Comment by mancerayder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mancerayder | Hacker News Reader

Because we encourage it? If I am an IV drug user with no possessions, and a city promises the right to shelter (NYC as an example), decriminalization of hard drugs (NYC, SF, Seattle, Vancouver as examples), and volunteers or vending machines with Narcan are floating around, I would go to these cities from where I'm from.

Cities were less squalid in the early 2000s, and somewhere in the decade that followed we decided law enforcement and incarceration were doing more harm than good. So, we elected mayors like De Blasio and Progressive DAs like Alvin Bragg and Chesa Boudin.

It doesn't help that in addition, now 100s of thousands of migrants are being bussed in.

Now parks are no longer usable for citizens and sometimes people living on the street or on public transport threaten us physically, but we're reminded to check our privilege.

There's nothing magical - this was a planned trade-off. The goal of Progressives is to treat homelessness and drug use as a shared societal problem to pay attention to, rather than hide under the rug (in prisons and jails).

Portugal decriminalised all drugs. It got a lot nicer, and certainly is now far less squalid than the US. So that theory is out.

Not necessarily... "niceness" has a lot of contributing factors. If we're cherry-picking, Singapore is pretty "nice" at street level.

I'd like to know some timelines on that, cursory googling get's me Portugal decriminalized in 2001, Oregon only did that in 2020. Systems don't change on a dime, how long was the transition period for Portugal?

I think a lot gets missed in these types of comparisons with the US because the US is both a much less urban country, and also a federal system where a lot of problems get pushed down to local governments.

These two forces work in opposite directions of attraction. Because the country is less urban than Western Europe, the most attractive places to live are not exclusively the big 3 cities. Our wealthy people are pulled away from the cities as much as they are attracted to them.

Meanwhile, a lot of national problems - drug addiction, homelessness, mental illness.. are essentially handed down to cities to deal with. Blue cities by and large have more social services, shelters, lax drug laws, needle programs, etc.. which attracts people who have these problems. Further, some cities like NYC have laws on the books that essentially force the city to provide a shelter bed for anyone who wants one.

Right now we are seeing this made worse by NYC absorbing a disproportionate number of migrants which are then the cities responsibility to house/feed. Wherever you stand on migrant policy, NYC has received a number of migrants equal to the pre-existing number of homeless shelter beds, at a time when shelters were at a an all time high utilization. So our homeless/shelter budget which is already higher per capita than most of the rest of the country just needed to double.

So blue cities end up with disproportionate number of problems they need to solve.

Portugal introduced mandatory treatment along with decriminalization; that's the component that diverges quite substantially from North American policy.

I think US bias towards individual liberties culturally, and civil rights laws legally.. make a lot of this type of stick AND carrot approach harder.

Like we can lock people in jail for violating drug laws.

Or we can allow drug use & provide clean needles.

But it is very very hard to pass & enforce "we will force you into a rehab house" or "we will force you to take addiction treatment X / mental health drug Y". The bar for this type of intervention is very high, and ironically higher than "you broke a law and go to jail now".

I think the biggest difference here is that Portugal abolished prohibition, acting with unity as an entire country. That's very different than when cities or states do away with it, but there's unrestricted travel between there and thousands of counties next door or a few states away, where prohibition is in full force. Those counties get hit with not only an "on-steriods" version of the symptom in question, but also any other demographic patterns that are corrolated with it for any reason, such as (in the case of IV drug users) extreme poverty.

One frequent response to this point, is for someone to say "I'm open to decriminalization arguments, but I'm not supporting anyone who says 'The entire country has to adopt my policy in order for it to work!'" Which sounds reasonable, on its face, but in this case it seems like it really is the best option.

Squalid applies to maintenance and upkeep, not necessarily the presence of drug users and homelessness.

So in the us it’s a budget and planning issue. Places with representation and money get stuff done and other places do not.. largely because nobody cares.

There's no budget, it got cut so multimillionaires could get tax breaks.

People love to throw this assertion at every American city problem, but really if you are rich in a blue coastal US city, you basically pay Western Europe level income taxes all-in.

