This is unfortunately all too true.
A primary root cause of homelessness is lack of affordable housing. We should be working towards policies and solutions that foster more "market rate" affordable housing, not affordable housing via government programs or nonprofit organizations.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/02/how-finland-solved-ho...
For one, drugs won the war on drugs, addiction is a big part of the problem, and we don't really know how to fix it; harsh punishments don't work, quasi-decriminalization isn't a success, and treatment for people who don't want to be helped is hard. We also don't like to institutionalize people anymore, so folks with severe mental illness often end up on the streets too.
These people try and try to solve their debilitating chronic pain problem (which they still have, and likely will always have) through increasingly-desperate and illegal measures; and go through many harrowing things due almost solely of the illegality of acquiring these same drugs outside of medical channels: the difficulties of finding a source and potential for arrest; the income-eating expense (no insurance to cover costs, plus 10x risk markup); the heightened spike-dose addictiveness of street forms of these drugs, that leads to a quick fiending withdrawal and need to redose, leading in turn to loss of employment due to spending all your time on the street hunting for the next dose; and of course, the unpredictable dosing and potential for adulteration, leading into high potential for OD.
Most of this particular problem can (and in some trials, has!) been solved just by prescribing these people the drugs they need again. When you go from unpredictably doing random shots of freebase heroin/fentanyl/etc with a dirty needle alone in an alley, back to predictably being able to get precisely-dosed extended-release pills from a pharmacy and take them on a set schedule, a lot of “addict behaviors” for these chronic-pain “addicts” just evaporate.
They do if they are very harsh, see Singapore, Indonesia etc. America doesn't want to that.
What a great line.
I'm not personally talking about homelessness in SF per se.
Nah, I think that is still a consequence. The root cause is the fundamental assumption that homes should be a commodity that is bought, sold and rented out for profit, rather than something that everyone needs for survival. We should be looking at ways to limit the market here, or finding ways to not treat houses as a commodity, or something for rent-seeking
My intuitive sense is that the proportion of rented housing probably has a seesaw effect on the price of owned housing vs the price of rented housing. If you want them both to go down it's necessary to build a lot more housing.
Why the 'not'? Those options are not mutually exclusive and are in fact complementary. Liberalising overly restrictive zoning laws across the USA can improve supply from all three sectors: for-profit, non-profit and local government, thus encouraging market-rate affordability.
Housing will get more expensive and the rich will keep getting richer, as per usual, while the politicians will keep making vague empty political promises about housing affordability when the election time comes.
I'm not holding my breath this will be solved ever in my lifetime, unless war or a violent revolution resets the monopoly board.
Affordable housing is not rocket science nor a novel or hard problem to solve. IMO the root cause is that there's a serious issue with the sustainability of the US political system (and its fiat currency) in general.
The author knows that, but includes the innuendo anyways, which makes me think he can't make a better case than that. Ick.
> Freedom Project’s executive director at the time was David Heppard who was convicted as a teenager for taking part in the gang rape of a pregnant seventeen-year-old.
And here's what the author COULD have said:
> On February 18, 1994, Heppard and five of his friends spotted a five-months pregnant 17-year-old who is referred to in court filings as “J.H.” Cecil Morton III, one of Heppard’s co-defendants, proposed raping J.H. Morton stopped the car and he, Heppard, and a third member of the group forced the pregnant girl into the back seat. She begged them not to hurt her and Morton threatened her into silence with a machete; someone in the vehicle told her that if she didn’t shut up, they would kill her unborn baby.
> They drove her into the woods where five or six of them raped her orally and vaginally. J.H. was then forced back into the vehicle completely naked and was ordered to direct them to her apartment. Some of the boys threatened that if she failed to do so, they would murder her and dismember her corpse.
> Along the way, Heppard orally sodomized the terrified girl a second time and she was raped by two of his co-defendants upon their arrival. As the pregnant 17-year-old girl was being raped for the third time that night, the boys who weren’t otherwise occupied robbed her apartment, stealing a number of items belonging to her and her boyfriend. They then left the apartment, telling her that if she ratted them out, they would come back to kill her.
> Once the boys were gone, their victim called a friend, who contacted the police on her behalf. Coincidentally, Heppard and his partners in crime were pulled over by Pierce County police officers at the same time the rape was reported. A call came over their radio regarding the assault, but the cops did not make the connection between the rape and the teenagers they were questioning; however, the rapists heard the report and were now aware that their victim had contacted the police. Heppard and Morton allegedly began plotting to have the girl murdered, but were arrested before she could be silenced.
