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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.
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/...
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.'"