A list of changes to make it easier to build beautiful and walkable places
chrisbarber.co
chrisbarber.co
(Ive had multiple family members who said this after I mentioned I didn’t have a car for 4 years while living in a major city)
It's one of the first things that stick out when I live somewhere walkable where I can walk to the corner shop for a can of beans and avocados on demand, and I can keep my fridge/pantry quite barren of perishable food.
For example, in the US, even buying a bag of ten apples from Costco means I'm probably going to eat five apples today. Versus picking up one apple on my walk back home when I feel for an apple.
E-bikes are very popular where I live. At first it was great to see people of all ages out biking everywhere.
But now everyone has started modifying their e-bikes to be overpowered and not require any pedaling. A lot of the cheap e-bikes have trivial procedures to unlock the power limit. Anyone who can search Reddit can figure out what to buy and how to do it quickly.
There's a multi-use pedestrian and bike path that parallels a road on my way to the office. In the mornings I commonly see e-bikes on the bike path going faster than the 30mph road traffic. I've been clipped by multiple e-bike riders who blew through stop signs or jumped from sidewalk to road. Last week I had to jump out of the way of an older woman on an e-bike who zoomed through a red light and turned right because she didn't see me in the crosswalk somehow.
A lot of these things are illegal, of course, but enforcement is non-existent.
It's weird to see it play out like this, though I should have seen it coming. I think even a small threat of enforcement and having modified bikes confiscated if used on public roads would make a lot of people think twice. For now, it feels like it's just an electric motorcycle free for all wherever we have a dedicated pedestrian and bike area.
I think this is unquestionably a problem in modern society. Too many interactions are purely transactional. People are isolated and lonely. Many people are only out for themselves. Community has definitely broken down
I don't know how to fix this and I'm definitely part of the problem, but I think it is a very big problem
If you know your neighbors, you are less likely to run them down on your e-bike.
And if you know your neighbor and maybe even rely on them somehow, it makes it much easier to accept certain behavior or opinions for example. It's much too easy to dismiss other people because they don't look like us or think like us, there is no downside because everyone only needs themselves.
It's sad but my hope is that the climate breakdown, wealth inequality for example will eventually lead to a "rebuilding" of a more localized society where we depend and help each other. Maybe hard times will come and give us a bit of a shake as a species.
Fat tire E-bikes, recommended by Bicycling magazine.[1]
1933 Harley-Davidson motorcycle.[2]
It is an electric motorcycle.
It would be better to treat the more powerful E-bikes as electric scooters. Lose the pedals, lower the CG, require license plates, turn signals, and helmets. That's standard practice in China, which encourages electric scooters but discourages high-speed E-bikes.[3] "Electric mobility devices" - e-bikes, Segways, hoverboards, etc. are limited to 20km/h and have size restrictions. China already had a huge scooter fleet, which is going electric, but e-bikes never really caught on. E-scooters did, instead.
[1] https://www.bicycling.com/bikes-gear/a33313406/best-fat-tire...
[2] https://www.rideapart.com/features/247168/rebirth-of-an-amer...
[3] https://www.pacificprime.cn/blog/scooters-and-mopeds-china-c...
The laws generally require that an e-bike must be under a certain power limit and the user has to pedal to keep it going. The power is for pedal assist only.
This is the difference between your links. The e-bike and the electric motorcycle have very different power limits and are controlled differently.
The unlocks remove the power limit and the mods can add a throttle so the user doesn’t have to pedal.
These turn it into an electric motorcycle under the law.
One is allowed on certain bike trails. An electric motorcycle is not.
Good E-bike vs. Motorcycle discussion.[3]
[1] https://bikexchange.com/electric-bike-classes/
In fact removing parking minimums would probably do 50% of the work of this whole list. Combine that with mixed-use zoning, more units per lot (including reducing FAR/height limits) and narrower streets, and dare I say you are 80-90% of the way there. It only takes a few high-impact changes.
While you're talking about how to transform a city more systemically.
It is kinda crazy to see parts of cities where hundreds of people are confined to sidewalks on a Friday night waiting to cross a street for the convenience of a tiny fraction of people who insist on driving. Every city has at least a few blocks that make sense to block off from cars.
