I think there's a crisis of ineffectiveness in Center-Left institutions
They are too deliberative, and take excessive time including voices of every stakeholder. So you don't just go do the "obvious thing". You cater to trying to listen to every voice in an effort to be as inclusive as possible. Committee after committee and an obsession with process. You can spend years placating NIMBYs and people living with their own alternate reality.
Meanwhile real people are suffering from lack of action.
This level of ineffectiveness just enables authoritarianism ("at least they get something done") and gets people to seek the private industry for their solutions.
Those on the left also quite often suffer from letting perfect be the enemy of good. I've had a few friends over the years who would seem to prefer nothing be done rather than make incremental progress. I.e., how people will be critical of a carbon tax to help reduce emissions simply because it's not good enough, even if its a step in the right direction. We've seen it with health care as well. It's "medicare for all or bust."
I appreciate the sentiment of wanting the right/perfect solution, but the perfect solution doesn't happen all at once. Often times a compromise is needed in order to help people right now, not hypothetically in the future. Sometimes that means you end up being less inclusive, but so be it if shit gets done.
Talking from personal experience, it applies also. Perfectionists like me are often deadlocked into not releasing something until it's perfectly executed, caters to every use case, takes every edge case into account, etc. My late cofounder spent (too much) time training me otherwise, that small incremental changes will compound into larger ones in a big enough timescale, and that it's more effective to simply get started than deliberate ages over it.
Definitely. Right now they’re “cancelling” Bill Burr because he went and did a show in Saudi Arabia. One of the left’s staunchest allies for years and one of the few males on the left that young boys can actually identify with and he’s in the trashcan for doing a show with the Saudis. It’s bonkers.
Don’t kid yourself, you are effectively “canceling” them in an environment where the federal government is already making it hard for them to express their views. The left needs to have more of a long term view rather than just pulling down all the people standing up for them at the slightest deviation from what is expected. Soon there won’t be anyone left and the other team is chomping at the bit to eat you up.
I'm not "left", but I liked Bill Burr even though he's fairly uneducated and populist.
That's because Bill Burr is a hypocrite for it. He complains about billionaires and the rich, complains about not enough free speech (but Saudi stipulation was censorship about royals and religion), and complains about other people doing exactly what he did[0] (still sleazy if he says he'd do it too). He acts like he's Carlin, rants about other people's $ but he's really only about his own $ too.
People thought he held sincere ethics and would speak on them. They're disappointed he's just another greedy rich guy he was complaining to everyone about.
>Those on the left also quite often suffer from letting perfect be the enemy of good.
Exactly, its because they are idealist. Its also not hard to follow this observation over to Europe, pretty much the epicenter of idealism on earth, and then look around. Oh yeah, much more liberal than the US, with countless examples of idealism throughout.
One of the current such examples is how Europe sees Putin, and how the East sees him.
The antidote to the idealism are individuals with confidence, and of course testosterone. Elements which when put in a pot with the aforementioned mix violently. You need people saying, well, this is good enough, and if its not I'll come up with something that'll fix it, when that happens.
I disagree. These half ass solutions come from parties with vested interests and effectively amount to inaction while taking the wind out of the sales of any real action. Carbon tax (the kind with credits and offsets) is a license to pollute. A direct tax on carbon would actually force them to change which would be bad for the economy so we can't have that. Compromise (listening to NIMBYS and lobbyists) is exactly what not to do. You can't make an omelette without breaking some eggs.
SF, Dallas, and Houston all have Democratic leadership that could be described as center left? (For America. To an outsider, America has two conservative parties)
The unhoused are 'stakeholders' too actually, so I'd describe Cali's problem as listening too much to wealthy/powerful stakeholders, while ignoring those most impacted. Who can forget Newsom's camp-destroying photo-op and forced bussing the undesirables out of town to prevent people from seeing 'crime' aka 'poverty'.
These institutions are not log-jammed by accident. "You cater to trying to listen to every voice" Reader, they only listen to their friends and donors, this is the problem. These 'listening sessions' you are told are 'stopping progress' exist to placate legitimate concerns. Blaming unions is also fun, I heard that a lot back in Cali, no matter the issue, no matter the union, from the wealthiest people.
Politicians that seem to do almost nothing are preferred by the donor class.
Bog standard Democrats have more smoke for Zohran (the sincere housing and affordability guy) than they have for their 'Republican colleagues' in this era. That should tell you everything you need to know.
"This level of ineffectiveness just enables authoritarianism ("at least they get something done") and gets people to seek the private industry for their solutions."
EXACTLY. THIS IS INTENTIONAL. PUBLIC COST, PRIVATE PROFIT IS THE GOAL. A WELFARE STATE FOR BUSINESSES, NOT PEOPLE.
Because Trump, for all the problems and crimes, represents _action_. I hate what he has done to this country and the government, this administration is nothing but cronyism and self-enrichment the whole way down. But, it does show a different standard of action.
The wealthy are supporting candidates who offer lip service to leftist policies and then do nothing to cut through basic red tape and court challenges. The "leftist" candidates that the rich support run on building more housing, and then let the rezoning take 15 years in committee.
Here, in Seattle, Bruce Harrell would be a perfect example. He ran on transit, policing reform, and housing, and in the time he has been in office he has accomplished - nothing. No majors action has been attempted, and even minor reforms have been stuck in endless committees for this whole time. But he was happy to intervene to move a major transit station to a place less convenient for commuters and more convenient for his donors.
The next candidate the democrats put up for president is probably going to be pretty uninspiring, and talk a lot about a return to norms. But that's exactly what is wrong with the party.
The next Democrat that runs for president should be promising massive reform - if Kash Patel can fire an FBI agent for having a pride flag on their desk 3 years ago then the next guy running the FBI should be firing any agent that has ever used a slur or received a substantiated complaint about use of force or violating civil rights. If Trump can yank funding from cities for no reason, then the next Democrat in office should be cutting funding from any city with a housing shortage that doesn't enact zoning reform.
In short - wealthy donors love Democrats who talk big but wring their hands about using the power they are given. Because that keeps the system exactly the way the wealthy want it.
Most of the things you’re describing he “can’t” do, but his party won’t impeach him and the Supreme Court is complacent if not intentionally incompetent.
You can bet, with 100% certainty, the standard will change for a democratic president. There’s a reason half the shit he’s doing is being decided on the SCOTUS shadow docket and it’s because they want to be able to tell a Democrat no for doing the same thing in the future.
The court isn't complacent, the conservative justices know exactly what they're doing. They are operating under the belief that once a president from the other party gets elected again, they will still have the old rules to fall back on.
But the ultimate truth of power is that the bounds are whatever you can get away with. Both the republicans in congress and the supreme court are burning every shred of legitimacy they have left in letting Trump get away with his crimes. I am certain the standard will suddenly change when a democrat gets elected again, but the court has set itself up for a perfect "now let him enforce it" moment.
Student loan forgiveness gets blocked by the courts but the administration is allowed to block funds allocated by congress with no push back? Well, that's the new standard. I certainly won't complain much if the next democrat in office starts doing the same thing. If the republicans didn't want the president to have that power, they should do something about it.
>The wealthy are supporting candidates who offer lip service to leftist policies and then do nothing to cut through basic red tape and court challenges. The "leftist" candidates that the rich support run on building more housing, and then let the rezoning take 15 years in committee.
The wealthy don't want more than lip service because "doing things" from any political position because that would imperil the status quo in which they are wealthy.
You see the same do-nothing behavior from the "swamp" republicans who serve the same moneyed interests.
The highly educated (which correlates with being wealthy) support Left candidates, while the K-12 educated (which correlates with being working class) support Trump.
But it's questionable whether a class reversal still appears in the data once you control for educational polarization.
The wealthy aren't supporting left candidates. They are supporting Democratic candidates. These Democratic candidates fully believe in capitalism and support the same things that the wealthy support.
Some in the working-class support Trump for cultural issues since no one supports their economic issues.
It's quite easy to understand when you stop looking at what the politicians tell the rubes and see what they actually do.
Another recent book along the same lines would be "Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress and How to Get It Back" by Marc Dunkelman:
"When he looked into the history, Dunkelman realized that progressives have long swung back and forth between two opposing impulses. One is what he calls Hamiltonianism: the desire to achieve progress by empowering government and institutions to tackle big problems at the direction of strong leaders (like Robert Moses) and informed experts. The other is what he calls Jeffersonianism: the desire to prevent unaccountable centralized authorities (also like Robert Moses) from abusing ordinary citizens by empowering them to fight back."
Wow, deregulation and austerity, what a fresh perspective on the economy!
This abundance "movement" has absolutely nothing new to offer, it is simply a rebranding of neoliberalism. It's easy to spot too, just look at who backs the movement: the same old establishment democrats and their wealthy donors. The same people who have entranched the democratic party into this technocratic blob of ineffectiveness and societal erosion. In particular, it is financially backed by, among others, Peter Thiel and Mark Andreessen. This should raise some red flags.
Also, I personally like winning. This abundance movement has exactly zero electoral hype. American voters don't care about it at all. Meanwhile, populist leftists like Mamdani are able to generate momentum for the left for the first time in decades. That Klein, Thompson and the billionaires behind them are so harshly criticizing them should raise additional red flags.
"How do you get austerity from neoliberalism, a movement that argues that more wealth should trickle down?".
The abundance folks constantly fight the populist left on government spending. Their proposed plan for "having more things built" is to deregulate the housing market and pray that somehow, the massive land owners, who de facto control the political life of this country and have had their way for a century won't fight it.
Look you can read between whatever lines you want, but Klein specifically calls out the left getting out of their own way. That even when the left tries to do far left top-down socialism, that the regulations and special interests groups prevent them from capitalizing on their own successes.
So even if you come back with something like price controls and government building more housing, you run into the same problems, and you say something like “fuck norms, ignore the neo-libs / conservatives, housing for the people!”
Congratulations, you’ve advocated for deregulation.
Your argument boils down to "people already said some things like this in the past" (ok, and?) and "some people I don't like agree with part of it", which is very weak and doesn't address anything in substance.
You know, you can still want to be able to build housing without having to wait 1 year for permitting or not want to live in a place where making a basic train track is basically impossible because of the number of stakeholders that have to come to a consensus and still vote for Mamdani. You are allowed to have non black and white opinions.
You can even have 1% of the things you think are good in common with Peter Thiel, and that won't immediately turn you into a far right psychopath.
You can even, hear me out, be for less regulation on specific areas where there has been a massive lack of supply but not for "deregulating the economy" in it's entirety!
alas, in southern California 1 year for permitting would be a miracle.
my family has been in construction for 3 generations, and 2 years is now considered normal. plus we have to seal up everything for energy efficiency, then have to remove and add more venting for the next round of inspectors who want to ensure air quality. We stopped building in Sun City because of the $17K tax per unit to fund schools even though it's a 55+ senior community. Currently it's about $115K per house in permitting fees in rural Riverside county. Makes it difficult
Housing can either be an investment vehicle or affordable, but not both at the same time. The abundance crowd remains willfully blind to this obvious reality, and is why they will fail. They promise to make housing affordable while receiving millions from people who became rich off of housing not being affordable. It fundamentally can't deliver on its promise, because it is completely compromised from the start.
I perceive abundance as a big grift to keep the populist left out of the democratic party, which is something they spend a lot of energy doing. How else could you explain this obsession of the abundance crowd for shooting down any populist policy or messaging?
The writer of this article (Dave) publicly dislikes Derek Thompson and keeps criticizing Matt Ygelasis for his austerity fetish, along with praising Mamdani
"Frances Perkins was not just the architect of SSA: she also proposed and implemented many of the foundational labor and safety laws1 still relied upon by the American working class. We can also thank her for the 40-hour work week, minimum wage, unemployment compensation, worker’s compensation, workplace safety, abolition of child labor, direct federal aid to the states for unemployment relief, a revitalized federal employment service, and universal health insurance. Well, except the last. We are still working on the last. "
She got everything she wanted done as Labor Sec. Except for universal healthcare. And it was a great loss for everything living American every year since.
No, there's no conspiracy here.
Ezra's probably a true believer, which I think is sadder honestly.
There is no coordination besides shared interest in protecting capital, same as it ever was. Shared 'class interest' and 'class solidarity' if you like. Though some of these folks are probably in weird passive aggressive and catty group chats these days, like Andresson and Thiel.
It is not a conspiracy to look at the super-pacs funding candidates with weird positions either. The transfers of cash are pretty open in our second gilded age.
These 'third way' institutes and movements pop up every decade or so if you are paying attention. The literal 'Third Way' and 'Tea Party' movements were funded directly by some of these 'abundance' groups. But there's no 'shadowy cabal' or secret. They are open about their desires, and rely on marketing to paper over the obvious.
Manufacturing consent for union breaking in Cali (Ezra didn't outright say it, but Josh Barro did) is clearly in their interest. It's also clear from many of them comments here like: 'I don't care who profits as long as there are suddenly houses' that show the 'abundance' gambit is succeeding.
And to be clear, I'm not against the message 'build more housing', but these are not people you should trust. They need to prove they are serious. Their track record tells me they will bait, switch, and act as spoilers.
Don't take just my word for it though! When they don't accomplish or even push for what they originally claimed their core goals are, remember this conversation.
You could call it guilt by association, sure! But critically, the funders and speakers and membership that build a movement give life and shape to what that movement becomes.
Not caring about 'means' only 'ends' or who profits strikes me as appallingly naive.
You tell me, can these people build the houses you so desire?
to the following descriptions:
"Mercatus Center, but without the libertarian brand that limits that think tank’s outreach to the left."
"The group is currently headed by Julius Krein, the founder of pro-Trump publications The Journal Of American Greatness and its successor, American Affairs"
"gone so far as to posit that AI is the only possible solution to climate change and that it should be powered even by fossil fuel sources."
"PI is a subsidiary of the The Third Way Foundation, and it proudly proclaims itself as the “intellectual birthplace of the New Democrat and ‘Third Way’ movements.”
"Chamber of Progress also used to be funded by Sam Bankman-Fried’s notorious FTX, Blockchain.com, Zillow, Twitter, and the investment firm behind WeWork, SoftBank. The group has launched a “Abundance & Affordability” project, is listed among Inclusive Abundance’s “Abundance Landscape,” and its employees are vocal in their support of the agenda."
"Manhattan employs conservative provocateur and Ron DeSantis ally Chris Rufo—the progenitor of the debate over “Critical Race Theory”"
"Stand Together’s Chairman and CEO, Brian Hooks, is also the President of the Charles Koch Foundation and previously served as the executive director and COO of the Mercatus Center"
one of the most prominent groups opposing the Obama administration’s two key domestic policy goals: health care reform and cap and trade
The philanthropy has funded “pension reform” work by right wing groups, school privatization efforts, Bari Weiss’ anti-woke university, the Niskanen Center, and sponsored both the 2024 abundance conference and the 2025 conference.
Do I need to go on? These people will decide what "Abundance 'progressiveism'" actually looks like if it continues forward.
They are not hiding the fact they are actually conservatives with new labels. They will republican even more if they are given voting positions.
Do you think these people are on your side? Its all oil and techoncratic billionaires top to bottom.
Who is on your side? People who made it all but impossible to renew and improve basic civilizational infrastructure (housing, roads, railways, electric grid, power plants etc.) by introducing so many demands that the system slowly ground to a halt?
Nope. They may say that they are on your side, they may even think that they are on your side, but this is a classical case of the road to hell being paved with good intentions. If someone makes it all but impossible to build new things by elevating chronic naysayers and various special interests into a vetocracy, they are not on your side.
You don't have to trust the abundance movement, but they still have a valid point. In the last 10-15 years, there is a growing awareness all across the West that we have painted ourselves into a corner by heaping too many regulations on further development of cities and land and introducing too many chokepoints where any project can be stalled in courts. This not only makes our living standards worse, but also increasingly leaves us vulnerable to various authoritarian regimes - not just in the sense of raw industrial power, but also propaganda.
If you are a progressive, try to swing your preferred politicians towards more permissiveness, too. This situation badly needs correction and if the progressive part of the spectrum gets stuck on its de facto preference of NIMBYism - for any reasons, be it "everything bagel" demands or the sort of visceral distrust towards other political players that you yourself exhibit quite nicely - they are done for.
Regular people don't want to spend several years fighting a paper war with fifty implacable stakeholders in order to build a block of flats. This is just madness. If someone imposed that system on another country by force, we would consider it an act of war comparable to a naval blockade. Why precisely are we doing this to ourselves?
Unfortunately we need less inclusivity in city planing, that much is clear. Too many people have interest in vetoing everything. It is time to learn this bitter lesson and move on. Maybe you could be the person who makes the change in the progressive circles - try talking to the people you trust about this.
> Unfortunately we need less inclusivity in city planing, that much is clear.
I don't think we need to go that far. :)
It's been long known the NEPA, CEPA, and other safeguards, were fully captured by bad faith actors and in much need of reform. Like closing legal exploits used to thwart any and all development, as you well know.
It's been kind of amazing how quickly YIMBYism has spun up and matured into a scrappy effective advocacy group(s). And we're starting to see progress, payoff, real results.
The recent CEPA reforms are already yielding positive results. eg By short-circuiting environmental reviews for redeveloping properties that are already in built-up areas. Real common sense "well, duh" type reforms.
There's no shortage of needful common sense reforms. I'm now confident these reform efforts will now accelerate. State-by-state, since federal action is currently closed off.
The biggly "abundance"-esque type challenges I worry about are structural and financial. Reforming public utilities, tackling regulatory capture, investment, green banks, industrial policy, etc.
In a nutshell, I want everything promised in the Green New Deal, times at least 4. (Which does account for inclusion, empowerment, environmental justice, and so forth.)
I also know that policy and legislation cannot be moved forward without them. Realpolitik.
Further, there may be an opportunity to mix-up the current coalitions. Checkout the "Montana Housing Miracle". NIMBY vs YIMBY is old vs young, not right vs left. With the reactionary nativists crashing the economy (again), the business members of the current ruling coalition are getting grumpy. Let's drive a wedge between the trogs and the merely greedy. Again, Realpolitik.
I also demand some kind of plan or strategy to address lack of housing and climate crisis. From experience, advocacy is easier than opposition. If not Abundance, then what's the plan?
Lastly, we are completely out of time. Land use and housing are the biggest (missing) components of any USA strategy for addressing climate crisis. I, the most left-wing person you're ever likely to meet, no longer have the luxury of partisanship. So I don't care how the things we need get built.
If we survive until 2050 (and beyond), our kids (and grandkids) can carry on the revolution.
for as long as the left has not been about the working class and been about university educated white collar government workers this has been true though. It may have been true prior to that too i just dont have living memory to back it up. There is something about being removed from the reality of how the metaphorical sausage is made that turns the left from having some valid concerns but usually wrong ideas on how to address them into actively incomptent civilization destroyers. I would love to know why.
When you go back to The New Deal, its absolutely the case that the Dem coalition was much more effective at delivery. To some extent because FDR acted very aggressively with executive action.
