I'm generally liberal, but I have absolutely 0 confidence that the asinine state and local governments whose policies led to this condition, would be skilled even more to get us out of it if we just gave them more money.
You don't think that the ineptitude / conflicts of the sort that prevent housing construction and neighborhood change would similarly infect any decision on who to tax, how to distribute it? While creating yet another new CA state agency to administer it? How many bandaids do you want to apply?
I once overheard actual-employees of the government discussing the possibility of hiring the current contractor-employee workers as actual-employees:
"We couldn't pay them half of what they're making now, and the person with ten years of experience--experience specifically in the exact job we'd be hiring for, the guy actually doing the work right now--wouldn't even be higher than the third page of the interview list."
Smart people are interested in interesting jobs. The government does not want to hire them, in accordance with its own laws. Those people do exactly the same jobs for a contractor company, and then the government hires the contractor, because they are legislatively, executively, and economically barred from hiring the best-qualified personnel directly.
This setup tends to prevent anyone that has good ideas, and anyone with any control over government budget items, from ever coming into direct contact with one another.
I don't think it's a setup that can be fixed with better advertising.
>> wouldn't even be higher than the third page of the interview list."
Does this mean the first two pages are filled with even better people? Or that the selection process for a government job is somehow favoring people who are less qualified in practice but more qualified academically?
> Does this mean the first two pages are filled with even better people?
In many public sector jobs, it would mean the top ranks of hiring lists are filled with preference-category candidates, the most common of which (and the one with strongest preference boost in most systems) is veterans preference.
Are Californian "asinine state and local governments" made up of Californians? Do they need some other state or country to help them out with governing?
Homelessness and the problems that go along with it is only a serious problem in certain cities on the west coast.
Don't get me wrong, every city has some homeless but cities in the rest of the country seem to be able to keep the problem at bay without increased "wealth redistribution", many of those cities even exist in states with far less "wealth redistribution" than the cities that have the biggest homeless problems. I see no indication that increased wealth distribution will fix the problem. There does not seem to be any substantial correlation.
I think the problem lies elsewhere. Problems like this don't tend to have single sources and single solutions anyway.
So the big difference in east coast vs west coast is the percent of unsheltered people. If you disregard whether people have shelter, the homeless rates are pretty similar between coasts.
One of the main problems is CA local governments are severely restricted from raising revenue. Property taxes are capped at 1% of assessed value, and assessed value is capped from raising faster than inflation. Other taxes require a 2/3 vote in order to pass. This means city governments are unable to capture a lot of the wealth increases that are leading to displacement among low income people.
This is a tough problem to fix, but it requires both money and a will to tolerate low income people in our neighborhoods.
Yet California has the highest overall taxation in the country (income, property, sales, capital gains, gas). So there is plenty of money being collected by the government. If the homelessness requires money as a solution, then the money is already there. It is an allocation problem.
> Don't get me wrong, every city has some homeless but cities in the rest of the country seem to be able to keep the problem at bay without increased wealth distribution.
I'd imagine part of that is the weather; you can't live outdoors year-round in, say, Maine. Sometimes they're just shipping the problem elsewhere, too.
Once you're homeless your chances of scraping up the $100+ for a bus ticket across the country are basically 0. When your homeless your biggest asset is your local knowledge, where you can sleep, where you can work as a day laborer for a few bucks, etc, etc. and you'd be giving that up by relocating. Hence most homeless people do not relocate. The homeless guy in Bangor is going to find somewhere he can sleep inside.
The number of people being subsidized is not that large. I'd wager that it's aproximatly made up for by non-homeless people who leave the destination states and then advocate for public policy that exacerbates the homelessness problem in their new cities/states. The spread of severe homelessness problems (i.e. the difference between homelessness in Baltimore and homelessness in SF) northward up the west coast but lagging CA's level of homelessness by a couple years seems to support my hypothesis.
Yes because it's the regions fault people don't want to freeze to death on a sidewalk in Minnesota.
The first thing I would do if it looked like sleeping on the street was my only option is start walking south.
The problem is wealth disparity; not drugs, not geography, not 'life-style', not 'poor choices'. These "certain cities" on the West coast are prime examples of the wealth gap, people are homeless because they can't afford to live there. Nothing more. The wealth-gap is CAUSING the problem.
The wealth gap was less at the start of the French Revolution then it is now.
Most homeless have mental issues. Minnesota has a good welfare system. However the cold in MN means that those who generally don't trust government (meaning that they will run away from any help the government tries to give unless restrained in an often inhuman way) either freeze to death or make their way south. Thus the poor in MN have a house of some sort. There are a few who migrate north for the summer and back south for winter.
No amount of safety net helps when your mental illness makes escaping the notice of the safety net a priority. It is a hard problem and I don't think anyone has a good solution.
>The problem is wealth disparity; not drugs, not geography, not 'life-style', not 'poor choices'.
I just don't think so. Anybody can get a bad break and end up homeless, I agree. But for long-term multi-year/multi-decade homelessness, mental illness and alcohol+drug abuse has to be a key component. Having lived in a big city with a major homeless problem, you can't ignore those factors because you see it right in front of you every day. It feels like gas-lighting to claim otherwise.
East coast cities don't have as many homeless as West coast for a single reason. Weather. Pretending like there's something inherently wrong with West coast cities is disingenuous. You even have cities bussing them out to SF. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/dec/...
Even on the west coast there is plenty money allocated for fighting homelessness. The problem is that long-term chronic homelessness almost always results from either mental illness and/or drug abuse.
Forcible eviction or institutionalization always leads to legal battles with activists leading to municipal governments simply doing nothing.
We've tried that a lot. Especially in very liberal California cities. Why would next time work any better?
As a follow-up question, for whatever your answer is, why can't we try that now with the amount of money already dedicated to the problem to see if it helps?
I'm generally liberal, but I have absolutely 0 confidence that the asinine state and local governments whose policies led to this condition, would be skilled even more to get us out of it if we just gave them more money.
You don't think that the ineptitude / conflicts of the sort that prevent housing construction and neighborhood change would similarly infect any decision on who to tax, how to distribute it? While creating yet another new CA state agency to administer it? How many bandaids do you want to apply?
Hm?