If you want to make a claim that rehabilitation is impossible, or that he's not rehabilitated, then do so. If you want to state that it goes to the point being made in the article, that hiring felons with a violent history is common, then do so. I don't think the article is indefensible, but these additional details without context to make them relevant don't add much.
Instead, it's just another instance of exactly the discrediting rhetoric I'm talking about.
What makes this worse is, this nonprofit does not look like a compelling use of public dollars, and an effective case could probably be made against it on the merits. Instead, it's just culture war bait. Since we're in a 50/50 culture, that means the entire argument is a push; we'll have to wait for someone else to move the dials on whether we fund organizations like this.
His history with the criminal justice system is a fact, but the intention in the article is to discredit him for a debt to his community that has long been paid.
This is just libel.
It's not libel; it's just an opinionated argument that you dislike, so much so that you want to stop the other person from speaking.
I recognize that this is a common, long standing idiom but it doesn’t make any sense.
Inasmuch as he had a debt, even abstractly, it was to his victim. And sitting in prison at large net cost to taxpayer isn’t paying anything to anyone.
That probably has more to do with Russian oligarchs being enabled to sue critical news organisations into bankruptcy.
If factual truth is not enough, you are in deep shit.
In Switzerland there's the "Stiftungsaufsicht". That's a supervision office for trusts.
Does the USA and its states know such institutes?
The IRS should be really interested in not granting tax breaks to profit-oriented organizations masquerading as nonprofits.
[1] I'm relying on https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stiftung
[2] In practice oversight of charitable trusts is minimal unless someone complains and there are resources to investigate. As is typical in common law jurisdictions, the rule is ask for forgiveness, not permission. Charitable trusts are typically only scrutinized when a beneficiary complains, AFAIU. Anyhow, at least in the US charitable trusts are basically just a large pile of assets with an administrator who writes checks to charitable corporations, so there's not much to oversee and illicit self-dealing is relatively less common.
Aren't most?
> nonprofit organizations hire convicted felons—including murderers, gang leaders, sex offenders, and rapists—who go on to commit more felonies
...because a criminal conviction is always 100% correct and should disqualify the person from ever being given a chance again, right? And of course, all of them will inevitably commit more felonies, after all they are born evil, they can't help it...
This type of unaccountable grift is common in Seattle. During the height of BLM, the city gave lots of money and even public property to random organizations. Taxpayers hard earned money was not just diverted away from core city needs but not really tracked. The same has been true of unaccountable programs to combat homelessness (the “homeless-industrial complex”), with little in terms of metrics to understand what was happening.
A lot of this happened because most citizens are too busy to keep track of these things, while activists push for spending on their ideological pet projects, and activist city leaders respond by handing out checks without any competitive process (picking sole winners of contracts) or real public input (hearings are swarmed by activists and held at inaccessible times and the general public isn’t even aware they’re happening).
Some example sources to read more: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/state-aud...
https://sccinsight.com/2021/07/29/the-black-brilliance-resea...
Like anything, there are good and bad examples. Seems inevitable that there is some corruption in the spirit of it.
Don't know how you'd police that.... TLDR on the article. I'll markov summarise it and see if it thought of some ways around the bad players.
https://komonews.com/news/local/seattle-public-schools-sps-e...
Your comment only makes sense if you view “black people” as an amorphous blob, essentially defined by their ethnicity and not as individually distinct people.
Yuck.
Something like this should be illegal: https://www.vox.com/recode/22321861/jeff-bezos-climate-earth...
First, Bezos steals money from hard-working employees and tax payers. Then he takes billions and funnels them into climate politics that no tax payer asked for.
https://laist.com/news/politics/orange-county-andrew-do-supe...
This can not only be seen by the masters degrees available - (higher ed. Administration , healthcare administration , etc.) but also ironically by those higher education institutions themselves. As student financing dollars go toward schools, people are there to absorb those dollars through employment in higher education and it's ecosystem. One could argue the merits of having decades of student future salaries garnished to subsidize employment at these institutions, but try explaining that to someone with a career in higher education. This is just one example of the push and pull of providing employment compared to the mandate of efficient production.