My personal opinion is the working class, not the fancy educated types, need to run the Dem coalition. It would be far more effective in a number of ways... with broader appeal.
>My personal opinion is the working class, not the fancy educated types, need to run the Dem coalition
They need to run the goddamn country.
Whether it's liberal white women with their whole foods and Starbucks or conservative men with their 100k pickup trucks the morals and political whims of "people rich enough to not get fairly instantly screwed if they make bad decisions" have been a disaster for this country.
It’s a different coalition now though. The FDR Democrats were labor focused. Then the 60s happened. The New Left student movements reoriented away from labor and towards racial/gender/sexual equality, and Kennedy signed the Civil Rights Act. Southern whites opposed this and you had George Wallace pop up, splitting the Democrats, and then Nixon swooped in with the Southern Strategy. The Democrats needed a new coalition and they went with disadvantaged racial/gender/sexual groups instead of labor.
The transition didn’t really finish until Clinton and the New Democrats though. Campaign money and TV ads got to be really important in Presidential politics, and to get that money, Democrats had to appeal to rich people, so they got rid of most of the labor aspects of the platform. Clinton signed NAFTA and MFN for China. Now there were two pro-business parties that served different identity groups. Ironically the last gasp of labor was the billionaire Ross Perot in 92 and 96 who ran on an anti-NAFTA platform. The only way he could do this credibly was to use his own money to buy TV time.
Kennedy did not sign the Civil Rights Act, Kennedy was dead. He wanted it, but it never got any support until after his assassination. It was LBJ who got bipartisan support for the bill. After it passed and LBJ used federal powers to force southern states to stop being so racist, many senators blamed the democrats, explicitly switched to the republican party, and the south has been anti-democrat since.
The democrats did not leave their labor base. The Democrats have never stopped pushing labor rights and unions and similar.
The voters who were pissed with being forced to desegregate left the democrat party. Turns out there were a lot of people who thought it was more important to be able to be racist than unionized.
I don't know why you believe billionaire Ross Perot, Texas businessman and prominent supporter of the war on drugs, who told Larry King that we should "cut medicare and social security for those who """don't need it""" " is "pro labor" ffs. He's the same kind of "we should run the country like a business" populist as Reagan and Trump, and just as wrong. He was literally a big supporter of Reagan as Reagan dismantled Unions and union rights!
NAFTA did not send your job to China, business executives did. Business executives like Ross Perot, who made his money selling computing services to the US government, and didn't really do much else before or since.
Even if NAFTA had been completely blocked, average Americans would still have been screwed from Reagan's changes to the country. Underpaid workers in other countries are not getting all the money, surely you recognize that right? The money never even leaves the country.
You're right about the Civil Rights act, I had misremembered. However Kennedy met with MLK and proposed the Civil Rights act.
Blaming "business executives" is unhelpful as an explanation because "business executives" is not a static group. Business executives who moved their manufacturing to China or Mexico made their businesses more profitable or at least preserved their profits, because they saved a ton of money. Business executives who kept manufacturing in the U.S. generally were outcompeted and they were either replaced, their businesses shrunk, or they were forced to reorient towards higher end, smaller markets.
NAFTA, MFN/PNTR for China, and then WTO membership for China is what created this situation. This was a total disaster for American labor. All of the things that Perot warned about with the "giant sucking sound" were exactly what happened.
Underpaid workers in other countries most certainly did get a lot of that money. Have you seen what has happened to wages in coastal China over the past 25 years? Most of that money comes from exports, and a large portion of those are to the U.S.
Perot's other policies don't necessarily track as "pro-labor." My point was just that the two biggest things that negatively affected American labor in the past 40 years were passed under Clinton. Interestingly, the vestiges of the labor-oriented Democratic party were still there in Congress, and large majorities of Democrats in the House voted against NAFTA and PNTR for China. On NAFTA, this result wouldn't even be possible today due to the "majority of the majority" way that the House is run.
The FDR admin had 90% support in the House and Senate. He wasn't authoritarian, he was operating with the clearest mandate America had until Reagan (not that I agree with the mandate Reagan was handed and followed through on)
The reason he was able to threaten the Supreme Court with packing is that it was a credible threat.
The working class abandoned democrats, not the other way around, when LBJ decided that the Civil Rights Act was a good thing, and got bipartisan support for it. Several prominent (terrible human beings) Dixiecrats screamed about "Democrat authoritarianism" for (checks notes) forcing southern states to stop being racist as fuck, and the south has been thoroughly republican voters since. Don't worry though, Strom Thurmund insists he wasn't a racist, he is just against being forced to allow black people to get the same legal treatment as white people.
A bunch of racists aren't willing to support welfare and public investment if black people get it. How do you form a coalition between them and black people?
These same assholes want to go back to the 50s because it was very good for white male americans, and they do not care about the rest.
FDR had this support because Americans rallied behind the New Deal because 1 out of every 5 Americans was jobless. That's the pain it took before America was willing to do socialism-lite.
If you want democrat policy, you need to elect them. Simple as.
> The FDR admin had 90% support in the House and Senate.
FDR directly embedded his staff in Congress and told them what they were going to do, and vigorously attacked anyone who got in the way of his agenda by any means necessary, including using the FBI and IRS against them, denying them federal funds, etc. He also was very effective at bullying the press - look at what went on with radio licenses. He even (via the Black Committee and FCC) conducted mass surveillance on his political enemies.
FDR did have a lot of support in Congress but brutally punishing people is what made him effective. He was certainly one of the most authoritarian Presidents in American history and we should probably thank our lucky stars he was a good one.
> These same assholes want to go back to the 50s because it was very good for white male americans
I really want to know when this was because all the men (white or not) who worked the mills and the mines in my memory were effectively functional alcoholics because life sucked so much.
> The working class abandoned democrats, not the other way around, when LBJ decided that the Civil Rights Act was a good thing, and got bipartisan support for it.
Odd, that the working class stayed with the Democrats for half a century after your claimed divergence.
It is true that progressive politics played a major role in the shift in the 2010s. But neither is that equivalent to the CRA, nor does it answer the question of why the working class reoriented around stupid bullshit. That latter, deeper issue has to do with the governing and professional classes of the US, which have shifted toward symbolic and procedural issues over broad material wellbeing, mostly because symbolic shit doesn't adversely affect professional classes' pocketbooks that much.
There is also the matter that the American political leadership managed to maintain some level of economic prosperity for the white working class in the intervening decades. Now that is collapsing, and the old narratives have returned.
The white working class and professional managerial class are in fact largely aligned in their zero sum assessments of the current situation. They differ principally on the nature of the solutions. No one on the left has the courage to acknowledge this, much less attack it.
It hasn't always been that way. The US political left did used to focus more on working-class issues. They only really lost the plot in the early 2000s when they started navel gazing on performative ideology and luxury beliefs, leading to an inversion in some of the voting blocks for the two major political parties.
The universities could have continued in their socially productive capacity if their leadership realized their obligations should take precedence over career advancement. Instead, they chose to embrace cost disease. The reactionary right remains committed to finishing off whatever remains.
More importantly what that did was split the working class. Even in this very thread there's people referring to the "working class" as if they also aren't in it.
If you aren't a billionaire capital owner, you are working class. If your primary income comes from a job, you are working class.
If we want solidarity again we need to dispel the notion of working class meaning poor, blue collar workers. We've been pitted against ourselves, our divide shouldn't be left v. right it should be ALL working class against the ultra-rich.
> "If your primary income comes from a job, you are working class."
TIL that CEOs and other C-level executives (ones hired from the outside by the board, not founders) are working class. It's a definition that is clearly too broad to be useful.
>If you aren't a billionaire capital owner, you are working class. If your primary income comes from a job, you are working class.
The petty bourgeoisie is a thing, and if you receive stock-grants as part of your pay-package, you're in it. You own real-estate in an expensive city where your property is an appreciating asset? You're in it.
A local school system near me was facing some financial issues a number of years ago.
The superintendent noted that there were dozens and dozens of individual social programs that the school system managed. Many extending well beyond education and even testing the bounds of what might be called social work.
While they all (on the surface) operated on the idea that if students got these services they would be more effective in school ... it wasn't clear for most of them if that was even the case / being measured.
The superintendent noted that the only thing they could be sure of was that if they touched anyone of them, they were sure to be someone's baby and they'd face a backlash.
Personally, I'd like to see a more "fail fast" type system for a lot of social programs. Run it, see what happens ... then make the call if it goes any further. But that would mean people would have to start up programs fast, and shut them down fast. Both are not easy.
> Personally, I'd like to see a more "fail fast" type system for a lot of social programs. Run it, see what happens ... then make the call if it goes any further. But that would mean people would have to start up programs fast, and shut them down fast. Both are not easy.
My partner does exactly this with healthcare in BC. They spin up a project to trial, say, allowing nurses to prescribe methadone directly, or even for patients just to get it directly. They measure costs, patient outcomes, etc etc.
After a set time get patient, doctor and nurse feedback.
Looks good? Great, roll it out to the whole province and hurry up about it.
They’re running 50+ of them continuously. Constant improvement is awesome.
>it wasn't clear for most of them if that was even the case / being measured.
If the programs were doing what they claimed they'd be measuring that and using the numbers as further justification. The fact that they're not speaks volumes.
Most of these programs are funded by government organizations so any measurement rules come form there, if there are any. It's less a choice than it is something (like much of the program) dictated.
This is an interesting thought. I also wonder if Houston is "helped" by the fact that they're a blue city in a red state... that kind of ideological conflict of governance requires unique and localized solutions. Whereas SF is blue city in a blue state, so it creates a "too many cooks in the kitchen" situation.
I think it also just creates a lack of "urgency" problem. I live in a blue city in a red state. Constituents expect results because we can't rely on our state gov. Local officials know this. There's more competition from more progressive candidates too locally which is helpful in keeping liberal officials more focused on results instead of the game of politics.
Idk, I think it's different for every city. But I think the point I'm trying to make is that having some kind of political constraints in governance seems to typically be a good thing for the sake of getting some shit done.
Actually I think I'm just stating an obvious point now given the glaring ineffectiveness of our two party political system...
It probably does make it easier to make drastic changes as described to consolidate data sharing etc when they ultimate authority is likely the city/county instead of the state. The state level agencies will have their own policies, systems and goals/approaches that might not suite the individual cities so the programs remain separated and fragmented.
I am not left, right, center. I am not even American. I am mostly curious why this is seem in center-left but (as I understood) not expected from the right?
I am supposing that and endless stack of problems to solve is always good for any politician. There is always room to blame something/someone and propose something else of there is a problem.
From outside, the discussions over immigrants in the United States seems to shadow deeper discussions on how to fix the rest. It seems to blame the outside world for the lack of internal competitivity while not recognising any of the obvious problems.
For example, it is not a matter of preferirng public or private healthcare like here in Europe. It is a matter of getting what makes more sense. Same for environment, trading, taxes, etc.
From time to time, we see response here that doing X is dumb because it is not a perfect solve. It's very common in discussions about solving pollution or energy use. Don't bother using EVs as we're still burning coal. Don't recycle because so much trash is everywhere else. These people are suggesting doing nothing until the perfect solve is available. Perfect will never happen. Instead make as many things better where you can while you can.
Nothing wrong with deliberation and listening to stakeholders. Great idea. The issue is the centre-left voters keep asking these institutions to take on more power, channel more funds and veto more projects [0]. I don't see how else they expect large centralised bodies to play out. I'm not sure if the US left even has a collective theory of how to fight institutional rot apart from stuffing institutions with leftists and assuming they do they right thing. Expecting good results from that strategy requires a certain naivete to the sort of people who seek power in government.
[0] Not just them, the centre right also seems to love the idea based on what I've read. Not the brightest crowd.
> Nothing wrong with deliberation and listening to stakeholders. Great idea.
True if you can identify the correct stakeholders and those stakeholders are aligned to the goal.
It becomes unhelpful when the list of stakeholders is so long and disconnected from the goal that listening to stakeholders becomes an endless cycle of meetings and talking about the problem instead of doing anything about it.
In my local experience, initiatives related to homelessness and drug addiction treatment attract a lot of people who like the idea of being involved because it advances their career or sounds good on their resume, but many of them are unqualified to be involved and think the role will involve a lot of delegation and deciding where to send money to other groups, not actually doing any of the work directly.
Basically, a lot of people who want to be in charge and claim leadership but who also don’t want to actually do the hard work.
I dunno, is it? In what sense are you comparing the centralisation of the two countries?
The US is pretty centralised. Around 40% of its spending is via the government and of the balance a lot of the decision making is controlled by the government.
China isn't centralized when it comes to boots on the ground policy implementation. The regional governments are extremely important. They direct subsidies and issue loans and have massive balance sheets and their own banks, they decide production capacity and things like factory output targets, they even decide which industries they specialize in, like EVs vs solar panels, etc.
Of course there is a framework from the CCP, and if red lines are crossed the big stick comes out and people are made an example of, but the regionals run the society. Including things like the social safety net. That's all regional and it's different between different regions.
There's a fairly large gap between how China works internally and how the west sees China.
For a more concrete example, the recent Third Plenum planning session was the typical communist style decade long roadmap with loud bullet points and achievement targets. Then there is a multi-month-long gap, all of the politicians go home, they work out how to achieve the goals between themselves, and they present their plans for approval. It's actually not as top down as you would think.
As you may sense, there is a sort of competition at play. If the committee is looking to consolidate key sectors like electric vehicles and increase industrial profits, the leaders who implement this guidance the best that get the acclaim. Likewise, if the central government is doing something like de-risking the regional banks, you so not want to be the region with the problems. Good luck in your career and climbing the ladder if so...
This power play dynamic is also strategically used to play different factions against themselves in a multifaceted way that is sometimes obvious but often has quiet subterfuge, in typical Chinese fashion.
While I’m not specifically arguing against your conclusion, there are a few narratives that to me point unfortunately to a systemic cause.
One is the book why nations fail, which among other causes points to circumstance and initial conditions. There was an interesting freakonomics podcast interviewing the mayor of, I think it was Dallas, and why Dallas was so successful, and the problem with California isnt sort of generic leftness but the specific organization of power structures that supports Nimbyism in a way that Texas doesn’t.
Plus the irony the EPA was formed by Nixon and the modern California environmental act was formed by Reagan?
The conspiracy theorist in me might suggest that in fact some of the environmental protections are explicitly right leaning to prevent progress.
I think the center-left deliberately prefers not to get things done. Centrists are usually people treated well by the status quo and would rather find any excuse to keep things the way they are than acquiesce to the left or meaningfully challenge the right
My point is that I'm not sure we need more assistance. TBH we need better, more efficient assistance. We spend a lot on deliberation, not enough on delivery.
A lot of this is due to leadership gaps IMO. Center-left leaders (ie Schumer) look weak because they excessively triangulate every stakeholder. Instead leaders need to act as true leaders, which means being a touch less collaborative / trying to triangulate. And more focused on some top-down, cut through red-tape, have a vision, persuade people etc.
(Then, arguably if people saw the system working well, they might want to award it with more money.)
Interesting article though it curiously deemphasizes what is likely the most significant reason for the differences in outcomes, which is that housing is more cheap and abundant in Houston/Dallas stemming from being easier and cheaper to build. (Yes this is mentioned, but it doesn't end up in the 5 point conclusion list).
This passage for example. Houston can only achieve permanent placement if it actually has homes to place people in. SF is just rearranging deck chairs on the titanic because it has no where to put people and they're in and out of shelters. (Vancouver has the same issue)
> Houston houses people first, then closes encampment sites permanently. San Francisco deploys enforcement first, achieves temporary displacement, and watches areas refill. Houston tracks every person from intake through permanent placement. San Francisco can’t determine if anyone is being permanently housed at all.
Beyond better outcomes around creating new affordable housing if Houston and Dallas are also doing a also better job at keeping rents low and maintaining existing affordable housing that will also prevent people from becoming homeless in the first place.
A recent study in Vancouver found that one of the most significant single causes of homelessness (20%) was people simply running out of money and being evicted. The direct cause of this is high rents. So any city that is building more housing in general, and not demolishing existing affordable rental is going to be doing a better job in this category at reducing homelessness.
I lived in Oakland and Berkeley for about eight years and left a few years ago. As someone originally from New York, I’m baffled at this idea that there’s no place left to build in the Bay Area. The East Bay still has large swaths of land with nothing on it. SF has plenty of options for building upward. There’s open land to the south. The political gridlock in Bay Area politics is the problem. I’ve never seen more dysfunctional government in my life.
Ultimately the government is the people. The problem is that the established wealthy single family owning class want to retain the status quo they bought into, and reject any and all political change. Cynical politicians leverage this to get elected and serve those interests by rejecting any change.
> A recent study in Vancouver found that one of the most significant single causes of homelessness (20%) was people simply running out of money and being evicted. The direct cause of this is high rents. So any city that is building more housing in general, and not demolishing existing affordable rental is going to be doing a better job in this category at reducing homelessness.
Affordability isn’t simply a function of supply in a market but the wealth distribution of market participants. When wealth is concentrated, housing ownership is concentrated in the hands of rentier capital, which is precisely what determines the amount of financial outflows from the poor to the wealthy in the form of housing prices (rent and mortgages).
Texas cities don't just stumble into better homelessness outcomes because they build more houses—though, yes, their zoning laws are less suffocating than California's bureaucratic strangulations, letting developers churn out homes while keeping rents from spiraling into the stratosphere.
The real engine here isn't just policy, it's the stubborn, unapologetic religious underpinnings of Texas. Those churches you see in Austin, from non-denominational barns to Catholic sanctuaries, are the sinew of a community that doesn't bend to the fickle winds of election cycles. The faithful don't wait for a ballot to act—they feed, clothe, and stabilize the downtrodden with a doggedness that shames the state's tepid, vote-chasing programs. Why? Because they answer to a higher power than city hall, and their time horizon isn't the next electoral race. Contrast this with the secular cathedrals of the blue coasts, where government is God and every solution is a press release, not a commitment. SF's "enforcement-first" shuffle—clear an encampment, watch it refill—betrays a system that worships process over results.
Texas' edge lies in cheap homes plus a culture that scorns the state's monopoly on virtue. The religious don't just build safety nets, they weave them into the social fabric, outlasting the transient schemes of politicians.
So if I'm understanding correctly, your argument is that more homes and lower housing prices wouldn't solve the issue of people not being able to find homes they can afford without people being religious as well? Or is it that only religious people would be willing to build more homes at cheaper prices?
News flash: churches exist even in the left coast.
One of the biggest non profit organizations that helps people in Vancouver's DTES is Union Gospel Mission and the Salvation Army.
Nonetheless severe poverty has persisted in this city my entire life. The churches hand out food and run some shelters but it's a band aid.
The solution would start with housing, but the government refuses to spend the money to build it. So the status quo persists, with non-profits, many of them religious, step into the void just to keep people alive.
This is the answer. Housing cannot be both an investment and broadly affordable. Our society needs to choose.
Honestly its time to rip the bandaid off here with housing. Build, build, build. Fuck the NIMBYs, use eminent domain and buy them out. Build up, not out, and start driving prices down.