A $1M income for a single person in NYC results in an all-in effective tax rate of 46% with a marginal tax rate a bit higher than that.

Plus we have fairly high property taxes so if you were to own say a 3 bedroom apartment commensurate with that income, you'd probably be paying another $30-50k in real estate taxes which is another 3-5% of your income.

I'm NOT saying let's cry for the poor millionaires, but I question that assertion that we just aren't collecting enough revenue.

We have serious rich mans cost disease in US cities where we just cannot spend money efficiently. See everything from homeless services / subway construction / etc.

You don't know high property taxes until you live in Texas: 2%/year. Your $2m ATX pad will set you back $40k in property taxes.

NYC property taxes are extremely convoluted, but a $2M condo would probably be about $30k/year in property tax, with like $10k variance.

However, a $2M apartment is only going to be like a 2 bedroom, so a Texas $2M home owner might be in the market for more of a $3M-4M apartment in NYC, even accounting for smaller square footage, etc. With the proportional increase in taxes..

$5M+ condos in ATX exist in the Jenga tower with 50+ floors. Even more ridiculous condos are being built in 70 Rainey that leveled a good fraction of what made it Rainey St. cool. The influx of new people has largely displaced and replaced what made ATX cool. There's still some cool bits of ATX, but I'm not telling anyone.

There are homes near Lake Travis that go for up to ~$20M, but the mean average is ~ $1.5m.

Uhh, there's been repeated tax reductions since the 80s.

We all, the upper brackets in particular, pay less taxes than we would be 30-40 years ago.

The rich also have tools to reduce their taxes further, like deferrals, that's how Trump didn't pay taxes for several years.

For sure taxes are down.

But having my tax rate go from 40% to 55% or 60% isn't going to solve, for example, NYC subway construction costs being 8x per mile more than Paris (a more socialist / strong union / pro-labor country).

So we have a serious cost disease in our cities.

Look at crazy stuff like this - https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/25/us/la-sombrita-bus-los-an...

Your tax rate? no. 50m+ incomes? Yes

But, you're right in that just having more taxes won't fix things. There's serious issues in our governments, local state and federal, around actual costs and mismanagement of projects.

It feels weird to hold the opinion that at the same time we need more pro-union and pro-workers rights movements, and at the same time we need to take a lot of unions and what-not to task. ("why do i need to pay $10k for this light to be turned on?")

Yes. It also starts with apathy of space users and space maintainers springing from an embarrassing lack of pride.

Or could it be that continuous tax cuts for upper tax brackets, and resulting deeper and deeper cuts in funding for basics like maintenance lead to shit like breakdowns in public infrastructure. I could see thins in places like NH in the 90s and 2000s, that libertarian paradise proved the idea of no taxes didn't work.

Poverty and squalor are a result growing economic disparity. Sure citys were cleaner decades ago. But compare how many hours at minimum wage it'd take to pay a mortgage then vs now. We hear the octogenarians in charge talk about buying a house out of highschool on a factory workers salary. Not only can't you do that now, but the factory likely closed a decade ago.

The point of decriminalization isn't to let people do drugs. It's so when people do get themselves in trouble, it's easy to get them back on track, instead of punishing them, and pushing them deeper in a hole with prison, and debts from fines, etc.

The nicest cities in the world are far more relaxed and far more giving. As far as I see it the answer is simple. Americans hate paying taxes, love giving their money to the millionaire/billionaire class and jerk themselves off to being mad about homelessness and immigration.

Yep. There is a dearth of love in America and it is very sad.

You should've seen how empty the holiday food donation box for my apartment complex was. I swear only one other person donated anything.

Also, there are many more churches and religious organizations in cities that lack community outreach and are just a place for the congregation to gather once a week. This is in contrast to the very giving churches and food banks of the South.

Exactly. My NYC super lefty but super incompetent condo board put out the thanksgiving food drive box in the first week of December. Can't make this stuff up.

It's absolutely true. I work 8 hours every other weekend at a local foodbank and donations and volunteers are low. A lot of people like to complain about conditions but few do anything about it. It seems the solution posited by most is simply to criminalize homelessness, which will cost us all much much more.

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