Los Angeles may force hotels to house the homeless
forbes.com
forbes.com
There are probably a lot of homeless people who could benefit from this and wouldn’t cause issues for the hotels. On the other hand, there is also a portion of the population that will harass guests, wreck rooms, and cause other problems. I wonder what the vetting process on who gets room through this initiative looks like.
Every participating hotel reported substantially above-average damage to hotel property (meaning, above the normal damage caused by non-homeless hotel guests), most participating hotels reported bed bug infestations that cost tens of thousands to eliminate. That doesn't include the dozens of suicides, murders, and rapes that took place at participating hotels.
TLDR: it turns out that housing isn't actually the solution to homelessness, because for most of LA's homeless, homelessness is just a symptom of untreated mental illness or uncontrolled drug use.
The reason we don't house the homeless is a percentage of them destroy whatever is given to them. So, use the treatment process to get them well first.
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/jun/03/its-a-miracle...
Decent, long-term medical facilities.
The problem is that solution is expensive. It's way cheaper to simply move the problem somewhere else (jail, different neighborhood, etc.) than fix it.
In addition, it has odd failure modes. You want to create a cluster of people to amortize the healthcare costs. However, your treatment options generally want your homeless to be separated as much as possible. The standard treatment for drug addiction generally starts by separating the patient from those who also do drugs or who provide access to drugs, for example.
Stable independent living only matters once a person is sober and sane enough to use it.
It doesn't look like it's happening yet:
> After a day of hearings, the Council, perhaps swayed by a huge hotel industry turnout, voted down the initiative. But the Council then voted 12-0 to put the initiative, which had 126,000 signatures, on the ballot for March 2024.
Is this ballot aimed at voters, or is it a ballot aimed at city council members? And pardon my cynicism but that's really far away, it's enough time for the hotel industry mentioned above to sway the people involved to vote against it, no?
What you’re referring to is that fact that states like California push for major federal projects that are inevitably unaffordable by lower gdp states like Alabama - many of those projects being things Alabama didn’t ask for or want. The result is that CA “subsidizes” Alabama.
So a more accurate statement would be “if it weren’t for California, Alabama would continue to exist just fine, and would live more closely in accordance with its values for smaller federal govt”