Santa Monica created a better solution - easy access to public toilets with an interior that is completely metal so its easy to hose down to keep them clean. For the most part they keep these very clean so while you see these outbreaks downtown you don't see them in Santa Monica because they do have public bathrooms. In downtown LA its impossible to find a public bathroom often the metro stations don't even have bathrooms. The assumption made is that bathrooms attract the homeless but in reality creates a situation where no one can wash their hands easily downtown.

This ignores the very real problem that chronic homeless people tend to suffer from mental illness problems and you'd need to ensure they are clean 24/7. There would also be the issue of people using them for drugs and what not.

This also ignores that the solution you propose has already been tried in other cities and hasn't worked out. Which could be part of the reason why you received such a harsh response.

The solution wouldn't be portable toilets, it would be fully fledged bathroom units available to the homeless with options to shower, shave, fresh clothing etc. Of course a better and longer lasting solution would be actual housing for the homeless but that seems to be a harder sell for some people.

I always thought of "woke" as more of a meme / ridicule kind of thing.

The irony is, it is. Unless you're "woke", in which case the ridicule is just something else to feign outrage over. And don't even get em started on the "social justice" bullshit!

I think we're too far down the double meaning rabbit hole for me to really know what that means ;)

Is your country the USA ?

Apparently they aren't that woke if they aren't aware of the systemic injustices that lead people to become homeless. But then again, most people aren't. Most people seem to dismiss homeless people as "lazy freeloaders who are just trying to get drugs" as if they're all addicted to drugs and that somehow addiction and poverty are moral failings worthy of scorn and contempt.

I agree. I have many well paid friends in tech, who bristle when I blatantly say "Everyone is 3 steps from being homeless - the steps are just a little larger for some". They fail to see how .... a sickness, a lost job, etc can lead to that path.

I've spent some time living in a third-world country and one of the things I've observed is that even the poorest people are still living in some sort of structure that is capable of providing a limited amount of protection from the elements, a small bit of privacy, and a place to come back to at night. Even in villages, these small homes have electricity and satellite TV. They're often built with low cost materials like bricks and tin roofs, but they allow people who can't afford a brick-and-mortor home the opportunity to have some stability in life.

I'm a big fan of safety regulations for construction but after time living abroad, I'm beginning to see a case for loosening some construction rules to make true low-cost housing available to more people. I don't intend to say bricks and tin, nor so dense it becomes a large fire risk, but some simple allowances that would let people build theirselves a small place to call home without city regulators barring it. Perhaps this could help with the increasing amount of health issues occurring like typhus.

I’m not sure we even need to lower construction rules. It might be enough to just build dorm-room style (i.e. SROs) for affordable housing. The problem is people don’t want this kind of housing going in near them. If you thought opposition to “luxury condos” was bad, wait until you see the opposition to homeless shelters in SF.

That’s lowering the standard of housing.

Many of the fancy 4 story buildings in NYC housed like 10-20x more people in those kind of accommodations. Opening that door will recreate the situations that led people who could to flee the city again.

It likely can't. Structures of the sort you are describing only work decently in small villages where people all know each other, etc. They tend to not work in more developed areas with a higher population density and different social fabric.

If you are interested in addressing the housing aspect of this in the US, look into "Missing Middle Housing" and ways to promote more of it in your community. These are more affordable forms of housing that were common at one time in the US that have been largely zoned out of existence while we promote ever larger single-family detached homes and suburban sprawl.

That's the crux of the issue in the US. It doesn't have to be that way.

> Structures of the sort you are describing only work decently in small villages where people all know each other

This hasn't been my experience at all. I live in a developing country. I've also spent significant amount of time in two cities: one with a population of 13 million and one with a population over 1 million.

In both cases, there is lots and lots of housing just like the OP describes. It works fine in a big city. It doesn't require a village.

There's an old lady who lives down the street. Her "house" is about 1 meter by 3 meters and is two levels. She sleeps upstairs and cooks downstairs.

I seriously doubt that.

I would bet that you tend to see a lot more theft and other crime committed against people who have flimsy, unsecured shelter in more dense populations.

In developing countries where people routinely still use a field to relieve their bowels and bladder in spite of the fact that you have city-style density levels, women get routinely raped and murdered while trying to pee or poop. This is such a widespread and common phenomenon that if you search on the term "rape, murder and lack of a toilet" you will find no shortage of articles on the subject.

So I seriously doubt it works just fine. It probably doesn't work just fine.

Shanty towns slowly developing into established neighborhoods with permanent houses is the normal way cities have been built throughout history, and still dominates throughout the developing world. A significant proportion of all people alive today live in shanty towns.

Of course urban shanty towns can be dangerous and have plenty of problems. So do rural villages.

I would very much love, love, love to see US zoning regulations (etc) loosened up to allow for smaller spaces with fewer amenities.

But I am loathe to say "Yes" to shanty towns per se as a thing we allow in the US as official policy on city property.

