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0 pointsrauchp6y ago0 comments

"Single party rule in California has been an improvement."

I just moved to California so I don't have too much of a personal opinion yet but that sounds like a bold claim. From what I've seen, people over the age of 30 seem split on whether or not it's an improvement. You look at mismanaged cities like SF where there's insane homeless budgets but very little action and results and wonder if the monopoly on political power has made politicians here complacent.

Then there's the whole NIMBY thing. There's a whole lot of Democrats (arguably DINO's) that are very anti-building. They run under the Democrat banner so they'll probably keep getting re-elected. Obviously a solution here is people getting involved in local party politics to primary these candidates out, but that sounds like a miracle that'll happen as soon as we get nuclear fusion power plants.

The whole thing makes me wish 3rd party candidates were more viable in the US. This flip-flopping really sucks and creates a lot of chaos but political monopolies, from what I've seen, are able to hide mismanagement and bad policies really well. (Texas is probably a similar example from the other spectrum.)

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bsder6y ago· 3 in thread

You are choosing really bad examples, because Republicans are even more extreme than the Democrats on them.

Homelessness is an infinite money sink coupled with very problematic civil rights issues. It takes a unified effort at the federal level when states are willing to just ship their problems to other states. It also requires a unified effort at healthcare--both physical and mental. Nobody has come up with a good solution to homelessness yet--anywhere. If you have one, put it out there as lots of governments are desperate for a fix.

While NIMBY is bad irrespective of party, the YIMBY movement only started gaining traction once the Republicans were purged as the NIMBY movement could COUNT on them as a unified bloc of obstruction. And, as for NIMBY, renters outnumber property owners, yet don't show up to vote. Well, then what results do you think you're going to get?

As for Texas, it isn't as uniformly Republican as you think. The major cities are gaining significant Democratic representation (the Republicans just banned straight ticket voting because it destroyed them in Houston last cycle). You can also see this in the Covid-19 response--the mayors for big Texas cities almost uniformly shut down--Austin declared very early in order to avoid the disaster that would have been SXSW.

Yes, the gerrymandering in Texas is horrific, and the areas outside the cities are as stupid red as it gets. However, Texas isn't as unified as you think--in spite of the human-shaped Senator known as Ted Cruz.

cactus20936y ago

The homeless coming in from out of state turns out not to actually be that prevalent in practice. In LA, for instance, only 18% of currently homeless residents became homeless while living out of state [0]. So if you could magically get everyone from out of state off the streets, you'd still be left with 82% of the homeless population, i.e. there'd still be a big homeless problem.

To a first order approximation, the majority of homeless are simply residents who lose a job or can't earn enough money, can't afford their rent, and end up on the street. Making a lot more housing available so it's not so impossible to afford is clearly an important part of the solution, which we seemingly can't do as long as progressive democrats are in charge.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/06/us/homeless-population.ht...

bsder6y ago

Homelessness is, unfortunately, not a uniform block.

Some chunk are from out of state. Some chunk are mentally ill. Some chunk are addicted to drugs. Some chunk have physical ailments. Some chunk are fleeing abuse.

This is what makes homelessness so intractable. Even if you fix a chunk, that's probably less that 20% of the problem. Now, you've spent a lot of money, made no visible progress on the problem, and have a bunch of people clamoring about how you wasted money.

manigandham6y ago

> "As for Texas, it isn't as uniformly Republican as you think. The major cities are gaining significant Democratic representation"

This is because of Democrat-voting people leaving Democrat-led states and cities that are no longer functioning well. If their policies worked, why would they leave (for example) CA in record numbers to move to TX?

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