I've lived in two major cities of the world, spent time in many others; However, I've never seen anything as bad as San Francisco and surrounding areas. Some of my colleagues are from Europe and felt so shocked and uneasy about what we saw.
I hate to say it, but it definitely left a bad impression of the USA on my friends and I. It certainly made me question a lot of the things the US claims to stand for.
Land of the free and home of the brave? If you say so...
Yeah as in, people are free to be homeless if they didn't work hard enough. It's the Trump argument, he's a self-made man who kicked off with a small loan of just one million. A lot of Republican, anti-socialist voters are poor, but don't see themselves as poor but "temporarily underfinanced". And the truly destitute / homeless apparently lose their right to vote.
I'm not sure I understand what you're trying to say anyway.
We really need to stop talking about The Homeless in this country and start talking about the housing crisis. No one can get a handle on how you fix homelessness when we focus on the people who are homeless. But we could make a lot of headway on the problem if we tackled the housing piece of it.
It would not get everyone off the street. But it would, for example, get retirees off the street whose income will not cover rent because we simply do not have housing at the price point they need.
That's quite a blanket statement for the entire US. Can we confidently claim that no affordable housing whatsoever exists in Detroit, Baltimore, rural Pennsylvania, non-metropolitan Texas, or Midwestern states, where in some places http://freelandks.com/ one can still get free land?
The problem seems to arise when everybody is vying for roughly the same space - large coastal cities with mild weather, proximity to public transportation, beaches, decent restaurants, some entertainment scene, job growth and economic prospects.
Same coastal cities also seem to be earthquake-prone and therefore require more expensive (than aforementioned Midwestern states) building codes and safety regulations. As the cities are dense, there's a set of regulations in regards to mandatory parking, green zones and other stuff that's just peculiar to large cities. Combined with higher than average cost of labor, the construction and compliance costs alone command a premium, and that's before we get into land prices.
In the 1950s, the average new home was about 1200 sqft and held about 3.5 people. Today, it is over 2400 sqft and contains about 2.5 people. Meanwhile, we tore down something like 80 percent of our Single Room Occupancy units over the course of a couple of decades.
The lack of affordable housing has been severe and growing worse for decades. This is why waiting lists for Section 8 housing is routinely measured in multiple years or even more than a decade in some cases.
I will add that these comments about "It is just big cities that have expensive housing" are a red herring. That's where the jobs are. If you have no job, you can't afford a place to live. Jobs in small towns typically pay less. Moving someplace cheaper works for the privileged few with portable income and/or passive income. People who still need to work for a living cannot magically solve their problems by moving someplace cheaper.
This would have been easily doable. Hell if the political will were there building that many units in a year would be feasible.
But you can't zone that, you can't mandate it. You can't grant easements; you can't even used condemned public property.
Because our political system has been captured by greedy bastards like Vhinod Khosla and Donald Trump.
I dunno.
The city of Los Angeles had access to land and planning resources and they still arrived at optimal cost of $350,000 per barebones unit http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-ln-prop-hhh-qa...
As the linked article politely notes, those costs are likely to overrun once the construction starts "A Times analysis of projects funded by the California Tax Credit Allocation Committee, which includes most permanent supportive housing projects, shows that recent projects have usually cost more, averaging about $420,000 per unit in 2016."
Even if land is semi-free or government-owned, the zoning has been taken care of and the architectural designs are obtained pro bono, it still costs money to get building materials, hire labor, provide parking spaces, develop infrastructure and build the residences on a code-compliant way.
And let's just say that $420,000 a head goes a long way in many non-coastal areas of the United States.
What category of young person, wanting to live in an expensive city, cannot have roommates?
My opinion is that rich and privileged people get to routinely exercise their preferences and predilections without having to justify them. Everyone else needs to jump through hoops and fill out paperwork and prove to some authority that their preferences are a valid need. I think we could do away with a lot of expensive programs designed to accommodate special needs if we started from a baseline assumption that you should be allowed to get your preferences so long as they aren't hurting anyone else.
Most of the design of our world is extremely accommodating of the privileged few. Everyone else is default shat upon. I would like to live in a better world than that.
