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One major aspect I want to touch on that bother me in the perspective you criticize.

Poverty and crime are not married.

My wife and I both grew up poor and working class. Living in trailers are in our life stories. You can be dog poor and still not be a junkie, still not mug others, still not assault people. This was understood widely in our upbringing and those we dealt with. People _did_ misbehave, but it was not "just what happens".

Presumption that poor areas must mean getting to deal with junkies, means dealing with violence, well, that is a morally bankrupt view. People don't have to do that. That is their choice. Improvement is possible.

> Presumption that poor areas must mean getting to deal with junkies, means dealing with violence, well, that is a morally bankrupt view.

Very disagree. It is not immoral or prejudicial to note the simple reality that, in aggregate, poverty and crime are correlated[0], and in part because poverty creates conditions where crime is more likely[1].

That doesn't mean that any particular person is doomed to crime because they're poor, or can't improve. Of course they can, and of course nobody should assume that a particular person is a criminal based on membership in a socioeconomic class (or any other class).

But it's just true that poverty and crime are correlated. There are confounding factors (police are more likely to arrest a poor person, and more likely to merely warn a rich person), but nothing suggests that crime is merely equally prevalent among poor and non-poor populations.

I applaud the compassion, and I agree that individuals bear the moral weight of doing the right thing, but let's not deny facts in service of those principles.

0. https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/28019/chapter/2118222... 1. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-80897-8

> Poverty and crime are not married.

They 100% are.

The plural of anecdote is not data. Your story is nice, but the reality is poverty is heavily correlated with crime. And social nets address both at once.

letting poor people suffer because some poor people can improve their station in life through luck, hard work and a number of other extrenous factors is unethical.

this is really not true. Poverty is correlated with crime, but the magnitude of this correlation is quite small. Portugal is very safe and very poor compared to most of the US

> Portugal is very safe and very poor compared to most of the US

Portugal has lower gdp than the US but it isn't poor internally. People spend less % on housing food etc than in the US.

Also having no guns means a lot of crime is less violent, not that there is less of it.

what does it mean "not poor internally"? I've been to Portugal, compared to US it's just poor. Source for "spend less % on housing, food" ? very much doubt this. Poor in the US get food stamps, etc.

> what does it mean "not poor internally"?

It means you do not have homeless camps in hollywood boulevard next to million dollar penthouses. The income inequality is smaller therefore the variance in income levels is smaller and therefore all prices are down.

Let me give you an example.

Country A is rich. The poorest person has 10$ the richest has 100000$

Country B is poor the poorest person has 1$ the richest person has 5$.

In both country Nestle sells water bottles, they use a formula to maximise profit based on average earnings. On country A a water bottle is 20$ in country B is 0.2$.

Despite the proportional poverty, a poor person in country B can buy 5 water bottles while a poor person on country A can buy 0.

> Source for "spend less % on housing, food" ?

https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...

On the most expensive city in Portugal and the only thing cheaper in SF is gasoline, something most people in portugal don't use as much as they walk everywhere.

> Poor in the US get food stamps

Getting vouchers for milk and beans is not helping people. Portugal for example does not have millions of people in jail for minor drug offenses. Portugal does not have medical bankruptcy. Portugal does not have homeless camps in every mayor city.

Also food banks are common everywhere, the only difference is they are usually much broaders and healthier than food stamps and come on top of unemplyment payments, health benefits, and council housing.

> I've been to Portugal

I was born in Spain a few decades ago, I am gonna take my 18 years there over your weekend abroad.

these numbeo numbers are not % spend

you realize salaries in SF are astronomically higher than in Portugal, right?

the income inequality is indeed smaller in Portugal, but that is a different issue, absolute numbers wise Portugal is clearly a lot poorer than US

US doesn't have millions of people in jail for minor drug offenses, where did you get this nonsense from?

> It's easy for a childless bohemian to have no problem with needles in parks, but for those of us raising future citizens, it's not fun.

> Your entire statement to me seems driven by emotion

> Sorry, but the whole comment reeks of luxury beliefs.

C'mon man. You don't know the person you are responding to and included multiple personal attacks in your response. There's a way to make your argument without making the person you are responding to your own personal hate-object.

I also grew up in the south. Interestingly, I always got more harassment for that sort of phrasing from other southerners. Most folks just don't give a shit, oddly. And those that do are often holding themselves back by trying to hold down others.

Sadly, I think there is enough evidence that the game plan is to build classes of people that are constantly holding each other down. That is literally the point. :(

> Your statement could just as easily be, on a different day: "Y'all abandoned the city for the suburbs and deprived the city of a tax base to help the poor."

That's a different situation from this one, so, sure, if that's something that happened and then you're complaining about the place you don't live anymore, sure, that's also a statement that could be made.

> Between "white flight" and "colonizer/gentrifier", you're damned if you do and damned if you don't

Not surprisingly, those aren't the only two options.

> Real, actual victims of violent crime don't think it's cute or have this nostalgia for squalor

I think you're confused if you think the GP's comment "It taught me compassion and empathy and how to avoid getting knifed by a junkie in the alleyway" was nostalgic for the getting knifed part.

> > Between "white flight" and "colonizer/gentrifier", you're damned if you do and damned if you don't

> Not surprisingly, those aren't the only two options.

"white flight" == moving out of the area

"colonizer/gentrifier" == moving in to the area

The only remaining option is to never move.

The other option is to accept you have been deemed evil by mainstream media and ignore them and judge people who listen to them the problem

Don't agree.

white flight = moving out of city because of fear, cost, crappy schools, etc. is flight. A white person moving to the boondocks because they want to homestead or live off grid is not "flight".

gentrifier = higher income person/family moving into a city or neighborhood, raising the housing costs by doing so, causing the long time residents to leave because of said costs and changing the culture of said area because the old families don't live there anymore.

White flight is a term used as slant, it isn’t some nuanced term for actually determining the different intentions of movers. If enough white people move for whatever reason then there’ll be someone waiting to paint it as racism.

Schelling’s segregation model comes to mind in these moments but I never see that mentioned, strangely. Oh, the inconvenience of maths that explains things better than divisive and ignorant rhetoric!

Neighborhoods always change but if SF were to actually build housing then people could have a place where they could still live.

> Between "white flight" and "colonizer/gentrifier", you're damned if you do and damned if you don't.

So you think that "flee the black people" and "drive the black people out" are the only two options here? There are more things, Horatio.

Such as...?