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Comment by aprilthird2021 | Hacker News Reader

aprilthird2021

We don't have anything like a machine that causes homelessness though. Homelessness has existed for thousands of years if not all of human existence and we are probably the closest any society has gotten to eradicating it entirely. We are dealing with probably the hard last 10% of a hard problem. It's just not at all as if we have a terrible system that leads to these outcomes. On the contrary, we've built many systems to successfully prevent these outcomes. They're just not perfect

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If you were talking about disease or poverty, you might have a point, but homelessness has never been as big of an issue as it is in certain parts of California or more broadly the USA today, except for certain refugee crises.

And a very basic part of it is simply geometry: the more people you have in a limited area, the harder it is to build homes for all of them. Historically, there simply were FAR fewer people, and so finding place for homes was never a huge issue. The cost of housing is mostly property, not construction costs.

> the more people you have in a limited area,

The US is huge with a low population density, why not just expand the cities a bit or build a few new ones? Is there some reason why this can't be done?

Unfortunately the majority of the USA, even where people don't live, is valuable private property one way or another. Back when there were fewer people and especially agriculture was much more manual labor intensive, it simply wasn't possible to work every last bit of land, so building new houses at the edge of town was not generally a huge problem (not that people didn't care about ownership, of course, but they cared less - i.e. it was cheaper). Today it is, since every bit of land you build houses on means removing that land from some other economic purpose.

This is more or less what the trump administration says they want to do

> Throughout his campaign, Trump focused on deregulation, tax cuts and reducing mortgage rates. In speeches, including one at the Economic Club of New York in September and a press conference in August, Trump reiterated his promise to reduce regulatory barriers and vowed to make federal land available for extensive housing projects.

https://www.housingwire.com/articles/trump-housing-build-fed...

So, how we funding this while getting less taxes, especially for the rich?

Funding what? What are you asking? They are selling the land to developers, there is no need for the federal government to fund anything. They will be the ones receiving money.

We do, but it's not as opaque and obvious as an orphan crushing machine. There's still systems in place that at best ignore and at best accelerate such homelessness issues.

Like what systems?

lol you make it sound like SF is the normal state of things when it’s one of the only places in the developed world with these issues

SF is the left wing version of the headline ‘nothing can be done about school shootings, says the only nation where this regularly occurs’.

And while it is a magnet for this kind of problem, San Jose and Los Angeles have similar issues.

Part of the problem being, they’re one of the easiest places to be/exist if you’re homeless. Not that it’s necessarily easy or pleasant, but compared to Chicago, New York City, or some random suburb? You bet.

Nyc has more homeless people, but they're sheltered. [1] California homeless have higher rates of mental illness and drug abuse.

It's this trifecta that people complain about - unsheltered, mentally ill and addicted. If we can solve any one, that feeling of abject squalor goes away.

[1] - https://open.substack.com/pub/dynomight/p/homeless

SF is one of the only places in the developed world that battles homelessness? What are you talking about. I'm talking about humanity generally. For almost all of human history there has been homelessness and vagrancy. We, as a global human population, are doing better at solving this problem than basically any time before in human history, long term, even if things may have declined since COVID in SF

No, we have a system that needs low degree of poverty to scare everyone into compliance.

That's why they say capitalism is based in fear. That's why we have dreams of Star Trek.

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