But thanks for chiming in. Have an upvote.

People can't have locks on their doors if their home isn't built up to Western building codes?

The OP was talking about "I'm beginning to see a case for loosening some construction rules to make true low-cost housing available to more people". My actual real world experience living in a developing country that doesn't have US- or European-level building codes (which you dismissed from your comfortable arm chair in a rich country) agreed with the OP.

Building codes are nice but they are, to a large extent, a luxury good. Rich people/countries can afford them. Poor people can't. They act a barrier to entry for having a home by increasing the cost.

Take GFCI electrical outlets. A GFCI outlet costs about $10 at Walmart, whereas a non-GFCI outlet costs about $5 at Walmart. For the average American that's a trivial difference. For the lady down the street from me, that's an entire day's income. Upgrading all of the outlets in her small house would take a week's pay.

The introduction of GFCI outlet's saved ~600 lives a year in the US (population 300,000,000).

Would you give up a week's pay to avoid something that only has about a 0.002% chance of happening in your lifetime?

I guarantee you that not having GFCI outlets doesn't increase the chance of burglary or rape.....

The Great Fire of London occurred largely because thatched roofs and other building practices that worked fine in less dense living conditions spread the fire. Afterwards, they outlawed thatched roofs in city limits. You can still have them in the countryside in England.

The US has lots of room for lowering expectations and standards without moving to "shanty town" standards. For starters, we tend to expect a really large amount of space per person.

I think we very much need to pursue some means to lower our expectations in the US in some metrics. At the same time, I would like to see some safety and health standards upheld.

I did a paper once on wells causing arsenic poisoning in, I think, Bangladesh. The wells were dug by non profits from rich countries to resolve the issue of high rates of disease and death from consuming unsanitary surface waters. The wells were successful in terms of reducing death and short term acute disease. But some wells were also poisoning people.

They ultimately found that the poison wells went to a particular depth. Wells that were less deep or more deep did not contain arsenic.

Having arsenic-free wells was not a matter of cost per se. It was a matter of knowledge of the bedrock.

I'm interested in finding those answers that are the equivalent of drilling wells to the right depth so people can have disease-free water that also is not poisoned. I'm not interested in agreeing that either we can die quickly due to disease-ridden surface waters or die slowly to arsenic poisoning and, obviously, poor people would rather die slow than fast.

> The US has lots of room for lowering expectations and standards without moving to "shanty town" standards. For starters, we tend to expect a really large amount of space per person.

We tend to expect a bed for nearly every person too! Many people around the world share a single bed in a single room with no complaints.

> "... I've observed is that even the poorest people are still living in some sort of structure that is capable of providing a limited amount of protection from the elements, a small bit of privacy, and a place to come back to at night. Even in villages, these small homes have electricity and satellite TV. They're often built with low cost materials like bricks and tin roofs, but they allow people who can't afford a brick-and-mortor home the opportunity to have some stability in life."

The description above is more similar to "favela" type housing in developing countries: http://catcomm.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Provid%C3%AAnc...

The closest American analog would be like a Great Depression shantytown: https://imgs.6sqft.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/20042951/h...

The missing middle housing, per their website, is more formal (regulated) housing with condos/duplexes/etcs, whereas OP's 'third-world' informal housing is more like "let someone build themselves something better than a tent to live in". For example, like the dense favela district next to Rio in Brasil. Above all, no city in the US would be ok with having random individuals build a favela district of unregulated/unauthorized housing. Encampments of a couple hundred people create lots of uproar; there would be a total shitstorm of lawsuits and political panic if people in the US cities lived next to "shantytowns" like those in developing countries.

There is housing like that commenter describes in some of the largest and densest cities in the world, like Manila.

We can't because we put them there for this reason. Zoning regulations affecting occupation like needing to be connected to water, sewage and sometimes electrical grid instantly prevent most of this. We could give people land and a shelter; but they wouldn't be able to occupy them, and we are UNWILLING to change this.

Socioeconomic stuff in the developing world is something I think we can learn a lot from, but also has to be taken in context. There's one factor in particular that's just so different. In the US crime is extremely strongly connected to low income. Alongside the crime also comes drug abuse and other related issues. In many developing nations this is not such an issue.

Building regulations and 'NIMBY' in general are often, at least in part, proxies for this issue. It's not until you've lived in the developing world and seeing 6 figure condos next to rundown shanties that you start to see how things differ. At first it's a depressing sight, but then you eventually come to realize that it's a million times better than the self economic segregation that we resort to in the US as we try to collectively escape crime. In the developing world when you speak of a 'nice' area you are often talking overtly and only about the positives of an area, as opposed to any 'non-negative.' In the US when you speak of a 'nice' area there's an often undertone of 'Can I walk around in this area at 10pm without having to worry about falling victim to randomly targeted violent crime?'

In my opinion this is the true fundamental root of so many of our social and socioeconomic issues. If it could somehow be solved everything else would begin to fall in place with the slightest of effort.