We need to stop making real estate an investment vehicle and an endlessly appreciating asset. "Line must go up" is fine for the stock market and a company's profit, it need not apply to a basic human need.
There are more churches in California than their are in Texas. We just don't brag about it as much because religion isn't a costume in California like it is in red states.
Saying California has churches is like saying a desert has cacti—it's true, but it misses the point.
Texas' religious density, from Austin's sprawling non-denominational hubs to its Catholic and Protestant strongholds, isn’t just a headcount of steeples, it's a cultural force that outmuscles the state’s flimsy, election-timed gestures.
These communities don't just exist—they act, relentlessly, weaving safety nets that endure beyond the next ballot. California's churches, where they stand, are drowned out by a secular dogma that kneels to bureaucracy over human need. If they were enough, San Francisco wouldn't be playing whack-a-mole with encampments while Houston houses people and moves on.
California has more churches - but not more practitioners.
San Francisco has four Orthodox Christian cathedrals. Many big cities only have a single Orthodox Church, much less a cathedral. San Francisco also has a many Catholic Churches - most with an ethnic component, not to mention Buddhist and cultural associations.
Most of these are due to extreme diversity, not religiosity.
Diversity isn’t an absolute good.
Having 200 churches, each with 50 members, does not make you more religious than a city with two megachurches, each with 20,000 members.
Nor does going to a megachurch to hear a rock band play Christian rock while your pastor tells you how great Trump is make you more religious than going to a more pious orthodox smaller church.
Don't act like this is the solution. It's the same as "religious people give more to charity than secular" which rapidly becomes untrue if you remove "their church" as the charity, in which case secular people tend to give more.
But, you say, it's the church that is doing all that charitable work, so why should it get removed from that accounting?
Religious people like to point to charitable giving.
But studies performed by religious organizations themselves (who, if anything, are likely to skew the numbers more positively) show that across the board, "Local and national benevolence receives 1 percent of the typical church budget," and an additional 5% goes to "church-run programs" (be it after-school care, social, or group activities).
If a secular charity - and let's go to Charity Navigator here - Top Ten Inefficient Fundraisers (https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=topten), we see some of the worst charities spending 15% of their donations on "program expenses" (i.e., doing what they are being given money to do).
I'm not familiar with the monitoring of 501(c)3 groups, but I suspect if secular charities regularly spent only one percent of their givings on what they were entitled to enjoy tax exemption for, they'd likely have such a status revoked.
And, if you factor in this average percentage (even the six per cent combined, which is generous, as as much fun as social and youth activities are, they're not necessarily serving a critical need), and start to question 'how much money is being spent on 'spreading the word', patting themselves on the back, competitions in Texas to see who can built the world's biggest cross just down the road from where the world's previously biggest cross was built at costs of millions, there comes more and more skepticism of just how highly you can value "giving to your church" on the scale of charitable contributions.
A study by ECCU (https://web.archive.org/web/20141019033209/https://www.eccu....) stated that churches use 3 percent of their budget for children’s and youth programs, and 2 percent for adult programs. Local and national benevolence receives 1 percent of the typical church budget.
I think this piece makes a strong point — when there’s already a working model, just copy it instead of endlessly debating. The homelessness crisis is real, and doing nothing while watching it grow worse is the worst option. Of course there’s a chance it fails, but the bigger issue is that no one wants to take responsibility if it does. That lack of strong leadership is, in itself, part of the problem.
Then there's also the Williston / North Dakota oil boom model. I met tons of homeless people out there (I was one of them), many of which whom solved it through "one neat trick" of doing something like hitchiking to the oil fields, or to Seattle where literally anyone can get hired to work on a fish processing boat or facility and they give you "free" room and board and then ~$10k to go home with.
> That model clearly isn't working in SF where they spend >$100k per homeless person per year.
That borders on irrelevant when 33% of your homeless population qualify as having a traumatic brain injury, etc. Hospital stays are about $5K per day--if a homeless person hits the hospitals for 20 days in a year you've already spent more than $100K.
After Saint Reagan (hack ... spit) "closed the institutions", there was supposed to be something better. That never happened. So, now you have the mentally ill cycling between the streets, the emergency rooms, and the prisons.
You can't fix homelessness without first fixing healthcare. Otherwise you're just rearranging the deck chairs.
> After Saint Reagan (hack ... spit) "closed the institutions", there was supposed to be something better. That never happened. So, now you have the mentally ill cycling between the streets, the emergency rooms, and the prisons.
The Lanterman-Petris-Short Act, which made it possible to close the institutions, was almost unanimously passed in the Assembly and the Senate, in an unholy union of civil libertarian do-gooders and budget cutting conservatives. In fact, the lone dissenter in either legislature was a law-and-order Republican.
And it's not like Democrats have been shut out of the government of California ever since.
The emptying of institutions in California happened long before that, in the late 60s and through the 70s; it became very hard to commit anyone, which justified further cuts.
If you pass a bill that destroys mental health systems for the sake of civil libertarian concerns, "its issues weren't magically fixed through half a century later, which was totally unforeseeable" is not a good excuse.
In SF they _do_ provide housing to homeless people. The homeless people, largely addicted to illegal drugs, use the housing to store most their possessions and occasionally come in to change clothes and bathe, but continue living in tents, or otherwise existing strung out on the sidewalks.
Why? Because they're not permitted to use illegal drugs in the provided housing facilities, they will lose the housing. These "houseless" people basically have two homes, the streets are their summer home where they get high and continue to be a nuisance. The provided housing goes mostly unoccupied in these instances. Having written that, maybe the analogy works better in reverse - the public housing is the unoccupied summer home? Either way, it's totally not being used as intended because of the restrictions placed on the housing.
Also consider shelters generally banned weapons and are dens of communicable disease and bed bugs (I'm horribly allergic to them so I'll never step inside a shelter).
When I was homeless I lived outside because if you have a decent tent and sleeping bag it's perfectly comfortable, and I like to have a weapon handy no matter what and I reject any living circumstance that would prohibit that. At no point did drugs enter the equation, but if they did, it wouldn't have changed the calculus.
The causes of homelessness are plentiful. Some, perhaps a majority I don't know any exact figures, would be helped by simply giving them money. Others are suffering from mental health crises and/or drug addictions that must be dealt with first before they can have any hope of taking care of themselves when given the money to support themselves.
This is where good faith opinions can differ. Do these folks still deserve freedom/autonomy or can we force them into rehab or mental heath treatments? If the only crime they have committed is not having a bed to sleep in, I'm not sure I'm comfortable with taking away their freedoms. I'm closer than I was five years ago but I'm not universally there yet.
Hah, yes. In Australia when I was growing up there was a program called Work for the Dole (Unemployment) after you had been unemployed for a while. During the dotcom era, that was me. There was one program that was tech and web development skills. I went to a church twice a week (the organization running the program wasn't the church, they just rented rooms), and we poked at shitty old computers while I tried to help the staff figure out how to get Dreamweaver running on them (I knew more than the staff) in a way that was basically trying not to break the licensing - since they'd only bought one copy for the entire classroom. I knew more than the staff, the computers were decrepit, etc., and we were stuffed in the back room of a church.
I got to meet the "org executives" (it was really only the two of them, grifting, in the entire org) who were collecting a nice fat government check per person enrolled in their program. They came by to see how we were doing, and were there for less than 15 minutes. Two ladies in their 50s who were more interested in talking about how excited they were to be going off to pick up their new company cars after lunch, matching Jaguar XJs.
Everything except ending the ban on homeowners & landowners building market housing. (ofc they are taking bites out of this apple, especially very recently, but every step is fought tooth & nail by homeowners who prefer the status quo just fine)
I'm fully in the camp of just give people dollars and let them decide how to spend it rather than navigate a bureaucratic nanny state system like SNAP. But if you're only doing that well no shit it doesn't help. You have to actually put them in a stable house/apartment and get them set up with work. Or if they're homeless due to mental illness get them admitted.
>Or if they're homeless due to mental illness get them admitted.
Therein lies the problem. A large proportion of homeless fall into this category [*], and it's very hard to institutionalize people against their will. We like to think that most homeless are functional people who are simply down on their luck, and thus putting them in stable housing and getting them set up to work would solve their problems. But this is sadly not the case.
[*] This study [0] found that 80% of homeless people have some kind of mental illness, with 30% having severe mental illness. This is compounded by the fact that >50% have substance abuse problems.
Right. As I touched on elsewhere in the thread, our local jailers know all the homeless people in town because they show up regularly when their mental illnesses and/or substance abuse get them into trouble. The ordinary guy who wound up homeless due to a string of bad luck and just needs a place to sleep and a new job to get back on his feet is more a movie trope than reality. These are people with real problems who in many cases need regular supervision in something like a group home, if not outright institutionalization. And as you said, the latter is very hard to do now.
That seems like an unfair metric. Any program that helps homeless people significantly more than anywhere else in the USA is going to become the new capital of homeless people and their population will explode. It doesn't mean the people helped are worse off.
Right, but the taxpayers in that city are worse off. That's why any solutions need to be driven at least at the county level and preferably at the state level. Leaving it to individual cities creates all sorts of perverse incentives. (SF is somewhat unique in that they are their own county so for that area specifically, shifting programs from the city to county level wouldn't change anything.)
Taxpayers are pretty much always going to be worse off helping the homeless. Only a small fraction of the chronically homeless will become tax positive citizens in their lifetime.
Either you start off with the first principle that it's OK for wealth-transfer schemes to make tax payers 'worse off' via compelled charity, or I don't think you can get to the point of supporting generalized homeless relief programs. Maybe programs targeted at short-duration stuff to get people into jobs that are capable of doing them and a housing contract might work, but it'd have to be extremely well thought out and wouldn't benefit most chronic homeless.
I mean, San Francisco could spend that money housing their homeless in random cities spread around the country - investing in these cities and avoiding encouraging influx to a single spot... Possibly even cities with jobs, and funding corresponding service and construction jobs in these cities. Except of course for the NIMBY problem - I laugh at how that would be received in the cities I know about.
>SF tried, didn't work. The homeless population increased, not offset by the people who got housed.
IIRC, For decades, the homeless "relief" programs run by states like Florida, Georgia, South Carolina and others pretty much ended at bus tickets to San Francisco for the homeless (whether they wanted to go or not) and that's it.
Is it any wonder the population of homeless in SF grew?
It does, though, and the article I linked explains what actually happens: people are not systematically shipped to any particular big west coast city. There are numerous programs in numerous cities which send people back home, essentially, to places where they have support in place and simply need a way to get there.
>It does, though, and the article I linked explains what actually happens:
And I disagree with your analysis. That's not an attack on you or The Guardian for that matter.
While there certainly are programs as you mention, there are (and have been for decades) others that do not seek to reunite people with support systems -- rather they just want those pesky homeless people gone.
That point would be strong, but this article doesn't make that point, or any other points I can tell. It does really weird things like comparing the annual cost of housing one Texan person to building an entire Californian housing unit, changes which definition of "homelessness" it uses (sometimes mid-sentence), ignores Houston's extremely police-oriented approach to the topic (police can cite you for trespassing if you're at a bus stop and don't produce ID), pretends the Texas cities aren't sweeping encampments (they are, right now, on Nance Street), and just generally plays fast-and-loose with the facts in Texas.
The problem is not that lack of examples. Technically, all two hundred something countries could take example of the best one in every metric and just copy most of the stuff to make life better.
The problem is that politicians are afraid to do anything (outside of direct and indirect enrichment). No one can blame some John Doe, chief Busybody of the Busyarea, if he won't do something. Because that didn't happen, nothing to point finger at directly, except for "you don't do enough", which is generic enough to be used at anyone and so ineffective at everyone. But if he will do something and it is immediately painful to at at least some group, then he will be blamed and his opponent will do that with pleasure too.
> it’s baseless to call homelessness a crises for the U.S
Sure, a quarter of a percent is not a big percent, but that sure is a lot of people. It is _more_ than the entire population of Alaska, Wyoming, or Vermont. It is near the population size of several other states.
An entire US state's worth of people are unable to find adequate housing and not just because they are off their meds. According to the 2024 Point-in-Time count, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development estimated 22% of homeless are facing a severe mental illness. So nearly 4 out of 5 homeless are regular people who simply cannot secure permanent housing.
> the US Department of Housing and Urban Development estimated 22% of homeless are facing a severe mental illness. So nearly 4 out of 5 homeless are regular people who simply cannot secure permanent housing.
No - the word there is severe. Requiring hospitalization more than once a month, often. When you look at "untreated mental illness" in the homeless, now you're above 50%.
> So nearly 4 out of 5 homeless are regular people who simply cannot secure permanent housing.
How does it follow? Not having a severe mental illness makes one normal? It's as same as saying that not suffering from severe obesity makes you fit and healthy.
Obesity is an excess of something. If we flip it, you can say that "too skinny is a problem" and there is a difference between someone someone with an eating disorder that makes them avoid food vs those who simply don't eat enough.
The unhoused has those people with a housing disorder, aka mental illness, and those who, simply, don't "house" enough.
Why don't they house enough? Many reasons. But nearly 4 out of 5 are not ticking the severe mental illness part. So there is less water in the argument that homelessness is caused by mental illnesses which is the leading reason I hear when people talk about homelessness. So, they aren't "mental," they are "normal."
Perhaps having a severe mental illness is somehow important for you but I still don't see how is it relevant in this context other than it shows that the fraction of homeless with it is ~4x bigger than in regular population so it's likely the rest of them are suffering with less than severe mental illness (not even taking drug addiction into account).
That's 1% of the population. Maybe not a big deal to you.
There's only 13,000 city blocks in SF.
That's a homeless person every 2 blocks.
Kind of dangerous to be walking past people in all different states of desperation multiple times every trip everywhere you go, is another way to look at it.
Even if you end homelessness, you'll still be walking past people in all different states of desperation multiple times everywhere you go.
People looking like they have homes or acting like it won't stop this. It doesn't make people inherently dangerous.
Don't get me wrong, I think any percent of the population being homeless because of lack of options is a tragedy. (I don't really care if someone wishes to be so, and I think we should have appropriate living options for this). I understand that you can't really stop temporary homelessness - fires and urgent things happen - but that's something we can deal with as needed.
Is your argument that, because x% of the population is desperate, we shouldn't care or do anything about x%+y% being like that?
y% LIVES on the blocks - so the multiple on y is higher (higher probability you encounter them), and the desperation factor is also likely much higher.
Please note that someone giving you a quantitative context isn’t necessarily saying don’t care. But it’s important to be mindful of how people use words in the media to describe certain issues because it benefits them politically or financially.
The problem which sticks out to me is that homelessness can be addressed by providing housing, but that’s not an easy solution to provide in a country that gets 10s of millions of illegal immigrants. So why is someone talking so much about homelessness relative to other issues? Do they want the U.S. to provide a house for every illegal immigrant who crosses a border? If political officials in states struggling with homelessness really care about solving the problem, they would do what other states are doing, as mentioned in OP’s article.
Is it dangerous? I agree that people with means feel unsafe when encountering poverty but the "it is unsafe to ride the subway because there are poor people there" stuff doesn't appear to be proportionate with actual risk.
I think that one of the huge limitations of how we think about homelessness in the US is that we view it as a problem that non-homeless people encounter. This encourages a bunch of policies that make it easier for somebody to avoid ever having to see a homeless person but which do little to mitigate the suffering of a homeless person.
I don’t really think this holds the point you think it does.
While property crime is more likely to be committed by people the lower their income level is, the majority of all violent crime is committed by people who have homes.
In fact, the homeless are far more likely to be the victims of a violent crime than any other income demographic.
Furthermore, the unstable and dangerous people you see behaving erratically on the street are not necessarily sleeping there - and the homeless in the area probably feel much more unsafe about their presence than you do.
Which is that if you’re scared of being assaulted by someone you should be scared of everyone around you at all times. Someone’s housing status does not make them any more likely to attack you.
Being scared of homeless people hurting you is like being scared of flying in a plane when you drive a car every day.
Yeah! A big problem. We should just Brian Kilmeade[0] them all, right?
They're a burden on society and should be removed. But why stop there? The bottom 20% of school kids are just going to end up being a burden on society too! Prison costs something like $50k/inmate/annum. So let's inject them too!
But why wait for the kids? We know who is popping out all those burden-on-society babies. Sterilize them. Then we can use them as "comfort women" for our brave, selfless Immigration Enforcement heroes!
771K people isn't a small number. 0.23% isn't a small number when it comes to homelessness. This also doesn't consider people who are housed but are overcrowded or living in otherwise very poor environments.
You also ignore that it's a rapidly growing problem.
Comparing it to DUI numbers doesn't make any sense whatsoever.
I've always been surprised by the official homeless population count, but it turns out there's a lot more to it.
The department of HUD generates this ~771K figure from a "point-in-time" estimate, a single count from a single night performed in January. They literally have volunteers go out, count the number of homeless people they observe, and report their findings.
It's not hard to imagine why this is probably a significant undercount. There is likely a long tail of people that happened to be in a situation that night where they were not able to be counted (i.e. somewhere secluded, sleeping in a friend's private residence that night, etc).
Even if these numbers are correct, to my mind a "crisis" is still more characterized by the trend than the numbers in absolute. From the first link you provided, we saw a 39% increase in "people in families" experiencing homelessness, and 9% in individuals. A resource from the HUD itself suggests a 33% increase in homelessness from 2020-2024, 18% increase from 2023-2024. That is far apace of the population increase in general.
And even then, I would say many people would suggest that the change in visible homelessness they've experienced in the last 10 years would amount to "crisis" levels, at least relative to the past.
It's completely fair to argue that it is not in fact a crisis, but claiming that it is certainly not "baseless."
It's kind of wild that they pick maybe the coldest month of the year to do this. You'd think that would be when people are most likely to try to find some sort way of avoiding direct exposure to the open air even if it's extremely short term.
A quarter of a percent still seems like a lot to me, even if it's not a "crisis."
But we can't do anything about it until we face up to the problem. Spending more money won't help. I'm somewhat familiar with the activity at our local jail, and a good part of it is homeless people rotating in and out. They get brought in because they were trespassing or shoplifting or something, the jail cleans them up and dries them out (they're usually on drugs, which they somehow manage to buy) and tries to get them back on their medications, they get released, and the cycle begins again. Most of them are mentally unstable, and perhaps they'd be somewhat functional if they could stay on their medication, but they don't, so they can't function in society for long.
We don't want to put them back in asylums, because some asylums really were hellholes, and I guess we don't trust ourselves not to let them be hellholes again. That seems awfully pessimistic; factories used to be pretty awful too, but we require them to be safe and clean now. Seems like we could do the same with asylums, but we won't even consider it. So we're left with letting them wander the streets, maybe bedding down at homeless shelters when they feel like it, using the jails as temporary asylums when they get in trouble, and throwing more money at the problem once in a while to soothe our guilt. It's sad.
Different US states have implemented useful measures for helping homeless people, but states which are struggling with their implementation have other issues as well. Border states in particular have illegal immigrants to contend with as well, so a housing-first policy for homelessness gets taken off the table right away. California has the means and resources for dealing with its homelessness problem, but the political will is murky.
