The Liberal Gun Club Forum

max129 wrote: Wed Sep 11, 2019 2:24 pm

Brownrasta said:

Some of us are literally one pay check away from being homeless.

If you expand "one paycheck" to "three paychecks" I think that covers almost half of the population.

We are living in very insecure times. Very.

It's been a lot of years since I've lived paycheck to paycheck and I don't miss it--most of my preteen childhood and much of my early adult life (although I did have fallbacks to family if necessary and I could swallow the bitter pill). My experience with family medical costs (even with insurance) the last two years put me closer to the "oh fuck" line than I've been in a long time. It is easy to understand how so many are insecure. It's not so easy to identify solutions.

featureless wrote: Wed Sep 11, 2019 11:21 am There are a lot of issues that touch on homelessness in California. I doubt very much that the federal government will come up with the correct answer. In my area (northern Bay Area and I suspect many other areas), one of the big problems is the length of time and cost of getting a development proposal through planning and to construction. It can take a good 10 years. While I don't pity the developers (far from it, they make their own problems by being slimy), the municipalities aren't doing themselves any favors with this lengthy review process. It adds considerable costs to the development which the developer passes on to the buyer. This results in an overall lack of housing units which drives up the cost of all housing units, including rentals. Unless you're a non profit, developers can't afford to do low income development because they'll go broke. It doesn't pencil, so they won't do it.

Add to this the constant influx of new bodies and yeah, there's a housing market issue. It's too expensive and there are too few units available.

I'm somewhat hesitant to suggest that further renter rights/rent control are the correct solution either. There are a lot of middle classers who own (the mortgage on) one or two rentals as their retirement. Yeah, they've got more money than the poor and certainly more assets. But if we make it impossible to adjust rents or evict people who don't pay, they lose the house and go bankrupt, which doesn't help solve the problem because now they don't have an income or place to live either. The banks win, though, so there's that.

I see the solution more as a government issue in that space needs to be allocated and we all need to pony up for construction costs (through taxes) to get folk under roofs.

Then, there's the mental health and addiction element. Many of the chronically homeless are so because they aren't able to participate in society, at least not the way society works presently. There are precious few resources for these people because... we don't demand and fund them.

NIMBY is a bitch and it's not just limited to "I don't want the slums next door." People don't want to pay for it. There are also the CAVE (citizens against virtually everything) People to deal with. Homelessness is as much an infrastructure problem as anything. The solutions are not glorious, they are very expensive, and nobody wants to pay for them.

It is a complicated issue and politicians like the quick and easy solutions, they procrastinate on tough problems. There are usually multiple reasons that people are homeless and employment is a huge factor in addition to mental health, substance abuse, felony convictions, lack of soft skills... If they do get a job, they don't have money for first, last and a security deposit and other deposits like utilities.

A few years ago Gov Andrew Cuomo made the statement,

70 million Americans have a criminal record — that’s one in three adults," Cuomo wrote....

It fits with the FBI definition of criminal records which includes arrests and convictions. Some employers only look at convictions others look at everything when they do a pre-employment background check. There are just not enough "felony friendly" employers around.

The short term solution is opening shelters and the long term solution is permanent housing. But if government doesn't fund wrap around services for long term help with mental health, substance abuse, employment and retention...it becomes a revolving door of getting people housed and after a short time they lose it due to unresolved problems.

Many of the chronically homeless are so because they aren't able to participate in society, at least not the way society works presently.

The "problem solvers" parade their embarrassing middle class values and "should" all over the place with statements like "the homeless should..." Even the homeless want to have control over their lives.

Homelessness is as much an infrastructure problem as anything. The solutions are not glorious, they are very expensive, and nobody wants to pay for them.

Yup

max129 wrote: Wed Sep 11, 2019 2:24 pm

Brownrasta said:

Some of us are literally one pay check away from being homeless.

If you expand "one paycheck" to "three paychecks" I think that covers almost half of the population.

We are living in very insecure times. Very.

The nature of work is changing faster than any retraining effort can cope. In data analytics, if someone leaves work for 3 years they need to be almost totally retrained. We did a semiotics scan project for an online job posting service. Entire job descriptions disappeared in less than 2 years.

