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Comment by jbob2000 | Hacker News Reader

jbob2000

This is what’s keeping me living at home with my parents. I tried to move out a few years ago, found an apartment that was $1,100 a month and plenty of parking.

6 months after moving in, after having multiple bad experiences with tenants, I realized I moved in to a “subsidized housing” apartment. There was lots of parking available because 90% of the tenants weren’t allowed to drive.

It hurts to work all day to pay for stuff, only to come home to half your neighbors lazing about drunk and stoned getting a free ride. It fucking sucks, I could never escape the thought that I could just quit my job and smoke weed all day and live pretty much the same as I was.

If I wanted to live in a condo, which doesn’t have subsidized housing, I’d have to pay rents upwards of $2,200. So I moved back in with my folks until I can buy something.

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>>It hurts to work all day to pay for stuff, only to come home to half your neighbors lazing about drunk and stoned getting a free ride. It fucking sucks, I could never escape the thought that I could just quit my job and smoke weed all day and live pretty much the same as I was.

I know people who work back breaking low-income jobs and get very angry seeing people on government assistance sitting around all day getting high with their friends.

I think the position of the homeless activists: of giving people with no life skills and no discipline, and who habitually abuse drugs, no-strings-attached taxpayer aid, is totally immoral and irresponsible. It's the worse example of short-sighted unthinking compassion and/or virtue-signalling.

At the very least, drug addicts who've lost the ability to support themselves should be committed to a drug rehab center. In the past the lost souls were also enrolled in work houses. Those on public aid doing some work should be another minimum requirement for any welfare system. The nature of the work can be targeted to their intellectual and physical capabilities, but they should be required to do some kind of work if they're going to receive public support.

Anyway, demanding accountability from welfare recipients is not going to win you any elections - people would rather elect someone with compassion and a terrible plan for governance than elect someone with a logically coherent governance plan who might not have compassion - so the problem will just get worse.

> At the very least, drug addicts who've lost the ability to support themselves should be committed to a drug rehab center.

Absent a desire to quit, rehab can't work. At that point, it's just a private prison with wallpaper.

The desire to quit can be shaped by the incentives society creates. If using drugs and partying with fellow drug-using friends means continually being committed to three month stints in rehab, it might encourage that party to get out of that lifestyle.

Also, some people may decide to quit once they've been forced to stop doing drugs for a few months, because it results in lessened chemical dependency, and some time for the parts of their brain damaged from the drug-use to recover, which helps increase self-control.

We forcibly prevent children from engaging in self-destructive behaviour, because sometimes they need someone who knows better to control them, until they mature and do know better. Just because someone turns 18, doesn't always mean this stops applying. In the case of someone habitually using hard drugs, I think a strong argument can be made that it still applies because they lack the maturity and self-control to make these decisions for themselves.

Good luck. Hope you get there soon.

Why didn't you?

> It hurts to work all day to pay for stuff, only to come home to half your neighbors lazing about drunk and stoned getting a free ride.

I hear this all the time - yet I don't see many people particularly keen on dropping out, and getting onto the free ride bus.

One of the problems with that free ride bus is that it doesn't go to great places. It didn't sound like you were looking forward to the prospect of living in subsidized housing for the rest of your life very much.

> yet I don't see many people particularly keen on dropping out

Just open your eyes. Look around Seattle, or San Francisco, or Los Angeles, or San Diego or any other city with mild weather, lenient law enforcement, and generous welfare benefits. The number of homeless and housed "drop outs" is astonishing.

If you think 'dropping out' and living a homeless life is in any way preferable to the alternatives, I'd recommend spending a few days panhandling, and a few nights in a homeless shelter.

I have a feeling that you'll change your tune pretty quick after that. You'll quickly realize how dehumanizing it is to be in that position.

It's not. It only looks like a large number because they are all crammed into a small public space and not hidden inside condos and houses.

We have more of an epidemic of rich people squatting in hundreds of miles of waterfront property and ruining shoreline access for the public.

Wrong.

Alameda County, 43% increase in homeless population in two years.

San Francisco, 17% increase.

Orange County, 42% increase.

Kern County, 50% increase.

In Seattle/King County, 28% increase in the chronically homeless population from 2017 to 2018.

  I don't see many people particularly
  keen on dropping out, and getting
  onto the free ride bus.

I don't either - but maybe those people just don't hang out on Hacker News.

> I don't see many people particularly keen on dropping out, and getting onto the free ride bus.

This isn't a plan of action that someone is likely going to advertise.

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