Whether it's homelessness, DUIs, or fentanyl deaths (only 75k per year!), measuring the impact of something by ignoring the blast radius is disingenuous. All who are touched are part of it. In the case of homelessness, it's a burden on emergency services, creates unsafe environments, impacts businesses, etc.
You would think that since DUI operators present a greater social problem, both in numbers and potential to cause harm, there would be all sorts of active campaigns against such an issue. But the present reality is that some issues have great political forces behind them, and the media takes care to paint such issues as “crises”. Maybe it is a crisis, for a certain locality, and that reflects on the governance of that place. But I don’t think it’s fair or accurate to say your local problem is a problem at large, even if that means you get less federal monies to deal with it. Maybe what that means is that people need to reflect on how their localities are spending their budget, or sorting their priorities.
How does Houston deal with those that can't be housed? Sure, 90% retention sounds nice for these people but California has limited housing/higher housing costs, in general, last I had read. The write-up even mentions rising housing costs or the Trump admin taking away their funding can crash the system, so unclear how easily this system could transfer to other cities. Sure, better communicating systems and a better hierarchy will lead to better outcomes for most orgs, but that's a pretty general statement about basically every org out there.
I also feel like this write-up sugar coats some of the actions Houston/Texas has been taking against non-compliance. Ticketing homeless people $200 for existing on the streets seems a bit counter intuitive - and Texas has been systematically shipping homeless and immigrants around the country (human trafficking) for political theater, so are they excluding that data? Probably.
I'm not an expert, but this write-up really comes off as one-sided since it's only talking about what's not working in California and ignoring some of the background stuff Texas is up to. Overall, do agree that better management and accountability would do other cities favors, but again, that's such an easy statement to make about any plan or org.
Higher housing costs in California are in some sense an artificial manufactured problem. California should mimic Texas by making it easier and cheaper to build more housing. Take approval power away from local governments, and give property owners and developers the right to build pretty much whatever they want wherever they want.
Texas' official policy on homelessness and drug users for at least a decade was to buy them a bus ticket to California. Gov Rick Perry bragged about it in a presidential debate. His successor bragged about it in a gubernatorial debate.
When the LA Times tried to survey the homeless population two years ago, fewer than 25% of the homeless in Hollywood were from California and none of them were locals. Want to guess the #1 state of residence for LA's homeless (Hint: it's Texas.)
But this article is right: once LA started buying the non-local homeless bus tickets back to their real home cities, things started getting better in LA. It's now part of our current mayor's homeless strategy to convince people to go back home.
Also: California defines homelessness differently (more broadly) than most states. Using the California definition, Texas, North Dakota, Florida, New York, and Oklahoma all have almost as many homeless. But when those states redefine homelessness to mean something narrower, of course they're going to look better. If California were to limit the "homeless" population to just Californians who became homeless (meaning that they owned, rented, or otherwise had housing before losing it), it would have fewer homeless than Texas.
This is such a bad faith article, downtown Dallas is full of homeless and the cvs has everything locked up. If homelessness went down it's because they moved to CA.
We do need more accountability for non profits though.
Hotels in Dallas for at least 15 years have disuaded people from walking even a few blocks downtown because they equate all the homelessness with crime.
I found this funny because by far the biggest danger I have seen there are endless electric scooters littering the sidewalks.
Agreed, but just so no one latches onto what I think you meant as a joke, the overwhelming majority of homeless people in California are native Californians.
I’ve been to more US states and cities than most Americans and every city I’ve been to has a severe homeless problem.
Whilst it’s true that europe does have homelessness too, and it has gotten worse in recent years, it is incomparable to America.
It doesn’t seem like a problem that can be fixed by some local policy or other. It’s a societal problem.
America also has stratospheric levels of inequality, a terrible healthcare system, and lacks a functional welfare state. I do not think this is a coincidence.
I’d much rather live somewhere more civilised, at the cost of higher taxation.
It always irks me to see Americans taunt Europeans on social media about their lack of very large tech companies, whilst the Europeans are perhaps too dignified to point out the consequences of America’s hypercapitalism (such as homelessness, crime, and trump) in return.
Houston has an absolutely massive amount of homelessness. It just also has tons of “null space” for them to exist invisibly. No one here walks or bikes so no one sees it only because they aren’t looking. Homelessness becomes a much bigger problem for society when homeless people cant find any space to be away from the public.
I’m a bit confused about this. I live and work in Houston, and it seems like the number of apparently homeless panhandlers I see (specifically in the med center / NRG) area seems approximately constant over the last decade.
Disclaimers- I don’t actually gather data. I don’t explore at night to see who is actually sleeping rough.
I do get report from panhandlers that they need $20 to stay at the shelter…
Article comes across as complete slop, if written by a human hand. Articles thesis is "build working systems" and "who knows if we're getting rid of the homeless people and drug users or just moving them around"[1] and top comment here is "committees are annoying."
Like Dallas that rounds up the homeless and puts them on busses to drop off in Houston?
"The success in Houston and Dallas came from building operational infrastructure to make encampments disappear permanently instead of temporarily."
This is 100% BS. I drive past tent encampments every day. All that happens is the city comes in and disrupts the encampments so they are clear for a couple of days, and then everyone just returns. They have even started placing signs at the intersections where the people from the closest encampment under the bridge pan handle that discourages "street charity".
If this is what is considered success, then it must be really bad elsewhere. At least on the west coast the homeless do not have to worry about the weather as much
Zoning code != building codes. Zoning deals with the types of buildings/uses that can be built in an area not the requirements for safety like electrical or structural building codes.
It's definitely a mixed bag though, zoning keeps industrial uses away from residential which is good for pollution and noise reasons but it also restricts building dense housing in areas zoned single family.
I'm always dubious about explanations that don't account for the fact that the weather in many California towns are more pleasant and survivable year round compared to Texas. Or that locations like SF are quite space constrained when it comes to new housing so new projects generally have to displace some current use making the process harder.
It’s not quite true that we have no codes, but you wouldn’t come here and find some hell hole of mixed industrial and residential. Land prices really do dictate use.
Maybe inside the loop, but go to Channelview or Deer Park or Baytown or La Porte or League City or even Webster.
Go take a look around the Nasa Bypass and Gulf Freeway. You've got apartments, a Great Wolf Lodge, an oil pipeline holding station, and single family homes all right next to each other all right on top of the creek.
The parks I used to play at had active oil and gas wells right next to them. My neighborhood growing up had a big, straight greenbelt that bisected the neighborhood due to the abundance of buried gas lines in between.
You mean like the million dollar McMansions on the same block as a gas station, across the street from an office high rise? I think you’re over-estimating the effect of land prices.
What's the problem with gas station (provided it keeps mandatory distance from the buildings) or the office building near the residential ones? In fact, close offices are often cited as a pros for certain locations, people are even trying to rent as close as they can in some cities.
PS: I've lived the whole last year approximately 100m away from both gas station and large office complex. Neither bothered me at all, and it was a first floor.
>Too many and too restrictive building codes are bad, but no codes? Yikes
You're confusing zoning codes (what land can be used for what type of structure, e.g., industrial and residential) and building codes (the rules for safely constructing a building).
I lived in Houston for six months and I don’t understand anybody who would ever use it as a model for any city in any capacity unless they love endless interstate construction and taking 60-90 minutes to get anywhere. “Sprawling mess” doesn’t even begin to cover it.
The sprawling mess of Houston has ostensibly contributed to its very low housing costs. A lot of the other problems in the area begin to melt away when everything is ridiculously affordable.
The golden path is to live in the Houston area while working remotely. This helps you to avoid the worst aspect of the region while maximizing the best aspects.
A million dollars buys you an incredible length of runway in the Houston market. You could buy a very high end home in the woodlands in cash, put a Porsche in the garage, and still have enough to go for a decade before you had to find a source of income again.
What you are proposing is far out of reach for most Americans.
“Put together a million dollars” and “work remotely”? The biggest employer in Houston by a huge margin is the oil and gas industry - most of those jobs are not going to be remote and a lot of those jobs are not a pathway to $1 million. What about people who work in hospitality, roughly 10% of the workforce?
You’re describing this as relatively simple/achievable but for a lot of people it simply isn’t. Houston has one of the highest poverty rates in the country with 1 in 5 living below the poverty line - https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/houston/202...
I am talking about what jobs people in Houston actually have as well as the socio-economic realities of the city. “Just get a remote job and make $1 million“ is not serious advice.
Speaking as a born and raised Houstonian, that’s a completely delusional claim — and you’re believing it credulously because it fulfills a narrative that appeals to your preconceived notions.
This article is the spitting definition of drawing a bullseye around an arrow. Houston’s secret sauce of preventing mass encampments is a combo of sprawl and police brutality. There aren’t as many dense areas to congregate compared to CA, and there are more places to hide away or squat to avoid notice.
The police in my city regularly go through and rip apart encampments and scatter everybody to the wind. It literally solves nothing.
I also find it pretty horrifying for someone to actively advocate for “police brutality.” By definition it is immoral and should not be desired. You can’t even be bothered to say “strong policing“ and pretend you don’t want law enforcement to abuse people who already have enough problems? You actively want them going out and hurting people? Please correct me if I’m wrong because it really comes across that way.
We have less homelessness because we put up signs saying "don't feed the homeless" (yes, real, and yes, real traffic signs) and put spikes under bridges. Oh and then the police here can basically do whatever they want.
The bay area has sprawl and has been embracing police brutality on this issue, and homelessness is not improving here. If that worked, they would try it here.
Does being born and raised in Houston make you an expert on homelessness? It's interesting you are so quick to rebuke the article with sweeping generalizations and zero data. Could it be because it does not appeal to your preconceived notions?
Houston was one of the first major cities to transfer chronically homeless individuals from encampments to one-bedroom apartments with almost zero friction (no intermediate shelters, no drug testing, no requirement to find a job). This was a highly successful program under Turner that had little to do with sprawl or police brutality.
Yes, it takes me 60 minutes to go 45 miles when I cross the extremes of the city. Oh noes! How far does the red line go in Boston and how long does that take?
I think the better question is general walkability.
The extremes is a pretty weird trip to do comparisons of since most people go from the outskirts into the centers to work and play and then go back to the outskirts.
The question becomes... once you get to your destination, can you get anywhere else without having to hop back into the car?
In cities like NY or Boston you can ride into town, hit a restaurant, go to the show, grab a few drinks then hit the clubs all without getting back into your car or just by taking short stints on readily available public transportation or taxis.
Can you have that same experience in Houston? I don't really know. Maybe. Where I'm from it's not concentrated like that so you go to your friends house... then you get in a car and go down to the bars... then you get in the car again to go to the arena for the show.
Everything's very dispersed. I personally like that much less.
California has passed SB79 which is a minor step forward. The opposition it received was pretty high for such a limited Bill.
I don't have a huge amount of faith CA will get housing costs under control but doing so is clearly one of the prerequisites to get a handle on the homelessness crisis.
What the actual fuck? The homeless problem here in Dallas is at an all time high. I've been in and out of the Downtown proper for 20 years now.
Completely unbelievable premise and not worth reading.
Citation: I was recently homeless following a stint in jail on a bogus Felony charge, and still frequent some of the resources / areas where I got help. 24 Hour Club. Dallas Public Libraries.
Tarrant County has a very good homeless program. They throw them in jail. Then let them out to do meth, then put them back in. They were my company in Lon Evans.
Good article. Very convincing. Even if the housing bit cannot be solved (NIMBY-ism in California is very strong) the other solutions should help. And there's no reason homeless people in SF or LA should stay in the most expensive housing areas of a completely Democratically controlled state
Good points and centralized infrastructure does seem key , but I think the biggest factor is the cost of housing. If Houston is half the cost of LA you’re going to have a lot less homeless to begin with and it’ll be a lot more affordable to over then housing.
This overlooks the weather factor. if you’re homeless and have the chance to get a bus to LA, would you rather try to survive in the streets of LA or Dallas (or Houston)? Easy decision.
Not really fair to compare the two geographic regions. Nobody wants to live on the streets in Dallas or Houston. It’s way too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter. That said, living in Dallas I have seen the odd tent city pop up under some freeway overpasses but they don’t stick around very long so I guess the city does do something about it.
Follow the money. Create a homelessness crisis, buy the cheap houses surrounding the tent cities and sell/rent them again for a bit/way more money when you fixed the crisis.
I remember a report about either SF or LA converting a parking lot to safe place for homeless and the mayor going on TV to show how proud they were this was a solution. I was flabbergasted. Because in no way would my SE coastal sensibilities regard this as any fucking solution to homelessness. It was literally a parking lot full of tents for the homeless.
Agree with you. Too bad this argument is using the wrong terminology.
To be acceptable to society, you either need to be willing to subjugate yourself for rent or be rich enough to own actual land. humans are no longer allowed a natural state.
I think there's a crisis of ineffectiveness in Center-Left institutions
They are too deliberative, and take excessive time including voices of every stakeholder. So you don't just go do the "obvious thing". You cater to trying to listen to every voice in an effort to be as inclusive as possible. Committee after committee and an obsession with process. You can spend years placating NIMBYs and people living with their own alternate reality.
Meanwhile real people are suffering from lack of action.
This level of ineffectiveness just enables authoritarianism ("at least they get something done") and gets people to seek the private industry for their solutions.
Those on the left also quite often suffer from letting perfect be the enemy of good. I've had a few friends over the years who would seem to prefer nothing be done rather than make incremental progress. I.e., how people will be critical of a carbon tax to help reduce emissions simply because it's not good enough, even if its a step in the right direction. We've seen it with health care as well. It's "medicare for all or bust."
I appreciate the sentiment of wanting the right/perfect solution, but the perfect solution doesn't happen all at once. Often times a compromise is needed in order to help people right now, not hypothetically in the future. Sometimes that means you end up being less inclusive, but so be it if shit gets done.
This is something that Barack Obama used to complain about. Incremental progress is progress.
Talking from personal experience, it applies also. Perfectionists like me are often deadlocked into not releasing something until it's perfectly executed, caters to every use case, takes every edge case into account, etc. My late cofounder spent (too much) time training me otherwise, that small incremental changes will compound into larger ones in a big enough timescale, and that it's more effective to simply get started than deliberate ages over it.
Definitely. Right now they’re “cancelling” Bill Burr because he went and did a show in Saudi Arabia. One of the left’s staunchest allies for years and one of the few males on the left that young boys can actually identify with and he’s in the trashcan for doing a show with the Saudis. It’s bonkers.
If anyone is not cancelable it Bill Burr. Cancel culture is pretty defanged at the moment.
Now we get US Government and POTUS backed cancel culture in the form of lawfare / weaponized partisan govt agencies instead.
Action by the state cannot be cancel culture by definition, that's just sparkling repression.
I'm a leftist who has been a Bill Burr fan, and who is wildly disappointed he did a show in Saudi Arabia because of the naked hypocrisy of it.
Listen to his own past comments (starting at 30 seconds in):
https://youtu.be/1Jp4Ce8yStA?si=wThUQtlRJo07Qn1Y&t=30
He did exactly what past him was (rightfully) calling someone else out for. So, yeah, I think its fair game to call him out for it.
Voicing your displeasure that someone did something is not "cancelling" them (whatever that even means anymore).
Don’t kid yourself, you are effectively “canceling” them in an environment where the federal government is already making it hard for them to express their views. The left needs to have more of a long term view rather than just pulling down all the people standing up for them at the slightest deviation from what is expected. Soon there won’t be anyone left and the other team is chomping at the bit to eat you up.
‘Effectively canceling?’ Is Bill Burr silenced somehow?
Ironically, he is being silenced - the contracts he signed in order to perform prohibit badmouthing the Saudi regime and its policies
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I'm not "left", but I liked Bill Burr even though he's fairly uneducated and populist.
That's because Bill Burr is a hypocrite for it. He complains about billionaires and the rich, complains about not enough free speech (but Saudi stipulation was censorship about royals and religion), and complains about other people doing exactly what he did[0] (still sleazy if he says he'd do it too). He acts like he's Carlin, rants about other people's $ but he's really only about his own $ too.
People thought he held sincere ethics and would speak on them. They're disappointed he's just another greedy rich guy he was complaining to everyone about.
[0]https://www.reddit.com/r/comedy/comments/1nt1umd/comment/ngq...
>Those on the left also quite often suffer from letting perfect be the enemy of good.
Exactly, its because they are idealist. Its also not hard to follow this observation over to Europe, pretty much the epicenter of idealism on earth, and then look around. Oh yeah, much more liberal than the US, with countless examples of idealism throughout. One of the current such examples is how Europe sees Putin, and how the East sees him.
The antidote to the idealism are individuals with confidence, and of course testosterone. Elements which when put in a pot with the aforementioned mix violently. You need people saying, well, this is good enough, and if its not I'll come up with something that'll fix it, when that happens.
As usual, a mix of both is needed.
I disagree. These half ass solutions come from parties with vested interests and effectively amount to inaction while taking the wind out of the sales of any real action. Carbon tax (the kind with credits and offsets) is a license to pollute. A direct tax on carbon would actually force them to change which would be bad for the economy so we can't have that. Compromise (listening to NIMBYS and lobbyists) is exactly what not to do. You can't make an omelette without breaking some eggs.
SF, Dallas, and Houston all have Democratic leadership that could be described as center left? (For America. To an outsider, America has two conservative parties)
The unhoused are 'stakeholders' too actually, so I'd describe Cali's problem as listening too much to wealthy/powerful stakeholders, while ignoring those most impacted. Who can forget Newsom's camp-destroying photo-op and forced bussing the undesirables out of town to prevent people from seeing 'crime' aka 'poverty'.
These institutions are not log-jammed by accident. "You cater to trying to listen to every voice" Reader, they only listen to their friends and donors, this is the problem. These 'listening sessions' you are told are 'stopping progress' exist to placate legitimate concerns. Blaming unions is also fun, I heard that a lot back in Cali, no matter the issue, no matter the union, from the wealthiest people.
Politicians that seem to do almost nothing are preferred by the donor class. Bog standard Democrats have more smoke for Zohran (the sincere housing and affordability guy) than they have for their 'Republican colleagues' in this era. That should tell you everything you need to know.
"This level of ineffectiveness just enables authoritarianism ("at least they get something done") and gets people to seek the private industry for their solutions."
EXACTLY. THIS IS INTENTIONAL. PUBLIC COST, PRIVATE PROFIT IS THE GOAL. A WELFARE STATE FOR BUSINESSES, NOT PEOPLE.
100%. Class solidarity is extremely strong amongst the wealthy.
Then why are the wealthy supporting left candidates, while working class supporting Trump.
This is a really toxic dynamic, and I don’t understand it.
That's what the previous poster was getting at - moderate left cantidates are not bad for the wealthy. Very status quo.
As for the working class, they don't feel represented, and the strongman shift is a predictable and toxic dynamic.
Because Trump, for all the problems and crimes, represents _action_. I hate what he has done to this country and the government, this administration is nothing but cronyism and self-enrichment the whole way down. But, it does show a different standard of action.
