Thx, Critter. I have these moments driving around Austin where I think we’re failing as a society. It’s heartbreaking. I don’t live there, but it’s really the only city I spend any time in. The suburbs on the east coast have their own problems but homelessness is not one of them.
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It’s frustrating and you’ll never win in the long run, but if people don’t get involved in the fight at the local level things do get worse.
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I do believe that’s what’s called a straw man.
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There are apparently 162 golf courses in Surrey, covering 2.65% of the total land area. By building apartment blocks rather than individual houses, it would be possible to double the population while leaving most of the area green. I don’t think anybody is proposing covering golf courses in the mini-mansions that litter Surrey. To quote the author of the report I was citing,
"[Cheshire] calculates that there is enough green belt land within Greater London – 32,500 hectares – to build 1.6m houses at average densities. “The only value of green belts is for those who own houses within them,” Cheshire argues. “What green belts really seem to be is a very British form of discriminatory zoning, keeping the urban unwashed out of the home counties – and, of course, helping to turn houses into investment assets instead of places to live.”
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How do you suppose those places came to be populated in the first place? It’s an uncomfortable fact that land which was was taken by theft in the first place is potentially open to being taken the same way again. Hence Proudhon’s famous remark “la propriété c’est le vol”.
The only way we should consent to the original land appropriation is if land is fairly shared out now.
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I have no idea, but the thing I always wonder is when I’m going to a mall (normally in San Jose, I’m not that fond of San Fransisco, so I don’t tend to go) and see RVs in the parking lots is how many of them belong to the employees of the mall? I don’t have anything against people that decide to live in an RV, and they can be really nice, but I suspect the ones parked in a strip mall parking lot as opposed to being hooked up to AC power and city water, and have some place for the grey and black “water” to go are not nearly as nice as all the ones in the RV parks dotted here and there.
Is the nice waitress that just poured me coffee going to an unairconditioned minivan for a nap after her shift is over? Or does she have a house to go back to somehow payed out of a meter hourly wage and tips? I have no idea, but I tip 20% just in case (that, and I like people that bring me coffee, so 20%).
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Same here in France. I once tweeted photos of the location of some disappeared benches around a tramway station, benches that I very much enjoyed back when I had a broken ankle. I immediately got a request to use the photos from a blog that documents those anti-homeless shenanigans - which I granted.
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Given minimum wage right now, even renting a single room would take most of the income from full-time employment, more than twice the 28% of income you’re “supposed” to spend on housing, ideally (ha, yeah). Assuming you could even find a room to rent, that’s just not sustainable. Most of the employed homeless that I know, and know of, sleep out of their cars/vans. RVs are another step up…
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My cousin has been buying old RVs on CraigsList here in San Diego, driving them to SF, and selling them for two or three times what he paid for them. 21st century version of house flipping.
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Oh gods, that’s exactly what it is…
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