> these small homes have electricity and satellite TV.

Not all of them. In many parts of Africa, electricity is still a luxury, as is having a supply of clean water nearby.

What African villagers have that American urban homeless people do not is access to open land where they can dig a latrine.

I saw the small homes with satellites in a Nepali village in the hills. It was very confusing at first to see people enjoying Indian TV shows in their homes (described above) and playing on their smartphones. I think they had a village latrine though.

Interlocking dry-stack (mortarless) compressed-earth blocks are actually very earthquake resistant as one-story buildings.

Dry-stack bricks and corrugated weathering-steel roofs wouldn't be all that bad, even in well-developed economies. And the bricks would be reusable when the original structure is no longer needed. Restack the brick house onto pallets and wrap in plastic film; no bulldozer necessary.

The alternating-cesspit outhouse is also an acceptable cheap sanitation solution. You don't really need to have the same high construction standards for rural poor counties as for rich urban counties. You're just preventing the former from using intermediate bootstrap technologies to reach a higher living standard.

In a lot of these sorts of situations land ownership is a bit different. In the UK (and I assume in the US) there just isn't anywhere you could construct something like that without being moved on.

Here in the UK, the major issue for home building seems to be less around the physical construction of houses (there are lots of low cost ways we can and do build), it's securing land to actually build on and that you can get planning permission for.

How much of that is because the inhabitants don't own the land their house is on? Each situation is different so I can't comment on what you saw, but in many cases the people don't own the land their house is on, thus they build cheap because when the police they can pack everything up and leave quickly are so are out almost nothing.

There are six times more empty homes in the US than there are homeless people. This is not a supply problem, it's a distribution problem.

I briefly lived next to a 'housing-first' building, and it became very clear why there was a 24/7 staff. At least once I week I encountered someone who needed to be helped home because they were disabled, lost, drunk or some combination thereof.

The staff basically filled in for the social support network that the residents didn't have. Residents may have been able to mostly get by on their own, but when they needed help, they really needed help. Living alone did not seem like a realistic option for the people I encountered.

Reading through my comment and the thread context again, it's hard to come to a single conclusion. It's complicated. There's many different situations that ultimately end up as homelessness, and the different situations require different interventions to fix.

From the SciAm article: “The hygiene situation is just horrendous” for people living on the streets, said Dr. Glenn Lopez, a physician with St. John’s Well Child & Family Center, who treats homeless patients in Los Angeles County. “It becomes just like a Third World environment where their human feces contaminate the areas where they are eating and sleeping.”

My son gave me an eye-opening book this Christmas: "Righteous Dopefiend" https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520254985/righteous-dopefie... "This powerful study immerses the reader in the world of homelessness and drug addiction in the contemporary United States. For over a decade Philippe Bourgois and Jeff Schonberg followed a social network of two dozen heroin injectors and crack smokers on the streets of San Francisco, accompanying them as they scrambled to generate income through burglary, panhandling, recycling, and day labor. Righteous Dopefiend interweaves stunning black-and-white photographs with vivid dialogue, detailed field notes, and critical theoretical analysis. Its gripping narrative develops a cast of characters around the themes of violence, race relations, sexuality, family trauma, embodied suffering, social inequality, and power relations. The result is a dispassionate chronicle of survival, loss, caring, and hope rooted in the addicts' determination to hang on for one more day and one more "fix" through a "moral economy of sharing" that precariously balances mutual solidarity and interpersonal betrayal."

Personally, I'm now convinced the most practical short term solution is for the city of SF to a) allow use of IV drugs without fear of arrest, and b) provide a clean, dry place to shoot up and nod out.

At the Hubert Humphrey Building dedication in Washington, D.C. on November 1, 1977, Humphrey spoke about the treatment of the weakest members of society as a reflection of its government: “the moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; those who are in the shadows of life; the sick, the needy and the handicapped.”

How come you don’t see homeless in Europe to the same degree like in the US?

Can’t speak for other countries, but in Germany there is a social security safety net that will pay rent up to a certain apartment size and just barely cover living expenses.

It doesn’t eliminate homelessness entirely, a lack of affordable housing in cities is a problem here just like anywhere else, but it makes it much less likely.

I know the narrative from some, especially in the US is a “why would anyone work when the state will pay for you”, but the standard of living you get in welfare is just basic survival and most if not all desire more than just that.

And there is of course mental health, a much lower rate of opioid prescriptions and therefore addictions, etc.

Hmmm...

Rates of homelessness: Germany - 0.50% USA - 0.17%

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_homeless_...

How homelessness is measured varies massively between countries. So Britain has an estimated 4751 people sleeping rough, but 307,000 people who are homeless, i.e. living in temporary accomodation, sofa surfing etc. The USA has an estimated 190,000 people sleeping rough (in cars, tents, on the streets) but only counts a total of 540,000 people as homeless. I don't know how the American figures are counted but the German ones are probably estimated in a similar way to the British ones because we live standardised statistics in the EU.

