Yes, this is the standard right-wing Seattleite bemoaning. Of course, what's always left unsaid is that the implied solution to the existence of homeless people is newly-hired & appropriately-worshipped cops kicking them out of their temporary shelter and trashing their meagre possessions. All so you don't have to look at and deal with the externalities of your nicely-appreciating property prices.
I have yet to hear a good answer to what people expect non federal governments to do, other than to keep people on the move and make it someone else’s problem.
For the same reason no single city, county, or state can offer taxpayer funded healthcare, they also cannot offer taxpayer funded mental healthcare and/or universal basic income (or whatever other welfare scheme), and still be part of a country that has freedom of movement.
The only reason the countries that do offer these things can continue to is because they have an immigration border with which they can limit the number of benefit recipients.
Canada implemented socialized healthcare regionally. Provincial hospitalization insurance was available in Saskatchewan many years before any federal program. So your assertions conflict with the historical fact of how successful social programs came into being.
With regard to homelessness, the solution is to build socialized housing with integrated health services. This will never happen at the federal level until some states (or counties, or cities) take the lead. In line with how a great many people believe federal politics should be.
My reasoning is from first principles of dividing x resources amongst y number of recipients.
I want everyone in the world to have everything they want, but that is not compatible with the constraints of nature.
I am also aware that I and almost everyone else in the developed world consume far more than our "fair" share of the world's resources.
I have not read that book, but the caveat that throws cold water on egalitarian solutions is that we all want to maintain our disproportionately high standard of living while also increasing the amount of resources others receive, which is not going to happen without redistribution.
The majority of homeless people in Seattle are not from Seattle. The point in time surveys aren’t real data because they rely on unverified self reported claims. The reality is that homeless are coached by activists to respond falsely on these surveys as former locals, to generate sympathy.
Personal responsibility is a thing still, and people can live anywhere in America instead of trying to do so in an expensive location. And yes I expect not to have to look at open drug dens or bike chops shops, not experience property crime, not have parking spaces occupied by trashy RVs, and not see taxpayer funded amenities like parks taken over.
It has nothing to do with appreciating property prices and nothing to do with right wing politics. That’s just your inaccurate editorialization. Most people have a common sense expectation that a city be clean, lawful, and operated for the benefits of its legitimate tax paying residents, not drug addicted vagrants or irresponsible nomads.
Your bullshit assertion that homeless people aren’t from here can’t even stand up to the data, not even from any right-wing news source you can find, so you come up with an idiotic story about activists coaching the homeless to respond inaccurately to surveys.
You have no solutions to the problem. Your only recourse is to push the problem somewhere else. Utterly pathetic. No vision whatsoever.
Reread what I said about point in time surveys before talking about data - bad, purposefully misleading data is worse than no data.
My “recourse”, which is to not let the homeless steal from legitimate residents, is the only reasonable solution. I certainly have no sympathy for the large number of drug addicted homeless taking advantage of the naivety of Seattle’s policies. But even for the rest - people need to figure out their own lives like the rest of us. No one is entitled to live in Seattle or New York City or Hawaii or other high demand, desirable, expensive location. Deterring the problem via enforcement and legal consequences doesn’t shift the problem - it addresses it by forcing people to be responsible, as long as other locations don’t try to accommodate them in the same broken ways.
Since you're so worried about this problem why not try learning the first thing about it? I'm sure you know people in your life who have become addicted to various substances, which is at this point widely recognized as an issue of mental health. Hopefully those people had enough of a safety net to avoid becoming homeless. If not, well, now they're caught in a vicious cycle. Kicking a drug addiction is hugely more difficult when you're facing housing insecurity, and when you're facing housing insecurity your likelihood of self-medicating with drugs and developing an addiction is also hugely more likely. Housing insecurity also makes it much more difficult to find & keep a job to get income and alleviate the insecurity, as does having a drug addiction. Of course, there are also expensive non-addiction-related health issues which make it more difficult to work - and it's more difficult to manage the condition while homeless. All of this is rendered much worse by high housing costs - you need to make more money to achieve housing security, and your likelihood of becoming homeless from financial stress is also much higher.
You look at this problem in your community and your solution is to ignorantly push for it to be someone else's problem. I repeat, utterly pathetic. You are not a serious person.
It’s telling that at the end of your comments, all you have left is an ad hominem attack. Not getting addicted is itself an act of personal responsibility. You’re acting as if none of these people have ownership around their actions, when they do. If they weren’t enabled by the policies you support, they would act differently.
The “personal responsibility“ and carceral approach to addiction is, thankfully, hideously outdated and you should join the rest of us with the medical community in the 21st century. When you see someone destitute under a bridge, have humility and think “there but for the grace of god go I”. Anything else is vanity.
That isn't even ad hominem! Ad hominem would be like "your ideas are pathetic, therefore they are wrong" whereas what I said was "your ideas are wrong for these reasons, therefore they are pathetic". You are mixing up the premise and the conclusion! Come on!
