Basic income, basic housing, basic food, basic education, basic healthcare?
Seems like we need to address all of these issues. Literally the only institutions that provide all of these things are jails, which many homeless attempt to get into.
Seems like we need to address all of these issues. Literally the only institutions that provide all of these things are jails, which many homeless attempt to get into.
Having studied the problem in an actual college class and also spent the last 5.5 years on the street: It's complicated. But we need more solutions for people and fewer aimed at poor people specifically. Programs to help the poor are routinely craptastic.
Affordable housing and single payer medical coverage would go a long way towards reducing the problem.
This is disingenuous, the housing shortages are all in the highly desirable locations like the SFO, LAX, NYC, etc. There is no housing shortage in the vast majority of the country (look at Detroit).
It's completely unsustainable to try to support a model where anyone should be able to live in whatever city they choose for an extremely low cost.
Listen, I support single payer systems, but how do they figure out how much to pay in each region? Same question for UBI.
I have come to believe that UBI and all other safety nets have to come with immigration requirements. Not just everyone is going to be accepted to live among rich billionaires without concern for running out of money. And so on in every neighborhood.
Thus, UBI needs for each area needs to be tied in with community membership, and be based on the Consumer Price Index in that area.
Communities can open themselves up to more people from time to time.
This is insane, dystopic (literally, geographically-based caste systems feature in dystopian fiction with some regularity, for example the Hunger Games and Elysium), un-Constitutional, and un-American.
If internal border controls ever became law, I'd be the first to sign up for the resistance in the resultant civil war.
This looks pretty similar to the English Poor Laws, which in the end proved to be quite despotic. It started like this, at the end of the 15h century:
> In 1495, Parliament passed the Vagabonds and Beggars Act ordering that "vagabonds, idle and suspected persons shall be set in the stocks for three days and three nights and have none other sustenance but bread and water and then shall be put out of Town. Every beggar suitable to work shall resort to the Hundred where he last dwelled, is best known, or was born and there remain upon the pain aforesaid." (taken from the wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Poor_Laws)
but it turned out that that made people dependent on their "original" parishes and that the other parishes/towns would not want any of them on their streets, thus impeding the free movement of people across England. There were other major ills caused by this law (this subject also has its own wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opposition_to_the_English_Poor...), I for myself first learned of its bad effects (and of the bad effects that similar laws can cause) by reading some Bentham.
not candid or sincere, typically by pretending that one knows less about something than one really does.
synonyms: insincere · dishonest · untruthful · false · deceitful · duplicitous · lying · mendacious · hypocritical
That is a personal attack.
The shortage of affordable housing is very much real. It is not something I am making up. And, yes, every American city should have housing that single people with entry level jobs can afford without an hour long commute or three roommates. We did historically. We tore a lot of it down in the 60s and 70s when it wasn't really needed, then never rebuilt it when the need for such came back, in essence.
https://portal.hud.gov/hudportal/HUD?src=/topics/housing_cho...
The landlord gets garaunteed income, huge waiting list of tenants, can VERY easily have them evicted for violations and actually get MORE than market rate brcause the govt pays better for the section 8.
It's driving up rents and drug related crime has already increased.
I'm currently looking at moving out of the city core and into a suburb.
In the 60s and 70s, we tore down around 80% of the SROs we had because the Baby Boomers came from an unprecedentedly well off, large middle class and did not need minimal housing of that sort. Boarding houses used to also be common. Now, most housing is designed with a nuclear family in mind and our default expectation is that single adults should get one or more roommates to make such housing work for them. There is far too little market based housing aimed at singletons and childless couples. Meanwhile, our demographics have changed and we have drastically more singletons, childless couples or single parents, drastically fewer nuclear families.
I want market based solutions, not more government interference of this sort. There are good things done by the government, but most programs to help the poor only entrench poverty and the problems that lead to it.
What would that look like?
I assume it's not profitable for builders...or else there wouldn't be a problem? If it were, they would build them everywhere.
Historically, we had a lot more SROs and boarding houses than we do currently. Up to 80% of SROs were torn down in the 60s and 70s when they weren't needed by Baby Boomers, who were a demographic anomaly. As demographics returned to something more normal, we never rebuilt them.
They are less profitable than other land uses. This is not the same as being unprofitable.