Of course the stakeholders funding institutions must decide the merits of employment programs (in the form of non profits) vs. the merits of the production of the institution. The answer, being complex may only be born though strong citizen engagement in civic processes where one advocates for and directs the mandate of that institution.
specially if it is focused on development policies or econometry.
its all a joke. they have just enough math that the average person struggles, then they drop the last steps and approximate everything in a way that completely defeats the purpose of using math at all! its all just to hand wave while pretending to be a science.
they still base all econometry knowledge on crap like the RAND workforce study (1960) or something. it's all a cult full of useful idiots who think they are making a difference because they laboured up to 80% of a couple derivatives.
but on the end, it does work for race to the bottom after short term profits. so...
The facts it shares are fascinating and damning.
I never thought I’d care so much about “Chilean Sea Bass.”
It's like if I said, build systems are awful and too much dev time goes to maintaining them, a build system was almost used in a clever hack by a state level actor, Kevin Mitnick, a Convicted Felon, used Make when coding hacking tools he used in his crimes, build systems are a problematic abstraction and we should avoid unnecessary abstractions in coding, and therefore we should call compilers directly from the command line.
Maybe we should do public social housing like this article suggests, I actually agree with that, but the above is hardly a measured article in support of that, anymore than I laid out a great case for invoking a compiler directly.
The issue is really there is a lack of genuine desire to solve the problem because the cruelty and baked-in lies within American self-reliance philosophy put such a solution outside the Overton window of what is possible.
Instead of a one-time investment, we dump more than $6 billion into the problem but never solve it.
Even if you could do this for your extremely underestimated price tag, getting the “chronically” homeless (the people on the street we typically imagine as the homeless) to maintain a property without being a nuisance to neighbors and actually use the social services would require an entirely new social service of its own, with legions case workers being assigned to people, etc.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t build more cheap housing near social services, but I think statements like this profoundly underestimate and trivialize a problem that goes very deep - namely, the complete lack of societal safety nets and access to quality healthcare, all of which is exacerbated by a lack of housing.
At the highest level, obviously the problem can't be solved with a one time purchase of 600k homes. The homes will be worn out and require replacing, some of them very rapidly, and their number will need to grow with time as new people requiring homes come to the city or drop out of regular housing. How many more homes do you need to build each year after the initial batch?
Furthermore, this number of homes has an infrastructure cost which isn't captured in your 10k figure. How much does it cost to hook each one into the grid, water and sewage? Without these they will be spoiled immediately.
And what of the land cost? Tiny homes aren't usually high rises, so you'll be creating tiny home suburban sprawl. Where do you put it? It should be close to city services, otherwise you might as well make it a camp in the wilderness. But it would be an inefficient use of space close to the city where land is generally valuable, and the cost of the land needs to be factored into it.
Furthermore you need to consider the impact to property values this housing project will have. Reduced property values means reduced revenue, from property taxes, from the city. This should be included in the cost of the project when proposing it.
BLM in particular has been egregious. Not a single positive thing or a dollar has been spent to actually improve black neighborhoods but the leaders have enriched themselves.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/black-live...
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/04/black-lives-matter-6...
Marilyn Mosby, Baltimore’s former top prosecutor and a BLM activist, was convicted of perjury and fraudulently claiming Covid hardship to get tens of thousands of dollars for her vacation homes. https://thepostmillennial.com/no-jail-time-for-former-dem-ba...
A BLM activist who was the diversity executive at Facebook and Nike has been sentenced to more than five years in prison for stealing over $5 million. https://thepostmillennial.com/diversity-exec-scams-facebook-...
This article is comingling vastly different political ideologies. Very few anarchists would have any interest in engaging the political system to solve problems, since most anarchists believe the political system is one of the systems originating the problems society faces today.
There is an alignment between anarchists, socialists, leftists, progressives, and even some liberals (very few!) in police abolitionism, but only because the police are so wildly out of control in the USA that it's easy to align along the general idea of "starting over." And even then, liberals seem to be performative in this support - as soon as students started protesting genocide against Palestinians, liberals predictably started asking why the police aren't out there brutalizing these "student terrorists." Anti-houseless spikes painted with a rainbow flag.
> Although progressives want the government to fund public programs, their opposition to centralized state power means they often don’t want the government to run the programs being funded.
In my opinion a total mischaracterization. Leftists and DSA types absolutely support centralized state power and socialization / nationalization - go read their takes on public transit and public housing. This whole article is describing neoliberal politicians allowing capitalists to do capitalism however they please, which is in line with neoliberal ideology. San Francisco is the best example of the failure of neoliberal ideology, and just because it's a city full of dirty anarchists doesn't mean said dirty anarchists have any political power - SF is politically neoliberal through and through.
