Many NIMBYs are basically ordinary middle-class people who are old enough that they were able to buy the house they live in decades ago before the price of properties in their area got bid up; so most of their wealth is locked up in the same house they are currently living in.
Taxing the extremely wealthy basically does nothing to decrease the property values of this class of people en masse, and decreasing their property values en masse is precisely what it would mean to make housing more affordable for more people.
Trump was never actually broke, but his popularity comes from the fact that he took a bunch of public political stances that his political opponents refused to take because they genuinely thought those stances were immoral; and then won elections based on those stances because a lot of the electorate also liked them.
There isn't actually one monolithic class of billionaires that all share the same interests and want the same things; and even though an individual billionaire can be personally influential, they simply do not have the power to unilaterally determine the political direction of a country. But regardless of what political direction a country does go in, there's probably some billionaire who is more or less aligned with that direction. So anyone who dislikes that political direction can point to the nearest-ideologically-aligned billionaire and blame them for influencing politics in that way, despite the fact that if the tables were turned and their side was winning, someone else would point to whatever billionaire aligned with them as an evil influencer.
“Trump was never actually broke, but his popularity comes from the fact that he took a bunch of public political stances that his political opponents refused to take because they genuinely thought those stances were immoral”
Um, no. His popularity comes from a willingness to actually do the things that many other politicians said they were going to do, often while campaigning, and never did.
> As a resident of a wealthy West-Coast New-World city, the effects of pathological inequality are in my face every day: Bentleys gleaming on the road, ragged people huddled in the rain cadging cash outside the drugstores, thousands homeless.
I also live in a wealthy West-Coast New-World city, and attributing these phenomena to pathological inequality badly misdiagnoses the problem. Most visibly homeless people in wealthy west coast cities are severely mentally ill in ways that prevent them from living a normal life or even living peacefully with other people without some kind of institutionalization, which local authorities are reluctant to do because there's no nice way to institutionalize people.
In some places, it's possible for people with a moderate amount of dsyfunction to be able to scrape together enough resources in order to rent cheap, low-quality housing; but in wealthy west coast cities there is a massive housing shortage that is downstream of decades of underbuilding, so all types of housing are very expensive. The underbuilding was and is mostly driven by large numbers of middle-class homeowners who primarily care about the negative externalities of construction and density affecting the place where they live and own their own homes.
Neither of these problems has much to do with extremely wealthy people, or wealth inequality in a general sense.
I'm highly unconvinced of the proposition that most homeless are severely mentally ill; the data I've seen doesn't support it. That's some of it, and also addiction. But a lot of them just can't make the rent.
As an anecdote, two people in my family have been or are homeless (don't know their current situation) entirely because they are incapable of continually making basic, smart financial decisions. At the level of "I decided to just not show up to work today" or "I spent my entire week's pay on a new toy". They both received enormous financial and social support from various people in the family, but always eventually just end up spending all their money somehow, or they get fired, or even just quit their job(!). Both eventually ran away from the responsibilities they built up into a different state.
I don't know if we should call this inability to make basic, smart financial decisions a mental illness or not, but it's something. And these 2 people aren't/weren't even what I would consider visibly homeless. At least as long as you didn't see them living in their car behind a convenience store.
Starting with the framing that housing is just too expensive makes the problem simple. You build more housing, or you subsidize housing for these people, or somehow just inject money into services for them so they can get back on their feet. But if that's not the core issue for some or many of these people, how do you actually help these people? How does a society help people who are incapable of handling their own finances? That's where the hard questions begin.
I doubt we will get to the end cause of all the issues in a conversation here, but my understanding is that getting people whatever kind of help they need is vastly easier if they have a roof over their head and a permanent address.
I agree. But one of these 2 people had subsidized housing through the state. It was incredibly cheap rent for the area. Cheaper than any housing can be just from building more. But they still lost the place after a few months because they did not pay rent and instead bought toys and quit their job. They were receiving money from the family, work opportunities from the family, the family walked them through all of their legal and bureaucratic needs, and the family took care of their children. But it was not enough.
For this subset of people, I don't see how you can help them without managing their finances for them. Even if you completely manage their finances, how do you help them if they just quit every job they get?
