Comment by bbor | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bbor | Hacker News Reader

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  It may not make life for the addicts better, but it won't make life for them much worse either

Seems like a hard claim to back up. What would “moving” the homeless from, say, Portland look like? Setting up a giant slum on Mount Tabor? Building a network of trailer parks? I can’t imagine any answer to “let’s concentrate all these undesirables somewhere where we don’t have to look at them and they can’t interrupt us” that ends up being a nice trip for said undesirables

Think about why homeless people go to downtown centers of big cities: community, institutional support nearby, income, tradition, and (relative) safety from police. How would you turn that back? What do you do if someone walks from your camp back to downtown?

I totally understand your frustration, but our failure so far should lead us to examine the obvious structural issues at fault here, and not abandon our fellow man and give in to the more basic instincts to push them away

> What would “moving” the homeless from, say, Portland look like?

My guess is you don't. Maybe it's easier for the people with money to go elsewhere than it is for the homeless. So, you get WFH, area small businesses shutting down, less of the casual visitors.

And Portland becomes unable to fund the programs that help these people because there is no tax income and becomes Detroit

Right. I think the bottom line is that nobody has solved this problem. Someone with no mental or drug issues can navigate the system such that they don't have to be on the streets. That problem has been taken care of pretty well. The other issues not so much. Previously maybe the problem was brushed away by putting people in jail, but that's not a fix either. I don't oboe what is.

Fixing the structural issues :). In a country where the minimum wage is 2x higher, where mental and physical health care is free, and where the real estate market is mostly controlled by private citizens rather than corporations, I seriously doubt homelessness would be an issue.

Tbh Portland didn’t really try to solve homelessness/poverty. Because it knows it can’t, at the city/county level. I mean, what would that even look like? The city taxes alone paying for a huge swath of free housing, at a time when middle class workers can barely afford to live here?

We need to come together as a country and civilization to solve this problem.

>I seriously doubt homelessness would be an issue.

based on absolutely nothing other than platitudes

> Maybe it's easier for the people with money to go elsewhere

It's absolutely easy. There is no faster way to kill a city. Drive away the people with money and businesses die, tax revenue plummets and it turns into an irrelevant backwater.

All this stuff costs money. It's always like this, "somebody" gotta go out there and solve these difficult problems. Nobody actually wants to be that somebody though. No one wants to step up and pay for it. If you try to make them pay, they leave.

The question also presumes a fixed number of homeless, which is obviously not true looking at the explosion of them we've had over the past decade. You can meaningfully reduce the number of homeless by (a) building a lot more housing, including especially the lowest rung on the housing ladder (weekly/daily-pay SROs), and (b) simply not tolerating them. When you tolerate something, you get more of it.

Hmmm we should solve poverty by not tolerating it? I have many solutions to poverty, but to be honest, that’s never shown up on the list for me.

The US largely has solved poverty by not tolerating it. The poverty rate has never been lower.

I appreciate the optimism, always, but I think this is missing the forest for the trees. Kinda like the people obsessed with FBI crime statistics (tho obviously you’re arguing in good faith, so not nearly as objectionable).

The poor in the US might be less likely to starve now than they were in 1933, but I really think the narrative that the US has been “solving” anything about poverty to be incredibly inaccurate. Some indicators (obviously an impossible point to prove either way):

Poverty is the 4th greatest cause of U.S. deaths - https://news.ucr.edu/articles/2023/04/17/poverty-4th-greates...

Deaths of Despair are up - https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/republicans/2019...

For most U.S. workers, real wages have barely budged in decades - https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/08/07/for-most-...

58% of Americans have no savings - https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/11/58percent-of-americans-are-l...

And last but not least: this article ;)

Edit: WAY more importantly I thought about this claim more and maybe I’m giving it too much credit. Are you saying that the people in the Great Depression just didn’t have a good enough work ethic, but now we’ve scared people into having a good work ethic? Cause I don’t think that lines up with my experience in our society or knowledge of our history at all. IMO

Poverty isnt a synonym for sad or unable to save. The US has far less people living in poverty than ever before. Obviously weve got a long way to go but removing the worst living conditions people historically faced is a big accomplishment.

All very true! I should clarify: I’m objecting to the user above attributing that to US policies or culture. The general trend in the developed world away from abject poverty is fantastic and something to be thankful for. I guess I don’t have proof that trend isn’t globally based in “not tolerating poverty” where that’s implied to mean hardline/law-n-order type stances (AFAICT?), but that seems to clash with other countries more compassionate/socialist policies.

Another issue here is not making a distinction between poverty, and people who are near unable function within the system due to drug abuse or mental issues. These are different issues to solve. If you are unable to work due to disability, but otherwise functional in the modern world, then you can work your way through the path to getting back on your feet. What percentage of these people of the homeless? My guess is that the larger problem are those who are on the street due to drugs or mental issues. I don't know what it's like to be on Fentanyl, but some of the people in videos I have found don't seem to be in a state where they're thinking about a place to live.

> I totally understand your frustration, but our failure so far should lead us to examine the obvious structural issues at fault here, and not abandon our fellow man and give in to the more basic instincts to push them away

The issue isn't fundamentally structural. It's personal. There's no structure that I'm aware of that gets people to take more and more debilitating drugs, other than a lack of structure on stopping the drugs entering the country.

The structures I’m talking about are along the lines of “if you have schizophrenia and don’t have rich parents then you probably will never be able to afford meaningful treatment”. Just to pick one.

I know it’s tempting to assume everyone else is just morally bankrupt and hedonistic because they’re flawed, but I implore you to be more empathetic to their situation. I PROMISE you, homelessness is not fun, it does not feel good in any way, and no one in their right mind would ever “choose” to “take more and more drugs” knowing that was the endpoint.

> The structures I’m talking about are along the lines of “if you have schizophrenia and don’t have rich parents then you probably will never be able to afford meaningful treatment”.

This is not a structure. It's a situation.

> I know it’s tempting to assume everyone else is just morally bankrupt and hedonistic because they’re flawed

No - the only assumption is yours you're making here. No one is saying that.

> no one in their right mind would ever “choose” to “take more and more drugs” knowing that was the endpoint

No one said they would.

  This is not a structure. It's a situation.

Sorry, I was unclear: I was trying to highlight the fact that this situation is far, far less common in other countries, namely those with single-payer healthcare. That seems like pretty solid evidence that it’s a structural issue, not just… idk, circumstance? Chance?

Otherwise sorry I misinterpreted you —- guess I’ll spend more time reading next time!

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