I literally in fact write it, in the sentence immediately after the sentence you quoted and reacted to. Literally the next sentence.
and yes, what i wrote is in fact true. Very few homeless shelters in the country operate at capacity. Even right now in Seattle, where they have a large tent camps, the shelters in the city are below capacity.
Total, in the US, we have around 867k beds in shelters for the homeless. That is significantly higher than the current rate of homelessness on the US which is around 500k.
That isn’t too say that there aren’t situations in very specific regions which may go over capacity at specific times, I’m sure that happens. As i said, LA currently has around 10% of all the homeless in America, so they may be straining the limits of their system. But places like Seattle which has historically been very attractive to homeless people for numerous reasons is still holding it together.
But nothing I’m saying is suggesting that. It’s just pointing out the fact that those people aren’t taking advantage of the system in place. I’m not blaming them, just like I’m not blaming the mentally ill.
Can you cite some statistics and a reference which support your view that there’s enough capacity for everyone? Everywhere I look I see a different answer than that. Here’s an example:
It is not just about LA. Seattle, for example, has 0.6 beds per homeless person.
But again, this is misleading. Their shelters are below capacity, and i know this from talking to folks who actually work with the homeless there. They are up over 90% right now, but they aren’t at capacity because there are people who are choosing not to use the shelters.
In terms of the source for the number of beds, that came from the AHAR report from 2016.
For some reason it’s giving me crap linkng to the report, but you can easily find it by googling 2016 ahar report or something. From page 72, they talk about the availability of beds.
867,102 year-round beds were available in
emergency shelters (ES), safe havens (SH),
transitional housing (TH), rapid rehousing
(RRH), permanent supportive housing (PSH),
and other permanent housing (OPH).
The biggest problem that we currently face in terms of dealing with the unsheltered homeless is not necessarily creating additional shelter, although I’m willing to admit that there may be isolated cases where that is actually a problem. But for the most part, the problem is that we need better outreach to put people in touch with the services that exist, and we need better treatment programs for drug addiction and mental illness.
Also, to try again to add some context here, the idea is not that our system is ideal, but rather the idea that capitalism had somehow failed everyone is silly because the situation in the Western world, which was created by capitalism, is far better for even the most hard up than the alternatives.
That said, the number of beds nationally is irrelevant. What matters is the number of beds in the places where they are needed. Large homeless population centers are chronically short of beds, no matter what some friend of yours told you. Also, too: 90% is basically at capacity. Only sheer dumb luck will fill the rest of those beds consistently.
Well, part of what their job is finding how to get those that need them into those beds.
Regardless, at this point I’ve hopefully convinced you that i was not intentionally lying. Certainly the goal was never to suggest that investment in helping the homeless was already a solved problem, as i advocate for programs to help them.
You seem to think the West is wealthy because of capitalism. But countries that weren’t capitalist until quite recently (e.g. Russian, China) are more wealthy than countries that adopted capitalism earlier (e.g. most of Africa). What’s the real difference? Well, some countries were raped for their resources, and other countries did the raping, and it is the latter who are wealthy. I don’t say that capitalism isn’t a factor, but it is not at all clear to me that it is a bigger factor than was the opportunity created by the theft of an entire continent and all the resources and growth potential it contained.
People are right to say that capitalism is failing them, because they’re comparing their lot with those of the people who came before them and the people who are around them. If you want to say to them ‘well, you’re better off than the descendants of the people we killed to take their stuff, or made slaves to develop that stuff,’ you can certainly say that, but you should not expect to get away with that comment without someone taking issue with it.
You can, but it would be stupid and irrelevant. Venezuela is fucked because the West fucked it for 400 years. If you want to ignore that fact, you can, but don’t expect people to take you seriously.
Similarly, if you think you can prove that poverty in the Soviet Union in (say) 1970 was a worse condition than poverty at the same period in the US, good luck with that.
Can we not digress to Venezuela? There’s another thread for that and it’s a vast sinkhole of socialism vs. not socialism and colonialist history vs. populist present.
Homeless shelters are palliative. What homeless people need are homes (duh). We don’t have even a glimmer of a solution to that problem. And the problem will only get worse as the cost of housing continues to rise while incomes remain flat.
