Re:California Spent $17B on Homelessness. It’s Not Working
by imtringued on Saturday June 03, 2023 @10:52AM
(#36177145)
The difference is that Europeans an Canadians are willing to bribe their homeless people to stay in line. It is called coasian bargaining and welfare payments are the only widespread application of it that has had any semblance of success.
Re:California Spent $17B on Homelessness. It’s Not Working
by neilk on Sunday June 04, 2023 @04:36PM
(#36189347)
Friend, every person gets benefits from the state. Be thankful that all the help you got was education, policing, infrastructure, community wealth, tax policies that favor asset owners, indirect subsidies, or policies that would be obvious redistribution if it weren’t laundered through defense spending. If you look at where America’s defense spending goes it is rather obviously an employment and welfare program with a side hustle of war profiteering. There would be no Silicon Valley without massive defense spending in the Cold War.
Bribed? You seem to think that the homeless actively use their immoderation as some kind of protection racket.
Alternately, we could say the Americans have decided to make the lives of poor and addicted people as bad as can be achieved without actually killing them.
But I'm just going to say: I've lived in San Francisco. I currently live in Vancouver, not far from the epicentre of unhoused and addicted people.
Vancouver has many of the same problems and for the same reasons.
I have never, not once, feared for my safety around poor or addicted homeless people in Vancouver. Nor did I even feel like they hated me, specifically. I remember walking out of a doorway in Gastown where there was a woman smoking a crack pipe, and she was very apologetic and moved her stuff. It seemed oddly Canadian to me, even at the time.
In San Francisco I often felt sheer rage from unhoused people, or even just poor people. Acting out aggressively at the slightest provocation. Screaming for apparently no reason.
If you've lived your whole life in America it may be hard to imagine that these things aren't universal. But they aren't. If you think about it there really isn't any reason why being poor has to be the same as being dangerous.
I have no evidence as to exactly what the difference is. I think maybe Canadian policies are a little more generous and a little more available. Canadians were just as racist, but maybe American chattel slavery really went over the top in causing such social rifts. I don't really know.