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Comment by touchofevil | Hacker News Reader

Middle America generally lives in the suburbs and does not interact with homeless people everyday who are dying on the streets in front of them like those who live in SF, LA, and NYC do. Basic Income is meant as a "floor" that those people will not be able to fall below.

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> Middle America generally lives in the suburbs and does not interact with homeless people everyday

Sure they do -- there's plenty of homeless people in the suburbs these days, it's just a different interaction.

It's homeless people standing on the sides of freeway offramps and stripmall driveways, dying in front of them on the grassy lawn road medians. It's handing change to a homeless person in the stormwater road ditch while you wait at a red light.

That used to be true, but the nation's very poor live mostly in the suburbs and rural parts of the country now. It shifted about 20 years ago. You can't go anywhere without encountering desperately poor people these days.

This is true. I live in a 30,000 person town in rural America that is a popular tourist destination for upper middle class types. Despite the cold winters, there is a surprising amount of homelessness - the city finally set up a camp area because they were concerned with the visibility to the tourists. Apart from a handful of white collar jobs (a small college, a hospital, a couple law offices), everything else is just above minimum wage, meaning even if you aren't homeless, there is limited mobility. Thankfully real estate is still very affordable, but as coastal cities push more people out of the market, even that is changing, as people move inland to find something cheaper.

> with homeless people everyday who are dying on the streets in front of them like those who live in SF, LA, and NYC do

You see very few homeless people on street or in trains, and zero tents, in NYC. Its kind of strange -- NYC has a larger homeless population than SF no matter how you slice it (total count, per capita, per square foot) but the issue seems way worse in the major California cities.

I have friends who visit Oakland from NYC and are amazed at the Mad Max quality of the Bay Area.

That's because the encampments are not tolerated in NYC.[0] There's lots of patchwork "solutions": shelters, hotels, housing vouchers, and roaming the subways (as long as they keep moving or don't congregate too many), but not long-term encampments. It's kind of like how spreading unwanted food around on your plate makes it look as though it's been eaten - is indeed weird how it affects the perception.

http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/bronx-drug-lair-cleaned-...

There are no tents, but you definitely see plenty of homeless people on the street or sleeping in trains in NYC. It does feel less dystopian somehow than SF though.

Here in the Midwest (MI) people beg for change on every other street corner. It's obvious to us here why things are falling apart politically. Whole cities have collapsed.

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