> Well, can we come up with a more constructive and friendly way of doing this

That's what the article is doing. Lots of people commit crime because they are homeless, or in financial struggle. If you allowed for zoning that would bring down the cost of rent, and therefore the cost of living, more people could get themselves off the street, and more people would have more money (from spending less of it on rent). That in turn should lower crime.

I think this is a very different approach from subsidised housing and other such strategies by the way. Because those just concentrate poverty in one area, without actually lowering cost of living. Instead it can make things worse, by keeping people who can't afford the area living in it.

> If you allowed for zoning that would bring down the cost of rent, and therefore the cost of living, more people could get themselves off the street

Lowering the cost of living is probably a good idea, you're not wrong, but there are some people for whom it will never matter how much the rent is, because they're not with-it enough to organize themselves to be able to pay it or to be a reasonable tenant. Mental health programs are the only hope I have for dealing with that, but they're too underfunded and frankly too voluntary presently to make the real difference we seek.

There are a lot of poor people who are not criminals who don't like being lumped in with the criminals. Welcome them, and show by example how to live a better crime free life. Show that education is what made you able to afford fun things. Show that you aren't actually smarter, but a few life choices that they can point their kids to (as an adult it is often too late) can bring their kids to your level.

I’m Appalachian. We have ridiculously low violent crime rates for the levels of poverty we have. I believe that this is a function of population density rather than any intrinsic trait of us hilljacks.

I went to PDX often before the lockdown and I was struck by the lack of housing. I met with mostly contractors and construction people and they either lived in campers or an hour north in Washington. These people were middle class and couldn’t afford that city. I can only imagine how awful it would be to have low income in a place like that.

There is no shortage of land though. It is not Manhattan.

Interestingly, violent crime rates in Appalachia have been increasing over the last 30 years while urban violent crime rates have been declining over the same period (minus the upward trend of the last 3-4 years).

But Appalachia bucks a lot of statistical trends, so make of that what you will.

A pretty good correlation exists between poverty and crime. You see the same kind of reactions in even small cities when there's a plan to build a homeless shelter or halfway house or any other such institutions, nobody wants it in their back yard, nobody wants the negative externalities.

You can call it cold, and it is, but it's also entirely rational.

same holds for sending your kids to a bad school. I had a conversation with someone about how i should send my kids to the neighborhood under performing school rather than private school because I was perpetuating the downfall. I said to him that he was perfectly free to sacrifice his kids on that altar but I reserve the right not to sacrifice mine.

if you want to move to a poor neighborhood with high crime in order to help save it then more power to you. However, I don't fault anyone wanting to avoid it either.

Why, yes; we could bring back a societal safety net and raise the minimum wage, so that it's actually possible for one income to pay rent, utilities, and still have some money left over for saving against a disaster and having some fun. We could take things like "healthcare" or "education" out of the hands of profit-seeking entities and run them with the philosophy that "a healthy population" is a much better profit than "a bigger number in a bank account".

We could even take the money we put into an increasingly militarized, dangerous, and expensive police force and put it into the things that reduce crime by making it a lot harder for someone to fall to the point where the consequences of crime are less than the consequences of being absolutely broke.

We could raise taxes on the tiny fraction of people and corporations who hold the vast majority of the money in the West, and especially the US, and send it back out into the system at the bottom with a basic income scheme, with the actual numbers on these tightly coupled with an assortment of cost-of-living indicators. If companies want to leave places that start taxing them, let them - they'll have to leave all their physical equipment behind, and we can institute a system of grants to help workers form a union and start using that stuff to fulfill people's needs for whatever they were making, with the profits being shared among the workers.

"But that sounds like socialism! Or even communism!", some will protest. Why, yes, yes it does. The people and corporations who want to accumulate huge amounts of money and power have been telling us that everything that sounds nice is "socialism" for my entire lifetime, and to be quite honest I have been at the point where they are making "socialism" sound pretty good compared to the capitalist hellscape they've turned the world into.

There are, of course, many ways this can go wrong. Utopia's not easy. But the present system sure isn't working either.

I'm probably biased being Canadian, but I feel a lot of Americans talk about social democracy like it's this ideological utopian grandiose dream that's never been tried or achieved.

But in reality, there's plenty of countries who've done it for a long time and had great success with it: Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Netherlands, Finland, Iceland, Belgium, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, India, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong for example.

Yeah we are basically swimming in “unrestrained capitalism is the only option forever” propaganda here.

US has crony capitalism, not capitalism. A social safety net is completely viable within the capitalist philosophy, and not considered "socialism". Real socialism is dangerous and people are scared of it for a reason.

> Real socialism is dangerous and people are scared of it for a reason.

Let's be honest: the only reason people in the US are scared of "socialism" is the fact that they've been immersed inanti-socialism propaganda throughout all their life.

Meanwhile, you can pretty much look at any European country to see how millions of people really feel about socialism.

What European countries have is social safety net within the capitalist philosophy, not socialism.

All of them?

Unless you confuse capitalism with an extremist Ann Rayndian neoliberal framework, and in that sense you can pretty much look at countries such as the Netherlands.

It was a statement, not a question.

Capitalism is an economic system based on private property on the means of production, and collection of economic rents on the basis of ownership. All European countries have that. The fact that they also tax those rents and redistribute that wealth into welfare makes it welfare capitalism, not socialism.

Although not an expert I've never seen a realistic individual and/or corporate tax rate that would generate enough revenue to enable UBI. Is there one?

Most of those things only work when you have the vast majority of the citizens in the country as net positive taxpayers. Unfortunately, that's not the case in the USA - you're ultimately becoming a "have not" country, full of itinerant people with no employment or prospects, thanks to massive-scale de-industrialization.

> basic income scheme

Paying people who don't contribute so that they can continue to not contribute is not going to get you out of this problem.

Your ideas are nice, you sound like a good person who wants good things for the world, but also somewhat naive and sheltered - somehow the socialist version of the libertarian shouting "bootstraps".

> they'll have to leave all their physical equipment behind, and we can institute a system of grants to help workers form a union and start using that stuff

It's just as likely to be burned to the ground in protest, these days. Much as the computer is more the OS than it is the hardware, the factory is more the business processes + engineering than it is the raw assembly line. Take that magic smoke out and even the nicest equipment will produce nothing. You expect squatters to move in and just resume producing widgets?

> Paying people who don't contribute so that they can continue to not contribute is not going to get you out of this problem.

How many businesses exist because someone had time to fuck around making a thing that nobody wanted, until suddenly they got it right and it was a thing a lot of people wanted? Basic income would grant that kind of time to everyone.

> Your ideas are nice, you sound like a good person who wants good things for the world, but also somewhat naive and sheltered - somehow the socialist version of the libertarian shouting "bootstraps".

dude we are living in the most extreme age of income inequity the US has ever seen, and you think me saying "what if we actually had the social safety net that I have watched corporate owned disaster capitalism systematically dismantle for my entire life" is "naive and sheltered"? ok, w/e

> You expect squatters to move in and just resume producing widgets?

No, I expect some of the people who were being severely underpaid to make the widgets to say "well, the boss is gone, but there sure does still seem to be a demand for widgets, let's keep making them and distribute the boss' pay more fairly".

This comment seems like Poe's law at work.

It this sarcasm? Wanting safety from crime is now same level as KKK or Nazis?