Washington State Ban on the Unhoused
Washington State Ban on the Unhoused
“Hey, we really don’t want you out here on the street, so we’re gonna have to do something about it.”
“You’re gonna give us homes?”
“lol no”
You either give them homes or you line them up and shoot them. Those are the only two options.
Though if bullets are too expensive you can just gas them and then cremate them, which might be a more efficient Final Solution to The Homeless Question.
American eugenics sought to solve poverty by forcibly sterilizing the poor. The only reason it fell out of favor was the great depression when suddenly people who were once employed decided that maybe this wasn't fair now that they were about to be sterilized.
Which ties back in nicely to WW2, I unfortunately have to give some of the lawyers at the nunumberg trials praise for arguing "How can America sit in judgement of Nazi concentration camps when eugenics has been established legal by the Supreme Court?"
Anyways, economic eugenics is coming back in fashion thanks to NIMBYs that just can't stand to see the results of treating the basics to life as commodities.
Absolutely correct, if they can't just pull themselves up from their own bootstraps they clearly are not worthy to be alive. Just get a job and quit drugs, that's the capitalistic dream.
Instead of gas chambers and transporting them we could just use trucks and put a hose from the exhaust to the back of the truck, way older method for less densely populated areas.
Oh and for the big cities we could establish self cleaning suicide booths.
Anakin staring at Padme meme
We stopped being a free country after the patriot act
You mean Reagan right.
The military industrial response to Vietnam protests and the utter unpopularity of an evil war that continues for decades and still has scars on America let alone SE Asia for me is the defining turn post WWII. Ike himself, as a general, directly stated the greatest threat to American democracy was the military industrial complex. The threats have multiplied since then.
The Atomic Cafe is a great documentary made solely with archival footage including the Ike quote above. It's chilling hearing that said 60+ years ago by a general and sitting president.
JFK's assassination.
Edit: Fun little song
I blame Polk, personally. But Reagan gets some credit.
Were we ever free though?
The freedom promised by the constitution rang hollow on every enslaved person, every native, and every woman and every other marginalized group when it was written, and it still rings rather hollow now.
Were we ever free though?
All men were created equal, right? Except women, PoC, queer folk, non christians, catholics (sometimes), the Irish, the bottom 99% and so on.
The freedom promised by the constitution rang hollow on every enslaved person, and every woman.
I think freedom is qualified differently here. You're free to own property. Then we "democratically" decide who and what can be owned as property based on our interpretation of the Jedi ancient texts.
/s
I hear a lot of Americans use that word. Online but also in real life. But what does freedom in the sense of a "free" country even mean?
It sounds like a propaganda term that does not have a clear definition.
Once asked some stranger at a burger place in San Francisco if it would be likely if the police would stop me walking around with a cup of coke (to check if I have alcohol in there). I really did not want a confrontation with the police. They said better not risk it. Talked to them a bit. Very friendly people but they also said that a lot of problems in the US are because they have too much "freedom" but asked what that even means they couldn't answer me.
At the same time the only reason I even talked to them was because I did not have the freedom to walk around with an open alcohol container... Which I would be free to do in many places in Europe.
I think this word is just a way to evoke emotions and knee-jerk reactions and should probably be avoided...
Gonna risk going a bit against the grain here…
I have a lot of empathy for their situation.
I don’t know what the solution is but it isn’t the status quo. A lot of the west coast cities are having a disproportionate problem with homeless. It’s not clear if people are bussing their homeless or the housing prices or what.
The amount of trash generated by these homeless camps is nuts and ruins virtually every public space. In Portland, it is common to find hypodermic needles littered in the parks. You’ll walk past people on the sidewalk passed out with a needle in their arm or actively doing drugs. Human excrement on the sidewalk. I wish I had some solution but the current situation sucks for everyone.
A lot of the west coast cities are having a disproportionate problem with homeless.
Prices go up, rents go up, wages stay flat.
Oops! Where did all the homeless people come from?!
The amount of trash generated by these homeless camps is nuts and ruins virtually every public space.
We live in a society of disposable things, but we don't provide homeless people with trash service.
You don't see the trash you generate, because the city carts it away. Homeless people are forced to live in their own squalor because the city doesn't cart it away.
I understand why trash, drugs, and homelessness occur. What I don’t understand is how to fix it.
The cities do clean trash up at, I should probably find a source for this, a significant cost. (From what I understand, this is due to the hazardous nature of the materials being cleaned up) Because these encampments can pop up anywhere, it’s not always practical to provide trash receptacles/dumpsters before it becomes a big problem. Having folks clear out during daytime hours at least helps that situation, but it’s far from ideal. It appears that Victoria BC is/was doing this and the atmosphere seemed a lot better overall when compared to Portland. Green spaces were usable, no major trash piles (that I saw) and homeless folks weren’t hassled when trying to sleep. I should note that I’m far from educated on Victorias homeless woes so there’s probably nuance here.
It’s not entirely clear how much power cities have to stop the housing crisis on their own, but I get the impression that the high cost of rent is mostly out of their control. Additionally, a lot of cities often do not have the resources to provide these services at the level they’re needed. It seems like there should be some level of expectation for every city/county/state whatever to provide services for a percentage of their population and organization to route folks from high saturated services to lower saturated services… and then sweep folks who refuse services… but the devil is in the details I’m sure.
I'm with you that that is inappropriate in public, and west coast cities are being hit super hard. The dirt little secret is that many interior cities do also run their homeless out.
