America in Two Headlines
kenklippenstein.com
kenklippenstein.com
Perhaps the increase in homelessness is because local NIMBYS efficevly ban new housing projects?
Or perhaps this post is trying to get an emotional response on a complex and extremely difficult to solve issue?
The point of this post and this article is not about how people are doing in inflation adjusted terms, but the startling and sharp increase in wealth inequality we're seeing.
One can get from $100 to $200 - 100% increase, yet that changes nothing.
No. Housing projects lead to nothing but misery and more homelessness.
The increases are almost 100% drug-driven. Because of drugs, people are not _exiting_ homelessness (the average time of being homeless is growing, according to the 2-year counts).
The answers, counterintuitively, to strengthen the NIMBYs and make sure it's impossible to build ANYTHING in cities. Then promote the remote work and suburbs/rural areas via tax incentives.
The US has millions of square kilometers of perfectly good land available for housing. There's zero reason to try to cram people into the Human Cube ( https://www.syfy.com/syfy-wire/the-human-cube-the-volume-of-... ).
Population density makes mass transit feasible.
It's funny that you mention infrastructure. Do you know that one mile of Manhattan subway now costs more than 1000 miles of modern 6-lane freeway?
Suburban infrastructure costs are in line with the _average_ urban costs (some cities like NYC or Seattle have _wildly_ inflated costs). Some costs are slightly more, some are less.
this will do wonders to the rental market (and car usage and the climate)
Now there's a hot take if I ever saw one.
Lower income wage gains in the US:
https://www.epi.org/publication/swa-wages-2023/
13.2% from 2019 to 2023
Median income (one of the charts if you scroll is median income per courtly adjusted for PPP)
https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/2024/06/society-at-a-gl...
Luxembourg is higher, but given they are a very strange city-state I feel like we can ignore them.
"Wage rates remain insufficient for individuals and families working to make ends meet. Nowhere can a worker at the 10th percentile of the wage distribution earn enough to meet a basic family budget."
Which is probably a more pertinent fact to note?
As a thought experiment: millions of Americans wished for the death of Osama Bin Laden and cheered about his death. Bin Laden plotted and oversaw plans which, when carried out by others, led to the deaths of thousands.
Health insurance CEOs have plotted and oversaw plans (such as updating tooling to increase the rate at which healthcare coverage is denied) which led to the death of tens of thousands (quite possibly orders of magnitude more) and the suffering or bankruptcy of millions, and yet it's not OK for people to be thrilled about their death?
Underlying the difference is the notion that what ObL did was difficult to replicate (or at least straightforward to stymie) but what LM did was the opposite.
If plotting to kill thousands is evil and should lead to an international manhunt to bring you into custody or kill you, plotting to kill tens of thousands should have consequences at least as severe, even if (especially if) you're hiding behind a corporation.
Our culture celebrated Seal Team 6.
It's increasingly obvious, not just from cui bono analysis, but also media coverage, that Po-Po is made up of a too-specific subset "of the people"
Update: for contrast, mull on which other too-specific subset of the people the TVA goons come from..
Bin Laden being from a billionaire oil family gave him the protection needed to orchestrate the attack. The same kind of protection that Epstein enjoyed.
Whenever someone becomes a much bigger news story, this is usually why. Take Jamal Kashoggi for instance - he was the nephew of the billionare adnan kashoggi. If you think his death would have received equivalent international coverage had he not been connected to multiple billions of dollars, I'd have to disagree.
This is insanely sticky. Take Ruja Ignatova or Jho Low for instance, criminals that stole billions that you've probably never heard of. The first one, top 10 fugitive, $5 million reward, on the FBI most wanted list. Somehow stealing a billion puts you in the media protection club regardless.
The phenomenon is real. Sean Combs is another example. Or how the people imprisoned for running the scams leading to 2008 is a solid Zero.
Aren't the government cuts sort of consistent with this? I would also be cutting, since in theory public servants or military who aren't bribed could step in, so you want as few of those who could still do something once they see the "bad" things done to the public. I'm uncertain about this and don't vother digging up though, could be that they are not cutting from everything.
More donations are needed to the right charities to fight homelessness.
We need to make sure that there are opportunities outside of dense city cores. Office towers are nothing but smoke stacks of the tech era.
Promote remote work, stronger labor laws (and unions) for industrial workers, etc.
Do you have data or an ideology or something? Seems like you’ve been radicalized to a point of view, but by what?
It means that if you want your life to become better, you have to move in closer to the large cities. In turn, this means that your living conditions will worsen.
> That's why i don't bitch about car being way, way more subsidized than train/buses in my city
My state is doing the inverse. We (heavily) subsidize transit, and our car infrastructure is paid for by user fees ( https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/state-infrastructur... ). The results aren't so great.
In short: no large city in Europe, US, or Japan managed to lower housing sale prices by increasing housing density and building transit. This is even tacitly acknowledged by urbanists. The best result that I found in literature, was a one-time 5-8% decrease in _rental_ costs immediately near the new construction.
But the negative effects are clear: people have to pay ever-rising costs for worse and worse housing. With the "upside" being "near to theaters and museums" (that people visit maybe once a year).
> Seems like you’ve been radicalized to a point of view, but by what?
By urbanist propaganda resulting in visible misery.
It has turned from a useful science of "how to make living in cities better" to "how to force more density onto people".
If this is the only upside you see in cities, then maybe you need to do more research.
where has this actually been done?
However, it's been done a bunch of times accidentally. One really great example: Copenhagen in Denmark. Its population actually decreased after the initial boom, it's only now back up to the levels of early 70-s: https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/cities/20894/cope...
As a result, the overall Danish well-being and economics improved compared to neighboring countries. I believe, that this is very much a part of the reason for the "Danish Bumblebee" economy (meaning that it shouldn't be able to fly, but does).
And Copenhagen is routinely scored as one of the best cities on the planet.