Many new postings have 25% net new descriptive keywords in measured over the same 2 years.

This is reality. We are literally working to keep these rich assholes comfortable. Does it not piss you off? It sure as hell pisses me off.

IMO there is absolutely no "market based" solution to homelessness. It is Government intervention or nothing. The problem is just too big.

I am guilting of "thinking like a scientist". What I want first is to quantify the problem.

What percentage of the population needs to be cared for at a base level? They cannot work, etc.

What percentage of the population needs to have their working income augmented? (I am personally for a moderate minimum wage and aggressive Government subsidy for the working poor. Too high a minimum wage simply suppresses employment IMO.)

What percentage just needs support while retraining?

Any of these groups really require different programs - all Government IMO.

Statistics I trust indicate there are between 500K and 1M homeless people in the US. OK, worst case that is 1/3 of 1% (0.33%). If they made me King for a Day, I would make a new tax of 0.5% on the top 1/3 of the taxpayers and wipe out the resource problem for the truly homeless. That would net about $10,000 per homeless person per year. That is enough basic resource. (About 3% of the US Military budget per year.)

But clearly, as a society, this is way down on the priority list.

Suburban America is very careful to direct their police forces to remove most signs of homelessness. Can't have homeless people with shopping carts in white bread neighborhoods.

The majority of homeless people (or dirt poor people) live in inner cities or rural areas.

Brownrasta said:

This is reality. We are literally working to keep these rich assholes comfortable. Does it not piss you off? It sure as hell pisses me off.

I apologize - I don't get pissed off very much. That wore off when I zipped up my 50th body bag in the Marines. I believe we need to think our way out of all this mess. I have feelings about it, but I tend to measure myself by what I "do" and not what I "feel".

If feelings are the "grace" in the King James Bible and output is the "works" in the KJB, I will stand on the works, not the grace.

In politics for example, I believe Andrew Yang has an ice-cube's-chance-in-Hell of getting the nomination - and I do not hope for it. But I do think he is describing at least one of the key issues of our time.

Issac Newton said "If I have seen farther than others, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants." All Andrew Yang is saying is that tech advancements have come from ALL of us. The internet came from DARPA research paid for by rich and poor alike. Just about all core science is paid for by "society". So as that technology starts to "pay off" some of the proceeds need to trickle all the way downward.

In the really big picture, tech advances are wrought by force of the entire society. The janitors who clean the science lab bathrooms help too. The food workers feed the tech workers. We all know that resource and mineral extraction SHOULD be charged a use-tax/extraction-tax. It is obvious that mining resources uses up collective property. Well, IMO, tech advances need this as well. Governments want the "tax" to be on individual wages - sorry, wrong model. The taxes need to be elsewhere in the supply chain. And we need it enacted fast. Trump sits in DC and imposes new tariffs at will. OK, tariff technology and use the revenue to fix a wide swath of social problems, homeless amongst them.

I yield my soapbox and my corner for contrasting points of view ...

There are some who look at retraining and/or getting clean and sober. They see that minimum wage is probably the best they will do for a long, long time. That means knuckling down for many years with very little material or spiritual reward. They'll never own a car or have a place of their own, and all that little bit of money just goes to someone else. Some people see that as wage slavery, not freedom.

Some people see that as wage slavery, not freedom.

You are describing the future of "work" for many people. If we don't start fixing this sh*t, we will have a real revolution.

I spend real money on non-directed training for my employees. They can get training and schooling paid for to stay ahead of the future.

Companies like GE were formerly famous for doing this at scale. In Austin Texas, they used to call Texas Instruments "TI High" (as in High School) because of the great training. It is disappearing as a trend.

Very few tech companies have a very good program IME. Starbucks offers better education benefits than many of my high tech customers.

But the Genie is out of the bottle. We cannot effectively de-globalize most work - especially work that can be delivered over the internet.

And people need more than "enough money" - they need hope. If it feels like wage drudgery or wage slavery, they will lose hope.