Would it have been better if your roommates shared the same (or similar, from a compassionate perspective) disorder? I have a friend who suffers from migraines. She found having similarly-afflicted roommates to be tremendously comforting and, in one case, potentially life saving.
Furthermore, you are ignoring my point that I did not have a diagnosis until shortly before my 36th birthday. Even without a diagnosis, I was well aware that my health was delicate, though other people viewed me as a hypochondriac and neurotic.
My argument is that people should be able to find a small cheap place they can afford to live in on their own if they strongly prefer living alone. They should not need to justify such a preference. A desire to have your own place and willingness to accept something small and bare bones should not make you a freak that society cannot accommodate. It was a completely normal arrangement in this country for quite a long time. Then we tore down most of our SROs and such accommodations these days are no longer a normal living arrangement for a young person just starting out. They are a program for hardcore junkies who would otherwise be chronically homeless and they have a terrible public image.
But if you watch old movies, or movies set in a previous era, just having a room with a sink and hot plate was completely normal for ordinary people. You see this in movies like A walk in the clouds. It was not Section 8 housing. It was not The Projects. It was a market rate rental commonly available.
There is no reason we can't bring that back.
In a country that values individual rights, it's not clear how you help that person get off the streets without forcing them. In a city with relatively mild climate like LA or SF, it's even harder to get the homeless into shelters where social services can more effectively help them.
Granted, there are plenty of people that do want to get off the streets, but not everyone living on the streets is willing to make the sacrifices to do so.
In most countries with functional social security networks. Canada, Germany and Sweden.
So while the above are leaps and bounds better, they aren't flawless. Canada has lots of mentally ill people on the streets due to _very_ poor mental health care available to them. And Germany and Sweden have people from Romania begging on the streets, since they're part of a group of people that have been historically (and currently are) mistreated in their homeland.
> In a country that values individual rights..
If you want people off the streets, offer them free housing. There is even (and remarkably so) an example of this from Utah, where free housing was provided to the ones in need. And the city saved money doing it, since fewer other services were needed as a result.
Also, separately, I find this argument to be a bit of a straw man, since the treating homeless people decently and having strong individual rights aren't fundamentally opposed. In America some things are done well collectively, in the interest of everyone, like providing roads.
I believe he was making the argument that, due to principles of individual liberty, the government cannot compel someone who wants to be homeless not to be.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/kevin-corinth/think-utah-solv...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/apr/27/utah-homeles...
And even when a region does offer good homeless services, word gets out and more homeless move in:
https://www.heraldextra.com/news/local/more-homeless-move-to...
Vancouver has about as severe a homeless problem as SF.
Can't speak to the other two countries.
I hear a lot about how this or that part of the population "doesn't integrate". What I never hear about is why it's so important they integrate.
Why it's important that the part of population integrates is because countries extend both rights and expectations to people. Groups of a specific culture that settle in an area and refuse to live under local laws are a problem. Because child/teen marriages are a problem. Because forcing children to beg for the families is a problem. Because living in conditions where large groups rely on begging is a problem. Etc.
How can we say some parents are guilty of child abuse while other parents are just not integrating?
Regarding difference between rights and expectations, there are two layers, there. There is the laws that apply to anyone with the rights that apply to anyone, and the laws that apply to citizen and the rights that apply to citizen (which rromas are not, most of the time). I'm not a lawyer, but I would tend to think the laws most often apply to everyone and the rights most often apply to citizen, except for basic decency. There's an exception regarding the laws : when a law makes mandatory for a child to go to school, it is usually only about citizens' children.
Now, we could certainly ask more of those people to disband mafias and enforce human rights. But I'm not under the impression it's what we try to do, in europe. What I see most of the time is attempts to push them away and to hell with them.
We tried all kinds of things. Yes, we tried to get their kids to go to school. We trie to build a police outpost in their village, burned in a week :) There're NPOs working specifically with them. The only problem is lack of will on their end.
As for your upper level comment, we can either leave them as outcasts' clan or make then integrate. In their current shape, they clash with modern society too much. Stealing, begging, dealing drugs, living in unregistered shacks, squatting public parks while keeping children away from education is what put them into their position in the first place. Either we look them up for all felonies they do or they have to learn to live with the rest of us. Their "special" way of life is not something that can continue and be respected in any way.
