Permanent campers: Rising rents are pushing people to live on public lands
azcentral.com
azcentral.com
On rare occasions a sketchy group would passed through who committed theft and vandalism. A pair of local teenagers occasionally harassed us. On some Saturday nights, a guy would show up and scream insults at us. A group moved in and got into fights. The law warned them to end the violence or else. A few weeks later law enforcement drove everyone away. I don't believe that did any good whatsoever.
One bright spot is that the FS, at least in my area, has been stepping up enforcement. A couple trips ago I ran into a pair of rangers who'd been turfing out RVs and issuing citations for litter.
You could, for example, aggressively imprison people for littering in national parks and perhaps restrict them from entering such lands in the future.
That aside, that kind of behavior eliminates this sort of resource for everybody, including those who need it most. A sibling comment mentions a camp getting shut down by bad behavior of a few. Letting trash accumulate to the point where a camping spot is physically unusable is in the same category of behavior. If you're concerned about those who slip through the cracks of society, you should be concerned about commons-torching abuses that cut off their remaining options.
secondly, people in the urban areas here that live literally in filth, are almost always abusing pain killer drugs
Re second point: same here, but (again, just in my experience) making it 200+ miles out of the city requires resources people in that category don't have. If you're camping in a national forest you almost definitely have at least a van, though I did once meet one guy who lived out of a bike with a trailer and a little Subaru ICE motor. Fwiw, I think urban camps are a different category of problem and I don't advocate for "sweeps" in that context.
Most people who fly the economic libertarian banner are actually Royal Libertarians, which is to say they aren’t really Libertarians at all.
Viz, the "common lands" are lands which everyone has an obligation to protect so they can be shared not just with those currently alive, but with future generations. The "royal lands" is land where the owner has the right not just to deny others the use of it, but can choose to destroy it. Those property rights can encompass more than just land, and generally includes people (conscription is the exertion of 'right to destroy' over people, for example)
In Australia this has led to utter incomprehension on the part of the colonists when locals choose to be killed rather than let their property be destroyed. Their lives are so bound up with the obligation to care for country that without that obligation their lives don't exist. The colonialists found this convenient although their short term approach obviously leads to their own demise. Traditional lands rights preserved the country for 50,000 years, royal rights look to destroy it in less than 1000. Ooops.
I think this is the essence of capitalism. It's not like Marx said that private property is the problem. It is this first mover advantage that is carried forward into the future forever. The solution is quite simple, you limit landownership to a finite amount of time, it could be 20 years like patents or it could be a public landownership system like Singapore or it could just be a land value tax.
The problem is that you cannot replicate being first without urban sprawl, which exists because the privilege of others being first forever. So future generations are in debt to past generations and their descendants, simply because they were first to settle. We are born poor because the first thing we have to do is negotiate with those who own our surroundings.
Also, one particularly perverse situation is where indigenous communities don't register their land and some foreign investor comes along and registers it without their consent and often the compensatory payments are purely symbolic like a dollar per hectare for land that leases for at least $20 per year.
The cost of building a house is the problem. Suitable land is hard to come by, and everything is expensive. One has no choice except to build high-end homes. Nothing else is financially practical. The cost is driven by unrealistic inflationary expectations, and I don't see any possibility of relief.
They also did a bunch of ‘condo conversions’ back in the real estate bubble which took inventory off the rental market and (from my non-scientific survey from driving a cab around the Phoenix metro area for nine years) they haven’t been putting any effort into affordable housing but just build massive, block sized, luxury apartments.
After the real estate bubble unless you want an hour commute all new housing is ‘infill’ and there’s a reason that a lot of that land wasn’t snapped up before. Now it’s super expensive, needs rezoning and quite often they’re tearing down multiple buildings to get a large enough lot size to make it worth their while.
Plus, they need a lot more water before they build a lot more housing. Phoenix is in the middle of the desert after all.
This does not make any economic sense whatsoever.
From your sibling comment:
> Unless population grows faster than prices can decrease keeping demand high.
Isn’t it the population growth that’s causing rent increases? Not luxury apartments, unless you think luxury apartments are the cause of this population growth. I suppose that wouldn’t be impossible, but it’s more something you’d expect to see in places like Jackson Hole.
However, if excess supply is being bought up by wealthy landlords, this is a problem because they will be able to drive the price up.
Unless population grows faster than prices can decrease keeping demand high.
And apparently it is the second fastest growing state.
I wasn't criticizing your comment, more like clarifying mine. I've studied housing issues and homelessness. This is a nationwide issue in the US currently.