Surprisingly, there are no official statistics on homelessness in Germany. Any numbers you see are not from the federal government, but probably from BAGW, a charitable organization supporting the homeless.

Their estimate for 2016 is 860,000 homeless people (including approximately 440,000 homeless refugees). The number of unsheltered homeless people was estimated to be 52,000. [1]

[1] https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u...

That sounds about right for street homeless for a European nation. The UK figure in reality is probably about that as the way street homelessness is measured in the UK is set up to undercount.

The data might depend on how well it is gathered but it could be true: The mentioned safety-net is rather bureaucratic and if you don't comply with orders (like getting a job, showing up for dates) they can scrap it completly for up to 3 months - including rent! That causes homelessness and then there are lot of immigrants (not asylum-seekers) from other EU and non-EU countries that have no right to these payments.

The rising prices for rent in cities are maybe also an factor. Besides that most homeless have some psychatric issues like addiction or psychic-problems (not everyone of cource but it's a factor) and while there is treatment available it's often not accepted and not always successfull.

That does not surprise me. I didn't think Germany was that bad, but my anecdotal experience staying the night at an immigrant heavy area in Frankfurt was that they had quite a bit of what looked like drugged up and/or homeless people laying around. I didn't see any homeless camps, but this was also in the middle of the city. The strangest part was that just a mile up the road there were hundreds of well-off younger people partying into the wee hours, and quite a police presence near them. Didn't see a single cop in the homeless populated area.

I'd wager that those on those "safety net" programs with the allowance of an apartment, etc, are still technically considered homeless and counted into those statistics.

I'd be curious to know for sure. It certainly sounds like the suffering and shame would be reduced, and for someone truly down on their luck it would make it easier to get back into working and life in general if you have an address to point to. Also, it reduces those sanitary problems.

I also wonder for how long the average person is homeless in Germany.

This is a good breakdown of how incompatible homelessness statistics are. Really that Wikipedia table is hugely misleading https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...

Interesting. The difference in homelessness between EU and US may just be perception and not reality?

Most countries, and for that matter most urban areas in the US, routinely force the homeless off the streets pretty systematically.

California (and especially the Bay Area) get a lot of criticism for their homelessness not because SF is especially cruel to the homelessness, but because in the Bay Area it’s not generally considered acceptable to sweep the homeless out of town.

For instance, New York City (at least in Manhattan) was aggressive for many decades about rounding up the homeless and forcing them out of town.

This doesn’t mean the Bay Area is doing a good job with homelessness, the root of US urban homelessness does genuinely seem to be a combination of missing middle housing and a shortage of affordable and accessible mental/physical health care.

But the mere presence of visible homelessness is more about (direct) police tolerance, and (indirect) municipal political tolerance for visible homelessness.

Housing market in any major city in most developed EU countries is notoriously inaccessible and expensive, while the media PR of their social systems promise the moon.

Look at Japan with 0.0039%, I wonder what they’re doing.

>> And there is of course mental health

Mental health is THE key issue of the homeless population in Germany. I know some social workers who work with the homeless at the train station in my home town. Its frustrating to see how often these people are ignored with an attitude of "... ahh gee, its sad but what can you do?". There is a basic social security safety net, but if you are unable to even fill out a basic form -- let alone be prepared to fill it out in the first place, because THEY are our to poison you[1], no help that is given to you can help you.

This is also the issue I have with "Basic Income". No form of "Basic Income" will help those people, because they don't need money but treatment and some semblance of dignity in their life -- no basic income can give you that.

[1]: This is not an unusual sad story. Untreated and/or undiagnosed paranoid schizophrenia is pretty common on the street.

> because THEY are our to poison you[1], no help that is given to you can help you.

> Untreated and/orundiagnosed paranoid schizophrenia is pretty common on the street.

There is nothing paranoid in it. Imagine being homeless while being abused and threatened probably multiple times. What guarantee one have that the food pieces given by passerby or anyone generally are good to eat?

The relevant German policy is one of massive housebuilding. For decades they have had policies and programs to just build a ton of housing, because that depresses wage inflation pressure, which is important for their export economy. Building homes also happens to be a good idea for your citizens!

California, meanwhile, has recently hit an all-time low in home construction and the 2018 "boom" in housing starts was lower per-capita than any pre-1980 housing "bust".

Because Europe has a social safety net. In Germany, for example, if you are a homeless German citizen, the government will provide you with an apartment which includes running water, internet, television, and a refrigerator, and they will give you a small allowance of spending money.

If you want to see massive homeless populations in Europe, go to Brussels.

There are very similar programs for the homeless in many of the cities with the worst homeless population, including SF. The helpful resources are there for people.

Most of the homeless in these areas just don't make use of these programs because of drug addictions and/or mental illness. It's a sad state, but it's not what you describe.