"Work" can be described as "that which one would not do if one was not being paid to do so".

I take some exception to that. Yes, much of work is wax-on-wax-off and a bit dull. But at least SOME of work should spark joy, and overall, work should provide satisfaction and a feeling of accomplishment.

One solution that actually worked for the chronically homeless was put into place in Utah- housing first, which saw a 91% reduction in chronic homelessness due to the program. Then they cut the funding off. Guess what happened.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa- ... SKCN1P41EQ

Agreed that it's a different category than some of the rest, but honestly, can we say that the model of housing first wouldn't help to alleviate some from both categories? Food, shelter, sanitation. Those three things are critical. Universal healthcare is another, but that benefits all, not just the homeless. And they should not be on the reliance of charity to provide it. Taxing religious organizations as businesses would be a start to pay for it.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/won ... on-a-year/

Trump administration officials tour unused FAA facility in California as they accelerate search for place to relocate homeless people

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business ... ss-people/

This week, a team of Trump administration officials toured a facility near Los Angeles that was once used by the Federal Aviation Administration as they hunted for a potential site to relocate homeless people, according to three government officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the private tour. President Trump is pressing aides to intervene in California's worsening homelessness crisis, but officials haven't made firm decisions as they grapple with legal barriers and logistical problems.

“They were very cagey with us about what they were doing,” said a Los Angeles city official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to be candid. “Our only understanding from them coming into this was they wanted to poke around and learn more about what we were doing out here. All this stuff about cracking down and sweeping people out of skid row was a total surprise to us.”

I have done a bit of reading on it and much of the problem is a deep mismatch between available housing and what people can afford for housing. If I wanted to take a big bite out of this problem, the first thing I'd do is change zoning laws to bring back SRO-type housing. It needs to be regularly inspected and found to be safe and sanitary. The second thing I'd do is force municapalites to set specific actionable goals for getting help to homeless people with mental illness and addiction issues and then hold them to it.

The last time I was in DC, I was panhandled much more aggressively than in the past. There seems to be less public order.

As for Trumps instincts to round up homeless people and warehouse them, it seems like one of those really bad ideas that will generate a remarkable level of support. Which is quite depressing.

Yeah, I think they are trying to push the "dangerous cities" narrative. They have been doing that here a lot recently. GOP claimed that the streets of Atlanta were flooded with drugs and crime. Blood flowing down the streets... MS13... etc. It is just a way to hype up the rural voters to vote for the white male GOP candidates versus the mostly female, mostly non-white Dems here.

Having been homeless at one time in my Life and watching this Government (both Democrats and Republicans) for what they do and not what they say my "Plan B" (which is to retire/flee to another country) is rapidly becoming my A Game.

Democrats go on and on about saving/fixing/expanding SS, Medicare, and all that but when elected ignore any and all of that and seek to disarm US. Republicans make no bones about gutting SS which will literally put millions on the street and then Dick Head wants to round them up and put them in camps after we are disarmed. What are supposed to do against these Government Goons?

I'll be truthful here - I'm fucking scared now. Of *all* of our Government. I'm seriously looking at immigrating as my grandparents did in the early 1900's and getting the hell out of here. This in not gonna end well - we are not gonna vote our way out of this one, friends.

VooDoo

VodoundaVinci said

... I'm seriously looking at immigrating ...

One of my great regrets is that I did not become a German citizen when they were allowing anyone with Germanic ancestry who could speak German to be allowed citizenship. Those days are long gone. I would love the option to be honest.

I'm not convinced there's anywhere better to flee to. Nationalism is raising its ugly head across the globe, generally as a response to immigration. That immigration is largely due to government instability precipitated by the economic/social disaster that is climate change. While the US (and North America in general) has too many warts to count, it also has vast resources and money (obviously misspent, but...), something that can't be said for most other places. If you, like I do, are looking at these events as a continuing trend toward collapse of the systems we've known (be it from overpopulation, climate change, or a mixture of the two), there just aren't many better options to ride out the storm. We are only beginning to see what we've done to our home. Ma Earth is pissed. Social systems in Europe will fare no better in the face of overwhelming immigration as people increasingly flee marginal and unlivable areas.