By the way, flat incomes in places where there’s no unemployment is a clear sign of where late-stage capitalism is taking us.
This is an interesting program going on in Austin currently. I’ve spent a little time volunteering there. I don’t know what the costs are like vs benefits, but glad to see something like it being tried. I’m sure the cost/benefit analysis is on the way.
I think you are right about 3rd world conditions. I come from a developing country. I grew up with tales of my grandparents post WW2 starving, and my parents’s tales of deprivation. Heck, when I grew up we didn’t have good electricity (went off for hours daily) or clean water from the tap. I love tap water in New York. It is awesome. I love that there’s people who pick up garbage. That there are running lights.
However, for the kids, the ones who are born and raised in the USA it is a different perspective. Why are they less worthy? Why are these hispanic kids not worth as much as a white kid? Why is the system rigged? Kids need people who believe they can make it.
What I mean is you’re saying this is better than other places, this is true. But I think it’s not good enough for them.
It reminds me of this story. It is heartbreaking. They brought some Puerto Rican and Dominican kids from the South Bronx over to a fancy ass school. One of the teachers noticed one of the kids was getting upset and went over to talk to them:
"And I went over to talk to her, as did Lisa. And she jumped up and she said, we’ve got to get out of here. We’ve got to get out of here. We’ve got to get out of here. And I thought it was a joke at the beginning. I didn’t realize, you know?
And it really was-- I mean, she went white, like completely white, you know? Blood drained from her face. And her friend was holding her and saying, calm down, Melanie. Calm down, Melanie. So it was just an awful situation. None of us had anticipated such a strong reaction."
Just adding my 2c on the original topic - I’m only closely familiar with birthright citizenship laws of S. Korea and Japan, which requires at least one parent to be a citizen in order their children to automatically become a citizen at birth. If both parents are foreigners, then the child automatically gains perm. residency but can’t apply for citizenship until they become an adult.
If the US was to move to such a model I’m not sure I would have that strong of a negative reaction against it? Maybe I’m missing something here though
Not thread copping, but can a mod split the homeless discussion into its own thread? I think it’s a conversation worth having, but it’s completely derailed this thread (and good luck finding it later down the road if there’s new information someone would like to bring to the topic).
Turning the question around to you, why do you think this? What is the problem you’re trying to solve? How big a problem is the problem? Is it worth spending time and energy solving?
Broadly speaking I would imagine there are two categories of issues worth debating
Middle-class & wealthy foreigners having having “pregnancy vacations” for their children so that they have the option of easily studying and working the US at some point in their future.
the so-called ‘anchor babies’ from poor Central and South American undocumented immigrants who then can leverage that to earn permanent residency for the rest of the family.
I’m much more familiar with the first problem since it’s something I know both family members and acquaintances who have done this. If I had to extrapolate based on what I know this is probably amounts to somewhere in the low-mid 5-figures of births every year globally.
I have no idea how many people will fall into the second bucket, which is probably the type that Republicans want to eliminate.
Collectively between the two do I think there is a net cost to the US that is worth debating? Yes.
Can the cost to debating and changing this law outweigh the cost? Quite possibly.
I mean, you’re talking about an amendment to the constitution. It’s not a small thing. Why?
To me whether or not it’s part of the constitution describes its difficulty, not if it should be debated or changed. If I did, I wouldn’t try to push for gun control.
I’m thinking this primarily in terms of financial cost - since my understanding is it’s not uncommon for a large part of the pregnancy cost to be left unpaid even for the the first category.
If the US really doesn’t care about this, then I’d like to ask for there to be a law change for immigration officers to not use pregnancy status as a potential criteria to deny a US travel visa.
With respect to your #2 (so-called ‘anchor babies’), minor children may not sponsor parents for residence status. Anchor babies are a myth.
With respect to #1, what problem does this cause? If you’re worried about the numbers, and if your estimate of the numbers is right, you’re talking about something on the order of 0.1% of the annual births in the USA.
Where are you getting these understandings? Can you point to something that measures the unpaid delivery costs associated with birth tourism in the US? I’m guessing it is something near zero.