The wealthy are supporting candidates who offer lip service to leftist policies and then do nothing to cut through basic red tape and court challenges. The "leftist" candidates that the rich support run on building more housing, and then let the rezoning take 15 years in committee.
Here, in Seattle, Bruce Harrell would be a perfect example. He ran on transit, policing reform, and housing, and in the time he has been in office he has accomplished - nothing. No majors action has been attempted, and even minor reforms have been stuck in endless committees for this whole time. But he was happy to intervene to move a major transit station to a place less convenient for commuters and more convenient for his donors.
The next candidate the democrats put up for president is probably going to be pretty uninspiring, and talk a lot about a return to norms. But that's exactly what is wrong with the party.
The next Democrat that runs for president should be promising massive reform - if Kash Patel can fire an FBI agent for having a pride flag on their desk 3 years ago then the next guy running the FBI should be firing any agent that has ever used a slur or received a substantiated complaint about use of force or violating civil rights. If Trump can yank funding from cities for no reason, then the next Democrat in office should be cutting funding from any city with a housing shortage that doesn't enact zoning reform.
In short - wealthy donors love Democrats who talk big but wring their hands about using the power they are given. Because that keeps the system exactly the way the wealthy want it.
Most of the things you’re describing he “can’t” do, but his party won’t impeach him and the Supreme Court is complacent if not intentionally incompetent.
You can bet, with 100% certainty, the standard will change for a democratic president. There’s a reason half the shit he’s doing is being decided on the SCOTUS shadow docket and it’s because they want to be able to tell a Democrat no for doing the same thing in the future.
The court isn't complacent, the conservative justices know exactly what they're doing. They are operating under the belief that once a president from the other party gets elected again, they will still have the old rules to fall back on.
But the ultimate truth of power is that the bounds are whatever you can get away with. Both the republicans in congress and the supreme court are burning every shred of legitimacy they have left in letting Trump get away with his crimes. I am certain the standard will suddenly change when a democrat gets elected again, but the court has set itself up for a perfect "now let him enforce it" moment.
Student loan forgiveness gets blocked by the courts but the administration is allowed to block funds allocated by congress with no push back? Well, that's the new standard. I certainly won't complain much if the next democrat in office starts doing the same thing. If the republicans didn't want the president to have that power, they should do something about it.
>The wealthy are supporting candidates who offer lip service to leftist policies and then do nothing to cut through basic red tape and court challenges. The "leftist" candidates that the rich support run on building more housing, and then let the rezoning take 15 years in committee.
The wealthy don't want more than lip service because "doing things" from any political position because that would imperil the status quo in which they are wealthy.
You see the same do-nothing behavior from the "swamp" republicans who serve the same moneyed interests.
The highly educated (which correlates with being wealthy) support Left candidates, while the K-12 educated (which correlates with being working class) support Trump.
But it's questionable whether a class reversal still appears in the data once you control for educational polarization.
The wealthy aren't supporting left candidates. They are supporting Democratic candidates. These Democratic candidates fully believe in capitalism and support the same things that the wealthy support.
Some in the working-class support Trump for cultural issues since no one supports their economic issues.
It's quite easy to understand when you stop looking at what the politicians tell the rubes and see what they actually do.
Lmfao which billionaires are supporting which leftists?
The answer is none.
2024 election map of New York City: https://projects.thecity.nyc/election-results-voter-turnout-...
Manhattan isn't supporting Trump. Staten Island is.
No leftists were running in that election. Let's see how Zohran's map looks
Manhattan isn't a person neither is Staten Island.
How does this show who billionaires voted for?
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Isn’t racism a pretty good proxy for class?
PJ O’Rourke quipped, “Racism is very lower-class. Upper-class people are never racists; they’re anti-Semites.”
At universities this is especially true. Racism is not tolerated, anti-Semitism “depends on the context.”
Nah, "upper" class is just better at wording it in less obvious ways when being too open about it is not politically opportune.
No. Racism is used by the rich to divide the poor and keep them from fighting the rich that are actually exploiting them.
I've known plenty of wealthy racists, and there's one running the country right now, and i don't believe you at all regarding universities.
12%
More like 70%
This is basically the entire theme of "Abundance" by Klein and Thompson, for those looking for a longer read on this.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_(Klein_and_Thompson_...
Another recent book along the same lines would be "Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress and How to Get It Back" by Marc Dunkelman:
"When he looked into the history, Dunkelman realized that progressives have long swung back and forth between two opposing impulses. One is what he calls Hamiltonianism: the desire to achieve progress by empowering government and institutions to tackle big problems at the direction of strong leaders (like Robert Moses) and informed experts. The other is what he calls Jeffersonianism: the desire to prevent unaccountable centralized authorities (also like Robert Moses) from abusing ordinary citizens by empowering them to fight back."
-- https://www.niskanencenter.org/why-nothing-works-with-marc-d...
thank you, i'll grab this!
Wow, deregulation and austerity, what a fresh perspective on the economy!
This abundance "movement" has absolutely nothing new to offer, it is simply a rebranding of neoliberalism. It's easy to spot too, just look at who backs the movement: the same old establishment democrats and their wealthy donors. The same people who have entranched the democratic party into this technocratic blob of ineffectiveness and societal erosion. In particular, it is financially backed by, among others, Peter Thiel and Mark Andreessen. This should raise some red flags.
Also, I personally like winning. This abundance movement has exactly zero electoral hype. American voters don't care about it at all. Meanwhile, populist leftists like Mamdani are able to generate momentum for the left for the first time in decades. That Klein, Thompson and the billionaires behind them are so harshly criticizing them should raise additional red flags.
How do you get “austerity” from a movement arguing that far more things should be built?
"How do you get austerity from neoliberalism, a movement that argues that more wealth should trickle down?".
The abundance folks constantly fight the populist left on government spending. Their proposed plan for "having more things built" is to deregulate the housing market and pray that somehow, the massive land owners, who de facto control the political life of this country and have had their way for a century won't fight it.
Absolutely ridiculous claim sorry.
They want SME's running regulations.
Look you can read between whatever lines you want, but Klein specifically calls out the left getting out of their own way. That even when the left tries to do far left top-down socialism, that the regulations and special interests groups prevent them from capitalizing on their own successes.
So even if you come back with something like price controls and government building more housing, you run into the same problems, and you say something like “fuck norms, ignore the neo-libs / conservatives, housing for the people!”
Congratulations, you’ve advocated for deregulation.
Your argument boils down to "people already said some things like this in the past" (ok, and?) and "some people I don't like agree with part of it", which is very weak and doesn't address anything in substance.
You know, you can still want to be able to build housing without having to wait 1 year for permitting or not want to live in a place where making a basic train track is basically impossible because of the number of stakeholders that have to come to a consensus and still vote for Mamdani. You are allowed to have non black and white opinions.
You can even have 1% of the things you think are good in common with Peter Thiel, and that won't immediately turn you into a far right psychopath.
You can even, hear me out, be for less regulation on specific areas where there has been a massive lack of supply but not for "deregulating the economy" in it's entirety!
alas, in southern California 1 year for permitting would be a miracle.
my family has been in construction for 3 generations, and 2 years is now considered normal. plus we have to seal up everything for energy efficiency, then have to remove and add more venting for the next round of inspectors who want to ensure air quality. We stopped building in Sun City because of the $17K tax per unit to fund schools even though it's a 55+ senior community. Currently it's about $115K per house in permitting fees in rural Riverside county. Makes it difficult
Housing can either be an investment vehicle or affordable, but not both at the same time. The abundance crowd remains willfully blind to this obvious reality, and is why they will fail. They promise to make housing affordable while receiving millions from people who became rich off of housing not being affordable. It fundamentally can't deliver on its promise, because it is completely compromised from the start.
I perceive abundance as a big grift to keep the populist left out of the democratic party, which is something they spend a lot of energy doing. How else could you explain this obsession of the abundance crowd for shooting down any populist policy or messaging?
The writer of this article (Dave) publicly dislikes Derek Thompson and keeps criticizing Matt Ygelasis for his austerity fetish, along with praising Mamdani
Mamdani just seems like a typical nepo baby that had some ideas in college he wants to try out because he skipped history class.
Abundance is just https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Way neoliberalism with a new coat of paint. The answer to all questions is 'bust unions and environmental groups'. We've been here before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancer_Alley
All the Reaganite conservative institutions (https://www.abundancedc.org/speakers) that are leery of fascism, but love business back this 'program'.
We need a new 'New Deal', that rebuilds what was broken during these last 90 years. We need the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frances_Perkins of this era.
"Frances Perkins was not just the architect of SSA: she also proposed and implemented many of the foundational labor and safety laws1 still relied upon by the American working class. We can also thank her for the 40-hour work week, minimum wage, unemployment compensation, worker’s compensation, workplace safety, abolition of child labor, direct federal aid to the states for unemployment relief, a revitalized federal employment service, and universal health insurance. Well, except the last. We are still working on the last. "
She got everything she wanted done as Labor Sec. Except for universal healthcare. And it was a great loss for everything living American every year since.
Somebody hasn't read the book, just knee jerk reactions to it.
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What do the grass roots want that will result in a higher supply of living spaces?
So basically you ignored the actual text in favor of the conspiracy theorist's "cui bono" about the funding structure behind the authors.
No, there's no conspiracy here. Ezra's probably a true believer, which I think is sadder honestly.
There is no coordination besides shared interest in protecting capital, same as it ever was. Shared 'class interest' and 'class solidarity' if you like. Though some of these folks are probably in weird passive aggressive and catty group chats these days, like Andresson and Thiel.
It is not a conspiracy to look at the super-pacs funding candidates with weird positions either. The transfers of cash are pretty open in our second gilded age.
These 'third way' institutes and movements pop up every decade or so if you are paying attention. The literal 'Third Way' and 'Tea Party' movements were funded directly by some of these 'abundance' groups. But there's no 'shadowy cabal' or secret. They are open about their desires, and rely on marketing to paper over the obvious.
Manufacturing consent for union breaking in Cali (Ezra didn't outright say it, but Josh Barro did) is clearly in their interest. It's also clear from many of them comments here like: 'I don't care who profits as long as there are suddenly houses' that show the 'abundance' gambit is succeeding.
And to be clear, I'm not against the message 'build more housing', but these are not people you should trust. They need to prove they are serious. Their track record tells me they will bait, switch, and act as spoilers.
Don't take just my word for it though! When they don't accomplish or even push for what they originally claimed their core goals are, remember this conversation.
Is this guilt by association? eg The roster of that Abundance Festival?
I've read the book. Ditto the criticisms. Heard the interviews.
My "abundance" take away is a rejection of neoliberalism, austerity, Hayek, etc. That it's akin to Green New Deal, Build Back Better, etc.
Am I wrong?
We need 3.5m (?) new homes, mass transit, upgraded grid, 4Tw (?) of additional renewable energy generation (plus their batteries).
Right?
I don't care how it gets done. I don't care what labels (pejoratives) are used. I don't care who profits.
I just demand it gets done, sooner than later.
You could call it guilt by association, sure! But critically, the funders and speakers and membership that build a movement give life and shape to what that movement becomes. Not caring about 'means' only 'ends' or who profits strikes me as appallingly naive. You tell me, can these people build the houses you so desire?
From this page https://therevolvingdoorproject.org/who-is-behind-the-growin...: compare your words: "take away is a rejection of neoliberalism"
to the following descriptions: "Mercatus Center, but without the libertarian brand that limits that think tank’s outreach to the left." "The group is currently headed by Julius Krein, the founder of pro-Trump publications The Journal Of American Greatness and its successor, American Affairs"
"gone so far as to posit that AI is the only possible solution to climate change and that it should be powered even by fossil fuel sources." "PI is a subsidiary of the The Third Way Foundation, and it proudly proclaims itself as the “intellectual birthplace of the New Democrat and ‘Third Way’ movements.”
"Chamber of Progress also used to be funded by Sam Bankman-Fried’s notorious FTX, Blockchain.com, Zillow, Twitter, and the investment firm behind WeWork, SoftBank. The group has launched a “Abundance & Affordability” project, is listed among Inclusive Abundance’s “Abundance Landscape,” and its employees are vocal in their support of the agenda."
"Manhattan employs conservative provocateur and Ron DeSantis ally Chris Rufo—the progenitor of the debate over “Critical Race Theory”"
"Stand Together’s Chairman and CEO, Brian Hooks, is also the President of the Charles Koch Foundation and previously served as the executive director and COO of the Mercatus Center"
one of the most prominent groups opposing the Obama administration’s two key domestic policy goals: health care reform and cap and trade
The philanthropy has funded “pension reform” work by right wing groups, school privatization efforts, Bari Weiss’ anti-woke university, the Niskanen Center, and sponsored both the 2024 abundance conference and the 2025 conference.
Do I need to go on? These people will decide what "Abundance 'progressiveism'" actually looks like if it continues forward.
They are not hiding the fact they are actually conservatives with new labels. They will republican even more if they are given voting positions.
Do you think these people are on your side? Its all oil and techoncratic billionaires top to bottom.
"Do you think these people are on your side?"
Who is on your side? People who made it all but impossible to renew and improve basic civilizational infrastructure (housing, roads, railways, electric grid, power plants etc.) by introducing so many demands that the system slowly ground to a halt?
Nope. They may say that they are on your side, they may even think that they are on your side, but this is a classical case of the road to hell being paved with good intentions. If someone makes it all but impossible to build new things by elevating chronic naysayers and various special interests into a vetocracy, they are not on your side.
You don't have to trust the abundance movement, but they still have a valid point. In the last 10-15 years, there is a growing awareness all across the West that we have painted ourselves into a corner by heaping too many regulations on further development of cities and land and introducing too many chokepoints where any project can be stalled in courts. This not only makes our living standards worse, but also increasingly leaves us vulnerable to various authoritarian regimes - not just in the sense of raw industrial power, but also propaganda.
If you are a progressive, try to swing your preferred politicians towards more permissiveness, too. This situation badly needs correction and if the progressive part of the spectrum gets stuck on its de facto preference of NIMBYism - for any reasons, be it "everything bagel" demands or the sort of visceral distrust towards other political players that you yourself exhibit quite nicely - they are done for.
Regular people don't want to spend several years fighting a paper war with fifty implacable stakeholders in order to build a block of flats. This is just madness. If someone imposed that system on another country by force, we would consider it an act of war comparable to a naval blockade. Why precisely are we doing this to ourselves?
Unfortunately we need less inclusivity in city planing, that much is clear. Too many people have interest in vetoing everything. It is time to learn this bitter lesson and move on. Maybe you could be the person who makes the change in the progressive circles - try talking to the people you trust about this.
I feel ya.
> Unfortunately we need less inclusivity in city planing, that much is clear.
I don't think we need to go that far. :)
It's been long known the NEPA, CEPA, and other safeguards, were fully captured by bad faith actors and in much need of reform. Like closing legal exploits used to thwart any and all development, as you well know.
It's been kind of amazing how quickly YIMBYism has spun up and matured into a scrappy effective advocacy group(s). And we're starting to see progress, payoff, real results.
The recent CEPA reforms are already yielding positive results. eg By short-circuiting environmental reviews for redeveloping properties that are already in built-up areas. Real common sense "well, duh" type reforms.
There's no shortage of needful common sense reforms. I'm now confident these reform efforts will now accelerate. State-by-state, since federal action is currently closed off.
The biggly "abundance"-esque type challenges I worry about are structural and financial. Reforming public utilities, tackling regulatory capture, investment, green banks, industrial policy, etc.
In a nutshell, I want everything promised in the Green New Deal, times at least 4. (Which does account for inclusion, empowerment, environmental justice, and so forth.)
No, I do not.
I also know that policy and legislation cannot be moved forward without them. Realpolitik.
Further, there may be an opportunity to mix-up the current coalitions. Checkout the "Montana Housing Miracle". NIMBY vs YIMBY is old vs young, not right vs left. With the reactionary nativists crashing the economy (again), the business members of the current ruling coalition are getting grumpy. Let's drive a wedge between the trogs and the merely greedy. Again, Realpolitik.
I also demand some kind of plan or strategy to address lack of housing and climate crisis. From experience, advocacy is easier than opposition. If not Abundance, then what's the plan?
Lastly, we are completely out of time. Land use and housing are the biggest (missing) components of any USA strategy for addressing climate crisis. I, the most left-wing person you're ever likely to meet, no longer have the luxury of partisanship. So I don't care how the things we need get built.
If we survive until 2050 (and beyond), our kids (and grandkids) can carry on the revolution.
I don't think Dave associates himself with the abundance movement
for as long as the left has not been about the working class and been about university educated white collar government workers this has been true though. It may have been true prior to that too i just dont have living memory to back it up. There is something about being removed from the reality of how the metaphorical sausage is made that turns the left from having some valid concerns but usually wrong ideas on how to address them into actively incomptent civilization destroyers. I would love to know why.
When you go back to The New Deal, its absolutely the case that the Dem coalition was much more effective at delivery. To some extent because FDR acted very aggressively with executive action.
My personal opinion is the working class, not the fancy educated types, need to run the Dem coalition. It would be far more effective in a number of ways... with broader appeal.
>My personal opinion is the working class, not the fancy educated types, need to run the Dem coalition
They need to run the goddamn country.
Whether it's liberal white women with their whole foods and Starbucks or conservative men with their 100k pickup trucks the morals and political whims of "people rich enough to not get fairly instantly screwed if they make bad decisions" have been a disaster for this country.
It’s a different coalition now though. The FDR Democrats were labor focused. Then the 60s happened. The New Left student movements reoriented away from labor and towards racial/gender/sexual equality, and Kennedy signed the Civil Rights Act. Southern whites opposed this and you had George Wallace pop up, splitting the Democrats, and then Nixon swooped in with the Southern Strategy. The Democrats needed a new coalition and they went with disadvantaged racial/gender/sexual groups instead of labor.
The transition didn’t really finish until Clinton and the New Democrats though. Campaign money and TV ads got to be really important in Presidential politics, and to get that money, Democrats had to appeal to rich people, so they got rid of most of the labor aspects of the platform. Clinton signed NAFTA and MFN for China. Now there were two pro-business parties that served different identity groups. Ironically the last gasp of labor was the billionaire Ross Perot in 92 and 96 who ran on an anti-NAFTA platform. The only way he could do this credibly was to use his own money to buy TV time.
Now come on, man. There's no explaining the decline of organized labor in the Democratic Party without the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947.
Probably so. I don't know enough about the politics at that time though.
Kennedy did not sign the Civil Rights Act, Kennedy was dead. He wanted it, but it never got any support until after his assassination. It was LBJ who got bipartisan support for the bill. After it passed and LBJ used federal powers to force southern states to stop being so racist, many senators blamed the democrats, explicitly switched to the republican party, and the south has been anti-democrat since.
The democrats did not leave their labor base. The Democrats have never stopped pushing labor rights and unions and similar.
The voters who were pissed with being forced to desegregate left the democrat party. Turns out there were a lot of people who thought it was more important to be able to be racist than unionized.
