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Comment by 999900000999 | Hacker News Reader

My first apartment didn't have a kitchen. And it was fine, we are talking about a homeless shelter. You do not need to have stainless steel appliances, it should be a short-term stopgap until you find a better solution. Historically lower income people had to share common amenities like a shower. Just because it would be nice for every single person to have a big apartment with brand new appliances doesn't make it feasible .

I don't know about you, but given the choice between sleeping on the streets or having to share a shower with a reasonable number of other people, I'd share that shower.

Instead LA built a bunch of vanity projects which provide no real help to the vast majority of homeless people. The only thing you can really do is move your feet, which is what I did .

Anyone struggling to find affordable housing in LA should get out. You can move to Vegas and drive in every other week to see your friends.

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No, we are not talking about a homeless shelter or a temporary stopgap, these kinds of units are the "something better" that people in homeless shelters and other temporary stopgaps are in a holding pattern waiting for.

Shipping the homeless elsewhere than California's most expensive cities is way outside the Overton window.

> Shipping the homeless elsewhere than California's most expensive cities is way outside the Overton window.

Why? Unless you can show proof that most of the homeless in SF and LA are locals who fell on hard times rather than junkies who moved in for better weather and benefits, shipping them out seems completely reasonable.

Ask the Democrats and judges if they think that's reasonable.

And where will you ship them to? Smaller cities don't want them and they'll be inhospitable enough they won't want to be there either - they'd rather ship themselves back where they can stay close to their drug sources and still rotate with their panhandling around enough that the locals don't get too familiar with them.

So if you want to do something about the vagrant encampments being in the city you live in, the most effective thing that you can do is move to where they aren't, which is what everyone else who cared that much about it already did long ago.

Ship them where? Can other cities ship to LA/SF? How does this work?

I assume the model would be to build the same kinds of supportive housing facilities but to do so in markets where the same budget buys more units.

> Why?

Morality and optics of forced relocations aside, because it leads to cycles of retaliation by the places they are shipped to.

> Unless you can show proof that most of the homeless in SF and LA are locals who fell on hard times

I don't know about LA, but this has been studied for SF, repeatedly, and they are.

That is preposterous. I believe all homeless should be provided some sort of shelter, but I absolutely don’t feel they have any entitlement to that shelter being in one of the most expensive zip codes in the country.

My friends who couldn’t afford Santa Monica moved east. Riverside, San Bernardino, etc. They bear horrible commutes but did what they needed to do to afford housing for their families.

Why do we just assume that homeless have some god given right to be housed precisely where they happen to be sleeping. Regular people migrate all the time to accommodate their own economics. Let’s build homeless some cheap housing. And let’s do it somewhere in the middle of no where where land is cheap and building costs are low.

I fail to see how this is controversial if it isn’t controversial for my friends who voluntarily do the same.

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