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| ▲ | nixon_why69 9 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | No, it's actually very unusual to have tons of homeless people next to spectacular wealth, California is a global outlier in this phenomenon. There are many, many places in the world that are much poorer and don't have homeless encampments all over the place. | | |
| ▲ | ltbarcly3 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | I literally said that. | | |
| ▲ | nixon_why69 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | You said "there are homeless people everywhere", which is technically true but omits quantity, and especially quantity compared to wealth. I'm not as positive as you are about what makes California (and Seattle) create/attract so many, but it's definitely an outlier compared to "everywhere". | | |
| ▲ | esseph 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I'm not as positive as you are about what makes California (and Seattle) create/attract The weather is pretty nice, much more stable than in the east coast. | |
| ▲ | ltbarcly3 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Yes, if you didn't understand my point: there are homeless people in every society, but most do not have as many as silicon valley because they pressure them into accepting the help necessary to restore their ability to make rational decisions. Rational people do not choose to live outside on the sidewalk like rats, people who are drug addicted and who have untreated mental illness do. | | |
| ▲ | nixon_why69 9 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I'd just be really skeptical of thinking I have the true understanding and solution to this issue. Like, do you know many addicts or seriously mentally ill? Have you tried pressuring them into being better? How did it work out? | |
| ▲ | amanaplanacanal 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | All it takes to be homeless is not being able to afford housing, drugs or mental illness are not required. You really think all it takes is "choosing" and housing will appear for you? | | |
| ▲ | dgellow 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | Also, drug consumption and mental disorders is very often a result of being homeless. Try having bad sleep in your comfortable home for a few days in a row and see how quickly your mental stability deteriorates and how many bad decisions you start to take (anyone who has insomnia periods will attest) |
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| ▲ | bulbar 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | That's not how it works at all. You can't pressure people into becoming a productive member of society. What you can do when it already happened is kill them or make them die in some ways, jail them or try to support and/or treat them. I hope it goes without saying that letting them just die or killing or jailing them is not an option in a western society. Prevention is much more favorable of course. For example, don't let people become homeless easily. But even then, a significant amount will become homeless. | | |
| ▲ | ltbarcly3 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | Until you accept that they didn't 'easily become homeless' the problem will continue. They used drugs and spiraled, usually over the course of many months or years, forced all their friends to turn their backs on them, got kicked out of any living situations they had access to because of drug/alcohol use or theft to support the same and finally ended up on the street. On the street they have access to almost endless support, at least in Silicon Valley, but much of that support is contingent on things like not openly using heroin or not repeatedly getting so intoxicated that they defecate or vomit on themselves, so they refuse it. I don't care how liberal you are, no society is functioning when it allows people to get on BART and pee on themselves and defecate on the cloth seats and walk up and down the aisles dripping feces and urine on the floor. That is allowed and nothing is done about it for fear of upsetting homeless 'rights' groups who are funded by the tax dollars meant to help homeless people. | | |
| ▲ | amanaplanacanal 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | Perhaps you aren't aware, but only about a third of homeless people are drug addicts, from the surveys I've seen. | | |
| ▲ | ltbarcly3 10 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Here is how you get to 1/3: 1. Widen the definition of 'homeless' to cover people that nobody would consider homeless in every day language. Include anyone who is staying with a friend, living in corporate housing, staying with a family member, etc. Include anyone you possibly can that is unlikely to be a drug addict. 2. Narrow the definition of homeless. Don't consider people that almost everyone does consider homeless. Make sure to target the subgroups of homeless people that are very likely to use drugs. 3. Narrow the definition of drug use. Make it as hard as possible to count someone as having used drugs. Raise the evidentiary bar so high that even when you have evidence they are a drug addict it doesn't qualify them as a "drug addict" by the studies definition. Bury that definition so it's technically there but you have to go through the study carefully to find it. Lets pick a study in a big important journal and check it for the above: How about CASPEH: "Illicit Substance Use and Treatment Access Among Adults Experiencing Homelessness," JAMA, 2025 JAMA is a very prestigious journal: Who counts as a substance user: Only meth, nonprescription opioids, cocaine/crack count as addictions. Cannabis, alcohol, benzos, hallucinogens, inhalants are excluded. Someone who has a valid prescription to opiates, even if they are being abused, cannot be methodologically counted as a drug addict. THIS INCLUDES METHADONE. What counts as addict: "Regular" = 3+ times per week. A twice-weekly meth user is 'occasional use'. They might take a gram and stay up for 3 days twice a week, but they are 'occasional user' and don't count in the 37% addict number quoted by this paper. What counts as addict: Last 6 months only. If you admit you used fentanyl every day for the last 10 years but claim you got clean 181 days ago, you are not a drug user according to this study. How did they check? They asked each person face to face whether they used drugs and which ones and how often and just took their word for it. The real numbers from the raw data the study used: 41.6% of homeless self reported 2x per week or more hard drug use before they became homeless.