(I know I go on and on about climate change, but it really is the threat multiplier its been defined as. I'm like a broken goddamned record. Sorry.)

I’m very wary about this administration trying to fix the homeless problem by warehousing them. I foresee more of the homeless treatment being similar to the treatment of the immigrants at our southern border.

But warehousing people has always worked so well in the past!

An additional problem with the way homelessness is handled is that many/most shelters won't admit if you're under the influence and many won't allow personal belongings. I understand the reasoning (health and safety of both "residents" and workers) but the result is many won't use the services.

featureless wrote: Thu Sep 12, 2019 12:15 pm I'm not convinced there's anywhere better to flee to. Nationalism is raising its ugly head across the globe, generally as a response to immigration. That immigration is largely due to government instability precipitated by the economic/social disaster that is climate change. While the US (and North America in general) has too many warts to count, it also has vast resources and money (obviously misspent, but...), something that can't be said for most other places. If you, like I do, are looking at these events as a continuing trend toward collapse of the systems we've known (be it from overpopulation, climate change, or a mixture of the two), there just aren't many better options to ride out the storm. We are only beginning to see what we've done to our home. Ma Earth is pissed. Social systems in Europe will fare no better in the face of overwhelming immigration as people increasingly flee marginal and unlivable areas.

(I know I go on and on about climate change, but it really is the threat multiplier its been defined as. I'm like a broken goddamned record. Sorry.)

I moderate a UK based FlightSim Forum and most of my closest friends and drinking buddies are all in the UK or EU. We converse often and for the last 10+ years we have compared notes on everything from immigration policies to rent, food, crime, car prices, laws, and just about everything that good friends talk about. I am closer to many of these folks than I am to blood family. 3 of them have a job for me in various places and have helped me understand exactly what it would take to move to different places.

I'll not try to convince you that America is no longer all that and a bag of chips...you'll have to do that yourself. But the truth is that there are at least a dozen places I can live out the next 30 years on a fraction of what it will cost me here with better healthcare, lower crime, better public transportation, and with happier people. I'm sorry...Americans are a miserable lot compared to my Euro Trash friends. Plus I have recently hooked up with family in "the old country"....blood relatives in Belgium and elsewhere. America and much of it's superiority is myth now. And if they take my arms and start herding the Homeless and poor into camps, gut SS, Medicare, and destroy our water and air I want to be somewhere where the crime rate is much lower and $2000 a month buys a nice Life.

Sadly, I have been turned sour by watching my friends live a better Life over seas while America smirks and touts America as all that when it's just not now. And I don't see it getting better unless we can purge our current Government. I don't see that happening. I *do* see America fleeced of her wealth by the .01% and then being herded into a camp when we have no where else to go.

VooDoo

You’re not wrong

VodoundaVinci wrote: Thu Sep 12, 2019 12:45 pm I'll not try to convince you that America is no longer all that and a bag of chips...you'll have to do that yourself. But the truth is that there are at least a dozen places I can live out the next 30 years on a fraction of what it will cost me here with better healthcare, lower crime, better public transportation, and with happier people. I'm sorry...Americans are a miserable lot compared to my Euro Trash friends. Plus I have recently hooked up with family in "the old country"....blood relatives in Belgium and elsewhere. America and much of it's superiority is myth now. And if they take my arms and start herding the Homeless and poor into camps, gut SS, Medicare, and destroy our water and air I want to be somewhere where the crime rate is much lower and $2000 a month buys a nice Life.

Sadly, I have been turned sour by watching my friends live a better Life over seas while America smirks and touts America as all that when it's just not now. And I don't see it getting better unless we can purge our current Government. I don't see that happening. I *do* see America fleeced of her wealth by the .01% and then being herded into a camp when we have no where else to go.

I don't disagree with any of this, Vodo. Never would I argue that the US is all that and a bag of chips.

