[Aunche]

> asking people who are used to rough and tumble life outside to then behave civilly indoors with zero tolerance seems…set for failure?

This is what I'm saying the ranger is doing. Someone who gets extremely distressed by indoor living is not a good candidate taxpayer funded indoor living. On the other hand, that housing given to someone who is capable of navigating welfare bureaucracy on their own may actually enable someone who is at risk spiraling down a path of no return to turn their life around.

[b112]

I've always wondered why such people don't live in a rural area. You could literally set aside parks for people wanting to live in this fashion, used to living in this fashion, but also provide facilities (bedding, small cabins, water supplies, washing machines, etc, etc).

You'd need, I think, to have security guards on hand. Not to stop drug use, but instead to stop violence against other homeless, to intervene if medical attention is required, and so on.

While the costs would be higher than some other solutions, it would be lower (I think) than paying for private housing.

Of course, you'd have to force move people, and that's not going to happen. That is, unless you make squatting in a park a crime, and the result is "you're going to be incarcerated in this very nice outdoor place" the "jail".

Maybe a medical order.

My point is, I don't see an issue with some of your logic. Some people won't transition to inside living, or being close to others.

But if you take people used to living in parks, move them to a park with cabins(tiny homes), and state run water/facilities, the cost might be the same, but they'd have a warm bed, etc.

[bombcar]

The people who are capable of this do this on their own.

The California high desert is full of variations of this in shacks and trailers across the nearly uninhabited expanse.

The biggest problem is support, but if they can navigate enough to get government assistance they can survive for quite a long time.

[ninalanyon]

What everyone wants, and these people want more than most perhaps, is autonomy. Your idea might work so long as there are few rules that would cause people to be kicked out and so long as money is also provided. It probably won't work if people are forced into it because being forced into things is one of the reason they are in their situation already.

More carrot and less stick, more compassion and less puritanism might have a chance of working.

[lupusreal]

A few people might be cut out to be rural hermits, but most need other people to fuel their lifestyle with food, booze and drugs, etc. Hard to buy fent by stealing bicycles if you're in a remote park.

[pkaeding]

Your last idea reminds me of https://mlf.org/community-first/

From what I hear, it is quite successful, giving their residents the dignity and autonomy they need to stand on their own.

[b112]

Neat. I was thinking more rural, but if this works, it works!

[hnbad]

> taxpayer funded

I don't understand the reflexive nature many people present in jumping this kind of framing. Of course it's taxpayer funded. Everything is taxpayer funded. Even when it's not literally paid from taxes collected by the government, it's probably funded by people who pay taxes.

The price you pay for your groceries funds not just the wholesale purchase of the goods you pay for but also the labor, facilities, equipment and resources used to purchase, deliver, store and sell those goods. Considering the total amount of taxes collected versus the revenue of the place you get your groceries, you probably contribute more of your income to operating that place than to any single service funded directly from taxes. The amount of those grocery expenses that goes directly into profits alone is probably still greater than that. Housing first specifically also literally is cheaper than the previous approach by reducing expenses for medical services, policing and incarceration.

So "taxpayer funded" is neither a meaningful qualifier if taken literally nor do its implications stand up to scrutiny.

The most common reason for using this phrase is an emotional appeal to selfishness. Your money is being spent without your say on services you don't benefit from. I find that framing morally appalling but even so, what is the alternative? What the US did before was more expensive. Not housing people means more health issues and ER visits. Throwing them in prison means housing and feeding them at a massive multiple of the cost of a housing first initiative. If you want to save costs without spending money on housing, I guess you could cut their access to medical services but then you might as well allow law enforcement to shoot them on sight as the outcome will be the same.

> On the other hand, that housing given to someone who is capable of navigating welfare bureaucracy on their own

What you're describing is triage, not housing the homeless. If your housing program is small enough that you have to engage in triage and turn people away, it's not addressing homelessness, it's addressing a fraction of the homeless population. It's better than nothing, sure, but it's not enough.

Also triage means weighing the necessary resources for treatment against the likelihood of recovery and the likely extent of the recovery. You don't treat someone who can walk it off but you also don't treat someone who's in very poor health or too far gone to be saved without using a disproportionate amount of resources.

Triage is not how you organize a hospital. Triage is how you respond to an overwhelming emergency situation without access to necessary resources. Triage is a last resort measure to reduce the number of people who will die, not a strategy for helping people survive and thrive.

Homelessness is not a natural disaster, not a spontaneous pandemic. Homelessness is a longstanding social issue most often directly arising from poverty and lack of mental health support. If your concern is with the support being wasted on people with worse chances and not support being insufficiently funded for that kind of decision not having to be made, I think you might be overestimating your humanitarianism.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

Also, to repeat a point I often make about this ...