I can only speak as a tourist, but if you’re out in the wee hours of the morning in London you can see plenty of folks sleeping on the street. I’m assuming that come 6am or something they’re told to move along.

If your experience with the US is mainly restricted to the west coast (and especially the SF Bay Area), then you probably overestimate how many homeless people there are in the US as a whole. Homeless people are dramatically more common on the west coast than they are anywhere else in the country.

I'd be quite interested to see statistics about this, because homeless people are definitely not rare in Western Europe, and I would have though the proportion is at least similar to the US.

Socialism.

Taxes are used to pay for things like housing assistance, welfare, health care, and so forth. Also, "minimum wages" are higher.

In other words: take away soap + water + disposal of you-know-what and...

Yet another reason to support higher taxes and more wealth redistribution.

Really, are you serious? I can't tell.

I'm generally liberal, but I have absolutely 0 confidence that the asinine state and local governments whose policies led to this condition, would be skilled even more to get us out of it if we just gave them more money.

You don't think that the ineptitude / conflicts of the sort that prevent housing construction and neighborhood change would similarly infect any decision on who to tax, how to distribute it? While creating yet another new CA state agency to administer it? How many bandaids do you want to apply?

Hm?

There's some evidence smarter spending helps.

https://www.npr.org/2015/12/10/459100751/utah-reduced-chroni...

The trick is how to get smart people interested in government jobs.

I once overheard actual-employees of the government discussing the possibility of hiring the current contractor-employee workers as actual-employees:

"We couldn't pay them half of what they're making now, and the person with ten years of experience--experience specifically in the exact job we'd be hiring for, the guy actually doing the work right now--wouldn't even be higher than the third page of the interview list."

Smart people are interested in interesting jobs. The government does not want to hire them, in accordance with its own laws. Those people do exactly the same jobs for a contractor company, and then the government hires the contractor, because they are legislatively, executively, and economically barred from hiring the best-qualified personnel directly.

This setup tends to prevent anyone that has good ideas, and anyone with any control over government budget items, from ever coming into direct contact with one another.

I don't think it's a setup that can be fixed with better advertising.

>> wouldn't even be higher than the third page of the interview list."

Does this mean the first two pages are filled with even better people? Or that the selection process for a government job is somehow favoring people who are less qualified in practice but more qualified academically?

> Does this mean the first two pages are filled with even better people?

In many public sector jobs, it would mean the top ranks of hiring lists are filled with preference-category candidates, the most common of which (and the one with strongest preference boost in most systems) is veterans preference.

Exactly this.

And this particular office was required to interview candidates in the order they appeared on the candidate list.

They can't get rid of the veteran's preference, either, because the military-industrial complex is a massive jobs program for people who have 20 years of experience with skills that are juuust short of entirely worthless outside of the military or military-associated companies. If you're a maintenance mechanic for a model of aircraft that only one government flies, and it has no civilian version....

Then it's time to use the preference points.

Solving the problem that military pay and post-service direct benefits (retirement pay, etc.) inadequately compensates for opportunity cost by making hiring in the rest of government (states as well as federal) less efficient rather than addressing it more directly seems to be a decidedly overcomplicated and suboptimal solution.

Not vilifying public sector might be a good start.

Are Californian "asinine state and local governments" made up of Californians? Do they need some other state or country to help them out with governing?

> I'm generally liberal

I don't think liberal means what you think it means. Liberals are fiscally right-of-center capitalists.

You can be socially liberal while being fiscally conservative (i.e., fiscally right-of-center capitalist).

That's what liberal typically means. The OP said "I'm a liberal BUT" and then went on to state a liberal view.

Liberal != leftist.

Homelessness and the problems that go along with it is only a serious problem in certain cities on the west coast.

Don't get me wrong, every city has some homeless but cities in the rest of the country seem to be able to keep the problem at bay without increased "wealth redistribution", many of those cities even exist in states with far less "wealth redistribution" than the cities that have the biggest homeless problems. I see no indication that increased wealth distribution will fix the problem. There does not seem to be any substantial correlation.

I think the problem lies elsewhere. Problems like this don't tend to have single sources and single solutions anyway.

So the big difference in east coast vs west coast is the percent of unsheltered people. If you disregard whether people have shelter, the homeless rates are pretty similar between coasts.

One of the main problems is CA local governments are severely restricted from raising revenue. Property taxes are capped at 1% of assessed value, and assessed value is capped from raising faster than inflation. Other taxes require a 2/3 vote in order to pass. This means city governments are unable to capture a lot of the wealth increases that are leading to displacement among low income people.

This is a tough problem to fix, but it requires both money and a will to tolerate low income people in our neighborhoods.

Yet California has the highest overall taxation in the country (income, property, sales, capital gains, gas). So there is plenty of money being collected by the government. If the homelessness requires money as a solution, then the money is already there. It is an allocation problem.

> Don't get me wrong, every city has some homeless but cities in the rest of the country seem to be able to keep the problem at bay without increased wealth distribution.

