Hundreds of unsheltered people living in tent encampments in the blocks surrounding the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco have been forced to leave by city outreach workers and police as part of an attempted “clean up the house” ahead of this week’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation’s annual free trade conference.
The action, which housing advocates allege violated a court injunction, was celebrated by right-wing figures and the tech crowd, who have long been convinced that the city is in terminal decline because of an increase in encampments in the downtown area.
The X account End Wokness wrote that the displacement was proof the “government can easily fix our cities overnight. It just doesn’t want to” (the post received 77,000 likes). “Queer Eye but it’s just Xi visiting troubled US cities then they get a makeover,” joked Packy McCormick, the founder of Not Boring Capital and advisor to Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto VC team. The New York Post celebrated the action, saying that residents had “miraculously disappeared.”
This comment is insane. You realize that a home / apartment needs to be maintained right? It’s not a magical cave that functions on its own. There’s plumbing, there’s electrical, sewage, a person suffering from mental issues cannot be safely just put into a building and left to their own devices.
I’m all for helping the homeless but just saying give them a free apartment is bonkers and completely misses the point why a lot of people are homeless.
It’s also why things will never change. You have the right who say fuck em, let them pull themselves up by the bootstraps and then you have lefties calling for free apartments… Both solutions are insane and basically assure we’ll never come to an agreement and people will continue to suffer.
I think (s)he meant it more like prison but more spacious
Why is “give people houses” insane? Other countries have done it and virtually eradicated homelessness, Cities and organizations here in the US have tried it. In most cases, even the ones with “serious mental illnesses” are able to seek treatment and manage their illnesses FAR better when they have a stable platform to build upon - meaning a house and food, which eliminates the rather more pressing needs of “I need to figure out where to pitch a tent so the police don’t drag me in” and “I need to eat some time this week or I’ll starve to death” and allows you to start saying “I really want to talk to someone about this PTSD and the drug addiction I developed because of it” or “that social worker was right, I should see about getting on medication for my schizophrenia”. Contrary to what people love to believe, most people with severe mental illnesses DO have touch with reality, and a lot of them simply don’t have the framework necessary to start building a long-term care plan because their meds are expensive, or the meds they’re on have terrible side effects, or they simply don’t have health insurance to be diagnosed and treated properly in the first place.
It would be insane to your classist bigoted NIMBY ass, but that’s the reason why no one on the left listens to worthless Karens like you anymore.
Being a drug addict or severely mentally ill doesn’t mean you can’t or shouldn’t have a house. Actually, the opposite: people like that need to just be given housing more than a normal person because they can’t take care of themselves, and that means even if they destroy the house, they should have it.
Drug addicts and mentally ill people have rights.
They have rights, and there’s nothing you can do to change that fact. Nothing.
And that means they have the right to housing just like the rest of us do.
You’ll have to live among them whether you want to or not, and you best get over it.