Until sometime around the 1980s, even in the USA poverty and homelessness were scene as systemic failures - "our system should not lead to those results". Post-Reagan, the attitude has shifted dramatically and now poverty and homelessness are broadly seen as personal failures, a mixture of poor morals, bad character and weak decision making. We even used to be a little inclined towards a potential role for the state in helping individuals deal with bad luck, but now bad luck is seen as "gravitating" towards individuals whose fault is all theirs.

This has necessarily drastically altered government policies at the local, state and federal level. We are much, much worse for it, no matter which interpretation of poverty and homelessness is more factually correct.

[pc86]

"Taxpayer funded" pretty obviously means "paid for or subsidized by the government directly" and it seems bad faith to pretend you don't know that.

Of course you can probably find some government subsidy somewhere and trace it to grocery stores but nobody realistically claims grocery stores are taxpayer funded.

The government directly putting homeless in hotels over and over again is very clearly taxpayer funded and everybody knows what is meant when someone says that.

[johnnyanmac]

Grocery stores are subsidized by the government. I would call pretty much any grocery chain store that gets government handouts to be taxpayer funded, yes.

>The government directly putting homeless in hotels over and over again is very clearly taxpayer funded and everybody knows what is meant when someone says that.

And why are we framing is as bad? You're either funding their low income housing, or you are funding their jail cell (and they are not generating any real sense of income to stimulate the economy).

[DangitBobby]

If you think this is a reply to their comment, you must not have read it.

[hnbad]

Thanks. To clarify for those who can't muster the attention span to make it to the second paragraph: my point is that the phrase is a red herring designed to trigger an emotional response because we're bad at comprehending how miniscule our relative contribution to each "taxpayer funded" expense actually is.

The parent of your post is a good example of how effective it is at doing that, especially when combined with the claim of an apparent wasteful use of that money. If you pay tens of thousands of dollars in taxes and hear about a million dollars of "taxpayer money" being supposedly wasted, your emotional response reflects an imagined scenario where all of your taxes went into that alleged waste even if individual income taxes alone represent over $2 trillion (i.e. million million, or thousand billion) of the US federal budget and your actual relative lifetime contribution to that individual project can't even be measured in cents.

Not to mention that the news sources referring to that spending as waste may be reporting on inaccurate or incomplete information (even when deferring to an official source) and may be misrepresenting or omitting the actual economic efficiency of that spending (e.g. the entire "condoms to Hamas" incident where the official announcement turned out to not only apparently have mistaken about US medical aid in Gaza specifically but also misrepresent the total spending on contraceptives for AIDS relief by the US across the globe as going to a single place - the benefit to Americans of providing contraceptives to HIV hotspots should be obvious enough).

[Yeul]

Social housing programs in Europe were first invented in the 19th century. Part of it was altruism to be sure. But the richer part of society also understood that the slums were hotbeds for disease, crime and revolution.

[Aunche]

> Your money is being spent without your say on services you don't benefit from.

I don't mind strangers benefitting from my tax dollars. No where do I even imply this, so this idea is completely coming from your own preconceived ideas about those who disagree with you. The problem with this case is that I'm not sure anyone is benefiting from these tax dollars. These men aren't asking for help. They're being pressured into accepting help. Someone resourceful enough to trap racoons isn't fundamentally so helpless that they require 7 months of handholding to apply for temporary housing. He required 7 months because that wasn't something he was interested in the first place but is willing to occasionally humor a pretty ranger. She would have much more success meeting them where they're at. For example, she can set up an arrangement where the rangers will stop harassing the campers and tearing down their encampments if they keep the surroundings clean.

> What you're describing is triage, not housing the homeless

Yes, I'm talking about triage because that's exactly what the ranger is doing.

[hnbad]

> She would have much more success meeting them where they're at. For example, she can set up an arrangement where the rangers will stop harassing the campers and tearing down their encampments if they keep the surroundings clean.

We must have read different articles because the one I read stated that her job description is literally to remove people from these parks, just in a more humane way than just harassing the campers and tearing down the campsites. You can make an argument that they should be allowed to let them live there but her job isn't simply to keep the park clean but to stop people from living there.

> Yes, I'm talking about triage because that's exactly what the ranger is doing.

Again, we seem to have read different articles because to me it didn't read like she was prioritizing specific individuals for movement into housing using any of the considerations I described.

[Aunche]

> We must have read different articles

Doubling down on the preconceived judgments I see. Yes I read the article, and from it, I can tell she is given a lot of autonomy. I don't thinking allowing a "client" to camp for seven months while you file for paperwork is part of her job description either.

> it didn't read like she was prioritizing specific individuals for movement into housing

She is convincing people who otherwise would have refused offers for housing to take housing. If that's not triage, then you shouldn't have brought that up to begin with.

[lazide]

The ranger is a hero. And hero’s are often toxic in long running scenarios for exactly the reason outlined - they are trying to make up for a systemic failure through self sacrifice, therefore enabling the underlying system failure.