Which is nice, but having experienced that in multiple cities, doesnt truly contribute in a larger meaningful way to "making it easier to build beautiful and walkable places" in the same way
It's not specific to the car issue either, it's many issues. They lie to your face and gaslight you for years on end as to their true motivations, while they slowly pry the door further and further open for their ideology, until they've finally garnered enough support that they can switch phases and now be open about their true goals.
I'm not quite sure what the end plan is, since they're forever burning bridges with people like me. I guess they plan on the newest generations having the viewpoint forced on them from a young age, overriding people like me who are quite disgruntled.
Think about how many people who support this stuff would be screaming bloody murder if some developer bought their neighbor's lot and coordinated with some other local developers to submit all their proposals for the most hard to approve stuff right at thanksgiving to take advantage of all the sped up paperwork and limits on how long government can sit on things and then built right up to the sidewalk.
Maybe show some of the negatives, your example as is doesn't sound that controversial.
All my favorite places have their buildings built right up to the sidewalk! ITS GOOD! I'm tired of pretending it's not! What are we afraid of? Oh no! There isn't a pointlessly small patch of astroturf out front?
I would be happy that people are building on all of their available land because it is scarce and it makes the units bigger.
I mean, we just got a signalized crosswalk on a state highway to my city's most popular custard stand, 3 years after a student was killed by drivers and others were injured. https://www.ksdk.com/article/news/local/17-year-old-hit-kill... || https://www.stlpr.org/news-briefs/2025-07-16/deadly-crossing...
and even still, the only thing separating the highway and a crowd of 100+ people in line for custard is a fence on an 8-12" tall curb https://maps.app.goo.gl/2pD9mSzr9yTAK1z19
I wish we had a society where the "real" felony is developing harmful infrastructure in the first place. Manslaughterers losing their license or going to jail, and band-aid fixes like paint, signals, and frangible fences do actually nothing to prevent the next fatality.
> Allow single‑stair buildings up to 6 stories
This seemed like a terrible suggestion, but it caused me to google it and now I see it's not that terrible.
I didn't fully understand all of these, and some are clearly specific to California. I also worry about some of these opening the floodgates for greedy developers (a lot of existing laws are due to some developer doing something ridiculous, collapsing, and leaving the municipality holding the bag).
Overall I like the direction, though.
Updated now
Being from Connecticut, this case comes to mind as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelo_v._City_of_New_London
Where a developer planned some huge build, forced people out of their homes via eminent domain, and then never actually broke ground at all.
These companies shut down once they hit some snag and then pop up somewhere else under a different name.
Edit: also you misrepresented one of the examples. The developer did NOT use the power of eminent domain. The elected officials of the City of New London used eminent domain.
I feel like we've been out of balance for so long (decades and decades and decades) that it might be a good idea to swing the pendulum back to the greedy developers so that rents/prices become more affordable. Disclosure: I guess I'm sort of a greedy developer albeit at a tiny scale.
see: https://clmarohn.substack.com/p/what-happens-when-housing-pr...
If you want affordable housing, it will have to be government-funded, allowing developers to continue making a profit while the government bears the loss. Another way of expressing it is the government pays for housing to be built at cost plus and then charges rent according to what people can afford, i.e., income and expense-based rent.
Also, when you cite "market forces" it suggests that the real estate market in the US is driven mostly by market forces, but it's highly regulated (zoning, building codes, etc.). As other commenters have pointed out, even in a declining market, if you removed some of the regulation you'd offset some of the drop in market prices thereby preserving the incentive for developers to build.
Lastly, if you think we arrived where we are today because of market forces I think that's largely untrue. HCOL areas (seems like the entire country is turning into one of those!) have criminally under-built for decades and that hasn't been a market problem, but a regulatory problem. Now I'm not advocating for unlimited development so please don't read it that way, but the historical forces against building have been municipalities, on behalf of their politically-active residents, erecting countless impediments to development. If that were only true for a couple of years then we wouldn't have ended up where we are, but over decades the compounding effect of that reality is the single-biggest reason we're in the situation we're in. It is likewise going to take decades to address it so if the regulatory regime changes and stuff starts getting built and you still see rising prices that shouldn't be a surprise. Funny enough the more real estate developers going bankrupt the closer we'll be to affordable housing for all (ok, for "many" because all is likely never going to happen).
