I don’t understand why punishing the homeless is less desirable than setting up areas where it’s more comfortable or better for the homeless so they gravitate to there that are away from the people who are so opposed to them being around. Then you can populate that area with buildings and programs that help them which ends up being cheaper, morally right, and should generally be seen as popular among citizens. I know I’m simplifying this wildly but it works in other places, this ultra religious conservative nutso punishment way of doing things is just idiotic and ineffective.
Because none of that is profitable. The correct answer is unfortunately usually the simplest one.
I mean maybe but I don’t really understand how building special benches to punish homeless people is profitable either.
Two words “property values”
Homeless people existing in an area is bad for real estate. Thus, homeless people are a threat to their speculative property values.
It is actually profitable to do so, just not directly profitable.
Capitalism is a truly insidious system. The interests of the owning class are diametrically oppositional to those of the proletariat.
There is a debate regarding what the best practice is regarding how to handle homeless people and people who need extensive social services.
On one hand, it may make sense to put all those people together in one area with support nearby. That way, you can target those who need help with concentrated resources.
On the flip side, concentrating these people together usually includes a subset who are disruptive and will bring down the quality of life of the area they live in. So, you’re taking vulnerable populations and sticking them in unhealthy areas. This is why a lot of government programs focus on distributing these people over as wide an area as possible.
Yeah. I actually volunteer at my local shelter and one of the guys was talking about how certain guys can’t come to the shelter because they’ll get in fights with other guys there, so I do understand that it’s good to have options. But I still think you could optimize those options and the concentration if we put just a little more effort into it as a society.
From what I’ve read, you need to really dilute the disruptive population before it affects local quality of life, which seems to only work if you distribute the homeless population across all of a country rather than localize them in locally impoverished areas.
The problem is that most places with a functioning local community able to self organize will fight homeless institutions from being built because it potentially threatens the local order, which threatens quality of life, which threatens housing prices.
Oh, I see what’s happening here. You misunderstood what I was saying initially. Probably my fault for not describing it properly.
I didn’t mean condense the homeless population to certain cities or something like that that. I meant spots within municipalities. Like multiple spots.
That’s covered in the last paragraph. Few people want these institutions built in their local communities and many places will fight the building of these shelters tooth and nail.
Yeah. We’re experiencing that in my province a lot.
American planners: needs more automobile lanes.
Yes, but also, there’s no reason to move 2000 people 500 miles in less than 3 hours in the US.
For the sake of argument, I’ll pick two reasonable cities to connect. San Francisco and Seattle (which would probably be more like 750 miles away, but close enough)
I just checked Seatac’s website, there are 16 flights today to San Francisco, at what, 200 people per flight.
That works out to 3200 people transported the whole day, or double that at 6400 if you count the return trips, and many of those are just going to be connecting flights, rather than people trying to specifically get between those two places.
So… a train system that can move 2000 people in each direction every 30 minutes, running 16 hours a day, would be about 128,000 people transported per day which is literally 20x more people than currently fly between those two places.
Why would an extra 100,000 people a day want to go between those cities? What purpose would they have for doing this that isn’t currently being served by a flight?
Google says it’s less than $200 return for the flight between those two cities. Would a train be significantly cheaper? Clearly no. There’s no way it’s going to be much cheaper than that.
Would it be significantly faster? Nope. It would probably take about the same amount of time.
It would likely leave from a more convenient location near town, and the seats may be a bit more comfortable. Those are really the only two benefits I see.
So the argument isn’t “America dumb” it’s “America has no real reason to do that”
If it’s all good and dandy, feel free to drive me around when I want to drive into LA. Thanks.
Try taking the metro or metrolink instead of driving. It’s not perfect, but it keeps getting better and better.
I have. Used it for years. That is not solving my problem. It takes the same time to drive into LA as taking a bunch of trains to get to the same spot. Don’t say I can read or sleep on the train. That’s also not solving the issue. It’s deflecting. Crazy that people want to say everything is fine and not actually address problems every day people face constantly for years. That’s why public infrastructure is so shit in America. Everyone’s licking some boot somewhere.
What?
