That wouldn't be an issue if we also provided shelter to the most distressed people in our society. As if we don't have the technology to build housing on the cheap. Our lack of communal will to help fellow people is a real shame.

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jdietrich 11 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Homelessness only partially overlaps with what British authorities euphemistically refer to as "street lifestyles". The people you see blacked out in the gutter or ranting wildly on a subway car are disproportionately likely to be homeless, but their behaviour is not the result of homelessness - many of them do in fact have a stable home and most of the rest would continue to behave in an antisocial manner even if they were adequately housed.

The problem of persistent disorderly conduct by a small minority of highly disturbed people is either an unfathomably complex psychiatric issue, or a fairly straightforward carceral issue.

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saimiam 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

to offer free public transport to people, we now have to solve housing at a societal level. To solve housing, we have to fix zoning laws. to fix zoning laws, we have to fix NIMBY-ism which needs partisanship to be solved. To fix partisanship...

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AnthonyMouse an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> to offer free public transport to people, we now have to solve housing at a societal level. To solve housing, we have to fix zoning laws. to fix zoning laws, we have to fix NIMBY-ism which needs partisanship to be solved. To fix partisanship...

Aren't half of these wrong?

NIMBY-ism isn't particularly partisan. Find a suburb and it's probably full of NIMBY zoning rules regardless of which party has the majority there. This is one of the things which isn't red vs. blue, it's "got mine" vs. the people who don't get a vote because they can't afford to live there because they don't get a vote.

You also don't have to "solve housing the societal level" to keep the homeless from using the subway as a bedroom. That's the better way to do that, but you can also do things like build homeless shelters that resemble (and therefore have the density of) college dorms in places where the "neighbors" are auto salvage yards, warehouses, prisons, abandoned buildings or the like and are correspondingly less likely to object to putting them there. And then anyone you catch being disruptive on the subway gets a free one-way ticket to the shelter.

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makeitdouble an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Shelter should be, but doesn't need to be housing. When people fear that public transportation becomes shelter they're not arguing houses will be built in train stations.

Having other places with a roof, some security and some public amenities should go a long way to avoid other services getting bogged down by homelessness.

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alsetmusic an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Why shouldn't we have exactly the ambitions you're using as an argument against change? I support all of those proposals. The richest nation in history could do all of that easily if there was the will to do so.

If giving away free public services could be grifted to increase the bottom line of the ultra wealthy, we'd have a utopian society.

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garciasn an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I absolutely despise the world we live in where the default answer to everything is effectively “no.”

I wish we could get to a point where we default to “yes” and find solutions rather than making it easier to say “no.”

	▲	jacquesm an hour ago \| parent [-]
		It's worse than that even. It is 'things are bad, therefore we can't begin to improve'. Weirdly enough that never goes in the other direction. The day that people realize that people without a lot of money are also people things will start to improve. And this is rather more than less likely to happen because I suspect there will be a lot more people without a lot of money soon compared to today.