> What is taking place in America’s most performatively socialist urban areas is that taxes are constantly raised in order to fund public services
I don't understand where the author gets the idea that American urban areas are "performatively socialist" from a politician standpoint. American politicians in every city are famously, painfully neoliberal. Eric Adams mischaracterizing and verbally attacking peaceful protesters. London Breed called the cops on a homeless guy she saw laying on a bench. Ted Wheeler pathetically tried to co-opt Black Lives Matter protests before being roundly rejected and then sending the cops to brutalize peaceful protesters. American urban politicians are not socialist nor are they performatively so.
> where “socialists” privatize government services at every opportunity;
I just don't see this happening. I see neoliberal Democrats doing this, but never avowed socialists. Happy to be corrected. So far as I know even SF has only ever had one avowed socialist politician, Chesa Boudin, and as soon as he was elected every politician in the city banded together to tank his career. Never has such as microscope been pointed at a District Attorney, with predictable results. Everyone was happy to take a potshot and cash in on the socialist under whom violent crime was dropping and who was prosecuting an "unusually high" volume of cases.
At least the author isn't leaning into the privatization and pointing out the obvious issues this is causing. I would be interested in seeing an analysis on how leftist ideology offering actual solutions is being co-opted by neoliberals serving the same cause as the reactionaries they run against every election.
Surely you’ve heard of Dean Preston, the DSA member of the Board of Supervisors who owns a $2.5m house in the city and is also the least pro-housing member on the Board?
While I don’t think housing in SF is socialist, it’s also about as far from neoliberal as is possible, with rent control, zoning and complex environmental review process. These also happen to be the means Dean uses to block development, and has been in place in the city for decades now. Whatever is causing the housing problems in SF at least, it’s not neoliberalism.
> Preston authored San Francisco's 2018 Proposition F, which directs the city to establish a universal right to counsel for tenants facing eviction
> Preston and other supervisors rejected the budget cuts and instead approved a $750,000 increase (to the same program which had received 4 million budget cuts from London Breed)
> In April 2020, Preston introduced an ordinance to permanently bar eviction of tenants for failure to pay rent because of issues related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
> Preston again introduced legislation to extend eviction protections in May 2021 as the state-wide eviction moratorium in effect at the time was due to expire.
> In April 2020, Preston co-introduced legislation with Supervisors Matt Haney, Hillary Ronen and Shamann Walton to require Mayor Breed to secure 8,250 hotel rooms to house the homeless during the COVID-19 pandemic
He does seem to oppose "free-market" "solutions" to homelessness, including unfettered development. He does appear socialist in action:
> Preston also introduced two ballot initiatives... Proposition K authorizes the city of San Francisco to build or acquire up to 10,000 units of affordable housing
State housing is socialist.
> Preston successfully proposed in the Board of Supervisors to appropriate $10 million from the funds raised by Proposition I to fund rent relief and $10 million to fund additional affordable housing.
Direct payments in rent relief is a somewhat socialist-aligned thing (would be better to simply cut out the middleman and socialize the property itself) though you're right, whiffs of neoliberal capitalist intervention.
> he fought to secure additional affordable housing funding including $40 million for land acquisition
That is out and out socialist, to have the government buy land to build housing on.
> In October 2021, Preston voted against the construction of a 495-unit apartment complex (one-quarter of which were designated as affordable housing) on a parking lot next to a BART station. Preston said that the construction of the apartment complex on the parking lot was "gentrification."
That is, indeed, super odd.
This person strikes me as absolutely a virtue-signalling, somewhat shallow politician, though I don't know if they're only a performative socialist, they seem to be adopting readily socialist concepts. They seem to be seeking the creation of a public bank, opposed to public transit fare increases, proposed free public transit, and opposed to increased police funding.
Accusations of champagne socialism don't really hold water, there's nothing inherently unsocialist about owning an expensive house (or even being mildly wealthy), especially considering he apparently has owned it since 1999. If he was renting it out, absolutely that would be hypocritical. If there were no billionaires in America, this would be worth more scrutiny. As it stands, it appears it would take several thousand Dean Prestons to make one billionaire, so I'm not really concerned.
> Whatever is causing the housing problems in SF at least, it’s not neoliberalism.
Dean Preston being a socialist or not doesn't really matter in terms of the greater question of whether SF is a neoliberal or socialist government - it's absolutely not a socialist government or comprised of socialist politicians. If Dean Preston and Chesa Boudin are the "most socialist" politicians the city has to offer, then, no.
