San Francisco homeless sweep was cheered on by the right. It was also illegal

I'll take "it was legal at the time" for a thousand, Alex.

The law is a essentially the enforceable moral code of the state that enforces it. Most criminal laws were created to penalise acts that are considered morally reprehensible. I wouldn't say the law is an afterthought around morality but a reflection of the morality of the state. The laws are largely written by the capitalistic class and are a reflection of what they consider right and wrong.

When it comes to actions of government agents, though, following the law is the most basic form of accountability, and unaccountable governments are never good.

A philosophical argument that goes all the way back to Socrates.

Where is that money going, I wonder

Most long-term homeless people can't just be given free apartments - they have serious, often untreatable problems that would make such a solution unsustainable.

10 months to go until the Bell Riots.

But I'm sure YOUR door is open to house the homeless right?

Agreed. I'd go a bit further. Anything regarding sustenance should be a right:

Housing, healthcare, access to clean water, clean air, at least one hot meal a day, and emergency services should be a right.

I'll even go as far as arguing that internet access should be included in that list.

Better yet, college

Because solving homelessness is counter-productive to running a capitalist society.

Yeah, the best solution I've seen is lots of small, private housing. Basically, give people a bed and a locking door, and they have a way better chance of turning their life around. Let people stay as long as they're not violating the rules, and don't violate their privacy.

Why is it when progressives carry out an illegal sweep of homeless people, and conservatives cheer it, we get a story about conservatives?

I remember homeless people doing exactly that in Santa Cruz back in the eighties to great success.

However, public sentiment over the past thirty years really seems to have swung aggressively toward the fuck you I got mine so die end of the pendulum.

They also miraculously appeared. San Francisco is a sanctuary city. There are countless cities that just ship off their homeless and make the residents deal with it. The weather does not help either. California is great for homelessness due to the lack of a true winter.

But as a resident it is hard to know how to help and still see them constantly coming.

If you read really, really critically, you’ll notice the entire article is about who cheered the move, not who actually did it.

Who did this sweep? Who is actually responsible for it?

WACO?

Link?

If the streets were cleaned by putting people in housing, it would be worth celebrating, but there's nothing left wing about people being displaced from where you personally live. Even if those "people on the left" have certain left wing values, it's right wing selfishness that made them happy. Those homeless people just got pushed elsewhere and those areas have to deal with a rise in the unhoused. The streets can only be, "cleaned," by housing people, otherwise you're just sweeping the, "filthy poors," into another person's area.

From an amoral economic perspective, we should either get people shelter and make them productive members of society, or just hasten their inevitable deaths on the streets by executing them ourselves. Give them a helping hand, or accept that we don't think that they deserve life if they can't play the capitalist game. The current approach costs us more money, prolongs their suffering, but gives us plausible deniability through ignorance. Fuck ignorance. Just embrace that the system is evil.

To solve homelessness would mean to completely upend the entire world's economy and change to a global socialist structure. Homelessness is baked into our economic system. Capitalism is a zero sum game and if we're going to celebrate having billionaires, we have to celebrate having people live and die on the street.

No I heard yous solved the problem by calling them uNhOuSEd

Aren't property taxes tied to the value of the house? Expensive houses bring more tax dollars to the government.

Much of the homelessness problem in America is really untreated mental health problems. A lot comes from not having universal healthcare.

Also, most jobs are in cities where housing is more expensive. We also have a shitty minimum wage, and a minimum wage job can’t buy a studio apartment and food in most areas where there are jobs.

Also, average and even median income is not a great measure of the wealth of the poor. The US Gino coefficient (a measure of income inequality) is poor compared to most other developed countries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_equality

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient

while having pretty much the cheapest real estate in the world (relative to income)

If that's true, considering young people in the U.S. can't afford to buy houses and end up living with their parents for 15 years after they turn 18, I'd hate to know what it's like in other countries.

There was a bill that was passed by the Clinton administration in the 90s that limits the amount of residential property the federal government is allowed to own. They also passed some concessions that make it so that a reduction in unpopular government spending cannot equate to an increase of spending on social programs.

Yeah, but why would we do that when we could just tell them to pull themselves up by their bootstraps?

Don't use California as a metric for American homelessness. California has made itself a veritable Mecca for homeless people by passing laws that allow them to set up camp virtually anywhere. Those laws, combined with its naturally temperate climate have resulted in 30% of America's homeless population living in California. No other state in the U.S. has such a hard-on for homeless people and we have much more sensible laws that reflect that.

The real answer is that people feel entitled to live in major cities so they don't go to the areas where there is cheap real estate.

They think supply and demand doesn't apply to them, and they have plenty of other entitled city-dwellers to support them.

Unfortunately, reality is just different than what they want. They don't want to admit that though, so they just sit around and wait for other people to solve their problems.

They're still waiting.

Historically, study after study has shown that most people are not homeless due to addiction. So either there's been a drastic shift in the data since COVID-19, or you're repeating a false narrative that liberals and progressives have been widely aware of and discussed for ages.

That's what makes it illegal, Republican crimes aren't real crimes, remember?

What do you have against woks?

And spell check

Homeless are people, not things. This is the exact same attitude that allows Greg Abbott to be a fucking shitlord and use real, vulnerable people in his bullshit political games.

If they’re homeless, they’re useless

What bullshit. Many, many homeless people have jobs. Jobs pay dick these days and rent is ridiculous, so they can't afford to live anywhere except maybe their car if they have one.