[adamrezich]

The way you've stated this implies a structurally-enforced causality with regards to vagrancy in such a way that, wittingly or otherwise, wholly denies the possibility of individual agency in the very people you're ostensibly trying to defend.

[roughly]

I'm curious where you see the levers of individual agency here, and to what degree you think the affected people have tried to pull them. What's _your_ underlying thesis?

[adamrezich]

That is beyond my proverbial pay grade. But it's not beyond my proverbial pay grade to state that believing that, systemically, “[x demographic in y location] are way more likely to be [in undesirable situation]” is completely denying agency to the individuals in question by pretending that [x demographic in y location] ending up [in undesirable situation] is something of a weighted dice roll made by unseen forces, completely outside of individual agentic influence.

[roughly]

So you don’t believe in, like, history? Or what’s the argument here?

[adamrezich]

Either you're willfully ignoring the American citizen's right to free movement between States, or you're actually saying that any given black person who moves to Oakland has—regardless of any life circumstances or decisions they've made, simply as a fact of their ethnicity—some arbitrary-percentage chance of ending up homeless, as some immutable localized nth-order structural outcome, regardless of any choices they make.

[roughly]

Oh, I see the confusion - in America, we use the word “free” to mean both “allowed to” and “doesn’t cost money,” which leads to the kinds of odd circumstances where one is “free” to do something, but that thing isn’t “free,” so if they lack the money or resources to do so, they’re not actually able to do it. It’s a confusing part of our language and our system.

Similarly, we’ve got a bunch of cases where the law says X, but actually conforming with the law, or proving what you’re doing is legal, also costs money, and is therefore not “free” either. That one catches a bunch of people.

[adamrezich]

Does anyone else here know what this guy is talking about? I think he completely misread my post. I was asking if a black American citizen moving to Oakland had some arbitrary percent chance of becoming homeless after living there for awhile, based on his ethnicity and whatever structural factors Oakland has going for it alone (as implied by the rhetoric elsewhere in the thread). He then turned it into some kind of tirade about the ambiguity of the English language, or something, rather than answering my question?

[dash2]

If people are systematically more likely to be in area X, that may be because they are systematically more likely to make the relevant choices - for example because they are under different constraints or have different preferences. Choice is part of social science.