My view is colored by the fact that I have a teenage daughter, all of my friends/family are here and I have some land in the family I intend to keep in the family for the future generations--it ain't much, but it's something, located near a lot of water and under agricultural production. If I didn't have those things, I'd probably be looking at Canada, for the reasons you state. But, the US does have natural resources and space that Europe does not. It will not be a panacea but it will help absorb the burden of the changes coming (if our corporations don't destroy it first). The thing about climate change is, it impacts the entire world, not just the places spewing the CO2. All systems will be subject to that same stressor. So far, much of the EU doesn't seem to be doing much better with the climate immigration thing than the US is, caging children notwithstanding.

About 40% of Americans don't have cash to cover a $1000 emergency, that's barely one month of rent.

Stiff wrote: Thu Sep 12, 2019 2:36 pm About 40% of Americans don't have cash to cover a $1000 emergency, that's barely one month of rent.

That's 1/2 to 1/3 months rent around these parts.

VodoundaVinci said:

Sadly, I have been turned sour by watching my friends live a better Life over seas while America smirks and touts America as all that when it's just not now.

First, I basically agree with this.

"Things never were what they used to be."

Ask a PoC if they are nostalgic for the "America in the 1960s - the Golden Age".

I love my Country for what is thinks it should be; I hate it for what it is instead.

I took the oath and served in the Military. To my knowledge, there is no expiration date on the oath I took. And I feel significant pride in the people with whom I served.

The mission we had? Oh, that was sh*t.

The Organization? The USMC has some good and some bad and a lot of history that is neither.

The lessons I learned? Priceless.

The Marines I served with? Cannot express it. There are no words.

I wish -any- company I had ever worked for had 1% of the Esprit de Corps we had.

Immigrants are mostly right. Compared to many other Countries, this is a land of dreams. But compared to many Countries in which I have spent considerable time, the US is way behind. I would trade my US Passport for a Swiss or Norwegian passport at any moment. About half the G20 Countries are noticeably better in terms of quality of life.


Back to the Topic on this Thread

What they hell could these guys be thinking? They are going to run homeless shelters now? What, with the same people who run the Border Patrol prisons?

featureless wrote: Thu Sep 12, 2019 2:40 pm

Stiff wrote: Thu Sep 12, 2019 2:36 pm About 40% of Americans don't have cash to cover a $1000 emergency, that's barely one month of rent.

That's 1/2 to 1/3 months rent around these parts.

Yeah. If rent is 2K-3K and you don't even have $1K saved, you're one paycheck away from being homeless.

That's my terror - about half the middle/working class is literally one paycheck/one medical emergency away from losing their homes. I think something like 70% of the homes lost due to delinquency in making the payments is due to a medical emergency or the loss of one of the people bringing in a paycheck. To stay on topic, the Government is actively trying to force people into a position where Trump wants to haul them off to a camp.

To even suggest this is heinous to me having been homeless and living in a car in 1979. How about we improve the odds of people being able to afford to live instead of finding places to hide them when they fall down?

VooDoo

I knew of people who went to retire in Europe to live well on little money. They loved it! Until Putin got involved, it was an enviable life.

You never know where this is going to go, so make sure you remember that refugees are almost never welcome in bad times.

VodoundaVinci wrote: Thu Sep 12, 2019 4:19 pm That's my terror - about half the middle/working class is literally one paycheck/one medical emergency away from losing their homes. I think something like 70% of the homes lost due to delinquency in making the payments is due to a medical emergency or the loss of one of the people bringing in a paycheck. To stay on topic, the Government is actively trying to force people into a position where Trump wants to haul them off to a camp.

To even suggest this is heinous to me having been homeless and living in a car in 1979. How about we improve the odds of people being able to afford to live instead of finding places to hide them when they fall down?

VooDoo

But we don't need Medicare For All or a good support system for our People. If they aren't wealthy and successful, they just didn't pull themselves up by their bootstraps and they deserve what they get. Reptilian Randian School of Economics. Or they didn't get the trickledown from the tax cuts that made so many successful. The Laughing Reagan School of Economics. Trillions for Defense and My Wall, Millions for me but not a penny for the people. Dominating Donnie Trumps education from the Wharton School of failures.