Btw everything above assumes you actually believe that increased supply of housing (eventually!) decreases prices. I know you, ricky, don't believe that atm. Tons of people point to places like NYC as evidence that supply/demand doesn't work in desirable places, but, as Flavor Flav once said so well: don't believe the hype; even places like NYC have under-built for decades.
Man I write long-winded comments on HN. This one is the worst by far, I think.
But even with regulations, developers don't care. see: https://www.youtube.com/@cyfyhomeinspections. This bloke is a building inspector in Arizona, and he documents all the shortcomings and tricks that builders will use.
You are right, I don't believe that increasing the supply of housing will decrease prices because housing is a financial instrument, and the whole system is so leveraged that it will fall apart if prices decline. One could claim that it fell apart in 2008. However, if you were to move housing out of the asset class, you would cause significant financial trauma to tens of millions of people. How would you make them whole?
We have an example of oversupply not leading to price drops. Commercial real estate, such as storefronts and offices, continues to maintain a high price, even though a property has been idle for years. One would expect it to sell/lease for less due to the lack of demand, but it doesn't.
The only thing I know that will decrease housing prices predictably or consistently is not maintaining the property. Let the property become worn, dysfunctional, and substandard. Some classes of landlords have made this an art form.
My responses are always long-winded, but that's a side effect of using speech recognition. :-)
And there is no example of oversupply not leading to price drops in residential construction. See every existing city with population declines as an example, or what happens in areas with growth when the increase in housing units exceeds household growth.
Does this sound like a realistic policy in any part of the US to you? Do you think the tax base in the US is eager to increase their taxes significantly to fund the creation of a government housing arm? My experience has been that even US megaprojects can't justify keeping staff in-house, let alone a housing authority. The stuff in this list is much more politically palatable.
There's a huge gap there where building housing would still be entirely profitable, if only we didn't have the self-inflicted wound of the permitting and zoning process in most major US being extremely slow and expensive.
For example, new row houses are explicitly or implicitly illegal in many cities (and thus all the old ones are extremely expensive), despite being both immensely popular for urban families and cheap to build in bulk.
Row houses are an interesting solution as long as there is a 30 dB or greater sound attenuation between apartments and a 90-minute firewall between them. Row housing is also interesting because it allows for the inclusion of a garage and charging infrastructure beneath the house, as well as a space to store home-scale batteries charged by your rooftop solar panels.
And just because you mind living with noise doesn't mean everyone does. Why should we outright ban places like that if there are people who might not be able to afford something better, or don't care and would like to save some money?
Like, your entire comment is part of the goddamn problem. Don't legislate your preferences.
Of course an outright ban is pretty extreme, but alternatives to overcoming this information asymmetry are not straightforward. Ideally: compulsory testing and disclosure, if it could be done.
The original start of this whole thread included a list of things the author wanted to see happen, which falls into the same category as legislating preferences, or, as I see it, a baseline that is higher than what we have today.
I'd deal with having to hear the neighbors fighting every once in a while vs never having to hear some small-penised individual revving his stupid engine ever again. One way of getting closer to that is building more dense housing cheaper. If we're talking about urban noise floors, start at the real fucking problem.
here's a relevant info with visualizations: https://secondegress.ca
At the behest of the prior generation of shortsighted attempts to build a utopia.
Not that this should be in any way construed as excusing industry fads at the expense of the public.
Otherwise it's one side saying "coulds" and the otherside saying "is'" and there not being any movement on anything.
Like why can't they walk to a cafe. Why a bar needs 100 parking spaces. Why parking dominates their city. Why they can't find a small lot. Why they can't build up to the edges of their own lot. Why they can't find a small house. Why housing prices only increase.
Most people don't realize that a place in Europe they might idealize is illegal to build in the US, and the closest they've experienced it in the US is walking around Disney World.
And those are some of the most meaningful ones on the list because importantly they a) don't require government funds to execute b) decrease the cost to build. Best way to make places beautiful and walkable is to put more people in them because then the demand and funds become available for some of the items that require material funding.
Devon also made this list: https://airtable.com/appcoaCeTbl22Few2/shrWJYzc04FQZIkP5
Combine the two and it feels like walking in the middle of a Covid lockdown.
This was exactly my experience. Blew my mind. I walked down a street that was being repaved, so there were construction vehicles actively tearing up the road surface, and it was still quieter than an average block on a normal day in New York City.
