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the purpose of a system is what it does
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this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2024
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- Henri Lefebvre, The Right to the City — In brief, the right to the city is the right to the production of a city. The labor of a worker is the source of most of the value of a commodity that is expropriated by the owner. The worker, therefore, has a right to benefit from that value denied to them. In the same way, the urban citizen produces and reproduces the city through their own daily actions. However, the the city is expropriated from the urbanite by the rich and the state. The right to the city is therefore the right to appropriate the city by and for those who make and remake it.
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There's a number of other studies that show that, overall, letting people go unhoused is far, far more costly than just fucking housing them. It's not just paying for the cops and demo teams to chase them around, you're also paying for excess use of medical services that wouldn't be taking place otherwise, lost revenue because of people wanting to avoid the homeless, and a bunch of other things that all just pile up. It doesn't help that some startups have entered this space and you've got cities like San Francisco paying them something like 40 or 80 thousand a year to keep the homeless in a fenced off area in a tent grid. It doesn't really fix anything, it's just another shitty, expensive band-aid whose funding could have gone to fixing the problem but didn't.
Yes. They should do it like NYC, where it's basically illegal to live on the street. The city is required by law to offer free housing at a certain quality level for anyone who needs it. It's not amazing but you get a door that locks and a security team, plus a bathroom.
If you don't want to sleep inside, you literally have to leave the city. It's not cheap but it works much better than letting people live in tents.
Why the illegal part, though? People don’t really need an incentive to have shelter. It just punishes people who are struggling with even deeper issues.
Technically it's not illegal to sleep on the street, but there are sanitation rules regarding it. NYC has 8 million people. Any problem you can think of is magnified. It's literally a sanitary issue if you allow thousands of people to camp outside.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/26/nyregion/nyc-homeless-camp-bill-of-rights.html
Note that these rules also restrict people who have homes too. No one can have a party in the park after hours or take up a ton of space on the subway. Note also that you can sleep outside if you don't get in the way.
This doesn't apply because the law doesn't forbid anyone from sleeping under bridges. Also, you can get housing for free. That's my point. It's the opposite of that quote. Unless you're pro-theft or something.
I am not sure what the housing situation is actually like for homeless in NYC because I've never spoken to anyone there who experienced it. I don't take your word for it that it's good or ethical.
I am not protheft. I'm not wealthy like that. https://www.edelson-law.com/blog/2022/10/wage-theft-outpaces-all-other-theft-in-america/
There are a ton of articles on it. The system is huge and has been around for decades. Look it up if you like. If you don't care, don't.
No one said it was good at all. It's a necessary service in a big city. Obviously some shelters are very different from others. None of them are at nice hotels, but you can get your own room and a place for some of your stuff.
The major complaints are usually "it's too small" or "they don't let me have pets". Guess what? There are actual apartments people pay for that are too small and don't allow pets. It's NYC.
I'm talking about reality in this century. You're quoting an 1800s writer from another country. The system is a complicated solution to a complicated problem. So there's not going to be any simple answer, and definitely not from online quotes.
If you lack a sense of humor and can't see how close your quote was to his, that's fine. It was funny to me and maybe others. That you haven't learned something people were joking about hundreds of years ago is kinda on you.
The effects of violating these fair and just laws - do they impact the homeless and the housed the same? Do the laws, say, give fines based on income? Or do they give preferential treatment to people with better, often more expensive lawyers?
But no, your statement wasn't silly at all. The law is totally fair to the poor and wealthy alike.
I would have to talk to a homeless person who was homeless recently in NYC and used these programs to assess them.
Where should they leave their pets, ESAs, and service dogs when they stay in the shelter? Do you think roaming packs of dogs at night would be good?
It's a glowed up version of "The law binds both rich and poor equally". A transparently untrue statement that's meant to draw attention to laws that are a mere inconvenience for the rich but seriously hurt the poor.
Obviously they restrict people who have homes but that isn’t really relevant here, is it? Those people have choices, they get to choose to stay late in a park and the alternative for them is go home.
It’s not even close to the same thing.
They didn't say it was the same thing, they just mentioned that it's not just to target the homeless.
As you said in another comment, things are often more complex than one thing or another.
Exactly. These are necessary rules for a large city. No one can camp without a permit because then parks would be unusable. The same permit is for weddings, parties, whatever. It's pretty easy to get one for a few hours, but they will reject it if you ask to use the park every day and night.