I'd imagine part of that is the weather; you can't live outdoors year-round in, say, Maine. Sometimes they're just shipping the problem elsewhere, too.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/dec/...

Once you're homeless your chances of scraping up the $100+ for a bus ticket across the country are basically 0. When your homeless your biggest asset is your local knowledge, where you can sleep, where you can work as a day laborer for a few bucks, etc, etc. and you'd be giving that up by relocating. Hence most homeless people do not relocate. The homeless guy in Bangor is going to find somewhere he can sleep inside.

> Once you're homeless your chances of scraping up the $100+ for a bus ticket across the country are basically 0.

Read the article I linked. Quite a few cities are happy to subsidize such a bus ticket, as you become someone else's problem.

The number of people being subsidized is not that large. I'd wager that it's aproximatly made up for by non-homeless people who leave the destination states and then advocate for public policy that exacerbates the homelessness problem in their new cities/states. The spread of severe homelessness problems (i.e. the difference between homelessness in Baltimore and homelessness in SF) northward up the west coast but lagging CA's level of homelessness by a couple years seems to support my hypothesis.

Yes because it's the regions fault people don't want to freeze to death on a sidewalk in Minnesota.

The first thing I would do if it looked like sleeping on the street was my only option is start walking south.

The problem is wealth disparity; not drugs, not geography, not 'life-style', not 'poor choices'. These "certain cities" on the West coast are prime examples of the wealth gap, people are homeless because they can't afford to live there. Nothing more. The wealth-gap is CAUSING the problem.

The wealth gap was less at the start of the French Revolution then it is now.

Most homeless have mental issues. Minnesota has a good welfare system. However the cold in MN means that those who generally don't trust government (meaning that they will run away from any help the government tries to give unless restrained in an often inhuman way) either freeze to death or make their way south. Thus the poor in MN have a house of some sort. There are a few who migrate north for the summer and back south for winter.

No amount of safety net helps when your mental illness makes escaping the notice of the safety net a priority. It is a hard problem and I don't think anyone has a good solution.

>The problem is wealth disparity; not drugs, not geography, not 'life-style', not 'poor choices'.

I just don't think so. Anybody can get a bad break and end up homeless, I agree. But for long-term multi-year/multi-decade homelessness, mental illness and alcohol+drug abuse has to be a key component. Having lived in a big city with a major homeless problem, you can't ignore those factors because you see it right in front of you every day. It feels like gas-lighting to claim otherwise.

East coast cities don't have as many homeless as West coast for a single reason. Weather. Pretending like there's something inherently wrong with West coast cities is disingenuous. You even have cities bussing them out to SF. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/dec/...

Even on the west coast there is plenty money allocated for fighting homelessness. The problem is that long-term chronic homelessness almost always results from either mental illness and/or drug abuse.

Forcible eviction or institutionalization always leads to legal battles with activists leading to municipal governments simply doing nothing.

We've tried that a lot. Especially in very liberal California cities. Why would next time work any better?

As a follow-up question, for whatever your answer is, why can't we try that now with the amount of money already dedicated to the problem to see if it helps?

(It's not really a money problem at this point.)

makes sense to just give them free houses

Clearly the solution here is to reduce the unsanitary living conditions is to eliminate homelessness. The easiest way to do that is to close the gap between the wealth gap between the richest and the poorest, and the easiest way to do that is to let the homeless die. As diseases become worse, those able to afford healthcare will live, and those unable to (the "potential homeless") will start to die in droves. Of course, we'll spend a bit more on cremations, but perhaps we can get a bulk discount? We'll have people look into that. All measures state that if the least wealthy people simply stopped being there at all, we'd be closer as a society to our ideals by every quantifiable metric. So hats off to typhus, and cholera, and dysentery, for existing in 2019 and doing what we always wanted to happen but haven't got the stomach to do ourselves.

>let the homeless die

This is immoral and thus not a potential solution, full stop. Others must be considered instead.

The GP comment was satire, modeled after Jonathan Swift:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal

I'm about 90% convinced that you're correct, and about 10% terrified that you're not.

You may find some comfort in the fact that the proposed solution wouldn't actually work. Humans are extraordinarily robust creatures. Our best efforts at exterminating them, even using state-of-the-art technology on industrial scales, have, for better or worse, barely made a dent in the population.

In this thread: zero mentions of the word capitalism.

Which is very much like a conference about pollution that lacks any mention of industrial production.

Because capitalism has nothing to do with the issue at hand.

'Capitalism' is also a misnomer in this context. We live in a market-based economy with a social safety net and democratic government. This is true whether you are talking about United States, Canada, Germany or France. Our governments have all the legal and revenue-generating tools they need to enact any policy they wish.

Finally, I'm not sure what alternative you're advocating for. Destroying our current system to adopt a Soviet-style, or Cuban-style, or Venezuelan-style socialism would be a disaster. Is that your solution?