Whether neoliberalism is the cause of the homeless problem in SF is another issue entirely. I'd say no, because I believe the homeless problem in SF is not just due to neoliberal failures in the city, but also the state being reactionary america's undesirables dumping ground, and the USA in general going through a critical period of late-stage capitalism that's increasing homelessness all over the country. Even an outright communist politician, should they somehow manage to get elected to a board of supervisors or even mayoral position in SF, can't really do much if the entire rest of the local and state government will immediately throw them under the bus (as happened with Chesa Boudin) or if the local, state, and federal government model itself seriously restricts the legal actions the person can take, guardrails at all levels to ensure the politician always serves neoliberal / conservative capitalist interests.
The possible solutions are therefore very obvious, either bring these services back into direct local government control or in the case of a tenants association require it to be tenant-owned and democratically governed.
this is iso9000 but for eco-conscious consumers instead of investors.
want to sell the torment Nexus, but need wholefoods to place it next to the organic avocados? bcorp was made exactly for this. just pay certification to this non profit. *shrugemoji
And no, weather is not the most important reason for why so many homeless come here. If it were, San Diego would have a worse homeless problem than San Francisco.
The most important difference is that the city of San Diego spends one third as much as San Francisco per homeless person. ($46.8 million in city spending[1] for an estimated 1900 homeless.[2])
The HIC uses every virtue-signaling, heart-tugging propaganda tool at its disposal to increase the flow of money thrown into its bottomless maw, despite no metric ever improving one bit whatsoever.
[0] <https://abc7news.com/sf-homeless-plan-housing-all-san-franci...>
[1] <https://www.lajollalight.com/news/story/2023-04-15/san-diego...>
[2] <https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-02-07/downtown...> [3]
[3] The count is only of the homeless in downtown San Diego. While presumably most homeless San Diegans are there, just as there are very few San Franciscans living on the sidewalk in Pac Heights, the point is that a larger number would mean that much less spending per homeless person in the city as a whole, and that much more glaring a discrepancy between the two cities.
If you construct a housing cooperative that has the following properties the entity should be incentivized to maximize the number of housing units:
1. Each tenant must own shares of the coop. 2. Shares per member are capped. 3. Profit must be reinvested 4. New shares can only be issued for new units build.
Rather than subsidizing rent, the government can subsidize the building of new housing, the corresponding shares can be handed over to new tenants.
Since tenants are shareholders, the system stabilizes at a point where rent and living conditions are acceptable.
In Germany this type of construction is called a “Wohnungsgenossenschaft”, and receives some tax incentives. Currently about 3 Million people are living in flats provided like this. It’s probably one of the only working pieces of socialism.
New York City also has co-ops but for very different reasons: To screen potential owners.
One of the few organizations that made the cut for me is Hearts of Joy International. They help arrange lifesaving heart surgery for small children who have Down Syndrome, usually paying for the patient and one parent to travel from Uganda or the Philippines to India for the surgery.
There really isn't a way to use policy to cause more children to be born with heart defects and Down Syndrome. Nobody's at fault when that happens, and the young child who needs the surgery is as innocent as it gets.
Tangentially, I made another personal rule against supporting nonprofits that do their fundraising by focusing on how "evil" their opponents are and how dangerous things would be if the other side "wins." That's meant not supporting certain organizations even when I agree with them that what their opponents are doing is evil.
I just don't trust that any organization can overcome evil by focusing on the evil. Too many things can be justified in a "battle against evil." If you want to win, you have to be focused on the good you can do, not the evil you prevent.
The only thing the government is providing is compulsorily forcing people to pay into the pool. So the fact that money is being spent on things that people wouldn't willingly commit to is actually the only feature of this system. IE, it is less unexpected than the author may believe.
Non profits at their best provide services that any half decent government should provide but do it at a fraction of the efficiency that the government could.
At their worst they are private individuals spending tax payers money (that’s what tax breaks actually are) on personal causes and self enrichment.
That’s why it’s interesting seeing a right wing publication advocating for fewer non profits, I’m all for it. Cut tax breaks for non profits, reduce funding of non profits and fund government to provide the services.
LOL, what a big pile of bullshit.
- freedom
- democracy
Lots of people are able to laugh at people who believe in the "freedom!" meme of America, but almost no one can do the same for "democracy".
If there was a list of most powerful magic words, Democracy would be very close to the top of the list, right along God and Science.