I don't know why you believe billionaire Ross Perot, Texas businessman and prominent supporter of the war on drugs, who told Larry King that we should "cut medicare and social security for those who """don't need it""" " is "pro labor" ffs. He's the same kind of "we should run the country like a business" populist as Reagan and Trump, and just as wrong. He was literally a big supporter of Reagan as Reagan dismantled Unions and union rights!
NAFTA did not send your job to China, business executives did. Business executives like Ross Perot, who made his money selling computing services to the US government, and didn't really do much else before or since.
Even if NAFTA had been completely blocked, average Americans would still have been screwed from Reagan's changes to the country. Underpaid workers in other countries are not getting all the money, surely you recognize that right? The money never even leaves the country.
> many senators blamed the democrats, explicitly switched to the republican party, and the south has been anti-democrat since.
In this case, "many" is at most 2.
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_senators... Thurmond was the only US senator who switched parties in the 60s. Harry Byrd (from Virginia, not Robert from West Virginia) stopped caucusing with Dems in 1970.
No other US senators switched parties until 94.
Before Thurmond, the previous switch was by Morse (Oregon) who went from Republican to Democrat in 53-55.
The same seems to be true of the House of Representatives - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_represen... .
Pretty much every prominent Dem segregationist only left office when he retired.
That's why the "first Republican elected since Reconstruction" events didn't start until the mid 70s and didn't really get going until the mid 80s.
You're right about the Civil Rights act, I had misremembered. However Kennedy met with MLK and proposed the Civil Rights act.
Blaming "business executives" is unhelpful as an explanation because "business executives" is not a static group. Business executives who moved their manufacturing to China or Mexico made their businesses more profitable or at least preserved their profits, because they saved a ton of money. Business executives who kept manufacturing in the U.S. generally were outcompeted and they were either replaced, their businesses shrunk, or they were forced to reorient towards higher end, smaller markets.
NAFTA, MFN/PNTR for China, and then WTO membership for China is what created this situation. This was a total disaster for American labor. All of the things that Perot warned about with the "giant sucking sound" were exactly what happened.
Underpaid workers in other countries most certainly did get a lot of that money. Have you seen what has happened to wages in coastal China over the past 25 years? Most of that money comes from exports, and a large portion of those are to the U.S.
Perot's other policies don't necessarily track as "pro-labor." My point was just that the two biggest things that negatively affected American labor in the past 40 years were passed under Clinton. Interestingly, the vestiges of the labor-oriented Democratic party were still there in Congress, and large majorities of Democrats in the House voted against NAFTA and PNTR for China. On NAFTA, this result wouldn't even be possible today due to the "majority of the majority" way that the House is run.
The FDR admin had 90% support in the House and Senate. He wasn't authoritarian, he was operating with the clearest mandate America had until Reagan (not that I agree with the mandate Reagan was handed and followed through on)
The reason he was able to threaten the Supreme Court with packing is that it was a credible threat.
The working class abandoned democrats, not the other way around, when LBJ decided that the Civil Rights Act was a good thing, and got bipartisan support for it. Several prominent (terrible human beings) Dixiecrats screamed about "Democrat authoritarianism" for (checks notes) forcing southern states to stop being racist as fuck, and the south has been thoroughly republican voters since. Don't worry though, Strom Thurmund insists he wasn't a racist, he is just against being forced to allow black people to get the same legal treatment as white people.
A bunch of racists aren't willing to support welfare and public investment if black people get it. How do you form a coalition between them and black people?
These same assholes want to go back to the 50s because it was very good for white male americans, and they do not care about the rest.
FDR had this support because Americans rallied behind the New Deal because 1 out of every 5 Americans was jobless. That's the pain it took before America was willing to do socialism-lite.
If you want democrat policy, you need to elect them. Simple as.
> The FDR admin had 90% support in the House and Senate.
FDR directly embedded his staff in Congress and told them what they were going to do, and vigorously attacked anyone who got in the way of his agenda by any means necessary, including using the FBI and IRS against them, denying them federal funds, etc. He also was very effective at bullying the press - look at what went on with radio licenses. He even (via the Black Committee and FCC) conducted mass surveillance on his political enemies.
FDR did have a lot of support in Congress but brutally punishing people is what made him effective. He was certainly one of the most authoritarian Presidents in American history and we should probably thank our lucky stars he was a good one.
> These same assholes want to go back to the 50s because it was very good for white male americans
I really want to know when this was because all the men (white or not) who worked the mills and the mines in my memory were effectively functional alcoholics because life sucked so much.
Its anemoia - nostalgia for a time you didn't live through.
They don't want the actual 50s, they want an illusion of what they saw on TV shows depicting white, wealthy, suburbia.
> The working class abandoned democrats, not the other way around, when LBJ decided that the Civil Rights Act was a good thing, and got bipartisan support for it.
Odd, that the working class stayed with the Democrats for half a century after your claimed divergence.
It is true that progressive politics played a major role in the shift in the 2010s. But neither is that equivalent to the CRA, nor does it answer the question of why the working class reoriented around stupid bullshit. That latter, deeper issue has to do with the governing and professional classes of the US, which have shifted toward symbolic and procedural issues over broad material wellbeing, mostly because symbolic shit doesn't adversely affect professional classes' pocketbooks that much.
There is also the matter that the American political leadership managed to maintain some level of economic prosperity for the white working class in the intervening decades. Now that is collapsing, and the old narratives have returned.
The white working class and professional managerial class are in fact largely aligned in their zero sum assessments of the current situation. They differ principally on the nature of the solutions. No one on the left has the courage to acknowledge this, much less attack it.
It hasn't always been that way. The US political left did used to focus more on working-class issues. They only really lost the plot in the early 2000s when they started navel gazing on performative ideology and luxury beliefs, leading to an inversion in some of the voting blocks for the two major political parties.
It’s universities. I’ve seen this myself - universities are the heart and souls of the American left. It used to be the labor hall.
The universities could have continued in their socially productive capacity if their leadership realized their obligations should take precedence over career advancement. Instead, they chose to embrace cost disease. The reactionary right remains committed to finishing off whatever remains.
More importantly what that did was split the working class. Even in this very thread there's people referring to the "working class" as if they also aren't in it.
If you aren't a billionaire capital owner, you are working class. If your primary income comes from a job, you are working class.
If we want solidarity again we need to dispel the notion of working class meaning poor, blue collar workers. We've been pitted against ourselves, our divide shouldn't be left v. right it should be ALL working class against the ultra-rich.
> "If your primary income comes from a job, you are working class."
TIL that CEOs and other C-level executives (ones hired from the outside by the board, not founders) are working class. It's a definition that is clearly too broad to be useful.
>If you aren't a billionaire capital owner, you are working class. If your primary income comes from a job, you are working class.
The petty bourgeoisie is a thing, and if you receive stock-grants as part of your pay-package, you're in it. You own real-estate in an expensive city where your property is an appreciating asset? You're in it.
A local school system near me was facing some financial issues a number of years ago.
The superintendent noted that there were dozens and dozens of individual social programs that the school system managed. Many extending well beyond education and even testing the bounds of what might be called social work.
While they all (on the surface) operated on the idea that if students got these services they would be more effective in school ... it wasn't clear for most of them if that was even the case / being measured.
The superintendent noted that the only thing they could be sure of was that if they touched anyone of them, they were sure to be someone's baby and they'd face a backlash.
Personally, I'd like to see a more "fail fast" type system for a lot of social programs. Run it, see what happens ... then make the call if it goes any further. But that would mean people would have to start up programs fast, and shut them down fast. Both are not easy.
> Personally, I'd like to see a more "fail fast" type system for a lot of social programs. Run it, see what happens ... then make the call if it goes any further. But that would mean people would have to start up programs fast, and shut them down fast. Both are not easy.
My partner does exactly this with healthcare in BC. They spin up a project to trial, say, allowing nurses to prescribe methadone directly, or even for patients just to get it directly. They measure costs, patient outcomes, etc etc. After a set time get patient, doctor and nurse feedback.
Looks good? Great, roll it out to the whole province and hurry up about it.
They’re running 50+ of them continuously. Constant improvement is awesome.
Things like this is what DOGE should have been. What a wasted opportunity.
Yes, but given who was running DOGE it was never going to work.
>it wasn't clear for most of them if that was even the case / being measured.
If the programs were doing what they claimed they'd be measuring that and using the numbers as further justification. The fact that they're not speaks volumes.
Most of these programs are funded by government organizations so any measurement rules come form there, if there are any. It's less a choice than it is something (like much of the program) dictated.
This is an interesting thought. I also wonder if Houston is "helped" by the fact that they're a blue city in a red state... that kind of ideological conflict of governance requires unique and localized solutions. Whereas SF is blue city in a blue state, so it creates a "too many cooks in the kitchen" situation.
I think it also just creates a lack of "urgency" problem. I live in a blue city in a red state. Constituents expect results because we can't rely on our state gov. Local officials know this. There's more competition from more progressive candidates too locally which is helpful in keeping liberal officials more focused on results instead of the game of politics.
Idk, I think it's different for every city. But I think the point I'm trying to make is that having some kind of political constraints in governance seems to typically be a good thing for the sake of getting some shit done.
Actually I think I'm just stating an obvious point now given the glaring ineffectiveness of our two party political system...
It probably does make it easier to make drastic changes as described to consolidate data sharing etc when they ultimate authority is likely the city/county instead of the state. The state level agencies will have their own policies, systems and goals/approaches that might not suite the individual cities so the programs remain separated and fragmented.
The article itself makes this point more than once.
I am not left, right, center. I am not even American. I am mostly curious why this is seem in center-left but (as I understood) not expected from the right?
I am supposing that and endless stack of problems to solve is always good for any politician. There is always room to blame something/someone and propose something else of there is a problem.
From outside, the discussions over immigrants in the United States seems to shadow deeper discussions on how to fix the rest. It seems to blame the outside world for the lack of internal competitivity while not recognising any of the obvious problems. For example, it is not a matter of preferirng public or private healthcare like here in Europe. It is a matter of getting what makes more sense. Same for environment, trading, taxes, etc.
From time to time, we see response here that doing X is dumb because it is not a perfect solve. It's very common in discussions about solving pollution or energy use. Don't bother using EVs as we're still burning coal. Don't recycle because so much trash is everywhere else. These people are suggesting doing nothing until the perfect solve is available. Perfect will never happen. Instead make as many things better where you can while you can.
The cities in Texas are run by Democrats
Nothing wrong with deliberation and listening to stakeholders. Great idea. The issue is the centre-left voters keep asking these institutions to take on more power, channel more funds and veto more projects [0]. I don't see how else they expect large centralised bodies to play out. I'm not sure if the US left even has a collective theory of how to fight institutional rot apart from stuffing institutions with leftists and assuming they do they right thing. Expecting good results from that strategy requires a certain naivete to the sort of people who seek power in government.
[0] Not just them, the centre right also seems to love the idea based on what I've read. Not the brightest crowd.
> Nothing wrong with deliberation and listening to stakeholders. Great idea.
True if you can identify the correct stakeholders and those stakeholders are aligned to the goal.
It becomes unhelpful when the list of stakeholders is so long and disconnected from the goal that listening to stakeholders becomes an endless cycle of meetings and talking about the problem instead of doing anything about it.
In my local experience, initiatives related to homelessness and drug addiction treatment attract a lot of people who like the idea of being involved because it advances their career or sounds good on their resume, but many of them are unqualified to be involved and think the role will involve a lot of delegation and deciding where to send money to other groups, not actually doing any of the work directly.
Basically, a lot of people who want to be in charge and claim leadership but who also don’t want to actually do the hard work.
Isn’t China even more centralized? They complete infrastructure projects in years not decades.
I dunno, is it? In what sense are you comparing the centralisation of the two countries?
The US is pretty centralised. Around 40% of its spending is via the government and of the balance a lot of the decision making is controlled by the government.
China isn't centralized when it comes to boots on the ground policy implementation. The regional governments are extremely important. They direct subsidies and issue loans and have massive balance sheets and their own banks, they decide production capacity and things like factory output targets, they even decide which industries they specialize in, like EVs vs solar panels, etc.
Of course there is a framework from the CCP, and if red lines are crossed the big stick comes out and people are made an example of, but the regionals run the society. Including things like the social safety net. That's all regional and it's different between different regions.
There's a fairly large gap between how China works internally and how the west sees China.
For a more concrete example, the recent Third Plenum planning session was the typical communist style decade long roadmap with loud bullet points and achievement targets. Then there is a multi-month-long gap, all of the politicians go home, they work out how to achieve the goals between themselves, and they present their plans for approval. It's actually not as top down as you would think.
As you may sense, there is a sort of competition at play. If the committee is looking to consolidate key sectors like electric vehicles and increase industrial profits, the leaders who implement this guidance the best that get the acclaim. Likewise, if the central government is doing something like de-risking the regional banks, you so not want to be the region with the problems. Good luck in your career and climbing the ladder if so...
This power play dynamic is also strategically used to play different factions against themselves in a multifaceted way that is sometimes obvious but often has quiet subterfuge, in typical Chinese fashion.
They are mostly stem types in charge though.
While I’m not specifically arguing against your conclusion, there are a few narratives that to me point unfortunately to a systemic cause.
One is the book why nations fail, which among other causes points to circumstance and initial conditions. There was an interesting freakonomics podcast interviewing the mayor of, I think it was Dallas, and why Dallas was so successful, and the problem with California isnt sort of generic leftness but the specific organization of power structures that supports Nimbyism in a way that Texas doesn’t.
Plus the irony the EPA was formed by Nixon and the modern California environmental act was formed by Reagan?
The conspiracy theorist in me might suggest that in fact some of the environmental protections are explicitly right leaning to prevent progress.
I think the center-left deliberately prefers not to get things done. Centrists are usually people treated well by the status quo and would rather find any excuse to keep things the way they are than acquiesce to the left or meaningfully challenge the right
[..]
"Provide more assistance"
My point is that I'm not sure we need more assistance. TBH we need better, more efficient assistance. We spend a lot on deliberation, not enough on delivery.
A lot of this is due to leadership gaps IMO. Center-left leaders (ie Schumer) look weak because they excessively triangulate every stakeholder. Instead leaders need to act as true leaders, which means being a touch less collaborative / trying to triangulate. And more focused on some top-down, cut through red-tape, have a vision, persuade people etc.
(Then, arguably if people saw the system working well, they might want to award it with more money.)
Interesting article though it curiously deemphasizes what is likely the most significant reason for the differences in outcomes, which is that housing is more cheap and abundant in Houston/Dallas stemming from being easier and cheaper to build. (Yes this is mentioned, but it doesn't end up in the 5 point conclusion list).
This passage for example. Houston can only achieve permanent placement if it actually has homes to place people in. SF is just rearranging deck chairs on the titanic because it has no where to put people and they're in and out of shelters. (Vancouver has the same issue)
> Houston houses people first, then closes encampment sites permanently. San Francisco deploys enforcement first, achieves temporary displacement, and watches areas refill. Houston tracks every person from intake through permanent placement. San Francisco can’t determine if anyone is being permanently housed at all.
Beyond better outcomes around creating new affordable housing if Houston and Dallas are also doing a also better job at keeping rents low and maintaining existing affordable housing that will also prevent people from becoming homeless in the first place.
A recent study in Vancouver found that one of the most significant single causes of homelessness (20%) was people simply running out of money and being evicted. The direct cause of this is high rents. So any city that is building more housing in general, and not demolishing existing affordable rental is going to be doing a better job in this category at reducing homelessness.
I lived in Oakland and Berkeley for about eight years and left a few years ago. As someone originally from New York, I’m baffled at this idea that there’s no place left to build in the Bay Area. The East Bay still has large swaths of land with nothing on it. SF has plenty of options for building upward. There’s open land to the south. The political gridlock in Bay Area politics is the problem. I’ve never seen more dysfunctional government in my life.
Ultimately the government is the people. The problem is that the established wealthy single family owning class want to retain the status quo they bought into, and reject any and all political change. Cynical politicians leverage this to get elected and serve those interests by rejecting any change.
Exactly.
There's a lot less homeless when you aren't constantly lubricating the "miss one paycheck -> living in car -> seriously homelss" slope.
> A recent study in Vancouver found that one of the most significant single causes of homelessness (20%) was people simply running out of money and being evicted. The direct cause of this is high rents. So any city that is building more housing in general, and not demolishing existing affordable rental is going to be doing a better job in this category at reducing homelessness.
Affordability isn’t simply a function of supply in a market but the wealth distribution of market participants. When wealth is concentrated, housing ownership is concentrated in the hands of rentier capital, which is precisely what determines the amount of financial outflows from the poor to the wealthy in the form of housing prices (rent and mortgages).
Texas is not a druggie safe space. California is.
Texas cities don't just stumble into better homelessness outcomes because they build more houses—though, yes, their zoning laws are less suffocating than California's bureaucratic strangulations, letting developers churn out homes while keeping rents from spiraling into the stratosphere.
The real engine here isn't just policy, it's the stubborn, unapologetic religious underpinnings of Texas. Those churches you see in Austin, from non-denominational barns to Catholic sanctuaries, are the sinew of a community that doesn't bend to the fickle winds of election cycles. The faithful don't wait for a ballot to act—they feed, clothe, and stabilize the downtrodden with a doggedness that shames the state's tepid, vote-chasing programs. Why? Because they answer to a higher power than city hall, and their time horizon isn't the next electoral race. Contrast this with the secular cathedrals of the blue coasts, where government is God and every solution is a press release, not a commitment. SF's "enforcement-first" shuffle—clear an encampment, watch it refill—betrays a system that worships process over results.
Texas' edge lies in cheap homes plus a culture that scorns the state's monopoly on virtue. The religious don't just build safety nets, they weave them into the social fabric, outlasting the transient schemes of politicians.
So if I'm understanding correctly, your argument is that more homes and lower housing prices wouldn't solve the issue of people not being able to find homes they can afford without people being religious as well? Or is it that only religious people would be willing to build more homes at cheaper prices?
nah this is nonsense.
News flash: churches exist even in the left coast.
One of the biggest non profit organizations that helps people in Vancouver's DTES is Union Gospel Mission and the Salvation Army.
Nonetheless severe poverty has persisted in this city my entire life. The churches hand out food and run some shelters but it's a band aid.
The solution would start with housing, but the government refuses to spend the money to build it. So the status quo persists, with non-profits, many of them religious, step into the void just to keep people alive.
> The solution would start with housing
This is the answer. Housing cannot be both an investment and broadly affordable. Our society needs to choose.
Honestly its time to rip the bandaid off here with housing. Build, build, build. Fuck the NIMBYs, use eminent domain and buy them out. Build up, not out, and start driving prices down.
We need to stop making real estate an investment vehicle and an endlessly appreciating asset. "Line must go up" is fine for the stock market and a company's profit, it need not apply to a basic human need.
So you’re saying Texas Christians are more christian than California Christians.
There are churches in California.
There are more churches in California than their are in Texas. We just don't brag about it as much because religion isn't a costume in California like it is in red states.