I never really thought about it much before them, but I think pretty often about the problem. How do you help someone who can't be helped? Even if you gave them free housing and a weekly allowance, they would still find a way to not have money for food before the next week.
A lot of the young ones are either escaping sexual abuse, thrown out by their family for their sexuality or rejection of religion, or aged out of foster care.
There is indeed a spectrum of homelessness from temporarily distressed to broken beyond repair. There's different actions for the different factions.
I live in the Portland OR metro and believe that the issue has spawned the Homeless Industrial Complex that thrives on extracting money to "help" but are incentivized to keep the problem going for their livelihood.
I'm not unsympathetic to their plight (I had been effectively homeless a couple times in my life). It bothers me to no end how this problem is mismanaged.
There is a difference between "most homeless" (your comment) and "most visibly homeless" (comment you're replying to).
IIRC, most people who obtain "homeless" status only keep it for a short time, and don't live on the streets during that time.
You'll get very different statistics if you count transitions into (or out of) homelessness over some window, vs systematic point-in-time counts of current homeless status, vs point-in-time counts of people camping on the street, vs trying to measure QALYs.
One of the challenges here as an ex-paramedic in the PNW who has certainly seen their fair share of homeless is that several of the more prominent studies use HUD's definition of "severe mental illness" that is far more conservative than you or I would expect...
"Requiring hospitalization more than once a month, on multiple occasions in a year".
And that number, per HUD, is 22%.
If you want to look at "untreated mental illness" in the homeless, now you're above 50%.
> If you want to look at "untreated mental illness" in the homeless, now you're above 50%.
But "untreated mental illness" isn't the same as "mental illness that requires institutionalization" which is what the OP is saying.
Additionally, a lot of mental illnesses can be reasonably managed with proper medication, and in my mind very, very few actually require institutionalization. But we as a country can't even get behind the idea of universal healthcare for non-homeless let alone homeless people. Somehow institutionalizing them seems more feasible or reasonable than just covering their medical care?.. I don't get it.
That's true, and it blows my mind that that's the first or even high on the list of "ways we can help with this".
I do think there's a Venn diagram around severely mentally ill and untreated mentally ill that might require more intensive care. There's also the complexity that drug use and abuse is a method to cope with the emotional pain of homelessness (as one of my instructors said, "if my existence was reduced to fishing rained-on food out of trash, brushing cigarette ash off of it, sleeping and shitting in alleyways, often without something to effectively wipe with, you better believe I'd be on a fast path to taking some drugs to numb that"), or for "self-medication" of said untreated mental illness.
I think you're seeing a segment of the homeless population and assuming that it represents the whole. It's likely that you encounter homeless people in your daily life and don't recognize them as being homeless.
Even if it’s true that most unhoused people are mentally ill — and I agree with Tim’s reply — you have must consider causation versus correlation. Is an unhoused person dysfunctional because they were always that way and thus doomed to lose shelter, or are they dysfunctional because living on the streets is extremely damaging?
You see this question a lot when discussing drug usage among homeless. The percentages of addicts is undeniably high; we know this from point in time counts, for example. Some people take that as proof that homelessness is the fault of the homeless: they made the bad decision to take drugs, and that’s why they lost their jobs. But there’s also a lot of data showing that people are more likely to become addicted as a way to cope with street life.
And if, in fact, losing your home is something that can happen relatively easily in part because of wealth inequality, we’re right back to the original assertion.
Underbuilding is for sure another factor. It’s just not the only one.
I hear a lot of accounts of relatively-normal people who talk about one member of their family who is homeless and living on the streets because they stopped letting that family member live with them because they did things like violently attack children in their home, or steal money in order to buy drugs. So this makes me think that a lot of visibly homeless people were in fact dysfunctional before they became homeless.
And this is relevant for any institution at all that tries to house such people, including the state. If the state provides some kind of basic housing with electricity, what happens when the people living there rip wires out of the wall so they can sell the scrap for drug money (a major reason why most landlords don't want to rent to really poor people)? Will someone prevent them from doing that (i.e. institutionalization), or will the state itself evict that person from their housing and allow them to live as a homeless street person?