But the research shows the fastest, most sure fire way to reduce the problem is to just give folks a permanent address that is safe.
Every effort should be made to give these folks a home, even if that home is some sort of rapid mass manufacture box with a door that locks.
I do acknowledge that the states on the west coast shouldn't be the only ones that need to follow that approach, and there clearly isn't a solution for that. I.e. a state should be rapidly obligated to house IT'S homeless, not ALL OF AMERICA'S homeless... But that is a very complicated layer
I’m with you on this. It seems like it’d have to be a coalition of states or the federal government tackling it. That seems impossible at the moment though.
I fully support whatever level of housing we can provide for folks that have the bare necessities… water, sewer, trash, and safety. Also agree that there would need to be some cap on services…. As a city could go bankrupt if the regions folks had flocked to them.
Portland had a few self regulated slightly better than tent cities that, as far as I could tell, had a pretty reasonable compromise. Not ideal… but they provided stability for folks and, if someone caused trouble or brought drugs in, they got kicked out. Better, at least, than the current situation of chaos, drugs, and trash everywhere.
a state should be rapidly obligated to house IT’S homeless, not ALL OF AMERICA’S homeless
This is unconstitutional under the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the 14th Amendment.
So all a homeless person would have to do is travel to any state; claim residence, which wouldn't be hard since they don't exactly have a home; and then petition the state for housing. I didn't have a primary address and did this a few months ago, and was able to get SNAP and Medicaid through the state.
Give them homes. That's the solution. It's actually that simple.
A studio apartment can be over $3,000 in the Bay Area. Meanwhile, there are like five homeless people on every block of the city I lived in with five-digit population. The city would need to find some way to seize land, without calling for a vote, in order to have enough housing for everyone since rent control has been voted against for over a decade.
The main issue is that people would vote to drive the homeless into the sea before they would vote to house them.
It's far more complicated than that for many of the homeless. A really high proportion have chronic mental health problems like schizophrenia, depression, and bipolar disorder. These people cannot maintain even a basic apartment. Fires are common. As are faeces smeared on the walls, major structural damage, dead animals, bullet holes and use of firearms inside the premises. Throwing a mentally unwell person into a home to fend for themselves doesn't work. The mental health treatment has to come first. It can take months, if not years, to help them out of their hole.
Another significant portion of the homeless have chronic addiction. In addiction treatment, we say that "a locking door is a death sentence" because the LAST thing you want is to give a junky unsupervised privacy to shoot up as often as they like. Apartments often turn into local hubs for dealing and sex work. This attracts all kinds of unsavory characters and crime - especially violent crime. You don't want to know what a junky would be willing to do to get a fix. A major part of this problem is called "destigmatization." This is a great documentary on how it has so thoroughly failed in Vancouver, specifically.
Both groups require intensive support before being given housing. Not after and not at the same time.
The problem is there are a lot of NIMBYs that would rather them trash their cities than hang out in their neighborhoods lowering their property value. They want the government to fix the problem, but don’t want their taxes raised to accommodate it.
The people who protect the homeless are every bit as responsible for the problem as anyone they accuse.
They just need to go home. /s
Bill Hicks, who wasn't funny, said it best. The Land of the Free... if you've got the money.
"We'll just make it illegal to be poor" is such an American take.
Have you tried "kill all the poor"?
Yea, but then they stopped joining the military, so now we don't know what to do.
I thought washington had good support homeless. What gives?
Def not. Seattle had a really huge explosion from the pandemic. There was the huge encampent in international district near chinatown and seattle's skid row towards 3rd st
The city hasn't really addressed the problem and are usually just sweeping it under the rug by shuffling the people around
Encampments do not represent the entire homeless community. Those most visible encampments, littered with garbage and needles, are largely addicts or sometimes people with mental health issues.
Shuffling people around combats the street barricades and open air Fenty and gives respite to the communities that were hosting the camps.
Lots of places swung hard the other way after the pandemic. That said there's literally no easy this is constitutional and it's already been ruled on. Some civil rights place will take it on for an easy slam dunk.
I don't think the Constitution permits sleeping in any public space, but the ACLU is challenging on Eighth Amendment grounds in Grants Pass v. Johnson. So we'll know soon enough if it's Constitutional.
Not a lot you can do when the state government is actively trying to kill you
Every time when I think I have bad government I remind myself that it is at least not us gov. Hell iirc whole city of Chicago regressed massively under some mayor right? I remember once it being like a go to destination for ppl. It’s possible that we offloaded some white trash there and it contributed I guess.
Lemme tell you it got a lot safer here after all the freaks went to chase the american dream.
I'm sure they're terribly appreciative of you referring to them as "unhoused" so you can feel just a tiny bit morally superior to those that just call them homeless 😂
I think bums deserve respect and kindness from all of us. A lot of the time bums suffer from mental health issues caused by shame and trauma and that needs to be addressed with care and humility. These are human beings and how we treat our most vulnerable is a greater reflection of how we treat each other as a society. We need to help bums not only out of kindness but out of respect for society and ourselves as a whole.
I mean, the term before homeless was literally street people. Terms change as they start to sound callous.
When I was homeless I definitely had less home. Arguably, I was occasionally "housed". I will always prefer "homeless" because to me it's the "home" part that mattered, not the "house".
Probably unpopular opinion: The only people who care if you say "unhoused" vs "homeless" are those who are either not themselves "unhoused" or "homeless" or are "unhoused" by some degree of choice and have the luxury of being less "unhoused" in the future.