Yeah I find it abhorrent whenever cities do this to shine up for a big event. Who do they think they are kidding? They want everyone to go home and tell all their friends, “never saw a single homeless person in utah!”.
It would be one thing if they were doing things that would help long term, but they are almost always of the sweep them under the rug variety.
USA has pulled much more comprehensive and brutal stuff at all USA-hosted Olympics, and will continue to do so in Los Angeles
We have the space. We have the empty units. We just wont fucking do it.
Housing first. Any other issues come second.
And there you have it.
Be like Finland, America.
Just got back from a few days in Portland. It’s really hard to believe this is the richest country in the world.
It’s actually way “better” now that it was a year ago since they designated some regions for people to tent in and built the “hut communities”.
Drug use is rampant in the Metro system. Since January, 22 people have died on Metro buses and trains, mostly from suspected overdoses — more people than all of 2022. Serious crimes — such as robbery, rape and aggravated assault — soared 24% last year compared with the previous.
“Horror.” That’s how one train operator recently described the scenes he sees daily. He declined to use his name because he was not authorized to talk to the media.
Earlier that day, as he drove the Red Line subway, he saw a man masturbating in his seat and several people whom he refers to as “sleepers,” people who get high and nod off on the train.
“We don’t even see any businesspeople anymore. We don’t see anybody going to Universal. It’s just people who have no other choice [than] to ride the system, homeless people and drug users.”
Commuters have abandoned large swaths of the Metro train system. Even before the pandemic, ridership in the region was never as high as other big-city rail systems. For January, ridership on the Gold Line was 30% of the pre-pandemic levels, and the Red Line was 56% of them. The new $2.1-billion Crenshaw Line that officials tout as a bright spot with little crime had fewer than 2,100 average weekday boardings that month.
I don’t know what the answer to this stuff is. But it sucks. Throwing more money at the problem doesn’t seem to help. SF has safe spaces for people to do drugs and it doesn’t seem to help the problem much there either.
AFAICT it helps tremendously and is the only solution. Not sure where our disconnect is
If you think that it’s because you’re not paying attention. SF or LA have mushroomed the amount they spend on the problem and it hasn’t made a dent. If anything things have gotten worse. Garcetti made homelessness and drug abuse his #1 problem. Massive funding increases. Basically zero results.
The city budgeted $667.8 million toward homeless services and $75 million for drug health and treatment programs during the 2022 fiscal year. And while many of those contracts were signed during previous budget cycles, the city also made several key additions to its continuum of services in the past year.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/S-F-spends-big-to-tackle-homelessness-safety-16349600.php
https://homeless.lacounty.gov/2022-2023-budget/
As Los Angeles County prepares to intensify and refocus its efforts to fight homelessness, the Board of Supervisors approved a $532.6-million Homeless Initiative spending plan for fiscal year 2022-23 that significantly expands permanent and interim housing solutions and increases funding for local cities.
I am happy for the people these programs help. But it doesn’t stop more people from getting addicted to drugs and more people from migrating to cities like LA and SF because the weather is nice and it’s easier to be homeless and on drugs here than other places. It doesn’t address the severely mentally ill who can’t be housed without causing problems. It doesn’t get fentanyl off the streets.
I feel like all the consideration is given to the addicts, and zero consideration to the working class people who have to commute with this, and live in these neighborhoods. It’s the kind of thing that at some point is going to cause enough of a backlash to usher in some kind of red wave. Although I doubt that fixes the problem either.
Maybe the safe space to do drugs is a better idea.
it’s like suzz doesn’t care what gpt4 is going to say about him
This sounds absurd on multiple levels.
Maybe they should just let homeless people live in the places where the weather makes it easier to be homeless and make everyone else move.
Maybe we could just make it so the weather is nicer to do drugs everywhere.
I dunno, I think it’s a decent start. But if you think it’s absurdly too little, I’m open to arguments
Sounds like the school choice pamphleteers got to you.
I feel like funding for addiction should concentrate on helping addicts deal with addiction.
How can you possibly say the money hasn’t helped when you cannot posit the counterfactual of spending less/nothing?
I’ve been wondering which of our new users was goofyballer. And now I know. My trap worked! ;)
Some weird pretzel logic you got going there where it’s the job of the people who question spending money to prove that it’s not working, and not the job of the people spending money to prove that it’s doing anything. Because the general word on the street, from people who care and know a lot more than liberals living in the suburbs, is things are real real bad right now.
There’s also a lot of addicts who don’t want help. They like being addicts. A program that just assumes every addict hates being an addict and desperately wants help isn’t addressing a big chunk of the problem imo.
Young people migrate to places like LA, SF, Portland, Seattle, because they’d rather be homeless and on drugs in SF than in an apartment in Cleveland. I’ve met some of them when I lived in SF. I’m not sure how throwing money at that subset is helping. If you housed every single one of them, a new batch would show up the next day.
Being more mobile than the average citizen makes homeless populations a barometer of the best places to live.
You should be happy they’ve chosen LA.
Can a @moderators excise the homeless chatter to the homeless thread? I’d like to have more discussions on it but don’t want to clog this thread up.
One point with homelessness is that it’s going to take work at the national level. Cities are already paying for bus tickets to ship homeless to other cities so if any city does well with homelessness other cities will just ship their homeless there, overwhelming the city’s resources.
Another point is that public spaces do need to be made safe so having a drunk tank or something similar needs to happen. But the reactionary position never gets past kicking the homeless and the drug users out of public spaces so it’s like bucketing water out of ship with a leak. It’s never going to fix the problem, or even pretend to fix the problem.
Don’t get me wrong, I also think working class people deserve much more government assistance than they’re getting as well. Nobody making less than some CPI standardized wage putting them in the lower middle class should pay any taxes. They should be getting credits back, if anything. Helping them and the homeless aren’t mutually exclusive propositions if you’re willing to tax the shit out of companies, and individuals making some CPI standardized wage putting them above upper middle class (perhaps $300k or so individual income in LA)