Friend of mine is in a situation like that, they live next to subsidised housing for people who'd otherwise be homeless and you really, really don't want to live there. It's a good week when armed police have to turn up less than once a week. They're actually quite an SJW so you know it's really bad when even they say "some people have to be made homeless".
I don't actually want someone who gets kicked out of subsidized housing for doing things that get the cops called on them to be homeless - because it means that they'll be wandering the streets doing the same sorts of crazy and probably-violent things they did to lose their housing, just aimed at anyone who happens to be near them in public. I want them to be institutionalized in some way, not for their sake, but for the sake of ordinary people who want to be able to use public spaces without the risk of visibly-homeless people acting crazy in those spaces.
> Most visibly homeless people in wealthy west coast cities are severely mentally ill in ways that prevent them from living a normal life or even living peacefully with other people without some kind of institutionalization
Sources? This just sounds like cope from a wealthy individual who wants to feel better about not helping the problem.
It's hard to find anyone that doesn't have some motivation in this problem. I won't claim any percentages because I do not know them and I would not trust them even if I did.
That said, my experience in a urban area on the west coast has given me many examples that support this notion that it's not just a housing problem. Indeed many of the local governments own attempts to house the unhoused fail in no small part because the unhoused create conditions incompatible with staying housed.
Furthermore there is a steady drip of examples in regional news that raise serious questions about the efficacy if not motivations of the judiciary, politicians, law enforcement and local beuracracies charged with addressing the problem.
I do believe that housing costs are a major part of the problem but I also believe that treating the population as if they have no obligations to society is a major and fatal mistake to the whole enterprise. For one the policy approach has invited contagion by not addressing the population of unhoused that cannot or will not uphold the most basic aspects of the social contract. For two, it turns away a large number of people that would otherwise be sympathetic to the cause.
> That said, my experience in an urban area on the west coast has given me many examples that support this notion that it's not just a housing problem.
You would know more about the situation in west coast cities better than myself, I’ll admit.
What I take issue with is how the anecdotes closely align with certain political talking points - it rings an alarm bell or two, and begs for more concrete sources. Personally, I couldn’t find any reliable sources saying one way or the other.
Anecdotes are highly susceptible to confirmation bias though, along with other biases. It’s one of the reasons propaganda is so effective: our preconceived notions influence how we see and interpret the world around us. This affects me too, I’m not immune to propaganda (2015 me thought the idea of a Trump presidency was “funny” because of the memes and I thought he had zero chance of winning, for example - don’t worry, I’m not American so no votes were cast!)
I appreciate you taking the time to respond with such detail, and you seem to be writing in good faith, but I think this issue is a lot more nuanced than (paraphrasing - not trying to directly attribute a quote to you) “the homeless in west coast cities are there because they cannot function normally in society”.
It’s a sensitive topic for me personally because my family was one of those “sheltered homeless” families for a few years when I was still single-digits of age, and growing up in severe poverty I also met many other homeless people. I can guarantee you, if wealth inequality were not so severe then many people wouldn’t have fallen into drugs and mental health crises to begin with.
Many folks see it as a “chicken or egg” problem, when really, we all know that struggling to make ends meet and being evicted is highly stressful and traumatic. Wealth inequality is the root of many of these tragic stories, and it’s unfair to label everyone in that position as if they’re fully to blame for their situation in life.
But, again, I’m not American and my culture is much more socialist and cooperative. So maybe the unhoused in America truly do fit your descriptions, and I simply have no idea what I’m talking about. :P
In any case, thank you for your thoughtful and insightful replies.
At some point, it’s not a shortage. Everyone naturally wants to live in the best city on earth but expecting one city to house 8 billion people is silly. It’s okay to admit that some cities are at their natural reasonable capacity.
For-profit companies jurisdiction shopping without any physical presence is so clearly sketchy that it's wild anyone could see it otherwise. I can't imagine a normal person not being shocked in disbelief when they first learn about the concept of tax havens.
Maybe when it’s Panama. But there is not a single sketchy reason why companies choose to incorporate in Delaware, for instance.
There are very legitimate reasons to incorporate in another location. Some are not only not sketchy, but even altruistic, e.g. incorporating in another state for the purpose of incorporating as a PBC.
