Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/06/05/tent-city-city.html
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Look at that mountain
Look at those trees
Look at that bum over there, man
He’s down on his knees
Sing it, Randy.
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Feels a bit like we’re living in a prequel to Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower.
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Where before it was concentrated, you now see evidence of the problem everywhere in little pockets all over the city, including some its affluent middle-class areas. The small 2-4 family tent encampments and the campers I’ve noticed on the Westside seem to inhabited by working poor who want to be closer to their jobs and schools and who want to avoid the squalor of the massive purpose-designed Skid Row area downtown (backgrounder podcast on Skid Row here).
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Where I live, there are tons of un- or under-utilized commercial places like stripmalls with 50+% vacancy, anchor stores that closed several years ago with no plans to redevelop, etc. etc. It would be a good thing if, rather than incentivizing property owners to leave buildings vacant because the tax breaks are better than having a rent paying tenant, we give them the tax breaks while having them redevelop those areas into low income housing. Many of them are close enough to working areas to let people walk or bus easily to work.
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I somewhat deal with construction, not directly, but my experience is that low income is typically seen as a bad thing for business. There’s a lot of lack of empathy and awareness over how untenable the cost of living is in many major cities. Been in some meetings/conversations where people refer to the low income projects with some level of hostility or indifference.
Thankfully where i work we’ve been trying really hard to create opportunities for low income projects to happen.
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That book is terrifying just because it’s so plausible.
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I think cities need to launch special districts where the homeless can find sanctuary in the form of food and shelter.
It’s obvious what the feckin problem is. Everybody thinks they’re better than everybody else. Stop your whining and build affordable homes for these folks, or accept that you’ll have to see them living on your streets every day. EVERY feckin day. No one is more responsible than you, and no one else will fix it for you, and no one is better situated to fix it than you.
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It’s particularly stupid, because you can either have low income housing, or people without housing. It’s not like people are going to go away.
And overall… KA-DUH! Unreasonably priced housing results in people not being able to afford housing? Whoa! Mind blown! (but you still want your minimum wage earning McDonald’s workers… so someone’s got to do the job eh?)
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In or near MY neighborhood? Not on your life, Mr. Mayor!!
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Sadly, LA isn’t even on the top of this list. (Though maybe it moved up a bit?)
From: https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/06/raw-data-the-homeless-rate-in-big-cities/
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Did you ever notice that in “Parable of the Talents” the presidential candidate character ran on a slogan of “Make America Great Again”?
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