> Wow, this is almost a parody. An able-bodied meth addict and convicted felon was illegally living in a public park for 20 years, littering the land around him and forcing rangers to spend countless time and resources cleaning up the mess he left behind, making regular emergency room visits due to his unhealthy lifestyle costing the city hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, constantly doing illegal drugs while not holding down a job and suspiciously acquiring new supplies for his encampment after every sweep (how much do you want to be he engages in illegal activity), and giving an extremely hard time to caseworkers and HHS staff who already have a busy workload (including leaving/getting kicked out of housing multiple times). That one Golden Gate Park Dweller has probably cost the city millions of dollars over the last few years while consuming valuable time from caseworkers and park rangers who could be helping someone else (they're already overloaded). Not to mention the potential damage to the park's environment caused by his littering. What this guy needs is outpatient mental health treatment, and it's honestly criminal that our country has basically no resources for people with mental illness and shoves them into jail or shelters without treating their underlying problems.
It seems US has a system that extracts maximumly from their tax payers and just keeps things in (bad) status quo as long as they can. A babying system if you well.
These “homeless” are not the kind who need clean clothes and shelter and some help getting a job. They want to live like this at the expense of the public’s money and enjoyment of public amenities.
We also need to support people at risk when they're young. If their parents had mental health support, if they didn't experience a loss of housing as children, if losing their job didn't make opioids looks so attractive, we wouldn't have that many people unable to care for themselves.
> The department’s environmental services crew...would tear down his tent when he was out and haul away his possessions.
> For Barrows, trying to forcibly remove Kaine from Golden Gate Park seemed both ineffective and cruel
> She embarked on a slow campaign of earning his trust and shepherding him through what one Recreation and Parks Department official described as the “arduous and achingly bureaucratic tasks” necessary just to be eligible for housing
> Kaine had no ID. All of his required public documents, from a birth certificate to criminal records, were under a different name, and they all had to be aligned to move his housing applications forward. Getting everything in order meant trips to various agencies — and the only way to ensure Kaine went was if someone accompanied him: either a member of HOT or Barrows and another ranger who was her partner at the time. Even then, Kaine repeatedly balked. For him, “it was overwhelming,” Barrows recalled.
> After seven months of cajoling, hand-holding, and advocacy by Barrows, Kaine in October 2021 was granted a room at the Civic Center Hotel Navigation Center, where he could stay until he was assigned permanent housing. Barrows and her partner helped him pack and hauled his two suitcases — heavy with gear, broken electronics, and sticks and rocks he’d collected in the park — up to his fifth-floor room. They helped him settle in by donating furniture and clothes, including the boots and pants worn by rangers. “We knew that’s what it was going to take to make it happen,” Barrows said.
..and long story short, the housing he got, sucked.
So they started by trying literally everything else first, including kicking his butt out, destroying his belongings, etc and then eventually had to have someone basically personally escort him through the system, to a get a shitty room and then get yelled at by his neighbors, and you're telling me that "he was given all those things, repeatedly". You didn't read the same article I did.
Besides, this article is just ONE anecdote. The system helps most people absolutely zero--on the contrary, it's a cruel as possible to homeless people in hopes they just move on.
Which gets to the heart of why conspiracy thinking doesn't hold water, who in your theory are "they"?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpIJJPvn_ZI
Edit: This got downvoted because it's a direct retort to what the GP is suggesting.
What's going to happen, if we're foolish enough to try UBI, is we're going to bleed a bunch more money that immediately gets vaporized (or at least put in the pockets of pushers and alcohol distributors), and then we still will have the same problems for at least 50% of the people that needed the focused benefits like SNAP or Medicaid anyways. We'd be much better served getting very medieval on anyone and everyone selling drugs, and then going from there.
As for my claim of homelessness being a threat - I’m not saying that there’s any grand conspiracy. But in the scheme of capitalism it helps to have an underclass that receive undue blame and keep people from sliding down the ladder further out of fear. No one needs to intentionally keep anyone homeless for this to be a functioning part of the system.
It’s like evolution but on a societal scale. Whatever we have now has persisted for a while. The threat of homelessness is part of why it’s persisted. Imagine if there was no uncomfortable bottom to society. All wage slaves that sell their body and time would simply choose to not work because not working would be a better life. It’s memetics. And of course we need people to do work. But we could be optimizing for happiness instead of GDP growth.
Think of religion. When a religion mandates evangelism it’s not necessarily out of a nefarious central planner trying to gain control over more people. But for religions that do mandate evangelism there is a greater chance the religion thrives. Because obviously recruiting people means you have a bigger religion. But the believers might simply each want to share their religion out of genuine belief in an afterlife.
I was raised in a specifically anti-evangelical religion. It’s pretty small as a result. There were the Shakers, a now extinct sect of Christianity. They considered sex ungodly and thus had no children. That killed the religion. Other sects promote having many children and survive.
The government can help people, but who would they rather help?
- a kid full of potential needing shelter, food, clothing
- a brilliant student needing a scholarship
- a scientist that needs funding for important research
- a family affected by natural disasters
- a veteran with PTSD
- the guy in this article
Should a kid go to bed hungry, or a student be denied access to education so that the government can subsidize the self destructive lifestyle of a person that doesn't even care about the people paying for it?
If you pay taxes on your income, plus taxes on everything you buy, etc... you worked at least 5 out of 12 months of the year for the government. So the government not only can waste it but also end up in debt that will be repaid by your children?
Ironic, isn’t it? Right back to where we started. Portugal has tried the “empathy” approach too and is now going through the slow and long process of rolling it back
My reaction to the OP article is: Oh... so that is why...
A rare aha moment of mine on HN.
Why do you think that's a fault of UBI, rather than the fault of your hypothetical UBI being insufficient? AFAIK any actual implementation of UBI would be intended to be feasible to have housing on, even if it's not very good housing. With UBI, there's a level of income that people are guaranteed to have without needing any proof, that's the whole concept!
I don't think government thinks far enough ahead to use this as a fear tactic. Most homeless are not some drug users hopelessly addicted.
Go to a mental institute if we tie the UBI to some basic factors. UBI isn't just some altruistic factor that gives money to everyone without condition. They at least want to make sure you're a citizen and not going to fund the destruction of society with it.
>if we give people some amount of money for nothing, they'll magically pick up art and entrepreneurship and other productive outlets spontaneously.
Talking about non-homeless, it has shown to increase recreation. Not necessarily businesses, but it's nice having time to breathe when you aren't spending half your like just to make sure you can pay rent.
>What's going to happen, if we're foolish enough to try UBI,
You can speculate or you can actually read studies done. Domestically and worldwide.
The perspective where the US has infinite money is wrong. The US is accumulating debt.