Regarding the "way of life", I find it funny it's considered a problem while I know so many friends, who nobody would say they are not integrated, who live just the same. They do seasonal winter work in tourism in mountains, seasonal summer work at beaches, and travel in between with their home/truck to visit friends and family, or just visit new places. I know three of them who have been living that way for 15 years, and nobody finds anything to say about it (except parents, of course, who would like to see them have "a real job").
Are you sure, deep inside, there is absolutely no problem of racism implied in your problems with rromas? (no need to answer this question, that's more something to ask to yourself)
In general population, we just lock them up, try to isolate from old friends and get their life back on track. For gypsies, their whole culture is immersed in that. We can either change their culture or leave them as-is. But if we leave them as-is, they stay outcasts. And then we get blamed for not integrating them :)
Racism in what way? That we don't want to let gypsies live in antisocial ways? I confident I don't have any problems with gypsies as long as they live like productive members of society. And I hate stealing drug-dealing scums equally no matter what their ethnicity or culture is.
If a gypsy gets clean and wants to join the society, nothing stops them. If a gypsy comes in regular clothes, it'd be hard to tell them someone is a gypsy and not just darker skin.
Of course, it's easiest to use racism card all the time. But sometimes the problem is the unfortunate culture.
I've been to a lot of places for a prolonged periods of time. The only place that has ever made me think of LA was Seoul. Every other city, no matter how poor, was in considerably better shape.
One difference that I feel is key, are housing regulations. You can put up 4 cement walls, with a cement floor and corrugated metal sheet roof, meet no safety standard, but still have a home. An address, a place of safety, where you can cook, clean clothes, and have access to electricity and water (possibly not legally, and certainly not reliably). Where your kids have light and can read and do their homework. Often housing 3 or 4 generations and forming their own community.
San Jose, Costa Rica, that is.
So it turns out that she had made the pot. Mined the clay. Fired it in charcoal from a wood fire. And she was intending to sell it for several pesos, with which she'd buy corn, beans and chillies. Walking both ways.
Getting over the theft and such, a little while still. But I started figuring out the usual scams and such. (Taxis still only cost $1 at the most, with no tipping expected, anyway.)
I even was able to mostly get over the fact that when you drove 5 km outside of the city that I'd see abject poverty that I hadn't even seen in the worst areas of my rust belt city - stuff that makes this article look like absolutely nothing.
It was a chronic thing: Ex-pats all living inside a literal walled garden, getting everything delivered. This was before Uber Eats and the like, so getting McDonalds and other fast food delivered to the complex was a new thing. Groceries, food, entertainment. And then the constant trips to Hotel del Rey and the Blue Marlin Bar so my co-workers could pick up prostitutes on the cheap with rooms available for rent by the hour...
What I realized slowly over a period of a few months is that it wasn't the insane poverty - and relatively low violent crime rate! - that got to me. It was what we were doing to "gentrify" the area. It felt like, and was, pure exploitation and taking advantage of massive economic gradients. That we worked in tech and could sling some code made us masters of our domain, being paid well-above-average wages for Silicon Valley - and literally unheard of sums in Costa Rica.
We've met the enemy, and it was us.
And damn, ex-pats! In heavily ex-pat areas, prices are pretty much at US level. I recall paying $20 to park for a few hours in downtown Cuernavaca! Stuff is very inexpensive outside those areas, but then you're the only gringos around.
Up in the mountains, you get hard looks from some of the male indigente. Who often speak Mexican as a second language. Their ancestors fled the Spanish way back when, and they're still there. And they don't trust outsiders. If they decide that you're up to no good, a mob may hurt or kill you. Even if you're an official of the Mexican government.
I recall one trip, going through the Amtrak section of Penn Station in NYC. There were at least four kinds of armed folk wandering around: 1) National Guard with AR15s; 2) NYC police with AR15s; 3) NYC K9 teams; and 4) Amtrack police. But at least no shotguns :)
Seeing the poverty and, how the poor are treated in San Fransisco, Los Angeles, and every other large US I've been to, is so degrading and offensive that the idea of participating in the financial system that sustains it is unacceptable.
Surely I can't be the only one who feels this way.