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Billionaire Tech Investors Support Divisive Plan To Ban San Francisco's Homeless Camps (techcrunch.com)
An anonymous reader shares a USA Today report: The images are startling: Homeless men, women and children huddled on the streets of the San Francisco Bay Area -- often in the shadows of start-ups and high-tech behemoths generating billions of dollars in wealth. It's a stark contrast that has gripped the region, and prompted four county measures on the Nov. 8 ballot to generate $3 billion over the next 25 years for affordable housing and services. Under the most-ambitious measure, San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee has proposed a 0.75% increase in the sales tax, to 9.5%, to raise $50 million a year. Propositions J and K would generate $1.2 billion for the next quarter-century via a simple majority. "There is clearly not enough affordable housing, or housing at any level," says Kevin Zwick, CEO of Housing Trust Silicon Valley.TechCrunch adds: The debate over what to do about San Francisco's homeless population has been building for awhile among the many startups and residents here. But now tech billionaires Ron Conway, Michael Moritz and well-to-do hedge fund manager William Oberndorf have each thrown about $50,000 behind a measure to rid San Francisco of its homeless tent cities. Other notable investors, including Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer's husband and venture capitalist Zach Bogue, have also donated. Bogue reportedly gave about $2,500 to support it.
SF gets the attention, but the whole BA has homeless. When you look at that larger picture, you realize the arguments about not having enough space aren't up to snuff. Water rights arguments would make more sense--except that it hasn't stopped development during boom times. No, it's really just that the equilibrium price of housing is too much, so you get working homeless/van dwellers, couch surfers, etc. Then of course there are the mentally ill homeless who want help and aren't really getting it, and then finally the hard core of mentally ill and/or obstinate people who are really hard to move off the streets.
Anyway, I digress. The solution needs to involve the whole BA, not just SF, and these guys aren't helping. They claim to be capitalists, but what would they say about getting rid of the restrictions on SROs, aka "flop houses" that you used to see all the time back in the 40s and 50s? Oh NOES! They'd say. That was when we were still living in a somewhat free country. Bring back the cheap flops, that would probably house most of the working homeless. Ditto for RV/trailer parks. That would be an affordable option for most working homeless, and it might even make the non-working homeless realize that it's worth cleaning up and flipping burgers so they can flop.
The mentally ill problem is a whole different ball game, and not enough time to rant here... but hey you big capitalists, until we actually have some REAL CAPITALISM, why don't you just stuff it?
Speak for yourself.
I live in Seattle, and I am more than enthusiastic about any plan that will help shelter our homeless neighbors. If I could vote a 10% income tax on myself to pay for making sure that everyone here has a safe place to sleep at night and to leave their belongings, I would.
I believe that mayor Murray's proposed plan announced yesterday is insufficient, but better than the status quo.
(In response to "well why don't you donate your money then" - first, I do, and secondly, one person's funds only do so much).
This is exactly the problem. Prices are a fairly straightforward function of supply and demand. Even look beyond the homeless in the city to other towns, such as San Jose around Tully/101/280. Go driving around those neighborhoods in the evenings and you see cars parked absolutely everywhere: lawns, sideyards, crammed and jammed up into garages and driveways and sidewalks, and of course good luck ever finding a spot on the street. Because San Jose, like San Francisco and the rest of the SF Bay Area, doesn't want to allow enough new residential units to be built each year, the supply of housing ends going only towards the wealthy or those who have a home and can afford to re-fi and use the cash as a downpayment. The rest, including the "working class,", have got nowhere to go because developers all but stopped investment in building anything they can even afford to rent, unless with a large group of strangers.
The better solution is don't "take" the money, just let developers choose how many units they want to invest in and they will remedy the problem, profitably, without stealing anyone's money.
I am really hoping the measure fails because the SF Bay Area has a pathetic history of wasting money on similar efforts (VTA doesn't go to SJC or connect to BART, there is a train that goes from Novato to Petaluma WTF) and the officials need to not have such a convenient cop-out every time this issue gets brought up. What is happening right now is a caste is forming with the landowners becoming a smaller percentage, huge swaths of the population being crammed into miserable housing that eats up all of their income, and I'm not sure this has a happy ending.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/...
This, I would give you mod points if I had 'em. I'm not against helping the less fortunate and homeless, but I would prefer where to donate my own money toward groups that I think my money will be best used, and not to a government that will spend to much for little gain, be taken advantage of by users, and have the fund raided for some other purpose eventually down the line, causing a request for yet more tax money to be raised for the 'solution'.
Now the more realistic problem: while there are a very small group of people that need assistance to 'get them back on their feet', there are unfortunately a larger group of people that for various reasons are homeless or in a state of 'constant need' that don't fall into that category. Most of the truely destitute out there, are mentally ill, and don't use the existing solutions that are in place currently to help them out. Many are substance abusers who aren't elegible for help or shelters because of a serious drug and alcohol problems. Nor are they willing to take advantage of free substance abuse programs to turn things around. There are dozens or more government assistance programs (federal and state) out there to give away money, food, subsidize shelter, free shelter, and so on, why will adding yet another program FIX this issue?
There are thousands of organizations, government and private, out there that help out the poor and needy. It's one of the main goals of many religious organizations, and tons of money is devoted to this cause. But many don't use those services, and end up in these situations anyway. In some cases, you lead a horse to water, but you can't make them drink comes to mind. Throwing more tax money at the problem isn't a guaranteed solution, and is rarely a solution at all.
As the OP said, there is nothing stopping you from donating more of your money to any of these organizations to help the problem, no need to vote on a tax to do it, other than because you like to force how others spend their money.
It's called capitalism. Supply and demand. That's America. Normal people move when they can't find work where they are. It happened in a massive way in the 2008 recession. There are 1 bedroom apartments starting at $700/mo in Detroit's city center - within walking distance from startup incubators, #20 on the Global Fortune 500, General Motors, and the nations 3rd largest mortgage originator, Quicken Loans just to name a few. Maybe try Dearborn, MI I think Ford employs a few people too. There is even cheaper housing in suburban (2br home for $875/mo) and rural areas ($550/mo). Take your pick. There are lots of places with cheap real estate and good jobs. It's unfortunate that homeless people are spoiled with the beautiful climate and endless handouts in California.
Amazing - so this is the attitude of the average citizen in God's own nation, where a higher percentage of people claim to believe in God and Christ and all that? "I want my quality of life and to hell with those worse off"?
It's one thing to say that we should care for our homeless, which we absolutely should. It's another thing to say that a handful of cities should bear the load for the entire nation. California, Oregon, and Washington have to pay for the bulk of the nation's failure to care for its people? That seems grossly unfair, especially since all of them already depend on us for food and culture and half of them depend on us for seaports.
If society - that is the ordinary members of society, not the state - does not care about those in need, then you will end up, like now, with a growing mass of people who are desperate and bittter against all those smug, well-fed idiots, that turned their back with some lame excuse.
We The People of The Western States are seriously fucking tired of dealing with the rest of the country's cockamamie bullshit. California is one of the states that gets raped on taxes by the federal government; our income taxes go to pay for stuff in other states that we can't afford, like freeway dots that don't get scraped off by plows (we have snow in the north, whatever you may have heard) without being located in deep wells that catch rocks and draw vehicles off course (into the oncoming lane!) when drivers stray onto the lines. And then those states literally have the audacity to put homeless people on buses to California? Well, fuck that.
As a nation we can handle the tired, poor, and huddled masses. But California cannot foot the bill for the rest of the country. Which, by the way, is the part that's claiming to be so fucking godly. We especially can't do it while paying your taxes.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"