People living outside in public parks and on streets is a really bad use of urban space. It takes public space and makes it private. That's why the city gives out free room in old hotels and shelters. It's a good thing people can't sleep wherever.
That's not to mention that it gets very cold in NYC in the winter, unlike San Francisco. If you're stuck outside in the winter in NYC, you will die.
Not necessarily true. For example if the place has "no alcohol and no being drunk" policy, some of them will rather stay out.
Right but that’s a choice the shelter can make and not a point against the idea that people, ultimately, won’t really refuse a place to sleep. It’s a more complex issue that takes more time than an evening so rules like “no being drunk” which sound fine don’t really help anyone.
I'd imagine it'd help make the unhoused who don't want to have to deal with drunk people feel a lot safer about using them.
So what are the people who depend on alcohol supposed to do? They aren't allowed to have seizures and go through withdrawal there either.
and if you want to use public money on it, then the goal has to be to help them get back to society, to which dealing with problematic behavioral patterns, like substance abuse, is a necessity...
Have you seen alcohol withdrawal?
What's your point? They should continue drinking themselves to death?
You let them continue until they can get a spot in a medical setting where they can safely withdraw.
that safe setting may very well be the shelter we are talking about
you are steering away from subject. it is absolutely fair to tell them "being homeless and nuisance in the street is from now on illegal. either you want help to get back to society and then you will accept the help with its terms - you are really not in a position to make demands - or you can move to some unabomber cabin in the middle of nowhere, and there you can do whatever you want"
No, alcohol withdrawal can cause seizures and death. A shelter is not a safe place, especially because they won't have alcohol for emergencies.
So you want to create an alternate society in the wilds?
Well that's one I haven't thought about since the last time I read Brave New World and thought, good thing we'd never do that.
Not what I wrote
Unfortunately some people do.
no. shut the fuck up with this authoritarian garbage. when the "shelter" offered comes with a slew of dehumanizing draconian traditions, forces them to abandon other resources (including pets, which are also functional when you're homeless) and wildly precarious, you would have to be fucking stupid to take the deal. cut this shit out, or let me impose those conditions on YOUR shelter.
Hey, just to get it off my chest since you attacked me for no reason other than some preconception you brought with you, fuck you too!
Now that I've dealt with that, back to the topic. Some people don't want structure, or shelter, or society, or any of it. It doesn't matter if there's no conditions applied, they just don't want it.
I remember years ago reading about this guy who was the director of a huge hospital. He was worth millions of dollars. He could do anything he wanted to do. Guess what he wanted to do? He wanted to live on the streets and drink alcohol until he died. He left his mansion, and his family, and went and drank himself to death on the streets. Was he mentally ill? Probably, man! But if anyone had access to every available option for help that existed, it was him. He didn't want it. He wanted to be a drunk homeless person.
So my point stands. You can offer whatever catch-all, condition-free solution you want, and some people are still going to reject it. That's just reality, regardless of what we wish.
Are you talking about Todd Waters? Otherwise link source. It's pretty rare for someone to want that lifestyle unless they've already involuntarily experienced it previously. Todd had started trainhopping when he was in high school.
I know of one other individual who is a millionaire and has a mansion he sleeps in, but during the day appears to be homeless and pushes a cart around cleaning up cans and trash. He's beloved by his local community (very nice man and generous tipper). He also experienced living on the street involuntarily previously and got an inheritance.
https://newscut.mprnews.org/2017/07/todd-waters-mission-was-to-make-people-homesick-for-their-freedom/index.html
No, not him. I can't find a source. I read about it in a newspaper, or magazine like 15-20 years ago. If I remember correctly, he was the director of St. Agnes hospital in Fresno, CA.
So 3 people we know of between the two of us were wealthy and lived some type of homeless lifestyle occasionally to full time. And so by your logic, the remaining hundreds of thousands of homeless should be penalized and not offered housing because these 3 individuals would decline it?
I never said any such thing. All I said was that unfortunately some people do need incentive to have shelter. Which I substantiated with an example, and you did as well. They're the minority, but some people just flat out don't want what we want. That has no bearing on what we should do for the people who do want and need shelter.
Oh sorry, I may have mistaken you for a different commenter then. Lemmy's reply system isn't super easy for me to navigate.
I think if a millionaire wants to rough it, camp, etc, they should be allowed to. Any adult should be allowed to roam. It's what our ancestors did.