>Because capitalism has nothing to do with the issue at hand.

Your position is that the unavailability of housing to those suffering diseases tied directly to their being unable to pay market price for housing somehow has nothing to do with the prevailing economic arrangement that utterly defines the housing market these persons cannot participate in. They don't have and cannot borrow capital, but their suffering "has nothing to do with" the prevailing system that revolves around / is animated by nothing but...capital? Total nonsense.

> Our governments have all the legal and revenue-generating tools they need to enact any policy they wish.

Your position is that concentrations of wealth -- such wealth's tangible assets dominated by holdings of real estate -- do not overwhelmingly divert the attention, priorities, electoral outcomes and revenues of government to their own ends at the explicit costs of the safety net. You seem to believe government does not sell political results exclusively to persons who can pay for those results. Again: total nonsense.

> Finally, I'm not sure what alternative you're advocating for

I'm advocating for merely mentioning capitalism in the discussion! And that much is too much, apparently.

I suggest you examine your own indoctrination in this economic arrangement if it is so sensitive that it cannot abide even its naming when discussing the intensification of suffering caused by lack of capital under the system that is exactly centered on capital.

>Your position is that the unavailability of housing to those suffering diseases tied directly to their being unable to pay market price for housing somehow has nothing to do with the prevailing economic arrangement that utterly defines the housing market these persons cannot participate in.

I'm not claiming that at all. In fact, I disagree with that. In this topic I've stated that chronic long-term homelessness is largely the result of mental illness and drug abuse. Those issues have different solutions than lack of income or capital or whatever you're trying push.

>They don't have and cannot borrow capital

We live in a democratic, regulated market economy with a social safety net. You're arguing a straw man when you imply we live in some sort of Randian/Libertarian free market capitalist system. We don't. Social welfare policies are tools already used by modern governments.

>I'm advocating for merely mentioning capitalism in the discussion!

To what end? If you have specific policy suggestions, then argue them. If you want to argue for a wholesale change to some other socio-economic system then at least argue for that. As it stands, I'm not sure what a straw-man lob at our current system accomplishes besides FUD.

> I'm not claiming that at all.

You absolutely did. In fact, you plainly used the phrase "nothing to do with". I'm sorry, but words mean things.

>In this topic I've stated that chronic long-term homelessness is largely the result of mental illness and drug abuse.

Then I am here to tell you that you have it perfectly backwards. What I've learned from working with the persons who make up the growing tent settlements in my giant city is that the perfect reverse is true: overwhelmingly, lack of capital triggers evictions, which triggers homelessness, and homelessness triggers mental illness, criminality and drug abuse. Exceptions to this pattern exist, but nowhere nearly in sufficient numbers to derail the characterization.

>You're arguing a straw man when you imply we live in some sort of Randian/Libertarian free market capitalist system. We don't. Social welfare policies are tools already used by modern governments.

I repeat: Your position is that concentrations of wealth -- such wealth's tangible assets dominated by holdings of real estate -- do not overwhelmingly divert the attention, priorities, electoral outcomes and revenues of government to their own ends at the explicit costs of the safety net. You seem to believe government does not sell political results exclusively to persons who can pay for those results...with capital. Again: total nonsense.

I've hung around with way too many homeless people who were working three to five years ago and were laid off as an effect of nothing but their employers' capital flight for me to fail to notice that capital allocation is the primary catalyst in this suffering.

>lob at our current system accomplishes besides FUD.

Don't worry about what I'm accomplishing; through your response, I've already demonstrated that the role of capitalism in human suffering is commonly and literally a taboo to discuss. Someone, maybe even you, although it need not be, will notice this when they hadn't before. That is a good thing.

>You absolutely did. In fact, you plainly used the phrase "nothing to do with". I'm sorry, but words mean things.

Yes. Words mean things. You can't distort definitions to suit your argument. It doesn't work that way.

But I'm fair minded. Let me qualify my statement to your satisfaction: "Your grossly dishonest distortion driven by some warped ideology is not useful in either diagnosing the homeless problem, nor coming up with a solution". That is what I wanted to convey to you. I hope that clears it up.

>I repeat: Your position is that concentrations of wealth ...

You can warp, distort and repeat as much as you want. That is not my position.

>I've hung around with way too many homeless people who were working three to five years ago

We both know you haven't. You wish you had, but you haven't. You come off like a disaffected college student who is really excited about Marx.

>Don't worry about what I'm accomplishing

The point is, I wish you were honest. If you're trying to argue for the replacement of the current soci-economic system, then argue it, instead of falling back on the eye-rolling "I'm just asking questions ... for a friend" cliche.

Yeah, if I had nothing to counter with on the topic and had my own indoctrination demonstrated so clearly, I might go ad hominem too.

Let me try another way.