an additional 23.2% claimed they started regular use after becoming homeless. That's about 65% already from their own data, 2x what the headline pretends. Excluding high use subgroups: to be included in the data, the homeless person had to prove they were giving informed consent. Then they additionally had to be willing and able to spend 45 minutes or so filling out the survey. The people with psychosis or who were intoxicated at the time of the interview were excluded. How many people have you walked past and they were incoherent, unconscious, or high? They were ignored in this study. | |
| ▲ | salemh 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [dead] |
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| ▲ | YackerLose 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Homeless people are a better way to keep cowardly minions (I mean, valuable employees) in line than cops. The homeless are an important part of capitalist power structures. They are a visible reminder of the consequences for not meeting quarterly goals. | | | |
| ▲ | estearum 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | No, homeless people are not everywhere. Homelessness is created by high rents. High rents are created by high local productivity. The people who are productive enough to make it over the rent-bar are housed, and their marginal productivity above the rent-bar serves to raise the rent-bar (talk to any landlord about how they set rent prices: it's the local wages, stupid). This then pushes a greater proportion of people below the rent-bar, and then they are homeless. There are few places in the world more productive per square foot than Silicon Valley, ergo one must be extremely productive in order to remain housed there, ergo it has an extremely bad homelessness problem. That's why people making $200k+ (an extremely productive person by national standards) need public housing assistance in Silicon Valley (https://www.reuters.com/article/world/palo-alto-considers-su...). Which of course actually just... raises the rent again... The charities may be full of grift and whatnot, but you can remove them entirely and you will not solve the fundamental problem. | | |
| ▲ | shafyy 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | > High rents are created by high local productivity. Wrong. High rents have many reasons and also good policies to get them down and have affordable housing for more people, also in otherwise expensive and popular cities. | | |
| ▲ | vlovich123 9 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | OP has the demand part of the equation if supply remains fixed. The reason supply remains fixed is the US as a whole made policy changes in the 1970s that slowed down construction, specifically zoning laws and environmental laws swept the country. The 2008 recession also cancelled what little construction remained ongoing for a long time. When you combine that with spiking wealth in Silicon Valley, you’ve got the perfect storm in Silicon Valley. With OpenAI and Anthropic both based in SF, it’s going to be worse than ever once they IPO. | | |
| ▲ | estearum 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | The equilibrium for new housing construction will always be "just enough to keep it expensive by local standards [i.e. by local wages]." That's especially true with rising labor, material, and capital costs. It was actually the post-war housing boom that was abnormal, fueled by aggressive federal funding of suburban buildout. US municipalities are now broadly doomed to bankruptcy trying to maintain sprawling infrastructure that was never cost-effective to create in the first place. Look at Austin TX. Influx of new building, prices stabilized, and now construction is dropping off a cliff. No one can afford to build into a stable or potentially falling local market. Construction will start again when local productivity grows enough for people to bid the prices back up again. |
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| ▲ | estearum 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Nope. Rents cannot (at meaningful scale) exceed local productivity, or else there will be widespread vacancies and landlords will reduce their rents. Rents cannot (at meaningful scale) fall below local productivity, or else landlords will simply raise their rents. Go talk to a landlord about how they site prices. Step 1. Look up income of your target demographic Step 2. Eat 30% of their income Can you show me a place with high local productivity and low rent? Can you show me a place with high rent and low local productivity (that's not e.g. a vacation destination for people with high productivity elsewhere)? You can certainly artificially suppress prices with rent control. But that just gets fed back into the system in the form of reduced supply, so it ends up raising rents on the non-controlled housing stock anyway. | | |
| ▲ | kbelder 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Assume you have an area with a certain productivity and rent. Population and housing are growing at a certain rate. Now make a law that makes construction cheaper. Or make a law that makes construction more expensive. What happens to rent and mortgages, even though productivity hasn't changed at all? Productivity (or, rather, wealth) of the occupants is a very strong factor, but it is still just one of multiple factors. | | |
| ▲ | estearum 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | You think you can make a law that sets the price of housing above local wages and stays there? No, you actually cannot do this in any lasting way. The price of land would fall to the level required to make it construction viable again. Or the city would be abandoned, which is not generally the outcome since cities have so much shared capital investment that cannot be moved elsewhere. |
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| ▲ | don_esteban 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Can you show me a place with high local productivity and low rent? Put the following prompt into your favourite AI and enjoy the reading: "How do rents relate to productivity in the area? How does Vienna compare to San Francisco?" | | |
| ▲ | estearum 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | Vienna? World famous for publicly-funded housing construction? Try this one: "Create a simple analysis approximating how much higher rents would be in Vienna if not for the aggressive public subsidization of supply" In any case, Vienna has a good system! But it's not that it avoids high productivity → high rent, it's that it splits rent into subsidy costs and rent. In other words, the amount of subsidy + rent required will grow with local productivity. | | |
| ▲ | don_esteban 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | My point is: Your post reeked by defeatist 'nothing can be done against market forces'. Yes, it can be done, and if we want to have a reasonable future, it should be done. | | |
| ▲ | estearum 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | So you were responding to an assumption that's not actually in my comment? Vienna's solution is fine but has escalating costs and isn't necessary. Land Value Tax is better. |
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