I think the lack of heavy HVAC equipment on every building helps too. Living in a mild climate has a lot of perks.
Life isn’t perfect, and we have serious problems like any other city, but I took my kids bike riding through downtown yesterday evening and felt safe.
I lived there for a few years, and while the river walks were very pleasant, I don’t have much to say about it particularly otherwise.
The job market was pretty bad, basically limiting you to State gov or one of the handful of insurance companies around and state government work is rough (easily the most fulfilling job I’ve had, but the salary was just way too low.
Seems hard to justify with GA and NC markets nearby unless you’re staying solely for CoL or existing ties.
But the Bull Street district is in a totally different place from when you were here, which creates a feeling of “coming liveliness.”
Also Scout Motors is dropping a multi billion dollar plant in Columbia which will help job market
Definitely not Greenville, but we are getting there.
The actual visible stuff (homeless people, trash, smell of public urination, people on drugs in public, people being mentally ill in public, shoplifting) is up. And both violent crime and rich people are more evenly distributed around the city so the “violent crime near a rich person” is up. And so people react to those.
That's like saying the economy is up from the 1930s.
Personally I think two things are true, crime ain't that bad and you're basically framing the problem to let you lie through your teeth a politican.
I’m not saying crime or homelessness don’t exist, but urban LA is just not representative.
It is shocking that the richest state in the history of the world can’t figure out how to help the people with nowhere to go.
Fast forward five years, the place is a shithole. Roach-infested, apartments severely damaged and filthy, needles and garbage everywhere. Police, fire, and EMS spending a disproportonate amount of resources there.
People who are chronically homeless and addicted do not know how to live in houses. If you give them housing they will destroy it or they people they associate with will destroy it.
Sobriety has to come first. Some people won't accept that. At some point you have to stop accomodating their behavior and just say "no, that is not an acceptable way to live, and you can't do that here."
I never understand these kinds of sentiments on the Internet. Was nobody actually alive in the 90s? Have no memories? All rich white kids who grew up sheltered in the suburbs? Is Hacker News just super European and it was way better there? I get that California closed all of the state mental hospitals 35 years ago and now you have to actually see crazy people shitting on the street near your office building, but the overall reality is so immeasurably better than it was then that you guys make me feel like I'm being Mandela Effected. I somehow slipped into the timeline where Los Angeles and San Francisco weren't gang-infested murdervilles suffering from drug and disease epidemics with barely breathable air 40 years ago but were actually paradises.
Like you're talking about the Walk of Fame? Hollywood Blvd has been public drug use, street walkers, sex shops, theaters where Pee Wee Herman might cum on you, for as long as it's existed. Pretty Woman wasn't making it up except they weren't actually as attractive as Julia Roberts.
Yet my point still stands, how can the worlds richest state not fix this?
I would, however, try to keep any safe area with good foot traffic that way, or even increase foot traffic.
I'm reminded of being on an airplane sitting next to a cop who told me, "Did you know that Chicago is the murder capitol of the world?". It was fun to show her that Chicago isn't actually even in the top 10 of the US in terms of homicide.
Where do you get your news from that makes you think crime is going up?
[0] https://news.wttw.com/2025/07/11/shootings-homicides-chicago...
[1] https://chicagocrusader.com/violent-crime-in-chicago-sees-bi...
[2] https://www.wbez.org/cpd/2025/05/01/chicago-hasnt-seen-an-ap...
It wasn't the first or last car theft we witnessed.
Chicago is safe 90% of the time. Statistically speaking, you won't be a victim of a crime. That doesn't mean the crime isn't happening and it doesn't mean it's getting properly reported either. Crime is here.
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/us-c...
Property crime is down similarly.
I understand that some people feel so afraid of homeless people or street addicts that they assume they must be in danger whenever they witness such poverty, but crime statistics do not support this opinion.
I’ve seen posters complaining about unreported crimes on here in response to posts citing studies that directly and prominently address that exact problem, because I guess they just assume everyone in the social sciences is a total dipshit who can’t possibly have thought of this obvious thing (and didn’t bother to read the study and perhaps learn something).
Victimization surveys agree with police report data. Crime’s down in general, way down in some cities, and violent crime especially is down, versus the 90s, and very much so versus any decade before that. There’s been a little bump post-Covid but it’s not ongoing and last I checked it was trending back down again, and it wasn’t anywhere near wiping out the progress from before.
