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.”
American liberals are only progressive until it fucks with their money.
I’m as liberal as the next guy, and i know this will definitely not be a popular opinion here, but honestly we need to stop giving homeless people a free pass and I’m fucking serious. A lot of these people do it only because they can get away with it. They need to know that what they are doing isn’t OK. It’s not the answer, there really isn’t a single answer, but we also can’t just keep enabling them. I say this as a person with a homeless meth addict sister, a brother in law who’s been on drugs his whole life and is currently in section 8, and a sister in law who got her shit together after being a homeless addict. I also have family who have volunteered full time at shelters and food banks
Most of these homeless there are either addicts or severely mentally ill and need help. Of course I’m just referring to the addicts here, the mentally ill need help. Homeless families down on their luck aren’t included here, they typically know where support is and are using it.
Historically, study after study has shown that most people are not homeless due to addiction. So either there’s been a drastic shift in the data since COVID-19, or you’re repeating a false narrative that liberals and progressives have been widely aware of and discussed for ages.
The homeless where they are booting people in downtown SF are 100%. I live 10 miles from there and see it. I agree with your claim, but location has a lot to do with the type of homeless. Oakland for example has a lot of people you’re talking about. Also read my second paragraph
How come the US has such a massive homelessness problem while having pretty much the cheapest real estate in the world (relative to income)? People in other developed countries can’t even dream about such low prices. The US government also has the world’s biggest budget - just house people for free for fucks sake! It’s literally pennies for the state.
P.S. Property to income ratio source - https://www.numbeo.com/property-investment/rankings_by_country.jsp
The real answer is that people feel entitled to live in major cities so they don’t go to the areas where there is cheap real estate.
They think supply and demand doesn’t apply to them, and they have plenty of other entitled city-dwellers to support them.
Unfortunately, reality is just different than what they want. They don’t want to admit that though, so they just sit around and wait for other people to solve their problems.
They’re still waiting.
You need to brush up on your reading comprehension.
People feel entitled to live in major cities. They think life outside of one doesn’t matter and they’d rather be homeless in LA than living in a house in Bald Knob.
Those who try to spend taxpayer money to house people in major cities think they’re above supply and demand and entitled to live in major cities even if they can’t afford it. They’re important though, because they funnel taxpayer money to landlords.
You’re absolutely right and I’m baffled that you and some others are getting down voted so heavily with only one critical response. Either there are a lot of dim bulbs in this comment section or someone is manipulating votes. Interceptor there has an unusual distribution of vote frequency, making all of his comments outliers. Looks like someone is cheating at Lemmy. What a weirdo.
You say the homeless in cities pay more to sleep on the street than the rural homeless, but you fail to provide sidewalk sleeping cost comparables. If you’re going to be so ridiculous it’s important to be very over the top, or people may really believe this is somehow your view.
yes, i’m sure i should quit my job in a big city, give up health insurance (which i have gotten for the first time in my adult life), uproot my kids and move to ?, to do ???, so i can live in a depressed backwater for cheap rent.
i’m so fucking entitled.
edit - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slab_City,_California
I never said it was easy, but it is doable.
If you can’t afford to live there, why should someone else foot the bill? Because you’re entitled? You think supply and demand doesn’t apply to you? You think you’re “too good” to live outside of a major city, even though many others do?
Yeah. Thanks for proving my point.
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, but why would we do that when we could just tell them to pull themselves up by their bootstraps?
Look, I’m all for telling people to pull themselves up, but the US could rake some serious political prestige points worldwide for doing that. And also flex over China and other commies - look how great capitalism is! If I was Trump during his dumb economic war with China, I’d house all homeless in an instant just to show China who’s a real daddy here.
Much of the homelessness problem in America is really untreated mental health problems. A lot comes from not having universal healthcare.
Also, most jobs are in cities where housing is more expensive. We also have a shitty minimum wage, and a minimum wage job can’t buy a studio apartment and food in most areas where there are jobs.
Also, average and even median income is not a great measure of the wealth of the poor. The US Gino coefficient (a measure of income inequality) is poor compared to most other developed countries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_equality
while having pretty much the cheapest real estate in the world (relative to income)
If that’s true, considering young people in the U.S. can’t afford to buy houses and end up living with their parents for 15 years after they turn 18, I’d hate to know what it’s like in other countries.
There was a bill that was passed by the Clinton administration in the 90s that limits the amount of residential property the federal government is allowed to own. They also passed some concessions that make it so that a reduction in unpopular government spending cannot equate to an increase of spending on social programs.
But it was the Democrats who orchestrated and approved it.
That’s what makes it illegal, Republican crimes aren’t real crimes, remember?
While I agree we should be solving the root problem of homelessness equitably, the headline is misleading as I know many people on the left were also happy to have clean streets for a while.
To solve homelessness would mean to completely upend the entire world’s economy and change to a global socialist structure. Homelessness is baked into our economic system. Capitalism is a zero sum game and if we’re going to celebrate having billionaires, we have to celebrate having people live and die on the street.
If the streets were cleaned by putting people in housing, it would be worth celebrating, but there’s nothing left wing about people being displaced from where you personally live. Even if those “people on the left” have certain left wing values, it’s right wing selfishness that made them happy. Those homeless people just got pushed elsewhere and those areas have to deal with a rise in the unhoused. The streets can only be, “cleaned,” by housing people, otherwise you’re just sweeping the, “filthy poors,” into another person’s area.
From an amoral economic perspective, we should either get people shelter and make them productive members of society, or just hasten their inevitable deaths on the streets by executing them ourselves. Give them a helping hand, or accept that we don’t think that they deserve life if they can’t play the capitalist game. The current approach costs us more money, prolongs their suffering, but gives us plausible deniability through ignorance. Fuck ignorance. Just embrace that the system is evil.
Lol what? I don’t think they would appreciate being executed, and would gladly take the status quo over being “out of their misery” 🙄
It’s a “Modest Proposal.” A satirical joke. It points out the absurdity of the current system and attitudes about unhoused people being filth that need to be cleaned away. You usually clean dirty things by washing away the grime and taking the waste to the dump. It’s no way to describe actual people.
We put these people’s lives at risk by not giving them basic necessities. We give them serious, life-changing trauma while insisting they pull themselves up with little help. We treat them like they don’t deserve to live, as dangerous pests that we can uproot at will. If we’re not going to do enough to help them out of their situation and we don’t want them around, what else can we do but kill them? We could put them in some town in the middle of nowhere, but that’s just housing them with extra steps. We give them housing and social services, or don’t complain when they’re on the streets.
Hmm I wouldn’t say left vs right wing is equivalent to some videogame good vs evil slider. Everyone can be selfish, it’s not a ‘right wing’ trait. To enjoy a respite from feeling unsafe, having human defecation on the street, and being yelled at for no particular reason doesn’t make you a sinner.
It is true that left vs right isn’t the same as good or evil. However, the left wing tends to look for non market based solutions, using the government to address issues rather than relying on private interests. Left wingers can be selfish, but right wingers have selfishness explicitly embedded into their ideology of free markets and social Darwinism. Besides, prudent behavior isn’t the same as being selfish. Enjoying negative reinforcement isn’t bad so long as you recognize who applies it and what they want to accomplish.
I personally think a not insignificant amount of encampment dwellers are just people taking advantage of the situation to steal and get high/drunk all day rather than stay clean and work some crappy job to get by, but even I think these sweeps are stupid and a waste of resources as they just shuffle people to other areas rather than accomplish a single thing.
