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Comment by peter_d_sherman | Hacker News Reader

>"Inside the shelter, there wasn’t room for everyone who sought its refuge: On average, more than 100 people were turned away every week."

Amazing.

We live in a first world country, where most of the the U.S.'s population and its businesses pay (in aggregate, collectively) what amounts to absolutely staggering amounts of tax money to its various governments (City, State, Federal), and yet, and yet:

>"Inside the shelter, there wasn’t room for everyone who sought its refuge: On average, more than 100 people were turned away every week."

To anyone that works in Government, at any level:

Please explain to the American People exactly how this is possible, because this phenomenon does not only exist solely in Phoenix.

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There is a vein of hatred for homeless people running throughout our country. Worse, they are not allowed to vote or recieve a lot of state support because they lack domiciliary. Politicians have no reason to view them as anything but a problem. Supporting homeless people in anything than a "Get rid of the problem" way is often political suicide.

(1) https://www.daily-journal.com/news/local/fortitude-shelter-r...

(2) https://gothamist.com/news/angry-upper-west-siders-wanted-ho...

(3) https://jerseydigs.com/homeless-shelter-denied-apartments-co...

(4) https://www.kcur.org/community/2019-11-25/church-sues-lenexa...

(5) https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/11/voting-can-be-h...

Nearly all of my local politicians flex their positions to enrich themselves and stifle competition. It's rather blatant, and a few antagonistic people with free time have spent countless hours documenting these abuses.

The employees of the city laboring under these politicians are burnt out and have little good to say about their bosses in private. The politicians won't devote effort to anything that isn't: extinguishing a fire, enriching themselves,or getting re-elected. So the managers of various departments settle into autopilot because they don't have the support they need, and this apathy trickles down through the ranks destroying morale, wasting money, and ultimately causing far greater costs to the taxpayers in the long run.

Land value isn't the same everywhere. A studio in a large city would cost more than a 5-bedroom house in the middle on nowhere. Except if you build a shelter in Noname Falls, 5 hours away from the nearest City, something tells me it will have a hard time finding residents. In a sense, it's like claiming that you're dying of hunger, while insisting on having a lobster diet.

Where are the jobs in your Noname Falls? How is someone supposed to continue earning income to pay for their living expenses with no work? Are you expecting them to commute 5 hours each way into the city for work? It's a far cry from your lobster diet analogy. It's probably more akin to someone starving not wanting to take their chances eating filth from a dumpster.

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