Delaware is quite literally a tax haven set up to assist in evading as many local laws as possible. Do we just excuse it because it's a US state and speaks English?
Why is it shocking to suggest that multi-national companies deliberately arrange to have their headquarters in a legal jurisdiction that has favorable tax laws for them? This makes perfect sense and it's something I would consider doing myself if I was starting a company.
its one thing to actually put your headquarters somewhere. Quite another to use tricks to put your "headquarters" somewhere, and the office where you and most of your employees go to work halfway across the world.
And what of incorporating somewhere, having your headquaters somewhere else, having your main office in a third place, and this all owned by a shell company in a fourth place, with all your assets owned by a fifth company, which rents it back to you for extortionate rates, your EU subsidiary in a sixth place, the actual EU offices in a seventh place, etc etc etc.
Thats not even approaching the trickery and deceit that is accepted as completely normal - let alone the ones that actually get in trouble
Do these sorts of things have legal benefits for the companies involved? (yes)
If I had a company over a certain size, I'd probably do it too. But it has sharply negative consequences for the rest of society, and for trust in the system in general.
> Is it though? This can mean anything. Is waving a Palestinian flag the same as waving an Israeli flag? Where do we draw the line between harmful and productive nationalism? Who exactly is blinded by nationalism?
Clearly it depends on your actual object-level position on the Israel/Palestine conflict. Or in general, what specific nationalisms you mean when you talk about being "blinded by nationalism".
And that's the main reason why I think this is a mediocre piece of art. Very few people actually are genuinely anti-nationalist for all possible human groups that have some sense of themselves as a nation. All anti-nationalist rhetoric is implicitly aimed at a specific nationalism that someone has a problem with - and also everyone knows this. So everyone wants to use the blank slate of bansky's featureless flag as a canvas upon which to paint a nationalism they don't like in order to discredit it. And I personally think that's boring. Maybe engendering that reaction was itself part of Bansky's artistic vision, but I still don't think that makes for good art.
It was an extremely funny aspect of the Scottish Independence referendum to see people denouncing "nationalism" from in front of a Union Jack background.
Both are great shows made by GAINAX, but I highly watching suggest their prototypes as well: Gunbuster and Diebuster. All four are great Mecha shows made by the same studio and it's fun spotting the similarities across all of them.
What I consider to be a spiritual successor to these GAINAX mecha shows was the most recent Gundam series "Gquuuuuux" which shared many staff members from them and has plenty of homages that were fun to spot! Also had the same mechanical designer as the Evangelions so I got a kick out of that.
> But if you ask someone if they'd drive without insurance, or without driver's license they look at you like you've asked them to do the impossible.
> Whereas in the US no-one bats an eye when that happens. Half the time the cops just issue a ticket, and don't even tow the car.
A lot of the people driving without insurance or licenses in the US are illegal immigrants, which means enforcement of driving illegally is caught up in the same cultural-war fight over immigration law enforcement that has dominated American news since Trump got re-elected. "And now people who obey the law need to take out extra insurance for under/uninsured motorists" is specifically an anti-illegal-immigrant talking point.
It's equally a consequence of not immediately arresting and deporting illegal immigrants the moment the government learns about their presence on US soil.
The easy way to accomplish that would be to go after the businesses that employ them. At this point, however, I think it's safe to assume it's not the real objective, and the economy would crash into a ditch if policy was anything but theater.
What sorts of things are you personally doing that aren't illegal, but that someone would want to imprison you for because they think you are unsympathetic for some reason and no longer find the argument that what you're doing isn't illegal to be compelling?
A lot of police policy wonks explicitly argue for replacing the human judgement of cops with impersonal, tech-mediated surveillance, on the grounds that this reduces the possibility of human bias against groups of people (typically black people); or just reduces the possibility of physical contact between a cop and certain people (again, typically black people), which therefore reduces the chances of the police stop escalating into a shooting. This is an argument for e.g. automatic red light cameras in lieu of having police stake out and pull over cars who run red lights.
Taxing the extremely wealthy basically does nothing to decrease the property values of this class of people en masse, and decreasing their property values en masse is precisely what it would mean to make housing more affordable for more people.
reply