Hacker News Reader

Comment by CPLX | Hacker News Reader

When people write responses like this I wonder if they’ve ever been to New York City. We don’t really have comparable problems.

For me visiting LA, SF or Seattle is jaw dropping. I totally reject this idea that these situations are just inevitable.

View on HN

I suspect you aren't familiar with NYC from the 70s through the mid 90s. It was as bad then as SF is now. Giuliani completely transformed Manhattan and made the streets and parks usable again, and they stayed that way for a while. It's going downhill fast, though. Penn Station and Port Authority are turning into shooting galleries again, there are encampments growing, bodily waste on the sidewalks, and plenty of harassment. Give it another few years of hands-off policies and it'll be as bad as the west coast cities.

Or Tokyo, for that matter. That's about as urban as you can get on Earth, with none of the 'grittiness' that so many West coast city-dwellers seem to think is inherent to cities. And in a comparable democracy, no less.

This is a pretty important point. Everything wrong with big American cities is normalized. If you don't like it, you're told to just go to the suburb. But it's all solvable and are usually consequences of policies as well as cultural problems. Many cities in the world just don't have these problems.

Suburbs are how America does segregation and separate but equal legally. We have “cities” next to major urban centers that can keep all their taxes dollars locally and shift their problems to urban centers. If you live in a nice neighborhood in the city of Seattle a good chunk of your money goes to fund poor parts of town and the homeless industry. Half a mile away the neighboring town keeps all its money for the local school and sends its homeless people to Seattle.

I feel the same way about Toronto. Over triple the population of SF or Seattle, yet the problems I see described in this article are almost unthinkable here.

Yeah, because it gets cold in the winter in NY. Simple as that. You can't support the year round homeless population like the west coast.

That's just objectively wrong. NYC has a higher homeless population both in sheer volume and per 100,000 people. So what is NYC doing to stop the growth of their homeless population beyond making it out of sight and out of mind?

If their homeless population is far less dangerous and destructive to the lives of all the other citizens that live there, then they're doing _something_ right, even if their homeless population is somewhat bigger per capita.

NYC has a right to shelter law. They also have enforcement of basic public space issues like camping and being in parks overnight, or petty street crime.

Those two things together are a good starting point for discussion.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com