Saying California has churches is like saying a desert has cacti—it's true, but it misses the point.
Texas' religious density, from Austin's sprawling non-denominational hubs to its Catholic and Protestant strongholds, isn’t just a headcount of steeples, it's a cultural force that outmuscles the state’s flimsy, election-timed gestures.
These communities don't just exist—they act, relentlessly, weaving safety nets that endure beyond the next ballot. California's churches, where they stand, are drowned out by a secular dogma that kneels to bureaucracy over human need. If they were enough, San Francisco wouldn't be playing whack-a-mole with encampments while Houston houses people and moves on.
California has more churches - but not more practitioners.
San Francisco has four Orthodox Christian cathedrals. Many big cities only have a single Orthodox Church, much less a cathedral. San Francisco also has a many Catholic Churches - most with an ethnic component, not to mention Buddhist and cultural associations.
Most of these are due to extreme diversity, not religiosity.
Diversity isn’t an absolute good.
Having 200 churches, each with 50 members, does not make you more religious than a city with two megachurches, each with 20,000 members.
Nor does going to a megachurch to hear a rock band play Christian rock while your pastor tells you how great Trump is make you more religious than going to a more pious orthodox smaller church.
Don't act like this is the solution. It's the same as "religious people give more to charity than secular" which rapidly becomes untrue if you remove "their church" as the charity, in which case secular people tend to give more.
But, you say, it's the church that is doing all that charitable work, so why should it get removed from that accounting?
Religious people like to point to charitable giving.
But studies performed by religious organizations themselves (who, if anything, are likely to skew the numbers more positively) show that across the board, "Local and national benevolence receives 1 percent of the typical church budget," and an additional 5% goes to "church-run programs" (be it after-school care, social, or group activities).
If a secular charity - and let's go to Charity Navigator here - Top Ten Inefficient Fundraisers (https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=topten), we see some of the worst charities spending 15% of their donations on "program expenses" (i.e., doing what they are being given money to do).
I'm not familiar with the monitoring of 501(c)3 groups, but I suspect if secular charities regularly spent only one percent of their givings on what they were entitled to enjoy tax exemption for, they'd likely have such a status revoked.
And, if you factor in this average percentage (even the six per cent combined, which is generous, as as much fun as social and youth activities are, they're not necessarily serving a critical need), and start to question 'how much money is being spent on 'spreading the word', patting themselves on the back, competitions in Texas to see who can built the world's biggest cross just down the road from where the world's previously biggest cross was built at costs of millions, there comes more and more skepticism of just how highly you can value "giving to your church" on the scale of charitable contributions.
A study by ECCU (https://web.archive.org/web/20141019033209/https://www.eccu....) stated that churches use 3 percent of their budget for children’s and youth programs, and 2 percent for adult programs. Local and national benevolence receives 1 percent of the typical church budget.
If you’ve got data showing California closing the gap, I’m all ears. But until then, the scoreboard speaks for itself.
> These communities don't just exist—they act
This smells like ChatGPT.
I think this piece makes a strong point — when there’s already a working model, just copy it instead of endlessly debating. The homelessness crisis is real, and doing nothing while watching it grow worse is the worst option. Of course there’s a chance it fails, but the bigger issue is that no one wants to take responsibility if it does. That lack of strong leadership is, in itself, part of the problem.
> The homelessness crisis is real, and doing nothing while watching it grow worse is the worst option.
California isn't doing nothing.
They keep spending even more money and wondering why it's not working.
If it was a problem that could be solved by giving people money, they'd have solved it already.
Then there's also the Williston / North Dakota oil boom model. I met tons of homeless people out there (I was one of them), many of which whom solved it through "one neat trick" of doing something like hitchiking to the oil fields, or to Seattle where literally anyone can get hired to work on a fish processing boat or facility and they give you "free" room and board and then ~$10k to go home with.
That model clearly isn't working in SF where they spend >$100k per homeless person per year.
So, sure, maybe it works if people sign up for it and show they actually want to do something.
But it clearly doesn't work if you just hand it out and hope for the best.
> That model clearly isn't working in SF where they spend >$100k per homeless person per year.
That borders on irrelevant when 33% of your homeless population qualify as having a traumatic brain injury, etc. Hospital stays are about $5K per day--if a homeless person hits the hospitals for 20 days in a year you've already spent more than $100K.
After Saint Reagan (hack ... spit) "closed the institutions", there was supposed to be something better. That never happened. So, now you have the mentally ill cycling between the streets, the emergency rooms, and the prisons.
You can't fix homelessness without first fixing healthcare. Otherwise you're just rearranging the deck chairs.
> After Saint Reagan (hack ... spit) "closed the institutions", there was supposed to be something better. That never happened. So, now you have the mentally ill cycling between the streets, the emergency rooms, and the prisons.
The Lanterman-Petris-Short Act, which made it possible to close the institutions, was almost unanimously passed in the Assembly and the Senate, in an unholy union of civil libertarian do-gooders and budget cutting conservatives. In fact, the lone dissenter in either legislature was a law-and-order Republican.
And it's not like Democrats have been shut out of the government of California ever since.
The funding for the original institutions came from the Community Mental Health Act (CMHCA).
The funding for the alternatives was also slated to come from the federal government: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_Health_Systems_Act_of_1...
But Reagan and a Republican controlled Senate killed it. Because funding was supposed to magically "trickle down" from thin air.
And, through it all, the mental health facilities were always chronically underfunded.
The emptying of institutions in California happened long before that, in the late 60s and through the 70s; it became very hard to commit anyone, which justified further cuts.
If you pass a bill that destroys mental health systems for the sake of civil libertarian concerns, "its issues weren't magically fixed through half a century later, which was totally unforeseeable" is not a good excuse.
In SF they _do_ provide housing to homeless people. The homeless people, largely addicted to illegal drugs, use the housing to store most their possessions and occasionally come in to change clothes and bathe, but continue living in tents, or otherwise existing strung out on the sidewalks.
Why? Because they're not permitted to use illegal drugs in the provided housing facilities, they will lose the housing. These "houseless" people basically have two homes, the streets are their summer home where they get high and continue to be a nuisance. The provided housing goes mostly unoccupied in these instances. Having written that, maybe the analogy works better in reverse - the public housing is the unoccupied summer home? Either way, it's totally not being used as intended because of the restrictions placed on the housing.
Also consider shelters generally banned weapons and are dens of communicable disease and bed bugs (I'm horribly allergic to them so I'll never step inside a shelter).
When I was homeless I lived outside because if you have a decent tent and sleeping bag it's perfectly comfortable, and I like to have a weapon handy no matter what and I reject any living circumstance that would prohibit that. At no point did drugs enter the equation, but if they did, it wouldn't have changed the calculus.
> But it clearly doesn't work if you just hand it out and hope for the best.
I actually think if they did just give 100k to homeless people a year that it would actually solve itself.
The problem is they give 100k to grifters who say they'll do something about it.
The causes of homelessness are plentiful. Some, perhaps a majority I don't know any exact figures, would be helped by simply giving them money. Others are suffering from mental health crises and/or drug addictions that must be dealt with first before they can have any hope of taking care of themselves when given the money to support themselves.
This is where good faith opinions can differ. Do these folks still deserve freedom/autonomy or can we force them into rehab or mental heath treatments? If the only crime they have committed is not having a bed to sleep in, I'm not sure I'm comfortable with taking away their freedoms. I'm closer than I was five years ago but I'm not universally there yet.
Hah, yes. In Australia when I was growing up there was a program called Work for the Dole (Unemployment) after you had been unemployed for a while. During the dotcom era, that was me. There was one program that was tech and web development skills. I went to a church twice a week (the organization running the program wasn't the church, they just rented rooms), and we poked at shitty old computers while I tried to help the staff figure out how to get Dreamweaver running on them (I knew more than the staff) in a way that was basically trying not to break the licensing - since they'd only bought one copy for the entire classroom. I knew more than the staff, the computers were decrepit, etc., and we were stuffed in the back room of a church.
I got to meet the "org executives" (it was really only the two of them, grifting, in the entire org) who were collecting a nice fat government check per person enrolled in their program. They came by to see how we were doing, and were there for less than 15 minutes. Two ladies in their 50s who were more interested in talking about how excited they were to be going off to pick up their new company cars after lunch, matching Jaguar XJs.
Everything except ending the ban on homeowners & landowners building market housing. (ofc they are taking bites out of this apple, especially very recently, but every step is fought tooth & nail by homeowners who prefer the status quo just fine)
I'm fully in the camp of just give people dollars and let them decide how to spend it rather than navigate a bureaucratic nanny state system like SNAP. But if you're only doing that well no shit it doesn't help. You have to actually put them in a stable house/apartment and get them set up with work. Or if they're homeless due to mental illness get them admitted.
>Or if they're homeless due to mental illness get them admitted.
Therein lies the problem. A large proportion of homeless fall into this category [*], and it's very hard to institutionalize people against their will. We like to think that most homeless are functional people who are simply down on their luck, and thus putting them in stable housing and getting them set up to work would solve their problems. But this is sadly not the case.
[*] This study [0] found that 80% of homeless people have some kind of mental illness, with 30% having severe mental illness. This is compounded by the fact that >50% have substance abuse problems.
[0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8423293/
Right. As I touched on elsewhere in the thread, our local jailers know all the homeless people in town because they show up regularly when their mental illnesses and/or substance abuse get them into trouble. The ordinary guy who wound up homeless due to a string of bad luck and just needs a place to sleep and a new job to get back on his feet is more a movie trope than reality. These are people with real problems who in many cases need regular supervision in something like a group home, if not outright institutionalization. And as you said, the latter is very hard to do now.
SF tried, didn't work. The homeless population increased, not offset by the people who got housed.
That seems like an unfair metric. Any program that helps homeless people significantly more than anywhere else in the USA is going to become the new capital of homeless people and their population will explode. It doesn't mean the people helped are worse off.
Right, but the taxpayers in that city are worse off. That's why any solutions need to be driven at least at the county level and preferably at the state level. Leaving it to individual cities creates all sorts of perverse incentives. (SF is somewhat unique in that they are their own county so for that area specifically, shifting programs from the city to county level wouldn't change anything.)
Taxpayers are pretty much always going to be worse off helping the homeless. Only a small fraction of the chronically homeless will become tax positive citizens in their lifetime.
Either you start off with the first principle that it's OK for wealth-transfer schemes to make tax payers 'worse off' via compelled charity, or I don't think you can get to the point of supporting generalized homeless relief programs. Maybe programs targeted at short-duration stuff to get people into jobs that are capable of doing them and a housing contract might work, but it'd have to be extremely well thought out and wouldn't benefit most chronic homeless.
My point is that it's a lot easier to share the tax burden at the state level rather than in individual cities.
I mean, San Francisco could spend that money housing their homeless in random cities spread around the country - investing in these cities and avoiding encouraging influx to a single spot... Possibly even cities with jobs, and funding corresponding service and construction jobs in these cities. Except of course for the NIMBY problem - I laugh at how that would be received in the cities I know about.
>SF tried, didn't work. The homeless population increased, not offset by the people who got housed.
IIRC, For decades, the homeless "relief" programs run by states like Florida, Georgia, South Carolina and others pretty much ended at bus tickets to San Francisco for the homeless (whether they wanted to go or not) and that's it.
Is it any wonder the population of homeless in SF grew?
This is a popular myth but it’s not true. The reality is a lot more complicated[1].
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/dec/...
>The reality is a lot more complicated
Reality is always more complicated than a one-liner. Surprise, surprise.
But that doesn't make it a "myth." Rather it's more municipalities and more disposable people being "disposed" of.
That doesn't make it right and certainly shouldn't normalize such practices -- that said, it's a little late now.
> But that doesn't make it a "myth."
It does, though, and the article I linked explains what actually happens: people are not systematically shipped to any particular big west coast city. There are numerous programs in numerous cities which send people back home, essentially, to places where they have support in place and simply need a way to get there.
>It does, though, and the article I linked explains what actually happens:
And I disagree with your analysis. That's not an attack on you or The Guardian for that matter.
While there certainly are programs as you mention, there are (and have been for decades) others that do not seek to reunite people with support systems -- rather they just want those pesky homeless people gone.
Out of sight, out of mind and all that.
> there are (and have been for decades) others that do not seek to reunite people with support systems
I'll point out that this is a myth as many time as you repeat it until you cite some source to back up the assertion.
And what I cited is not my analysis, it's a reputable publication that did actual investigative journalism.
That point would be strong, but this article doesn't make that point, or any other points I can tell. It does really weird things like comparing the annual cost of housing one Texan person to building an entire Californian housing unit, changes which definition of "homelessness" it uses (sometimes mid-sentence), ignores Houston's extremely police-oriented approach to the topic (police can cite you for trespassing if you're at a bus stop and don't produce ID), pretends the Texas cities aren't sweeping encampments (they are, right now, on Nance Street), and just generally plays fast-and-loose with the facts in Texas.
The problem is not that lack of examples. Technically, all two hundred something countries could take example of the best one in every metric and just copy most of the stuff to make life better.
The problem is that politicians are afraid to do anything (outside of direct and indirect enrichment). No one can blame some John Doe, chief Busybody of the Busyarea, if he won't do something. Because that didn't happen, nothing to point finger at directly, except for "you don't do enough", which is generic enough to be used at anyone and so ineffective at everyone. But if he will do something and it is immediately painful to at at least some group, then he will be blamed and his opponent will do that with pleasure too.
I am not saying it’s okay that anyone should be homeless, but it’s baseless to call homelessness a crises for the U.S.
The homeless population accounts for 0.23% of the total U.S. population, or about ~771K people.
https://endhomelessness.org/state-of-homelessness/
For comparison, more people are getting DUI citations per year,
https://www.safehome.org/resources/dui-statistics/
> it’s baseless to call homelessness a crises for the U.S
Sure, a quarter of a percent is not a big percent, but that sure is a lot of people. It is _more_ than the entire population of Alaska, Wyoming, or Vermont. It is near the population size of several other states.
An entire US state's worth of people are unable to find adequate housing and not just because they are off their meds. According to the 2024 Point-in-Time count, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development estimated 22% of homeless are facing a severe mental illness. So nearly 4 out of 5 homeless are regular people who simply cannot secure permanent housing.
That sure as hell sounds like a crisis to me.
> the US Department of Housing and Urban Development estimated 22% of homeless are facing a severe mental illness. So nearly 4 out of 5 homeless are regular people who simply cannot secure permanent housing.
No - the word there is severe. Requiring hospitalization more than once a month, often. When you look at "untreated mental illness" in the homeless, now you're above 50%.
> So nearly 4 out of 5 homeless are regular people who simply cannot secure permanent housing.
How does it follow? Not having a severe mental illness makes one normal? It's as same as saying that not suffering from severe obesity makes you fit and healthy.
Obesity is an excess of something. If we flip it, you can say that "too skinny is a problem" and there is a difference between someone someone with an eating disorder that makes them avoid food vs those who simply don't eat enough.
The unhoused has those people with a housing disorder, aka mental illness, and those who, simply, don't "house" enough.
Why don't they house enough? Many reasons. But nearly 4 out of 5 are not ticking the severe mental illness part. So there is less water in the argument that homelessness is caused by mental illnesses which is the leading reason I hear when people talk about homelessness. So, they aren't "mental," they are "normal."
Perhaps having a severe mental illness is somehow important for you but I still don't see how is it relevant in this context other than it shows that the fraction of homeless with it is ~4x bigger than in regular population so it's likely the rest of them are suffering with less than severe mental illness (not even taking drug addiction into account).
There's 8300+ homeless people in San Francisco.
That's 1% of the population. Maybe not a big deal to you.
There's only 13,000 city blocks in SF.
That's a homeless person every 2 blocks.
Kind of dangerous to be walking past people in all different states of desperation multiple times every trip everywhere you go, is another way to look at it.
Even if you end homelessness, you'll still be walking past people in all different states of desperation multiple times everywhere you go.
People looking like they have homes or acting like it won't stop this. It doesn't make people inherently dangerous.
Don't get me wrong, I think any percent of the population being homeless because of lack of options is a tragedy. (I don't really care if someone wishes to be so, and I think we should have appropriate living options for this). I understand that you can't really stop temporary homelessness - fires and urgent things happen - but that's something we can deal with as needed.
Is your argument that, because x% of the population is desperate, we shouldn't care or do anything about x%+y% being like that?
y% LIVES on the blocks - so the multiple on y is higher (higher probability you encounter them), and the desperation factor is also likely much higher.
Please note that someone giving you a quantitative context isn’t necessarily saying don’t care. But it’s important to be mindful of how people use words in the media to describe certain issues because it benefits them politically or financially.
The problem which sticks out to me is that homelessness can be addressed by providing housing, but that’s not an easy solution to provide in a country that gets 10s of millions of illegal immigrants. So why is someone talking so much about homelessness relative to other issues? Do they want the U.S. to provide a house for every illegal immigrant who crosses a border? If political officials in states struggling with homelessness really care about solving the problem, they would do what other states are doing, as mentioned in OP’s article.
Is it dangerous? I agree that people with means feel unsafe when encountering poverty but the "it is unsafe to ride the subway because there are poor people there" stuff doesn't appear to be proportionate with actual risk.
I think that one of the huge limitations of how we think about homelessness in the US is that we view it as a problem that non-homeless people encounter. This encourages a bunch of policies that make it easier for somebody to avoid ever having to see a homeless person but which do little to mitigate the suffering of a homeless person.
I don’t really think this holds the point you think it does.
While property crime is more likely to be committed by people the lower their income level is, the majority of all violent crime is committed by people who have homes.
In fact, the homeless are far more likely to be the victims of a violent crime than any other income demographic.
Furthermore, the unstable and dangerous people you see behaving erratically on the street are not necessarily sleeping there - and the homeless in the area probably feel much more unsafe about their presence than you do.
> majority of all violent crime is committed by people who have homes.
Gee, I wonder why, they make up 99% of the population.
How could they ever make up more than 50% of crime?
> I don’t really think this holds the point you think it does
No, you just missed the point I made.
Which is that if you’re scared of being assaulted by someone you should be scared of everyone around you at all times. Someone’s housing status does not make them any more likely to attack you.
Being scared of homeless people hurting you is like being scared of flying in a plane when you drive a car every day.
People drugged out screaming on the street in SF are not necessarily homeless. Just that they may have rules about drugs in their room.
Is this an argument that a homeless person per block isn't a problem?
Or are you just what-about-ing?
Homeless people can be a problem independent of housed-drug addicts being a problem.
Yeah! A big problem. We should just Brian Kilmeade[0] them all, right?
They're a burden on society and should be removed. But why stop there? The bottom 20% of school kids are just going to end up being a burden on society too! Prison costs something like $50k/inmate/annum. So let's inject them too!
But why wait for the kids? We know who is popping out all those burden-on-society babies. Sterilize them. Then we can use them as "comfort women" for our brave, selfless Immigration Enforcement heroes!
USA! USA! USA!
[0] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/fox-news-involuntary-letha...
I'm getting a little worried about you HNers.