San Francisco infuriates me. There are activist groups that are made of actual literal unhoused people telling the city what they need and what they want. And the city could just give people the money they need for a fraction of the administrative costs it spins on its non-profits and its government agencies.
But the city says homeless people are drug addicts and criminals and can't be trusted to use money responsibly.
So they funnel millions of dollars to corrupt non-profits and government agencies who promise to use the money responsibly for the benefit of the homeless and they fucking don't. There was a $350K program run by the Salvation Army in partnership with the local public transit agency. One homeless person used their services.. One.
At least government agencies are, at some remove, responsible to the taxpayers and the voters. Non-profits dedicated to "helping" the homeless have a very strong incentive to make the problem worse. Because the worse the homelessness crisis becomes, the more money goes to the nonprofits. So they take government money, give it to their employees, make some sort of pathetic token effort to help unhoused people, and as the crisis worsens they go back to the government and say "the crisis is worse, we need more money".
And civilians look at the amount of money being poured into assistance to unhoused people, and look at the crisis getting worse, and say "more money and services won't help these people, we need to criminalize them". And fucking Newsom is all over that because he's angling for the Presidency and military style crackdowns impress the fascists in red states.
There's a homelessness crisis because of government corruption and incompetence. And the majority of Americans think the solution is to give the government more military power, more police power, and let those same corrupt agencies brutalize the homeless more. It's sickening.
I actually kind of went to a major fancy pants conference in Portland last year for homelessness issues.
Yes, it was extremely dystopian to drink wine and wear jewelry and fancy dresses while seeing presentations on homelessness. The whole thing was depressing. The other people who were there to genuinely resolve the issue were also depressed. Everyone got drunk. We talked a bit.
The problem is that it's all a gridlock and all controversial and these people don't face any real discomfort from that gridlock or from prolonging the situation. They still get paid. As much as they wince and say how it's bad and they can't figure out how to work with NIMBY's and all the stigma and regulations etc- they still get paid. And they get to brag to all their friends about how kind and amazing they are for being the head of the Sad Pathetic Homeless People NonProfit Fund for the last 8 years.
It's like they sympathy jerk off. They are just edging to the suffering in a different way. If they were effective, then they wouldn't look so amazing and charitable because the homeless wouldn't be an issue. They couldn't keep jerking off to their own saintly ego.
The nonprofit industrial complex is a leech. At least government agencies have some level of accountability, because if they fail to solve a problem, the voters blame the politicians, and the politicians shit downhill on the agencies. Nonprofits don't even have that minimal level of accountability. They just spend all the government money they get, write grants saying "we spent all the money you gave us doing stuff, please give us more", and get more money.
But this is what you get when both the left and right have bought into libertarian free market ideology and agree that privatizing government services is more efficient than letting the government do its goddamn job.
Yes, charitable organizations are unfortunately corrupt.
Star Trek DS9 predicting the future yet again
We're less than 3 weeks away from the Bell Riots if we're in the Prime Universe.
Unless I slept through the Eugenics Wars in the 90s I'm sad to report we are not in the Prime Universe.
Though in that case there is a distinctive lack of lens flare.
Who are you going to believe your lying eyes or your buddy teft? The eugenics wars totally happened. Dolly the sheep was one of the first soldiers.
nah, they're about to happen, just late. check india and silicon valley.
The Eugenics wars were moved to 2022 through 2056 due to time travel bullshit.
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Eugenics_Wars
So we still got time to fuck it up.
and honestly, I would like to sit on a bench at night without worrying im keeping somebody out of their bed. that would be cool. I would like to stop the streets smelling like piss. I would like too walk on the sidewalk without having to detour and step into the street to avoid people's homes at least twice a block.
clearly, armed neo nazi thugs, even if you LIKE armed neo nazi thugs (we should, um, have a chat separately. what the fuck is wrong with hypothetical you?) don't make that happen. and for the libs: you wouldn't even have to look at human tragedy beyond their full comprehension every time you go outside! yes, you would have to give resources and basic human dignity to the 'undeserving', and supply side jesus WOULD damn you to eternal hell (being homeless in san francisco but during extreme weather events), but the few years before you die would be substantially nicer.
Not asking as a challenge to your comment, but what studies are you referring to? I'd be interested to learn more.
I would be very proud to say I had them on hand, but I don't. I'll look around, and share if I find them.
That would be very cool of you!