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Comment by dahfizz | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand how this can be your position when CA has both some of the highest taxes and best social safety net in the country, but also some of the worst homelessness and crime in the country.

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It's super easy to end up homeless in CA. Just run out of money.

Source: I ran out of money in CA in 2009, ended up homeless.

That's literally everywhere. California has one of the most tenant friendly landlord laws, so if you run out of money, California is probably the last state that you would become homeless due to how insanely long it takes for landlords to evict.

I became homeless by choice. The thing you're missing is that if your landlord tries to evict you, you'll end up with a record of that eviction on your record. The next time you try to rent an apartment, you'll be super screwed. I was able to get enough money together a couple months after being homeless, and I was able to get another apartment because I didn't have an eviction on my record.

Can you take advantage of the landlord by not paying rent for several months? Sure. But that's not a social safety net. It's an inefficiency in the system that will screw you if you use it, kind of like overdrawing a checking account & calling it free money.

Even if they're best in the USA is lmao is that ever low bar if we're talking about social safety net.

I'm just saying that the correlation doesn't make much sense. If more taxes and more government action was the "simple solution" as my parent said, then CA would have less homelessness and crime than the rest of the nation. The opposite is true.

The costs of living are higher in CA too

And do you think very high taxes is a solution to this problem? Do you consider the high COL to be unrelated to the policies that CA has?

I think the solution to homelessness and petty theft is to house people. Typically such housing is only deliverable by the state and taxes are a way to pay for it.

I know that the status quo of not housing people is not going to solve homelessness.

If California feels it is "tapped out" of taxing its citizens and yet is unable to build housing to house its population, maybe it needs to have a look at what it's spending its money on.

(Of course the fact that Prop 13 exists means there's plenty of more tax room...)

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