In terms of actual crime, we're doing about as well as we were back in the late '50s.
You sound like many people here in Seattle who gripe about "public safety", but this is a very safe city - it's kind of absurd. When you press them on it, you find out that they simply don't like to look at homeless people, or junkies, and they mistake the discomfort they feel when witnessing such sights for actual danger.
Statistics show that homeless people and street junkies are far more likely to be the victims than the perpetrators of violent crime. Merely seeing them does not harm you; nor are they likely to do anything which would harm you.
During the 70s in the Netherlands there were massive protests called 'Stop the Child murder', because cars were killing too many children on bicycles. This was actually a conservative protest, because people were used to safe streets and simply did not accept that cars started killing their children.
That said, this understanding is very unevenly distributed, in large part because our neighborhood also gets more police attention and is generally very safe.
One thing I've noticed that makes biking/walking in conjunction with cars much safer is the construction of road-sized sidewalks with clear delineators, where pedestrians and cyclists can safely pass. In Helsinki, biking was a joy, despite the busy streets nearby. I saw the same organization in many parts of Israel—big sidewalks with a section designated for bicycles, scooters, and e-mobility devices. In many of the small cities surrounding Stockholm, dedicated bike paths with their lighting were located adjacent to the main roads.
Around where I live, there is a three-lane main thoroughfare that has two lanes for travel and one lane for turning. There are sidewalks along this road, but they are functionally destroyed by the roots of trees growing near them.
This could become more bicycle-friendly if roundabouts were installed at major intersections and the sidewalks were expanded to accommodate pedestrian/bicycle use. Although if they did, I could hear the screams about how the roundabouts are impeding traffic flow for commuters and removing all the sidewalk-destroying trees.
I agree with the people who say it's not that we can't do it, it's that we won't do it.
Can you expand on this? What timeframe? Which cities? Which crimes?
Violent crime is down precipitously in pretty much every US city right now.
They're all able to be distilled into patterns (or antipatterns). Someone actually wrote a book on it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuyvesant_Town%E2%80%93Peter_...
A good model is here: https://www.college.police.uk/research/crime-reduction-toolk...
Not to mention that the weather for walking is only present for about 20 days per year.
Walking everywhere isn't a practical for most people in the Calumet Region of Indiana.
There are reasonable sidewalks already present and crossing buttons on the lights where needed. I've actually used them on occasion.
I don't see the need to push walkability further at the cost of everyone who passes through the area on the interstate.
For me, moving to a townhouse was a genuine relief - no more yard work making unwelcome demands on my time! The old place was not a large property, though, just an ordinary suburban-style lot.
I maintain we're in a special case, for just 3 roads (Ridge, Calumet, and 45th) walkability should only be a secondary concern, not the primary one.
A dedicated bus lane or a dedicated cycling lane on the other hand keep a lane free for emergency vehicles to drive in.
I think pretty much anyone who is pro-walkability would hop onboard a car-free lane for emergency vehicles which is a strictly better solution than the status quo where ambulances compete with cars to get people where they need to go.
I thought I was fairly explicit that this wasn't just a typical low traffic suburb. We routinely have backups that go for miles. It's been a feature of the area (the crossroads of the nation) since my dad was a kid in the 1950s.
Fewer lanes is insane, but they want to do it anyway
- No drug addicts
- No homeless people
- No drunks
- If you throw your trash anywhere except the bin you get punished
- If you shout into your phone you get punished
- If you intentionally break or deface anything you get punished
If your city is full of drug addicts and anti-social people not a single thing you are going to do about zoneing will make it more "walkable". This stuff is so completely delusional. People use cars to get away from the total dysfunction and danger of cities.
Could you elaborate on that? I could speculate, but I'd love to know your reasons.
I do not own a car, I walk/bike/bus/train everywhere and almost every time it is a terrible experience.
I want to have a better city, but a city does not become "walkable" or "unwalkable" because of zoning. It becomes either because it is either a good place to be or a terrible place to be. The obvious drug dealing at train stations make it a bad place, the obnoxious people with a total disregard for others make it a bad place, the trash everywhere make it a bad place, etc.
If you do not make cities nice places to be nothing else matters. And if you do make them nice places, everything else will follow, since now people want to be there and will demand e.g. better zoning and infrastructure.