In California, residential prices are skewed by protectionist government measures. Dismantling the government interference that pushes housing costs up in the state would very likely reduce the need for government vouchers et al for the poor.
I left California to find someplace I could afford.
Less profitable - yet profitable - sounds reasonable. I'm not familiar enough with the builders pricing to know.
Well-funded truly universal (i.e., every citizen is automatically eligible and automatically presumed eligible by the administering agency) have not been tried in the US.
I presumed it was common knowledge that the vast majority of homeless people have mental health issues. America seems to lack any public mental health services. I was disgusted by the number of disturbed homeless people roaming the streets of California when I visited in ways you never see in most of europe. There seems to be absolutely no support for the most vulnerable in society over there.
Around the same time, the Court ruled, in O’Connor v. Donaldson, that a Florida man named Kenneth Donaldson had been kept against his will in a state psychiatric hospital for nearly fifteen years. The ruling added momentum to a nationwide campaign to “deinstitutionalize” the mentally ill. Activists decried the existence of mental hospitals that were filled, as one account put it, with “naked humans herded like cattle.” During the next two decades, states across the country shut down such facilities, both to save money and to appease advocates pushing for reform. But instead of funding more humane modes of treatment—such as community mental-health centers that could help patients live independently—many states left the mentally ill to their own devices. Often, highly unstable people ended up on the streets, abusing drugs and committing crimes, which led them into the prison system.
[0] http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/02/the-torturing-o...
Every single program you've listed has a coverage that is only a fraction of what it needs to be to actually keep people housed, fed, educated, and alive.
Edit: Here are some interviews that explain what poverty is really like in the US today: http://www.wnyc.org/series/busted-americas-poverty-myths
Public housing: Section eight has been closed for years. The sign up list has been closed for years now--in many counties. Of yea, the current lease for Section 8 housing is 47 pages in my county. 47 pages of "can't, and do this!". It's beyond petty.
Food Stamps: Requires a degrading elegabily approval. Designed so people just don't even sign up. (Clinton made it very degrading, and cut people off after a certain time period. Obama had a heart. Who know what Wonder boy will do to the program.) Then finding stores to buy food. Then being told you can't buy orange juice. Why--I don't know, just overheard the demeaning conversation. Another one that stuck with me. A mom bought a cheap birthday cake for her child. The Checker "schooled" her on how to bake a cake from scratch. The women said, "I need to buy 10 ingredients for one birthday cake?" Cashier, "I don't make the rules lady!". Yea--I wanted to pull the guy across the counter. She walked out in silence, with child looking perplexed.
Public Education: great if you live in the right district.
Medicaid/Medical: It's almost like having no insurance. So much is not covered. So many doctors don't take it. 30 day supplies on a very restrictive Formulary. I imagine it does when wheeled into the emergency rooms.
So many of our Welfare Programs are purposely administered so people just give up. Personally, I think we need to open up any available federal, state, and county land to allow homeless to at least pitch a tent. Right now being homeless is for all practical purposes a crime. We are beyond finding solutions. Americans shouldn't be forced to sleep on the sidewalks--just waiting for a ticket, or being the victim of a random crime.
We have a huge problem in America. And it's the way we treat those that don't fit in. Tech community should take notice. When the balloon pops; you just might see the misery first hand. I know Willie Brown is wondering out loud what San Francisco will do when Iwasfired.com happens.
I am open minded about UBI, etc.
However, it has occurred to me recently that we already have a decent experimental result with regard to:
"Basic income, basic housing, basic food, basic education, basic healthcare"
Poor white people in the rural United States have all of those things. Even the poorest of them have basic food, housing and education that we might consider "first world".
I notice that they aren't following their passions and climbing up to the peak of mazlows hierarchy.
Instead, the lack of self-determination and "purpose" causes a despair that drives them to substance abuse.
(apologies for the cascading UBI debate, below...)
Most places that offer food or financial assistance do so in a manner that is detrimental to those receiving it, specifically due to sentiments like yours. Those in power with similar political mindsets as you purposely neuter the usefulness of these programs, making them difficult to obtain and then taking them away for arbitrary reasons at the most inconvenient of times, setting back those relying on them, probably while they're trying to become financially stabilized.
The only sentiment I expressed was that I am open-minded about UBI. You have no idea what my political mindset is nor do you have any idea what my background is.