Hundreds of unsheltered people living in tent encampments in the blocks surrounding the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco have been forced to leave by city outreach workers and police as part of an attempted “clean up the house” ahead of this week’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation’s annual free trade conference.
The action, which housing advocates allege violated a court injunction, was celebrated by right-wing figures and the tech crowd, who have long been convinced that the city is in terminal decline because of an increase in encampments in the downtown area.
The X account End Wokness wrote that the displacement was proof the “government can easily fix our cities overnight. It just doesn’t want to” (the post received 77,000 likes). “Queer Eye but it’s just Xi visiting troubled US cities then they get a makeover,” joked Packy McCormick, the founder of Not Boring Capital and advisor to Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto VC team. The New York Post celebrated the action, saying that residents had “miraculously disappeared.”
Don’t use California as a metric for American homelessness. California has made itself a veritable Mecca for homeless people by passing laws that allow them to set up camp virtually anywhere. Those laws, combined with its naturally temperate climate have resulted in 30% of America’s homeless population living in California. No other state in the U.S. has such a hard-on for homeless people and we have much more sensible laws that reflect that.
Well, property values around where the homeless are are also way higher than just about anywhere else in the world. California also has 12% of the US population.
It’s not just the laws allowing homeless people to live that have created this. It’s also the laws that allow rent to be extremely high and allow landlords to have empty living spaces without being taxed to hell for it.
Here in Colorado rent keeps going up with no end in sight and our local government is trying to provide help rather than limit it. Tax dollars down the drain.
Yeah, we really need some laws to punish landlords hording living space. If it isn’t being used to house someone, it should be taxed at an extremely high rate. You shouldn’t be able to get a tax write-off for not utilizing property just because you want to charge too much. Reduce prices until it’s filled or pay the consequences.