Please don't cross into personal attack in HN comments.
Also, please omit internet tropes. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
On further thought, maybe I actually don't, but I do not think that is the discussion.
Like, the whole reason the West Oakland homeless encampment has such an enormous garbage pile problem is because nobody living there can sign up for trash service, since they lack an actual address (and likely can't afford trash service anyway). So as soon as the single 30-gallon courtesy trash can gets filled up (within hours of delivery, if experience is any guide), they're on their own until that that can gets emptied. And they provide that single can for all the trash needs of the 30 or so people living adjacent to it.
One of the core drivers of homelessness is the absence of affordable housing within efficient reach of public transit to get to where people work. So by setting up communities that are designed specifically for walking and public transit and are affordable for most directly addresses the main driver of homelessness, which in turn starves the friends-couch-to-homeless-encampment pipeline. Nobody goes directly from evicted to homeless encampment. Its a long fall from grace. Preventing the first step, by ensuring there's adequate housing near where the jobs are, helps prevent the final step.
I lived in West Oakland for several years during the first .com bubble. People with houses there often didn't sign up for garbage service (or if they had, they didn't pay). I had to put a damned padlock on my garbage can just so I didn't have my own garbage dumped out and replaced by the freeloaders living next to me. They eventually notched my garbage cans with a saw so I couldn't lock them anymore. By the time I moved it was dueling piles of garbage, and it wasn't like I was the only one with the problem.
I find online commenters consistently underestimate the level of antisocial behavior that accompanies much of the squalor we see, and the fact that many people simply have no interest in playing by the rules of society regardless of how many handouts you give them.
You can't just keep giving them free things and hope they'll magically turn into productive citizens, especially when 'free' really means "paid for with someone else's money." They just laugh at you and take the handouts, just like they laughed at me for being such a sucker that I paid my bills every month. This is the reality of dealing with antisocial behavior, and it would behoove more commentators (and policymakers) to familiarize themselves with it.
To be honest I do not care. If you want to have great urbanism the single most important thing you can do is create places, where people want to be. Those places have to be nice to look at, enjoyable to be in and need to feel very safe, especially at night. If you have that everything else will follow, people will want to be there and they will demand zoning and transit to make it easier to access.
>One of the core drivers of homelessness is the absence of affordable housing within efficient reach of public transit to get to where people work.
No. It is drugs and untreated mental illness. Have you ever been around homeless people? The idea of homeless people, as people who are priced out of housing is ridiculous.
Yes. At many stages of the descent from "I'm just crashing on your couch until I save up enough for another deposit" to "I'm sleeping in my car until I can find a job" to "I'm living in a shanty and rummaging through the trash to turn in aluminum cans for change". Both whilst living in the Bay Area, but also in Oregon and Washington.
You're complaining (rightly) about the end stage. I'm saying that nobody starts at the end stage.
Hell, I'm actively watching my brother-in-law and his baby mama descend through the mental illness and addiction process, and even though they've been evicted and are now dragging their daughter through the couch-surfing phase, they still aren't at the living-in-tents-shitting-on-the-street phase of that descent.
And a major factor, for them was that neither of them could get the kind of jobs that would allow them to both have a stable living situation and do anything but work (because of criminal history resulting from addiction). Its a cascading series of problems that when he lost his license (due to his addiction), he could only work where he could walk, or where he could realistically ride a bus. And in most of the country, if you can't find work within those two ranges, you're shit out of luck.
And to be clear, I'm not proposing we just throw up our hands and say "I guess they're just addicted and this is our life now". I'm saying that "just lock up the homeless people" is as much a solution as "well, we've got seatbelts" is for a hydroplaning car. We have within easy reach the ability to 1) stop more people from becoming homeless, and 2) help people who are homeless get their lives back in order.
I live in a country with a right to housing. The government will literally pay your rent. Public transit is still full of homeless people. Guess why? Spoiler: It is not because housing is unaffordable or because transit is bad.
>Hell, I'm actively watching my brother-in-law and his baby mama descend through the mental illness and addiction process, and even though they've been evicted and are now dragging their daughter through the couch-surfing phase, they still aren't at the living-in-tents-shitting-on-the-street phase of that descent.