[hnbad]

This is needlessly cynical. The hero isn't toxic. The narrative of an individual effort in lieu of calling out the systemic issue is what's toxic. I don't see any way she could have better spent her energy contributing to systemic change whereas by doing what she does she literally improves the lives of others.

Favoring narratives of individual heroes over narratives of systemic changes is a cultural problem. Whether it's Atlas Shrugged, the Odyssey or Harry Potter. It instills a learned helplessness and an artificial desire for a "strong man fix things" that can be very difficult to overcome. But it also atomizes and fractures society and benefits those with the most individual wealth and power.

The ranger is a hero. What she is doing is good. But she shouldn't have to do it. And nobody should have to do so much. The article intentionally buries its lede: if this is what it takes to save one person, how can we save thousands? The implied answer is again helplessness: of course this isn't scalable so we can't. What she is doing is too much for one person, so we can't expect it of others. But the real answer is that literally none of this would be necessary if the system were actually built to help these people.

Her work does not require a herculean effort because it is difficult. It requires so much effort because it is being made difficult. The right question isn't how can we scale this, the right question is how can we make it easy enough that we don't need her to be a hero. The question of scalability answers itself once you've removed the obstacles.

[lazide]

that’s what i said?

[hnbad]

You said heroes are enabling the system.

Hero narratives are enabling the system.

Those are two different things. She likely doesn't consinder herself heroic. The story about her however is written in such a way to portray her as heroic. It doesn't leave room for any other option than helplessness and hoping for more heroes to emerge.

Framing it as heroes being toxic and enabling the system suggests accelerationism: if things only get bad enough (i.e. if we stop "enabling" the system by trying to work around it), the people will see how bad things are and demand change. But accelerationism doesn't work. When things are bad enough, the people will want a simple answer and a promise of a fast change. Stable systemic changes don't work fast and they are rarely simple.

To put it another way, heroes aren't toxic, heroes are harm reduction. Harm reduction is good because it helps people in the here and now. But harm reduction is not a solution to problems. Solving problems requires putting in the ground work of building bottom-up social structures. There's no reason to believe she would be just as good and enduring in doing that as she is in what she does now. And most importantly, she wouldn't be helping those she helps now because she might not even see it resulting in change within her lifetime.

So given that heroism doesn't work and letting things get worse doesn't work, what now? It sounds like we need a hero to take on the herculean task of dismantling the individualist atomizing culture norms - oh.

[lazide]

You might want to actually read my comment? The details in the article re-enforce the point.

The noted person she was ‘saving’ attacked someone when she was on vacation, and she is lamenting how if she had been there she could have stopped him from being kicked out again. And she’s angry (and reading between the lines, probably burning out) and lashing out at people. And not assigning any agency to the person she was ‘helping’. That is toxic. Regardless of her hero status. I’m sure she didn’t start this way, but this is a result of being put in this position over and over again and trying to do the right thing.

Like a combat vet with PTSD who attacks a random clerk at a grocery store due to a sudden trigger, or goes around yelling at everyone all the time because they’re always pissed off. That isn’t usually because of a one time event.

That she is also doing what she is doing, is also enabling the brokenness of the system by not allowing it to fail in a terrible way so the public or those in charge actually do something different.

Expecting heros to solve systemic issues by going so above and beyond that they ruin themselves is also toxic. That’s that I’m calling out.

Someone who jumps on a grenade in a foxhole is a hero - and those around them owe them their lives. That should be celebrated.

That someone got close enough to throw a grenade into that foxhole was likely due to many screwups, and if we ignore that, and even reinforce the environment that resulted in it, we’re just murdering heros, aren’t we?

Not that anyone wants to think long and hard about that of course.

It doesn’t mean all of these problems are solvable - some parts of life are, and likely always will be, meat grinders for a number of reasons. Maybe this is one of them.

Thoughts? I think we’re actually in agreement frankly.

I know the common human fallback is going to the ‘strongman’ (the ultimate hero fantasy).

IMO, that will almost certainly ultimately fail, and is toxic for anyone to try to even ask, because really we need to take a legitimately honest accounting of what we need/want, what price we’re willing to pay for it, and then actually follow through.

As a society. So there don’t need to have heros constantly ruining themselves to try to save us.

Notably, however, some people will still try to martyr themselves, even in those situations, to be the hero no one was asking for. But that is a different kind of problem.

[AStonesThrow]

perhaps the pervasive narratives of systemic toxicity and chronic social issues that get us down? are those good for society? should we listen to those news stories all day? and believe that things are so awful that There Oughtta Be A Law And Reform?

those who cried out to quote Tax The Rich unquote, were likewise upset by the tariffs being imposed which are taxes on the rich... a really uniform and effective one! taxing corporations by tariffs is much father reaching than taxing individuals. individual heroes.

those who cannot interpret epic fantasy sagas as allegory or larger than Life metaphors are already helpless and they just need entertainment and some opiates.