I think you have to find a way to manage your expectations in these discussions. For example, if the discussion centers around the problem of library fines, suggesting to overhaul the entire socio-economic system to solve it is not rational. In the same vein, the problem of homelessness in certain urban areas does not lend itself to a solution based on destroying the entire system. I understand you're very excited about Marx and every issue is just another entry to an ideological debate of communism vs capitalism that you want to have, but it tends to not be very productive and most will just ignore it.

I know you feel slighted that I haven't answered your objections, but honest to God, I have no idea what specifics to answer to. You view our modern society through a specific ideological lens and you can't just expect others to take on your ideological assumptions. Here's an example of something you argued: "Your position is that the unavailability of housing to those suffering diseases tied directly to their being unable to pay market price for housing somehow has nothing to do with the prevailing economic arrangement that utterly defines the housing market these persons cannot participate in."

To that, I can only say the following:

1) You're putting words in my mouth, that isn't my position.

2) That isn't the system we live in. We don't live in a purely capitalist system where everything is determined by the cold hand of the market. We live in a market-based economy, with a social welfare state. We spend inordinate amount of money on providing a safety net, from government programs to grants and subsidies. Government social spending is also complemented by non-profits, private charities, and churches. So no, not having an income to pay rent does not imply you're going to be homeless.

3) Lack of income isn't what is driving homelessness. Chronic homelessness is driven by drug and alcohol abuse, and mental illness. That is a fundamentally different problem, requiring a fundamentally different approach for a solution. Communist regimes (and I grew up in the Soviet Block)side-stepped this issue because they would simply forcibly institutionalize a mentally ill person found living on the street. I actually think that this is the correct solution in this case as well.

So you tell me, given all that, how do I argue with you? What kind of an argument do you expect from me, given that I don't share your ideology.

>Let me try another way.

Okay, no more weak, baseless and condescending ad hominem?

> I understand you're very excited about Marx > I know you feel slighted

That didn't last long.

You ask: how do we argue? We don't, because you've already performed your function.

Recall why you engaged: I noticed that despite the topic's plainly economic roots in housing markets, literally nobody in the thread was talking about the dominant economic system, prompting you to contribute the idea that capitalism somehow bears no responsibilities for what happens to the steadily growing population of persons who specifically lack the capital to pay for shelter under its system.

Effectively, you believe nobody actually lacks the protections of having capital under capitalism even when they don't have capital. That is a howling absurdity on its face, available for all to see, similar to a turd worn as a hat.

I thank you for your help in demonstrating my point: indoctrination tends to make people believe absurdities and enforce taboos to suppress examination.

Have a good weekend!

Can't be, Hans Rosling and Steven Pinker had all the good stats for how it's all ever more perfect in this best of all worlds...

Predictable result of modern municipal government acceptance of homeless encampments. If you try to prune a tree on your front yard you'll need 17 approvals before you can even think about touching shears, but pitch a tent in the middle of the sidewalk and nobody will ever bother you.

I doubt homeless people would agree with the assertion that "nobody will ever bother you".

It was colloquial phrasing. The existence of permanent encampments and even tents on pedestrian walkways (experienced in San Fran, LA and Toronto) shows me that municipal governments have abrogated any semblance of enforcement of their own by-laws.

I'm curious as to why you are so wrapped up in law enforcement, and not in common decency. Isn't the issue that these cities don't house their homeless? If removed from the sidewalk, where would these people go? Fixing this problem starts with humanizing the homeless and proposing coherent solutions, not complaining about the lack of law enforcement.

>I'm curious as to why you are so wrapped up in law enforcement, and not in common decency

That's a fair interpretation based on my phrasing, but I would like to further qualify my point that outside of enforcing bylaws, it is also the decent and moral thing for local governments not to allow people with mental illness and drug problems to languish in the streets, tents and encampments.

>Fixing this problem starts with humanizing the homeless and proposing coherent solutions

The problem is that activists have completely hijacked policy. Attempting to institutionalize a homeless person with severe mental illness leads to boycotts, lawsuits and FUD from activists. It has gotten to the point that even immediate families cannot take those individuals off the streets and into institutional care.

I'm not going to respond to these arguments because you clearly are continuing to dehumanize homeless people, and thus are arguing in what I would consider bad faith.

I will challenge you to think a bit outside of your current paradigms and realize that there is more to this than the solutions you have defined. We can do more as a society than just enforcing bylaws and institutionalizing the people at the margins. I agree that those solutions don't work, but then throwing up your hands and blaming everyone else might not be the solution. Do you want to complain, or do you want an equitable and just society for everyone who lives in it? Do you want to be right, or do you want the homeless to be housed?

>because you clearly are continuing to dehumanize homeless people

That is a patently unfair statement and a gross mischaracterization of what I wrote. At no point did I even imply something of the sort.

>I will challenge you to think a bit outside of your current paradigms

Fair. And I challenge you to think a bit outside of YOUR current paradigms.

The reality is that we are more OK with leaving our most vulnerable people to languish in the streets in filthy encampments than providing them with institutional care and I don't think that's moral.

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