And you are sure that, if they stayed completely drug-free and sane, they couldn't find jobs which allowed them to pay rent? The problem here are the drugs, blaming anything else is absurd. There is exactly one way to help them and their child get the parents of the drugs and the child away from them until the parents stay sober.
Literally every single step in that tragedy, as you describe it, revolves around drugs. Seeking the cure in anything but getting rid of the drugs is absurd.
>We have within easy reach the ability to 1) stop more people from becoming homeless
No, we don't. The only way to stop people being homeless is getting rid of the drugs. Even if the government is legally obligated to pay for housing there are still homeless people because of the drugs.
>2) help people who are homeless get their lives back in order.
No. We need to get drug addicts sober. Anything else is secondary. Do you think your brother in law would be fixed if he got free housing, but remained a drug addict? Of course not.
I see by your comment history that you live in Germany. You do understand that even California is considerably less urban than your country, right?
And to be clear, I'm not saying my brother-in-law doesn't need to quit drugs. I'm saying that the in the US's justice system, just putting him in prison until he's clean will just guarantee that he's in and out of prison until he eventually overdoses, all the while dooming his 11-year-old daughter, my children's beloved cousin, to a life of addiction and abuse herself. Moreover, even if he does get himself clean, because of his criminal record, he's doomed to working those same shit jobs, living at the ragged edge of the poverty line, for the rest of his life, because very few will take the risk of hiring an ex-con. Nobody ever relapsed in those conditions, no sir.
Maybe its different in Germany. Maybe getting yourself clean and sober will allow you to live a productive and happy life, and once you've served your time, you're free of the stigma of being an ex-convict. But if the only solution to the drug problem in the US is incarceration, given the current state of prisons in the US, a more humane approach might be mass executions. Which, I recall, Germany has some experience with.
Is it? Much of Germany is rural, especially manufacturing, you would be surprised.
>But if the only solution to the drug problem in the US is incarceration, given the current state of prisons in the US, a more humane approach might be mass executions.
My point is that the homelessness problem is downstream of drugs. I have never said, nor do I believe, that just putting drug addicts in prison will solve anything. Especially when the prisons are full of drugs, as they are, even in Germany.
I do believe that trying to solve homelessness, while not addressing how to get people of drugs is a pointless endeavor.
>And to be clear, I'm not saying my brother-in-law doesn't need to quit drugs. I'm saying that the in the US's justice system, just putting him in prison until he's clean will just guarantee that he's in and out of prison until he eventually overdoses, all the while dooming his 11-year-old daughter, my children's beloved cousin, to a life of addiction and abuse herself. Moreover, even if he does get himself clean, because of his criminal record, he's doomed to working those same shit jobs, living at the ragged edge of the poverty line, for the rest of his life, because very few will take the risk of hiring an ex-con. Nobody ever relapsed in those conditions, no sir.
But the drugs clearly started it all. It is the root cause, not the lack of housing or distance to jobs. We both know that had he never taken any drugs none of this would have happened.
At no point did I say "don't try to solve the drug problem". I even said as much when I said "help the homeless get their life back on track". What I'm trying to say (and clearly failing at saying) is that "don't even bother with 'x' until we accomplish 'y'" misses the fact that at least as it pertains to dealing with making cities people want to live in, its a complex, interrelated system. In my, highly limited experience, for instance, homelessness drives drug use, because its a relatively cheap escape from the desperate reality of homelessness and long-term unemployment. I'm not here to make excuses for people, but I am here to say that its a lot more complicated than "get rid of the drugs, and people won't be homeless". If it were that easy, then Reagan's War On Drugs would've actually, you know, worked.
You should educate yourself on the root cause of the US's opiate problem. While there a lot of recreational drug users who went off the rails, virtually all of the addicts I know personally were initially wildly over-prescribed opiates for a legitimate medical reason, and in trusting their doctor, got addicted. There was a big court case around it. I know, the plural of anecdote is not data, but there is in fact data about it.
Yeah, just the federally controlled (mostly protected national parks, forests, wilderness, wildlife refuges, etc.) land is 45% of California’s land area.
The only reason it is not as easy as that is, because it is very, very hard to get rid of the drugs. But if that was accomplished and mentally ill people were properly institutionalized, then homelessness would become a non-issue.
>If it were that easy, then Reagan's War On Drugs would've actually, you know, worked.
Nonsense. The war on drugs failed to get rid of the drugs.