Granted, this is pretty obvious satire, but upvoting it?
If you did, is it because you support murdering poor and disadvantaged people?
I hope not. But some folks around here make me wonder.
Maybe I'll just stop, as I certainly don't want to encourage murderous pieces of shit.
771K people isn't a small number. 0.23% isn't a small number when it comes to homelessness. This also doesn't consider people who are housed but are overcrowded or living in otherwise very poor environments.
You also ignore that it's a rapidly growing problem.
Comparing it to DUI numbers doesn't make any sense whatsoever.
Disagree that it’s a growing problem, there are lots of states dealing with it correctly. Look at the article, for example.
And there are plenty of states that put their homeless on a bus to some other state to deal with.
That's not doing anything about the root causes.
I agree, and I want humane solutions for people who go through this.
I've always been surprised by the official homeless population count, but it turns out there's a lot more to it.
The department of HUD generates this ~771K figure from a "point-in-time" estimate, a single count from a single night performed in January. They literally have volunteers go out, count the number of homeless people they observe, and report their findings.
It's not hard to imagine why this is probably a significant undercount. There is likely a long tail of people that happened to be in a situation that night where they were not able to be counted (i.e. somewhere secluded, sleeping in a friend's private residence that night, etc).
Even if these numbers are correct, to my mind a "crisis" is still more characterized by the trend than the numbers in absolute. From the first link you provided, we saw a 39% increase in "people in families" experiencing homelessness, and 9% in individuals. A resource from the HUD itself suggests a 33% increase in homelessness from 2020-2024, 18% increase from 2023-2024. That is far apace of the population increase in general.
https://www.huduser.gov/portal/sites/default/files/pdf/2024-...
And even then, I would say many people would suggest that the change in visible homelessness they've experienced in the last 10 years would amount to "crisis" levels, at least relative to the past.
It's completely fair to argue that it is not in fact a crisis, but claiming that it is certainly not "baseless."
It's kind of wild that they pick maybe the coldest month of the year to do this. You'd think that would be when people are most likely to try to find some sort way of avoiding direct exposure to the open air even if it's extremely short term.
A quarter of a percent still seems like a lot to me, even if it's not a "crisis."
But we can't do anything about it until we face up to the problem. Spending more money won't help. I'm somewhat familiar with the activity at our local jail, and a good part of it is homeless people rotating in and out. They get brought in because they were trespassing or shoplifting or something, the jail cleans them up and dries them out (they're usually on drugs, which they somehow manage to buy) and tries to get them back on their medications, they get released, and the cycle begins again. Most of them are mentally unstable, and perhaps they'd be somewhat functional if they could stay on their medication, but they don't, so they can't function in society for long.
We don't want to put them back in asylums, because some asylums really were hellholes, and I guess we don't trust ourselves not to let them be hellholes again. That seems awfully pessimistic; factories used to be pretty awful too, but we require them to be safe and clean now. Seems like we could do the same with asylums, but we won't even consider it. So we're left with letting them wander the streets, maybe bedding down at homeless shelters when they feel like it, using the jails as temporary asylums when they get in trouble, and throwing more money at the problem once in a while to soothe our guilt. It's sad.
Different US states have implemented useful measures for helping homeless people, but states which are struggling with their implementation have other issues as well. Border states in particular have illegal immigrants to contend with as well, so a housing-first policy for homelessness gets taken off the table right away. California has the means and resources for dealing with its homelessness problem, but the political will is murky.
Why are you comparing amount of homeless people to DUI?
Scale of the issue relative to the risk, I think.
It's another public health issue that could also be receiving attention which causes harm to people.
Whether it's homelessness, DUIs, or fentanyl deaths (only 75k per year!), measuring the impact of something by ignoring the blast radius is disingenuous. All who are touched are part of it. In the case of homelessness, it's a burden on emergency services, creates unsafe environments, impacts businesses, etc.
I think the article points out some useful ways to deal with the problem at hand.
What is supposed to be the relationship between those two things? Will you be comparing it to the number of ham sandwiches next?
You would think that since DUI operators present a greater social problem, both in numbers and potential to cause harm, there would be all sorts of active campaigns against such an issue. But the present reality is that some issues have great political forces behind them, and the media takes care to paint such issues as “crises”. Maybe it is a crisis, for a certain locality, and that reflects on the governance of that place. But I don’t think it’s fair or accurate to say your local problem is a problem at large, even if that means you get less federal monies to deal with it. Maybe what that means is that people need to reflect on how their localities are spending their budget, or sorting their priorities.
How does Houston deal with those that can't be housed? Sure, 90% retention sounds nice for these people but California has limited housing/higher housing costs, in general, last I had read. The write-up even mentions rising housing costs or the Trump admin taking away their funding can crash the system, so unclear how easily this system could transfer to other cities. Sure, better communicating systems and a better hierarchy will lead to better outcomes for most orgs, but that's a pretty general statement about basically every org out there.
I also feel like this write-up sugar coats some of the actions Houston/Texas has been taking against non-compliance. Ticketing homeless people $200 for existing on the streets seems a bit counter intuitive - and Texas has been systematically shipping homeless and immigrants around the country (human trafficking) for political theater, so are they excluding that data? Probably.
I'm not an expert, but this write-up really comes off as one-sided since it's only talking about what's not working in California and ignoring some of the background stuff Texas is up to. Overall, do agree that better management and accountability would do other cities favors, but again, that's such an easy statement to make about any plan or org.
https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/city-of-hou...
Higher housing costs in California are in some sense an artificial manufactured problem. California should mimic Texas by making it easier and cheaper to build more housing. Take approval power away from local governments, and give property owners and developers the right to build pretty much whatever they want wherever they want.
Texas' official policy on homelessness and drug users for at least a decade was to buy them a bus ticket to California. Gov Rick Perry bragged about it in a presidential debate. His successor bragged about it in a gubernatorial debate.
When the LA Times tried to survey the homeless population two years ago, fewer than 25% of the homeless in Hollywood were from California and none of them were locals. Want to guess the #1 state of residence for LA's homeless (Hint: it's Texas.)
But this article is right: once LA started buying the non-local homeless bus tickets back to their real home cities, things started getting better in LA. It's now part of our current mayor's homeless strategy to convince people to go back home.
Also: California defines homelessness differently (more broadly) than most states. Using the California definition, Texas, North Dakota, Florida, New York, and Oklahoma all have almost as many homeless. But when those states redefine homelessness to mean something narrower, of course they're going to look better. If California were to limit the "homeless" population to just Californians who became homeless (meaning that they owned, rented, or otherwise had housing before losing it), it would have fewer homeless than Texas.
Texas still has its own struggles.
"Tent cities" do still exist, regardless of what the article stated.
And under bridges is still a common gathering point.
But yes, to a way lesser degree than anything you'd find in CA.
This is such a bad faith article, downtown Dallas is full of homeless and the cvs has everything locked up. If homelessness went down it's because they moved to CA.
We do need more accountability for non profits though.
Hotels in Dallas for at least 15 years have disuaded people from walking even a few blocks downtown because they equate all the homelessness with crime.
I found this funny because by far the biggest danger I have seen there are endless electric scooters littering the sidewalks.
Agreed, but just so no one latches onto what I think you meant as a joke, the overwhelming majority of homeless people in California are native Californians.
41% are not from California, 59% is not exactly overwhelming. it is a little more than half.
Pretty sure they often "moved" to ca via government busses
I’ve been to more US states and cities than most Americans and every city I’ve been to has a severe homeless problem.
Whilst it’s true that europe does have homelessness too, and it has gotten worse in recent years, it is incomparable to America.
It doesn’t seem like a problem that can be fixed by some local policy or other. It’s a societal problem.
America also has stratospheric levels of inequality, a terrible healthcare system, and lacks a functional welfare state. I do not think this is a coincidence.
I’d much rather live somewhere more civilised, at the cost of higher taxation.
It always irks me to see Americans taunt Europeans on social media about their lack of very large tech companies, whilst the Europeans are perhaps too dignified to point out the consequences of America’s hypercapitalism (such as homelessness, crime, and trump) in return.
What social media platforms do you use where Europeans are too dignified to point out the consequences of America’s hypercapitalism?
"Too dignified to point out...." That would be all social media platforms., then. Or [n]one.
This helps too: https://gov.texas.gov/news/post/texas-transports-over-100000...
100 degree plus days in summer
Torrential rain
Hail storms
Hurricanes
flash floods
Houston is not a place to live outdoors.
Doesn't justify herding people up like cattle. Most of the US would be a miserable place to live at least 3-4 months out of the year.
Never stopped anyone in New Orleans or Miami.
Didn't some cities "solve" the problem by buying homeless people bus tickets so that they go to SF? That is a system that "works".
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/is-relocating-homeless-peo...
Don’t forget to donate for the excellent journalism.
There was also that one time Texas claimed to have sent 100,000 migrants to San Francisco and other cities.
Houston has an absolutely massive amount of homelessness. It just also has tons of “null space” for them to exist invisibly. No one here walks or bikes so no one sees it only because they aren’t looking. Homelessness becomes a much bigger problem for society when homeless people cant find any space to be away from the public.
I’m a bit confused about this. I live and work in Houston, and it seems like the number of apparently homeless panhandlers I see (specifically in the med center / NRG) area seems approximately constant over the last decade.
Disclaimers- I don’t actually gather data. I don’t explore at night to see who is actually sleeping rough.
I do get report from panhandlers that they need $20 to stay at the shelter…
Article comes across as complete slop, if written by a human hand. Articles thesis is "build working systems" and "who knows if we're getting rid of the homeless people and drug users or just moving them around"[1] and top comment here is "committees are annoying."
[1] true! what's the next thought from there? :)
Like Dallas that rounds up the homeless and puts them on busses to drop off in Houston?
"The success in Houston and Dallas came from building operational infrastructure to make encampments disappear permanently instead of temporarily."
This is 100% BS. I drive past tent encampments every day. All that happens is the city comes in and disrupts the encampments so they are clear for a couple of days, and then everyone just returns. They have even started placing signs at the intersections where the people from the closest encampment under the bridge pan handle that discourages "street charity".
If this is what is considered success, then it must be really bad elsewhere. At least on the west coast the homeless do not have to worry about the weather as much
> If this is what is considered success, then it must be really bad elsewhere
Yes, it is, lol...
> Houston has no zoning code
Too many and too restrictive building codes are bad, but no codes? Yikes.
Zoning code != building codes. Zoning deals with the types of buildings/uses that can be built in an area not the requirements for safety like electrical or structural building codes.
It's definitely a mixed bag though, zoning keeps industrial uses away from residential which is good for pollution and noise reasons but it also restricts building dense housing in areas zoned single family.
I'm always dubious about explanations that don't account for the fact that the weather in many California towns are more pleasant and survivable year round compared to Texas. Or that locations like SF are quite space constrained when it comes to new housing so new projects generally have to displace some current use making the process harder.
It’s not quite true that we have no codes, but you wouldn’t come here and find some hell hole of mixed industrial and residential. Land prices really do dictate use.
Maybe inside the loop, but go to Channelview or Deer Park or Baytown or La Porte or League City or even Webster.
Go take a look around the Nasa Bypass and Gulf Freeway. You've got apartments, a Great Wolf Lodge, an oil pipeline holding station, and single family homes all right next to each other all right on top of the creek.
The parks I used to play at had active oil and gas wells right next to them. My neighborhood growing up had a big, straight greenbelt that bisected the neighborhood due to the abundance of buried gas lines in between.
The loop will not save you
You mean like the million dollar McMansions on the same block as a gas station, across the street from an office high rise? I think you’re over-estimating the effect of land prices.
What's the problem with gas station (provided it keeps mandatory distance from the buildings) or the office building near the residential ones? In fact, close offices are often cited as a pros for certain locations, people are even trying to rent as close as they can in some cities.
PS: I've lived the whole last year approximately 100m away from both gas station and large office complex. Neither bothered me at all, and it was a first floor.
Have you been on Houston Avenue? It is an unwalkable hell hole.
It literally goes townhouses, lumber yard, liquor store, train track, townhouses, bail bonds, Chevy dealership with limited sidewalks.
>> Houston has no zoning code
>Too many and too restrictive building codes are bad, but no codes? Yikes
You're confusing zoning codes (what land can be used for what type of structure, e.g., industrial and residential) and building codes (the rules for safely constructing a building).
I lived in Houston for six months and I don’t understand anybody who would ever use it as a model for any city in any capacity unless they love endless interstate construction and taking 60-90 minutes to get anywhere. “Sprawling mess” doesn’t even begin to cover it.
The sprawling mess of Houston has ostensibly contributed to its very low housing costs. A lot of the other problems in the area begin to melt away when everything is ridiculously affordable.
The golden path is to live in the Houston area while working remotely. This helps you to avoid the worst aspect of the region while maximizing the best aspects.
A million dollars buys you an incredible length of runway in the Houston market. You could buy a very high end home in the woodlands in cash, put a Porsche in the garage, and still have enough to go for a decade before you had to find a source of income again.
What you are proposing is far out of reach for most Americans.
“Put together a million dollars” and “work remotely”? The biggest employer in Houston by a huge margin is the oil and gas industry - most of those jobs are not going to be remote and a lot of those jobs are not a pathway to $1 million. What about people who work in hospitality, roughly 10% of the workforce?
You’re describing this as relatively simple/achievable but for a lot of people it simply isn’t. Houston has one of the highest poverty rates in the country with 1 in 5 living below the poverty line - https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/houston/202...
> The biggest employer in Houston
It seems that we have different definitions of "remote".
I am talking about what jobs people in Houston actually have as well as the socio-economic realities of the city. “Just get a remote job and make $1 million“ is not serious advice.
> I don’t understand anybody who would ever use it as a model for any city in any capacity
They spent far less to basically completely solve their street homelessness problem compared to "model" cities like SF, so...
Speaking as a born and raised Houstonian, that’s a completely delusional claim — and you’re believing it credulously because it fulfills a narrative that appeals to your preconceived notions.
This article is the spitting definition of drawing a bullseye around an arrow. Houston’s secret sauce of preventing mass encampments is a combo of sprawl and police brutality. There aren’t as many dense areas to congregate compared to CA, and there are more places to hide away or squat to avoid notice.
Enjoy your flavoraid though.
The police in my city regularly go through and rip apart encampments and scatter everybody to the wind. It literally solves nothing.
I also find it pretty horrifying for someone to actively advocate for “police brutality.” By definition it is immoral and should not be desired. You can’t even be bothered to say “strong policing“ and pretend you don’t want law enforcement to abuse people who already have enough problems? You actively want them going out and hurting people? Please correct me if I’m wrong because it really comes across that way.
It was so much worse than that. Michael Hecht needs to answer for a lot of things.
It's a somewhat similar story in Dallas.
We have less homelessness because we put up signs saying "don't feed the homeless" (yes, real, and yes, real traffic signs) and put spikes under bridges. Oh and then the police here can basically do whatever they want.
The bay area has sprawl and has been embracing police brutality on this issue, and homelessness is not improving here. If that worked, they would try it here.
Does being born and raised in Houston make you an expert on homelessness? It's interesting you are so quick to rebuke the article with sweeping generalizations and zero data. Could it be because it does not appeal to your preconceived notions?
Houston was one of the first major cities to transfer chronically homeless individuals from encampments to one-bedroom apartments with almost zero friction (no intermediate shelters, no drug testing, no requirement to find a job). This was a highly successful program under Turner that had little to do with sprawl or police brutality.
Yes, it takes me 60 minutes to go 45 miles when I cross the extremes of the city. Oh noes! How far does the red line go in Boston and how long does that take?
I think the better question is general walkability.
The extremes is a pretty weird trip to do comparisons of since most people go from the outskirts into the centers to work and play and then go back to the outskirts.
The question becomes... once you get to your destination, can you get anywhere else without having to hop back into the car?
In cities like NY or Boston you can ride into town, hit a restaurant, go to the show, grab a few drinks then hit the clubs all without getting back into your car or just by taking short stints on readily available public transportation or taxis.
Can you have that same experience in Houston? I don't really know. Maybe. Where I'm from it's not concentrated like that so you go to your friends house... then you get in a car and go down to the bars... then you get in the car again to go to the arena for the show.
Everything's very dispersed. I personally like that much less.
You can have that experience in Houston, but most of "Houston" isn't like that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fMTaNYYvwE
California has passed SB79 which is a minor step forward. The opposition it received was pretty high for such a limited Bill.
I don't have a huge amount of faith CA will get housing costs under control but doing so is clearly one of the prerequisites to get a handle on the homelessness crisis.
https://cayimby.org/legislation/sb-79/
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That's not what a zoning code does.
Meh, that's not a problem when you've been allowed to build in a flood zone.
What the actual fuck? The homeless problem here in Dallas is at an all time high. I've been in and out of the Downtown proper for 20 years now.
Completely unbelievable premise and not worth reading.
Citation: I was recently homeless following a stint in jail on a bogus Felony charge, and still frequent some of the resources / areas where I got help. 24 Hour Club. Dallas Public Libraries.
Tarrant County has a very good homeless program. They throw them in jail. Then let them out to do meth, then put them back in. They were my company in Lon Evans.
Good article. Very convincing. Even if the housing bit cannot be solved (NIMBY-ism in California is very strong) the other solutions should help. And there's no reason homeless people in SF or LA should stay in the most expensive housing areas of a completely Democratically controlled state
Good points and centralized infrastructure does seem key , but I think the biggest factor is the cost of housing. If Houston is half the cost of LA you’re going to have a lot less homeless to begin with and it’ll be a lot more affordable to over then housing.
This overlooks the weather factor. if you’re homeless and have the chance to get a bus to LA, would you rather try to survive in the streets of LA or Dallas (or Houston)? Easy decision.
Not really fair to compare the two geographic regions. Nobody wants to live on the streets in Dallas or Houston. It’s way too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter. That said, living in Dallas I have seen the odd tent city pop up under some freeway overpasses but they don’t stick around very long so I guess the city does do something about it.
Follow the money. Create a homelessness crisis, buy the cheap houses surrounding the tent cities and sell/rent them again for a bit/way more money when you fixed the crisis.
I remember a report about either SF or LA converting a parking lot to safe place for homeless and the mayor going on TV to show how proud they were this was a solution. I was flabbergasted. Because in no way would my SE coastal sensibilities regard this as any fucking solution to homelessness. It was literally a parking lot full of tents for the homeless.
Many of the country's druggies have migrated to druggie havens like California, Denver and Portland.
Not sure the whole of California can take the advice from subsets of Texas, considering the state of the intersections in Austin.
The brushing-along still happens
Don't these places knowingly round up their homeless populations and bus them to "left wing" cities???
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Agree with you. Too bad this argument is using the wrong terminology.
To be acceptable to society, you either need to be willing to subjugate yourself for rent or be rich enough to own actual land. humans are no longer allowed a natural state.
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Does it look like they are even trying to solve the problem?
Perhaps they're more waiting for the public to beg for permanent military presence. Create a problem for the solution you're looking to implement.
I have no idea about California, but I do know that's how it works in Sweden.