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Comment by sha256sum | Hacker News Reader

> Thieves are pilfering railroad cars in a crime that harks back to the days of horseback-riding bandits, but is fueled by a host of modern realities, including the rise of e-commerce and Southern California’s role as a hub for the movement of goods.

> Union Pacific reported what it claimed was a 160% increase since December 2020 in thefts along the railroad tracks in L.A. County

Both e-commerce and LA’s status as a hub are established. So why the increase now? I didn’t see a mention of economic realities driving crime, aside from the increased presence of homeless camps, such as skyrocketing costs of everything.

Means: your new home in California being a tent or car by the railway tracks

Motive: money.

Opportunity: unguarded rails and bottlenecked supply chain

America’s problems, especially the tragic amount of homelessness in CA, are becoming a lot harder to hide.

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Organized crime has been taking advantage of an opportunity created by rising e commerce and a DA office that has been unwilling to prosecute a lot of petty crimes:

"In a letter to Dist. Atty. George Gascón, Union Pacific’s Guerrero estimated that more than 100 people have been arrested but they “boast to our officers that charges will be pled down.” "

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-01-16/rail-the...

Could it be a problem with policies rather than the country's structural failure you imply?

LA alone dedicated close to $1B to fight homelessness in 2021! [1]

[1] https://www.npr.org/2021/04/20/989015659/la-dedicates-1-bill...

"SCOTT: Yeah. Well, you know, it's not just an issue of money; it's also about spending it well. I've talked to many homeless advocates who have been in this world for decades who argue that city officials misspending, even wasting, resources that they do have over the years is a big part of what has gotten LA to this point, with more than 40,000 people homeless on its streets."

at $25'000 per capita we should be seeing some improvements, but it's hard to know how much of that has disappeared to 'administration fees'. Also the article talks about how the main push for this was creation of affordable housing, that has a long lead time and with material shortages I would be surprised to find any new units built last year.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8WGjCeFyr1g

Louis Rossman has a lot of videos on this in New York, essentially 50,000$ a year for tiny little slumlord hovels run by people with connections. More money isn't what's needed, it's for people who actually care to be spending it instead of politicians.

Original idea: fire all the administrators and use the money they were paid for year after year to tackle a problem they did not resolve to said homeless, just the same way: 1 cheque every 2 weeks :)

$1B doesn't sound like a very large number. Google says there's 63,706 homeless.

If LA for example is needing to build new low income housing for even a small part of that 63k number, well with spiking construction and land costs, that's going to be well more than $1B

That's more than 15k per person per year. When your homelessness program is spending close to what a basic income for said people would cost without making a dent, you start wondering if your institutions are broken.

This would be less per month than the median rent in LA.

If one disbursed all of it it would probably not really be enough for housing, let alone the other costs of living, and there'd be $0 for any sort of supportive programs whatsoever.

It's clearly not enough money.

I’m implying that people don’t resort to theft when they can afford food, housing, medical care, and that the solution is probably a lot more complex than just throwing money at one symptom of deeper problems.

That is not true. The motives for theft are varied. Even wealthy people will steal.

At a minimum the entire idea of "white collar crime" disproves the notion that people don't steal once they hit subsistence.

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