Tensions with “houseless residents” escalating in Portland
wweek.com
wweek.com
The scare quotes around "houseless residents" are stupid. They live in Portland and aren't housed. It's the best descriptor.
The first level of information is the obvious one: an adjective phrase that describes a homeless person.
The second level of information is about the writer: it conveys the writer’s support for a political position, and an ideological in-group to which the writer claims membership.
The “scare quotes” here are used to convey that the author does not subscribe to the underlying political position that the phrase communicates; rather, they’re quoting someone else’s usage.
This is correct.
No, it's not.
Submitting the original article titles on HN is not making a political statement, it's the rules. Since it's the rules, it's not necessary to add one's own scare quotes - in fact that's the editorializing the rules tell you not to do:
"Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
In this case, the original title is
"Tires Slashed, Mirrors Shattered Along Laurelhurst Street Where Tensions Between Neighbors and Houseless Residents Continue to Escalate"
That exceeds the maximum limit on HN, but can be trimmed without the scare-quotes editorialization. (In fact, the scare quotes take away 2 characters that could otherwise be well-utilized.)
> Often the people voting for policies that allow urban camping are the people who have private security and aren’t exposed to the effects.
The vast majority of voters do not have "private security" - certainly there are not enough with it to influence any election.
> The people voting out progressive DAs are the people most affected which happen to be the poorer neighborhoods and don’t have private security.
Nope, it is the most affluent neighborhoods that are voting for these recalls. [0] Poorer neighborhoods do not like crime, but they also have direct interactions with the criminal justice system and are generally skeptical of "broken-windows" style policing as compared to "stop shootings" style policing.
[0]: https://www.sfchronicle.com/election/article/These-were-the-...
>"The PVI index shows that neighborhoods in the city’s core — the Haight, the Mission and Bernal Heights — tend to vote more progressively than those on its outer rim, like Lake Merced, Visitacion Valley and the Marina.
>These outer-core neighborhoods, which voted against Boudin in 2019, also voted against him on Tuesday. But this time, they were joined by several neighborhoods that voted for Boudin in 2019, including the Bayview, the Tenderloin and the Richmond."
I’m not trying to attack Portland, I don’t know much about it.
Ten years ago, many parts of many coastal cities would qualify. Being in the Bay Area, I know San Jose, Union City, Newark, Fremont, Dublin, Livermore, and Walnut Creek homes were all affordable on working class Bay Area wages. Those days are gone. I'm bitter about most of my friends being unable to afford a middle class life here. However, they're mostly the same people that complain about any new construction and homes, so it's a bit self-inflicted.
It is a bit self-inflicted, but having lived in cities my whole life you can't ignore the demand side of the story.
White flight has completely reversed itself in the last 15 years and urban areas are now incredibly popular destinations for millennial aged white people who grew up in suburbs in a way that just wasn't the case before. Even with a ton of building, it is hard to keep up with the demand boost.